As school officials in Cleveland revise their security plans after a shooting rampage by a 14-year-old gunman, professionals who study youth violence said the solution is simple: Pay attention to threatening behavior and talk.
A week before Asa Coon wounded four people and fatally shot himself at SuccessTech Academy in downtown Cleveland on Wednesday, he had threatened to blow up the school and stab students, said Doneisha LeVert, 14.
Fortifying schools with metal detectors, security guards and surveillance cameras doesn’t guarantee that a gunman will be kept out, criminologists and educators said. There were no metal detectors at SuccessTech on Wednesday.
The experts said educators should learn a key lesson from the more than two dozen school shootings since Columbine in 1999: Troubled teens who plan attacks often warn of their intentions. Schools should teach staff and students to recognize and report threats, and require they be investigated, they said.
“Speaking Up for Teens”
One afternoon I was seeing a 16-year-old boy with his mom for a check-up. As with all teenagers, during the middle of our appointment, I asked his mother to leave so he and I could talk privately. After she stepped out, I asked him, as I do just about anybody older than 12, if he ever drank, smoked, used drugs or had ever had sex.
He had smoked five to seven cigarettes a day for three years, and used marijuana twice a month. He drank at least twice a month. When he did, he would have four to five beers and/or shots of hard liquor. He had been sexually active for two years, having had four partners. He used condoms, but he had never requested testing for sexually transmitted diseases.
I counseled him about his habits (assessing how well he understood the risks of what he was doing, educating him and encouraging abstinence). I offered him testing for HIV, chlamydia and gonorrhea and gave him condoms. I encouraged him to come back if he had more questions or wanted further counseling. I thanked him for his honesty and he went home.
Study: Bullies and bullied more likely hit by crime
As a growing number of states pass laws against bullying, new research finds that bullies and their victims are more likely than other children to be victims of crime outside of school.
“They’re often victimized in the community,” says Melissa Holt, research professor at the University of New Hampshire’s Crimes Against Children Research Center, co-author of a new study on bullying.
The kids in the study at greatest risk are those who are both bullies and victims of bullies, Holt says. Of those, 84% had been victims of a crime, including burglary and assault, and 32% had been sexually abused. The study was based on interviews with 689 fifth-graders in 2005 in an unidentified urban, low-income school district in Massachusetts. Holt says the area’s overall crime rate is higher than average, but she believes that the pattern of victimization would hold in most places.
The study found that 70% of bullies and 66% of bullying victims were crime victims, compared with 43% of kids who were neither bullies nor victims.
Holt says bullies may be less apt to walk away from fights, and therefore more likely to be assaulted, and more likely to associate with aggressive kids who would commit crimes against them. A shy or insecure child is vulnerable in and out of school, she says.
Cleveland School Gets $2.5M for Security
The state will provide $2.5 million to Cleveland schools to upgrade security after a student gunman shot and wounded two teachers and two students before he killed himself, the governor’s office said Friday.
The money would be available for security upgrades selected by the district, which has identified installing metal detectors in all of the district’s 110 schools as a top priority, Keith Dailey, spokesman for Gov. Ted Strickland said Friday.
Madison School Board Forum – Today
The Members of the Madison School Board have agreed to attend and participate in the Northside Planning Council and the East Attendance Area Parent/Teacher Organization Coalition (NPC/EAAPTO) Forum to be held on Sunday, October 21, 2007 (3:00p.m. at the UW Memorial Union’s Tripp Commons). This joint meeting of the NPC/EAAPTO Coalition and the members of the School Board constitutes an open meeting of the members of the Madison School Board for which public notice must be given pursuant to Wisconsin Statute § 19.82 through § 19.84.
Map & Directions to the UW Memorial Union. Maya Cole has more.
Andy Hall:
But do small, neighborhood schools really lead to higher achievement levels for students?
“I don ‘t think there ‘s any hard-core answer to that, ” said Allan Odden, a UW-Madison education professor and nationally recognized expert in education policy and reform.
Research so far, Odden said, fails to show a clear link between achievement and school size, particularly within the range of sizes in Madison.
The district ‘s smallest elementary school is Nuestro Mundo, with 181 students, and largest is Leopold, with 718.
Odden does offer an opinion, though, of Madison ‘s turmoil over neighborhood schools.
“What I would say is the city has too many schools in some neighborhoods and it costs too much to keep some of them open, ” Odden said. “The issue to me here is not effectiveness (of small schools compared to larger schools). The issue to me is budget and politics. ”
The other trade-off, in some neighborhood schools, is that students may be packed into classrooms or have inferior bathrooms or gyms, compared to their peers in larger, newer buildings.
This is an issue. The classroom fixtures in new school structures (far west elementary building) are quite different than those found in most facilities.
Cell Phone Etiquette
All Students Feel the Effects of Trying to Meet a Higher Standard
What that advice overlooks is that when a school is in danger of not meeting the AYP standards, all students in the school are affected, not just those who are in danger of failing the test. Last year at our neighborhood elementary school in Silver Spring, the principal said there was a real chance the school would not meet the standard. Consequently, the entire focus of the school was on the Maryland School Assessment tests. For example:
All the students at the school, even kindergartners, were drilled on how to answer “brief constructed responses” (short written answers to essay questions), because they are an important part of the MSA. My son was in second grade last year and did not even take the assessment tests, but BCRs came home regularly in his backpack.
The focus of the leadership meetings in the school is on the MSA. I’m active in the school and attended one of those leadership meetings last year, and know from other parents who attended other meetings that most of the discussion at those meetings is on the MSA and what the school needs do to ensure it will make AYP.
What works in education: the lessons according to McKinsey
THE British government, says Sir Michael Barber, once an adviser to the former prime minister, Tony Blair, has changed pretty much every aspect of education policy in England and Wales, often more than once. “The funding of schools, the governance of schools, curriculum standards, assessment and testing, the role of local government, the role of national government, the range and nature of national agencies, schools admissions”—you name it, it’s been changed and sometimes changed back. The only thing that hasn’t changed has been the outcome. According to the National Foundation for Education Research, there had been (until recently) no measurable improvement in the standards of literacy and numeracy in primary schools for 50 years.
England and Wales are not alone. Australia has almost tripled education spending per student since 1970. No improvement. American spending has almost doubled since 1980 and class sizes are the lowest ever. Again, nothing. No matter what you do, it seems, standards refuse to budge (see chart). To misquote Woody Allen, those who can’t do, teach; those who can’t teach, run the schools.
Why bother, you might wonder. Nothing seems to matter. Yet something must. There are big variations in educational standards between countries. These have been measured and re-measured by the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) which has established, first, that the best performing countries do much better than the worst and, second, that the same countries head such league tables again and again: Canada, Finland, Japan, Singapore, South Korea.
Men in elementary classrooms scarce
It takes a big man to teach small children.
At 6 feet 5 inches tall, Josh Reineking towers over his kindergarten students at Stephens Elementary School, but it’s actually his large heart and patient, steady manner that keep his lively charges learning, and in line.
It doesn’t hurt that he finds it easy to laugh, and thinks on his feet. Oh, and he also doesn’t mind folding up like a Swiss Army knife to fit in a kindergarten-size chair.
“My friends, my friends. Hands up for a message,” Reineking says quietly and firmly as his class of 5-year-olds begin squirming and shoving shortly before recess.
Fourteen pairs of arms shoot up, and hands are folded above little heads. The early symptoms of an imminent scuffle disappear as all eyes are on Mr. Reineking, waiting for instructions.
4GW at work in a community near you
Part V of this series provoked many emails requesting more symptoms showing the decline of the State (DOTS) in America. I wish all the questions I received were so easy to answer. This essay will give some general background and a specific example.
The ur-text for DOTS is Martin van Creveld’s The Rise and Decline of the State. [DNI Editor’s note: See also van Creveld’s “The Fate of the State”] He gives vast evidence of DOTS in America, such as the shifting of core functions like primary education and security from public to private entities – either for profit companies or non-government organizations (NGO’s).
The privatization of education is a major media story, especially efforts by the government to resist the rise of home teaching and for-profit schools. The privatization of security has occurred more quietly and is perhaps more significant. Private security detectives/guards outnumber police in America by approximately 1.1 million to 800 thousand, and their numbers are growing faster. The total number of private guards does not even include in-house guards, such as for companies and schools – nor mercs, such as those Blackwater brought in to guard the mansions of New Orleans following Katrina.
Clusty search on Fabius Maximus.
A Vision of Students Today
ADHD Guide for Parents
Two leading U.S. psychiatric organizations on Tuesday released a guide intended to help parents deal with the torrent of often confusing and frightening information on treatments for attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).
In addition to providing information on medications, the ADHD Parents Medication Guide, co-sponsored by the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and the American Psychiatric Association, also offers insights into non-drug treatment options such as behavioral therapies and school services.
“When I needed information, few people had heard of ADHD and little information was available to help parents,” Soleil Gregg, a parent of two children who grew up with ADHD in the 1970s and ’80s, said during a teleconference to unveil the guide. “Now families are faced with just the opposite problem. There’s an overwhelming and confusing array of information and misinformation on the Internet, on television and in the print media.”
Experts estimate that almost 2 million children in the United States — or about 3 percent to 5 percent of young children in the country — have ADHD.
Site Posts Videos of Autistic Behaviors
What’s so unusual about a baby fascinated with spinning a cup, or a toddler flapping his hands, or a preschooler walking on her toes?
Parents and even doctors sometimes miss these red flags for autism, but a new online video “glossary” makes them startlingly clear.
A new Web site offers dozens of video clips of autistic kids contrasted with unaffected children’s behavior. Some of the side-by-side differences can make you gasp. Others are more subtle.
The free site, which makes its debut Monday, also defines and depicts “stimming,” “echolalia” and other confusing-sounding terms that describe autistic behavior. Stimming refers to repetitive, self-stimulating or soothing behavior including hand-flapping and rocking that autistic children sometimes do in reaction to light, sounds or excitement. Echolalia is echoing or repeating someone else’s words or phrases, sometimes out of context.
Principal for a Day Notes
My assignment earlier this week was to “help” Marquette Elementary School Principal Andrea Kreft run her school.
No doubt I got in the way more than I helped, but for me it was an eye-opening experience that I highly recommend to others. The occasion was the Foundation for Madison Schools’ fourth annual “principal for a day” event. Dozens of local business, media and government people spent a morning with a Madison elementary, middle or high school principal to get a firsthand look at what goes on in their schools.
The experience demonstrated just how little so many of us really know about today’s schools and the challenges their students and staffs face.
“Reprehensible – Rejection of school-board candidate is a shameful moment for Democrats, union”
tephanie Groce was not the loser on Tuesday when the Franklin County Democratic Party kowtowed to the local teachers union and withdrew its endorsement of her for the Columbus Board of Education.
The biggest loser was the county party and its top officeholders, who had a chance to demonstrate leadership by standing on principle for an independent-minded and highly qualified candidate. Instead those leaders caved cravenly.
The other loser was the Columbus Education Association, which nakedly illustrated that the union’s top priority is not the welfare of students but the protection of its members against any demand for accountability and fiscal responsibility within the Columbus City Schools.
As the district contemplates asking voters next year to approve an operating levy and, possibly, a bond issue for building new schools, this is a terrible message for teachers to send to taxpayers.
Experimental School Gets Rid of Classes, Teachers
NPR:
Minnesota New Country School is not your typical high school. There are no classes, no teachers and no walls. Students work on projects at their own computers. The experiment seems to be working: The school sends 90 percent of its graduates to college.
Panel to Consider Restrictions on Youth Cold Medicines
A special panel of federal advisers today is considering whether the government should restrict the use of over-the-counter cough and cold medicines in children because of doubts about the effectiveness of the popular products and rising concerns about their safety.
The 22-member joint committee is debating whether to recommend a number of steps to the Food and Drug Administration, including banning some of the remedies, issuing strong new warnings about their use or more specific guidance about how to use them safely. The FDA is not bound by the committee’s recommendations, which will be made later today, but the agency usually follows the advice of its advisory panels.
Madison School tax increase lower than expected
Madison homeowners received some good news Thursday — a continued state budget impasse wouldn ‘t affect their property taxes as much as expected.
Figures released by the Madison School District show that a failure to pass a state budget for 2007-09 — and provide more aid for schools — could drive up property taxes by as much $12 on the average home. That ‘s just a fraction of an August estimate by Gov. Jim Doyle ‘s budget office that suggested property taxes from schools would rise by up to $48 on that same Madison home if the Legislature fails to pass a new two-year budget.
The state budget is now 110 days late.
Posing questions a start to fixing education woes
“Systems, I am convinced, are not afraid of accountability,” he said. How much control the local boards exercise depends on how much responsibility for doing their jobs they’re willing to take. If they fail, they risk losing authority over nonperforming schools. My preference, but not a part of the commission’s expected recommendations, would be that parents be given the full state funding share to buy the services their children need from any competent and willing provider of education services.
Alford’s panel is also attempting to determine precisely how much a quality education should cost and what portion should be borne by locals and by the state. Now it’s about 55-45, state-local.
The public education and funding model does need to change. As Alford noted, the current system was designed for a homogenous world that no longer exists. Georgia has 180 school systems and three times that many critical problems with them. The solution is statewide standards and local control, with accountability and consequences, even down to the individual school level.
The Need for Better PR & Madison High School Redesign Notes
Beebe made his pitch at a meeting of the school board’s communications committee chaired by Beth Moss, who says one of her top priorities this year is developing strategies to more aggressively seek changes in state funding.
“We’re going to have to continue to cut the budget annually, and it’s going to be worse and worse,” laments Moss, a school board newcomer elected in April. She fears the district will have no choice but to begin “dismantling programs.
As for the perennial issue of school funding, Moss and others are gearing up for a Nov. 15 state Senate education committee hearing. Tom Beebe’s group supports a proposal to hike state funding for K-12 education by $2.6 billion a year, based on a model developed by UW-Madison professor Allan Odden.
But as Beebe was asking the Madison district to join his group as a paying member, Rainwater expressed “serious doubts” about the plan and questioned whether Madison schools would benefit. The funding scheme, Beebe admitted, could potentially lead to an initial decrease in state funding to Madison.
“In the first year, Madison gets screwed for political reasons,” Beebe told the committee — hardly the best message to send when seeking money from a cash-strapped district.
Beebe might benefit from a lesson in better communication. Or maybe he believes that sometimes, the best PR strategy is telling it like it really is.
I continue to believe that the odds of successfully influencing the State Legislature – in Madison’s favor – are long. Better to spend the effort locally on community partnerships and substantively addressing the many issues facing our public schools (such as academic preparation in elementary and middle schools so that students are prepared for high school, rather than watering down high school curriculum). Madison spends more per student (about $13,997) than the average Wisconsin School District (11,085).
Tom Beebe Audio / Video.
LaFollette High School Weapons Violation
On October 18th around 9:05 Madison police arrested a Lafollette High School student on the above tenative charges. The student is accused of pulling a small knife from her purse and threatening another student with the knife. This happened in a math class following an argument between the two students. A teacher was able to help diffuse the situation peacefully and get the knife away from the suspect. There were no injuries
West High / Regent Neighborhood Crime Discussion
Parents, staff and community officials met Wednesday night to discuss a number of recent violent incidents at and near Madison West High School [map]
I took a few notes during the first 60 minutes:
Madison Alders Robbie Webber and Brian Solomon along with James Wheeler (Captain of Police – South District), Luis Yudice (Madison School District The Coordinator of Safety And Security), Randy Boyd (Madison Metro Security) and West Principal Ed Holmes started the meeting with a brief summary of the recent incidents along with a brief school climate discussion:
James Wheeler:
Police beat officer and Educational Resource Office (ERO) patrol during West’s lunch period.
“There have been complaints from the houses around the school” so MPD increased patrols to “make a statement last week”.
Still a relatively safe neighborhood.
3 arrests at Homecoming.
Made a drug dealing arrest recently.
People do see drug dealing going on and have reported it.
There have been additional violent incidents, especially at the Madison Metro transfer points
Ed Holmes
Behavior is atypical of what we have seen on the past . Perpetrators are new to West.
Emphasized the importance of a safe learning environment.
Make sure there are police and school consequences and that they are severe. These crimes are unacceptable and should not be tolerated.
Randy Boyd (Madison Metro)
60+ bus runs daily for the school system.
There have been some serious fights at the transfer points. Cameras are in place there.
Main problem is confidentiality due to the students age. Can track them via bus passes.
Adding DSL so that the police precinct can monitor the transfer points. Incidents are about the same as last year but the numbers are going up.
Baptist church elders have helped patrol the South Transfer Point. We are looking for more community help.
Luis Yudice
Big picture perspective:
Our community really has changed a lot within the past five years. I sense a great deal of stress within the police department.
Citywide issues
Increasing violence involving girls. He has looked at a lot of data with the District Attorney’s office. Girls are extremely angry.
Angry parents are coming into the schools.
Increasing issues in the neighborhood that end up in the schools. Mentioned South Transfer Point beating and that Principal Ed Holmes mediated the situation at an early stage.
Growing gang violence issue particularly in the east side schools. We do have gang activity at Memorial and West but most of the issues are at Lafollete and East. Dealing with this via training and building relationships
What the school are experiencing is a reflection of what is going on in the community.
Parents:
Parent asked about weapons in school, metal detectors and k9 units.
Response:
Do we have weapons in school? Yes we find knives in all the schools. No guns. Unfortunate fact is that if a kid wants to get their hand on a gun, they can. They are available.Ed Holmes:
“We took away a gun once in my 18 years”.
I want to get across to the students – if they see something they have to report it. We have 2100 students and 250 staff members.Parents:
Kids are afraid of the bathrooms
Another lunch assault that has not been reported.
Incidents are much higher than we know because many incidents are not reported.
A parent asked why the District/Police did not use school ID photos to help victims find the perpetrators? Ed Holmes mentioned that District has had problems with their photo ID vendor.
Madison School Board member (and West area parent) Maya Cole also attended this event.
Ten Stupid Ways to Ruin Your College Application
Remember, these are things you should NOT do.
1. Rack up as many extra points as you can for “expressed interest” in your favorite colleges. This particular obsession was new to me. Connolly has encountered applicants who have inundated admissions offices with voicemails, e-mails and snail mail because they have heard that colleges want concrete indications of interest and don’t think you can overdo it. Believe me, you can. “There is a fine line between showing adequate interest in the school and stalking,” Connolly said. “Unsolicited cakes, pies, cookies, sneakers (the old ‘one foot in the door’ trick), a life-sized statue of you holding an acceptance letter, or a painstakingly detailed scale model of the campus clock tower will not make up for a lackluster academic record.” When colleges look for “expressed interest,” that means they hope that you will show up when their college reps visit your school, that you will visit their campuses and sign the visitor logs in their admissions offices and that you will get your application in on time with no loose ends. If you have a legitimate question, they are happy to receive your e-mail or telephone call. Doing more than that just makes you look desperate, and a little scary.
2. Don’t worry about your postings on social networking sites — college admissions officers understand your need for individual expression and will probably never look at them. I know, I know. What you put on Facebook or Myspace is your private business. College officials appear to share that view. They say they do not make a habit of looking up their applicants. But there are enough exceptions to make me think care should be taken when posting photos from your last rollicking beach party. Not everybody loves you. Those who don’t could send anonymous notes to your first-choice school suggesting it inspect a certain Web site. There are no rules that say they can’t.
Gaps broaden the mind
If, after leaving school in the early 1990s, you announced to your parents that you were taking some time out from the daily grind and leaving hearth and home to explore the world and broaden your mind, you would most likely have received a pair of horrified stares. This might be followed by a barrage of expletives regarding an expensive education being flushed away, and a stream of invective on a presumed new life of drug taking and trafficking.
A lot has changed in 15 years. Nowadays it is practically taboo to deride the idea of a gap year – to ban your children from taking one is close to abuse. For the majority of 18 to 24-year-olds, a year away from the pressures of the library has become a rite of passage. And whether it be spent conserving watering holes in Tanzania or drinking from them in Australia, the general consensus of clichés is that a break from education provides an opportunity to find oneself and form a wider perspective on life.
But what about taking time off after university before embarking on a career? How do would-be employers feel about all of this time out of the workplace? Are they as keen for their future workforce to be gallivanting around the world, or are those who head straight into the workplace displaying a greater work ethic and therefore more likely to land that top graduate position?
Almost a Third of U.S. Kids Use Supplements
More than 30 percent of American children take some kind of dietary supplement, mostly multivitamins and multiminerals, a U.S. National Institutes of Health study finds.
The study analyzed data on more than 10,000 youngsters from the 1999 to 2002 National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey.
The study found that 31.8 percent of children 18 and younger had used dietary supplements in the previous 30 days. This included 11.9 percent of those younger than 1 year, 38.4 percent of those ages 1-3, 40.6 percent of those ages 4-8, 28.9 percent of those ages 9-13, and 25.7 percent of those ages 14-18.
Among American adults, 57 percent of women and 47 percent of men take dietary supplements.
Local districts considering future of race-based school integration program
The Menomonee Falls School Board held a closed-door session Monday to talk about the impact that decision might have on its continued involvement in the Chapter 220 integration program. The board met with attorney Steven Rynecki to talk about the potential risks for the program, board Vice President Anne Weiland said. As part of the 31-year-old Chapter 220 program, racial minorities living in Milwaukee can attend 23 suburban school districts and white students from those districts attend Milwaukee Public Schools.
“Our goal really was for him to give us his legal opinion as to how that case might or might not affect our own program, who potential litigants might be against our school district, what the likelihood of success might be if we were sued,” said Weiland, who also is an attorney. “Those were kind of classic legal opinions.”
In a Competitive Middle School, Triage for Aches and Anxieties
Sorting fact from fiction, tragedy from comedy, fever from fevered performances is the venerable part of a school nurse’s job. But as childhood and adolescence have become increasingly medicalized, and schools have been mandated to accommodate students with an array of physical and psychological challenges, the school nurse’s role has expanded exponentially.
Now in her seventh year in this affluent suburb 20 miles west of Manhattan, Mrs. Palmieri regularly confers with the school’s social worker, guidance counselors, psychologist. A registered nurse with certification in school nursing, she is a front-line medical manager, first responder, diagnostician, confessor, shrink. She coordinates tutors for the housebound and leads Lunch Bunch sessions for girls to discuss puberty. Every year, she checks all students for height, weight, vision and scoliosis. Upon request, she checks for lice.
The lone nurse for 1,100 sixth, seventh and eighth graders, Mrs. Palmieri is also a comfort zone. At 52, this mother of four adult children has a plain-spoken, savvy warmth that calms these awkward, goofy fawns.
Statement by Madison Board of Education President Arlene Silveira on the state budget
“I am disappointed that the members of the Wisconsin Legislature are unable to do the job they were elected to do: pass a state budget. As an elected
official, I take my duties and responsibilities seriously.
“In September, school started on the day it was scheduled to begin, teaching and learning is taking place in our classrooms and our school district is operating the way we planned for it to operate.
“Earlier this year, the Madison School board approved a tentative budget for the 2007-08 school year, anticipating that by October, when the Board usually sets the tax levy, we would have all the final information to finish our job. After months of partisan wrangling, our state legislators have failed to uphold their end of the partnership.
“It’s unfortunate that our local property taxpayers will suffer the consequences of the Legislature’s inability to pass the only bill required in a two-year session: the biennial budget.”
COMMENTS OR QUESTIONS? PLEASE CONTACT:
Madison Metropolitan School District
Public Information Office
545 W. Dayton St.
Madison, WI 53703
608-663-1879
Keep up with the latest state budget information via the WisPolitics Budget Blog.
The Once and Future University
Mike Caulfield points to this video which, he says, “does a nice job of showing what a museum a university education has become.” The large lecture hall shown in that video certainly reinforces the point. Seeing it reminds me of a telling episode this past April. I was writing about Darwin and I recalled something I’d heard in a biology lecture I’d heard the previous spring on one of the Berkeley podcasts.
I went back to the site and wound up referring to the current year’s version of that lecture in video form. As I scrubbed back and forth on the timeline looking for the part I remembered, my daughter — who was then between high school and college — watched over my shoulder. Eventually she said: “So, the students just sit there?”
That was the first of three revelations. The second was my realization that I’d certainly absorbed those lectures more fully on a series of bike rides, breathing fresh air and soaking up sunshine, than had the students sitting in the lecture hall.
The third revelation came when I found the part I was looking for, and realized that it wasn’t as good as last year’s version, which had been overwritten by the current version.
WHEN NONENGINEERS THINK ABOUT ENGINEERING, it’s usually because something has gone wrong: collapsing levees in New Orleans, the loss of the space shuttle Columbia in 2003. In the follow-up investigations, it comes out that some of the engineers involved knew something was wrong. But too few spoke up or pushed back — and those who did were ignored. This professional deficiency is something the new, tuition-free Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering wants to fix. At its tiny campus in Needham, Mass., outside Boston, Olin is trying to design a new kind of engineer. Most engineering schools stress subjects like differential calculus and physics, and their graduates tend to end up narrowly focused and likely to fit the stereotype of a socially awkward clock-puncher. Richard K. Miller, the president of the school, likes to share a professional joke: “How can you tell an extroverted engineer? He’s the one who looks at your shoes when he talks to you.” Olin came into being, Miller told me last spring in his office on campus, to make engineers “comfortable as citizens and not just calculating machines.” Olin is stressing creativity, teamwork and entrepreneurship — and, in no small part, courage. “I don’t see how you can make a positive difference in the world,” he emphasized, “if you’re not motivated to take a tough stand and do the right thing.”
Now, as then, everyone says higher education is more important than ever to America’s future. But interesting enough to become a topic of national obsession? Controversial enough to fight a gubernatorial campaign over? Hardly. The kids do have their own war now, but not much of an antiwar movement, much less building takeovers. College campuses seem to have lost their centrality. Why do college and college students no longer lead the culture? Why does student life no longer seem all that important?
Here’s one answer: College as America used to understand it is coming to an end.
For nine years I’ve lived in the shadow of the University of Chicago — as an undergraduate between 1988 and 1992 and again since 2002. After growing up in a suburb that felt like a jail to me, I found my undergraduate years delightfully noisy and dissident. I got involved with The Baffler, the journal of social criticism edited by Thomas Frank, who went on to write “What’s the Matter With Kansas?”; every Sunday, I trekked down to the neighborhood jazz jam session, where ’60s continuities were direct. The bass player was a former Maoist, the drummer a former beatnik.
Early in May of this year I had lunch with the beatnik, Doug Mitchell, who received his undergraduate degree in 1965 and then went to graduate school here and is now an editor at the University of Chicago Press. “I suspect I got in this university primarily because I had a high-school friend who got a pirated copy of Henry Miller’s ‘Tropic of Capricorn,’ ” he said. “I put that on my reading list. And the admissions counselor was utterly astonished: ‘How did you get this?’ It was truly banned in 1960.” He settled into an alienated suburban kid’s paradise. “We had a social life that kind of revolved around the dorm lounge, because that’s where everybody hung out after midnight. And some people got way into it and didn’t survive. They would never go to class. They would argue night and day in the lounge!”
Tough, Sad and Smart
They are a longtime odd couple, Bill Cosby and Harvard’s Dr. Alvin Poussaint, and their latest campaign is nothing less than an effort to save the soul of black America.
Mr. Cosby, of course, is the boisterous veteran comedian who has spent the last few years hammering home some brutal truths about self-destructive behavior within the African-American community.
“A word to the wise ain’t necessary,” Mr. Cosby likes to say. “It’s the stupid ones who need the advice.”
Dr. Poussaint is a quiet, elegant professor of psychiatry who, in public at least, is in no way funny. He teaches at the Harvard Medical School and is a staff member at the Judge Baker Children’s Center in Boston, where he sees kids struggling in some of the toughest circumstances imaginable.
Come On People: On the Path from Victims to Victors – Amazon, Tattered Cover.
To Catch a Cheat
The pressure is on for schools to raise test scores. Some, it seems, are willing to resort to anything.
For a while it seemed as though Forest Brook High School in Houston was a shining example of school reform. In 2005, after years of rock-bottom test scores, results shot up: 95 percent of eleventh graders passed the state science test. Administrators praised the hard work of the teachers. The governor awarded the school a $165,000 grant. But that same year, the Texas Education Agency hired a company called Caveon Test Security to ensure that the state’s standardized-test results were valid. Caveon—along with an investigative series by The Dallas Morning News—found a host of irregularities at Forest Brook. The state eventually cleared the school’s administrators but made sure last year’s testing was monitored by an outside agency. The scores at Forest Brook plunged Last year, only 39 percent passed science.
It’s a jarring but common story. While there have always been students who crib an answer or two, lately teachers, principals and school administrators are being snared for gaming—and sometimes outright cheating on—standardized tests. Under the six-year-old federal education-reform law No Child Left Behind, scores on statewide exams have become the single yardstick by which school success is measured. Struggling schools are being penalized—and some are even slated to be taken over if tests scores fail to rise. Teachers are under pressure to show that kids are learning more, and if they do that, even by fudging the results they can help their borderline school survive. Nowhere is that pressure more intense than Texas, the state that was the incubator for the federal law. In 2005, Caveon found that 700 public schools had suspicious test scores—and though all but a few schools were cleared, the state education commissioner resigned amid the controversy and new testing regulations were put in place.
Ed Hughes and Marj Passman on Madison’s Small Learning Community Climate and Grant Application
I sent an email to Ed and Marj, both of whom have announced their plans to run for Madison School Board next spring, asking the following:
I’m writing to see what your thoughts are on the mmsd’s high school “reform” initiative, particularly in light of two things:
- The decision to re-apply for the US Dept of Education Grant next month
- The lack of any public (any?) evaluation of the results at West and Memorial in light of their stated SLC goals?
In other words, how do you feel about accountability? 🙂
They replied:
Marj Passman:
I am generally supportive of small learning communities and the decision to reapply for a Federal grant. Our high schools continue to provide a rich education for most students — especially the college bound – but there is a significant and maybe growing number of students who are not being engaged. They need our attention. The best evidence is that well implemented small learning communities show promise as part of the solution to increasing the engagement and achievement of those who are not being well served, do no harm and may help others also. My experience as a teacher backs up the research because I found that the caring relationships between staff and students so crucial to reaching those students falling between the cracks on any level of achievement are more likely to develop in smaller settings. Some form of small learning communities are almost a given as part of any reform of our high schools and if we can get financial help from the Federal government with this part of the work, I’m all for it.
I think it is important not to overestimate either the problems or the promise of the proposed solutions. The first step in things like this is to ask what is good that we want to preserve. Our best graduates are competitive with any students anywhere. The majority of our graduates are well prepared for their next academic or vocational endeavors. We need to keep doing the good things we do well. If done successfully, SLCs offer as much for the top achieving students as for any group – individual attention, focus on working with others of their ability, close connection to staff, and consistent evaluation.
You also asked about “accountability” and the evaluations of the existing SLCs. Both evaluations are generally positive, show some progress in important areas and point to places where improvements still need to be made. Neither contains any alarming information that would suggest the SLCs should be abandoned. The data from these limited studies should be looked at with similar research elsewhere that supports SLC as part of the solution to persistent (and in Madison) growing issues.
Like many I applauded when all the Board members asked for a public process for the High Schools of the Future project and like many I have been woefully disappointed with what I’ve seen so far. Because of this and the coming changes in district leadership I’d like to see the redesign time line extended (the final report is due in April) to allow for more input from both the public and the new superintendent.
Thanks for this opportunity
Marjorie Passman
http://marjpassmanforschoolboard.com
Ed Hughes:
From what I know, I am not opposed to MMSD re-applying for the U.S. Dept. of Education grant next month. From my review of the grant application, it did not seem to lock the high schools into new and significant changes. Perhaps that is a weakness of the application. But if the federal government is willing to provide funds to our high schools to do what they are likely to do anyway, I’m all for it.
Like you, I am troubled with the apparent lack of evaluation of results at West and Memorial attributable to their small learning communities initiatives. This may seem inconsistent with my view on applying for the grant, but I do not think we should proceed further down an SLC path without having a better sense of whether in fact it is working at the two schools that have tried it. It seems to me that this should be a major focus of the high school redesign study, but who knows what is going on with that. I asked recently and was told that the study kind of went dormant for awhile after the grant application was submitted.
My own thoughts about high school are pointing in what may be the opposite direction – bigger learning communities rather than smaller. I am concerned about our high schools being able to provide a sufficiently rich range of courses to prepare our students for post-high school life and to retain our students whose families have educational options. The challenges the schools face in this regard were underscored last spring when East eliminated German classes, and now offers only Spanish and French as world language options.
It seems to me that one way to approach this issue is to move toward thinking of the four comprehensive high schools as separate campuses of a single, unified, city-wide high school in some respects. We need to do a lot more to install sufficient teleconferencing equipment to allow the four schools to be linked – so that a teacher in a classroom at Memorial, say, can be seen on a screen in classrooms in the other three schools. In fact, views of all four linked classrooms should simultaneously be seen on the screen. With this kind of linkage, we could take advantage of economies of scale and have enough student interest to justify offering classes in a rich selection of languages to students in all four high schools. I’m sure there are other types of classes where linked classrooms would also make sense.
This kind of approach raises issues. For example, LaFollette’s four block system would be incompatible with this approach. There would also be a question of whether there would need to be a teacher or educational assistant in every classroom, even if the students in the classroom are receiving instruction over the teleconferencing system from another teacher in another school. I would hope that these are the kinds of issues the high school re-design group would be wrestling with. Perhaps they are, or will, but at this point there seems to be no way to know.
There are some off-the-top-of-my-head thoughts prompted by your question and by Maya Cole’s post about the high school re-design study. Feel free to do what you want with this response.
Related Links:
- Involving the Community (in High School Reform) by Maya Cole
- Madison Small Learning Community Grant Application / US Department of Education Response
- Examining the Madison West High SLC Grant Community Connection Results
- Examining the Madison West High SLC Grant Results
- Examining the Data from Earlier Grants, Part 1 (Memorial High School)
- Where does the MMSD get its numbers from?
Thanks to Ed and Marj for taking the time to share their thoughts on this important matter.
Notes on “Principal for a Day”
WISC-TV sports anchor George Johnson was principal for a day at East High School.
Johnson said playing principal was a unique and eye-opening experience.
Johnson said that he was surprised to see that when the national anthem was played, none of the students stood up during it.
The Changing Milwaukee Public Schools
Before your very eyes, ladies and gentleman, see the Incredible Shrinking School System.
Well, maybe it’s not incredible. But it is certainly shrinking.
It also continues, bit by bit, to become a district where the faces of the students are those of minority children.
Official attendance figures for this fall, released by Milwaukee Public Schools officials, show that the enrollment in the traditional MPS schools is down for at least the ninth year in a row.
Since 1998, the number of students in elementary, middle and high schools has declined from 96,942 to 81,381, a 16% drop.
Between a year ago and now, the drop was 3,522, or more than 4%.
Even the alternative and “partnership” schools that contract to educate MPS children – generally run by nonprofit organizations – have had declining enrollment over the past nine years.
Notably, one area showing increases is charter schools not staffed by MPS employees but authorized to operate by the Milwaukee School Board. They had 68 children in 1998 and 3,090 this fall.
Madison School Board Discussion of Fund 80 Based Community Partnerships
Monday evening’s Madison School Board meeting included a fascinating and quite useful discussion of the way in which the district “grants” money to (or creates partnerships with) local groups via Fund 80 (Fund 80, or “Community Services” is money sourced from local property taxes that lives outside the state revenue caps. This means that Fund 80 spending can grow as fast as the School Board approves). The growth of Fund 80 spending has been the subject of some controversy during the recent past.
Props to the school board for discussing and addressing this matter.
Audio 13MB MP3
Much more about Fund 80 here [RSS]
Another factor that will drive property taxes is the changing real estate market. I noted nearly two years ago, that Madison had about 14,000 more parcels in 2005, than 1990. This creates a larger pie to spread government and school spending across. Slower or no growth in the property tax base may mean larger tax increases per parcel than we’ve seen in the past (along with flat state funding). Madison is considered a “property rich” school district, therefore we receive a much smaller percentage of our budget from redistributed state taxes and fees (this approach was referred to as the “Robin Hood Act” in Texas). The MMSD’s handy citizen’s budget notes that 65% of its revenues arrive via local property taxes. Finally, Madison’s property rich status means that any increase in spending beyond the revenue limits via referendums reduce state aids. For example, $1.00 of new referendum spending may cost local property taxpayers $1.60 or thereabouts. This concept is known as “Negative Aid”.
Related: K-12 Tax & Spending Climate.
College Application Coaches
Susan Berfield & Anne Tergesen:
Michele Hernandez boasts that 95% of her teenage clients are accepted by their first-choice school. Her price: As much as $40,000 a student
As I listened to my 8th period English teacher drone on for the third time about how Finny, a character in A Separate Peace, was indeed the main character although he was not the narrator, it finally dawned on me that this was not the exciting world of high school that I had hoped for.
Michele Hernandez boasts that 95% of her teenage clients are accepted by their first-choice school. Her price: As much as $40,000 a student
As I listened to my 8th period English teacher drone on for the third time about how Finny, a character in A Separate Peace, was indeed the main character although he was not the narrator, it finally dawned on me that this was not the exciting world of high school that I had hoped for.
This is how Andrew Garza began an essay in his application to Haverford College. It was a 1,200-word piece that established him as an intellectually curious young man. It was crafted to appeal specifically to the admissions officers at the small liberal arts school. And it was the idea of his high-priced college admissions coach, Michele A. Hernandez. Garza attended a private school in Switzerland, and that worried Hernandez: She thought he might appear to be a privileged teenager without much substance. So she advised him to write about why he had left his public high school in suburban New Jersey. “We had to make it seem like he didn’t want to be around so many rich kids. We spun a whole story about him taking the initiative to leave in order to broaden his experience,” Hernandez says. “It was his initiative. But he wouldn’t have written about it.”
Today Andrew is a senior at Haverford, studying sociology and economics. His father, John, paid Hernandez $18,000 for 18 months’ worth of advice. “It is a lot of money,” says Garza, a manager at Abitibi-Consolidated (ABY ) in New York. “But if you look at it as an investment, it’s not a bad one.”
Amazing. Michele’s website. Clusty search.
Penelope Wang:
To improve her chances of getting into a good college, Caitlin Pickavance, a 17-year-old high school senior from Danville, Calif., has been working with a private college coach since her freshman year (cost: $800).
She gets tutored in math ($1,400), takes an ACT prep class ($900) and participates in afterschool enrichment activities ($1,350). Then there’s the good-will mission to Belize she went on last spring ($1,375) and the classes she took this summer at the University of Salamanca in Spain ($7,000) in hopes of further buffing her résumé.
High-quality standards, a curriculum based on critical thinking can enlighten our students
ne of the central lessons of No Child Left Behind is that if school sanctions are tied to test scores, the testing tail can wag the schooling dog. And a key problem for the United States is that most of our tests aren’t measuring the kinds of 21st century skills we need students to acquire and that are at the core of curriculum and assessment in high-achieving countries.
While a debate rages about whether our tests should be created at the national or state level, this argument is focused on the wrong issue.
We need to focus on the quality of our standards and assessments rather than fighting over who administers them. Unless we change the way we think about learning and testing, it won’t matter who makes the tests. They will still be a major part of the problem of American education, rather than the solution.
The plain truth is that the United States is falling far behind other nations on every measure of educational achievement. In the latest international assessments, the United States ranked 28th out of 40 countries in math – on par with Latvia – 20th in science, and 19th in reading, even further behind than a few years ago. In addition, these other countries surpass us in graduation rates and, over the last decade, in higher education participation as well.
Milwaukee Teacher Pay
So how much will teachers be paid in MPS under the contract proposal almost sure to be ratified by teachers and the School Board? When agreement between the bargaining teams was announced, we reported that the salary schedule for teachers would increase 2.5% this year and 2.5% next year, but we didn’t give details.
So here are a few:
Under the agreement, a starting teacher with only a bachelor’s degree will receive $34,858 in salary this year, up from $34,008 a year ago. A year from now, the figure will be $35,729.
A teacher with a master’s degree in the seventh year of working for MPS — a farily typical situation — was paid $48,350 a year ago. This year that will be $49,559 and next year it will be $50,798.
The highest possible straight-pay amount for a teacher in MPS would be someone with a master’s degree and 32 additional credits who is in at least the 16th year of teaching. Last year, such a teacher would have been paid $69,400; this year, the figure is $71,135; next year it is $72,913.
Failing Schools Strain to Meet U.S. Standard
As the director of high schools in the gang-infested neighborhoods of the East Side of Los Angeles, Guadalupe Paramo struggles every day with educational dysfunction.
For the past half-dozen years, not even one in five students at her district’s teeming high schools has been able to do grade-level math or English. At Abraham Lincoln High School this year, only 7 in 100 students could. At Woodrow Wilson High, only 4 in 100 could.
For chronically failing schools like these, the No Child Left Behind law, now up for renewal in Congress, prescribes drastic measures: firing teachers and principals, shutting schools and turning them over to a private firm, a charter operator or the state itself, or a major overhaul in governance.
But more than 1,000 of California’s 9,500 schools are branded chronic failures, and the numbers are growing. Barring revisions in the law, state officials predict that all 6,063 public schools serving poor students will be declared in need of restructuring by 2014, when the law requires universal proficiency in math and reading.
Spike in violence in middle schools raises concerns
A Marlborough student was suspended for bringing a knife to school. A week later, a Concord student was arrested for putting 10 classmates on a hit list. Then there was the bomb threat at a Tewksbury school and a lockdown in Waltham where two knives were found in students’ lockers, just a day after a pellet gun was discovered at another Waltham school.
The episodes all occurred within five weeks last spring, not in high schools, but in middle schools in suburban districts, where educators and law enforcement agencies are increasingly worried about violence penetrating places once considered havens.
Massachusetts suburban and rural middle schools in 2005-06 had 4,750 reports of violence – such as fights, sexual assault, and robbery – and threats of violence; 484 drug, alcohol, and tobacco offenses; 290 cases of sexual harassment, and 383 weapons found, according to a Globe analysis of school safety statistics provided by the Massachusetts Department of Education.
Madison Math Task Force Expands
I’ve learned that parent and activist Jill Jokela and LaFollette High School Physics Teacher Charles Chapin will be named to the Math Task Force this evening.
Much more on the Madison Math Task Force here.
New map for college aid drawn
Overhaul includes grant increases, interest rate cuts, loan repayment program for those who need help
“The financial aid package gets better for those who are eligible for need-based financial aid, since interest rates are dropping,” said Joseph Hurley, chief executive of Savingforcollege.com, a Web site on college financing.
The College Cost Reduction and Access Act, which President Bush recently signed into law, has been called the largest overhaul of aid to college students since soldiers returned from World War II battlefields and headed into the classroom.
While it doesn’t change the strategy and approach that families should take when shopping for college financing, it will give them more benefits to go with the financial aid options that are available.
Major provisions of the new law include:
“Ohio and Rogue Teachers”
Jennifer Smith Richards & Jill Riepenhoff:
How can a child rapist still have a teaching license?
Why is a teacher who married his student still in the classroom?
How can a man who has been on trial four times for molesting children be allowed to teach?
The answer is simple and stunning: Ohio’s system to punish rogue teachers is flawed at all levels — school, district and state.
It puts the rights of teachers before those of students. It hides information from parents and potential employers. It allows secret deals with troubled teachers.
A 10-month Dispatch investigation, a first-of-its-kind analysis of the system, found that 1,722 educators have been disciplined since 2000 for everything from shoplifting to murder. Two-thirds were allowed to return to the classroom or start school jobs.
Via Mike Antonucci.
More here.
Milwaukee Considers Expanding Gifted Program to High School
What if Milwaukee’s Samuel Morse Middle School expanded its programs for the gifted and talented to cover sixth through 12th grades?
What if the whole program were moved into the Marshall High School building, giving it more room, and maybe even taking the Marshall name?
Milwaukee Public Schools leaders are doing a lot of thinking along those lines, prodded by a strong desire by Morse Principal Rogers Onick and others at his school to expand into high school programming.
“There currently are discussions with the staff at Morse Middle School about relocating,” MPS Superintendent William Andrekopoulos said. “There seems to be some interest in pursuing that.”
Behind those cautious statements lies a potentially bold change in MPS. Onick says there is no high school in Wisconsin whose entire program is aimed at gifted and talented students.
And if Morse took that route, it could have an impact on high schools such as Rufus King and Riverside, generally college-bound programs that are frequently the choice of Morse graduates.
Author Finds Fault with Federal Testing
Alan Borsuk & Linda Pearlstein:
Q.You were obviously unhappy in the book at times about what kids (at Tyler Heights) weren’t doing – social studies, geography, just orientation to the world, opening their minds in a broader sense. . . . What were kids missing by having this kind of testing and drill-oriented curriculum?
A. I think critical thinking. Skills that they really needed to be starting to build at that age that they weren’t necessarily developing outside of school, as you would have liked. Also, engagement in what this all is about. . . . I think a lot of teachers felt sort of constrained by the sort of structure they were in and couldn’t take the tangents they wanted to take to help the kids understand, and sometimes couldn’t take the time they wanted when the kids needed to back up and learn some basic skills but the pacing guide insisted you need to move along. . . . It was just a very sort of structured and sometimes even Spartan day.
Q.You went to Maple Dale (School) in Fox Point yourself. Compare Maple Dale and Tyler Heights.
A. If I had to say the two things that they had in common, they were: an abundance of adults who clearly cared about the children and connected with them, and I still appreciate that to this day. That was evident at Tyler Heights. . . . The other thing was that we had resources. We had all the books we needed, we had a perfectly acceptable facility, the building was clean, and we had the equipment and tools we needed. Tyler Heights, even though the student population is low income, has a lot of resources, mainly because it is in an affluent district and it receives Title 1 funding from the federal government.
When state proficiency standards are lowered, there will be NO CHILD LEFT BEHIND
Proponents of No Child Left Behind – including the odd couple of President Bush and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi – received uplifting news last month: The nation’s fourth-graders had finally stirred on federal tests, showing gains in reading and math. Eighth-graders saw little progress in reading, but they did experience an uptick in math.
The news reached Capitol Hill in the nick of time, as Bush and Democratic leaders struggle to renew Washington’s controversial education reforms. No Child adherents had waited five long years – and spent more than $90 billion – before seeing these tepid yet encouraging results.
Still, Bush’s signature domestic policy is in deep political trouble, and even its Democratic sponsors continue to ignore its fundamental flaws.
Some business groups side with Bush and Pelosi, urging quick renewal and even tougher love for local educators, such as tying teacher pay to student learning curves.
But two recent polls reveal that a majority of Americans believe that No Child should be rewritten or simply scrapped, and are worried that the law is narrowing what children are taught and forcing them to spend countless hours getting ready for nonstop tests.
Support for No Child is weakest among suburban Democrats and independent voters, a fact not lost on Sen. Hillary Clinton and other presidential candidates who now speak harshly against the law.
Politics aside, is this massive federal experiment boosting children’s achievement beyond the long-running benefits of states’ own accountability programs, which focus on helping teachers instead of dinging them? Evidence to date suggests the answer is no.
D.C. Schools Chief Wants Power to Fire Ineffective Teachers
As D.C. Mayor Adrian M. Fenty proposed legislation yesterday that would grant schools Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee the power to drastically revamp the system’s central office, Rhee said she also wants more authority to fire underperforming teachers.
It was her first public statement that teachers could be ousted as part of what Fenty (D) called “wholesale changes” to the 49,000-student system.
Within a year of enacting the legislation, Fenty said, “I would be surprised if we kept more than a small percentage” of the 934 central office employees.
“We’re not going to tinker around the edges,” he said in an interview.
The statements by Rhee and the mayor marked an escalation in their efforts to overhaul the bureaucracy. Their attempt to acquire broader personnel authority through legislation and labor negotiations is a key test of Fenty’s power as the ultimate arbiter of city education.
The Madison School District attempted to change the criteria used when teachers are surplused, transferred or laid off during the most recent negotations with Madison Teachers, Inc – without success. More here.
Life on the Edge: No place for children
In a darkened Algebra II classroom, all eyes were on an illuminated graphing calculator projected three feet high on the white board as students studied a series of graphs and talked about absolute value functions. The defense of public education is not the defense of the status quo in public schools. The New York City Department of Education web site has had a dramatic facelift, with almost every new whistle and bell you could want. It is now widely acknowledged that GCSEs don’t stretch the most able, so how do schools with only bright pupils cope? Mrgan is a 10-year-old fifth-grader in Roxbury, New Jersey. She’s fair-skinned, petite, with freckles across her nose and wavy, light-brown hair. Her father is a police sergeant on duty until 3 a.m. Her mother, Heather, works part time, devoting herself to shuffling Morgan and her brother to their many activities. Morgan plays soccer, but her first love is competitive swimming, with year-round workouts that have broadened her shoulders. She’s also a violinist in the school orchestra, with practices and lessons each week. Every night, Morgan sits down to homework before watching Flip This House or another show with her mother. Morgan has always appeared to be an enthusiastic, well-balanced child. The concept of charter schools is popular enough that even most liberals won’t attack them openly. Yet the national political assault continues behind-the-scenes, most recently in Ohio, where unions have now been caught giving orders to Attorney General Marc Dann, who has duly saluted. V. Dion Haynes and Aruna Jain: Danielle Chappell had no reason to doubt she was a solid student. She earned decent grades, even scoring some A’s in English and math, while balancing schoolwork with basketball, track and a spot on the dance team. Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction (DPI): Wisconsin high school students may apply to attend one or two courses in nonresident school districts, while remaining enrolled in their resident school districts for the majority of their classes. No later than one week before the start of the course, the resident school district must also notify the student if the course does not meet the high school graduation requirements in the resident school district (although the student may attend the course even if it does not meet the high school graduation requirements.) Not only has high-stakes testing largely failed to magically swing open the gates to successful learning, it is questionable in many cases whether the tests themselves are anything more than a shell game. On Thursday morning October 11, 2007 seven Madison Police officers and some 30 Lafollette High School staff members were needed to breakup a disturbance at the school around 11:15 a.m.. Officers learned that two adult women and two teenage boys (one of the woman is the mother of one of the boys) came to Lafollette where they confronted another teenage boy in a hallway. The boy, who was confronted, reportedly had gotten into a fight with the other two outside of school earlier in the week. He (the boy confronted) said the group of four circled him and the two adult women encouraged the young men to fight. Staff, hearing the ruckus, responded. Karen Rivedal has more. Last spring, town officials in this affluent Boston suburb changed the elementary-school assignments for 38 streets — and sparked outrage. Some white families had been reassigned to Tucker, a mostly black school which has historically had Milton’s lowest test scores. This study, based on an analysis of the National Educational Longitudinal Study of 1988-2000, finds that, once family background characteristics are taken into account, low-income students attending public urban high schools generally performed as well academically as students attending private high schools. The study also found that students attending traditional public high schools were as likely to attend college as those attending private high schools. In addition, the report also finds that young adults who had attended any type of private high school were no more likely to enjoy job satisfaction or to be engaged in civic activities at age 26 than those who had attended traditional public high schools. Joanne has more. 12:15 p.m. Check-in and Refreshments During my own 20 years of observing and writing about public education in New York, I’ve seen firsthand how exasperatingly difficult it has been for principals to oust abusive, incapable or negligent teachers who are protected by a powerful union. Instead, some principals would privately agree to swap problem teachers in a process known as “trading turkeys.” Others would offer such teachers a positive rating if they used their seniority to transfer to a different school. How many times have you heard of a lucky duck who wins the lottery, just to squander it all and return to his old work-a-day self? I’m sure those guys thought winning the lottery would turn their luck around forever. Yu Minhong attributes his decision to abandon a teaching career and go into business partly to his wife’s intense nagging. For those folks so enamored of the various suburban “great schools” you should make sure you look at the facts. Specifically, I’m pretty amazed at the relatively poor performance of Waunakee HS. It’s down in the 66th percentile statewide. That’s not terrible but it’s not a super-dooper school either. Contrast it with West HS which is in the 99th percentile statewide and, in fact, the 4th best high school in Wisconsin (according to my analysis, etc, etc) The work done by former state representative and school board member Dean Alford and others is groundbreaking. Three efforts are especially striking. The Madison School District’s current 2007/2008 budget is $339,685,844, or $13,997.27 per student [24,268 students]. The latest MMSD Citizen’s budget is worth a look. When the young people who run washingtonpost.com recruited me to moderate the Web site’s new “Admissions 101” discussion group, they said it would be a breeze. All I had to do was come up with a few provocative topics each week and stand back. Our readers would be the ones who would make it interesting. I wouldn’t have to miss any of my afternoon naps. This is Phil-180, also known as “Philosophy & Star Trek.” Singapore’s National Institute of Education (NIE) and Vietnam’s National Institute of Education Management have signed a Memorandum of Understanding to set up a centre to train education professionals in Hanoi. Singapore Mathematics & Mathematics Education Academic Group. The reality is that more money and better teachers mean little to a black student if his or her parents do not instill a desire for knowledge and create a context for academic success in the home. To quote Wendell Harris, the education committee chairman of the Milwaukee chapter of the NAACP, “We can’t keep making excuses for parents.” Rich school district or not, a child is only as good as the support his or her parents provide. The d.school’s first major venture in the world of K-12 education opened this week at the Nueva School in Hillsborough, CA. Called the Innovation Lab, the project is a 3500 square foot space where students in the K-8 school will develop their design thinking skills. The project cycle was rapid with needfinding in April and May, conceptual prototype in June, and full-scale prototyping at Sweet Hall in July. July’s prototype sessions brought 20 kids a week to campus and deeply informed everything from how to brainstorm with 1st graders, to how high to build the tables. The team also conducted a 3-day teacher workshop with Nueva faculty where teachers reported they rediscovered the importance of play and one was quoted as saying, the Innovation Lab, “is not just a space, it’s a movement.” THE teacher held up a laminated card, and 4-year-old Ryan Murphy tried to name the object shown: strawberries, oranges, a pair of pants. “Here, he is totally independent,” said Witt, whose family moved to LaGrange a year ago. “He just fits, and he’s loving that.” Via a reader’s email, ABC News: At age 13, Luis Sanchez’s mother kicked him out of the house — permanently — for misbehaving. High expectations. One would think, with Madison’s abundant intellectual, community and financial resources, that these kinds of opportunities should be available here. If the best hackers all start their own companies after college instead of getting jobs, that will change what happens in college. Most of these changes will be for the better. I think the experience of college is warped in a bad way by the expectation that afterward you’ll be judged by potential employers. Geoff Caldwell, The parents of Damion Frye’s ninth-grade students are spending their evenings this fall doing something they thought they had left behind long ago: homework. The program Friday included a tour of some choice schools in Milwaukee. I’ve done tours like this in other places, including Washington, D.C., New Orleans and Michigan. They are always enlightening. We had one especially inspiring visit to a school called the Milwaukee College Preparatory School. A new study concludes that Milwaukee’s voucher program has improved public schools; another study questions the benefits of competition. says improvements leveled off after a few years. In fourth grade, Brentson Duke went grocery shopping with his mom, and when he saw a sign above the aisle that said “peanut butter,” he had a bout of anxiety so severe it set off an asthma attack. Companies are rolling out a new benefit that aims to alleviate a big source of stress for many middle-aged employees: help getting their kids into college. AS THE 58,000 pupils of the District of Columbia Public Schools (DCPS) begin a new school year, their teachers are adjusting to a controversial new boss. Michelle Rhee, a rookie superintendent, is an unusual choice to run one of the worst school systems in America. She is the youngest chancellor ever of DC’s public schools and the first non-black to run the system in four decades. But the most interesting aspect of Mayor Adrian Fenty’s choice is that Ms Rhee is an alumna of an outfit called Teach for America. The Silk Road Project is a not-for-profit arts, cultural and educational organization founded in 1998 by cellist Yo-Yo Ma, who serves as its artistic director, and led by Laura Freid, executive director and CEO. The Project has a vision of connecting the world’s neighborhoods by bringing together artists and audiences around the globe. Inspired by the cultural traditions of the historic Silk Road, the Silk Road Project is a catalyst promoting innovation and learning through the arts. Road Project But that clear and present danger is not here today. It’s a slowly growing problem that we haven’t really faced up to, that we are rapidly losing our lead in this war for minds. The Cold War is over. The arms race is over. It’s now a mind race. Slashdot discussion. A tentative teacher contract agreement announced Wednesday for Milwaukee Public Schools would mean the process of hiring teachers would start sooner each spring and operate with more of a welcome mat for people willing to work in high-needs schools or teach subjects in which there are shortages of teachers. The Madison School District attempted to change the criteria used when teachers are surplused, transferred or laid off during the most recent negotations with Madison Teachers, Inc – without success: FURTHER ISSUES: Matthews said another issue that is likely to cause consternation among MTI members during contract negotiations has to do with administration proposals to change the criteria used when teachers are surplused, transferred or laid off. More here. Bill Clingan will become part of a bridge between the mayor’s office and the Madison School District if the City Council confirms Clingan’s appointment as the director of its new Economic and Community Development Department. Outgoing School Board member Lawrie Kobza defeated incumbent Bill Clingan in April, 2005 [site history at archive.org]. Angela Hernandez-Marshall 971K PDF: We have completed our review of applications received under the Smaller Learning Communities Program (CFDA 84.215L) [MMSD SLC Application]. The Department received a total of 236 eligible applications in this competition. Of these, 38 were selected for funding. Unfortunately, your application was not selected for funding this year. The first reviewer noted (page 3) that “(5) As part of the district’s strategic planing there is no examination of the successes and weaknesses of previous SLC initiatives (pages 15-16).”. The 2007 state testing data is out and I thought I’d take another look. Again I’m looking here at Dane County area schools only compared with each other and state-wide as well. The data you will see only includes non-poor students — you can read more about why below. Much more on the WKCE here [RSS]. The study found that “cut scores” – the line between proficient and not proficient – vary widely among the 26 states, casting doubt on the question of what it means when a state says a certain percentage of its students are doing well. Those percentages are central to the way the federal No Child Left Behind education law works. From the Fordham Institute report: Cats and Dogs vs. Tolstoy Fordham Institute Study. A new study of state achievement tests offers evidence that the No Child Left Behind law’s core mission — to push all students to score well in reading and math — is undermined by wide variations in how states define a passing score. During the historic 1957 desegregation of Little Rock Central High School, 26-year-old journalist Will Counts took a photograph that gave an iconic face to the passions at the center of the civil-rights movement—two faces, actually: those of 15-year-old Elizabeth Eckford on her first day of school, and her most recognizable tormentor, Hazel Bryan. The story of how these two women struggled to reconcile and move on from the event is a remarkable journey through the last half-century of race relations in America. Children’s television show host Fred Rogers understood something that, apparently, Atlanta Public Schools doesn’t. YouTube is now an important teaching tool at UC Berkeley. Madison Police Department: Both of these Police Reports did not include West High’s address (30 Ash Street). The incident address can be a factor in reporting school related issues. See the Madison Parents’ School Safety Site’s Police call data summary from July 2006 to June 2007. NBC 15 also covered these incidents. Via a reader’s email: Bob Hebert: I asked a high school kid walking along Commonwealth Avenue if he knew who the vice president of the United States was. Herbert is spot on. The same old, same old (or, “Same Service”) strategy at ever larger dollar amounts has clearly run its course. “Concerned about raising the quality of teachers, states and local school districts have consistently focused on the credentials, rather than the demonstrated effectiveness — or ineffectiveness — of teachers in the classroom.” , and alternative school models: The second area to be mined for potentially transformative effects is the wide and varied field of alternative school models. We should be rigorously studying those schools that appear to be having the biggest positive effects on student achievement. Are the effects real? If so, what accounts for them? More than 1.2 million students are attending more than 4,000 charter schools in 40 states and the District, up from 200,000 students in just 600 charter schools a decade ago. Charters are hot commodities, the public school equivalent of hybrid cars or left-handed relief pitchers. But many people are puzzled why that is so. Utah’s powerful Republican legislative leaders have quietly formed a political issue committee aimed at defeating a referendum on November’s ballot that would repeal a private school tuition voucher law passed by the 2007 Legislature. Jim and Robyn Dahlin knew replacing the roof of their home in Greenbrae, Calif., would be expensive. But they hadn’t planned to spend an extra $15,000 on solar panels. For that, they have their 8-year-old son, Luke, to thank. In addition to hearing testimony at three public hearings in August, the state Department of Public Instruction also accepted written statements through the end of the last month on its proposed changes to the rule guiding the identification of gifted students in Wisconsin [PDF File]. “I am a fifteen-year-old home schooled student, and currently a full-time special student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. I spent nine years at EAGLE School of Madison, and one year at James Madison Memorial HS (MMSD). Tacoma’s eighth-through-12th-grade algebra, geometry, pre-calculus and calculus students are cracking open new math textbooks worth more than half a million dollars. It’s the fourth math series to be used in the city’s high schools in the last seven years. Despite mounting scientific evidence to the contrary, thousands of families still ardently believe that vaccines containing the mercury-based preservative thimerosal are the cause of their children’s autism. A study published Wednesday in The New England Journal of Medicine concluding that there is no correlation between thimerosal and neuropsychological development in young children is unlikely to dissuade them. And two articles accompanying the new study, including one that sounds the alarm about a coming onslaught of civil lawsuits against vaccinemakers by autism families, will hardly defuse the emotionally charged issue. Together, the three journal pieces highlight the the tangle of scientific, medical and legal strands underlying one of our most enduring and complicated public-health controversies.
Hand-Held Calculators’ Milestone Number
The weightless image of a TI-84 Plus Silver Edition graphing calculator is a far cry from early typewriter-size calculators that weighed 55 pounds and plugged into an outlet. This year marks the 40th anniversary of the moment that revolutionized not only the calculator but also the way students learn math. It was 40 years ago that three Texas Instruments scientists shrank that monstrosity and created the hand-held calculator.
To mark the milestone, the Texas company donated some historic hand-helds to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History last week as symbols of change in the United States. The devices will go alongside the table Thomas Jefferson used when he wrote the Declaration of Independence and the top hat Abraham Lincoln wore when he was assassinated.
In math classrooms, calculators mechanized finger counting, pencil-and-paper calculations and slide rules. Elementary students weaned on Little Professor calculators that can add, subtract, multiply and divide move on to graphing calculators in later grades. Future students will use programmable devices that show algebraic formulas, graphs and word problems on the same screen.
The Defense Of Public Education, Democratic Change And Charter Schools
This is an important and essential truth that teacher unionists and other advocates of public education need to grasp. With very real enemies targeting education of, by and for the public, the temptation is to treat every criticism of public schools as a mortal threat, and to rush to the defense of ‘actually existing school systems’ and ‘actually existing schools,’ regardless of the merits of the criticisms. When we do that, too often we become apologists — unwitting apologists perhaps, but apologists nonetheless — for much of what actually harms public education, from dysfunctional bureaucracies and out of control testing to inept district leaderships and tyrannical school leaders.
The real defense of public education is the defense of the democratic educational values and vision which are central to the idea of public education. This is not some Platonic ideal: there are ample illustrations of that idea, those values and vision, in practice, and we should be highlighting and learning from those living examples. Moreover, when school districts and schools fall far short of that idea, we need to understand why, and figure out how they can be changed to realize the full potential of public schooling. In sum, the defense of public education demands of us a vision and a strategy for changing public schools and districts for the better, for the realization of the promise of public education — not an undifferentiated apology for whatever is.
Bad News? We Don’t Need No Stinking Bad News!
If you want information and data on a school, you type the name into the conveniently located search engine, and it will take you to what is called a NYC DOE portal for that school. We searched Stuyvesant High School, and we were taken here. On the left hand side of the page there is a category “Statistics,” and if you click on it, it takes you to a page that has all of the DOE’s statistical reports. You can read the Stuyvesant High School’s Learning Environment Survey, its Quality Review Report, its School Report Card, its Budget, its Weekly Attendance, its Register, its Expenditure Report, its Galaxy Budget Allocations, its Table of Organization [with budget allocation], and its Building and School Facilities Report.
Everything you could want to know, right?
Well, we went looking for the most important statistic for a high school, its graduation rate. In previous years, the graduation rate was part of the school report card. But when you go to the School Report Card from this web portal, you find a truncated report, less than 1/3 the length of the old Report Card. Here’s the previous year’s Stuyvesant report card, with all of the graduation and drop out data on the last page. The new report card tells you what Stuyvesant’s students plan to do after graduation, just like last year’s report card does, but it manages to omit the information on how many students actually reach that goal.
A*’s in Their Eyes
My nephew, a bright boy, goes to the type of school where everyone gets an A* in their GCSEs. On the morning his own results were published, he couldn’t be bothered to find out what they were. Instead, he went off to play tennis.
For able children, GCSEs have become what Tony Little, headmaster of Eton, described as boy scouts’ badges. More than half of those taking this year’s edition were awarded an A* or A and, if you narrow the field down to the top selective schools, independent and state, the figure shoots up to over 80 per cent.
GCSE doesn’t distinguish sufficiently well at the top, says Professor Alan Smithers, director of the Centre for Education and Education Research at the University of Buckingham and a special adviser to the All-Commons Education Committee. They award persistence and care, not talent and ability.
But those who teach the talented and able as well as the diligent and the careful have increasingly tried to find ways to make the exam system more relevant to their pupils.
Snooze or Lose: Overscheduled Kids are Getting at Least an Hour’s Less Sleep Than They Need
But once Morgan spent a year in the classroom of a demanding teacher, she could no longer unwind at night. Despite a reasonable bedtime of 9:30 p.m., she would lay awake in frustration until 11:30, sometimes midnight, clutching her leopard-fur pillow. On her fairy-dust purple bedroom walls were taped index cards, each with a vocabulary word Morgan was having trouble with. Unable to sleep, she turned back to her studies, determined not to let her grades suffer. Instead, she saw herself fall apart emotionally. During the day, she was noticeably crabby and prone to crying easily. Occasionally, Morgan nearly fell asleep in class.
Union Orders, on Ohio Charter Schools
Last week the Columbus Dispatch published emails showing that Mr. Dann and the Ohio Education Association are in cahoots to close down certain charter schools in the state. Mr. Dann was elected last November in a Democratic sweep that included Governor Ted Strickland and was helped by Big Labor. As a token of his appreciation, Mr. Strickland earlier this year proposed placing a moratorium on new charter schools and restrictions on private-school vouchers, only to be rebuffed by the Legislature. Now it’s Mr. Dann’s turn to send a thank-you.
In March, the teachers union sued the state, alleging that low-performing charters should be closed because officials had failed to monitor them properly. The Ohio Supreme Court had ruled against the union in a similar case last year. Yet Mr. Dann offered to settle the case, and the union dropped the suit after the AG’s office agreed to go after charter schools on its own.
The union even advised a legal strategy for Mr. Dann, which was to use the charitable trust status of the schools to argue that they were failing in their mission to educate kids. “I know this is a long shot, but by any chance, are community schools registered as charitable trusts?” said a union lawyer in an email to the AG’s office. “If not, are they exempt from registration by regulation?”
Whatever Happened to the Class of 2005?
Then she graduated from Cardozo High School and arrived at the University of Maryland Eastern Shore, where she bombed the placement tests so badly that she had to take remedial English and math. She failed the makeup math course twice before passing it. Low grades overall put her on academic probation. Finally, mid-sophomore year, she was forced to withdraw.
Part Time Wisconsin Open Enrollment
ACCEPTANCE OR REJECTION—RESIDENT SCHOOL DISTRICT
No later than one week before the start of the course, the resident school district is required to notify the student if the application is denied (notification is not required for approval).
The resident school district may deny a student’s application only for the following reasons:
High-Stakes Flimflam
Daniel Koretz, a professor at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education, told me in a recent interview that it’s important to ask “whether you can trust improvements in test scores when you are holding people accountable for the tests.”
The short answer, he said, is no.
If teachers, administrators, politicians and others have a stake in raising the test scores of students — as opposed to improving student learning, which is not the same thing — there are all kinds of incentives to raise those scores by any means necessary.
“We’ve now had four or five different waves of educational reform,” said Dr. Koretz, “that were based on the idea that if we can just get a good test in place and beat people up to raise scores, kids will learn more. That’s really what No Child Left Behind is.”
The problem is that you can raise scores the hard way by teaching more effectively and getting the students to work harder, or you can take shortcuts and start figuring out ways, as Dr. Koretz put it, to “game” the system.
Guess what’s been happening?
“We’ve had high-stakes testing, really, since the 1970s in some states,” said Dr. Koretz. “We’ve had maybe six good studies that ask: ‘If the scores go up, can we believe them? Or are people taking shortcuts?’ And all of those studies found really substantial inflation of test scores.
“In some cases where there were huge increases in test scores, the kids didn’t actually learn more at all. If you gave them another test, you saw no improvement.”
LaFollette High School Incident
School Integration Efforts Face Renewed Opposition
Among those reassigned is Kevin Keating, a white parent who is talking to lawyers about going to court to reverse the plan. I “just don’t feel good putting [my son] in an inferior school,” he says. His ammunition: the U.S. Supreme Court’s June ruling that consideration of race in school assignments is unconstitutional. Without the backing of the Supreme Court, Mr. Keating says his effort wouldn’t have “much of a standing.”
Five decades ago, federal courts began forcing reluctant districts to use race-based assignments to integrate schools. But in June, a bitterly divided Supreme Court reversed course, concluding that two race-based enrollment plans in Louisville, Ky., and Seattle were unconstitutional. “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race,” Chief Justice John Roberts declared.
Now, in an era when schools nationwide are becoming increasingly segregated, the ruling is affecting local school districts in ways large and small. Some districts are sidestepping the ruling by replacing measurements of race with household income. But many others, such as Milton, are adjusting their programs in the face of opposition that’s been emboldened by the Supreme Court decision.
In Georgia, the Bibb County School District, which encompasses Macon, has decided to abandon a balancing plan between whites and minorities at one of its top magnet schools next year. A broader school-board redistricting plan aimed at promoting integration is facing a host of opposition, including a threat of legal action by a lawyer citing the Supreme Court decision.
Are Private High Schools Better Academically Than Public High Schools?
Greg Toppo has more.
UW-Madison: Fall Day on Campus 11/9/2007
Check-in at the Ameritech Lounge, on the first floor of the Pyle Center, just off the lobby. Enjoy some light refreshments.
1:00 p.m. Session I
Henry Kissinger and the American Century
Jeremi Suri, Professor of History
Room 313
The Rise of China as a World Power
Ed Friedman, Professor of Political Science
Room 325
2:00 p.m. Session II
The History of Door County’s Peninsula State Park
William H. Tishler, Professor Emeritus of Landscape Architecture
Room 313
The Private Michelangelo: The Man Behind the Art
Fred Plotkin ’78, Alumnus in Residence Program
Room 325
3:00 p.m. Session III
The United Nations: Is Expenditure on Peacekeeping Missions to the Detriment of Development?
Florence Chenoweth, MS’70, Phd’86, Managing Director of the UW Human Rights Initiative; Former Food and Agriculture Office Liaison to the United Nations; past Distinguished Alumni Award Winner
Room 313
Chancellor’s Q&A
John Wiley, MS’65, PhD’68, Chancellor, UW-Madison
Room 325
New York’s Teacher Transfer Rules
The transfer rules were ended in 2005, under an agreement between the city and the teachers’ union. That same accord also slightly streamlined the process of bringing termination cases before an arbitrator. But I’ve also reported on examples of quality teachers persecuted by insecure or dictatorial administrators for being active in the union, speaking to the press or merely having independent views on curriculum. Not every teacher in the rubber room deserves the fate, even if some surely do.
Arbitrators and courts will weigh the evidence in each case. So why are those who have been charged, but not convicted, consigned to places like the eighth-floor room at 333 Seventh Avenue, which seem intended to mete out punishment long before any verdict has been issued?
New research on school choice: Winning isn’t everything
Just like education reform proponents who are fond of calling school choice a “panacea” think that winning a voucher or attending a private school automatically results in a better student.
Well, there is new evidence that offering a choice isn’t, by itself, going to effect education reform. A newly released study by the National Bureau of Economic Research (authored by Julie Berry Cullen of UC-San Diego and Brian Jacob of the University of Michigan) attempts to focus on the “lottery” effect of school choice by tracking, over time, students who won the ability to choose their Chicago public schools in Kindergarten or first grade. By also following students who did not win, they are able to avoid what is the biggest hurdle to good research on the effect of school choice…non-random selection.
Here in Milwaukee vouchers are not awarded randomly to families. In our city, parents first must find a school, then apply for a voucher seat at that school. Only if there are more applicants than seats will random selection kick in, and even then, the student is only competing against the other students who have chosen that school…they are not in a pool with students choosing other schools. Not a random situation at all. (Which is not to say it isn’t in the students’ and schools’ best interests to operate the program that way, just that it is difficult to research rigorously due to this.)
China hones its English accent
“Some of my friends were making more money and my wife wanted me to be more successful. She felt that, compared with them, I was a loser,” he says with characteristic candour.
Mr Yu rose to the challenge, founding New Oriental and turning it into China’s biggest private education company, with English-language schools and other learning centres in 34 cities.
In the latest financial year, more than 1m students enrolled, boosting New Oriental’s revenues by 36 per cent to more than Rmb1bn ($136m).
Analyzing Madison High School’s WKCE Scores
Anyway for the most part, the high schools do pretty well. I would say anything above 80th percentile statewide is pretty good. Who knew that Wisconsin Heights HS was so good? I don’t even know where it is! It got on this list because the district was in the area. It probably helps that they only have something like 95 students in 10th grade.
Georgia’s “Appropriate Education” Financial Definition
One — important but not all that novel — is to determine precisely how much money is needed to produce an educated child. Final numbers are about a month away, but as a start, the task force concludes that a system should be able to meet the academic needs of an elementary school child for $6,220, plus add-ons for other considerations — special needs, for example. Operation and maintenance of school buildings would add another $600 and transportation another $151.
The second significant contribution goes to the heart of the suits here and elsewhere. That is to identify wealth and tax it appropriately.
“There are probably better ways of measuring wealth than we use now,” said Jeffrey Williams, a consultant to the task force. “We only use property values now.” In the 1950s and early ’60s, he says, some measure of personal income was included. From the ’60s on, it’s been the property tax.
Williams examined 10 local systems spread throughout the state. Some were rich in property and wealth, some poor on both and some low or high on wealth or property.
Will AP or IB Really Get You College Credit?
As proof of both the washingtonpost.com staff’s honesty, and my decrepitude, take a look at this topic on the discussion group list: “Will AP or IB REALLY get you college credit?” I put it up more than five months ago, on May 22. As of yesterday, it had more than 250 posts and was still going strong. How many of those posts were mine? About five. Some of the discussion group members are irritated by my absence from their intriguing debate, for which I offer a couple of lame excuses below.
What this topic has taught me is that the battle between pro-Advanced Placement and pro-International Baccalaureate people is a bigger deal than I thought it was. AP and IB both offer college-level exams to high school students that can earn credit at many colleges. I consider the argument trivial, like comparing a Mercedes to a BMW. They are both very fine cars; whether you choose one or the other doesn’t make much difference.
But I was wrong about the importance of the AP-IB choice to other people. The Admissions 101 debate indicates it is a big deal and is likely to become even more important as IB — at the moment tiny compared to AP — continues its rapid growth. The number of people posting on the issue is relatively small, but they are unusually articulate and well-connected advocates for their point of view. As AP and IB continue to increase their influence over the American education system, the argument is going have an impact.
Charting New Courses To Make Subjects Click
“It’s got a better title than ‘Metaphysics, Metaphysics and More Metaphysics,’ ” Wetzel joked. “But seriously, the show can display the philosophy, doing the job for you in a way that a thousand words can’t.”
Courses such as the one Wetzel designed, which frequently attract students because they are unconventional, engage students in the learning process better than traditionally conceived classes, educators say. But, they add, there just aren’t anywhere near enough of them.
“I think some courses are being designed better today, but to put that in context, that means we’ve moved from 10 percent to maybe 25 percent,” said L. Dee Fink, an adjunct professor at the University of Oklahoma and an instructional development expert. “There’s still a massive percentage of poorly designed courses.”
Singapore & Vietnam to Collaborate in the Training of Education Professionals
Vietnam’s Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Education and Training Professor Dr Nguyen Thien Nhan and Singapore’s Education Minister and Second Finance Minister Tharman Shanmugaratnam witnessed the signing.
The Centre will focus on leadership training for Vietnam’s school principals, professional development for educational administrators and English language training.
Education system fails black pupils
The number of black students admitted to our university will not substantially increase until black communities and families are unified in a determination to increase it themselves.
d.school
Diversity as Normal as Speaking Chinese
At the ripe old age of 3, Sidney Kinsale is in her second year of learning two foreign languages. She attends a preschool here on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays where she learns Chinese. Then on Fridays, she goes to a second preschool in Scotch Plains where she learns Spanish.
“I’m not sure she’ll totally get it all,” says her mother, Carlene, whose college degree is in early childhood studies. “But our hope is she’ll have a love for language and continue Mandarin and Spanish until she’s fluent.”
The Kinsales are not alone. The Mandarin preschool here, Bilingual Buds, has grown to 110 students from 10 in three years. The Scotch Plains school, Little Lingoes, which opened 15 months ago, now serves 50 students, ages 1 to 8, teaching Spanish and Mandarin.
But while the Kinsales are delighted with the language training — Sidney was at a backyard birthday party recently, swinging and counting in Mandarin, when a Chinese-American woman commented on her “perfect” accent — that is not the only reason the parents like the two preschools.
A School’s Autism Classes
But the lesson did not end there. Every time he got one right, the teacher instructed him to look at her and clap his hands. That was because Ryan and his five classmates have autism or a related disorder in this unusual preschool class at Radcliffe Elementary School and must be taught the social niceties and everyday interactions that come naturally to most other children.
Last month, the 4,000-student district here in Essex County started its first in-house program for autistic children after years of paying for them to be educated at specialized private schools. Nutley has seen a steady increase in autistic students with 27 children this year, about twice the number of children five years ago. In 2006, the district, which has an annual budget of $52.7 million, spent $984,964 on private school tuition and busing for autistic students alone, according to district officials.
Special school or segregation?
Witt’s interpretation bumps up against a more traditional definition of special-education law that, for the last three decades, has caused massive changes in how students with disabilities are educated, including the setting where they receive their instruction.
It’s that definition, which contends that disabled students should learn alongside non-disabled classmates as often as possible, that has prompted an ongoing lawsuit challenging the future of Lakeland School.
Jeffrey Spitzer-Resnick, managing attorney for Disability Rights Wisconsin, casts his group’s case against the school as a modern-day Brown vs. Board of Education. “Separate is not equal, and it certainly is not better,” said Spitzer-Resnick, whose group sued the Walworth County Board of Supervisors to prevent a new, larger home for Lakeland.
Students with disabilities who are taught separately miss the kind of social networking that helps them land jobs and become full members of their communities, Spitzer-Resnick said.
Tough School Propels Inner-City Kids
Charter School’s Long Hours Pay Off With Some of the Best Test Scores in the State
“She just brought me to court and was just, like, you know, ‘I don’t want him,'” Luis explains.
The memory hurts. For two weeks he lived on the streets.
A year later, angry and on drugs, he arrived at MATCH in Boston, a high school where school starts at 7:45 a.m. and the day lasts until 5, or even 8 p.m. — late hours required for any kid falling behind.
MATCH, opened its doors in September 2000, aiming to close the achievement gap by preparing inner-city students not just to get a spot in college, but to succeed in college as well.
Like other charter schools, it is a tuition-free, independent public school. MATCH receives two-thirds of its operating support from the state, and must raise the rest privately.
The school is supported by Boston University, which provides use of athletic facilities and allows students to audit courses, and with other colleges, universities and local businesses.
Students are admitted by blind lottery. Almost all of them are minorities, the majority live in poverty, and most arrive at MATCH well behind in math and reading.
MATCH provides a mix of rigorous rules, demanding academics and regular tutoring. The rules are posted everywhere at MATCH. Principal Jorge Miranda says signs dictate, “everything from the dress code, unexcused absences, tardiness, poor posture in class.”
Related, in Philadelphia.
College Will Change
One of the most obvious changes will be in the meaning of “after college,” which will change from when one graduates from college to when one leaves it. If you’re starting your own company, why do you need a degree? We don’t encourage people to start startups during college, among other things because it gives them a socially acceptable excuse for quitting, but the best founders are certainly capable of it. Some of the most successful companies we’ve funded were started by undergrads.
I grew up in a time where college degrees seemed really important, so I’m alarmed to be saying things like this, but there’s nothing magical about a degree. There’s nothing that magically changes after you take that last exam. The importance of degrees is due solely to the administrative needs of large organizations. These can certainly affect your life—it’s hard to get into grad school, or to get a work visa in the US, without an undergraduate degree—but tests like this will matter less and less.
As well as mattering less whether students get degrees, it will also start to matter less where they go to college. In a startup you’re judged by users, and they don’t care where you went to college. So in a world of startups, elite universities will play less of a role as gatekeepers. In the US it’s a national scandal how easily children of rich parents game college admissions. But the way this problem ultimately gets solved may not be by reforming the universities but by going around them. We in the technology world are used to that sort of solution: you don’t beat the incumbents; you redefine the problem to make them irrelevant.
The greatest value of universities is not the brand name or perhaps even the classes so much as the other students you meet there. If it becomes common to start a startup after college, people may start consciously trying to maximize this. Instead of focusing on getting internships with companies they want to work for, students may start to focus on working with other students they want as cofounders.
Should kids be forced to go to school if they don’t want to?
San Francisco
I believe in the technical school method that the British and French use. Academics are not for all. I have had students who had exceptional skills in what we consider trade skills. They are probably making more money now than I do as a teacher. Fourteen should be the decision age.
Alejandro Macias,
San Francisco
Yes, because education is what allows them to stand out.
Peter Carey, San Bruno
Of course they should. I had to – why not them? The downside of an unhappy child does not outweigh the benefit of an education.
Spreading Homework Out So Even Parents Have Some
So far, Mr. Frye, an English teacher at Montclair High School, has asked the parents to read and comment on a Franz Kafka story, Section 1 of Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself” and a speech given by Robert F. Kennedy in 1968. Their newest assignment is a poem by Saul Williams, a poet, musician and rapper who lives in Los Angeles. The ninth graders complete their assignments during class; the parents are supposed to write their responses on a blog Mr. Frye started online.
If the parents do not comply, Mr. Frye tells them, their child’s grade may suffer — a threat on which he has made good only once in the three years he has been making such assignments.
The point, he said, is to keep parents involved in their children’s ’ education well into high school. Studies have shown that parental involvement improves the quality of the education a student receives, but teenagers seldom invite that involvement. So, Mr. Frye said, he decided to help out.
Notes on Charter/Voucher Options and Public Schools
The school began as a Marva Collins concept school (using the teaching strategies of the famous Chicago educator) and has evolved into a K-8 program that seeks to place its graduates in top high schools in Milwaukee and prep schools around the country.
Principal Robert Rauh is a former teacher in a prep school who wanted to take the high expectations and rich curriculum he was used to into poor neighborhoods and challenge low income kids to achieve.
In a forthcoming paper in the Journal of Public Economics, economist Rajashri Chakrabarti, find that public schools were motivated to improve after 1999, when religious schools were allowed to take vouchers and the public schools lost more money for every student who used a voucher to leave.
When a Child Is Afraid to Eat: Coping With Allergy Anxieties
“I tried to talk him through it and said ‘words won’t hurt,’ ” says his mother, Laura, a day-care administrator outside Nashville, Tenn. But soon after that incident two years ago, Brentson grew so anxious he wouldn’t return to the supermarket, and he begged to skip school. His mom says his pediatrician eventually prescribed Valium to control his frequent panic attacks.
The source of Brentson’s anxiety: A couple months before, he had had an allergic reaction to peanuts at school, which made his throat swell and landed him in the emergency room.
As the number of children diagnosed with life-threatening food allergies grows, so does an insidious side effect: the extreme anxiety they can develop around eating, socializing or even a trip to the supermarket. The problems can come after a bad allergic reaction, or simply as children grow old enough to comprehend that their allergy can be fatal.
Employers Offer Help On College Admissions
A number of employers are inviting former college admissions officers to lecture and offer advice to employees. Some are contracting with outside consulting firms to guide employees through the labyrinth of testing, admissions and financial aid.
This past spring, Boston-based law firm Bingham McCutchen offered its employees access to a college admissions question-and-answer hotline and one-on-one counseling sessions. Last month, Millennium Pharmaceuticals offered a seminar and individual financial-counseling sessions for employees interested in strategies on how to save for college. And accounting firm RSM McGladrey, a unit of H&R Block, has begun offering a Web-based seminar that gives an overview of college-admissions testing.
Does the Teach for America programme really improve schools?
Only about half of Americans growing up in poverty complete high school, and those who do reach only an eighth-grade standard. In an effort to solve that problem, Teach for America (TFA) recruits top college graduates—usually people without teaching qualifications or experience—and asks them to spend two years teaching some of the nation’s poorest children. “We need fundamental systemic change and we believe our people can help be a force for that,” says Wendy Kopp, TFA’s founder and CEO.
SilkRoad Project
Along the Silk Road explores the vast ancient network of cultural, economic, and technological exchange that connected East Asia to the Mediterranean. Students learn how goods, belief systems, art, music, and people traveled across such vast distances, resulting in interdependence among disparate cultures. Yo-Yo Ma has referred to the Silk Road as the “Internet of antiquity,” and by studying this network of trading routes, students not only learn about the historical interconnectedness of people and ideas throughout the world, but also gain a new perspective on contemporary issues of globalization.
Along the Silk Road is a multidisciplinary course of study including materials appropriate for social studies, geography, art and music classes.
SAS CEO Blasts Old-School Schooling; The War of Minds
Countries like China, India, and Korea have invested heavily in education over the last decade. They are now producing more scientists and engineers than we are. It is my concern that as we look to the future, innovation is going to come from the other side of the world.
Lacking a clear and present danger, the American education system is not mobilizing to support science, technology, engineering and math. Today’s generation of kids is the most technology savvy group that this country has ever produced. They are born with an iPod in one hand and a cell phone in another. They’re text messaging, e-mailing, instant messaging. They’re on MySpace, YouTube & Google. They’ve got Nintendo Wiis, Game Boys, Play Stations.
Their world is one of total interactivity. They’re in constant communication with each other, but when they go to school, they are told to leave those “toys” at home. They’re not to be used in school. Instead, the system continues teaching as if these kids belong to the last century, by standing in front of a blackboard.
Education has not changed, and that’s a problem. It was a good system when I came through, but today’s kids have changed, and that’s the part that educators are not realizing. It’s the kids that have changed, and our education system needs to change along with them.
Milwaukee’s New Teacher Contract Changes the Hiring Process
The agreement would change the date by which teachers give notice that they will be retiring or resigning for the next school year from April 1 to March 1 and would allow schools to begin interviewing for openings March 1 instead of May 1.
It also would allow about 40 schools with weak records to interview new applicants for MPS jobs from the start of the interviewing period. Now, only current MPS teachers can be considered in the first round of interviews. Low-performing schools and schools in less-popular neighborhoods say they have trouble attracting job candidates under the current system and are cut off from going outside the system until the summer.
The new contract also would allow any school to interview new applicants for jobs in subjects that are hard to fill – math, science, special education and bilingual instruction – from the start of the hiring process.
Tim Daly, president of The New Teacher Project, praised the changes in the contract, saying that more Milwaukee teachers could now have a say in who their colleagues are.
Matthews said the district is trying to shift the current seniority system to one that relies on the judgment of principals and administrators about where and how teachers should be assigned, and positions allocated.
“We’ve worked smoothly with the current system for years, and I simply don’t understand why this kind of evil proposal is being brought forward,” Matthews said. “It’s just absurd.”
Madison Mayor’s Perspective on the Schools
As Mayor Dave Cieslewicz told the Capital Times editorial Board this week, the city has no real authority over the schools but they are crucial to the city’s success in fighting crime and in promoting economic development.
“We need to find the right way to engage with the schools,” he said. “Bill Clingan is part of the answer.”
Clingan, 53, was a Metropolitan Madison School District board member from 2003 through 2005.
Business relocation decision are based in large part on access to a skilled work force and quality of life issues, Cieslewicz said. Both are related to good schools, he added.
“We shouldn’t miss the opportunity presented by a new school district superintendent,” Cieslewicz said.
He added he had already met with the consultants who are helping the school district pick a new district superintendent to replace Art Rainwater, who is retiring at the end of this school year. Rainwater has been at the head of Madison’s schools since February 1999.
Former Madison Mayor Paul Soglin has more.
US Department of Education Response to Madison’s SLC Grant Application
Each application received a comprehensive review b y external reviewers who had experience implementing, documenting, or evaluating policies, programs, or practices at the national, state, or district level to improve the academic achievement of public high school students. Panel members included teachers, school, district, and state administrators, technical assistance providers, education researchers and program evaluators. Using the criteria published in the Federal Register notice, three reviewers independently rated each application and documented strengths and weaknesses.
The Department does not return copies of unfunded application to the applicant but we will retain a copy of your application until the end of this calendar year in the event that you wish to discuss it with us. We are enclosing a copy of the reviewers’ evaluations and comments, which you may use to strengthen your proposal for future competitions. To that end, please check our website beginning in November 2007 for information about the next Smaller Learning Communities grants competition: http://www.ed.gov/programs/slcp/applicant.html.
We appreciate the time and thought that went into the planning and preparation of your application. Your ongoing school improvement efforts are critical to improving educational services that will meet the unique needs o f high school students. Again, we do regret that we are unable to support your application and thank you for your effort.
Please forward any further inquiries to me at smallerlearningcornmunities@ed.gov.
Related, via Jeff Henriques:
Analysis of Local Schools & Districts Based on 2007 WKCE Data
Some Madison Elementary Schools are Tops
As you can see, Madison schools are simultaneously excellent and terrible. The top 8 are MMSD schools as are 6 of the bottom 10. Wow!
Not only does MMSD have top elementary schools in the area but the top 8 are above the 95% percentile statewide. That means those 8 schools are better (with respect to my measurements) than 95% of the other elementary schools in Wisconsin.
Furthermore, MMSD schools Lowell, Randall, and Van Hise are the #1, #2, and #3 elementary schools STATEWIDE. Yes you heard right. According to my ranking those are the 3 best elementary schools in the state for non-poor students.
Of the top 25 schools statewide, 7 are MMSD schools. No other area schools make the top 25.
You might consider moving to one of those attendance areas because these schools and the students in them are really, really good.
Wisconsin’s Low State Test Score Standards (“The Proficiency Illusion”)
The law’s accountability system, which focuses on things such as whether a school or district is making “adequate yearly progress,” is driven largely by how many students meet the standards a state sets for proficiency in reading and math. The goal is that all students, with a handful of exceptions, be proficient by 2014.
“Five years into implementation of the No Child Left Behind Act, there is no common understanding of what ‘proficiency’ means. . . . This suggests that the goal of achieving ‘100 percent proficiency’ has no coherent meaning, either,” says a summary of the study, issued by the Washington, D.C.-based Thomas B. Fordham Institute.
To illustrate the differences among the states, the study’s authors gave an example in which a fourth-grader in Wisconsin would be regarded as proficient if the child could correctly answer a fairly simple question involving cats and dogs, while a child in Massachusetts would not be proficient if he or she couldn’t answer a formidable question about the meaning of a passage by Leo Tolstoy.
Wisconsin
This is a fourth-grade item with a difficulty equivalent to Wisconsin’s proficiency cut score (16th percentile).
Which sentence tells a fact, not an opinion?
A. Cats are better than dogs.
B. Cats climb trees better than dogs.
C. Cats are prettier than dogs.
D. Cats have nicer fur than dogs.
Massachusetts
This is a fourth-grade item with a difficulty equivalent to Massachusetts’ proficiency cut score (65th percentile).
Read the excerpt from “How Much Land Does a Man Need?” by Leo Tolstoy
So Pahom was well contented, and everything would have been right if the neighboring peasants would only not have trespassed on his wheatfields and meadows. He appealed to them most civilly, but they still went on; now the herdsmen would let the village cows stray into his meadows, then horses from the night pasture would get among his corn. Pahom turned them out again and again, and forgave their owners, and for a long time he forbore to prosecute anyone. But at last he lost patience and complained to the District Court.
What is a fact from this passage?
A. Pahom owns a vast amount of land.
B. The peasant’s intentions are evil.
C. Pahom is a wealthy man.
D. Pahom complained to the District Court.
Source: Thomas B. Fordham Institute. The correct answers are B for the first item and D for the second.
Much more on Wisconsin’s Knowledge & Concepts Exam here [RSS], including a recent Madison School Board Performance & Achievement Committee discussion on using WKCE to “Measure Student Performance“. Clusty Search on WKCE.
Ian Shapira:
Through a Lens, Darkly
It was a school night, and Elizabeth Eckford was too excited to sleep. The next morning, September 4, 1957, was her first day of classes, and one last time she ironed the pleated white skirt she’d made for the occasion. It was made of piqué cotton; when she’d run out of material, she’d trimmed it with navy-blue-and-white gingham. Then she put aside her new bobby socks and white buck loafers. Around 7:30 a.m. the following day, she boarded a bus bound for Little Rock Central High School.
Other black schoolchildren were due at Central that historic day, but Elizabeth would be the first to arrive. The world would soon know all about the Little Rock Nine. But when Elizabeth Eckford tried to enter Central, and thereby become the first black student to integrate a major southern high school, she was really the Little Rock One. The painfully shy 15-year-old daughter of a hyper-protective mother reluctant to challenge age-old racial mores, she was the unlikeliest trailblazer of all. But as dramatic as the moment was, it really mattered only because Elizabeth wandered into the path of Will Counts’s camera.
Schools Without Playgrounds
Rogers, the late host of “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood,” said “Play gives children a chance to practice what they are learning. … They have to play with what they know to be true in order to find out more, and then they can use what they learn in new forms of play.”
But the Atlanta public school system doesn’t include playgrounds or playground equipment when it builds elementary schools. Though school system officials told The Sunday Paper that their “no-playground” practice is only that—a practice and not a stated policy—it’s a practice that is taking its toll on children, parents and teachers.
In the city of Atlanta, about 42 percent of property taxes are allocated for the school system. Some of that tax money will go to maintain and fix playground equipment once it’s provided—but it’s parents, not the school system, who have to provide it.
A group of parents in East Atlanta is doing exactly that. On August 10 at 9 p.m., when patrons of the Earl pay an $8 entry fee to hear indie-rockers Deerhunter, the Spooks and Chopper, they will be helping to finance a playground at Burgess-Peterson Academy, an Atlanta public school.
UC Berkeley first to post full lectures to YouTube
The school announced on Wednesday that it has begun posting entire course lectures on the Web’s No.1 video-sharing site.
Berkeley officials claimed in a statement that the university is the first to make full course lectures available on YouTube. The school said that over 300 hours of videotaped courses will be available at youtube.com/ucberkeley.
West High School Homecoming Police Calls
According to a Madison Police Department report, the teens went to the school nurse’s office for minor injuries. The nurse’s office reported the attack to a Madison police officer, who was at the high school for the West High Homecoming Parade.
Officers were dispatched at 12:20 a.m. to the emergency room at University Hospital, where the Fitchburg teen was being treated for a head injury suffered during the assault.
Our Schools Must Do Better
He thought for a moment and then said, “No.”
I told him to take a guess.
He thought for another moment, looked at me skeptically, and finally gave up. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t know.”
The latest federal test results showed some improvement in public school math and reading scores, but there is no reason to celebrate these minuscule gains. We need so much more. A four-year college degree is now all but mandatory for building and sustaining a middle-class standard of living in the U.S.
Over the next 20 or 30 years, when today’s children are raising children of their own in an ever more technologically advanced and globalized society, the educational requirements will only grow more rigorous and unforgiving.
A one- or two-point gain in fourth grade test scores here or there is not meaningful in the face of that overarching 21st-century challenge.
What’s needed is a wholesale transformation of the public school system from the broken-down postwar model of the past 50 or 60 years. The U.S. has not yet faced up to the fact that it needs a school system capable of fulfilling the educational needs of children growing up in an era that will be at least as different from the 20th century as the 20th was from the 19th.
“We’re not good at thinking about magnitudes,” said Thomas Kane, a professor of education and economics at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. “We’ve got a bunch of little things that we think are moving in the right direction, but we haven’t stepped back and thought, ‘O.K., how big an improvement are we really talking about?’ ” Professor Kane and I were discussing what he believes are the two areas that have the greatest potential for radically improving the way children are taught in the U.S. Both are being neglected by the education establishment.
Herbert’s words focus on addressing teacher quality
The Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP), to cite one example, is a charter school network that has consistently gotten extraordinary academic results from low-income students. It has worked in cities big and small, and in rural areas. Like other successful models, it has adopted a longer school day and places great demands on its teachers and students.
Said Professor Kane: “These alternative models that involve the longer school day and a much more dramatic intervention for kids are promising. If that’s what it takes, then we need to know that, and sooner rather than later.”
Do Charter Schools Improve Behavior?
Charters are independent public schools that don’t have to follow many school district rules. They can usually choose their own curriculums and hire and fire staff without dealing with the teachers union. Those freedoms are enough to win the support of some parents, but most, I think, also want to know what such schools would do for their children.
That is where the allure of charters becomes harder to figure out. Several studies have shown that, on average, they don’t raise student achievement more than regular public schools with students of similar backgrounds. Yet many charters, even some with mediocre academic records, get lots of applications. What is going on?
Utah Voucher Politics Update
That is not the only quiet move in the voucher battle. Loopholes in Utah campaign law are also allowing some groups on both sides of the fight to hide exactly who is providing hundreds of thousands of dollars of their funding.
The state’s voucher law would provide tuition payments of between $500 to $3,000 per child, based on parents’ income, to private schools. An anti-voucher citizen referendum petition drive last spring was successful, and the question of whether to repeal the new law will be on the November ballot.
With anti-voucher sentiment winning in recent public opinion polls in Utah, the GOP legislative leaders decided to take action to “educate citizens” on what the voucher law would really do, said Jeff Hartley, who has been hired by the Informed Voter Project PIC to run the leaders’ campaign.
Inconvenient Youths
After Luke acted in a school play about global warming, he went on a campaign to get his parents to install the panels. He routinely lectured his dad from the backseat of the minivan about how reducing their energy consumption could help save the planet.
Mr. Dahlin says he put Luke off at first, not wanting to “just give in and sound like a big wet-noodle parent.” But after doing more research about the energy savings, he relented. Luke, he says, “is proud that we’re trying to do our part.”
In households across the country, kids are going after their parents for environmental offenses, from using plastic cups to serving non-grass-fed beef at the dinner table. Many of these kids are getting more explicit messages about becoming eco-warriors at school and from popular books and movies.
A gifted student on ID’ing giftedness
Tucked among those 16 pages of comments was this perspective (with some editing for space):
“I also belong to two organizations for gifted students: Cogito (cogito.org) and Gifted Haven (giftedhaven.net). Cogito is run by the Center for Talented Youth, an organization sponsored by Johns Hopkins University. It is primarily populated by math- and science-oriented kids and teens who live in the United States, and who participated in a talent search in middle school. Membership is by invitation only. (I am not an active member of the community.)
A return to traditional math
“Like everybody else, we’re in a constant quest to find that program that’s going to best work to get kids to standard,” assistant superintendent Michael Power said.
School district officials believe the new curriculum is easier to use, better aligned with local and state standards and gives kids a higher chance at success than previous math program.
“We weren’t getting the growth (in achievement) that we wanted to see,” said secondary math facilitator Patrick Paris. “Our scores at the high school level were relatively flat.”
Administrators realized early this year that the Saxon math program implemented last fall wasn’t working out in the upper grades. They asked a curriculum review team to find a replacement.
The team scrutinized available programs for high school study before settling on the Prentice Hall algebra-geometry-algebra series of texts and Houghton Mifflin pre-calculus and calculus books.
The School Board approved the $530,000 plus tax and shipping purchase Aug. 23.
Saxon math remains in the lower grades, where its back-to-basics approach is credited, in part, with helping raise scores this year.
Autism & Vaccines: An Update
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