Third, the NAACP must make public education the civil-rights issue of our times. Everything else will fall into place if young blacks overcome illiteracy, stay in school, and are inculcated with a love for learning and for the pursuit of excellence instead of trained to accept mediocrity and quotas as a means of social advancement.
Holding school authorities accountable — including black teachers and black-dominated school boards such as in Newark, N.J., and Washington, D.C. — must be the priority. That means tutoring pupils and coaching teachers so that they pass standardized competency tests, and eschewing notions that such examinations are “culturally biased.”
A revamped NAACP should not accept any alibis for blacks’ academic underachievement. It would take the lead in answering those black educators and their paternalistic allies who develop ghetto industries for grants and careers explaining blacks’ deficits. It would confront separatist schemes such as “black paradigms” of learning and Ebonics as the language of Africans in America.
Housing Slump Strains Budgets of Cities, States
Tremors from the housing market’s slump are straining the budgets of state and local governments from coast to coast, sending officials scrambling to plug gaps.
Rising defaults on subprime home loans are boosting the inventory of unsold homes and driving sale prices lower. That’s cutting into housing-related revenues from building-permit fees, taxes on contracting and recording property transfers, and even sales taxes.
As a result, legislators in Florida, which was at the forefront of the housing boom, plan a special session this month to consider deep budget cuts to offset a projected $1.5 billion funding gap. California forecasts a shortfall of at least $5 billion in next year’s budget. And Chicago faces a $217 million gap in its $5.6 billion budget for 2008.
In the Kansas City, Mo., area, more than two dozen agencies that serve the homeless are likely to lose at least some of their funding this year. Meanwhile, the tiny town of Sultan, Wash., near Seattle, has had to lay off the janitor at City Hall, forcing office workers to take over bathroom-cleaning duties.
In many cases, budget officials knew that the fast pace of housing-related revenue growth in recent years wasn’t sustainable, but the extent of the slowdown has sometimes surprised them. Unlike the federal government, states and local governments generally balance their budgets. That means sudden revenue shortfalls can translate into serious cutbacks in spending plans.
“Our forecasts for the last couple of years have been building in a decline” of revenue as the economy headed toward a soft landing, says Amy Baker, coordinator of the Florida Legislature’s Office of Economic and Demographic Research. “What we discovered, when we met in 2006 and then spring 2007, is that the decline was actually occurring more rapidly than we thought.”
Opportunities and Risk with the Departure of Madison School District Superintendent and Staff
This week, nearly 25,000 Madison schoolchildren will settle into the routines of a new school year defined by anticipation and anxiety about big changes to come.
After eight years as superintendent, Art Rainwater, 64, will retire in June. Last week, the Madison school board moved decisively on its new top priority by agreeing on key details for the replacement search and setting a half-dozen deadlines leading to the hiring of a new superintendent early next year.
Rainwater’s announcement in early January of his plan to step down has given his loyal deputies ample time to consider retirement or new jobs. In recent months, Rainwater has lost three top aides: chief of staff Mary Gulbrandsen, legal counsel Clarence Sherrod and budget director Roger Price.
Rainwater calls Gulbrandsen and Sherrod his “two closest advisers,” and tried to convince both to stay for his final year. “I honestly talked to Mary probably 15 times a day,” Rainwater says. “There probably hasn’t been a thought that went through my head in the last nine years that she didn’t react to.”
More high-level retirements are expected at the end of this school year, leaving in place as few as three of nine department heads with significant time on the job. The brain drain is coupled with a relatively inexperienced principal base, especially at the city’s four major high schools, and departures in other administrative positions.
No Child Left Behind Loopholes Decried
Should suburban schools that barely miss federal learning targets be allowed to escape penalties, while inner-city schools that never even hit the dart board are required to give free tutoring and let students transfer to better schools?
That question is at the heart of an emerging argument in Washington over how to improve the federal No Child Left Behind Act. Influential House Democrats and Republicans have circulated a draft proposal that would take many schools off the hook if they raise achievement for most students but miss the mark for a few.
Yesterday, Education Secretary Margaret Spellings pushed back hard against that approach. “To move from reasonable accommodations to big loopholes would be a huge mistake,” she said.
In a speech to the Business Coalition for Student Achievement, which supports the federal law, Spellings said she is willing to consider proposals to allow states to use more than just annual tests in reading and math to rate schools and to treat differently schools that fall only slightly short of targets. But she said she is not willing to bend if the changes mean struggling students won’t get the extra help they need.
Secretary of Education Margaret Spelling’s Speech.
School District Has Dress Code, and Is Buying the Uniforms, Too
Many public schools are supplying their students with an ever-growing list of essentials that go far beyond textbooks to include scientific calculators, personal laptops and free breakfast.
Now they are dressing them, too.
The Elizabeth school district has spent more than $2 million since January 2006 to buy navy blazers, khaki pants, polo shirts, gym shorts and even socks as part of a new policy to put all its students in uniforms.
The district, which serves mostly poor and minority families, has outfitted more than 9,000 students — nearly half its enrollment — so far as it phases in the uniforms a few schools at a time over five years to spread out the cost.
“They’re just getting another school supply; that’s how we see it,” said the Elizabeth superintendent, Pablo Muñoz, noting that schools had long provided uniforms for athletic teams, choirs and marching bands. “If we expect high-quality academic achievement in the Elizabeth schools, not only do we need the staff and the materials, the kids need their uniforms.”
The School Cafeteria, on a Diet
As students return to school this week, some are finding an unusual entry on the list of class rules: no cupcakes.
School districts across the country have been taking steps to make food in schools healthier because of new federal guidelines and awareness that a growing number of children are overweight.
In California, deep fryers have been banned, so chicken nuggets and fries are now baked. Sweet tea is off the menu in one Alabama school. In New Jersey, 20-ounce sports drinks have been cut back to 12 ounces.
Food and beverage companies have scrambled to offer healthier alternatives in school cafeterias and vending machines, and some of the changes have been met with a shrug by students. The whole-wheat chocolate-chip cookies? “Surprisingly, the kids have kind of embraced them,” said Laura Jacobo, director of food services at Woodlake Union schools in California.
Bipolar Illness Soars as a Diagnosis for the Young
The number of American children and adolescents treated for bipolar disorder increased 40-fold from 1994 to 2003, researchers report today in the most comprehensive study of the controversial diagnosis.
Experts say the number has almost certainly risen further since 2003.
Many experts theorize that the jump reflects that doctors are more aggressively applying the diagnosis to children, and not that the incidence of the disorder has increased.
But the magnitude of the increase surprises many psychiatrists. They say it is likely to intensify the debate over the validity of the diagnosis, which has shaken child psychiatry.
Thinking About K-12 Building Maintenance, Spending and School Climate in Colorado
Colorado’s speaker of the house is traveling the state in daylong jaunts – driving on unpaved roads to meet with kids, eating lunch in restaurants decorated with rusted farm tools, singing America the Beautiful with the Lions Club – to learn more about rural schools.
It’s not always a pretty picture.
In the San Luis Valley, the high school’s only math teacher is too busy with other subjects to teach calculus; in Ordway, the gym weights are prison castoffs; in tiny Joes, a teacher applies for Gerber Foods grants to buy textbooks.
In repairs alone, K-12 schools statewide need $6 billion to $10 billion. Which is why Romanoff may propose, for the first time in Colorado history, a statewide ballot measure to build and repair schools.
No break, no bells in school of the future
Jared Downer, 17, stared in awe at the curved, concrete walls towering above him. Stepping into the open lobby, more than 15 metres high, he saw sweeping staircases, multi-coloured up-lighting and soundproof glass walls. A striking, arched ceiling stretched above him with retractable panels and mirrors that reflected light back towards the centre-piece – a huge eye-shaped pod filled with computers.
Designed by architects working for Norman Foster, this could have been the futuristic headquarters of a multinational company. It was, in fact, Jared’s new school.
It is more than just the architecture that will be different when the Thomas Deacon Academy opens in Peterborough, Cambridgeshire, next week, replacing three local schools. This project will break apart the traditional notion of how a school should operate. Under head Alan McMurdo, the academy will be a school with no playground, no break time, no bells and no register. A school that McMurdo hopes will help shape the future of British education.
‘People have got to realise that things develop,’ he said, standing by a vast window overlooking the red-brick building that was until recently Deacon’s School. ‘We know more about the brain, about how people work and about effective teaching. It would be an outrage if you went to the doctor and they were still treating you like they did 40 years ago.’
Related: The Big Picture.
Goal is to get students walking, bicycling
As children make their way back to classrooms, schools and municipalities in Wisconsin will start spending $4 million in federal transportation grants to encourage and help more of them make that trek by foot or bicycle.
Milwaukee Public Schools will spend the largest planning grant, $242,000, to teach 6,000 grade school and middle school students how to walk or bike to school safely.
That such an educational program is deemed necessary suggests how much society has changed from a time in the late 1960s when more than half of the students in the country walked or biked to school. That percentage has dropped to 15%, according to the Federal Highway Administration.
The decline in walking or biking to school has been cited as a cause behind a different trend: the growing number of children who are overweight or obese. A national study found that 18.8% of children ages 6 to 11 were obese in 2003′-04, roughly triple the percentage found two decades earlier.
Looking to reverse the trends, Congress allocated $612 million for the national Safe Routes to Schools program, spread across the 2005-’09 fiscal years.
Putting Our Changing (Milwaukee) District to the Test
As a new school year opens, we look at the new challenges and recurring demands facing education and ask what can be done to aid our classrooms and students
The start of the school year is always a time when children, parents, teachers and administrators have to rush to take care of a zillion small questions, from what to wear on the first day to whether there’s a teacher in every classroom.
But it is also the start of the next round of the wrestling match with the largest questions hanging over education, especially in urban places such as Milwaukee.
Here are 10 of the big questions facing Milwaukee as the school year begins in earnest today and thumbnail thoughts on how they are being answered.
1) What works? Want to hear a recitation of all the reforms that haven’t really succeeded in getting better educational outcomes for Milwaukee children? Neither do we. Nonetheless, there are bright spots on the local education scene – specific schools that are doing well – and they tend to have common traits, including excellent principals, united and stable staffs, a strong commitment to clear education programs and a willingness to keep working with each child to get the child engaged and to the point of success.
The Story and Science of the Reading Brain
Anyone who reads is bound to wonder, at least occasionally, about how those funny squiggles on a page magically turn into “Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang” or “After a while I went out and left the hospital and walked back to the hotel in the rain.” Where did this unlikely skill called reading come from? What happens in our brain when our eyes scan a line of type? Why do some of us, or some of our children, find it difficult to process the visual information held in words?
In Proust and the Squid, Maryanne Wolf, a professor at Tufts University and director of its Center for Reading and Language Research, offers explanations for all these questions, but with an emphasis that is “more biological and cognitive than cultural-historical.” This means that Wolf focuses on the physiological character of the human brain, which holds at its disposal “three ingenious design principles: the capacity to make new connections among older structures; the capacity to form areas of exquisitely precise specialization for recognizing patterns in information, and the ability to learn to recruit and connect information from these areas automatically.” These “design principles” provide the neuronal foundation of reading, and Wolf spends half her book explaining the evolution and minutiae of this “reading brain.”
Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain @ Amazon.com
Navigating Middle School Takes Just the Right Combination of Skills
“Strike two,” said Brian Hill as his stepdaughter Briana DeLeon, 11, rotated the dial on her red locker, searching for the number 39 through slightly crooked, wire-framed glasses. “Left, right, left,” he coached, as she spun it around. After the third misdial, her mother gave it a go. Then Hill rolled up his sleeves. “Let me try.”
After a few more strikes, a teacher parted the crowd of sixth-graders and parents at Seneca Ridge Middle School’s orientation last week in Sterling and helped Briana and her family cross the first of many potential middle school hurdles to come: opening her locker.
For the first days of school, the anxieties of moving from the familiarity of the one-teacher classroom in elementary school to a bigger, more anonymous middle school can be boiled down to a three-digit combination.
Worries include “I could be late to class,” “I could grab the wrong book” and a myth that Jack Berckemeyer, assistant executive director of the National Middle School Association, said is “passed down from generation to generation: ‘I could get locked in there.’ “
Education Roundtable
NPR:
Today we kick off a new month-long series on education. While public school may be free, the price of making sure kids are equipped to learn is out of reach for some parents.
Joining Farai Chideya are Rudy Crew, the superintendent of Miami-Dade County Public Schools and the author of Only Connect: The Way to Save Our Schools; Janelle Thompson, a third grade teacher at Kohne Elementary in the Chicago Public School District; and Genea, a single mom living in Southern California.
Student Loans: Reeling in the College Bound
Mr. Meyers’s student-lending niche has exploded into something of the norm as the cost of a college education has skyrocketed. And the company he helped to found 16 years ago, First Marblehead, is now one of the biggest in a $20 billion industry that occupies one of the most lucrative segments of consumer lending.
But such growth — as well as the fact that debt levels for newly minted graduates have more than doubled over the last decade — has drawn the scrutiny of Congress and regulators. Andrew M. Cuomo, the New York State attorney general, has helped expose financial ties between some lenders and colleges — including kickbacks to financial aid officers — that put their own interests ahead of those of students. (First Marblehead was not one of the companies implicated.)
The student loan industry could be in for more jolts. Policy makers and regulators say that there are dangerous parallels between the private student loan and subprime mortgage markets. In both, there have been phenomenal profits, aggressive marketing and, until the recent credit market turmoil, a healthy appetite from Wall Street investors.
And, as was seen in the subprime market, many student loans that were made in the last couple of years are resetting at much higher rates.
Police calls for Madison schools, July 2006-June 2007
The tables linked below summarize Madison Police Department calls for service to MMSD schools from July 1, 2006 through June 30, 2007, as follows:
The tables linked below summarize Madison Police Department calls for service to MMSD schools from July 1, 2006 through June 30, 2007, as follows:
By call date
By school, subgrouped by call date
By school, subgrouped by incident type
School subtotals
Incident type subtotals
To repeat the commentary from the last time we posted call data statistics:Data like this provides a starting point for getting a sense of the type and levels of incidents that affect safety in our children’s schools, and it’ll be useful to compare these numbers from time to time against like categories of data going forward. Context that we need, but don’t have, is information on the number and types of violent or disruptive incidents occurring in the schools as a whole (not just those resulting in police calls), and to what extent policies on summoning law enforcement in response to a violent or disruptive incident vary from school to school (in which case call data alone may be an unreliable index of the school’s relative safety).
Madison School Board August 2007 Progress Report
Superintendent Search: The search for our new Superintendent officially started on August 27. The Board met with our search consultant, Hazard, Young and Attea, to plan the timeline and action items for the search. Ideally, we would like to have a new Superintendent in place in the February time-frame. This will give the new person time to transition properly with Superintendent Rainwater. The first big step in the process is the development of the Superintendent Leadership Profile. The development of the profile will involve the Board, staff and community. Our consultants will conduct focus groups and forums on September 19 and 20 to determine what people value in a new Superintendent. We are in the process of scheduling times for our staff and community to be involved in this process. More detailed information will be available the week of September 3. Everyone will have an opportunity to participate in this process.
School Naming: The Board has made final revisions to Board Policy 6700, the policy for naming an MMSD building or facility. A Citizens Naming Committee will now be part of the process. The committee will review all of the proposed names, copies of public comments, and ay additional research conducted on the proposed names. The committee will recommend to the Board a minimum of four names which meet the naming criteria established by the Policy and provide the reasons for the Committee’s recommendation. At least 2 of the recommended names shall be for a prominent national or local figure who is deceased. The committee will have 12 members and 1 chairperson. Board members will submit citizen recommendations to the Board President who will assign the committee members. We will start accepting new names the week of September 17. The process and information on how to submit names will be found on the MMSD home page at www.mmsd.org .
Referendum Discussion: The Board had its first discussion on a potential referendum to be held during the 2007-2008 school year. Below are the questions the Board will have to answer as we move through the evaluation process:
- Should the Board submit a referendum question(s) to the public during the 2007-2008 school year to alleviate the continuing reduction of services caused by the revenue caps?
- If the Board decided to submit a referendum question(s) to the public, should it be recurring or non-recurring?
- How many years should the referendum question(s) cover?
- What should be the content of the referendum question(s)?
- Should the referendum be one question or separate questions?
- When should the referendum be held? February 19, 2008 or April 1, 2008
Racine School District is a “Lesson for Hands Off Boards”
Amy Hetzner & Jennie Tunkieicz:
Among the problems highlighted in a recent investigation of the Racine Unified School District’s relationship with a private firm was the “broad discretion” given to the district’s superintendent.
Although the words are never mentioned in the seven-page preliminary report by Milwaukee-based law firm Reinhart Boerner Van Deuren, to those familiar with the Racine School Board, that complaint refers to policy governance.
Begun in Racine in early 2006, policy governance was intended to reduce board micromanagement in operational issues that could be left to hired professionals, such as superintendents, so members could focus more on student achievement. It’s a concept that is gaining support in school systems throughout the state with encouragement and training by the Wisconsin Association of School Boards.
The idea is that while school boards have traditionally been intimately involved in the operational issues of running school districts – some believe too involved – they have not been active enough in monitoring student achievement. Under policy governance, they draft policies and achievement goals and give wide leeway to their superintendents to meet those high expectations.
Area school boards are trying to change the traditional model, and three – Brown Deer, Kettle Moraine and Wauwatosa – have agreed to participate in a multistate study into whether their efforts can affect student performance.
“The demands have changed, where years ago boards were really to focus on the budget and maybe boundary lines,” said LuAnn Bird, a governance consultant for the school board association. “What’s changed for school boards is . . . there’s more demand from the public that it’s no longer acceptable to have children who, for example, can’t read or graduate without the basics.
Mistaking Attendance
HERE’S a math problem only truant officers will get right: How is it possible for many school districts in America to report both that average daily attendance is better than 90 percent and that almost 30 percent of students miss a month of school annually?
(a) Averages hide underlying data. While a few schools have nearly perfect attendance, most have a serious truancy problem.
(b) Elementary schools are large and have high attendance, while middle and high schools have smaller enrollments and miserable attendance. Large numbers of dropouts in the upper grades hide mass absences because enrollments there are lower.
(c) That 90 percent average daily attendance doesn’t mean the same 10 percent of children are out all the time; it could mean 30 percent are chronically absent, only on different days.
Sadly, the answer is:
Paying Parents to “Do the Right Thing”
Paying kids for good grades is a popular (if questionable) parenting tactic. But when school starts next week, New York City will try to use the same enticement to get parents in low-income neighborhoods more involved in their children’s education and overall health. Mayor Michael Bloomberg has raised more than $40 million (much of it from his own money and the Rockefeller Foundation) to pay families a modest amount for small tasks—$50 for getting a library card or $100 to take a child to the dentist—that could make a big difference.
The experimental program, called Opportunity NYC, is modeled on a 10-year-old Mexican program called Oportunidades, which has been so successful in reducing poverty in rural areas that it has been adopted by more than 20 countries, including Argentina and Turkey. International studies have found that these programs raise school enrollment and vaccination rates and lower the number of sick days students take
Auditors Rejecting AP Course Syllabuses
Students of David Keener, an ex-priest who teaches at T.C. Williams High School in Alexandria, almost always pass the Advanced Placement biology exam. So when the teacher submitted a description of his course for the College Board’s first quality-control audit of the AP program, nobody thought there would be a problem.
A clean audit was also expected for Frazier O’Leary of Cardozo High School in the District. The College Board has often asked the highly regarded AP English teacher, who has long experience in urban education, to help train others to meet the challenge of teaching at a college level.
Yet Keener, O’Leary and other AP veterans in the last few months have met with a surprising initial response from auditors: rejection. Most ultimately win approval, but the new audits begun this year have rubbed raw the already bruised relations between some high school AP teachers and the college professors who are rating them.
Top 3 Ways Parents Can Boost Kids
It’s that time of year — a chance for a fresh start for all students. It’s been a long time since I started a school year, but I remember the anxiety and anticipation: Will it be a good year? What do I have to do to be successful?
With that in mind, I e-mailed principals at three Madison schools and asked them to offer a bit of advice. My question was simple and straightforward: What are the three most important things parents can do to help their kids get off to a good start in school this fall?
Their answers brought to mind a book that was a bestseller in the 1980s: “All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten” by Robert Fulghum. The advice from these experienced educators involves a lot of common sense and caring and sharing.
Here are their responses:
Do culture-themed public schools cross a legal line?
When the Tarek ibn Ziyad Academy opened four years ago in suburban Minneapolis, the school was a bold experiment and its survival was in question. There was the scramble to attract students that any charter school faces, but Tarek ibn Ziyad had the additional worry of a constitutional challenge, given the school’s sponsorship by a nonprofit called Islamic Relief and the curriculum’s emphasis on Muslim culture and the Arabic language.
The school has not only survived but thrived, and there are plans for local expansion. Perhaps the surest sign that the experiment worked came last week, when a new charter school opened up thousands of miles away in Hollywood, Fla.–founded by Jewish parents, Ben Gamla Charter School has kosher food in the cafeteria and Hebrew posters in the classrooms. In the planning of the Florida school, Tarek ibn Ziyad’s experience was taken into account.
The success of Tarek ibn Ziyad’s model, and its adoption outside of Minnesota, heralds a potentially explosive new trend in America’s charter schools: publicly funded schools tied to a particular religion. The founders of Ben Gamla are already promising more branches in other states, and parents from other religions are sure to venture into similar territory, pushing the constitutional limits even further. As Peter Deutsch, the Orthodox Jewish congressman who started Ben Gamla, has said, it “could be a huge paradigm shift in education in America
Superintendent by Feb. eyed: School Board wants hire by then
The Madison School Board intends to hire its new superintendent of schools by early February 2008, so he or she can learn the ropes before veteran Superintendent Art Rainwater retires at the end of June.
Board President Arlene Silveira announced a working schedule for the superintendent search this week. The board has been meeting throughout the summer with a consulting firm and now has mapped out dates and action items for naming the new administrator.
“We’re very comfortable with our consultants and with the process. Even so, I’m a little nervous about it,” she said this morning. “This is likely to be the most important thing we do as a board, and we’re taking it very seriously. Change is good, though, and it’s an exciting process.”
She said the process in Madison will include more public input than is typical in most communities looking for a new school superintendent.
“We’ll have two general community forums on September 19 and 20, and there will probably be 20 focus groups with everyone from advocacy groups, to our philanthropic partners, to the business community and staff members. If we made it any broader, we’d just be inviting names out of the phone book,” she laughed.
Washington State’s Math Standards Review
The board’s executive director, Edie Harding, said public comment required some changes to a draft report the committee circulated last month, but the basic message is the same: The state needs tougher math standards and clearer guidance for teachers, parents and students.
The draft report called for putting more emphasis on learning the mechanics of math, but Harding said the math committee learned during public hearings around the state that people thought the report came on too strong concerning memorizing basic math facts.
Washington does need to re-emphasize the mechanics of math, but not give up on teaching students how to apply what they learn and to understand how math ideas fit together, Harding said.
The report, written by Linda Plattner of the Maryland-based educational research firm Strategic Teaching, which was hired by the state to assess its math expectations, also emphasizes the need to simplify grade level expectations and to set priorities for the state’s math standards.
“That should help teachers as well as kids,” Harding said.
The focus groups also taught the math committee that they need to include a math educator in their review committee so they can hear from a teacher if the standards will work in the classroom.
Strategic Teaching Draft Report: 650K PDF:
The bottom line is that Washington’s math standards need to be strengthened. If mathematics is the gateway to student success in higher education and the workplace, Washington is getting too few of its students to and through the door.
Compared to other higher-achieving states and countries, Washington is not expecting enough of its students. There is insufficient emphasis on key mathematical content. Some key math should be taught earlier in a student’s schooling, and some key math is simply missing. Washington does not provide sufficient clarity in its math expectations and does not ensure that Washington students learn the critical algorithms — math rules — that they need to succeed.
And the standards do not provide sufficient clarity of how well students are expected to learn math. For example, the standards often call for student “understanding” rather than a demonstration that a student can actually use the math to calculate, estimate, or solve a problem.
This is a harsh assessment. To be sure, there are good qualities in Washington’s mathematics standards including well-defined and developed mathematical processes and some well-developed strands, such as Algebra in the elementary years.
The Madison School Board instructed Superintendent Art Rainwater to conduct an “Independent Math Review” as part of his annual review process. Proposed Math Review Task Force [outline] (which did not obtain the required NSF funding).
I found it interesting and useful that Strategic Teaching included a discussion “on higher achieving states and countries” acknowledging the fact that our next generation is not competing with students from only from Racine or Green Bay, but those from Helsinki, Bangalore, Moscow and many other communities around the world.
Make science easier, examiners are told
Examiners will have to set easier questions in some GCSE science papers, under new rules seen by The Times. A document prepared by the Joint Council for Qualifications (JCQ), which represents awarding bodies across Britain, says that, from next year, exam papers should consist of 70 per cent “low-demand questions”, requiring simpler or multiple-choice answers. These currently make up just 55 per cent of the paper.
The move follows growing concern about the “dumbing down” of science teaching at GCSE and grade inflation of exam results, which critics claim is the result of a government drive to reverse the long-term decline in the number of pupils studying science.
In the past five years, the proportion of students gaining a grade D or better in one of the combined science papers has leapt from 39.6 to 46.7 per cent.
The latest move has been condemned by an education expert. Last night Professor Alan Smithers, head of the Education and Employment Research Centre at the University of Buckingham, said: “Deliberately increasing the proportion of easier questions is a clear example of lowering the bar.”
Teachers in Trouble, Parents Ignored, Part III
Dawn Henderson’s daughter Kaitlin was crying hysterically when she came home from Hardy Middle School one day in early October 2003. The D.C. sixth grader had a learning disability. She had not understood her social studies homework and was among six students who had not completed it.
Henderson said she knew the teacher to be a young woman new to the profession. During visits to Hardy, Henderson said she heard the teacher yell at some students about failing to do homework.
Kaitlin told her mother that day the teacher had tried something new: She made the six students stand in front of the class and hold all of their textbooks in their outstretched arms for about 15 minutes, until their muscles ached. Kaitlin did not have many books, but they were heavy for an 11-year-old.
Views on Wisconsin’s K-12 School Spending
The third Friday of September is an important date for schools. On that day the final enrollment count is made, then each school district will move to finalize their annual budget. Having the school budgets final by mid October is important for all of us, especially property taxpayers.
Under current law, schools will be allowed to spend $264 more for each student than last year. That is what the Governor and Democratic Senators proposed, as well. The Assembly has shaved it back to $200 per kid each year of the budget (with an incentive of $264 if the teachers agree to negotiate for a less expensive health plan). Last year in Wisconsin, we spent almost $10 billion on our public schools, approximately $5 Billion of state taxes, $4 Billion of local property taxes and $1 Billion from the federal government.
Wisconsin State Representative Frank Lasee (R-2nd) needs to go back to school. I suppose it is an intended public service that he tells us that, “Education is by far the single biggest expense of our state budget.”
O.K. Interesting information, but he never tells us what is the proper level of spending, or for that matter, why home owners should pay more so that businesses can pay less for education.
He makes additional observations such as the fact that, “Total spending divided by the number of teachers works out to nearly $150,000 for each teacher.”
Huh? What does that mean? Lasee thinks that the cost of busing kids to school or the cost of school books is to be measured by the cost per teacher. A figure as useful as knowing the cost of postage to mail a letter to the moon. Most of his comments continue with measures and data that are meaningless, either with no context or a useless context.
Much more on K-12 spending here.
Emphasizing Middle School Academics
Montgomery County School Superintendent Jerry D. Weast marched down a hallway on the first day of classes in the newly modernized Parkland Magnet Middle School in the Rockville area, trailed by a retinue of students. Then he stopped and asked, “Who’s taking algebra?” Three hands went up.
A few years ago, the question would have seemed more fitting in a high school. But today, half of Montgomery students take high school algebra before they leave the eighth grade, part of a regionwide trend toward more rigorous instruction in middle school.
Middle schools are the center of attention as Washington area school systems enter the 2007-08 academic year, which began yesterday in Montgomery, Howard, Anne Arundel and Charles counties and in the District. Four of eight middle schools in Charles, eight of 19 in Anne Arundel and 11 of 38 in Montgomery missed their achievement targets this year under the No Child Left Behind law.
2007 SAT Scores Released
The College Board announced SAT® scores today for the class of 2007, the largest and most diverse class of SAT takers on record. Nearly 1.5 million students (1,494,531) in the class of 2007 took the SAT, and minority students comprised nearly four out of 10 test-takers.
“The record number of students, coupled with the diversity of SAT takers in the class of 2007, means that an increasing number of students in this country are recognizing the importance of a college education and are taking the steps necessary to get there,” said Gaston Caperton, president of the College Board. “I am encouraged by the greater numbers of students from all walks of life who are taking on the challenge of the SAT and college.
This year’s average score in critical reading is 502, a 1-point decline compared to last year, or a change of 0.20 percent. The average scores in mathematics and writing declined 3 points each compared to a year ago, bringing the scores to 515 and 494, or a change of 0.58 percent and 0.60 percent, respectively.
Wisconsin Results [250K PDF]. 50 State results are available here.
Daniel de Vise:
The Class of 2007 posted the lowest SAT averages in several years, according to scores released this morning. Scores from the second year of an expanded, three-section college-entrance test declined by double digits in Maryland and the District, by five points in Virginia and by seven points nationwide, compared with the previous graduating class.
Education leaders said the modest decline reflected an ever larger and more diverse population of students taking the test. More blacks, Asians and Hispanics took the SAT in this year’s graduating class than in any previous class; two-fifths of test takers are now minorities.
Study finds emotional trauma can alter size of a child’s brain
Hoping to unlock some of the mysteries of post-traumatic stress disorder in children, a Stanford University researcher looked inside their heads.
What Dr. Victor Carrion found was startling: Children with PTSD and exposure to severe trauma had smaller brains.
Carrion found a nearly 9 percent reduction in the size of the hippocampus, a horseshoe-shaped sheet of neurons that deals with memory and emotions.
The study, released earlier this year, was just a first step toward understanding the physical effects of trauma and why some children have a greater ability to ward off physical and mental reactions.
Families Weigh Drugs for Attention Deficit
With school about to start, kids are coming in for their physicals — and for medication for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.
I’m seeing more kids each year with symptoms of ADHD. Some just have the attention problems and others are hyperactive, too.
New treatments can be given once a day. They are relatively easy for kids to take at home and don’t require the involvement of the school nurse during the day, as shorter-acting older medicines do.
The medicines are even easier for doctors to prescribe. A trial of medication is the quickest and easiest thing to try for kids with symptoms, given the limited impact a doctor can have on complex family dynamics.
It may be too easy an option considering the rising sales of these heavily marketed medications. Ads for attention-deficit medications are everywhere in the popular press where a parent might see them, including People, Good Housekeeping and Family Circle magazines at our house.
Is Wisconsin’s ACT Rank Inflated?
Last week, we got the annual good news that Wisconsin “scores near top on ACT once again,” as a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel headline declared. Aping her predecessors, state Superintendent Elizabeth Burmaster hailed the results as proof of how dandy we’re doing in Badgerland. The “composite score speaks well of our students’ academic achievement and the support they receive from their parents and teachers,” she declared.
But are we really doing that well? A close look at the ACT test data offers some reason for caution. Yes, Wisconsin’s average score of 22.3 was high compared to the national average of 21.2 (with scores ranging from 18.9 for Mississippi to 23.5 for Massachusetts), but the percentage of students taking the test here is lower than in 15 states. While 70 percent of Wisconsin students take the test, the percentage is 100 in Illinois and Colorado, 96 in Tennessee and Mississippi, and ranges from 71 to 82 percent for another 11 states.
Why does this matter? As the percentage of students taking the test increases, you are likely to include more low-attendance and low-performance students in the mix, pushing the average score lower.
Burmaster brags that Wisconsin has maintained its high ACT score even as the percentage of students taking the test rose. But the increase was minimal, rising from 68 percent in 2002 to 70 percent last year. That includes a steady rise in the number of African-American and Hispanic students taking the test, but they still remain underrepresented.
“We allow people in this state to pound their chest while ignoring the fact that Milwaukee has significantly fewer kids taking (the ACT),” Milwaukee School Board member Terry Falk declared in the JS story. (Falk, a former contributor to Milwaukee Magazine, sure knows how to give good quotes.)
As a reality check, I looked at state scores combined with the percentage of students taking the test to estimate which states we might actually trail. A state like Mississippi, for instance, can be quickly rejected: Yes, 96 percent of students took the test, but the average score of 18.9 was abysmally low, worst among all 50 states. Even if Wisconsin tested 96 percent of students, its average score would never drop that low.
America Risks the Fate of the Roman Republic
David Walker (Comptroller General of the United States):
T he US is a great nation, possibly the greatest of all time. Yet to keep America great, policymakers must learn certain lessons from history, notably the downfall of the Roman republic.
The world has changed dramatically in recent years. The US is currently the sole superpower on earth but that exclusive status is likely to be short-lived. While the US is number one in many things, from the size of its economy to military might, it faces several big sustainability challenges.
America’s fiscal, healthcare, education, energy, environment, immigration and Iraq policies are in need of review and revision. Timely action is needed because Washington’s historical crisis-management approach to dealing with hard public policy choices is no longer prudent.
Jeremy Grant has more along with David Potter and Martin Walker.
Comptroller of the Currency
Teens exposed to world of biotech careers through partnership
The family culture of Berkeley’s Hernandez clan is a cool blend of Mexican roots and Bay area savvy – jumpy banda music, quinceanera parties, spicy pico de gallo and genetic engineering experiments.
That last part, the biotechnology, has been grafted onto the traditions Roberto and Irma Hernandez brought with them when the family immigrated to California in the late 1980s. Their arrival was timely – a new school program was about to welcome minority and disadvantaged kids to the biotech industry.
Their oldest child, Roberto, was the pioneer at 15 when he took a chance on the unfamiliar subject at Berkeley High School in 1992. Over the years, he has persuaded his brother and two of his three sisters to sign up for the biotechnology classes.
These four children of immigrants are now part of a young generation of biotech initiates whose prospects include some of the best-paying jobs in the Bay Area.
Roberto Hernandez, 30, was one of the first students to join the school program designed to convince disadvantaged kids that biotechnology jobs are a real option for them. The program, Biotech Partners, removes the barriers that often stand between low-income students and the well-compensated positions abounding in their own neighborhoods.
Hernandez and his sister Griselda, 28, work at the sprawling Bayer Healthcare campus in West Berkeley. Their younger brother Jesus just spent the eve of his 17th birthday tossing around terms such as “cell transformation” and “diafiltration” at a celebration for Biotech Partners students like himself who were finishing summer internships.
Biotech Partners Website:
Biotech Partners provides an entry-level biotechnology education and training program dedicated to supporting the San Francisco Bay Area’s robust bioscience industry while providing valuable working skills for local young people.
Biotech Partners has long been recognized as a model for connecting youth who are under-represented in the sciences to the world of biotechnology. A non-profit organization, Biotech Partners owes its success to strong collaboration among local biotechnology companies, secondary school and community college districts, a dedicated core staff and most importantly, the students and their families.
Related: Madison West High School’s Accelerated Biology Program [RSS].
Beloit College’s Mindset List® for the Class of 2011
Most of the students entering College this fall, members of the Class of 2011, were born in 1989. For them, Alvin Ailey, Andrei Sakharov, Huey Newton, Emperor Hirohito, Ted Bundy, Abbie Hoffman, and Don the Beachcomber have always been dead.
# What Berlin wall?
# Humvees, minus the artillery, have always been available to the public.
Cathy Lynn Grossman has more:
For this fall’s incoming college class, “off the hook” could mean “excellent” or escaping blame, but for sure it has nothing to do with telephones.
“Here’s Johnny!” That’s Jack Nicholson in The Shining, not the intro for Johnny Carson’s monologue, according to today’s 18-year-olds.
Professors had best update their lingo if they want to communicate with the Class of 2011 (on the assumption that anyone actually finishes in four years anymore).
Here to help is the 10th annual Beloit College Mindset List, released today by the small Wisconsin liberal arts college.
Checking the Kids Homework Over the Internet
Growing Web-Based Software
After his divorce, Gregg La Montagne found it hard to help his 15-year-old daughter with her schoolwork since she lives in another state. So for her Spanish class recently, Mr. La Montagne told her to write her assignment in an online word-processing application made by Google Inc.
Mr. La Montagne, a sales manager in Austin, Texas, then accessed his daughter’s homework online, using the same software through his Web browser at home. A native Spanish speaker, Mr. La Montagne was then able to suggest grammar changes, which he typed in at the bottom of the paper. His daughter, who was online at the same time, was able to see her father’s notes almost instantaneously as her screen refreshed, and then in turn correct the document for him to see.
“It makes it easier to participate,” says Mr. La Montagne, 50 years old. “It’s not the same as being with her, but it’s at least a step in that direction.”
Mr. La Montagne is one of a growing number of parents now using Web-based applications to review and aid their children’s educational work. Google Docs & Spreadsheets, which Mr. La Montagne used, provides word processing and spreadsheets that a consumer can access using just a Web browser.
New LA Superintendent “Blasts Culture of Low Expectations”
The L.A. schools chief tells administrators ‘we’re going to teach you how to change.’ They’ll get leadership training and will be held accountable for student achievement, he says.
In his first formal speech to administrators, Los Angeles Schools Supt. David L. Brewer told principals and managers Friday that they must change both themselves and a pervasive culture of “low expectations for brown and black children,” adding that they would receive mandatory leadership training and support but also would be held accountable for student achievement.
Brewer, a devotee of management books, set out eight principles — including creating “a sense of urgency,” “building a team” and “communicating a vision” — that he expects principals and others to follow.
In a later interview, Brewer said the Los Angeles Unified School District would launch a pilot management-training program, with courses shaped by input from universities, outside consultant firms and corporations.
“We’re going to teach you how to change,” Brewer told his audience, promising “world-class leadership and management training” as well as real support from higher-ups. “You’re going to need it,” he said.
Many of the roughly 1,500 administrators in attendance took notes on stationery provided free by a credit union that was trying to drum up business. After Brewer’s morning speech at a hall in the Los Angeles Convention Center, “inspirational” was the adjective of choice for many.
French Gains Foothold in NYC’s Dual Language Schools
Nearly all the 65 dual-language programs in the New York City public schools are conducted in Spanish and Chinese, languages that are considered practical tools for future success.
So far, French has not fit into that equation.
But next month, the first French-English dual-language programs will begin at three schools in the city: Public School 125 on the Upper West Side, P.S. 58 in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn, and Intermediate School 22 in Harlem. They are the result of two years of lobbying from the French Embassy and a group of parents determined to promote the language in the public schools.
Dual-language programs have operated for more than 15 years, officials at the city’s Department of Education said. The inclusion of French brings the total number of languages in the program to five, including Spanish, Chinese, and last year’s addition of Haitian-Creole and Russian.
Back to School Picnic
100 Black Men of Madison 11th Annual Back to School Picnic will be held this Saturday August 25th, rain or shine at Demetral Park located on Commercial and Packers Avenue at 11 am.
Over 2,000 free backpacks filled with school supplies will be distributed to students in kindergarten thru eighth grade.
In addition, hamburgers, hot dogs and beverages will be served. This event is first come, first served and students must be in attendance to receive a backpack.
The purpose of this event is to assist students at the beginning the school year with the supplies needed for academic success and to reduce the achievement gap.
For more information please contact, Chris Canty at 244-1259 or cwcanty@gmail.com.
Via a Johnny Winston, Jr. email.
Attempts to make schools healthier are faltering
THE proportion of children in America who are overweight has tripled over the past 20 years and now exceeds 17%, according to the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The health problems that this causes include hypertension and type-2 diabetes, formerly known only among the nation’s overweight adult population. A group sponsored by the National Institute on Ageing has warned that this may be the first generation ever to have a shorter lifespan than their parents.
All the while, the proportion of children who take part in daily exercise at high school has dropped from 42% in 1991 to only 28% in 2004, according to the CDC. Snacking has greatly increased; the Government Accountability Office found in 2003 that 99% of America’s high schools now sell snacks and other food as well as providing lunches.
In an attempt to get the problem tackled at local level, Congress in 2004 passed an act directing school districts that get money from the national school-lunch programme to create “wellness” policies by the start of the 2006-07 school year. The districts were told to set standards for nutrition, physical activity and education about good food, then make sure that schools actually implement them.
One year after the deadline, the results are haphazard. School districts’ plans range from a few paragraphs long to more than 25 pages. Some states, like Texas and Arkansas, have pre-emptively set standards for school districts under their jurisdiction, forcing schools to ban fizzy drinks and junk food while increasing the amount of exercise the pupils take. Others offer guidelines rather than mandates, with no repercussions for schools that don’t comply. And in some areas, schools are being eased into change very slowly. Oregon’s legislature passed a bill in June that gives its schools ten years to meet its new physical-education requirements.
NY State Names 17 More ‘Persistently Dangerous’ Schools
New York State education officials yesterday added 17 schools to the list of those considered “persistently dangerous,” substantially expanding the list for the second year in a row. All but 2 of the 27 schools on the new list are in New York City, including a dozen schools designed for students with severe disabilities.
The schools ranged from the behemoth Jamaica High School in Queens to smaller schools like Powell Middle School in Harlem and Public School 14 in Staten Island. The list also includes a school in Rochester and Berkshire Junior-Senior High School in Canaan, N.Y.
The federal No Child Left Behind Act requires states to compile annual lists of “persistently dangerous” schools but leaves it to each state to define the term. Many states, including New York, have been criticized for issuing extremely short lists in past years.
“We are utterly determined to make all schools safe,” said Richard P. Mills, the state education commissioner, in announcing the list yesterday at a news conference in Albany.
Mr. Mills said New York’s list had grown because the state had vastly improved its reporting efforts. He noted that the 49 other states had listed a total of only 30 schools as “persistently dangerous” last year, just a hairsbreadth more than the schools now listed by New York.
Madison Parent’s School Safety Site posted 2006/2007 student teacher assaults/injury data here.
Wisconsin DPI “Discipline Data Collection and Reporting” webpage.
Teachers in Trouble – Parents Ignored, Part II
For a long time, Dawn Mosisa had trouble forgiving herself for the way she shrugged off her daughter’s story about the teacher who hit one of her second grade classmates in the spring of 2003. Her daughter said the man ordered the class to count to 10 in French while he hit the boy 10 times with a ruler.
The girl was not in the habit of making up such stories, the mother said, but like most parents, Mosisa did not want to think that any educator would be so cruel, so she chose not to believe it. When the teacher left the school the next year, Mosisa grew more concerned. But she said she could not get anyone at Maryvale Elementary School in Rockville to explain to her or her child exactly what had occurred and how they should respond.
Abuse of a student at school is a parent’s nightmare. Not only do such incidents harm the victims and their parents, but they also trouble the children who may have witnessed the event and their parents. Such cases usually remain undisclosed because parents do not want their children embarrassed or disturbed by public knowledge of what happened. But Mosisa, 44, a student financial services official for a public university, has given an unusually detailed account that sheds light on a rarely examined side of public education.
Flushing Out Life’s Hard Calls
Harvard law school thinks it has found the solution to many of society’s problems, from teenage delinquency to world diplomatic crises: a hand of poker.
The card game that is a game of skill to its advocates, and a potentially ruinous bet on chance to its detractors, is to be taught to disadvantaged US schoolchildren and college students to teach respect, business acumen and even war strategy.
Madison and State ACT Scores Rise
Madison public school students’ average scores on the ACT college admissions exam outpace those of their counterparts statewide, even as Wisconsin performs well compared to other states.
The average composite score of Madison public high school students on the national test was 24.6 over the 2006-07 school year, the best showing the district has had since it began keeping ACT records 22 years ago. Nearly 70 percent of high school students in Madison took the test last year.
Up from 24.2 in 2005-06, the average score for Madison students compares to 22.3 among students statewide. The average national composite score is 21.2.
Although an achievement gap remains among minority students and their white counterparts in Madison, students from all ethnic groups here perform substantially better than their peers statewide, and nationally. For the second year in a row, all Madison minority sub-groups improved their performance on the ACT.
School Employees Serving on School Boards
School employees commonly serve on the governing boards of school districts that don’t employ them. What makes a case in South County different is three administrators’ dual roles at Southwestern College and the Sweetwater Union High School District, because they’re in positions to vote on each other’s budgets and salaries.
Greg Sandoval is interim president of Southwestern and a member of the Sweetwater board. Arlie Ricasa is director of student activities at Southwestern and is on the Sweetwater board. Jorge Dominguez is director of the Educational Technology Department at Sweetwater and a member of the Southwestern board.
The arrangement is legal. Governance ethicists raise questions about appearances, though, especially when the crossover votes occur as close together as they have recently.
How close?
In May, Sandoval joined the majority in a 3-2 vote rejecting $500,000 for Dominguez’s department.
K-12 Spending More Reliant on Federal Government Since No Child Left Behind Act
New data from the National Center for Education Statistics show that the federal government has been commandeering a continually larger role in K-12 education in recent years, especially since 1999 and the January 2002 passage of the No Child Left Behind Act.
The new statistics include detailed financial data about school districts across the nation for the 2004-05 school year. Five years earlier, during the 1999-2000 school year, public school districts received an average of $578 per pupil from the federal government. By 2004-05, that number had risen to $919. That’s a 60-percent increase, and even after adjusting for inflation, it’s a 39 percent boost in federal aid. In this study we rank the states on how much more reliant they have become on Uncle Sam for this traditionally local government function.
There are several ways to quantify this increasing reliance on the federal government. The two we present in Table 1 are the absolute dollar amounts per pupil that the federal government sent to each state’s school system, and the percentage of each state’s education spending that comes from the federal government. The rightmost column shows how every state’s share of revenue from the federal government has changed since 1999-00.
Related: K-12 Spending Climate.
When Special Education Goes Too Easy on Students
John Hechinger and Daniel Golden:
On June 25, 2006, Michael Bredemeyer threw his tasseled cap in the air and cheered after getting his high school diploma. Two days later, his parents mailed the diploma back.
Michael, now 19 years old, has learning disabilities and finished high school at a seventh-grade reading level, despite scoring above average on IQ tests. The Bredemeyers say he passed some classes because teachers inflated his grades and accepted poor work. By awarding him a meaningless diploma, they say, school officials avoided paying for ongoing instruction.
“I felt proud because he had worked so hard,” says Michael’s mother, Beverly, her voice breaking. “You don’t want to take that away from him. But you knew it wasn’t real. What’s he going to do in the future? Will he be able to go to college and get a job?”
The Bredemeyers represent a new voice in special education: parents disappointed not because their children are failing, but because they’re passing without learning. These families complain that schools give their children an easy academic ride through regular-education classes, undermining a new era of higher expectations for the 14% of U.S. students who are in special education.
Years ago, schools assumed that students with disabilities would lag behind their non-disabled peers. They often were taught in separate buildings and left out of standardized testing. But a combination of two federal laws, adopted a quarter-century apart, have made it national policy to hold almost all children with disabilities to the same academic standards as other students.
Moving Students Out of Poor Inner Cities Yields Little, Studies of HUD Vouchers Say
Many social reformers have long said that low academic achievement among inner-city children cannot be improved significantly without moving their families to better neighborhoods, but new reports released today that draw on a unique set of data throw cold water on that theory.
Researchers examining what happened to 4,248 families that were randomly given or denied federal housing vouchers to move out of their high-poverty neighborhoods found no significant difference about seven years later between the achievement of children who moved to more middle-class neighborhoods and those who didn’t.
Although some children had more stable lives and better academic results after the moves, the researchers said, on average there was no improvement. Boys and brighter students appeared to have more behavioral problems in their new schools, the studies found.
Hours of teaching differ for schools
Where a student attends public school in the five-county metropolitan Milwaukee area can make a difference of as much as four weeks’ time in the classroom per year, according to data reported to the state.
For the last two school years, the school districts of Burlington, Cudahy, Kettle Moraine, Mukwonago, Slinger, South Milwaukee and Wauwatosa reported that most – if not all – of their schools held classes at least 65 hours longer than the minimum hours set by state law.
Meanwhile, the Oak Creek-Franklin and Waukesha school districts met for the minimum amount of hours, and a large number of schools in the Milwaukee Public Schools system fell below the standard in 2006-’07.
“There’s nothing more important than time with the classroom teacher,” said Tony Evers, deputy superintendent of the state Department of Public Instruction. “And, if that’s continually taken away, the state of Wisconsin would have an obligation that doesn’t happen.”
By and large, most public schools in Milwaukee, Ozaukee, Racine, Washington and Waukesha counties reported similar annual total instructional hours for their students for the past two years, the only years for which data was available from the DPI.
Teachers in Trouble, Parents Ignored — Part I
I have written several columns about clashes between educators and parents, a subject that rarely gets much attention because it is so personal. Those involved are often reluctant to give details. Over the last few years I have been saving material on some particularly interesting cases in which parents feel school officials froze them out of the process of dealing with their children’s teachers. A few months ago, less-detailed versions of these episodes were reported in The Post. Today, and in the next two columns, I will describe four cases at more length, and follow with a column of reader reactions, and one on how experts in parental issues think these cases should have been handled.
What do you think explains these communication meltdowns? What can be done about them? Two of the cases I will examine are about teachers who allegedly abused students and were eventually fired, with parents unable to get the full story. I will start however with a different situation: a teacher who was fired for reasons that made no sense to the many parents who loved her work. They tried to influence the decision, but found their views rebuffed.
New Study Reveals School Finance Lawsuits Increase Funding Temporarily, Hike Taxes Permanently
But few studies have attempted a comprehensive, state-by-state measure of the long-term fiscal impact of court education mandates4 and none have presented a state-by-state estimate of the cost of legislation approved to comply with court education mandates.
How much more are states spending on education as a result of these mandates? Have lawmakers increased taxes to comply with the mandates, and if so, how much? Has compliance with court mandates led to long-term increases in per-pupil spending? This study—the first in a new series called Appropriation by Litigation—will answer these questions.
Elmbrook considers allowing bonus for college-level work
The Elmbrook School Board is considering plowing new ground by extending weighted-grade options to courses taken by students preparing for technical colleges rather than only four-year universities.
Elmbrook would be “blazing new territory” because no other area school district that Elmbrook considers high-achieving has this weighted-grade policy, said Elyce Moschella, Brookfield Central High School’s coordinator of gifted and talented students.
The move would touch sensitive issues such as grade point averages and class rank. The policy change would extend weighted grades to Elmbrook classes that provide dual credit at both technical colleges and universities.
Those classes are college accounting, principles of interior design, mechanical drafting and computer-aided design, engineering computer-aided design seminar and auto systems and tuneup. Students taking those courses would earn an extra 0.025 on their grade point per semester, the same added quarter-point that students earn for taking advanced placement and fifth-year foreign language classes.
Education in Mexico: La Maestra
A YEAR ago Felipe Calderón won a desperately close election for Mexico’s presidency by a margin of barely 200,000 votes. While there were many factors behind his victory, one that may have tipped the balance was the support of Elba Esther Gordillo, the head of the National Educational Workers’ Union, as the country’s teachers’ union is called. Ms Gordillo is reckoned by many to be the most powerful woman in Mexico. Indeed, after Mr Calderón, she may be the second most powerful politician in the country.
Ms Gordillo’s political power comes mainly from the union’s sheer size: with 1.4m members teaching in primary and secondary schools, it is the largest labour union in Latin America. From that political base, Ms Gordillo controls a significant block of deputies in the lower house of the federal Congress, as well as two senators. And while no state governor will say so openly, “none of them will go against her will,” says Carlos Ornelas, an education specialist at Mexico City’s Metropolitan Autonomous University.
“La maestra” (“the teacher”), as Ms Gordillo is known, is widely reckoned to have reached an unwritten—and maybe even implicit—agreement with Mr Calderón, under which she has swapped her support in other matters for his acquiescence in her grip over the country’s schools.
Life in the Carpool Lane
Four mothers armed with calendars and schedules huddled around a kitchen table in Vienna plotting how to get their children to and from Trinity School at Meadow View when classes start in two weeks.
Watts Riot (Green Dot Charter School)
On a sunny Los Angeles afternoon in early May, Steve Barr gathered with parents, teachers and other supporters across the street from Alain Locke Senior High School in the Watts neighborhood. He proudly declared to the news media that the 2,800-student school, one of the state’s worst, was seceding from the Los Angeles Unified School District.
Green Dot, Barr’s charter school operation, was ready to take over the school and pump up its abysmal graduation rate. A majority of Locke’s tenured teachers had voted in secret to shuck their cozy union contracts and side with Barr. Standing next to him was Frank Wells, Locke’s popular principal, fired two days earlier when district officials got wind of the takeover plan.
“So here the revolution starts, in Watts,” Barr declared.
UW-Madison: Arts on Campus
Teaching to the Test in Maryland
But in pre-NCLB (No Child Left Behind) days, Tyler Heights students weren’t critical thinkers and creative writers: Only 17 percent passed the MSA in 2000. Many went on to fail in middle school and drop out of high school.
Principal Tina McKnight, a fanatically hard-working woman, started the turnaround in 2000. Superintendent Eric Smith brought in Saxon Math and Open Court, a phonics-first reading curriculum that tells teachers — often inexperienced — exactly what to say.
Because it has so many poor students, Tyler Heights gets extra funding to pay for very small classes and a variety of pullout programs for students who aren’t doing well. Half the third-grade class receives some kind of special help.
After School Activities Declining
During Rick Xiong’s first two years at Milwaukee’s Madison High School, his habit was to “go to school and get back home as fast as possible.”
Sometimes Xiong, now a 19-year-old student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, would hear about after-school activities advertised during the morning announcements. But they never enticed him to stay.
As another school year approaches, many of the extracurricular activities that have long interested Milwaukee students are relics of the past. Although there are notable exceptions, gone are the days when city high schools had an array of sports, a drama club, a school musical, a band, an orchestra, a choir, an active yearbook and an assortment of other organizations.
The gap in test scores and graduation rates between the city and suburban high schools has attracted the most attention from policy-makers and the media in recent years. But others worry that there’s another gap that’s just as meaningful: the difference in the richness and breadth of the high school experience available to children in cities and suburbs as urban districts slice after-school activities and clubs.
US Drops Out of International Math & Science Study (TIMMS)
Americans took note when Bill Gates said last spring that American schools needed to beef up science and math standards if the country was going to maintain a competitive edge in the new century. So did Congress, which last week approved legislation called the America COMPETES (Creating Opportunities to Meaningfully Promote Excellence in Technology, Education and Science) Act, which carves out a whopping $43.6 billion for science education and research.
So why did the federal government quietly decide last year to drop out of an international study that would compare U.S. high-school students who take advanced science and math courses with their international counterparts?
The study, called TIMSS (Trends in Mathematics and Science Study) Advanced 2008, measures how high-school seniors are doing in algebra, geometry, calculus and physics with students taking similar subjects around the globe. In the past, the American results have been shockingly poor. In the last survey, taken in 1995, students from only two countries—Cyprus and South Africa—scored lower than U.S. school kids.
Joanne has more.
The Case for Pre-K
A new book explains why other progressive causes should take some cues from the preschool movement.
In 1961, 13 three- and four-year-olds from poor black families began attending a preschool class at Perry Elementary School in Ypsilanti, Michigan. They were there as much to learn as to teach. A team of researchers followed not only their time at the preschool, but their trajectory over the next four decades, and the findings were startling:
Compared to a control group of similar children who didn’t attend preschool, this class from Perry Elementary School would be less likely to skip class, be placed in special education, or wind up in jail. They’d be more likely to graduate high school and college and have a job, and would earn more money than their non-preschool peers. And, 40 years later, their successes would launch a national movement to ensure all children the opportunity to attend and benefit from the same type of high-quality preschool they had.
The movement to expand publicly funded preschool education is perhaps the most ambitious, promising, and fundamentally progressive campaign in public education today. Its members want, first, to make an additional year or two of publicly funded education available to all four- and three-year-olds whose parents want it — an enormous step, representing a potential 15 percent expansion in the time children spend in public education. And at this, they’re succeeding: 950,000 children currently attend state-funded preschool programs, and the number of four-year-olds attending such programs has risen 40 percent in the past five years alone.
Finding the equation for math education
While the math scores in the recently released Minnesota Comprehensive Assessments-Series II are slightly higher than last year’s scores, they’re still not very encouraging. Midday explores what these scores mean for math education, how students learn math and the state of our math curriculum?
GUESTS
Ken Vos: professor of education at the College of St. Catherine
Karen Teff: Deer River math teacher
In Hong Kong, Flashy Tutors Gain Icon Status
When Richard Eng isn’t teaching English grammar to high-school students, he might be cruising around Hong Kong in his Lamborghini Murciélago. Or in Paris, on one of his seasonal shopping sprees. Or relaxing in his private, custom-installed karaoke room festooned with giant Louis Vuitton logos.
Mr. Eng, 43 years old, is one of Hong Kong’s best-known celebrity “tutor gods.”
Hong Kong parents are often desperate to help their children succeed in this city’s pressure-cooker public-examination system, which determines students’ college-worthiness. That explains why many are willing to pay handsomely for extracurricular help. Mr. Eng and others like him have made a lucrative business out of tapping that demand. They use flashy, aggressive marketing tactics that have transformed them into scholastic pop stars — “tutor gods,” as they’re known in Cantonese.
Private tutoring is big business around the world. Programs that help people prepare for standardized tests — such as SAT-prep courses in the U.S. — have become a multibillion-dollar industry. Tutoring agencies are also booming in places like mainland China and Japan. Several years ago, Hong Kong’s government estimated that the city’s families spent nearly half a billion dollars a year on tutoring.
Hong Kong stands out, though, for instructors who boldly tout their success rate — and their own images. They pay to have their faces plastered throughout the city on 40-foot-high billboards and the sides of double-decker buses. They’re also known for buying ads that take up the entire front page of newspapers — space more commonly filled by banks and property developers. One local television station is even preparing to launch a fictional drama series based on the lives of the tutor gods.
Fascinating
MMSD Misses Notification Date, Will Again Provide Private School Bus Rides
The Madison School District said Tuesday it will provide bus rides for children attending private schools this year because it missed a legal deadline to notify families that the service was ending.
Hoping to save about $229,000, the School Board voted last spring to abolish bus routes that carried 208 children to six Catholic schools.
Instead, the district would pay their parents a transportation subsidy of about $450 per student.
The district has been working this summer with the Catholic Diocese of Madison to help it set up an alternative transportation system, but it did not realize there was an Aug. 4 deadline for notifying parents affected by the change, Superintendent Art Rainwater said Tuesday.
“We were so engrossed, it just went by us, ” he said. “The statute is very clear and we did not meet it. ”
Michael Lancaster, superintendent of schools for the diocese, said he ‘s happy that children will be receiving safe rides to school.
“Safety was a huge parental concern and ours as well, ‘ ‘ he said.
The financial effect on the district will be evaluated in October when it deals with “hundreds of pluses and minuses ‘ ‘ in making final budget adjustments after receiving data on enrollment, state aid and other factors, Rainwater said.
“We really don ‘t know until October how this fits in,” he said.
Much more on last spring’s private school busing budget change and commentary.
Perhaps this matter is related to gaining voter support for a 2008 referendum, which was discussed at Monday’s Madison School Board meeting:
Approval of Minutes dated April 30, May 7, May 14, May 22, May 29, June 27, July 16 (two sets), 2007
Announcements
There are no announcements.
Initial Discussion of Potential 2007-08 Referendum.
An oversight by the Madison school district’s administration means that the prayers of some Catholic school parents have been answered.
The school district announced Tuesday that it must continue to provide yellow school bus service for students at six local Catholic schools through the 2007-08 school year because it missed a deadline for notifying parents that there would be a change in transportation policy.
The Madison School Board voted last spring to eliminate busing for parochial school students and instead provide a stipend of $450 per child so parents can pay the cost of transportation themselves. State statutes mandate that public schools must provide transportation to all students in their districts, even those attending private schools.
According to Superintendent Art Rainwater, the district has been working over the summer with the Catholic Diocese of Madison to establish alternative means of getting parochial students to school, and it inadvertently missed the 30-day legal deadline for notifying individual parents that there would be a change in transportation policy.
‘Tested’ examines difficult choices
Since 2002, when No Child Left Behind became law, states have spent millions of dollars giving standardized reading and math tests; one estimate puts the total cost above $5 billion through 2008.
The law requires that about half of all students take the tests and that schools improve each spring so they can stay off federal “needs improvement” lists. Many educators say that’s turning schools into test-prep factories where history, science and even recess get shortchanged.
Linda Perlstein, a former Washington Post reporter, wanted to see the effects firsthand, so she spent an academic year inside a high-poverty elementary school in Annapolis, Md.
The result is Tested: One American School Struggles to Make the Grade. USA TODAY’s Greg Toppo talks with her about testing:
Q: You spent a year getting to know kids at Tyler Heights Elementary School. How did this change your outlook on their education and tests?
A: I don’t have a problem with testing children. I have a problem with thinking test results tell you most of what you need to know. They simply don’t — these tests are often very narrow instruments. Where reforms have forced educators to notice children who might otherwise have been neglected, I give credit. But I wrote this book because school reforms intended to abolish a two-class system were in some ways exacerbating it. There’s one world where students pass the test as a matter of course and get to write poems, and another where children write paragraphs about poems.
Meanwhile, there’s supposed to be a movement in American schools to educate each child as an individual. The teachers at Tyler Heights work mightily to do that, but they have to get everybody to the same place in the same amount of time, and follow daily curriculum agendas handed down from above.
An Interview with the Gates Foundation’s New Education Director
Portland schools superintendent Vicki Phillips starts her job as education director at the Bill and Melinda Gates’ Foundation on Wednesday.
With more than $3 billion in grant money to give away, Phillips is arguably in one of the most powerful K-12 jobs in the country.
Audio.
An Experienced Teacher:The Oakland A’s and Public Education
Moneyball didn’t lead to a paradigm shift for my students, but it did for me. I have not thought about my own work in the same way since reading it. How do we determine what counts as excellence in teaching? I wish I could be evaluated according to the nice things students write about me in my yearbook, but something tells me that isn’t a sound approach. In financial terms, my employer considers my work a little more valuable every year I choose to stick around. And when I earned an additional graduate degree a few years back I got a substantial raise. But I can assure you that my graduate work did not translate into student performance that was worth several thousand more dollars per year to my school system.
The direction we’re moving in, of course, is evaluating teacher performance according to student test scores. Now I’ve never been a knee-jerk opponent of standardized tests. When I’m charged with proctoring them and examine their contents, I rarely see anything that I would not want my own children to know or be able to do at that age. That said, a good standardized test score should be a side effect of a rich education, not the point of the education. Almost anyone who is in a public school classroom today would agree that tests are becoming the point. If our teaching performance were to be evaluated according to our students’ test scores, tests would become the point once and for all.
And yet my inner Billy Beane asks, “Given that the tests are far from perfect and given that you have limited control over student performance, aren’t students supposed to learn knowledge and skills in your classroom? Is there a better statistic to evaluate your performance by than your students’ test scores?” Not really.
18 Milwaukee “Year Round” Schools
“Welcome back! Today is Monday, August 6, 2007.”
That was the message on a chalkboard in Debra Alpert’s classroom at Wheatley Elementary School, 2442 N. 20th St.
It was humid and warm outside and inside the building – no question about it, an August day.
And school was in session?
Indeed, as it was on Monday at 17 other schools in the Milwaukee Public Schools system, all of them using a “year-round” schedule, which does not mean kids go to school year-round, or even that they go to school more days than the 175 to 180 of students on traditional schedules. But they do have a school calendar that gives them a shorter summer break (six weeks or so) and three breaks of three to four weeks throughout the year.
Some educators – as well as many teachers, parents and even kids – think that schedule is preferable when it comes to the impact on a child’s learning and, in some cases, a child’s safety or social development.
Research overall is mixed on the impact of reducing that three-month break. But there are arguments for saying maybe that long summer vacation isn’t such a hot idea after all.
Teaching the trades: High school apprenticeship program gives students on-the-job training
“It’s hard to find opportunities like this, where a company will give you that start,” Rewolinski says, loud enough to be heard over the fan that cools him. “A lot of companies now, they want you to have the experience right away. And with a program like this, I can get that start, and then I can move on and maybe move to something better or stay here and just get better at it.”
Rewolinski is talking about Wisconsin’s Youth Apprenticeship program.
He’s demonstrating his skills to Roberta Gassman, secretary of the state Department of Workforce Development.
For months, Gassman has been visiting youth apprentices at schools, factories, fabricators, machine shops and nursing homes.
She’s stumping for Gov. Jim Doyle’s plan to double the budget for youth apprenticeships to $2.2 million a year.
Today’s Geography: Classroom to Boardroom
Educators have always insisted they not leave out the “three Rs”: reading, writing and arithmetic. That paradigm may be shifting to “three Rs and a G” – and world enterprise is most appreciative.
The “G” is for geography – the science that links a range of interests and information from a variety of cultures based on a visual map. This subject is moving to the forefront of the minds of educators as its utility, later in life, in developing business strategy within public and private sectors around the world becomes more and more evident.
As a nation, the United States has received a clear signal from studies like the 2006 National Geographic/Roper survey, which followed an earlier survey in 2002. In the latest survey, young adults aged 18 to 24 in nine countries were surveyed and the results showed that Americans were outperformed in geographic literacy by young adults in seven countries – Sweden, Germany, Italy, France, Japan, Great Britain and Canada. Only 13% of the Americans surveyed correctly identified Iraq on a map of Asia and the Middle East. Only about half of young Americans were able to locate landmasses such as Japan and India on a global map. And 20% of those surveyed could not find the Pacific Ocean.
But set aside our less-than-satisfactory performance at a Geography Bee, and jump ahead to the terrain of public and private firms where geography has become one of the most powerful weapons in the arsenal. Maybe our educational system does not play out well in a Geography Bee, but you need to look at the extra edge firms are getting when they embrace not just geography, but the story that it tells. With the coming of age of GIS, the geography story becomes one where decisions can be made like never before. Almost anything can be plotted on a map.
Grading Mayoral Control of Schools
Mayoral control, the hot new trend in urban school reform, began in Boston and Chicago in the 1990s. Now it’s the New York City school system, under the authority of Mayor Michael Bloomberg, that’s become the beacon for education-mayor wannabes like Adrian Fenty of Washington, D.C., and Antonio Villaraigosa of Los Angeles. Influential philanthropic foundations, such as the Los Angeles–based Broad Foundation (headed by Bloomberg friend and fellow billionaire Eli Broad) and the Gates Foundation, are investing in Bloomberg as the model big-city mayor who uses his new executive powers over the schools to advance a daring reform agenda. Meanwhile, the national media’s positive coverage of mayoral control in Gotham is adding to the luster of a possible Bloomberg presidential run.
For New Yorkers, though, the original appeal of mayoral control was entirely parochial. The old Board of Education—with seven members, appointed by six elected city officials—offered a case study of the paralysis that sets in when fragmented political authority tries to direct a dysfunctional bureaucracy. New Yorkers arrived at a consensus that there was not much hope of lifting student achievement substantially under such a regime. The newly elected Bloomberg made an offer that they couldn’t refuse: Give me the authority to improve the schools, and then hold me accountable for the results.
The Tough Road to Better Science Teaching
The principal effort is led by the University of Wisconsin at Madison. In 2003 the NSF gave the university a five-year, $10-million grant to establish the Center for the Integration of Research, Teaching, and Learning. The center has worked with more than 1,000 new faculty members and graduate students at Madison and other universities to try the new teaching methods and conduct research on the process of putting them into practice.
The project also works on ways to attract science professors to join in the innovation. Trying the new teaching methods, the center’s leaders say, should be viewed as conducting an experiment with measurable results — an approach that appeals to the instincts of researchers. Organizers also argue that the new methods are more professionally satisfying than delivering conventional lectures.
Observers hope that the Wisconsin project will show results different from those of a similar NSF-financed effort that ran from 1993 to 2002. An evaluation of that program found that participants, who were graduate students, rated it highly but felt pressure to “conceal” the work from their professors, who viewed it as distracting them from research. What’s more, the new teaching methods often did not take root in the students’ departments, which was a goal of the project.
If young researchers delay trying the new teaching methods until their careers are established, though, they may put the attempt off for good, advocates say. And if American science is to stay competitive, that is a problem. “We don’t really have the time to wait around for another 20 years,” says Madison’s Ms. Millar, “for this kind of sea change to occur.”
Via Kevin Carey.
Top Online Learning Resources
Want an education? Open up a browser. With the information available online, you could probably get a complete education without ever leaving your house.
But for more traditional students, as well as their parents and teachers, it can be tricky to find online information that is safe, relevant and age-appropriate. You don’t want your kids to jump knee-deep into DNA sequences if they haven’t even reached their third grade Mesozoic-era workshop.
Here is Wired News’ selection of the best educational resources on the net. Sure, the sites on this list aren’t going to replace Wikipedia or Google, or even a trip to the local public library. But if it’s education you want, and you’re at a computer, these sites are great places to start.
Steve Barr Mission to Fix LA’s Schools
Entrepreneur Steve Barr is on a mission to replace the worst public school in Los Angeles with charter schools. Barr has got an army of supporters behind him, from union organizers to teachers unions, from LA’s mayor to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
Barr has got brass knuckles, and with ten schools up and running he is getting results.
On Point speak with Steve Barr about fixing America’s troubled schools.
Audio.
At Odds Over Immigrant Assimilation
But he knows that not everyone sees people such as him — an immigrant who prefers to speak his mother tongue — that way. To this, he responds that the U.S. government should demand that newcomers know English — and help them learn it.
“This country was founded by immigrants. There should be a lot of cultures,” Ruiz, 48, said. “But at the base is the government.”
Ruiz’s idea lies at the heart of a question that has recently entered the national immigration debate, one some researchers say is important as new trends challenge old integration patterns: Should the government encourage assimilation?
The Bush administration is taking steps to do that. The Task Force on New Americans, created by executive order last year, recently presented initiatives that supporters say will help immigrants “become fully American.”
More on Communities Withdrawing from Milwaukee’s MATC
A movement that began in Germantown is spreading in Ozaukee County, where the county itself and the Cedarburg Common Council, School Board and Town Board are all exploring the possibility of leaving the Milwaukee Area Technical College District.
In addition, an alderman in Mequon says he plans to ask city staff to look into whether a secession by Mequon is feasible.
The movement began with a Germantown Village Board trustee who is upset about MATC’s property tax levy, which has risen nearly 25% in the past four years.
The Organized Student
Denville, N.J.: How to start a preschooler with good organization skills?
Donna Goldberg: That’s a wonderful question. There are ways you can start a preschooler. Actually, organization starts with preschool, and even with toddlers. As parents, we give toddlers a routine of the day. If it’s time to clean up, you say to your child, “now it’s clean up time.” And make your child be a part of that process. While you’ll be doing 99-percent of the cleanup, and the child 1 percent, you’ve set the tone that it’s part of play. After that, it’s usually time for dinner, and after that, it’s usually bath time. After bath time, it’s story book time and then bed. And these are the precursors, children begin to predict and anticipate. They start to understand time.
So to start to repeat routines they will go through the day is the beginning of teaching your children to be organized, because they can anticipate what happens next, and the steps that happen. And that really is what organization is, it’s a step-by-step procedure.
Status of Education in Rural America
This report presents a series of indicators on the status of education in rural America, using the new NCES locale classification system. The new system classifies the locale of school districts and schools based on their actual geographic coordinates into one of 12 locale categories and distinguishes between rural areas that are on the fringe of an urban area, rural areas that are at some distance, and rural areas that are remote. The findings of this report indicate that in 2003-04 over half of all operating school districts and one-third of all public schools in the United States were in rural areas; yet only one-fifth of all public school students were enrolled in rural areas. A larger percentage of public school students in rural areas than those in any other locale attended very small schools. A larger percentage of rural public school students in the 4th- and 8th-grades scored at or above the Proficient level on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) reading, mathematics, and science assessments in 2005 than did public school students in cities at these grade levels. However, smaller percentages of rural public school students than suburban public school students scored at or above the Proficient level in reading and mathematics. In 2004, the high school status dropout rate (i.e., the percentage of persons not enrolled in school and not having completed high school) among 16- to 24-year-olds in rural areas was higher than in suburban areas, but lower than in cities.
“Formal Education Slows Down the Process of Growing Up”
In a recent Medical Hypotheses editorial, I suggested the name psychological neoteny (PN) to refer to the widely-observed phenomenon that adults in modernizing liberal democracies increasingly retain many of the attitudes and behaviors traditionally associated with youth. I further suggested that PN is a useful trait for both individuals and the culture in modernizing societies; because people need to be somewhat child-like in their psychology order to keep learning, developing and adapting to the rapid and accelerating pace of change. Thirdly, I put forward the hypothesis that the major cause of PN in modernizing societies is the prolonged duration of formal education. Here I present a preliminary empirical investigation of this hypothesis of psychological neoteny. Marriage and parenthood are indicative of making a choice to ‘settle down’ and thereby move on from the more flexible lifestyle of youth; and furthermore these are usually commitments which themselves induce a settling down and maturation of attitudes and behaviors. A sevenfold expansion of participation in UK higher education up to 2001 was reflected in delay in marriage and parenthood. Increasing number of years of education is quantitatively the most important predictor of increasing age of the mother at the time of her first birth: among women college graduates about half are aged 30 or older at the time of their first birth – a rise of 400% in 25 years.
Via Tyler Cowen. Clusty search on Bruce Charlton.
As States Tackle Poverty, Preschool Gets High Marks
In Washington and statehouses across the country, preschool is moving to the head of the class.
Florida and Oklahoma are among the states that have started providing free preschool for any 4-year-old whose parents want it. Illinois and New York plan to do the same. Hillary Rodham Clinton wants to spend $15 billion over five years on universal preschool funding. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke calls preschool one cure for inequality.
The movement represents one of the most significant expansions in public education in the 90 years since World War I, when kindergarten first became standard in American schools. It has taken off as politicians look for relatively inexpensive ways to tackle the growing rich-poor gap in the U.S. They have found spending on children is usually an easy sell.
It took a well-orchestrated campaign to put pre-K on the top of political agendas — and new tactics that didn’t rely on do-gooder rhetoric. Among those working on the issue are the research director of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, a billionaire Oklahoma oil man and a foundation executive in Philadelphia.
Their winning pitch: Making pre-K as prevalent as kindergarten is a prudent investment. Early schooling, they say, makes kids more likely to stay in school and turn into productive taxpayers.
Related: The Economics of Preschool.
Madison Police Chief Hears About West Side Crime
Children seeing people run from police through their backyard, waking up to the sound of a gunshots, watching drug deals.
These were some of the scenes described by West and Southwest Side residents as hundreds of them turned out Wednesday to voice their concerns about crime in their neighborhoods at a meeting with Madison Police Chief Noble Wray.
“Allied Drive is not the only problem on Madison ‘s West Side, ” said Suzanne Sarhan, who owns property there, prompting hundreds to rise to their feet in applause.
Ald. Thuy Pham-Remmele, 20th District, who set up the neighborhood listening session for Wray, said the safety problems need both short- and long-term solutions.
“I don ‘t ask for any quick fix, ” she said.
Lisa Subeck has more.
Some Wonder if Cash for Good Test Scores Is the Wrong Kind of Lesson
Should cash be used to spur children to do better on reading and math tests?
Suzanne Windland, a homeowner raising three children in a placid enclave of eastern Queens, doesn’t think so. Her seventh grader, Alexandra, she said, had perfect scores last year. But she doesn’t want New York City’s Department of Education to hand her $500 in spending cash for that achievement. That’s what Alexandra would earn if her school was part of a pilot program that will reward fourth and seventh graders with $100 to $500, depending on how well they perform on 10 tests in the next year.
Mrs. Windland wants Alexandra to do well for all the timeless reasons — to cultivate a love of learning, advance to more competitive schools and the like. She has on occasion bought her children toys or taken them out for dinner when they brought home pleasurable report cards, but she does not believe in dangling rewards beforehand.
“It’s like giving kids an allowance because they wake up every morning and brush their teeth and go off to school,” she said. “That’s their job. That’s what they’re supposed to be doing.”
Summer Reading Programs Gain Momentum for Students About to Enter College
For students starting college, August is the time to quit the summer job, dump the high school sweetheart and, finally, open the book their college has asked them to finish before classes start.
Nationwide, hundreds of colleges and universities, large and small, public and private, assign first-year students a book to read over the summer, hoping to create a sense of community and engage students intellectually.
While there are no reliable statistics on summer reading programs, a recent survey of more than 100 programs by a student researcher at Gustavus Adolphus College in St. Peter, Minn., found that most had started in the last four years, although a few go back decades.
The range of books colleges use is enormous, covering fiction and nonfiction. Classics are largely absent, with most of the works chosen falling closer to Oprah than academic.
Inside the KIPP School Summit
The first thing I noticed about the KIPP School Summit, the annual meeting of the country’s most intriguing public school network, was the food. It was cheap, simple and abundant — potato chips, popcorn, corn chips, juice bars, hamburgers and fajitas available outside the many meeting rooms last week. This was fuel for teachers half my age, about 1,200 of them, nearly all in their 20s and early 30s.
The second thing I noticed were the principals. Each time I met a school leader, as they are called at KIPP, my generational surprise alarm sounded. Forgive me, but my 62-year-old brain still thinks of principals as men in the middle to later years of their lives. About half of the KIPP school leaders were women. Nearly all of them were, like the teachers, also in their 20s or early 30s, and much more representative of inner-city ethnicities than any other school organization I have seen.
KIPP is short for Knowledge Is Power Program. Each school is an independent public school, typically a charter or contract school that does not have to follow the usual rules in its district. Most are fifth-through-eighth grade middle schools, but some KIPP high schools and elementary schools have been established. The schools are small, usually about 300 students. The school leaders are carefully selected from the best available teachers and given a year of special training. They have power to hire and fire their staffs and use any curriculum they like as long as it produces significant gains in the achievement of their students, more than 80 percent of whom are from low-income families.
A Look at Houston’s $805M Referendum in light of Enrollment Declines
First, the Houston school board, which is expected to approve that $805 million bond proposal Thursday, signed a $3.8 million contract with Magellan Consulting, a Conroe-based firm that specializes in analyzing school buildings. Magellan consultants – with the help of HISD’s former in-house demographer, who now works for the company – also estimated student enrollment for each of the district’s schools over the next decade. Magellan projects the district’s overall enrollment will continue dropping – about 4 percent over the next decade. With that decline, several people have asked why the district needs taxpayers to dip into their pockets to fund new campuses.
Waukesha Virtual School Generates a Cash Surplus
The School District’s virtual high school has delivered its first financial surplus to the school system more than a year after it faced an uncertain future amid budgetary losses.
The district received about $65,000 more than it spent on the 3-year-old school, called iQ Academies at Wisconsin, for 2006-’07 in the first year of a renegotiated contract with KC Distance Learning, the private company that manages the virtual high school.
The school raised about $4 million through the state’s open enrollment system; special-education and tuition payments; and student fees, said Erik Kass, Waukesha’s executive director of business services. A little more than $1.5 million of that revenue went to the School District, which pays employee salaries and benefits as well as some supply costs for iQ.
In a report Monday to members of the School Board’s Finance and Facilities Committee, district officials attributed the financial turnaround to a change in the revenue-sharing arrangement with the company as well as better cost controls in the recently ended school year.
Fresh from the frontlines, New York Teaching Fellows tell all
Stacy Cowley and Neil deMause:
The subway ads promise inspiration, fulfillment, and the kind of career satisfaction rarely found in an office cube. “Your spreadsheets won’t grow up to be doctors and lawyers,” one gently chides. “You remember your first-grade teacher’s name. Who will remember yours?” asks another.
The posters are an effective lure for enticing dissatisfied corporate professionals and idealistic college grads to apply for the New York City Teaching Fellows program. Set up in 2000 as a collaboration between the city and the nonprofit New Teacher Project, the program aims to address the city’s chronic teacher shortage, epecially in hard-to-fill areas like math, science, and special education. It offers a subsidized master’s degree in education and a quick on-ramp to a new career. This year, nearly 20,000 would-be educators from across the country applied.
But recent fellows warn aspirants not to fall for the gauzy sales pitch. Recounting their initiation into leading a classroom, the novice teachers describe a scene that’s more Full Metal Jacket than Goodbye, Mr. Chips. Seven weeks of crash-course training and summer school student teaching, they say, is no preparation for the realities of city classrooms.
“The year before I came, the kids set three or four fires in the school,” recalls one fellow about to enter her fifth year of teaching first and second graders. “You’re prepared that some of the kids aren’t going to listen, but not for the things they’re going to do—like throwing desks across the room. I had a kid taken away in an ambulance my first year because he just flipped out and was ramming into the door.”
People Gives Students A Leg Up
The UW-Madison PEOPLE program helped Nana Asante struggle against a feeling of non-acceptance at the mostly white Verona Area High School.
Asante, who will be a senior at the high school this fall, said that being able to interact with other academically achieving minorities from other schools through the program helped her confidence grow.
“I had experience with people like myself,” Asante said.
The Pre-College Enrichment Opportunity Program for Learning Excellence (PEOPLE), administered by the School of Education at UW-Madison, encourages racial and ethnic minorities and low-income students to work hard and achieve the grades that can help them attend UW-Madison. Tuition scholarships are offered to those who make the grade.
Dual Income Families & Tax Burden
EVALUATING THE TWO-INCOME TRAP HYPOTHESIS: As I’ve been working on my book on bankruptcy this summer, I’ve been going back through the various hypotheses that have been advanced for the rise in American bankruptcy filings in the 1980s and 1990s. One hypothesis was that advanced in The Two-Income Trap: Why Middle Class Mothers and Fathers are Going Broke by Professor Elizabeth Warren and Amelia Warren Tyagi.
Warren & Tyagi’s argument can be easily summarized. They focus on the rise in the number of households with two parents working as an indication of economic distress. Conventional economic theory would indicate that one benefit of having a second wage-earner is that it will make the family more resilient to a financial setback or loss of job than a traditional family with only one wage-earner. Families today, unlike those a generation ago, can save the second earner’s income as precautionary savings, thereby making it easier to withstand a setback.
So I got out my handy calculator and calculated what the indicated percentage of taxes translates into in terms of actual dollars paid in taxes. In turns out that for the 1970s family, paying 24% of its income in taxes works out to be $9,288. And for the 2000s family, paying 33% of its income (a higher rate presumably because of progressivity hitting the second wage-earners income) in taxes works out to be $22,374.
Building ‘Smart Education Systems’
As the unprecedented push to improve American education enters the midpoint of its third decade, reformers can claim some success. Yet no one would argue that the job is done, particularly in the nation’s cities. Even the most successful urban school districts, the winners of the Broad Prize for Urban Education, would acknowledge that they have a long way to go toward ensuring that every child receives an excellent education and develops the knowledge and skills needed for a fulfilling and productive future.
There is no shortage of ideas for improving urban education, and there are efforts under way in nearly every city to improve schooling for urban youths: New schools are proliferating, high schools are being redesigned, new curricula are being developed and implemented, accountability systems are being strengthened, and much more. But there is also a growing recognition that improving schools and school systems, while essential, is not enough. Ensuring that every child becomes proficient and beyond will require the support and active engagement of organizations and agencies outside of schools as well.
The role of out-of-school factors in educational success has sparked heated debate. But the debate over whether in-school or out-of-school factors are more salient in children’s learning—a debate that has raged at least since the 1966 publication of James S. Coleman’s Equality of Educational Opportunity—is in many respects a false one. Both factors are important, and both must be addressed if the nation is to fulfill its 60-year-old promise of equal educational opportunity, and its more recent pledge to ensure that all children learn to high levels.
The experiences of middle-class and affluent children make this proposition clear. To be sure, relatively affluent students tend to have schooling advantages that support higher levels of learning. Numerous studies have documented the disparities in school facilities, teacher quality, and curriculum offerings that favor more-advantaged students.
A bit of Tangential, International News
Both articles below are at best, thinly related to this site’s purpose. However, I think they each merit a link and a read:
- Thailand to keep on repatriating Hmong to Laos by Pracha Hariraksapitak:
Thailand has no plans to halt its repatriation of ethnic Hmong to communist Laos despite appeals by U.S. Congressmen and the United Nations, Prime Minister Surayud Chulanont said on Monday.
Thailand had not sent any Hmong, many of whom fought alongside the United States during the Vietnam War, back forcibly, he told reporters.
We did not deport them. There have been repatriations as they hold the nationality of our neighbour. The process is under the care of third countries to ensure no human rights are violated after their return,’ Surayud said.
Thailand’s policy was influenced partly by the burden of caring for Hmong who continued to cross over from Laos three decades after the end of the war, he said.Madison has a large Hmong community which was recently in the news over the naming of a new elementary school.
- Former Wisconsin DPI Employee Madeline Uranek:
In November 2006, I left my home in Madison, trading a wonderful, decently paid job with the state Department of Public Instruction for the opportunity to volunteer two years with the Peace Corps. I am posted in Lesotho, in southern Africa.
Lesotho is a tiny country, about the size of Maryland, with a population of about two million. It is surrounded on all sides by South Africa, the continent’s richest country. The wealth of South Africa is a magnet for the men of Lesotho, who travel there to work in diamond and copper mines, and for Lesotho’s handful of professionals, who go to be teachers, lawyers, nurses and electrical engineers. But most women venture no further than the nearest grimy camp town, and most children have never left their village.
I sense desolation in the tired red soil, the wispy corn plants, marching in bedraggled rows like defeated soldiers. Yet the beauty of this country is breathtaking, and it comes in 360-degree vistas. I can stand in any high place and see ranges upon ranges of mountains in all directions, vast open valleys through which a river trickles.
In Madison, it is summer, lush and green. In Lesotho, it is winter, brown and windy. Before the missionaries and Boer settlers came, the Basotho people wore animal skins to keep warm. Now they wear beautiful blankets, whose designs are based on English mill weavings of the mid-1800s, evolved over the decades since to be uniquely Basotho. The blankets come in patterns dominated by a single color, and have intriguing names meaning, for example, blanket of royalty, heart of the chief, or thigh of a woman in labor.
The Violence-Free Zone initiative seems to be tamping down violence at two Milwaukee high schools
Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel Editorial:
There isn’t just one right answer to preventing school violence – you try what works. But a program that will expand this fall to five Milwaukee high schools shows promise.
The Violence-Free Zone initiative places young people from the community into schools as youth advisers. These advisers form relationships within the school and nearby community, and they work to identify students labeled as the most disruptive. They may help a kid find a safe place to go after school or better living arrangements for families. At South Division High School, they have even helped families with tax forms.
In the hallways, advisers defuse arguments before they boil over, and they confront unruly students with a stern message: Violent behavior is not acceptable. But along with that message, healthy alternatives are offered.
The program is all about making stronger connections with troubled kids and offering them hope.
Mary Gulbrandsen Reflects
Retiring Madison School District Chief of Staff Mary Gulbrandsen:
I can use the words privileged and honored when I think of all of the people with whom I have been lucky enough to work, but it is much more than that. I have learned so much from the occupational and physical therapy staff, the psychology and social work staff, the R&E staff, the SAPAR staff, the principals, the teachers, all of the central office staff, the management team with whom I have closely worked the last nine years and last, but not least, the group with whom I started, the health services staff.
For me, the most difficult part of leaving the district is realizing that I won’t see the same people that I’m accustomed to seeing, worrying with, planning with, caring about, arguing with, and celebrating with on a daily basis. I will miss you all.
Much more on Mary, here.
Schools Bypass Budget Caps
A little-publicized exemption to a state law that caps school district revenue has kept a nurse in the Greenfield School District and cops in South Milwaukee’s middle and high schools in recent years.
It could also help pay the Waukesha School District’s share of a new traffic light, and for a part-time aide to record student immunization data for the Oak Creek-Franklin School District.
And there is a possibility such cases, in which school systems are allowed to raise extra money if they have to replace a service that had been provided by another governmental entity, could grow.
“I think there is a potential but it varies from school district to school district, community to community,” said Woody Wiedenhoeft, executive director for the Wisconsin Association of School Business Officials. “But, in tight times, to try to make budget fits, I can see people discuss ‘Well, should we move it from one budget to another?’ ”
In recent years, the exemption has led school districts to raise their revenue caps so they can pay for everything from police liaison officers and nurses to grass cutting and snow plowing. Since 2003, school districts have been allowed to collect more than $1.8 million under the exemption, according to records from the state Department of Public Instruction, which has to approve all requests under the law.
Non revenue limited spending growth in the Madison School District’s Fund 80 has drawn local attention. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel applauds this loophole.
Gestures Convey Message: Learning in Progress
Susan Wagner Cook stands at the front of a third-grade classroom, an unfinished equation printed neatly on the whiteboard.
4 + 3 + 6 = __ + 6
“I want to make one side,” she says, as her left hand sweeps under the left side of the equation, “equal to the other side,” she continues, now sweeping her right hand under the right side of the equation.
It’s a concept that third-graders are just ready to learn: The total value on one side of an equal sign should equal that on the other.
Some kids get it quickly as Cook goes through her carefully choreographed tutorial. Others take longer. But what none of them know is that they are subjects in an experiment that is helping scientists understand one of the most familiar and yet mysterious components of human behavior: the hand gesture.
Professor pans ‘learning style’ teaching method
A leading scientist has dismissed the latest approach to teaching that has been endorsed by the Government and embraced by teachers.
Under the new system children are considered to have different “learning styles” and instead of being taught by the conventional method of listening to a teacher, they should be allowed to wander around, listen to music and even play with balls in the classroom.
But now Baroness Greenfield, the director of the Royal Institute and a professor of pharmacology at Oxford University, has dismissed as “nonsense” the view that pupils prefer to receive information either by sight, sound or touch.
She said that the method of classifying pupils on the basis of “learning styles” is a waste of valuable time and resources.
The approach, first introduced in the United States following research on brain development, is being adopted by an increasing number of schools, colleges and local authorities and forms a key part of the Government’s drive for “personalised learning”. In effect, it dismisses so-called “chalk and talk” teaching as inadequate.
Apollo Image Archive
To record their historic voyages and collect scientific observations many thousands of photographs were acquired with handheld and automated cameras during all the Apollo missions. After returning to Earth, the film was developed and stored at Johnson Space Center (JSC), where they still reside. Due to the historical significance of the original flight films, typically only duplicate (2nd or 3rd generation) film products are currently available for study and used to make prints.
To allow full access to the original flight films for both researchers and the general public, Johnson Space Center and Arizona State University’s Space Exploration Resources are scanning and creating an online digital archive of all the original Apollo flight films. Through this online interface, users may browse through the archive and download any of the images. This web site also provides a suite of resources regarding the images and the cameras that were used during the Apollo program. Finally, the scanning process is estimated to take three years with the first production scans recorded in late June 2007.
More on MATC – Milwaukee Property Tax Blowback
The folks running Milwaukee Area Technical College want your money, deserve your money, have a right to your money, and it matters not a bit what they do with it.
In fact, the technical college district doesn’t just want your money for technical education. It deserves your money because, I guess, that’s just the way things are around here – so quit whining.
Quit being, as one Milwaukee state representative put it recently, I noted in my blog, so “political.”
Or, better yet, consider – seriously – quitting MATC itself.
What Autistic Girls Are Made Of
Caitlyn & Marguerite sat knee to knee in a sunny room at the Hawks Camp in Park City, Utah. On one wall was a white board with these questions: What’s your favorite vacation and why? What’s your favorite thing about yourself? If you could have any superpower, what would it be?
Caitlyn, who is 13, and Marguerite, who is 16 (I’ve used only their first names to protect their privacy), held yellow sheets of paper on which they had written their answers. It was the third day of the weeklong camp, late for icebreakers. But the Hawks are kids with autistic disorders accompanied by a normal or high I.Q. And so the main goal of the camp, run on a 26-acre ranch by a Utah nonprofit organization called the National Ability Center, is to nudge them toward the sort of back and forth — “What’s your favorite video game?” — that comes easily to most kids.
Along with Caitlyn and Marguerite, there were nine boys in the camp between the ages of 10 and 18. They also sat across from one another in pairs, with the exception of one 18-year-old who was arguing with a counselor. “All I require is a purple marker,” the boy said over and over again, refusing to write with the black marker he had been given. A few feet away, an 11-year-old was yipping and grunting while his partner read his answers in a monotone, eyes trained on his yellow paper. Another counselor hurried over to them.
Let’s get real about Indiana school data
Indianapolis Star-Tribune Editorial:
At the beginning of the 2005-06 school year, there were 969 seniors left in Indianapolis Public Schools’ graduating class.
By the end of the school year, nearly 1,300 seniors collected diplomas from the district.
Yes, you read that correctly. IPS had 33 percent more graduates than seniors who began the year, the second consecutive school year it has done so.
There’s no way that IPS, which promoted a mere 31 percent of the eighth-graders who made up the original graduating class, experienced a sudden influx of transfers. The fact that just 52 of them would have graduated the previous year shows that holdovers don’t account for this.
As the nonprofit Education Trust notes in a report released today, parents and state officials “cannot allow such dubious figures to go unexplained — or unchallenged.”
That admonition must also extend to the Indiana Department of Education and its boss, Superintendent Suellen Reed. After all, IPS’ graduation numbers reflect the agency’s longstanding difficulty in accurately reporting the condition of education in our state.
GRADUATION MATTERS: How NCLB allows states to set the bar too low for improving high school grad rates.
“The first ingredient in education reform is to tell parents the truth.”
Lawrie Kobza’s Performance & Achievement Committee discussed “A Model to Measure Student Performance” Monday evening.