The National Foundation for Advancement in the Arts is accepting applicants for cash awards of up to $10,000 and an opportunity for arts enrichment programs.
The early deadline, which provides for a 30 percent discount on the $35 application fee, is June 1. The final deadline is Oct. 1. High school seniors or graduates who will be 17 or 18 years old on Dec. 1 can apply for the money.
Students’ rights versus limited means: Special Needs Children and School Budgets
The public school enrollment of autistic children, whether born into privileged or impoverished circumstances, has gone from a trickle to a flood. Their legal rights are crashing up against strapped school budgets.
Under two federal laws — the Individuals With Disabilities Education Act and the Rehabilitation Act, both passed in the 1970s and revised over the years — all special-needs children, including those with autism, are entitled to free and appropriate public school educations in the least restrictive environment. And, science shows, the sooner children with autism get treatment, the better their odds of speaking, reading, learning and eventually living independently.
A breakthrough discovery, released Feb. 18 in the online publication of the journal Nature Genetics, could mean that someday medical science might pinpoint the disorder in infancy, or even before birth. Researchers homed in on the genes behind autism, putting an early DNA test within reach.
Mission Impossible?
For example, in an effort to prevent drop-outs, we abandon our expectation of educational behavior and lower academic standards until they are functionally meaningless. We divorce the expectation of allegiance to academic achievement and academic behaviors from the expectation for membership in the school community, and therefore undercut the very mission of the school. Although the providing of all of those other services and experiences is no doubt noble, and certainly enjoyable, they also serve as static that destroys the message and mission of the school. Shouldn’t the education of our members at least be priority number one in public schools? If not, why not just call schools “community centers” and be done with the hypocrisy?
School Drug Testing
ONCE a year or so, Roy Tialavea is summoned from his classes at Oceanside High School to report to the athletic director’s office bathroom. He receives a urine specimen cup and heads for a stall.
The 17-year-old is unruffled. Random drug testing has been going on for two years at the school. He’s used to it. “I don’t use drugs so I don’t have to worry about getting caught,” he says.
His mother, Robyn, thinks her son steers clear of drugs and alcohol. But, she says, no parent can know for sure what a teenager is up to.
“If he doesn’t like testing, I really don’t care,” she says. “I think it’s a wonderful tool. It creates the fear that they could be tested.”
Call it the 2007 version of “just say no.”
Madison School Board Should “Learn from Fiasco”
Wisconsin State Journal Editorial:
After the Greek King Pyrrhus defeated the Romans in 279 B.C., he cut his celebration short.
Pyrrhus realized that the battle had been more costly to his army than it had been to the Romans. His response went something like this:
“One more such victory, and we are undone.”
Those words should be haunting the Madison School Board today.
One more fiasco like last week’s flip-flop on consolidating two elementary schools, and this board may be undone.
School Board member Johnny Winston Jr. said the board’s reversal could be a win-win.
He was wrong-wrong.
Milwaukee Approves New Transitional School
A new Milwaukee school set to open as soon as next winter would serve children transitioning back into the public school district from correctional institutions and expulsions.
The school was one of several safety-related efforts put forward by the Milwaukee School Board as budget amendments, at a session that ended at 2:21 a.m. Friday.
The board also agreed to set aside an additional $750,000 next school year for violence prevention, conflict resolution and other safety-related efforts in Milwaukee Public Schools.
South Carolina Ok’s Virtual School Classes for Graduation Credit
Home-schoolers and students attending public, private or charter schools can take online classes after Gov. Mark Sanford on Thursday signed a new law creating the South Carolina Virtual School Program.
The law, which will be administered by the state Department of Education, will allow students a chance to enroll in online courses that might not otherwise be available to them.
“It’s an incredibly important step forward because, among other things, it represents another choice in education,” said Sanford, who was joined in the Statehouse via the Internet by students at the Governor’s School for Science and Mathematics in Hartsville.
Virtual schools are modeled after regular classroom courses, but students communicate with teachers online and e-mail their homework and other assignments. The law builds on a pilot program first offered last May with summer courses such as geometry and Web design available to students in 11 school districts.
The law will allow students to earn credits in Advanced Placement, remedial and specialty classes online. It will also ease scheduling conflicts, provide individualized instruction and help students meet graduation requirements.
Wisconsin School District Teacher Settlement Trends
Wisconsin Association of School Boards has posted a summary of teacher settlement annual increases (Salary and total package) since 1984. More here.
Minnesota’s Proposed Mandatory School Employee Health Insurance Pool
A bill that would create a mandatory statewide health insurance pool for Minnesota’s 200,000 school employees is one step closer to reality.
After a fiery, eight-hour debate, the House approved the measure on an 81-52 vote Thursday night.
Supporters say the pool will put school districts in a better position when negotiating health plans and help keep premium spikes under control. Opponents argue it would remove control from districts and cause some to experience jumps in insurance costs.
The bill made its way through the Senate in March. Now, the Democratic House and Senate need to come together to iron out differences in the proposed legislation before sending it to Republican Gov. Tim Pawlenty. It’s unclear whether Pawlenty will sign the bill.
House Majority Leader Tony Sertich, DFL-Chisholm, said a mandatory pool would help both rural and urban school districts that are dealing with erratic premium increases.
“The status quo is not working,” he said. “Insurance is rising and rising. And I think a pool will help with the spikes that school districts are experiencing.”
Helping Overbooked Kids Cut Back
When Debra Cooper’s 6-year-old daughter Taylor resisted taking a family vacation day because she was anxious about missing extracurricular activities, Ms. Cooper decided she was overscheduled and started cutting back.
But stepping off the treadmill wasn’t easy, Ms. Cooper says. When Taylor started coming home after school, there was no one in the neighborhood to play with; other kids were at practices or lessons. Other parents were skeptical, hinting Ms. Cooper was short-changing her daughter. And Taylor herself soon asked to resume some activities. Frustrated, Ms. Cooper wondered, “How do we stop and get off this mommy marathon?”
Written about and discussed for decades, the problem of overscheduled children still looms large. Many parents keep children busy believing that stimulating activities will aid their development; the pattern is most marked among 9- to 12-year-olds. But the trend has gone too far, the American Academy of Pediatrics said in January in the journal “Pediatrics”; kids need more time for free play and family togetherness. Resolving the issue can require some artful life-balancing skills.
Finding Ways to Better School African American Boys
Group Proposes Mentors, Single-Sex Classrooms
A new report by a statewide task force that paints a grim picture of how African American male students are faring in Maryland’s public schools and universities recommends strengthening mentor programs, encouraging more black men to be teachers and providing more academic support for those who need it.
Two of the more controversial proposals are suggestions to place troubled students at black-majority high schools into single-sex classes and to encourage nonviolent offenders to be mentors to students.
In Low-Income Schools, Parents Want Teachers Who Teach: In affluent schools, other things matter
Recent government education policies seem to assume that academic achievement as measured by test scores is the primary objective of public education. A prime example is the federal No Child Left Behind law, which requires schools to bring all of their students to “proficient” levels on math and reading tests by 2014. Many state accountability plans judge schools on the basis of these tests alone, and some states and school districts are considering tying teachers’ compensation to student test results. Yet education historically has served a variety of functions (e.g., socialization, civic training), and public support for music and art in school suggests that parents value things beyond high test scores.
Are test scores the educational outcomes that parents value most? We tackle this question by examining the types of teachers that parents request for their elementary school children. We find that, on average, parents strongly prefer teachers whom principals describe as best able to promote student satisfaction, though parents also value teacher ability to improve student academics. These aggregate effects, however, mask striking differences across schools. Parents in high-poverty schools strongly value a teacher’s ability to raise student achievement and appear indifferent to student satisfaction. In wealthier schools the results are reversed: parents most value a teacher’s ability to keep students happy.
Pennsylvania Voters Reject Tax Plan to Finance Schools
Pennsylvania voters overwhelmingly rejected a plan to reduce property taxes in return for higher local income taxes as a way of financing school districts, officials said Wednesday.
The proposal appeared on ballots in all but 3 of the state’s 501 school districts on Tuesday after a campaign by Gov. Edward G. Rendell to cut property taxes.
Mr. Rendell, a Democrat, promoted the plan as a chance for homeowners to increase the size of property tax cuts that they will receive when an anticipated $1 billion in revenue from 14 new casinos that are being built around the state is used for school financing, starting in June 2008.
But only 4 of the 419 districts reporting by midafternoon Wednesday approved the plan, according to a Pennsylvania Department of State Web site.
Under the state’s Taxpayer Relief Act, school boards have the right — with voter approval — to impose or increase taxes on earned income or personal income — which includes items like interest and dividends — to pay for an equal reduction in property taxes.
A dangerous promise to Wisconsin’s little 8th graders
The Wisconsin Covenant. Kind of a spiritual sound to it, don’t you think? Come to the mountaintop, do a couple of thou shalt not’s, hit the books, and you’re set.
It’s great stuff. So Governor Doyle travels all over creation, parts the Red Sea and declares education for all.
Normally, I would hardly notice this showmanship and posturing by the governor. But this Covenant business is upsetting. And here’s why.
First of all, this program of post-secondary education for everybody is by NO means a done deal. It’s one piece of a huge budget proposal that would once again end in deficit, despite extraordinary proposed tax and fee increases. It hasn’t hardly been discussed in Joint Finance, except long enough for the Committee to say “your plan is pretty sparse – please come back when you have more details.”
So come back they did. Last Friday, JFC co-chairs Rhoades and Decker received a letter from Secretary of Administration Morgan. Here are just some of the details.
Students Gain Only Marginally on U.S. History Test
Federal officials reported yesterday that students in 4th, 8th and 12th grades had scored modestly higher on an American history test than five years earlier, although more than half of high school seniors still showed poor command of basic facts like the effect of the cotton gin on the slave economy or the causes of the Korean War.
Federal officials said they considered the results encouraging because at each level tested, student performance had improved since the last time the exam was administered, in 2001.
“In U.S. history there were higher scores in 2006 for all three grades,” said Mark Schneider, commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, which administers the test, at a Boston news conference that the Education Department carried by Webcast.
The results were less encouraging on a national civics test, on which only fourth graders made any progress.
Why Is Income Inequality in America So Pronounced? Consider Education
The most commonly cited culprits for the income inequality in America — outsourcing, immigration and the gains of the super-rich — are diversions from the main issue. Instead, the problem is largely one of (a lack of) education.
The extent of outsourcing, for instance, is not yet high enough to have much effect on American wages. Even if a call center is set up in India, this helps American business expand at home. Most generally, the net flow of investment is into the United States, not away from it. It appears that more American jobs are “in-sourced” than outsourced.
Nor should we be distracted by the gains of the top 1 percent. The goal should be to elevate the poor, not knock down the tall poppies. Microsoft has created cheap software and many jobs, and its co-founder, Bill Gates, is giving away most of his fortune.
Districts unite for health savings
A new cooperative aimed at lowering the health insurance costs for non-teachers could decrease payments for participating Waukesha County school districts by up to 20% next school year.
The savings amount to as much as $400 per month for a family plan in the Hartland-Lakeside School District, where the deal already has been approved, and the Mukwonago School District, where the School Board is scheduled to vote next week on whether to join the cooperative.
Savings for five other districts still involved in the effort may not be as high.
But even the lowest expected cost drop of 8% would save the Pewaukee School District $1,600 to $2,000 per year for each family plan, said John Gahan, Pewaukee’s director of business services.
Between 200 and 250 employees would be covered by the new health insurance carrier if all seven Waukesha County school districts accept the plan from United Healthcare, Gahan said. With escalating health care costs, many of the districts involved in the new cooperative have been interested in switching insurance carriers for lower-priced alternatives to WEA Trust, the state’s dominant player in public educators’ health care plans.
Madison School Board “Kowtows to Complainers”
So kids, what did we learn from the Madison School Board’s decision Monday to reverse itself and not consolidate the half-empty Marquette and Lapham elementary schools?
We learned that no doesn’t really mean no.
We learned that, oops, maybe there is money after all.
And most importantly, we learned that whoever yells the loudest gets it.
The most telling moment at Monday’s board meeting was when the rowdy crowd of Marquette supporters was admonished to “respect the board” after hissing at Lawrie Kobza, who said she was “saddened” by arguments that the schools must stay open to appease residents with “political clout.”
“Respect us,” one man hollered back.
Respect you?
Honey, with the exception of Kobza and Arlene Silveira, who held their ground, the board rolled over for you like a puppy. Tony Soprano doesn’t get this kind of respect.
A Yin to that Yang – Capital Times:
Kindergartner Corey Jacob showed up at this week’s Madison School Board meeting with a homemade “Keep Schools Open” sign.
And he got a terrific lesson.
The board, which had voted to close Marquette Elementary School on the city’s near east side, reversed its wrongheaded decision in the face of overwhelming opposition from parents, teachers and kids like Corey.
The lesson Corey learned is perhaps the most important one that can be taught in public life: No decision is set in stone. When an official body makes the wrong decision, people can and should organize to oppose that decision. And when that happens, the members of the targeted body are duty-bound to reconsider their mistaken move.
More from Bessie Cherry:
er column was ludicrous. Comparing a school board who actually listened to its constituents’ warranted concerns to a parent who gives in to a whiny child?! Lapham Elementary, where my daughter attends kindergarten, is hardly “half empty.” In fact, the students there eat lunch in 18 minute shifts, and the school board’s own projections predict that it will become overcrowded within the next five years.
Smith failed to mention that the velocity behind the vocal backlash against the original decision to consolidate was fueled by the fact that two of the board members won their seats by proclaiming before their election that they would never vote in favor of consolidation. Instead of accusing the board of “rolling over like a puppy” and proving that “whoever yells the loudest gets it”, she should be applauding those parents for exemplifying democracy in action for their children. They organized, yes, the old-fashioned way (a way I much prefer to the prevailing point-and-click passivity of “activism” today), and involved their children by having them sign petitions, hand out flyers– they even staged an elementary school walkout.
Communicating School Threats
25% of students at one Madison high school spend the day at home, and it wasn’t a planned skip day. The students attend Memorial High School, where an alleged threat was supposed to be carried out Wednesday. Nothing happened, but the incident has the district talking policy.
“If we don’t communicate, obviously, it raises the concern of parents,” says MMSD Superintendent Art Rainwater.
He says a new system is opening the lines of communication between administrators and parents.
“(It) allows us to call every single parent and give them a message,” says Rainwater.
A message like the one Rainwater says went out to every Memorial parent Tuesday night. It included information about a non-specific threat found at the school and indicated classes would continue Wednesday, as scheduled.
Wisconsin Legislature’s Joint Finance Committee Approves Growth in State Tax Redistribution for K-12 Schools
The committee also kept Doyle’s plan to raise state aid for public schools by $235.3 million over the next two years, which would allow per-pupil spending to rise by $264 next year.
The 10-6 vote of the committee killed a move by some Republicans to cap the one-year growth in per-pupil spending at $100 in each of the next two years. Democrats said that limit would further choke class offerings and force massive layoffs.
Rhoades said state aid for schools, a record $5.89 billion this year, has never gone down and would have gone up again under the GOP proposal.
The Joint Finance Committee also recommended removing some public school safety costs from spending controls imposed on school districts, citing recent incidents of violence in Milwaukee and elsewhere.
MPS would be entitled to about $1.3 million in school-safety exemptions from cost controls, according to the Legislative Fiscal Bureau.
Seth Zlotocha summarizes failed budget amendments:
To provide a brief explanation of how the JFC is handling the budget, those items that were in the governor’s budget when JFC talks started require a majority vote (at least nine) to be removed while those items that are not in the governor’s budget when JFC talks started require a majority vote (again, at least nine) to be added.
WisPolitics Budget Blog.
Fair support or unfair subsidy: Private school busing faces legislative review
Public schools in Madison and Dane County could save thousands of dollars a year on the costs of transporting private school students under a draft bill in the Legislature.
The Assembly legislation would end the requirement that school districts pay certain parents multiple times for the costs of taking students to the same private school and would save school districts statewide more than $1 million a year, according to estimates.
The proposal’s author, Rep. Sheldon Wasserman, D-Milwaukee, said he got interested in the issue after receiving three reimbursement checks from Milwaukee public schools in the past for driving his three children to the same Jewish private school there.
With Simplified Code, Programming Becomes Child’s Play
After school lets out on Fridays at the Jonas Clarke Middle School , two dozen boisterous students descend on the computer lab to fiddle with the computer code that powers their projects, from a “Star Wars” lightsaber duel to a flying hippo animation.
The school has been beta-testing Scratch, a new programming language being released today by the Lifelong Kindergarten Group at the MIT Media Lab. The program, named after the technique hip-hop DJs use to mix music, gives novices the ability to create dynamic programs without wading through a manual, teaching computer programming concepts while encouraging students to play.
The goal: turn a daunting subject usually taught in college and considered the domain of geeks into an integral part of education for the grade-school set. MIT researchers hope the program will promote a broader cultural shift, giving a generation already comfortable using computers to consume content online a set of new, easy-to-use tools to change the online landscape itself.
Check out Scratch here (Mac and Windows versions).
Best Book Chapter of the Year
I was ready to like Peter Sacks’ new book, “Tearing Down the Gates: Confronting the Class Divide in American Education.” He is a terrific reporter with a keen sense of weak spots in conventional wisdom about schools. And since the word “class” in the title of this column has always had a double meaning, I was eager to read the work of someone who shared my view that socioeconomic differences are at the root of our failure to help many of our brightest kids get the educations they deserve.
It turns out Sacks has written an exceptional book, with one particular chapter that blew me away. But my first quick read made me grumpy, for reasons that have more to do with my own personal flaws and biases than his good work.
I started with the Washington thing, what all we journalists working in our nation’s capital do when checking out a new book — look for our names in the index. Sadly, I wasn’t there. Well, maybe the acknowledgments? No again. The fact that Sacks and I have never met, as far as I can remember, may have something to do with that. Still, it wasn’t a good beginning for me.
Minnesota wins ‘benchmark’ game
The issue: How we stack up against Minnesota.
Our view: The numbers aren’t in our favor, and that requires our attention.
We like to brag to our neighbors to the west that our Green Bay Packers have three Super Bowl trophies and their Minnesota Vikings have none. We also like reminding them that they’ve also lost the big game four times.
Unfortunately, in the real game of life, figures show Minnesota ranks ahead of Wisconsin in many areas much more important than who has the more talented group of hired football players, many of whom don’t live here year-round anyway.
The Wisconsin Taxpayers Alliance recently published its annual “Measuring Success” pamphlet. The nonpartisan group’s study compares Wisconsin to other Midwest states and the nation to measure our strengths and liabilities in a range of “benchmarks” including health, education and jobs.
Wisconsin’s brightest star is our low crime rate. At 242 violent crimes per 100,000 people in 2005, Wisconsin is far below the national average of 469, and better than Minnesota’s 297. But there’s a dark cloud: Violent crime in Wisconsin jumped from 210 per 100,000 people in 2004 after seven straight years of decline.
Related: Patrick McIlheran: “Fixing school funding is more than just “more””
The Sting of the Bee
Spelling bees are hot.
Broadway plays host to one nearly every night with an award-winning musical about six overachieving spellers in “The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee.” Hollywood has embraced them too: “Akeelah” would be nothing without her “Bee,” not to mention “Bee Season.” And the Scripps National Spelling Bee, set for May 30 and 31, is popular enough for the finals to be televised in prime time for a second year.
Still, don’t expect to find a spelling bee in Sue Ann Gleason’s first-grade classroom at Cedar Grove Elementary School in Loudoun County. She doesn’t think much of them.
“They honor the children who already know how to spell, but they do little to support those who need explicit instruction,” she said.
Clearing Up Tax Rank Confusion
No question is asked more often of WISTAX researchers by the public and press than: How does Wisconsin’s tax burden compare with other states? And no issue is more debated by partisans and interest group advocates at the State Capitol.
Two reliable tax rankings
Based on the most recent national data available (fiscal year 2004) from the most commonly used source (U.S. Census Bureau), facts show that Wisconsin state and local taxes claimed 12.2% of personal income, the sixth-highest percentage in the nation. The U.S. average was 11.0%.
An equally useful ranking results if population, rather than income, is used. State-local taxes here totalled $3,714 per capita in 2004, or 12th highest. The U.S. average was $3,447. Because Wisconsin per capita income is below the national average, tax rankings based on population are generally lower than those based on income.
40 Students Receive Rotary Club Awards
Forty Madison high school students will receive Rotary certificates and cash awards to recognize their scholastic achievements and contributions to the city at a ceremony before parents, school officials and Rotary Club members Wednesday afternoon at the Inn on the Park.
The club’s Youth Awards Committee sponsors the annual program and gives awards up to $26,800 from its associated Madison Rotary Foundation.
Microsoft Unveils Math 3.0 and Latest ACT Report: Rigor at Risk….
According to an independent survey commissioned by Microsoft Corp., 77 percent of teachers and 73 percent of parents claim math and science are the most difficult homework subjects for students, yet only 36 percent of parents feel capable to help their children. While parents and teachers struggle to find the time or knowledge to provide their kids with adequate assistance in math and science, students can grow frustrated by the lack of resources and the amount time it may take to find relevant guidance in these difficult subjects. To address these issues, Microsoft has developed a low-cost, comprehensive resource for middle school, high school and entry-level college students.
Today Microsoft releases Microsoft® Math 3.0, a new software solution designed to help students complete their math and science homework more quickly and easily while teaching important fundamental concepts. Microsoft Math 3.0 features an extensive collection of capabilities to help students tackle complicated problems in pre-algebra, algebra, trigonometry, calculus, physics and chemistry, and puts them all in one convenient place on the home PC. Similar to a hired tutor, Microsoft Math 3.0 is designed to help deepen students’ overall understanding of these subjects by invoking a full-featured graphing calculator and step-by-step instructions on how to solve difficult problems.
Related, maybe? Karen Arenson:
Only one-quarter of high school students who take a full set of college-preparatory courses — four years of English and three each of mathematics, science and social studies — are well prepared for college, according to a new study of last year’s high school graduates released today by ACT, the Iowa testing organization.
The report analyzed approximately 1.2 million students who took the ACT college admissions test and graduated from high school last June. The study predicted whether the students had a good chance of scoring C or better in introductory college courses, based on their test scores and the success rates of past test takers.
The study concluded that only 26 percent were ready for college-level work in all four core areas, while 19 percent were not adequately prepared in any of them.
ACT Report: Rigor at Risk: 350K PDF
Milwaukee Chinese School Starting In Fall
The Milwaukee school district is opening a Chinese school this fall.
It will join at least a dozen Chinese programs in Wisconsin.
About 130 students have signed up so far to attend the Milwaukee Academy of Chinese Language, also part of a growing number of schools offering Chinese language classes nationwide.
It will teach four-year-old kindergarten through fifth grade the Mandarin language, symbols and culture for 30 to 45 minutes a day, along with traditional curriculum in English.
James Sayavong, who started the Milwaukee school, said that he expects nearly 200 students to enroll by fall.
So far, the school’s students are mostly from the surrounding neighborhood, which is generally black and low income. He said he wants this type of education to be available for everyone.
Russian-born sisters to become professors in US at age 19, 21
AFP:
Two Russian-born sisters are due to become assistant professors of finance in New York state later this year, even though they are only 19 and 21, university officials said Wednesday.
Angela Kniazeva and her younger sister Diana were due to take up their new positions in September at the University of Rochester, where half of their students will likely be older than them.
The pair, who already have masters degrees in international policy from Stanford University in California, were picking up their doctorates from New York University’s Stern business school on Wednesday after five years of study.
The talented twosome told the New York Post they did not consider themselves geniuses, despite their achievements.
“I don’t think this is the right word or right way of putting it,” the newspaper quoted Angela as saying. “I think we’ve been given valuable opportunities, and we found ourselves in very fortunate circumstances.”
The duo were home-schooled by their parents and earned the equivalent of their US high-school diploma at the ages of 10 and 11 before graduating college in Russia at the ages of 13 and 14. They graduated from Stanford in 2002.
More at NYU Today. Via Volokh.
California State K-12 Budget Notes
The proposal
The governor wants to spend $40.5 billion from the general fund for K-12 education, up slightly from his January proposal and 1.2 percent more than is being spent this fiscal year. For classroom spending, that translates to $8,681 per pupil, up from $8,569. Career-technical education gets a big boost, with $25 million for vocational counselors, $100 million for equipment, and $50 million for nursing programs.
The bottom line
Besides students aiming to study a trade, winners are growing districts. Less lucky are those like San Francisco and Oakland with declining enrollments. San Francisco, for example, would get about $12 million more than last year, up from $11.5 million in January. But it’s about $5 million less than last year because 1,000 students will leave.
Wisconsin’s per student spending averages about $9,200 – the Madison School District’s is $13,684.
School Board chastised for snack ‘n chat
For at least half a century, Osceola School Board meetings have been followed by a smorgasbord of snacks, desserts and soft drinks where board members can chat about the issues of the day – and, apparently, school business.
It’s a tradition that has ended after a local newspaper publisher and editor crashed the after-hours hobnob on April 11, wrote an editorial chastising the School Board and filed a complaint with the Polk County district attorney’s office.
” ‘Is there something we can help you guys with?’ ” Kyle Weaver, editor of the weekly Sun, recalls being asked when he and Sun Publisher Carter Johnson walked into the room where five School Board members, the district administrator and four principals were discussing curriculum issues about 20 minutes after the close of the regular meeting.
“I said, ‘It appears the meeting is still going on,’ and we sat down in our usual chairs,” Weaver said. “It went on just a few minutes more. It appeared they were trying to wrap it up pretty quick.”
Milwaukee Schools’ New Strategic Plan
Two men, who often did not work together openly in the past, stood Monday in front of a crowd that, at many times, wouldn’t have been receptive to either of them.
“From our standpoint, this is a remarkable day,” said Sam Carmen, executive director of the Milwaukee Teachers’ Education Association, as he and schools Superintendent William Andrekopoulos made a presentation to a luncheon of about 100 members of the Greater Milwaukee Committee, a private group of civic leaders that has played a big role in charting Milwaukee’s course for decades.
“This is the real deal,” Carmen told the audience, describing the impact that a new strategic plan for Milwaukee Public Schools could have. The draft of the plan, created largely by the teachers union and MPS leaders, was released recently and is expected to be presented for action by the Milwaukee School Board in June. The Greater Milwaukee Committee funded the process of creating the plan.
Carmen said the plan presents “a real opportunity to change teaching and learning in Milwaukee Public Schools.”
Madison School Board Votes to Keep Marquette School Open
Two weeks after voting to close Marquette Elementary, the Madison School Board bowed to public pressure Monday evening and decided to keep the school open.
The board’s 5-2 vote was greeted by cheers and a standing ovation from about 50 parents, children and activists who campaigned to save the school at 1501 Jenifer St. on Madison’s Near East Side.
Susan Troller has more.
Consultants Overbill Racine Schools
The consultants hired to slash costs and boost revenue for the Racine Unified School District overbilled the cash-strapped district by about $125,000, a review of district records shows.
That overpayment alone would have been more than enough to pay the annual salary of a staff budget director who would be charged with finding the same type of savings that the consulting group now wants over $1 million for, according to a Journal Sentinel review of how other school districts in the state operate.
“I would say that every business manager is very cognizant of these areas,” said Erik Kass, business manager at the Waukesha School District, when told of the savings claimed at Racine Unified by the Public Business Consulting Group.
Still, it appears the consulting firm will keep its job running the business office of Racine Unified, the fourth-largest school district in the state.
Offered healthy food by servers, school kids take the bait.
You know how hard it can be to say no.
But our tendency to accept what we’re offered may have positive value when it comes to encouraging children to choose — and eat — healthier food at school. A new report suggests that there’s a simple, low-cost approach: Just offer it to them.
That’s the conclusion of a pilot program in Guilford, Conn., where school cafeteria servers were trained to ask elementary school students, “Would you like fruit or juice with your lunch?” Ninety percent of the children said yes. What’s more, 80% then consumed the fruit or juice that they put on their trays.
Compare those numbers with students at a nearby school who also participated in the study. At lunch, the same fruit and juice was available, but it wasn’t personally offered to the kids. The difference? Just 60% of these students reached for fruit or juice on their own.
These findings “have pretty significant implications,” says the pilot program’s designer, Marlene Schwartz, director of research and school programs at Yale University’s Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity. They suggest, she says, that if the National School Lunch Program were to modify its regulations and had servers actually encourage children to eat fruits and vegetables, their consumption might increase.
Denver’s Attempt to Address Their “Enrollment Gap”
Superintendent Michael Bennet and the Denver School Board:
The Rocky Mountain News series, “Leaving to Learn [Denver Public Schools Enrollment Gap],” tells a painful and accurate story about the state of our school district. It is hard to admit, but it is abundantly clear that we will fail the vast majority of children in Denver if we try to run our schools the same old way. The evidence in Denver and from big-city school districts across the country is undeniable. Operating an urban school district in the 21st century based on a century-old configuration will result in failure for too many children. It is long past time to admit this. As a district and a community, we must gather strength and have the courage to make change, knowing that the changes we face are much, much less perilous than the status quo.
Many believe that our system is intractable and impossible to fix. They look at our high dropout rate, our low achievement rate, and decades of failed reform efforts in Denver and around this country, and conclude it cannot be done.
This answer is obviously intolerable for the 72,000 children in our school district, and for the tens of thousands of children who will receive a public education in Denver over the next decade. We must refuse to accept that this is the best we can do for the next generation, or, worse, that this is all we can expect of them.
In view of the current discussions in Denver about whether to close schools after years of declining enrollment and shifting demographics, now is the time to re-examine how our system works. No matter how compelling the arguments for school consolidation, school closures create pain and upset expectations about daily life. In the shadow of this potential dislocation, we are obligated to reconsider the way we do business to ensure that our schools and our students will succeed. In the coming months and years, we must renew and rejuvenate the educational opportunities available to all of Denver’s children.
Cities all across the country face dramatic change sooner or later. For a variety of reasons, we think Denver is in a position to create the first 21st century urban school district in the United States. Not the least of these reasons is our tremendous faith in the committed people who work for DPS and in the citizens of Denver. We must not make the easy, but terrible mistake of confusing a lack of confidence in the system with a lack of confidence in ourselves or our children.
Related; Barb Schrank’s “Where have all the Students Gone?“. Joanne Jacobs has more.
Radical Math in the NYC Department of Education
Late last month, over 400 high school math teachers and education professors gathered in Brooklyn for a three-day conference, titled “Creating Balance in an Unjust World: Math Education and Social Justice.” Prominently displayed on the official program’s first page was a passage from Paulo Freire, the Brazilian Marxist educator and icon of the teaching-for-social-justice movement: “There is no such thing as a neutral education process. Education either functions as an instrument which is used to . . . bring about conformity or it becomes the practice of freedom, the means by which men and women deal critically and creatively with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of our world.”
The conference’s organizers left nothing to the imagination about their leftist agenda. At many of the conference’s 28 workshops, math teachers proudly demonstrated how they used classroom projects to train students in seeing social problems from a radical anticapitalist perspective. At a plenary session, Professor Marilyn Frankenstein of the University of Massachusetts’ math education department proclaimed that elementary school teachers should not use traditional math lessons, in which students calculate, say, the cost of food. Rather, the teachers should make clear that in a truly “just society,” food would “be as free as breathing the air.”
New York City’s Department of Education insists that the radical math conference was perfectly appropriate. In fact, as I recently learned, the whole affair got rolling with the assistance of the DOE, which gave a financial grant to the conference’s principal organizer, Jonathan Osler. Osler is a math teacher at El Puente Academy, a small “social-justice” high school in Brooklyn. In 2005, he and two math teachers from other schools applied for the DOE’s Zone Teacher Inquiry Grants Program. Their application proposed “the creation of a system to bring together NYC math teachers to share ideas, curriculum, resources, and experiences integrating issues of social justice into math classes.” Some of the social justice issues that math classes could explore: “Check-cashing locations ripping off poor people. H&R Block and Jackson Hewitt ripping off poor people. Foreclosure agencies ripping off poor people. Issues of joblessness, homelessness, incarceration, lack of funding for education, excessive funding for war. . . . The list goes on and on.”
Cheating and California’s High Stakes Achievement Test
Teachers have helped students cheat on California’s high-stakes achievement tests — or blundered badly enough to compromise their validity — in at least 123 public schools since 2004, a Chronicle review of documents shows.
Schools admitted outright cheating in about two-thirds of the cases. And while the number reporting problems represents a small fraction of the state’s 9,468 public schools, some experts think the practice of cooking the test results is more widespread.
That’s because the California Department of Education relies on schools to come forward voluntarily, and to investigate themselves when a potential problem is flagged.
“The vast majority of educators are ethical and play by the rules. (But) when identification of potential cheating hinges largely on self-reports, it is almost certainly underreported,” said Greg Cizek, who teaches testing at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and is the author of “Cheating on Tests: How to Do It, Detect It, and Prevent It.”
Records show that California teachers who unfairly helped students boost scores usually did so during the test. For example:
End to school violence must start at home
When considering violence in Milwaukee Public Schools, I find myself recalling a School Board meeting years ago where the discussion centered on rising suspension rates.
One mother demanded that School Board members explain why her 15-year-old African-American son kept getting kicked out of school for misbehaving.
“I can’t do anything with him at home,” she complained.
After the meeting, I interviewed the mother away from the microphones. That’s where she told me why she thought her son kept getting expelled.
“They afraid of him,” she said of the teachers. “He’s 15, but he’s 6 feet 2 inches tall and weighs 240 pounds.”
That hammered home for me the fact some “kids” at MPS aren’t really kids at all but are not yet fully developed young people with enough physical strength to intimidate the outnumbered adults.
My latest visit to a Milwaukee public school was just a few weeks ago, during which I observed a mini-meltdown in the hallway by a student who had become enraged at another student.
As he was dragged away, the boy struck a door with his fist, nearly shattering the glass.
New Graduation Rate Resource
The Editorial Projects in Education Research Center is proud to announce the Beta version of a powerful new online mapping tool to help the public, policymakers, and educational leaders combat the graduation crisis.
The EPE Research Center calculated graduation rates for each district, as well as every state and the nation as a whole, using data from a single federal data set. The Cumulative Promotion Index, developed by Research Center director Christopher Swanson, estimates the probability that a student in the 9th grade will complete high school on time with a regular diploma.
Parents are failing the education test
In a world of rapidly rising standards and economic rewards for knowledge, are some American parents actually hostile to education? In my travels I’m seeing evidence that the answer is yes. It’s just bits and pieces so far but worth our attention, because in a globalizing economy, with the question of the U.S.’s competitiveness feeling more urgent all the time, such a shift would be puzzling – and very bad news.
I was talking some time ago with a group of school superintendents from Maryland. The dominant mood was frustration – a sense that they weren’t making the progress with our kids that they wanted to. A few of the superintendents surprised me by saying they had received complaints from parents who were angry because their kids were being made to learn algebra. Basic objection: “What do they need algebra for? It’s hard!” Just a few days ago I was talking to a middle-school vice principal, this time in Nebraska. She reported the same thing: parents angry over kids having to learn algebra.
Maybe that strikes you the way it did me – as simply unbelievable. Perhaps it’s the education industry trying to blame others for its own failures. But I don’t think so. These school administrators didn’t seem eager to report their experiences and didn’t do so until we’d been talking about U.S. education for some time. More important, their reports fit with other signs I’ve noticed suggesting that some folks really don’t like schools and education – and are surprisingly willing to let the world know how they feel.
A Model Middle School
Across New York State and the nation, educators are struggling with performance slumps in middle schools and debating how best to teach students at a transitional, volatile age. Just this week New York City put in place a new budget formula that directs extra money to middle schools.
Briarcliff has emerged as a nationally recognized model of a middle school that gets things right, a place that goes beyond textbooks to focus on social and emotional development.
There is no question that the Briarcliff school starts out with many advantages. It is part of a district in Westchester County that spends $24,738 per student, or more than one and a half times the New York State average, and can afford to buy extra sets of classroom textbooks so that students can leave their own copies at home. Its student body is relatively homogenous — 91.8 percent are white — and so well off that less than 1 percent qualify for free or reduced lunches. In contrast, in nearby New York City, 72 percent of the population qualifies.
But even affluent districts generally see a drop in student achievement in grades six through eight. Briarcliff has not; it is at the upper end of about 50 middle schools — out of more than 600 — in New York State where test scores have held steady and in some cases even increased slightly from the elementary level, according to state education data.
School choice has saved $444 million
Friedman Foundation; Dr. Susan L. Aud:
A landmark new study finds that school choice programs throughout the country generated nearly $444 million in net savings to state and local budgets from 1990 to 2006. Contrary to opponents’ predictions, the analysis also finds that instructional spending per student has consistently gone up in all affected public school districts and states.
“School choice saves. It saves children, and now we have empirical evidence that it saves money,” said Robert Enlow, executive director and COO of the Milton and Rose D. Friedman Foundation. “In the face of $444 million in savings, another excuse to deny children a quality education has vanished before our eyes.”
Released by the Friedman Foundation, “Education by the Numbers: The Fiscal Effect of School Choice Programs, 1990-2006” provides the first comprehensive analysis of how the nation’s school choice programs have affected state and public school districts. Of the 12 voucher and tax-credit scholarship programs that began operations before 2006, every program is at least fiscally neutral, and most produce substantial savings. Seven more programs have been created since 2006.
Madison and it’s Public Schools – 1970’s
In the 1970’s with the decline of Baby Boomers in the Madison Public Schools (MMSD), the school board proposed closing a number of schools including Marquette and Lapham. The city responded with the following message:
Educating Eric
Robert Tomsho & Daniel Golden:
Cazenovia, Wis.
When Eric Hainstock didn’t get his way in kindergarten, he told other children his father would kill them. In fifth grade, he tried to spray a homemade concoction he called blood into the mouths of classmates. In sixth grade, he threatened others, fought, and talked “about killing himself and others.”
Worried about these and other incidents recounted in internal school reports, teachers and a school psychologist recommended that Eric, who was diagnosed in second grade with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, get more one-on-one attention, or be placed in a special private school. Instead, he was one of millions of special-education students mainstreamed in regular classes.
After Eric transferred to Weston Public School here in 2002, his grades plummeted and he was suspended frequently. His only regular help with controlling his outbursts was a weekly, half-hour social-skills class.
On the morning of Sept. 29, 2006, Eric, then 15 years old, walked into Weston Public with two guns and shot dead the school’s principal, John Klang, police reports indicate. He told investigators he was tired of taunting by other students and aimed to “confront” Mr. Klang, teachers and students. He has been charged with first-degree murder.
Schools Reconsider Laptops as Educational Tools
Educators and politicians have pushed the goal of a laptop for every student. But a number of early adapting schools say the laptops aren’t helping, and critics argue that the computers are simply a distraction.
Pre-K in the South
The Southern Education Foundation [2.3MB Report]:
Over the last 140 years, Southern states have made significant progress in catching up with the nation in education and income, but in recent decades the South’s gains have virtually flattened as the world economy continues to elevate the critical role of education in innovation, productivity and income. Today, most Southern states remain where they were in the early 1980s, closer to the national average than they were decades ago, but still at or near the bottom of the nation’s major rankings in education, income and well-being.
There is an all-important exception to this pattern of Southern underperformance: high-quality, early childhood education – pre-kindergarten (Pre-K). Several Southern states have become the nation’s leaders in Pre-K over the last 10 years. As a result, the South in 2007 leads the nation in offering state-funded Pre-K to three- and four-year-old children:19% of three- and four-year-olds in the South are in state-funded Pre-K, more than double the rate in non-South states.
Merit Pay for Teachers: Into the Hornet’s Nest
“HORRIBLY divisive” is how Gayle Fallon, president of the Houston Federation of Teachers, describes the recent distribution of $15m in bonuses to teachers in the largest school district in Texas. Most teachers received payments averaging close to $2,000. But an angry minority received none; and everyone learned what everyone else got when the Houston Chronicle’s website published a list of teachers and amounts. Raising hackles further, 100 teachers were asked to return part of their bonuses because a computer glitch had inflated them.
This was Houston’s first year of doling out such bonuses, and its troubles may have prompted the Texas House of Representatives to vote against a statewide merit-pay programme. The idea of merit pay is a good one: teachers should be paid more for teaching better. At the moment, few teachers in America receive bonuses, and their salaries are based mainly on length of service or their degrees. But the system, put in place early in the 20th century, is not working. Jay Greene of the University of Arkansas says that spending per pupil has doubled in the past three decades, while student-achievement measures such as high-school graduation rates are roughly flat.
Madison Schools’ Special Ed Reductions
But when students resume classes in the fall, fewer special education teachers like Bartlett will be available to work with Karega and 228 other of the Madison School District’s 3,600 special education students.
That’s because the School Board last week voted to save $2.2 million in the 2007-08 school year — by far the largest single amount cut and one-fourth of the total budget reduction — by making a major change in the way special education teachers are allocated to the district’s schools.
There’s been little public outcry about the cut, compared to the howls over the board’s decision to close Marquette Elementary and end free busing for private-school students. But some think those affected by the budget maneuver, which is generating a mixture of concern and praise, don’t fully realize the effect yet.
2007 – 2008 MMSD $339M+ Citizens Budget [72K PDF] [2006 – 2007 $333M+Citizen’s Budget]
Fixing school funding is more than just “more”
It’s funny that everybody hates the way Wisconsin reckons school aid. The formula’s doing what it was supposed to do.
The aim was that if a poor school district and a rich one imposed the same property tax rate, state aid would make their schools equally funded. The system does that, admirably. As Allan Odden, who studied the formula on the state’s behalf last fall, found, it’s local tax rates, not wealth, that determines revenue. Some places just want to tax themselves less.
He suggests changing it.
Districts say they’re squeezed by two numbers: Their revenue shouldn’t rise more than an inflation-linked number, about $260 a student this year, while their labor costs can rise by more, 3.8%.
Of course, school spending has risen faster than inflation or Wisconsinites’ income over the past decade or so, especially thanks to referendums letting districts blow the caps. Still, the difference is why districts constantly say they’re cutting even while Wisconsin taxpayers spend 5% more a year on average on schools.
Wisconsin’s not underspending. We’re already 12th-highest in per-pupil spending, 11% above the national average.
For which we’re getting . . . OK results. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce last winter graded states on schools. Wisconsin got a C on its return on investment: Our high per-pupil spending produces middling achievement. Virginia got results on the National Assessment of Educational Progress similar to ours but for $1,800 less per pupil. Massachusetts spent more and got great scores. Minnesota did both, massively outscoring us for 10% less per child. “Some states are not getting what they’re paying for,” chamber spokeswoman Karen Elzey put it.
Minnesota’s NAEP scores are higher than Wisconsin’s, yet they spend over $1000 per student less than we do.
Keeping Teens Safe on the Job
If your teenager is looking for a job this summer, as mine is, brace yourself: The employment outlook for teens is among the gloomiest in decades.
This summer’s teen employment rate will match a 57-year low set in 2004 and 2005, predicts Andrew Sum, director of the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University, based on an analysis of federal data released last week. Just 36.5% of 16- to 19-year-olds will be working, down from 37.1% in 2006 and 45% in 2000, he says, citing increased competition for part-time and temp jobs from older workers and immigrants.
Area students win honors, scholarships
‘Tis the season for student honors.
Two students from Madison West and two students from Mount Horeb High School recently took first prizes at the Distributive Education Clubs of America’s 61st conference in Orlando, Fla.
Jacinth Sohi and Payton Larson from Madison West High School were winners in the business law and ethics events at the conference, and Kristen Gower and Jenna Myers of Mount Horeb High School took top honors in the travel and tourism marketing management event.
Madison School Board to Reconsider Marquette / Lapham Consolidation
The Madison School Board may reverse its decision to consolidate Lapham and Marquette elementary schools after a neighborhood group mobilized in opposition to the budget cut.
The board is nearing the five votes needed to overturn its decision.
Four of the seven board members — Carol Carstensen, Beth Moss, Johnny Winston Jr. and Maya Cole — asked board President Arlene Silveira to reopen a discussion on the consolidation for a meeting on Monday. Four votes are needed to reopen discussion.
Bill would toughen school crime laws
Violent crimes committed on school grounds would be subjected to stiffer penalties under a bill circulated in the Legislature on Wednesday.
The bill was one of two drafted by a West Allis lawmaker aiming to curb school violence committed by outsiders who cause or aid disruptions in schools.
The other bill calls for jail time or fines for those who trespass on school grounds with the purpose of causing a disturbance.
“Outsiders and non-students can turn a pushing match into a gang brawl,” said Rep. Tony Staskunas (D-West Allis), who drafted the bills.
He began drafting the bills after outsiders were called to participate in a fight at Bradley Tech High School this winter. He said a Journal Sentinel investigation on school violence provided perfect timing for him to circulate the bills for co-sponsorship on Wednesday. Among other things, the investigation found that at least 127 school staff members were physically assaulted in the schools in the first half of the school year. It also found that the district’s 11 largest high schools called police about twice a day on average over the last six months.
When is a school dangerous?
Under the No Child Left Behind law, the definition varies from state to state. In Wisconsin, that means some troubled schools escape the law’s scrutiny.
Sarah Carr:
At Todd County High School in South Dakota last school year, 16 calls to police helped earn the school an unsavory distinction in the eyes of the state and federal government: The rural school was slapped with the label “persistently dangerous.”
Under the 6-year-old No Child Left Behind Act, each state must define a “persistently dangerous” school and allow parents to transfer their children out of them.
But at Milwaukee’s Fritsche Middle School, 187 calls to police over a recent six-month period did not make the school persistently dangerous under Wisconsin’s definition.
Neither did 263 calls at Bay View High School, or 299 at Custer.
Madison Schools’ police call data for Fall, 2006.
Oklahoma Supreme Court Tosses School Funding Adequacy Suit
hope the Oklahoma Education Association (OEA) received the public relations boost it desired from filing one of those “adequacy and equity” lawsuits, because the decision was an unmitigated legal and financial defeat.
The Oklahoma Supreme Court upheld a lower court decision to dismiss the suit, dismantling the union’s arguments. The court’s ruling spends much time examining the whole question of whether OEA had standing to file the suit in the first place, even though this is a low threshold to meet. The justices noted:
“With few exceptions, ‘constitutional rights are personal and may not be asserted vicariously.’ The plaintiffs assert injury to the rights of Oklahoma’s students. The OEA has not established that any of its members are Oklahoma students. Although some of the members of the OEA may be parents of Oklahoma students, this is insufficient to establish the OEA’s standing to assert injury to the students’ rights. The OEA has failed to meet its burden to show that any of its members have a right of their own to assert injury to the rights of Oklahoma’s students. As the OEA’s members cannot vicariously assert injury to the constitutional rights of Oklahoma’s students, neither can the OEA.”
Additionally, the court ruled “the plaintiffs have failed to allege any facts that would support a finding that the plaintiff school districts or OEA’s members have an interest which is within a constitutionally protected zone….”
Police calls for Madison schools – September through December 2006
Madison Parents’ School Safety Site:
The charts below (click on each thumbnail to enlarge) summarize Madison Police Department calls for service to MMSD schools from September 1 through December 31, 2006. The data is summarized by school below the fold.
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).
Paying Brave Teachers What They’re Worth
Eighteen award-winning teachers have come up with a performance-pay plan for teachers. It is full of good ideas. These people know what success in the classroom means. So why am I having trouble accepting the whole package?
The teachers, backed by the Center for Teaching Quality in Hillsborough, N.C., and calling themselves the TeacherSolutions team, break their plan into 10 parts. I will describe it in a moment and name the 18. There is no better use of the vast resources of the Internet than to give credit to good educators for hard work.
Some parts of their plan are solid. Breaking the base-pay system into three tiers — novice, professional and expert — makes sense. Rewarding teachers who help students make significant gains is an obvious step. Giving after-hours leadership assignments to the best teachers, not the oldest, and paying them for that time would also be an improvement. I am even willing to concede that teachers should be judged on improvement of their students on more than just one kind of assessment.
But the teachers trouble me with point number four, “Provide additional pay for additional degrees and professional development, but only if the training is relevant.” And they lose me completely with point number nine, “Be brave, be bold.”
Mike Antonuccia has more.
Free to choose, and learn
New research shows that parental choice raises standards—including for those who stay in public schools
The Economist:
FEW ideas in education are more controversial than vouchers—letting parents choose to educate their children wherever they wish at the taxpayer’s expense. First suggested by Milton Friedman, an economist, in 1955, the principle is compellingly simple. The state pays; parents choose; schools compete; standards rise; everybody gains.
Simple, perhaps, but it has aroused predictable—and often fatal—opposition from the educational establishment. Letting parents choose where to educate their children is a silly idea; professionals know best. Co-operation, not competition, is the way to improve education for all. Vouchers would increase inequality because children who are hardest to teach would be left behind.
But these arguments are now succumbing to sheer weight of evidence. Voucher schemes are running in several different countries without ill-effects for social cohesion; those that use a lottery to hand out vouchers offer proof that recipients get a better education than those that do not.
Harry Patrinos, an education economist at the World Bank, cites a Colombian programme to broaden access to secondary schooling, known as PACES, a 1990s initiative that provided over 125,000 poor children with vouchers worth around half the cost of private secondary school. Crucially, there were more applicants than vouchers. The programme, which selected children by lottery, provided researchers with an almost perfect experiment, akin to the “pill-placebo” studies used to judge the efficacy of new medicines. The subsequent results show that the children who received vouchers were 15-20% more likely to finish secondary education, five percentage points less likely to repeat a grade, scored a bit better on scholastic tests and were much more likely to take college entrance exams.
Making Education Safe
Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel Editorial:
More and more kids are arriving at school in Milwaukee with a bellyful of anger, which they vent by lashing out at teachers, other staffers and fellow students. Intensifying violence is bedeviling the Milwaukee Public Schools, distracting the system from its main mission: education.
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Journal Sentinel reporter Sarah Carr vividly portrayed this thorny, complex problem in a four-part series of articles that concludes today. The community must not tolerate this trend, which, by hampering education, stunts the future of the children, the city, the metro area and the state. And the community must do whatever it takes – yes, if necessary, spending more money or making schools more regimented – to restore a sense of safety to MPS.
The uptick in violence likely stems from the deteriorating plight of the poor, the causes of which lie largely outside the schools. So the ultimate solutions lie largely in that direction, too. But MPS can’t wait until society gets its act together. It must take measures to tamp down the violence.
Society at large must:
California Accused of Inflating Exit Exam Data
UCLA professor says officials distorted pass rate on test required for high school graduation. Educators counter that analysis was flawed.
California education officials put forth artificially positive results on the number of students who passed the state’s controversial high school exit exam last year, according to a recent UCLA study.
The analysis also concluded that about 50,000 fewer students statewide earned diplomas last year compared to previous years, raising the prospect that the exit exam requirement is pressuring students to drop out. The decline in graduation rates was most pronounced in poor, heavily minority areas, the study found.
“We’ve constructed a system that sets in place incentives for disinformation,” said John Rogers, the study’s author and co-director of UCLA’s Institute for Democracy, Education and Access. “People who are making education decisions in this state need to think about how this policy is really playing out.”
Critics pack meeting on unpopular school decisions
Although the Madison School Board so far has held its ground on a host of unpopular decisions, it may be approaching a tipping point, at least on the issue of school consolidation.
The School Board’s meeting was a multi-ring circus Monday night as a capacity crowd presented a collective howl of anguish about many budget cuts and about the controversial decision to name the community’s newest elementary school for a Hmong military leader revered by his adherents.
It will be up to board members in coming days to decide whether to revisit any of the decisions they have made in recent weeks that are stirring passionate, and often angry, public commentary on topics ranging from the elimination of yellow school buses for parochial school students to a school closing on the near east side to the new school’s name.
Arlene Silveira, elected unanimously Monday night as the board’s new president, said she would return items to the agenda for possible reconsideration if four board members requested them. A supermajority, or five votes, would be necessary to reverse any budget-related decisions. So far, it appears that several board members are willing to revisit the budget item to consolidate Marquette and Lapham elementary schools.
Disruptive students bounced from school to school
Before anyone could stop them, two boys stood on tables during a crowded lunch at Milwaukee’s Bradley Tech High School this winter, flashing gang signs and chanting gang slogans.
Many of the students, who had been eating, chatting and milling about in the school’s open atrium, cheered them on.
Quickly, the commotion grew.
The boys who caused the disruption were new to Tech. A few days before, they had been expelled from a suburban high school for fighting, said Tech Principal Ed Kovochich.
Shortly thereafter, they would be forced out of Tech, too – bounced to another MPS high school.
“The dance of the lemons,” as Kovochich described it.
Teachers, administrators and social workers say the most violent or disruptive children are regularly moved from school to school.
Teachers Take a Crash Course As County Strives for More AP
John E. Deasy, the superintendent of Prince George’s County schools, issued a decree soon after taking charge a year ago: Each of the county’s 22 high schools will offer at least eight Advanced Placement courses next year.
He got funding for the expansion, which would increase the number of students in the county taking AP courses by 25 percent. Now he just needs the teachers.
The effort to mobilize the teaching corps brought about 80 current and prospective AP teachers to Charles H. Flowers High School on a recent Saturday morning for a series of workshops in AP English, math, social studies and science. The workshops are run by the College Board, which administers the AP exams and recently announced that it will audit courses to ensure that they meet college standards.
“You can’t just say to people, ‘Get more kids in AP classes,’ unless you have the teachers,” Deasy said. He’ll need as many as 200 certified to teach the advanced courses by the fall. As he walked from classroom to classroom, he added: “I can’t hold you accountable for doing something without giving you the skills to do it.”
College program lacking price tag
On Thursday, Wisconsin’s 75,000 eighth-graders will get their first opportunity to participate in the Wisconsin Covenant, a program that Gov. Jim Doyle hopes will lead to dramatic progress in college participation in the state.
Students who sign the pledge form are promising to maintain a B average through high school graduation, stay out of trouble, perform community service, meet college entrance requirements and apply for financial aid.
Doyle says students who fulfill the pledge will be guaranteed a spot after graduation in one of the state’s colleges or universities, along with a financial aid package based on need. If students from low-income families cannot afford college with existing financial aid, he says, the state will provide more assistance to close the gap.
But with enrollment in the program about to begin, the Democratic governor so far has provided few details to the Legislature, in which Democrats control the Senate and Republicans control the Assembly. Some lawmakers, frustrated by lingering questions and the absence of a price tag, are vowing to kill the Wisconsin Covenant.
Officials’ Silence Puts Parents ‘at Arm’s Length’
Schools nationwide are calling on parents to get involved. The Maryland State Board of Education endorsed a broad range of family outreach initiatives in a 2005 report that called public education “a shared responsibility.”
Yet some parents in Montgomery County and elsewhere have discovered limits on the get-involved policy when they ask questions about individual teachers, whether those queries are about alleged abuse of students or a decision to fire a popular instructor.
Dawn Mosisa said she found an information void when she tried to follow up on her daughter’s story about a teacher who allegedly hit another second-grader at Maryvale Elementary School in Rockville. Likewise, scores of parents at Lakewood Elementary School, also in Rockville, said they had a hard time finding out why a teacher they considered top-notch was recommended for dismissal. They also felt their input was ignored.
School officials said they are required to hold back information because of privacy laws, union contracts and potential lawsuits. Some acknowledged that a more open policy would help families handle the repercussions of incidents involving teachers. But the officials said there is little they can do.
Troller, schools reporter, wins 2007 Allegretti Award
Members of The Capital Times nonsupervisory staff have chosen reporter Susan Troller as the winner of the 2007 Allegretti Award.
They judged Troller’s work as best carrying on the legacy of former Capital Times reporter and editorial writer Dan Allegretti in exposing injustices in the community.
Troller’s colleagues honored her coverage of Madison’s K-12 schools. The nomination said Troller “has worked tirelessly to bring the human face, the child’s face, to the messy bureaucracy that is our school system.”
Since being assigned to the schools beat in 2006, Troller has consistently brought readers into the classroom as well as chronicling the operations of the district administration and the School Board. Not only has she used words to describe children’s learning experiences, but she was the first staff member to delve into the multimedia world for the paper, creating an audio slideshow to accompany a portrait of the successes of high-poverty Mendota Elementary School.
Props to Susan!
Geography Explores New Terrain
In 1948, the president of Harvard University James Conant famously called geography “not a university subject” and many colleges stopped teaching it. But Dartmouth wasn’t listening. It remains the only college in the Ivy League with a distinct geography department, says Magilligan, and majors in the subject increased from 17 last year to 34 this year. Next year, 38 are signed up.
Behind knockout of principal lies a sad tale
When another student slammed a fruit cup on a cafeteria lunch table last fall, the young girl’s rage began to build.
It grew in the cafeteria, as the 15-year-old lashed out at her fellow students, angry that some of the spilled fruit landed on her pants.
It grew in the main office of Ronald Reagan High School on Milwaukee’s south side, where school staff had taken her to regroup.
In the office, a steady stream of profanities flowed from her mouth. Sensing a growing threat of violence, the school principal, Julia D’Amato, approached. Again and again, D’Amato told her:
“You have to calm down.”
“You have to calm down.”
But she was just getting started.
When authorities arrested the student for punching the principal twice, knocking her out, the incident became front-page news, a horrific example of random violence in the schools.
Grade School Goes Corporate
Businesses want to build better employees, but will that really mean a better education for your child?
Elizabeth Weiss Green:
It took less than a year for Algene Patrick to learn all she needed to know about William H. Brazier Elementary School: rock-bottom test scores, spoiled milk in the cafeteria, and teachers who logged more absences than their students. These were the lessons her granddaughter, Lawrenesha Williams, brought home from kindergarten. When Patrick, who is Lawrenesha’s custodial guardian, asked the principal about the 50 absences Lawrenesha’s teacher had logged, he just cited the teacher’s personal problems. The grandmother decided enough was enough, and she put Lawrenesha in parochial school.
For Trinity Gardens, a poor neighborhood in Mobile County, Ala., that sends children to Brazier Elementary, the neglect wasn’t a huge surprise. In 1965, a nearby Air Force base closed-taking away 10,000 jobs-and a series of paper mills shut down in the 1990s, stealing at least 3,000 more. Most of the Gardens’ residents live below the poverty line, holding two jobs to get by. Who had time to care how many fifth graders passed a state writing test? (In 2003, only 7 percent.)
But in 2004, Brazier Elementary suddenly began to change. In just one year, workers cleaned up the halls, new teachers poured in, and test scores shot up. Noting the change, parents like Patrick sent their kids back to Brazier. Patrick thanks Brazier’s new principal, Merrier Jackson, for the turnaround, calling her “a godsend.” But it was actually a less heavenly group that sent Jackson to Trinity Gardens: CEOs.
More on Vang Pao Elementary School
The decision to name Madison’s newest school after Gen. Vang Pao is creating a divide in Madison.
Opponents said that they plan to bring their concerns to the school board on Monday.
For people in the Hmong community, Gen. Vang Pao is a leader comparable to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. They said that Pao led masses of Hmong refugees to the U.S., WISC-TV reported.
But opponents said that they still hope to convince the school board to change its mind and not honor a man that some say has a questionable past.
Science Tests Come as Teaching Time Falls
Many elementary schools offer half as much science instruction as they did before the law was enacted, teachers and principals said. Science and social studies, once taught separately, share time to make room for more reading and math. Some middle schools that used to offer a full year of science and social studies give a semester of each.
But starting with the 2007-08 academic year, the law requires states to test students in science. A new exam is being field-tested in Maryland this year.
“I think the test will open up some eyes,” said Brian Freiss, a fifth-grade teacher at Highland Elementary School in Silver Spring.
For schools, status quo is not an option
Wisconsin State Journal Editorial:
When the Madison School Board approved budget cuts last week, it underscored a message important to every school district in Wisconsin:
Schools can no longer afford to conduct business as usual.
If Wisconsin is to preserve high quality education, its school boards, administrators, teachers, students, parents and taxpayers must recognize the need for bolder action.
Schools must create ways to deliver education more cost-effectively.
That means change — change that disturbs the comfort of the status quo.
Just saying no is not an option.
Milwaukee Public Schools Violence Intensifying
An 18-year-old punches his school’s football coach and grabs his genitals. • Two middle-school age sisters jump a police officer called to calm a disturbance. • A grandmother charges a group of students at an elementary school, and then strikes the principal. • A boy tries to sell a gun to his friend in elementary school.
Violence in Milwaukee Public Schools has intensified, and calls to police have become daily occurrences in some of the city’s schools.
Teachers and staff trained to bring knowledge to children in a safe setting are instead struggling to keep the hostility of the streets from seeping into classrooms and hallways.
A Journal Sentinel investigation found:
- Dozens of teachers, administrators and staff are getting attacked. In the first semester of this school year alone, at least 127 MPS employees reported being physically assaulted by students or outsiders coming to campus.
- Elementary school teachers are falling victim to physical or verbal assaults nearly as much as those in high schools. Close to half the teachers assaulted this year work at elementary or K-8 schools.
- Far more Milwaukee students were expelled for bringing firearms to school last year than in all of the Chicago Public Schools, a district more than four times the size of MPS. In Chicago, unlike Milwaukee, high school students walk through weapons scanners every day, and handguns have virtually disappeared from the schools.
- The number of students expelled and suspended for drugs, violence and weaponshas nearly doubled in the past five years, and many are simply transferred to other schools. Total MPS expulsions have tripled in the past 15 years.
- Police are called routinely to break up fights or deal with other disturbances. Staff at each of the district’s 11 large high schools called police about twice a school day on average in the past six months.
Similar English Learner Students, Different Results: Why Do Some Schools Do Better?
How elementary schools focus their time and energies, and what resources they have for doing it, can make a powerful difference in the academic achievement of English Learner students from low-income backgrounds, according to findings from this new analysis of data.
This new extended analysis was based upon extensive survey data from 4,700 K-5 classroom teachers (80% or more at each school) and all principals in 237 California elementary schools from 137 different school districts across the state. These schools were initially randomly selected from 550 schools in California’s 25-35% School Characteristics Index band. All schools from this band have high levels of student poverty and low parent education levels; for this analysis we further narrowed our original sample to eliminate any school that didn’t have enough English Learner students to have an EL Academic Performance Index score.
The research team analyzed the school practices covered by the teacher and principal surveys to see which most highly correlated with California’s new school level English Learner Academic Performance Index. In addition, the team analyzed the same practices against percent proficient on the California Standards Tests to see if the results were similar. Finally, the team ran an additional analysis to see if the results were similar for only schools in our sample with English Learner student populations that were 80% or more Spanish speakers. The results for all three analyses were essentially the same: there are four interrelated broad school practices – backed up by numerous examples of specific actionable practices – that most strongly differentiate the lower from the higher performing elementary schools with regard to English Learner API. These four practices are the same, although in a slightly different order of significance, as the team had found in October 2005 for the school-wide API.
A public school with a private-school mission
The “Stuyvesant of the East” has become one of the most sought-after public schools in the city. It got that way by leaving much of the public out.
Jeff Coplon:
As light faded on the first arctic day of winter, a band of 40 die-hard parents huddled on Seventh Avenue, outside Region 9 headquarters of the Department of Education. Mostly white and middle-aged, armed with signs and certainty, they stood shivah for a dream foreclosed on the Lower East Side: the notorious NEST+m, a school for the best and brightest in all New York.
Braced against the slicing wind, they chanted against the ousting of their founding principal, the feared and revered Celenia Chévere, and grieved for the motto she once posted outside her office door:
A public school with a private-school mission.
The sign dripped with hubris, but it had wooed the striving classes well. Since the troubled birth of New Explorations Into Science, Technology & Math, in 2001, its parents had tithed body and soul and disposable income—for their children, to be sure, but also for the urban impossibility: a truly great public school. In NEST they’d found a hothouse with record test scores, free of the usual tawdry concessions—sardined classes, peeling paint, creeping illiteracy.
Prominent Education Reformer to Lead New Orleans Schools
Louisiana on Friday picked one of the nation’s most prominent education reformers to run the troubled school district of New Orleans, as schools here continue to grapple with physical and administrative damage from Hurricane Katrina.
The new superintendent, Paul G. Vallas, who is credited with changes in school systems in Chicago and, most recently, in Philadelphia, was chosen to take on what is seen as one of the more singular challenges in American education: creating a working school district where many of the buildings are ruined, many of the teachers are missing and thousands of students might return suddenly. When they do, they will be among the neediest — the poorest and lowest-achieving — in the nation.
As a superintendent in Philadelphia and Chicago, Mr. Vallas raised test scores with the help of after-school programs, new schools and revised curricula. He is generally regarded by schools experts as one of the more energetic practitioners in the field. But speaking Friday in a shuttered school in the Lower Ninth Ward, he seemed to recognize the special difficulty of this task.
Letters Regarding “In Search of the Master Teacher”
NYT Letters to the Editor regarding Kristoff’s recent column on teachers:
To the Editor:
I retired to South Carolina in 2004 after 35 years as a teacher, administrator and superintendent in New York. I have permanent New York certification in secondary English, special education and as a school district administrator.
Thinking I might teach in South Carolina, I applied for information on certification. I learned that I would need to do the following: fill out an application; submit original college transcripts; submit teacher examination scores from the Educational Testing Service (to ensure that I was “highly qualified”); submit an F.B.I. fingerprint card; submit recommendations from the college where I completed my teacher preparation (36 years ago). There was more, along with a $75 fee.
I am enjoying my full retirement!
More here:
Several teachers argued that it’s ridiculous for someone who has never actually taught for a day in his life to offer proposals for school reform. That strikes me as a fallacy. Obviously doctors aren’t the only people who should offer views on health care reform. And reporters aren’t the only people entitled to views about the failures in the news media. Indeed, if we are going to see improvements in education, it will be only because a broader segment of society became involved. Obviously, teachers bring a special expertise to the discussion, but they have no exclusive claim to these issues.
Another common objection was that there is no way you can solve the school problems as long as parents are apathetic, or students are raised wrong, or resources are not increased. I don’t buy that either. Look, you could have said a generation ago that we’ll never solve the problem of traffic deaths as long as humans enjoy the sensations of speed and alcohol. But in fact we figured out how to engineer cars better, how to require seat belts and air bags, how to crack down on drunk drivers, how to design roads better and improve signs – and the result has been that we now save tens of thousands of lives a year. In the same way, there will always be troubled kids who fall through the cracks – and there are such kids in Singapore, which probably has the best public schools in the planet. But even if schools can’t be perfect, even if the backdrop is challenging, we can improve high school graduation rates, we can improve quantitative skills and ability to read.
Letter to School Board Members & a Meeting with Enis Ragland
Sue Arneson, Jason Delborne, Katie Griffiths, Anita Krasno, Dea Larsen Converse, Diane Milligan, Sich Slone, Grant Sovern, Lara Sutherlin:
Dear School Board Members:
A group of neighbors from the Marquette and Tenney-Lapham communities met this morning with Enis Ragland, Assistant to the Mayor. While we didn’t claim to represent any organizations, many of us have been tapped into various discussions and email threads over the last few days. We put forth the following points:
- The city’s vision for downtown development is sorely compromised by the consolidation plan. It goes against all the investments in business development, affordable housing, central park, improved transportation, and the building of a strong community that spans the isthmus.
- The school board’s own projections predict that Lapham (as the sole elementary campus) will become overcrowded in 5 years – perhaps sooner if we reinstate reduced class sizes. Where will the city find a ‘new’ school to open in the downtown area?
- The Alternatives programs DO need a permanent home, but their own director stated last year that the worst possible site is next to a junior high. Other options are available, including the possibility of the Atwood Community Center once it is completed.
- The Lapham/Marquette consolidation passed purely for financial reasons – there is no convincing or consensed-upon programmatic advantages.
Marquette Teachers will go to Lapham
Marquette Elementary students may be happy to know that if they must move to Lapham Elementary next year as part of a consolidation plan, the teachers they know from Marquette will most likely go with them.
The Madison teachers union and the Madison school district have reached an agreement, similar to one used in similar past situations, that will essentially allow current Marquette teachers to move to Lapham and apply for the job openings that will be available at the new consolidated school.
The School Board voted last Monday to join the two paired schools on the near east side as part of a series of cost-saving moves to keep the district operating in the black.
Currently Lapham, on East Dayton Street, houses kindergarten through second grade students and an early childhood program. Marquette, at 1501 Jenifer St., is home to third- through fifth-graders.
Superintendent Art Rainwater said he appreciated the union’s effort to work with the district to create the least possible disruption for students and staff.
Board members explain votes to close schools
When newly elected Madison School Board members Maya Cole and Beth Moss went into Monday night’s crucial budget meeting, both intended to vote against closing schools, consistent with their campaign promises.
But by the time the seven-member board patched together the various cuts, additions and compromises necessary to restore some programs and services while keeping the budget in the black, both Moss and Cole found themselves making a reversal and voting with Lawrie Kobza and Arlene Silveira to consolidate the paired elementary schools Marquette and Lapham at the Lapham site on East Dayton Street.
Now Moss, along with board members Carol Carstensen and Lucy Mathiak, would not mind reopening the discussion with the possibility of reconsidering that vote.
But Cole — who during the campaign was firmer than Moss in her opposition to school closings — says her decision to consolidate Marquette and Lapham is final.
More on the MMSD Golf Team Consolidation
In an anticipated move, Big Eight Conference athletic directors unanimously voted to reject the Madison School Board’s proposal to consolidate prep boys golf teams beginning next spring.
With a 9-0 vote, it was agreed that combining athletic teams was strictly a participation issue as opposed to a financial one, Madison Memorial athletic director Tim Ritchie said Thursday.
“Our numbers are good for golf,” Ritchie said.
The idea of combining teams from Madison Memorial and Madison West, as well as teams from Madison La Follette and Madison East will not be proposed to the WIAA because the conference did not agree to it, Ritchie said.
Tea Leaves, Budgets and Governance
Maureen Rickman raised some pertinent points in her recent post regarding MMSD budgeting. Observing some of the discussions over the past few months, I found it interesting that when a school board member asked about business services items, teaching and learning (should we really be spending money developing curriculum and “frameworks” in this day and age, never mind the fact that we live in the internet era, the UW and MATC are next door, and that many teachers choose the best tools for their students, regardless of local dogma?) or other items not on the proposed reduction in increased spending list, they never got very far. In one case, the response was (paraphrasing) “if you do that, it will come out of salary savings” which translates to a reduction in the district’s equity.
If that is the answer, what can a board member do, in the absence of 3 more votes? Or, if the votes are there, and the Administration does not execute, what happens? What is the recourse? Navigating these challenges is not a simple task.
We’ll soon have new leadership in some MMSD departments along with an eventual new Superintendent (props to the board member(s) who recognize this reality and route around the outages). The department changes may be the biggest news of all, particularly, given the timing – before a new super is hired – which is very important, in my view. Laurie Frost looks beyond the “fog”. It’s interesting that in so many facets of life, one has to step back and try to look beyond the immediate rhetoric.
There are no shortage of challenging K-12 issues at hand. Many on this site have argued (for years) that all budget items should be on the table. I think we’re getting closer to that day. I also hope that we’ll soon see the last of the “same service” or “cost to continue” or “cost plus” budget approach. After all, spending goes up every year ($333M in 2006 / 2007 to $339.6M+ in 2007 / 2008 – maybe more, we’ll see this fall when the “final” budget is adopted).
Related:
- US K-12 Spending Climate
- Re-thinking K-12
- Peter Gascoyne’s “A 5 Year Approach to budgeting“
- MMSD historic spending, staffing and student population
- MMSD Health Care Costs.
At MPS, time to go extreme
Ho, hum. Another sunny morning, another cup of coffee, another disgusting story about the Milwaukee Public Schools. How’s this for an idea? Shut down MPS because it sure doesn’t seem to be working.
Initiate a 13-year plan (pardon the negative connotation) to eliminate grade levels, beginning next year with kindergarten. That way, students (or are they “combatants”?) are free to find other educational solutions from the beginning. No kindergarten means no first grade the next year and so on as the children pass through (or drop out).
Parents will be responsible for vying for precious space in private schools, which don’t seem to have the level of problems that MPS does, probably because they can remove disruptive thugs. Or try home schooling. Let parents sit home with their unruly kids and see how they like it.
Good teachers will have time to look for other employment. There surely will be more entrepreneurs opening schools to replace the MPS holding tanks. Just think – no more guns, no more weapons, no more crowd control. Just lessons, homework and appropriate discussions about grades.
Teachers have been shifted from being educators to baby sitters to interim parole officers. A couple of e-mails I received noted the situation at MPS is much worse than we even know. Worse than a week with two lockdowns, a fight resulting in a staff member being knocked unconscious and a seventh-grader with a gun and ammunition? Those are only the reported incidents.
Some Schools Drop Laptop Programs
The students at Liverpool High have used their school-issued laptops to exchange answers on tests, download pornography and hack into local businesses. When the school tightened its network security, a 10th grader not only found a way around it but also posted step-by-step instructions on the Web for others to follow (which they did).
Scores of the leased laptops break down each month, and every other morning, when the entire school has study hall, the network inevitably freezes because of the sheer number of students roaming the Internet instead of getting help from teachers.
So the Liverpool Central School District, just outside Syracuse, has decided to phase out laptops starting this fall, joining a handful of other schools around the country that adopted one-to-one computing programs and are now abandoning them as educationally empty — and worse.
Many of these districts had sought to prepare their students for a technology-driven world and close the so-called digital divide between students who had computers at home and those who did not.
“After seven years, there was literally no evidence it had any impact on student achievement — none,” said Mark Lawson, the school board president here in Liverpool, one of the first districts in New York State to experiment with putting technology directly into students’ hands. “The teachers were telling us when there’s a one-to-one relationship between the student and the laptop, the box gets in the way. It’s a distraction to the educational process.”
The End of Lapham School
What depressing news to read that Lapham School will be merged out of existence.
I sent two kids through Lapham, and it was single best experience our family has had with the Madison schools.
Lapham’s K-2 format was born out of a political compromise that reopened the Depression-era school in 1989 in return for Marquette serving grades 3-5. This turned out to be an inadvertent stroke of educational genius. Separated from the sometimes baleful influence of older kids, Lapham became its own little cozy world, a safe and encouraging place for the youngest of students.
As I wrote in a 2003 column, my kids were lucky enough to have Barb Thompson as principal. She ran a tight ship, kept a watchful eye on her charges and wasn’t afraid to battle “downtown” — the school district administration — for her school.
Petition seeks reconsideration of General Vang Pao Elementary
Heidi Reynolds doesn’t deny that, ultimately, she’d like see the Madison school board rescind its decision to name a new school on Madison’s southwest side after General Vang Pao, a controversial Hmong leader implicated in drug trafficking and summary executions. But for now, “We just want to reopen the debate.”
Reynolds, the parent of children who will attend the new school when it opens in fall 2008, says the board’s April 9 vote to select this name “was done way too quickly, there was not enough debate. It was all done under the radar.”
Community Colleges
Community colleges today do far more than offer a ladder to the final years. They train the people who repair your furnace, install your plumbing, take your pulse. They prepare retiring baby boomers for second or third careers, and provide opportunities for a growing number of college-age students turning away from the high cost and competition at universities. And charged with doing the heavy remedial lifting, community colleges are now as much 10th and 11th grade as 13th and 14th.
It’s a long to-do list on a tightening public purse. Two-year colleges receive less than 30 percent of state and local financing for higher education, according to the American Association of Community Colleges. Yet they are growing much faster than four-year colleges and universities, enrolling nearly half of all undergraduates. That’s 6.6 million students. Add those taking just a course or two, and the total reaches some 12 million.
Maryland School Budget Growth Friction
When Anne Arundel County Executive John R. Leopold stepped into the council chamber yesterday to present the first budget of his administration, several key officials were notably absent: the county’s school superintendent and the president, vice president and several other members of the school board.
They were the same school officials who had fought for months with Leopold (R) over how much funding he would give them. So when Leopold finally announced what share of the county’s $1.2 billion budget would go to the schools, they made a point not to be there.
School officials had requested a $101 million increase in direct funding from the county. Leopold said he would give schools significantly less — about a $27 million increase, to $542 million. He said in his speech that he was balancing “what resources are necessary to achieve excellence within the parameters of fiscal responsibility.”
Consolidated Madison Golf Team Causes Controversy
The Madison School District may have “opened a big door” by authorizing the consolidation of golf teams at its four high schools into two programs as a tiny part of its $7.9 million in budget cuts, a Wisconsin Interscholastic Athletic Association official said Tuesday.
The Madison School Board included that measure as it balanced the district’s $339.6 million budget late Monday night because, as in most school districts, costs have grown faster than the state allows the district to raise property taxes.
If the merger of the golf teams gains Big Eight Conference and WIAA approval before a June 1 deadline, Madison Memorial will combine with Madison West, and Madison La Follette will combine with Madison East, beginning with the boys seasons in 2008.
The projected $14,895 savings to the district – all in the form of coaching salaries – was the smallest of the last-minute additions to the district’s budget cuts.
Waukesha Superintendent May Move to Appleton
Rick Carlson of SCF Educational Consultants, a company the district engaged at the end of March to help conduct the superintendent search, said seven people applied for the job, and that he had contacted Schmidt this spring to tell him about the opening.
Before becoming Waukesha’s superintendent in 1998, Schmidt worked for 23 years in the Appleton district.
“I spent 10 years there as a teacher, five years as a principal and eight years as a system superintendent,” Schmidt said, adding that his family in the Appleton area, including his wife, made the job attractive to him. “I live here and she lives there and we do weekends,” he said of his current family-work balance.
Why It Is NOT Harder to Get Into Top Colleges
“From a student’s perspective, the odds of getting into college are a function of two things: the number of qualified students who apply, and the number of slots that colleges make available. It’s true that the number of prospective college students is growing, as The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal all noted in nearly identical articles published recently. Driven by the baby-boom echo, the number of high school graduates jumped from 2.9 million in 2002 to 3.1 million in 2006, an increase of 8.4 percent.
“But the number of spaces in elite colleges is increasing too, at a nearly identical rate. According to U.S. Department of Education statistics, the 60-odd colleges and universities rated ‘Most Competitive” by Barron’s Guide to Colleges sent out 199,821 acceptance letters in 2002. In 2006, the number of ‘fat envelopes’ had increased to 215,738, an 8.0 percent jump. As the nation has grown, its elite colleges have grown along with it.
“Why, then, the high anxiety? Because college admissions scare stories aren’t based on the overall ratio of admissions to applicants. They’re based on the ratio of admissions to applications, as reported by individual colleges. And the number of applications to elite schools is skyrocketing, increasing 18.9 percent from 2002 to 2006.”
Every spring, the media send a bolt of fear into the heart of the upper middle class. The message is clear: “Your children are never getting into a good college.”
As Ivy League universities report — once again — that admissions rates have fallen to record lows, newspapers rush to publish stories documenting the increasingly “frenzied” (variants: “frantic,” “brutal”) competition among students vying for a coveted slot in an elite school. The stock characters include the tearful student — dreams crushed under an avalanche of rejection letters — the angry parent, the frenzied guidance counselor, and the college admissions official or other expert who notes with grateful wonder, “If I had to apply to my alma mater today, I couldn’t get in.”
There’s just one problem: it’s not true. The declining odds of getting into an elite college are mostly a statistical mirage, caused by confusion between college applicants and college applications.
A Teacher on Student Information Systems
Our school volunteered to beta test a new feature whereby parents can log in to the school website and see their students’ grades daily, in real time. Many teachers oppose this. I do not, for a few reasons. I think it’s a great idea for parents and students to be able to access their grades. I feel it places more responsibility on the student to keep up with their grades, and provides teachers another means of “contact” with parents who, perhaps, don’t return phone calls or emails – a last resort.
Truth on Teacher Quality
Nicholas Kristoff gets everything right in his Times column($) about teacher policy, which basically re-summarizes the findings and conclusions of Gordon, Kane, and Stager’s widely-discussed Hamilton Project paper. Long-time Quick and ED readers know all about the report, of course, since we blogged about it on April 14th…of 2006. But better late than never, I say. To quote our post from last year:
“For decades researchers have been struggling to tease out bits of evidence pointing to the small impact of various traditional methods of categorizing teachers–certified, uncertified, alt-route, has a Master’s degree, licensure exam scores, this disposition, that disposition, etc. etc. Some of these things matter a little, or somewhat; some (like having a Masters’ degree) appear not to matter at all. The lack of definitive results has left plenty of room for people of different camps to comfortably keep various ideological arguments going ad infinitum, with little danger of actually resolving the issue and thus having to find something else to do.
But at the same time, research has also consistently found huge variations in teacher effectiveness within any category of teacher you care to name–old or young, certified or not, black or white, short or tall. Some teachers are just much, much better than others, regardless of external labels or credentials.
Teach kids to live within their means
In the book of Proverbs we are told: “Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it.”
Somehow that lesson gets lost for many families when it comes to teaching children about money — even though there are a number of government agencies, nonprofit organizations and private companies promoting financial literacy.
As parents, we know it’s imperative to teach our kids to say no to drugs and alcohol. But can we honestly say we’re doing enough to help them fend off consumerism and credit dealers? I’m doing my best, but I could do better.
Most important, are you training your children to live off an average salary as young adults? Or are they now living so large based on your income that they will be incapable of managing their finances on a modest starting salary once they get into the real world?
2007 / 2008 Budget Approved: School Board keeps Lindbergh open
Board members tussled over dozens of suggestions to try to find money to return various programs and services to the district that had been cut by the administration in an effort to balance the $339.6 million budget.
The administration had originally proposed about $8 million in cuts, including $2 million from special education aimed at helping students with speech or language problems, increased class size at the elementary level and closing Lindbergh Elementary and Black Hawk Middle School, and consolidating Marquette and Lapham.
The board also approved a district proposal to eliminate busing for five Catholic schools in the district, and offer parents a $450 subsidy to transport their children themselves, to save about $230,000. State statutes require that public schools provide transportation for all students in their district. Parents of students at other area private schools take the subsidy in lieu of busing.
Board member Lucy Mathiak and Superintendent Art Rainwater had several testy exchanges as Mathiak grilled administrators on their programs and expenses.
“I’m trying to understand why our district requires so many more people in teaching and learning than other districts,” Mathiak said.
“Our priorities since I’ve been superintendent are highly trained, highly skilled teachers in a small class. After that, we believe in highly trained, highly skilled teachers in front of a large class. We don’t believe in poorly trained teachers in small classes,” Rainwater said sharply as he defended the Madison district’s focus on professional development.
Board members also disagreed on how aggressively to use projected salary savings, an accounting method that predicts how many teachers will leave the district. Any shortfall would have to come out of the district’s equity fund, which some board members feel is dangerously low.
In a six-plus-hour meeting punctuated by flaring tempers, the board also found ways to stave off most proposed increases in elementary class sizes by raising fees and increasing projected savings in salaries for the 2007-08 school year.
The board also spared the district’s fifth-grade strings program from elimination.
The moves came as the board balanced the district’s $339.6 million budget by cutting $7.9 million from existing services and programs.
The budget finally was approved just after midnight on a 6-1 vote. Lucy Mathiak was the lone dissenter.
Board members voted 4-3 to consolidate Marquette and Lapham at Lapham, 1045 E. Dayton St., into a kindergarten through fifth-grade school, while rejecting a proposal from Superintendent Art Rainwater to close Lindbergh, 4500 Kennedy Road. Currently, Lapham hosts K-2 students while Marquette hosts grades three through five.
Rainwater also had proposed consolidating Black Hawk Middle School into Sherman and O’Keeffe middle schools, but that proposal wasn’t adopted.
Voting for the consolidation of Marquette and Lapham, to save $522,000, were Lawrie Kobza, Arlene Silveira, Beth Moss and Maya Cole. Opposing the measure were Johnny Winston Jr., Carol Carstensen and Mathiak.
The Madison school board approved the consolidation of Marquette and Lapham elementary schools under next year’s budget. The two schools will combine under Lapham’s roof, reported WISC-TV.
Under the budget, Marquette will be used for alternative education programs.
The school board also approved combining all high school boys golf teams into two and elminated bussing to Wright and Spring Harbor charter schools.
The moves are all a part of cutting the budget by more than $7 million.
Many of those linked to affected schools have loudly spoken out in opposition to the closings, and Monday was no exception. Parents and students put their concerns in writing outside the Doyle Administration Building — children writing in chalk on the ground — hoping to catch the eye of board members before the meeting inside.
Brenda Konkel, TJ Mertz and Paul Soglin have more. Paul mentioned:
“From the debate, the motions and the votes, it seems that all of the rancor over ideological splits in the Madison Metropolitan School Board is irrelevant” given the vote to consolidate Marquette and Lapham schools
I think the current diversity of viewpoints on the Madison School Board is healthy. Rewind the clock three years and imagine how some of these issues might have played out. Would there have been a public discussion? Would the vote have been 6 – 1, or ? One of the reasons the “spending gap” in the MMSD’s $339.6M+ budget was larger this year is due to the Board and Administration’s public recognition of the structural deficit. The MMSD’s “equity” has declined by half over the past 7 years. More from Channel3000.com.
Still separate after all these years
LARRY BISIG grew up in Louisville, Kentucky, where he went to Catholic school and where he now runs a local marketing firm. He has seen his local school district’s history from several angles. In 1975, when a court-ordered desegregation drive began, his public-school friends started waking up at five o’clock to be bussed to new schools across town. His Catholic school made reassuring intercom announcements, saying that the public-school buses had arrived safely—despite the violent protests and threats. And he remembers the sudden influx of new students into his own school, as white Protestant families chose a Catholic education for their children rather than sending them to public school with blacks.
By the 1990s, however, the Jefferson County school district, which includes Louisville, was far more racially integrated (see chart). Its public schools had also become much more attractive to the white families who had stayed in the district, and Catholic schools had such a hard time keeping students that Mr Bisig’s marketing firm began working with some of them to handle the stiffer competition. These days, Jefferson County is eager to keep the racially integrated school system it has created. But that integration—which began with a federal court order driven by Supreme Court precedents—is now under threat from the Supreme Court itself.
With Edline Online, The Report Card Goes 24/7 and Every Test Is An Open Book
: Edline — and other programs like it, such as SchoolFusion and School Center — provide students, teachers and parents with an online meeting place to discuss day-to-day assignments, tests and grades. But it also enables parents to keep track of a kid’s academic progress — or lack of progress — in a heretofore unthinkably micromanagerial way. Parents can know everything; children have no wiggle room. Gone is the fudge factor, the white lie. A student makes a D on a quiz, a D shows up on Edline. No matter that a student leads a discussion in class or puts forth a cogent point. Or has the possibility to retake the quiz, make up the poor grade or do extra credit work over the weekend.
This swift knowledge of success or failure can drive a wedge into families.
The Madison School District has invested in a new student information system. It will be interesting to see how this plays out, given the recent report card reductions in some schools. More here.
Money for minds: Some of Omaha’s richest support initiative to help poor kids succeed
Henry Cordes & Michaela Saunders:
Sustaining funding for such a major push will be difficult, he said. And no outside group can control the biggest void behind youths who fail: their home life.
“What do you do when the parents aren’t there?” he said. “You can’t regulate that stuff.”
Fred Schott, president and CEO of Boys and Girls Club of Omaha, said the initiative is focusing on “the right six things to make a long-term impact.”
He said, however, that the organizers should be prepared for some suspicion in the community. There’s understandable anger, he said, that it’s taken so long to recognize the area’s poverty.
“Our north Omaha community has seen many task forces,” he said.