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RSS Newsletter·2024 Referendum·Gell-Man Amnesia Effect

Newark schools, Rutgers unveil research collaboration

Steve Chambers:

s one of the state’s poorest school districts, Newark has long known it has some severe problems. Quantifying them has been another matter.
Now, the district may be one step closer to getting some answers as Superintendent Clifford Janey joined officials at Rutgers University in Newark today to announce an ambitious research collaboration.
Modeled after a 20-year relationship between the University of Chicago and that city’s public schools, the project seeks to join a growing trend of universities helping public schools use technology to better track student performance. The relationships are particularly prevalent in cities where impoverished students have long struggled and are the focus of growing national concern.

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Study Finds Millions in Waste in the Milwaukee Public Schools

Alan Borsuk:

Milwaukee Public Schools could save as much as $103 million a year if it operated like a well-run business, according to a much-anticipated report that has Gov. Jim Doyle and Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett taking steps that could lead to a takeover of the system.
The report, released Thursday, concludes that MPS does not have a culture aimed at achieving good results, and is in tenuous financial shape that will worsen without systemic changes.
The report mostly sidesteps the academic side of MPS, concentrating instead on business operations, from busing to lunch programs to purchasing practices to health insurance policies. It found waste in every area – inefficient payroll processing, overqualified maintenance teams, even pencil sharpeners that cost more than $100. The report also found more than five dozen central office jobs with six-figure salaries.
Spending outside the classroom is about a third of total MPS spending.
“To free up funds needed to close its worrisome academic achievement gaps, MPS must first get its financial house in order,” the report says.
Invoking powers granted the state by federal law, Doyle and Barrett said they will move within several weeks to create a council of community leaders to pursue major changes in the way MPS conducts business – and, ultimately, how well it educates children.

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Playing Nice: Teachers Learn to Help Kids Behave in School

Sue Shellenbarger:

When teacher Deena Randle took over a Portland, Ore., preschool class three years ago, behavior problems were so bad that “kids were bouncing off the walls, pushing and shoving, not listening — it was wild,” she says.
You’d never know it now. When Ms. Randle calls out, “Eyes up here! I need your attention,” one recent day, all 16 pairs of eyes in her class of 3- to 5-year-olds turn toward her. Beyond Ms. Randle’s considerable teaching skill, she and school officials credit a fast-growing curriculum that builds deliberate training in self-control right into the daily routine.
Behavior problems among small children are a growing issue. The possible causes are many: pressure on teachers to stress math and reading over emotional skills; family instability; a decline in playtime; heavy use of child care; or a rise in learning problems such as attention-deficit disorder. Based on preliminary findings from a federal child-care study, discussed last week at a conference for the Society for Research in Child Development in Denver, the slight increase in behavior problems found in children who spent lots of early time in child care persists all the way to age 15, in the form of more impulsivity and risk-taking.

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Triumphing Over Long Odds to Succeed at School

Sharon Otterman:

Before the economy collapsed and thrift became a national watchword, a high school senior named Wei Huang was already scouring New York City for bargains, determined to support herself on the $10 a month she had left after she paid her rent.
Ms. Huang, 20, one of 12 high school seniors named New York Times Scholars this year, immigrated to New York from China with her parents in 2007. But when her parents found the transition to American life too hard and returned to China last year, she decided to stay here alone, entranced by the city’s streetscapes and the thought of attending college here one day.
She found a job at a florist paying $560 a month, and a house to share in Ridgewood, Queens, for $550. That leaves $10 a month, which she spends carefully on large bags of rice, chicken leg quarters at 49 cents a pound, and whatever vegetables are cheapest. Throw in the two free meals a day at school, a student MetroCard and the unexpected kind act — her English teacher, for instance, gave her $100 — and she manages to get by.

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High School Dropouts: A Scandal More Shameful than AIG and Just as Costly for Taxpayers

Keli Goff:

They say there are two things you should never discuss on a first date or at a dinner party: religion and politics. But there has always been another subject that is so taboo that most people would rather arm wrestle over the other two than dare mention it.
That subject is class.
Americans have never liked discussing class status. Unlike our founding cousins over in England where your status is something bestowed upon you by birth, here we believe in a little something called the American Dream; the idea that any person regardless of race, religion or socio-economic background can become anything they want to be, including president.
But unfortunately that Dream is becoming increasingly out of reach for millions of Americans.
Though Madoff and the Wall Street meltdown have forced some of us to finally become more aware of the world beyond our comfortable middle and upper-middle class bubbles, another issue has been lurking for years that threatens to bring about even greater financial Armageddon for our country down the road: America’s burgeoning dropout epidemic. Before you decide that this issue has nothing to do with you (and therefore decide to move on from this blog post) consider these facts for a moment:

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Big Tax Jumps Loom in 10 States, including Wisconsin

Leslie Eaton:

A free fall in tax revenue is driving more state lawmakers to turn to broad-based tax increases in a bid to close widening budget gaps.
At least 10 states are considering some kind of major increase in sales or income taxes: Arizona, Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Jersey, Oregon, Washington and Wisconsin. California and New York lawmakers already have agreed on multibillion-dollar tax increases that went into effect earlier this year.
Fiscal experts say more states are likely to try to raise tax revenue in coming months, especially once they tally the latest shortfalls from April 15 income-tax filings, often the biggest single source of funds for the 43 states that levy them.
The squeeze is especially severe in states hit hardest by the recession, such as Arizona, where sales-tax revenue has fallen by 10.5%, income-tax collections are down 15.7% this fiscal year, and the government faces a $3.4 billion budget gap next year. But such shortfalls are likely to be widespread; federal income-tax receipts from individuals have dropped more than 15% in the past six months, according to Congressional Budget Office estimates.

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Juilliard Curtails Program That Serves Poor Children

Daniel Wakin:

The Juilliard School’s music-training program for poor minority schoolchildren — a rigorous curriculum that the conservatory holds up as a national model — has been slashed, disappointing dozens of children preparing to audition.
The Music Advancement Program will take back about 50 children in the fall to finish the second year of their two-year course. But it has canceled auditions next month for the incoming class, said Joseph W. Polisi, Juilliard’s president. About 50 are admitted each year.
Mr. Polisi said that the school could not raise the $400,000 necessary to finance the whole program, and that across-the-board budget cuts meant there was no money elsewhere for it. “I was the guy who started it 20 years ago, and I believe deeply in it,” Mr. Polisi said. “It’s an extremely important part of me and Juilliard.” But the likelihood of raising enough money was “exceedingly low,” he said. Mr. Polisi said he hoped to raise money to restart the program, on a smaller scale, in two years.
“It’s like cutting down the bush, but it’s going to bloom with fresh growth in a few years,” he said. “It’s not going out of business by any stretch.”

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A Look at Textbook Prices in Hong Kong

:

The cost of textbooks under the new senior academic structure has risen, with some publishers nearly doubling the prices for certain subjects.
The fewer subjects required to qualify for the future Hong Kong Diploma of Secondary Education examination, which will replace the HKCEE, meant longer lesson times per subject, which would translate into thicker textbooks, the Educational Publishers Association said.



Compulsory Form Four subjects under the new system, including Chinese, English language and mathematics, registered an average increase of 8 per cent – with prices for English-language textbooks rising 12.3 per cent.



The average prices in elective subjects such as geography (HK$401), physics (HK$510) and economics (HK$414) have also gone up. Biology textbooks will cost an average of HK$476 – an increase of 87 per cent on last year’s HK$255.



The Education Bureau released the prices of books for senior secondary subjects yesterday after assessing 152 sets of textbooks submitted by publishers.

The Hong Kong dollar is worth .129025 US Dollars at this writing.

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Evers Wins Wisconsin Education Post

Amy Hetzner:

Staving off a spirited run by a political newcomer, Tony Evers went from understudy to Wisconsin’s next schools chief Tuesday with the backing of the state’s largest teachers union and other professional educators throughout the state.



In doing so, he beat back a challenge from Rose Fernandez, a parent advocate and former pediatric trauma nurse who tried to capitalize on discontent with the educational status quo.



Evers won with the significant help of the Wisconsin Education Association Council and its affiliates throughout the state, which contributed nearly $700,000 toward his campaign.



Evers credited his victory to people’s trust in his ability to help improve state schools.



“People recognize that in order to make the changes necessary, we need a candidate with a broad base of support behind him, and we need a candidate with experience behind him,” he said.



Evers, 57, was considered the front-runner in the race ever since he declared his candidacy in October.

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UC Berkeley professor takes on school spending
In his book, “The Money Myth: School Resources, Outcomes, and Equity,” W. Norton Grubb argues that how much is spent is less important than how it is spent

Mitchell Landsberg:

SDo we spend enough on public education? What does it mean that California has fallen from near the top of per-pupil spending in the United States to very near the bottom?
Money has long been at the center of debates over education. Now a book from a UC Berkeley professor argues that the entire debate is wrongheaded.
In “The Money Myth: School Resources, Outcomes, and Equity” (Russell Sage Foundation, 2009), W. Norton Grubb argues that how much we spend is less important than how we spend it. For decades, Grubb says, school spending has inexorably risen, while student achievement has stayed relatively stagnant. Maybe it’s time to look at which expenditures actually improve education, he argues, and which are a waste. The Times’ Mitchell Landsberg spoke to Grubb about his book.
Let me try to boil down the message in your book: Money matters, but only if it’s spent well. Is that right?
That’s certainly one of the conclusions, absolutely. And again, this phrase that I use constantly in the book is, “It’s often necessary, but it’s not sufficient.” So it’s finding what the necessary resources are in the school and then directing money and other resources — like leadership, vision, cooperation, collaboration — to them that makes a difference. And part of the point is an attempt to move the debates away from money to resources, because a lot of the debates in school finance have just been about money.

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Serve America Lets Congress Take Another Bow

Gene Healy:

Last week, the House passed the Serve America Act (SAA), which will triple the number of federally funded “volunteer” positions, create a “Clean Energy Corps” to weatherize homes, and make September 11th a “National Day of Service.”
Like many federal assaults on the taxpayer, the SAA is a bipartisan offense: It passed by huge margins in both houses. Sen. Ted Kennedy, D-MA, the primary sponsor, got a standing ovation after the vote was in, and co-sponsor Orrin Hatch, the Utah Republican, gushed that “the whole Kennedy family has been a service family.”
Hatch’s statement neatly captures the fallacy behind the act – the notion that service to America is principally service to the American state.
The SAA is more carrot than stick, subsidizing volunteerism rather than mandating it. But the Obama administration prefers a more coercive approach if and when they can get away with it. Obama’s campaign-trail plan would have forced schools to require 50 hours of community service a year, making charity as popular among teens as study hall and mandatory pep rallies.

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Denver Public Schools’ eager to prove its renewal

Jeremy Meyer:

By taking the nation’s education secretary to visit two Denver schools undertaking significant reforms, U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet aims to demonstrate why Colorado’s innovation should be rewarded with government cash.
But while Denver schools showed some encouraging improvement when Bennet was superintendent, there remains a question whether there is substance behind the buzz at Denver Public Schools.
The two schools Secretary Arne Duncan will visit today — Montclair Elementary and Bruce Randolph schools — have made intentional moves to free themselves from district and union rules. Duncan will be watching that kind of innovation as his department decides how to divide $5 billion in stimulus funds nationwide through a program called “Race to the Top.”
“This allows the secretary to point to something tangible that should be rewarded in this new world order,” said Joe Williams, director of Democrats for Education Reform. “People watched (President Barack) Obama run on a campaign of change. This is kind of an attempt to show people what that looks like on the ground.”
But at both schools, the reforms are in their infancy. One has had some modest success, but scores are still low.

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Alternative British exam details released

BBC:

A group of Catholic grammar schools has released details of an alternative to the 11-plus transfer test.
Pupils will sit the tests in English and mathematics on Saturday 21 November at 28 schools across Northern Ireland.
Many state-run schools have already signed up to tests in November run by the Association of Quality Education.
Catholic Heads Association chairman Dermot Mullan said it was not just Catholic schools which had signed up for the exam.
“The schools involved are right across Northern Ireland – we are in discussion with a number of other schools as well,” he said.
The tests will be set and marked by the England-based National Foundation for Education Research. Children will receive their results at the end of January.

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What is Discovery Learning?

Barry Garelick, via email:

By way of introduction, I am neither mathematician nor mathematics teacher, but I majored in math and have used it throughout my career, especially in the last 17 years as an analyst for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. My love of and facility with math is due to good teaching and good textbooks. The teachers I had in primary and secondary school provided explicit instruction and answered students’ questions; they also posed challenging problems that required us to apply what we had learned. The textbooks I used also contained explanations of the material with examples that showed every step of the problem solving process.
I fully expected the same for my daughter, but after seeing what passed for mathematics in her elementary school, I became increasingly distressed over how math is currently taught in many schools.
Optimistically believing that I could make a difference in at least a few students’ lives, I decided to teach math when I retire. I enrolled in education school about two years ago, and have one class and a 15-week student teaching requirement to go. Although I had a fairly good idea of what I was in for with respect to educational theories, I was still dismayed at what I found in my mathematics education courses.
In class after class, I have heard that when students discover material for themselves, they supposedly learn it more deeply than when it is taught directly. Similarly, I have heard that although direct instruction is effective in helping students learn and use algorithms, it is allegedly ineffective in helping students develop mathematical thinking. Throughout these courses, a general belief has prevailed that answering students’ questions and providing explicit instruction are “handing it to the student” and preventing them from “constructing their own knowledge”–to use the appropriate terminology. Overall, however, I have found that there is general confusion about what “discovery learning” actually means. I hope to make clear in this article what it means, and to identify effective and ineffective methods to foster learning through discovery.

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Democrats and Poor Kids

Wall Street Journal Editorial:

Education Secretary Arne Duncan did a public service last week when he visited New York City and spoke up for charter schools and mayoral control of education. That was the reformer talking. The status quo Mr. Duncan was on display last month when he let Congress kill a District of Columbia voucher program even as he was sitting on evidence of its success.
U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, left, and Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley, read to first graders at Doswell Brooks Elementary School in Capitol Heights, Md. on Wednesday, April 1, 2009.
In New York City with its 1.1 million students, mayoral control has resulted in better test scores and graduation rates, while expanding charter schools, which means more and better education choices for low-income families. But mayoral control expires in June unless state lawmakers renew it, and the United Federation of Teachers is working with Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver to weaken or kill it.
President Obama’s stimulus is sending some $100 billion to the nation’s school districts. What will he demand in return? The state budget passed by the New York legislature last week freezes funding for charters but increases it by more that $400 million for other public schools. Perhaps a visit to a charter school in Harlem would help Mr. Obama honor his reform pledge. “I’m looking at the data here in front of me,” Mr. Duncan told the New York Post. “Graduation rates are up. Test scores are up. Teacher salaries are up. Social promotion was eliminated. Dramatically increasing parental choice. That’s real progress.”

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A Kentucky View of the “Nation’s Report Card” (NAEP)

Freedom Kentucky, via a kind reader’s email:

The NAEP is a federally administered academic testing program for school systems throughout the nation. NAEP documents often refer to the assessments as “The Nation’s Report Card”.
The NAEP has been of considerable interest in many states, including Kentucky, as it generally offers the only state-to-state comparisions available for fourth and eighth grade academic performance. However, there are often considerable problems involved with making these comparisons, as discussed below.
The NAEP is operated by the US Department of Education at the direction of the Congress. It is administered by the National Center for Education Statistics. Since 1988, NAEP policy has been determined by the congressionally created non-partisan National Assessment Governing Board.
Over the years the NAEP has periodically assessed various academic areas.
The NAEP began in 1969 as a strictly nation-wide test, prohibited by law from producing scores for either individual states or local school jurisdictions. The testing samples were drawn from across the entire nation in such a way that the results would actually provide invalid scores even if the students from each state could be separately identified. In succeeding years, more testing has been added to cover both state level results and, most recently, results for some of the nation’s largest urban school districts.

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Wikipedia’s Old-Fashioned Revolution

Grodon Crovitz:

In 1993, Microsoft launched an innovative multimedia encyclopedia, Encarta, delivered through CD-ROM. It nearly put the Encyclopaedia Britannica out of business. Last week, Microsoft announced that it will close Encarta down.
Encarta could not compete with Wikipedia, which plays by different rules, using the online medium to beat earlier encyclopedias at their own mission. Created and maintained by anonymous people around the world, Wikipedia is by far the biggest and most popular encyclopedia ever. Despite being created by amateurs, it has the potential to become the most professional.
This may be a startling claim. There are infamous inaccuracies, such as the mischief-maker who edited the profile of a well-known journalist to say he’d been accused of assassinating the Kennedys. There have been drawn-out battles about whether the city is Gdansk or Danzig. (And whoever created the entry about me incorrectly listed my ex-wife as my current wife. My actual wife was not amused.)
But Wikipedia is quietly transforming itself into a hybrid of amateurs and professionals. Anyone can create entries — it has 10 million articles in 253 languages — but the ultimate editing is increasingly done by well-trained researchers. This trend is important because by some measures Wikipedia is in the top five Web sites, it is often the top result on Google searches, and it gets 97% of traffic to online encyclopedias.

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An Update on the Madison School Board Election

Royston Sim:

One of the most striking things about Tuesday’s contested Madison School Board race is that challenger Donald Gors does not cite any policy differences he has with incumbent Arlene Silveira, who is the board’s president.



“I don’t disagree with anything,” Gors said in an interview after a candidate forum Saturday morning. “It’s just that there are differences in people and what they offer.”



That sentiment showed at the forum attended by about 10 people at the Lakeview Branch of the Madison Public Library, where the candidates presented their positions on a range of issues. For the most part, Gors did not disagree with Silveira, although he did emphasize different things.



“School safety is job one,” said Gors, 58, reiterating a theme that he has raised in what has been limited coverage of a quiet race. He runs two businesses out of his home. He is a distributor for Eco Friendly Indoor Solutions and owns ClearViewCleanWindows.


Gors, who has a daughter at Memorial High School, said schools could install automatic sensors and door locks for security. More importantly, he added, all staff in school buildings should develop a culture of promoting a safe environment at all times.


Silveira, meanwhile, called for a multi-faceted approach toward safety, encompassing facilities, school programs and students.

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Waitlisted? Here’s What You Do

Jay Matthews:

Are you stuck on a college waiting list? Frustrating, isn’t it? You feel disrespected, unlucky. But you are not alone. Some selective schools send more wait-list letters than acceptance letters. This year’s economic uncertainties might produce the largest number of wait-listed applicants ever.



What can you do about it? I have some ideas. There is only one job other than newspapering that I would be even remotely qualified for: college admissions consultant. I have written a lot on the subject, including a guidebook. My clients would be careerist, overinvolved parents just like me. In truth, I couldn’t take the pressure, but for fun, let’s pretend that you are paying me $300 an hour to get you off that waiting list. Here’s the plan:



Winning the wait-list game, like getting to the Final Four, is all about commitment. You must decide if a college that wait-listed you is still your first choice. If so, then go after it. (Pick just one school. No others allowed. Otherwise, someone will tell on you, and you will be dead.)

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Discord builds over new downtown Los Angeles arts school

Mitchell Landsberg:

A tug of war erupted last week over L.A.’s new downtown arts high school, with some of its biggest supporters declaring that they had given up on the Los Angeles Unified School District and wanted the $242-million campus turned over to a charter school organization. In response to the critics, who included philanthropist Eli Broad, Supt. Ramon C. Cortines shot back: “There is not a for-sale sign on it.”



The tension had been building for months, fueled in part by the district’s plan to reserve most of the school’s seats for students from the surrounding neighborhood rather than open it up to the most talented students districtwide. It bubbled over after two star principals from the East Coast turned down offers to take charge, leaving the school leaderless less than six months before it opens in September.



“This pace is so slow that we have lost total confidence that the district could open this school in September as a really excellent place for students,” said Maria Casillas, president of Families in Schools, a nonprofit organization that encourages parental involvement in education. She is on the board of Discovering the Arts, an organization created to support the downtown arts school, and was on a design team for the school until she recently resigned in frustration.



Casillas and others have reached out to Judy Burton, the president and chief executive of the Alliance for College Ready Public Schools, a successful charter organization, in hopes that she could run the arts school with Board of Education approval. Burton, a former top official at L.A. Unified, said she would do so only in partnership with the district, and with the blessing of Cortines and board President Monica Garcia.

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The Orwellian language of Wall Street finds its way to the Treasury Department.

Daniel Gross:

In his timeless 1946 essay “Politics and the English Language,” George Orwell condemned political rhetoric as a tool used “to make lies sound truthful” and “to give an appear­ance of solidity to pure wind.” Were he alive today, Orwell might well be moved to pen a com­panion piece on the use of financial lingo. Remember those toxic assets? The poorly performing mortgages and collateralized debt obligations festering on the books of banks that made truly exe­crable lending decisions? In the latest federal bank rescue plan, they’ve been transformed into “legacy loans” and “lega­cy securities”–safe for professional in­vestors to purchase, provided, of course, they get lots of cheap government credit.
It’s as if some thoughtful person had amassed, through decades of careful hus­bandry, a valuable collection that’s now being left as a blessing for posterity. Using the word legacy to describe phenomena that are causing financial car­nage is “crazy,” according to George Lakoff, a Berkeley professor of cognitive science and linguistics, because “legacy typically suggests something positive.” More insidiously, the word is frequently deployed to deflect blame. Legacy finan­cial issues are, by definition, holdovers from prior regimes. Word sleuths advise me that legacy derives from an ancient In­do-Aryan root meaning, “It wasn’t my fault, and I should still get a bonus this year even though we lost billions of dollars.”

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Boston Teacher’s Union vs. Teach for America

James Vaznis:

But the Boston Teachers Union has a message for those eager Teach for America recruits: Thanks, but no thanks.
With the first batch of 20 corps members scheduled to arrive in the fall, just months after probable teacher layoffs, the union has sent a letter to the popular program objecting to its help.
“We already have hundreds of good, ‘surplus’ teachers; we don’t need [Teach for America] to provide us any additional help,” Richard Stutman, the union’s president, wrote in a letter sent this week. “By coming here, you will only make matters worse.”
While public service is a key mission of Teach for America, the program does not provide free help. Participating school districts must pay the recruits the same salary as a beginning teacher in the district, which in Boston would be $46,291.
Recruits must make a two-year commitment and are allowed to run their own classrooms after completing a five-week training program.

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Class Trip



A rite of spring, perhaps.

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School districts have nearly $1 billion in reserve

Tim Pugmire:

At a time when many Minnesota school boards have been cutting programs and laying off teachers, school districts as a whole are sitting on record budget reserves.
Total general fund reserves for the state’s 340 school districts and 153 charter schools grew last year to nearly $1 billion.
Some state lawmakers have noticed the money. And they say schools are well positioned to absorb a financial hit to help erase the state’s $4.6 billion budget deficit.
St. Paul, Minn. — Gov. Tim Pawlenty and House Democrats want to delay payments to school districts as part of their budget plans. Lawmakers have used the accounting shift before to help balance the books.
Holding back some of the promised funding until the second year of the two-year budget cycle comes at a cost.
Some school districts would be forced to take out loans to pay their bills. But some lawmakers say many districts could handle the shift by tapping into budget reserves.

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The Sudden Charm of Public School

Terry Karush Rogers:

FOR some young families who bought during the housing boom, having it all meant an affordable brood-sized apartment in possession of a good public school zone. But other parents in pursuit of real estate never even thought about schools. They assumed they would send their children to private school, often because they too had followed that route.
That was before the economic crisis. Now, as many would-be private school parents scramble for a good public school, there is a despairing recognition that in this respect, geography is destiny: With odds of being accepted into a popular school in another zone slimmer than ever, they either live in a neighborhood with a decent elementary or they don’t.
Renters and first-time buyers are in the best position to light out for better school zones with their young offspring. Meanwhile, landlocked owners — unable or unwilling to sell in a down market or to spend around $33,000 a year to send their child to private school — are panicking.
Trapped by their real estate, these parents are swallowing a bitter pill: had they sold their apartments a year ago, their profits might have financed an entire private school education.

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On Music Education

Bob Lefsetz:

First we met Seth Godin at Maison du Chocolat. It was fascinating to hear him riff on music education, Felice’s world. He lamented teachers married to excellence, performance of material that most people were not enamored of. He boiled it down to a sense of mastery. That by learning how to play an instrument, a child experienced a sense of accomplishment. That’s the message of music education, not exposing people to the classics or some extrapolation about IQ improvement. That’s Seth’s gift, the ability to execute an insightful surgical strike, right to the heart of the matter.
Are people ready for it?

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Social Media Course Defended on Twitter

Jessica Shepherd, via a kind reader’s email:

Lecturers criticised for setting up £4,000 social media degree are fighting back on Twitter

Academics criticised for offering a masters degree covering Twitter and other social networking websites are defending themselves against the media onslaught – where else, but on Twitter.

Students on the £4,000 one-year Social Media degree, offered by Birmingham City University, will explore how we communicate on the websites and how they can be used for marketing.

Other modules on the course will teach students how to start a blog and podcasting techniques. The course is being advertised through a video on the university’s website.

The course convenor, Jon Hickman, who is posting regularly today on his Twitter feed, responded to media coverage of the course, saying it was not for “IT geeks”.

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Study Supports Washington, DC School Vouchers

Maria Glod:

A U.S. Education Department study released yesterday found that District students who were given vouchers to attend private schools outperformed public school peers on reading tests, findings likely to reignite debate over the fate of the controversial program.

The D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program, the first federal initiative to spend taxpayer dollars on private school tuition, was created by a Republican-led Congress in 2004 to help students from low-income families. Congress has cut off federal funding after the 2009-10 school year unless lawmakers vote to reauthorize it.

Overall, the study found that students who used the vouchers received reading scores that placed them nearly four months ahead of peers who remained in public school. However, as a group, students who had been in the lowest-performing public schools did not show those gains. There was no difference in math performance between the groups.

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An Update on the April 7, 2009 Madison School Board Race

Royston Sim:

Mathiak said the district needs to restructure how it approaches school funding.


“We will not cut something for another,” Mathiak said. “We need to change the way we use resources and find other ways to manage them without hurting people. We have to make things more efficient.”


The candidates agreed that schools need to reach out to parents of minorities and form more community partnerships with businesses and groups.


Silveira said schools need to cultivate trust, understand what works for parents and how to make them comfortable. She cited south-side Franklin Elementary, which has parent engagement groups, as a positive example that other schools should emulate.



“It’s very important to remember there isn’t one model, we have to develop trust and understanding between schools and parents,” Silveira said.



One area where Gors and Silveira differed greatly was on the need for continuity in leadership.

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THE AGE OF COMMODIFIED INTELLIGENCE

More Intelligent Life:

The commute is just long enough to be useful. Over the speakers comes the reflective voice of Harold Bloom, telling the businessman as he sits in traffic about the “The Art of Reading a Poem”. Across town on the subway, a student spends the first day of spring break on a visit to the Guggenheim. And overhead, as a plane clears the skyline, a woman unpacks her Oprah edition of “Light in August”.
As a still life, the “Age of Mass Intelligence” is compelling. No one doubts that reality TV and gossip journalism increasingly share mental space with Joyce and Ravel. But intelligence is not a matter of pressing more pieces of culture into the great jigsaw puzzle of the mind. Unless operas and concerts are prophylactics against a churlish existence, we are not wising up. We are merely trying to buy wisdom.
This is an Age of Commodified Intelligence, a time of conspicuously consumed high culture in which intellectual life is meticulously measured and branded.
Equal measures success and hubris are to blame. By the end of the last century, exponential gains in science and in living standards made advancement seem inevitable, progress a matter of putting one scientific foot in front of the other. The intellectual horizon felt flatter, more intelligible, more accessible. A rise in intellectual exuberance is therefore unsurprising. Enrichment has certainly been on the march.

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Nothing to Think About

Intelligent Life:

There is a priceless exchange in the 20th episode of “The Sopranos”–the soap-opera about a New Jersey mobster whose stressful career brings him to the couch of a psychotherapist, Jennifer Melfi. Tony Soprano is annoyed with his teenage son, who has been moaning about the ultimate absurdity of life:
Melfii: Sounds to me like Anthony junior may have stumbled onto existentialism.
Tony: F____’ internet!
Melfi: No, no, no. It’s a European philosophy.
Quite so; one cannot blame the internet for everything. Existentialism has roots in the 19th-century thought of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, but it is most famously linked with restless French students in the 1960s and the writings of Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus. Sure enough, Anthony junior has been assigned Camus’s novel “L’Etranger” in class. It also doesn’t help his precarious state of mind when his grandmother bitterly tells him “in the end, you die in your own arms… It’s all a big Nothing.”
Well, plus ça change. It is not only on television that nihilist strains of existentialism continue to tempt young minds, and no doubt the minds of some grandmothers. Last autumn I taught a seminar about ideas of nothingness at the New School, a university in New York. Most of the students were already keen on Sartre and Camus, and among the many facets of nothingness that we looked at in science, literature, art and philosophy, it was death and the pointlessness of life that most gripped them. They showed a polite interest in the role of vacuum in 17th-century physics and in the development of the concept of zero. But existentialist angst was the real draw.

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An Interview with Eli Broad

Steve Pearlstein interviews Eli Broad on Education:


Broad discusses school choice, differential pay for math, science and Michelle Rhee.

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A Discussion of New York City School Reforms

Jennifer Medina:

This week brought their latest display of strange bedfellows, as the couple, Schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein and the Rev. Al Sharpton, co-sponsored a conference of the Education Equality Project, at which the audience included the left-leaning mayor of Los Angeles, Antonio R. Villaraigosa, and Newt Gingrich, the Republican former House speaker.


The pair is not lacking for shtick — rarely do they conclude a public performance without referring to themselves as looking something akin to a before-and-after advertisement for hair transplants. (Mr. Klein has a rather sparse scalp next to Mr. Sharpton’s signature bouffant.)


Since forming the alliance nearly a year ago, Mr. Klein and Mr. Sharpton have raised more than $1 million to promote school improvement across the country.


With a coalition that includes several black and Hispanic elected Democratic officials at all levels, the group has embraced many policies once anathema to the Democratic Party — including increasing the number of charter schools, providing performance pay for teachers and expanding the use of data to measure performance at every level of the schools.

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Treating Autism as if Vaccines Caused ItThe theory may be dead, but the treatments live on.

Arthur Allen:

A federal court may have changed the public discourse about the safety of vaccines in February, when it dismissed the theory that they cause autism. But vaccine damage is still the reigning paradigm for a rump caucus of thousands of parents who turn to physicians with a remarkable set of beliefs and practices in hope of finding recourse for their children’s ills.


To sift through the 15,000-page record of the Autism Omnibus hearings and the decisions by the three special masters who considered the evidence is to peek into a medical universe where autism is considered a disease of environmental toxicity, rather than an inherited disorder, and where doctors expose children to hundreds of tests simply to justify the decision to “detoxify” them. In some cases, the judges found, doctors simply ignored data that didn’t fit the diagnosis.


The court came down hard on the alternative medical practitioners who tailor their treatments to fit theories of vaccine damage. Among the doctors criticized was Jeff Bradstreet, a former Christian preacher in Melbourne, Fla., who has treated 4,000 children with neurological disorders. Among the children was Colten Snyder, whose case was one of those considered by the court.

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The Peter Principle Lives On

Leigh Buchanan & Robert Sutton:

Forty years ago, Laurence Peter and Raymond Hull invented business satire with the publication of The Peter Principle: Why Things Always Go Wrong. The principle posits that employees are rewarded for competence by being shoved up hierarchies until they reach a position that overwhelms their skills. At that point, they stick. Consequently, “In time, every post tends to be occupied by an employee who is incompetent to carry out its duties,” the authors wrote. Inc. editor-at-large Leigh Buchanan discussed the idea’s enduring relevance with Stanford management professor Robert Sutton, who wrote an introduction to the 40th-anniversary edition. (Peter and Hull died in 1990 and 1985, respectively.)

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Get Smart: INTELLIGENCE AND HOW TO GET IT Why Schools and Culture Count

Jim Holt:

Success in life depends on intelligence, which is measured by I.Q. tests. Intelligence is mostly a matter of heredity, as we know from studies of identical twins reared apart. Since I.Q. differences between individuals are mainly genetic, the same must be true for I.Q. differences between groups. So the I.Q. ranking of racial/ethnic groups — Ashkenazi Jews on top, followed by East Asians, whites in general, and then blacks — is fixed by nature, not culture. Social programs that seek to raise I.Q. are bound to be futile. Cognitive inequalities, being written in the genes, are here to stay, and so are the social inequalities that arise from them.
What I have just summarized, with only a hint of caricature, is the hereditarian view of intelligence. This is the view endorsed, for instance, by Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray in “The Bell Curve” (1994), and by Arthur R. Jensen in “The g Factor” (1998). Although hereditarianism has been widely denounced as racism wrapped in pseudoscience, these books drew on a large body of research and were carefully reasoned. Critics often found it easier to impugn the authors’ motives than to refute their conclusions.

Intelligence and How to Get It.

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Religious education in Germany

The Economist:

BY AMERICAN standards, German culture wars are mild affairs. A spat in Berlin over teaching religion in schools may be an exception. Next month the city will vote on whether schools should teach the subject as an alternative to an ethics course. The debate is only partly about how God fits into the classroom; it is also about how Muslims fit into Berlin.
In most of Germany, the constitution already makes religious instruction part of the curriculum (secular students can opt out). But Berlin and two other states are exempt. The city’s godlessness was shaken in 2005 by the “honour killing” of a young Turkish woman. As an antidote, Berlin’s government brought in a non-religious ethics course a year later.
Click here!
For Berlin’s beleaguered believers, this was both threat and opportunity. Enrolment in (voluntary) religious classes outside school hours dropped. But some religious folk spotted a chance to sneak in more traditional teaching. Thus was born Pro-Reli, a movement that has festooned Berlin with red-and-white posters demanding “free choice between ethics and religion” and collected 270,000 signatures to force a referendum.
The debate is over whether religious teaching fosters or hinders tolerance. Pro-Reli’s critics fear that separating schoolchildren by religion may undermine social peace. Supporters retort that people with strong religious convictions respect faith, whatever its form. Christoph Lehmann, Pro-Reli’s leader, defines tolerance as “accepting everyone as he is”. The left, he says, belittles religious differences and calls that tolerance.

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Eleminate the Education Major at UDC?

Susan Kinzie:

The University of the District of Columbia plans to shut down its struggling undergraduate education department, which, officials say, is out of touch with current thinking on how to train teachers and fails to graduate the vast majority of its students.
Usually, 7 or 8 percent of the students who enroll in the department have graduated from it within six years, according to UDC data. Professors said that is primarily because many cannot pass a national standardized test of basic high school-level reading, writing and math skills.

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Michigan State Test Scores Released

Michigan Department of Education:

Scores on the statewide math tests have risen for the fourth consecutive year, the Michigan Department of Education announced today. Students’ scores in social studies and writing rose overall, as well.
Over 75 percent of students in grades 3-8 tested as “proficient or above” on the Michigan Educational Assessment Program (MEAP) math tests given in the Fall of 2008, including 91 percent of third graders. The greatest improvement was among seventh graders, where 83 percent scored proficient or above, compared to 73 percent the year before.
“There is a direct connection between our kids learning more in the classroom and getting the jobs we need in Michigan’s economy,” said Governor Jennifer M. Granholm. “We are glad to see these signs of success but we know we have a lot of work to do to give Michigan the best educated workforce in the nation and that must be our goal.”
Michigan students were tested in October 2008 on skills learned through the end of the previous year. Students’ MEAP scores are divided into four performance levels: Not Proficient, Partially Proficient, Proficient, and Advanced. Students who place in either the Proficient or Advanced levels are considered to be “proficient or above” in that subject.

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Academic March Madness

Lindsey Luebchow:

There haven’t been many upsets in this year’s NCAA men’s basketball tournament, as big name basketball powerhouses have dominated the hardwood. But evaluate the Sweet Sixteen based on the most important academic competition of studying for and obtaining a meaningful degree and you’ll find that most of the top teams wouldn’t even come close to cutting down the nets in Detroit early next month.


Higher Ed Watch’s third annual Academic Sweet Sixteen examines the remaining teams in the NCAA men’s basketball tournament to see which squads are matching their on-court success with academic achievement in the classroom. And for the third consecutive year, academic indicators produce a championship game match-up that isn’t on anyone’s radar: Purdue versus Villanova, with Purdue’s 80 percent graduation rate trumping Villanova’s 67 percent. The University of North Carolina and Michigan State, meanwhile, round out the Final Four with graduation rates of 60 percent.

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On Milwaukee’s Voucher Schools

Eugene Kane:

Over the years, I’ve often expressed my reluctance to join Howard Fuller in embracing the private school voucher program.


Fuller is a longtime Milwaukee educator and a nationally known leader of the school choice movement. He’s been involved in efforts to improve the education of black children since long before the program’s inception in 1990.



I have tremendous respect for Fuller but never really agreed with his advocacy of this particular educational policy due to my suspicions of where it would ultimately lead. There are a handful of solid private voucher schools in town, but I’ve seen too many examples of failed schools run by well-meaning adults – and in some cases by charlatans and hustlers – that eventually have left students with their studies temporarily interrupted.



There’s also the corrosive political atmosphere that has turned support for school choice into a partisan litmus test – Republicans for, Democrats against. I’ve often wondered why this community spends millions of dollars in taxpayer money to fund two separate school systems when it’s clear there’s not enough money to fund one properly.


Fuller always had a ready answer. For him, the main issue was giving low-income children a quality education. If the public schools couldn’t do that, he reasoned, why not give voucher schools a chance?



Last week, the debate over school choice reached another level after a long-awaited report – based on several studies of Milwaukee’s parental choice program and Milwaukee public schools – found essentially no major difference in the academic success of students in both systems. Fuller said those conclusions, along with recent proposals by Gov. Jim Doyle to increase accountability of choice schools, represented a significant moment for his movement.

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Walter Payton Prep publishes Cabrini-Green issue

Michael Miner:

To their credit, it occurred to the student journalists of Walter Payton College Prep that an important question to ask about nearby Cabrini-Green was whether their own fancy new school sticks in the residents’ craw.
For as the Payton student paper, the Pawprint, reports in its most recent issue, the story of Cabrini-Green is now about demolition, gentrification, and displacement. “The people and the culture of Cabrini-Green are slowly being phased out,” write Julian Antos and Danielle Bennon, “leaving the few thousand remaining residents struggling to make do with what’s left of their homes. . . . The poster child of the transition from a ghetto to a Gold Coast neighborhood is inarguably Walter Payton College Prep, a school filled with good intentions . . . but a school that Edna Morris, a security guard at Schiller [Elementary], thinks of as an outfit that sits in the community but doesn’t make an effort to be a part of it.”
Antos (a junior) and Bennon (a senior) draw a contrast between Payton, just northeast of Cabrini at 1034 N. Wells, and Schiller, in the heart of the project. “CPS thinks of a school with 35 kids to a classroom, no library or special ed. classes, and no art programs as a well-run institution,” Schiller vice principal Brian Billings is quoted as saying. Payton is another world. Someone from the Department of Children and Family Services comments, “You should see the look on a kid’s face when he sees a new school going up in his neighborhood and he realizes that they won’t let him in”; and Antos and Bennon add, on their own authority, “For better or worse, Payton is part of a movement to phase Cabrini-Green out, making the building all the more frightening to local students.”

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High School Debate Lacking in Madison

Nick Bubb, via Isthmus:

ast week’s Isthmus reminded me that school board elections are happening this April. The lack of discussion this time around stands in stark contrast to the amount of discussion that occurred in 2007. Some of the 2007 issues stick out in my memory, because many of the candidates chose to highlight the value of speech and debate. Two year’s later, I wonder if the rhetoric of praising the value of speech and debate has translated into supporting the activity.
In the Spring of 2007, as an assistant forensics coach preparing for the state championship, it was nice to hear that members of the community had taken notice of James Madison Memorial’s success. (Memorial won state forensics championships in 2002, 2003, 2004, and 2006. JMM also won last year and they’ve taken individual championships each year). Back then, we were just about the only game in town. Since then, Madison West, Sun Prairie, and Middleton have developed quality forensic teams. At last year’s state forensics tournament, Memorial went home with the championship, West placed eighth, and Sun Praire placed fourth.
Debate, however, is a different story. Madison West has lost most of their debate team; while Middleton has developed one. Madison East and LaFollette, are no where to be found for either debate or forensics. Sure, they have teams. But their teams do not compete in the same way that Memorial/West/Sun Prairie/Middleton do.

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Education Secretary Says Aid Hinges on New Data

Sam Dillon:

Secretary of Education Arne Duncan told the nation’s governors on Wednesday that in exchange for billions of dollars in federal education aid provided under the economic stimulus law, he wants new information about the performance of their public schools, much of which could be embarrassing.
In a “Dear Governor” letter to the 50 states, Mr. Duncan said $44 billion in stimulus money was being made available to states immediately. To qualify for a second phase of financing later this year, however, governors will need to provide reams of detailed educational information.
The data is likely to reveal that in many states, tests have been dumbed down so that students score far higher than on tests administered by the federal Department of Education.
It will also probably show that many local teacher-evaluation systems are so perfunctory that they rate 99 of every 100 teachers as excellent and that diplomas often mean so little that millions of high school graduates each year must enroll in remediation classes upon entering college.

Wisconsin’s academic standards have been criticized by the Fordham foundation, among others.
aSam Dillon:

Secretary of Education Arne Duncan told the nation’s governors on Wednesday that in exchange for billions of dollars in federal education aid provided under the economic stimulus law, he wants new information about the performance of their public schools, much of which could be embarrassing.
In a “Dear Governor” letter to the 50 states, Mr. Duncan said $44 billion in stimulus money was being made available to states immediately. To qualify for a second phase of financing later this year, however, governors will need to provide reams of detailed educational information.
The data is likely to reveal that in many states, tests have been dumbed down so that students score far higher than on tests administered by the federal Department of Education.
It will also probably show that many local teacher-evaluation systems are so perfunctory that they rate 99 of every 100 teachers as excellent and that diplomas often mean so little that millions of high school graduates each year must enroll in remediation classes upon entering college.

Wisconsin’s academic standards have been criticized by the Fordham foundation, among others.
Robert Tomsho has more.
Robert Tomsho has more.

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Cynicism We Can Believe In

Simon Critchley:

SOME 2,300 years after his death, Diogenes the Cynic dramatically interrupted a recent New York State Senate committee meeting. Wearing a long, white beard and carrying his trademark lamp in broad daylight, the ancient philosopher — who once described himself as “a Socrates gone mad” — claimed to be looking for an honest man in politics. Considering the never-ending allegations of financial corruption that flow from the sump of Albany, it’s no surprise that he was unsuccessful.
This resurrected Diogenes was, in fact, Randy Credico, a comedian who says he is considering challenging Senator Charles Schumer in the 2010 Democratic primary. Whatever boost Mr. Credico’s prank provides his campaign, it might also cause us to reflect a little on the meaning of cynicism — and how greatly we still need Diogenes.
Cynicism is actually not at all cynical in the modern sense of the word. It bears no real resemblance to that attitude of negativity and jaded scornfulness that sees the worst of intentions behind the apparent good motives of others.

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Oprah Winfrey school in South Africa faces second sex scandal

Caroline Hedley:

The girls were suspended last week for the alleged sexual harassment of fellow pupils at the Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy School For Girls in Henley-on-Clip, near Johannesburg.
According to the Afrikaans on Sunday newspaper, one 15-year-old “preyed” on a schoolmate and coerced others into lying to officials investigating the alleged incidents.
Six other pupils have been excluded from the $46 million (£32 million) girls-only boarding school after being alleged to have touched each other intimately, or “intimidating others into partaking of inappropriate behaviours”.
A letter sent to one of the suspended girls’ parents is said to have read: “You have been found guilty of physical contact of a sexual nature with another pupil on campus, harassment, bullying other girls on campus and of being dishonest by not telling investigators the whole truth”.
The girl claims the accusations are false and has blamed other girls.

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Wisconsin Lags in Closing the Education Gap – Education Trust

Alan Borsuk:

Wisconsin is not making as much progress raising student achievement and closing the gaps between have and have-not students as the nation as a whole, according to a report released Tuesday by the Education Trust, an influential, Washington-based nonprofit group.

As with other reports in recent years, the analysis showed the achievement of African-American students remains a major issue overall and that the gaps between black students and white students in Wisconsin are among the largest in the United States.

But it also analyzed the progress made in recent years and found Wisconsin lagging when it came to all racial and ethnic groups – and the news was generally not good across a wide range of measures.

Daria Hall, director of kindergarten through 12th-grade policy for the Education Trust, said, “What you see is when you look at any of the critical milestones in education – fourth-grade reading, eighth-grade math, high school graduation, collegiate graduation – Wisconsin and African-American students in particular are far below their peers in other states. This shows that while there has been some improvement, it is not nearly fast enough for the state’s young people, communities or the economy as a whole.”

For example, consider reading scores for fourth-graders in 1998 and in 2007 in the testing program known as the National Assessment of Education Progress. White students nationwide improved their scores seven points over the nine-year period (on a scale where average scores were in the low 200s), while in Wisconsin, the improvement was one point. For black fourth-graders, the nationwide gain was 11 points, while in Wisconsin it was four. And for low-income students in general, the national gain was 10 points, while in Wisconsin it was two points.

Wisconsin lagged the nation when it came to similar comparisons involving the graduation rate for black students, the percentages of black and Hispanic students graduating college within six years of finishing high school and the degree to which there had been improvements in recent years in the size of black/white achievement gaps.

This pdf chart compares the 50 States and the District of Columbia.


Related: Tony Evers and Rose Fernandez are running for Wisconsin DPI Superintendent in the April 7, 2009 spring election. Capital Newspapers’ Capital Times Editorial Board endorsed Tony Evers today.

Watch or listen to a recent debate here. SIS links on the race.

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Milwaukee’s Howard Fuller & School Vouchers

Bruce Murphy:

c Schools, he was seen by some liberal critics as a right wing-toady who had betrayed his old ideology by getting in bed with conservative school choice supporters. That view was always simplistic, as his bold call for reform of school choice, announced last week, proved once again. His new position – which could greatly alter the politics of school choice – raises many questions.

For starters, why the seeming flip-flop by Fuller? The answer is that he’s never been an ideologue. The old Fuller, after all, was a Democrat. He worked to get Democrat Tony Earl elected in 1982 and was rewarded with a position running the state’s Department of Employment Relations. And his commitment to public schools was personified by his work as MPS superintendent from 1991-1995, which included championing an über-liberal referendum to spend some $400 million to construct new schools, which was defeated by the taxpayers.

But Fuller was more often a critic of MPS, among other things proposing (in the late 1980s) to create an all-black school district that would be carved out of MPS. (That idea, too, went down in flames.) Fuller was always a supporter of alternative schools – or any schools, really – that would provide a good education for minority and low-income students. And he was always willing to work with business leaders and politicians of either party to accomplish his ends. For at least the last 10 years, that has meant mostly Republicans, as he embraced school choice as the solution to urban education in Milwaukee.

But the latest results of the five-year study on school choice, reported last week in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, showed there is no statistically significant difference in achievement between MPS and voucher schools. The schools are cheaper, but because of the partisan legislation battles over voucher funding, the program’s complicated funding formula awards most of the savings (some $82 million a year) to every place in the state but Milwaukee. This city’s property taxpayers are paying $45 million more annually for a program that appears to be having little positive impact on education.

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Some schools are cutting back on homework

Seema Mehta:

Rachel Bennett, 12, loves playing soccer, spending time with her grandparents and making jewelry with beads. But since she entered a magnet middle school in the fall — and began receiving two to four hours of homework a night — those activities have fallen by the wayside.
“She’s only a kid for so long,” said her father, Alex Bennett, of Silverado Canyon. “There’s been tears and frustration and family arguments. Everyone gets burned out and tired.”
Bennett is part of a vocal movement of parents and educators who contend that homework overload is robbing children of needed sleep and playtime, chipping into family dinners and vacations and overly stressing young minds. The objections have been raised for years but increasingly, school districts are listening. They are banning busywork, setting time limits on homework and barring it on weekends and over vacations.

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Reforming Education in America

Jay MacDonough:

According to a 2005 Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) study, the United States is tied for first place with Switzerland when it comes to annual spending per student in public schooling. Each of the two countries spends more than $11,000 per student per year, while the average spending in developed countries at $7343. The United States spends 7% of it’s GDP on education, second in the world.
Sadly, that doesn’t mean U.S. students are roughly 50% better educated than the students in these other countries. In fact, (given the topic it seems appropriate to award it with a grade) American education would most likely earn a sold “C”.
The 2007 Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) showed U.S. student’s science and mathematics scores in the middle of the pack:

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Lead on Education

Fort Worth Star-Telegram:

Just how desperate must public schools get before Texas lawmakers find the gumption to fix the flawed system they created in the first place?
From the perspective of new House Speaker Joe Straus, it isn’t enough that superintendents across the state are pleading that their districts will have to deplete savings, slash programs or increase local tax rates substantially — all of which some have already done — if the Legislature doesn’t repair the funding mechanism adopted in a 2006 special session.
“We tend not to address situations until we absolutely have to, and we don’t have to this session,” Straus said during a wide-ranging meeting with the Star-Telegram Editorial Board last week.
“The political will doesn’t exist to do anything major” on school finance this session, he said.
Straus brings a welcome open-mindedness to the speaker’s chair, something missing during the autocratic reign of his predecessor, Tom Craddick.

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Jay Cross Wants No More Learners

David Gurteen:

Take a look and see what you think of this three-and-a-half minute rant about leveling the preacher-and-congregation model of learning from Jay Cross. I of course love it as you will recognize that is what my knowledge cafes are about. You can hear the story here of how I started the knowledge cafes in response to death-by-powerpoint presentations.
But also read the comments on Jays post. Some people do not agree with him. But note Jay is not saying that we need to get totally away from the teacher-student model of learning more that we need to shift the balance. Jay himself is in preach mode in delivering the rant and I am sure he was well aware of it. My Knowledge cafes also have a chalk-and-talk component.

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An Interview with Madison School Board Candidate Don Gors



Click to watch or listen (5MB mp3). Gors is running against incumbent Madison School Board President Arlene Silveira. Vote April 7.

Websites: Donald Gors and Arlene Silveira.

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Education Chief Urges Mayoral Control Of Schools

AP:

Education Secretary Arne Duncan says big city mayors should take control of their school systems.

Duncan said Tuesday that there’s too much turnover among superintendents in cities where the mayor is not in charge of the schools. He says strong leadership is needed to carry out reform in big cities, where children are struggling the most.

Currently, mayors control the public schools in only a few cities while most others are run by school boards. Duncan told the U.S. Conference of Mayors that if the number doesn’t rise, he will have failed as secretary.

Fascinating: Duncan is a former Chicago Public Schools CEO. His governance point is well worth discussin.

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Third Party Group Leafletting for Wisconsin DPI Candidate Tony Evers

Advancing Wisconsin is leafletting (and profiling voters with handheld devices) for Wisconsin DPI Candidate Tony Evers (opposed by Ruth Fernandez) (watch a recent debate), Supreme Court Candidate Shirley Abrahamson (opposed by Randy Koschnick) and Dane County Incumbent Executive Kathleen Falk (opposed by Nancy Mistele).

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Poverty Goes Straight to the Brain

Brandon Keim:

Growing up poor isn’t merely hard on kids. It might also be bad for their brains. A long-term study of cognitive development in lower- and middle-class students found strong links between childhood poverty, physiological stress and adult memory.
The findings support a neurobiological hypothesis for why impoverished children consistently fare worse than their middle-class counterparts in school, and eventually in life.

“Chronically elevated physiological stress is a plausible model for how poverty could get into the brain and eventually interfere with achievement,” wrote Cornell University child-development researchers Gary Evans and Michelle Schamberg in a paper published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

For decades, education researchers have documented the disproportionately low academic performance of poor children and teenagers living in poverty. Called the achievement gap, its proposed sociological explanations are many. Compared to well-off kids, poor children tend to go to ill-equipped and ill-taught schools, have fewer educational resources at home, eat low-nutrition food, and have less access to health care.

At the same time, scientists have studied the cognitive abilities of poor children, and the neurobiological effects of stress on laboratory animals. They’ve found that, on average, socioeconomic status predicts a battery of key mental abilities, with deficits showing up in kindergarten and continuing through middle school. Scientists also found that hormones produced in response to stress literally wear down the brains of animals.

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Advanced Placement Annual Conference

The College Board, via a kind reader’s email:

The AP Annual Conference is a forum for all members of the AP and Pre-AP communities, worldwide, to exchange experiences, strengthen professional ties, and gain a better sense of how they can help their students to prepare for college success.

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US Library of Congress Joins iTunes

Jeff Gamet:

The U.S. Library of Congress audio archives are becoming even more accessible now that the recordings are being added to Apple’s iTunes Store. The move is part of an effort to bring some 15.3 million digital recordings to the public in an easy to access manner.

Matt Raymond, the Library of Congress director of communications, said “Our broad strategy is to ‘fish where the fish are,’ and to use the sites that give our content added value — in the case of iTunes, ubiquity, portability, etc.”

So far, there are about 39 podcasts available, and more files are on the way, according to Macworld. The Library of Congress is also adding its video library to YouTube.

“These services are a place to start learning, but our agreements are not exclusive, so other services are certainly possible in the future,” said Michelle Springer, Library Web Service Division digital initiatives project manager.

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Greens in cafe – culture call for school lunc

Timothy Chui:

Schools with cafeterias can reduce food wastage and save about 2.14 million disposable lunch boxes heading for landfills every year, Greeners Action project officer Yip Chui-man said yesterday.

Roughly 380,000 primary school students take lunch everyday, according to Yip, who said over one-third of 13,000 disposable lunch boxes went straight into the garbage, a February to March survey of 212 primary schools showed.

The survey suggested most primary schools want more funding to introduce canteens in a bid to cut down on waste.

With a mere 5 percent drop in the amount of disposable lunch boxes being junked, compared to seven years ago, Yip is calling on the Education Bureau and the Environmental Protection Department to set up regulations to control lunch-time garbage.

A resounding 95 percent of primary schools want public money to outfit them with a cafeteria.

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Clever boys dumb down to avoid bullying in school

Jessica Shepherd:

Clever children are saving themselves from being branded swots at school by dumbing down and deliberately falling behind, a study has shown.

Schoolchildren regarded as boffins may be attacked and shunned by their peers, according to Becky Francis, professor of education at Roehampton University, who carried out a study of academically gifted 12- and 13-year-olds in nine state secondary schools.

The study, to be published in the Sociological Review next year, shows how difficult it is for children, particularly boys, to be clever and popular. Boys risk being assaulted in some schools for being high-achievers. To conform and escape alienation, clever boys told researchers they may “try to fall behind” or “dumb down”.

One boy told researchers: “It is harder to be popular and intelligent. If the subject comes naturally … then I think it makes it easier. But if the subject doesn’t come naturally, they work hard and other people see that and then you get the name-calling.” This may in part explain boys’ perceived underachievement, Francis said.

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The New Hard Times

Barry Ritholtz:

Ernest Kurnow, a 96-year-old business school professor at New York University, finished his own schooling in the middle of the Great Depression. Now his current students are faced with finding a job in the floundering world of finance after graduation.

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Planting the Seeds of Life Skills

Michael Alison Chandler:

By the first week of spring, a crowd of shivering daffodils offered a lonely spray of color to a still-dormant garden outside Hollin Meadows Elementary School. But the bright blooms were not safe for long amid the prying fingers of two dozen curious fourth-graders.
Winter coats guarded the children against a chilly breeze, but their mittens came off as they pulled leaf after buttery leaf from the flower and gave names to each of its parts.
“It’s breathtaking,” said Nikos Booth, 9, as he rubbed the golden pollen from the stamen onto his finger.
Lots of elementary students learn plant anatomy by studying a diagram and labeling the parts or circling terms on a worksheet. At Hollin Meadows in Fairfax County, they get their hands dirty.

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Some Happy D.C. 8th-Graders Moving Up Without Moving On

Jay Matthews:

Christian Carter’s conversation with his mother began last fall just before dinner. The eighth-grader said he didn’t like any of next year’s D.C. high school choices. The places were too scary or too disorganized, he said. He wanted to stay at Shaw Middle School, a former educational disaster area suddenly doing well. Other classmates had similar chats with their parents, their principal and eventually the chancellor of the city schools.
Now, to the astonishment of nearly every adult involved, class president Christian and his friends have become, as far as historians can determine, the first eighth-graders ever to lobby successfully for a ninth grade at their middle school so they could have an extra year to prepare for the jarring realities of urban high school.
Shelontae Carter, Christian’s mother, said he and his co-conspirators, Trevon Brown, Daamontae Brown, Ronald Bryant, Marc Jones, Davaughn Taylor and Velinzo Williams-Hines, were spoiled. They ought to grow up, she said, and adjust to ninth grade in a high school just as she did. Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee was startled to find the seven boys from Shaw in her conference room, wearing suits and ties and armed with data. She is still not quite sure how they pulled it off.

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Dallas-Fort Worth school districts struggle as need for bilingual classes grows

Holly Yan:

Bilingual education is supposed to be expanding to more languages – such as Vietnamese and Arabic – but many school districts can’t find the teachers to handle the two-language classes.
“The teacher shortage that was there for Spanish now translates to other languages,” said Shannon Terry, Garland ISD’s director of English as a Second Language (ESL) and bilingual education.
Area districts are recruiting for next school year, searching for tough-to-staff areas such as math and science. But bilingual teachers are also in high demand.
The state requires any school district that has at least 20 students in a grade level who speak a language other than English to provide a bilingual program in that language.
In 2007, the State Board for Educator Certification expanded the bilingual program to include Vietnamese, Arabic, Chinese, Japanese and Russian. But that doesn’t mean more diverse teachers are lining up for jobs.
“It’s not common knowledge,” said Terry. “The universities aren’t designing programs necessarily yet to support teachers in securing those credentials.”

The Madison School District, in response to Nuestro Mundo’s desire for a middle school charter, plans to implement dual immersion across the District.

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Connecticut Special-Education Advocates Dislike Plan To Change Complaint Process

Jodie Mozdzer:

Parents and special education advocates fear that a proposal before the legislature could make it harder for special-education students to get “free, appropriate, public education” in the state.
Under a current regulation, parents who are unable to resolve a problem with their child’s special-education plan through the school district can appeal to the state Department of Education. The appeal can lead to a state-mediated hearing at which the school district must demonstrate that the education plan adheres to federal law.
But a bill proposed by the legislature’s education committee would shift that burden of proof to the party filing the complaint — which in most cases is the parents.
Supporters of the bill say it would save school districts money and shorten hearings, which can last anywhere from a week to 40 days.

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Teach the Kids, and the Parents Will Follow

Jay Matthews:

Like most principals, Dave Levin believed that parental support was essential to a school’s success. So when many families pulled their kids out of his struggling South Bronx charter school after its first year, he thought he was in trouble.
Some parents called him and his teaching partner, Frank Corcoran, “crazy white boys.” The two had recruited 46 fifth-graders, barely enough to start the Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP) Academy, and 12 failed to return for sixth grade. Test scores were somewhat better than at other local schools, but Levin’s discipline methods weren’t working. By March of his second year he believed that he had no choice but to close the school.
That was 1997. Twelve years later, the academy, saved by a last-minute change of mind, is considered a great success and a model for the 66 KIPP schools in 19 states and the District. Together, they have produced the largest achievement gains for impoverished children ever seen in a single school network.

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Rendell, Nutter fill out Pennsylvania school reform panel

Martha Woodall:

Saying it was time “for a fresh look” at the Philadelphia School District, Gov. Rendell and Mayor Nutter yesterday named two lawyers and an educator who was trained as an artist to the School Reform Commission.
With the appointments, Rendell and Nutter have remade the five-member commission – established after the 2001 state takeover of the schools – signaling a new era in leadership of the 167,000-student district.
They announced their selections at a briefing packed with politicians and educational activists at the High School of the Future in West Philadelphia.
Rendell also announced he had nominated Sandra Dungee Glenn, the former commission chairwoman, to the state Board of Education.
“Your work is not done,” Rendell told Dungee Glenn, who had been part of the district’s governance for nearly a decade and attended the briefing.
Nutter named Robert L. Archie Jr., a partner at Duane Morris L.L.P., and Johnny Irizarry, director of the Center for Hispanic Excellence at the University of Pennsylvania, to four-year terms.

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Lower property values hurt schools

Greg Toppo & Jack Gillum:

Way back when times were good — last April — builders showed up one day at Forest Grove Middle School and gutted a little-used classroom off the gym.
Four months and a half-million dollars later, they had transformed the space into a bubbling mini-marine biology laboratory, with five huge, blue plastic tanks for local marine life and a refrigerated tank that replicates the cold-water ecosystem off Maine.
For the first time, teacher Kevin Stinnette said, his students could do hands-on lessons with cold-water species such as frilled anemones and Acadia hermit crabs.
Then the mortgage meltdown hit central Florida, and the crabs and anemones weren’t the only ones hit with cold water. Here as elsewhere across America, hard times have forced schools to trim budgets, freeze hiring and, in a few cases, make substantial job cuts, raising doubts about the future of a range of programs, including the new marine lab.
Already, St. Lucie schools have lost $22 million in tax revenue from lower property values, and the district is staring at a 25% budget cut in the fall. It has frozen salaries and put central office employees on a four-day workweek. Enrollment is down only slightly but if things get much worse, schools in St. Lucie may cut athletics, after-school activities and summer school to the bone — or even consider a four-day week for students.

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Surrogacy makes for a perilous path to parenthood

Alan Zarembo and Kimi Yoshino :

Not even jail could keep Nanette Delp out of the surrogacy business.
In 2006, she was arrested on allegations that she stole tens of thousands of dollars from couples who had paid her to find women to carry their babies, according to court records.
While she was behind bars awaiting trial in Sacramento, she continued to sign up more couples, using a new business name and a new website, state records show. Ultimately, she was sentenced to six years in prison after pleading no contest to seven counts of grand theft.
In the surrogacy industry, there are no consumer guarantees. A website is not a professional license — in fact, there is no such thing. Even in California, widely considered the friendliest place in the world for people seeking surrogates, contracts tend to favor the broker agencies, not the clients.
Signing with an agency is frequently an act of faith, sometimes with bitter results. Often, aspiring parents must pay the entire bill — $50,000 or more — in advance. The money is nonrefundable, placing them at the mercy of the agency.
In recent days, Modesto-based SurroGenesis and Beverly Hills-based B Coming have been accused by attorneys or through lawsuits of misusing more than $2.5 million in clients’ funds — in some cases without ever helping couples choose a surrogate or conceive a child.

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The Impact of Dropping the SAT

Scott Jaschik:

A new research study — based on simulations using actual student applications at competitive colleges that require the SAT or ACT for admission — has found that ending the requirement would lead to demonstrable gains in the percentages of black and Latino students, and working class or economically disadvantaged students, who are admitted.
The finding is consistent with what admissions officers have reported at many colleges that have gone SAT-optional. But the basis of this new research goes well beyond the anecdotal information reported by colleges pleased with their shifts. Scholars at Princeton University’s Office of Population Research obtained actual admissions data from seven selective colleges that require the SAT or ACT. Using the actual admissions patterns for these colleges, the scholars then ran statistical models showing the impact of either going SAT-optional or adopting what they called the “don’t ask, don’t tell” approach in which a college says that it won’t look at standardized test scores.
These models suggest that any move away from the SAT or ACT in competitive colleges results in significant gains in ethnic and economic diversity. But the gains are greater for colleges that drop testing entirely, as opposed to just making it optional. (To date, only one institution — Sarah Lawrence College — has taken that step.)
In terms of other measures of academic competitiveness, the study found that going SAT optional would result in classes of students with higher grade point averages. Dropping testing entirely, on the other hand, would result in higher levels of academic achievement in the entering classes at the public institutions studied, but not the privates. The research will be formally presented next month at a conference at Wake Forest University about college admissions, but the Princeton researchers released the findings Wednesday.

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Teacher Unions vs. Poor Kids

Nat Hentoff:

The “education president” remained silent when his congressional Democrats essentially killed the Opportunity Scholarship Program (OSP) in the city where he now lives and works.



Of the 1,700 students, starting in kindergarten, in this private-school voucher program, 90 percent are black and 9 percent are Hispanic.



First the House and then the Senate inserted into the $410-billion omnibus spending bill language to eliminate the $7,500 annual scholarships for these poor children after the next school year.



A key executioner in the Senate of the OSP was Sen. Dick Durbin, Illinois Democrat. I have written admiringly of Durbin’s concern for human rights abroad. But what about education rights for minority children in the nation’s capital?



Andrew J. Coulson, director of the Cato Institute (where I am a senior fellow) supplied the answer when he wrote: “Because they saw it as a threat to their political power, Democrats in Washington appear willing to extinguish the dreams of a few thousand poor kids to protect their political base.”

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Bioscience, genetics, ecology revolutionizing ‘Ag Ed’ class

Erin Richards:

In Craig Kohn’s classroom at Waterford Union High School, students use traditional Punnett square diagrams to study animal genetics.

But they also use 80-pound Foster, the living, breathing class Holstein calf, and talk about his genetics and which of those traits they can predict his offspring may have generations from now.

Using Foster requires more post-lesson cleanup in the school’s agriculture education classroom, but students say Kohn’s lessons bring science alive. It is fun, real and far more engaging than memorizing facts and formulas.

The approach represents part of a revolution in agriculture education that is under way across Wisconsin and the United States.

The so-called “cows and plows” high school curriculum – animal science, plant science and mechanics – once dominated by farm kids in Carhartt jackets and Wranglers has morphed into courses that cover turf management, wildlife ecology, landscape design, biotechnology, organic farming, genetic engineering, sustainable water, biodiesel production and meat science.

The developments have exciting implications, from a wave of new student interest in agri-science to ample post-secondary career prospects.

Many school leaders are harnessing the potential of the programs. The Hartland-Lakeside School District is designing an organic farming charter school; state agriculture officials hope a similar urban agriculture school could take root in Milwaukee.

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Europe and the Financial Crisis: US High School Students Take on The Euro Challenge

Comtex:

Is the global economy heading from recession to depression? Why did a crisis in US mortgage markets wreak havoc in economies across Europe? The Euro Challenge, an academic contest now in its fourth year, pits teams of high school students against each other as they answer economic and financial questions to showcase their knowledge of everything from ballooning government deficits to rising unemployment.
This year, 72 high school teams from nine states (Connecticut, Florida, Michigan, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Massachusetts, Illinois and Pennsylvania) will compete in the Euro Challenge, which fosters a better understanding of the European and transatlantic economy and supports local learning objectives in the field of economics and finance. Regional rounds kick off on March 30 and culminate in the finals at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York on April 29.

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Parent projects: When homework help goes too far

Bonnie Miller Rubin & Tara Malone:

Anyone who has ever proudly carried Junior’s papier-mache heart into the science fair–only to run into the cardiologist’s kid with the medical school model–has seen what happens when the line between parental involvement and parental takeover gets crossed.
Science fair season is in full swing, but meddling by mom and dad is not limited to budding scientists. It spans childhood, from the Cub Scouts Pinewood Derby to college essays.
Parents may try to help a struggling child, allow a perfectionist streak to get the best of them or get carried away by their own interest in the topic. But one way or another, dad’s or mom’s work gets turned in, giving the student an unfair advantage.
In response, several school districts are opting for more in-class assignments, studying the meaning of grades and flat-out reminding parents not to do their child’s homework.

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Students Speak Out on AP and the Challenge Index

Jay Matthews:

Advanced Placement English teacher Allison Beers asked her 11th-grade students at Eleanor Roosevelt High School in Prince George’s County to critique my annual rankings, in The Washington Post and Newsweek, of public high schools. I use the Challenge Index, a measure of participation in AP and other college-level tests. Here are excerpts of comments from several students, with some comments from me:

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Grabbing Dropouts Early

Jay Matthews:

I am an optimist, maybe too much of one. I believe, for instance, that our school dropout problem in many instances takes care of itself. Often teenagers leave school because they just cannot bear sitting in class. Eventually they mature, return to school, graduate and have productive lives. Data show that of the 30 percent of students who do not graduate on time, about half have acquired high school diplomas or General Educational Development certificates (GED) by their late 20s.
Many people find my congenital sunniness on this and other issues annoying. My wife, who married me nearly 42 years ago, has always called me “the Pollyanna From Hell.” She might have a point. Optimism can lead to error. For instance, I have found a impressive new report on dropouts that suggests my laissez faire attitude toward the issue might keep many young people from being yanked back into school in ways that would do them good.

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Other countries’ efforts to develop and support teachers

Stacy Teicher Khadaroo:

A recent study of the professional development of teachers identified four key areas in which nations with high student achievement tend to have an advantage over the United States:
Support for new teachers
•Many countries mandate mentoring or other support for beginning teachers. In New Zealand, new teachers spend 20 percent of their time being coached. In Norway, each new teacher is paired with a teacher trained as a mentor. In Switzerland, novices meet with practice groups from other schools for peer evaluation.
• The US has made progress in this area. In the early 1990s, about half of new teachers participated in support programs. A decade later, that had grown to two-thirds, and 7 out of 10 had a mentor.

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Chicago Parent School Survey

Target Area DevCorp:

According to the results of a citywide survey released today, the parents of Illinois and Chicago public school students are poorly informed about the real problems and challenges faced by local students. The survey report, Parent Perceptions, Student Realities in Chicago Schools, released by the Citywide Education Organizing Campaign (the Campaign), a coalition of 13 community groups convened by Target Area DevCorp, explores ways to better engage parents in decisions regarding public education.
“It is imperative that parents play a leadership role in serious reform efforts affecting public education in Illinois,” said Rev. Patricia Watkins, Executive Director of Target Area DevCorp. “In order to perform well, parents need accurate, timely information from unbiased sources. Unfortunately, the Campaign research suggests many parents are not being given all the information they need to make informed decisions about the educational futures of their children. We must unite ourselves now and create a remedy that speaks to this important matter because the price of ignorance on this issue is too high.”

Jason Knowles has more.

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Obama Dialogue with a Teacher

Michael Fletcher & Jose Antonio Vargas:

Arguably the most animated and substantial exchange was between the president and a longtime teacher from Overbrook High School in West Philadelphia who was seated a few feet behind him. The teacher asked Obama for his definition of “a charter school” and “an effective teacher.” While Obama quickly dispensed with the first part of the question, he could not get the teacher to answer when he asked whether in her 15 years on the job she has encountered colleagues who she would not want to teach her own children.
“My point is that if we’ve done everything we can to improve teacher pay and teacher performance and training and development, some people just aren’t meant to be teachers, just like some people aren’t meant to be carpenters, some people aren’t meant to be nurses. At some point, they’ve got to find a new career,” he said.

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Key Milwaukee voucher advocate says more regulation, standards for program needed

Alan Borsuk:

Calling this a potentially historic moment in Milwaukee education, a key leader of the private school voucher movement called Thursday for major increases in regulation of the participating schools and for a new focus on quality across all the channels of schooling in the city.
Howard Fuller, the former Milwaukee Public Schools superintendent who is now a central figure nationally in advocating for school choice, said he wants school leaders to join with Gov. Jim Doyle, legislative leaders and others in working out new ways to assure that students of all kinds have quality teachers in quality schools.
“We can’t just keep wringing our hands about these terrible schools,” Fuller said. “We have a moral responsibility to our children to not accept that.”
He said that he believes Doyle is seeking higher quality and more accountability and transparency for the 120 private schools in Milwaukee that have more than 20,000 students attending, thanks to publicly funded vouchers. Fuller said he was in general agreement on those goals.
Doyle has presented “an opportunity to come together and do something that is truly constructive for our children,” Fuller said. “I think it is one of those historic moments that don’t come all the time.”
Fuller was reacting both to a new set of studies of the voucher program and to a dramatically different situation for voucher supporters in the state Capitol.

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Why Homeschool

Janine, Derek, Henry and Grandma Cate:

Mission statement: On this blog we explore why homeschooling can be a better option for children and families than a traditional classroom setting. We’ll also explore homeschooling issues in general, educational thoughts, family issues, and some other random stuff.

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‘Great Texts’ exposes high-schoolers to literature

Gwen Evans:

High school students in Wisconsin are digging into great world literature that would bewilder older and more experienced readers: “Don Quixote,” by Miguel de Cervantes, “Dante’s Inferno,” by Dante Alighieri, “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” by Gabriel Garcia Marquez and “The Brothers Karamazov,” by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. All the students need is a chance to try and the right guidance from their teachers. Both of these necessities are provided by the Center for the Humanities.
During the past five years, the center’s program Great World Texts in Wisconsin has enabled some 1,000 students to read heady and challenging tomes not found on the young adult reading list. The program is a perfect example of the Wisconsin Idea in action. It creates partnerships between UW-Madison faculty and Wisconsin high school teachers for the benefit of state students.

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Design Under Constraint: How Limits Boost Creativity

Scott Dadich:

..A 16-by 10.875-inch rectangle containing precisely 174 square inches of possibility, made from two sheets of paper glued and bound together. Legendary magazine art director and Pentagram partner D. J. Stout calls the science of filling this box with artful compositions of type and images “variations on a rectangle.” That is, in any given issue of a magazine–this one, for example–subjects and stories will change, but as a designer, you’re still dealing with the same ol’ blank white box.
At Wired, our design team sees this constraint as our daily bread. On every editorial page, we use words and pictures to overcome the particular restrictions of paper and ink: We can’t animate the infographics (yet). We can’t embed video or voice-over (yet). We can’t add sound effects or music (yet). But for all that we can’t do in this static medium, we find enlightenment and wonder in its possibilities. This is a belief most designers share. In fact, the worst thing a designer can hear is an offhand “Just do whatever you want.” That’s because designers understand the power of limits. Constraint offers an unparalleled opportunity for growth and innovation.
Think of a young tree, a sapling. With water and sunshine, it can grow tall and strong. But include some careful pruning early in its development–removing low-hanging branches–and the tree will grow taller, stronger, faster. It won’t waste precious resources on growth that doesn’t serve its ultimate purpose. The same principle applies to design. Given fewer resources, you have to make better decisions.

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Academic Earth Aggregates Lectures from MIT, Harvard, Yale, and Others

Adam Pash:

Web site Academic Earth is like Hulu for academic lectures, pulling free lectures from Berkeley, Harvard, MIT, Princeton, Stanford, and Yale into one attractive, easy to navigate site. It’s incredible.
The site clearly takes its cues from Hulu and iTunes on its design, but it’s ten times better than either, because it’s open. The videos can be embedded anywhere or downloaded and enjoyed wherever you want to take them. It’s easy to use, has tons of great content, and it doesn’t cost a dime.

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When Private Schools Take Public Dollars: What’s the Place of Accountability in School Voucher Programs?

Chester E. Finn, Jr., Christina M. Hentges, Michael J. Petrilli and Amber M. Winkler [458K PDF]:

Of all the arguments that critics of school voucher programs advance, the one that may resonate loudest with the public concerns school accountability. Opponents say it’s not fair to hold public schools to account for their results (under No Child Left Behind and similar systems) and then let private schools receive taxpayer dollars–however indirectly–with no accountability at all. We at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute don’t buy that argument entirely. Private schools participating in voucher programs, tax-credit programs, scholarship programs and such are accountable to parents via the school choice marketplace. But we don’t dismiss it, either. For both substantive and strategic reasons, we believe it’s time for school choice supporters to embrace accountability, done right.
For too long, school choice supporters have been stuck in a tired internal debate that hobbles the advance of vouchers and other worthy forms of school choice. Staunch free-marketers say “leave the schools alone and let the parents decide.” More left-leaning critics say “if they won’t play by the same rules as public schools don’t give them any assistance at all.” Yet this debate has become ever more archaic in a society preoccupied with student achievement, school performance, results based accountability, international competitiveness and institutional transparency.
It’s time for the school choice movement to wake up–and catch up to the educational demands and expectations of the 21st century. It’s paradoxical to us that even as the demands on K-12 education are escalating and important new forms of choice are emerging (not just vouchers for choice’s sake but private schooling as a decent option for kids otherwise stuck in failing public schools, means-tested scholarships for low-income families, corporate and individual tax credit and deduction programs, specialized vouchers for disabled youngsters, and more) the accountability and-transparency discussion seems mired in the 1970s.
Let’s restart the discussion. But what does “accountability, done right” looklike in practice? To find out, we sought the assistance of 20 experts in the school choice world–scholars, advocates, program administrators, private school representatives–to help us wrestle with the thorny issues that together embody the accountability question writ large. In this paper, we present their insights, opinions, and advice about how accountability for voucher programs should be structured. We then synthesize their views and offer our own take. Here’s an overview.

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School-Voucher Movement Loses Ground After Democratic Gains

Robert Tomsho:

The school-voucher movement is under assault, as opponents have cut federal funding and states move to impose new restrictions on a form of school choice that has been a cornerstone of the conservative agenda for education overhaul.
Vouchers — which give students public money to pay private-school tuition — have grown since a 2002 Supreme Court decision upheld their use in religious schools. About 61,700 students use them in the current school year, up 9% from last year, according to the Alliance for School Choice, a voucher advocate.
But earlier this month, Congress voted to stop funding a voucher program for the District of Columbia. Two other prominent voucher programs — in Milwaukee and Cleveland — are facing statehouse efforts to impose rules that could prompt some private schools to stop taking voucher students.
Pressure is mounting from other corners as well. President Barack Obama has said he opposes vouchers, and the stimulus bill he signed in February bars its funds from being used to provide financial aid to students attending private schools. On Wednesday, the Arizona Supreme Court ruled that two state voucher programs, benefiting foster children and disabled students, violated Arizona’s state constitution.

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Do Your Kids Have Too Much Homework?

Sue Shellenbarger:

A Pennsylvania mom wrote me this week to say her son was drowning in too much homework.
As a middle-schooler at a demanding private school, this worried mom writes, her son is laden with hours of homework every night, and it seems to be getting the best of him. His grades have sunk to C-minuses from B’s; he has begun dodging assignments and has been put in detention for missed work. “I don’t remember sixth grade being this much of an ordeal, or any ordeal at all,” she writes.
John has posted on why kids hate school, and homework is a major reason. A growing number of schools, including those in several California cities and Broward County, Fla., are putting a ceiling on kids’ out-of-school workloads.
Parents remain deeply divided on whether kids get too little or too much homework, as shown by this recent report from Atlanta. Nevertheless, a growing number of school districts have embraced guidelines recommended by Duke University’s Harris Cooper: Children should be assigned roughly 10 minutes of homework times their grade level. Thus a first grader would have 10 minutes, a third grader 30, and a high-school senior a couple of hours of homework a night.

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Break It to ‘Em Gently: Telling Kids About Financial Woes

Sue Shellenbarger:

As hard as it is, as much as I’d like to avoid it, it’s time to have The Talk with my kids.
I’m not talking about the birds and the bees. I’m talking about the need to cut spending — to downsize my budget to reduce debt and gird for higher-than-expected college costs. I’m finding it surprisingly hard to communicate with my children, 18 and 21, about this. Based on my email and comments on our blog, TheJuggle.com, other parents are struggling too. Some spouses are fighting about how much to tell their children about financial setbacks. Others are just not saying why Daddy or Mommy has suddenly started driving the daily car pool.
In truth, the information we’re trying so hard to hide or dress up for our kids probably doesn’t matter nearly as much to them as how they see us behaving and feeling. “In conversations with kids of any age, how you say it is more important than what you say,” says Ralph E. Cash, president of the National Association of School Psychologists.
In my own case, at least, providing well for my kids has gotten tangled up in my mind with showing my love for them. Separating the two is making The Talk harder.

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Soviet Legacy Looms Large In Russian Schools

Gregory Feifer:

Teachers and principals in Russian schools say the government is providing more money for education, but discouraging critical examination of Soviet history. Meanwhile parents complain that widespread bribery for good grades is eroding standards.

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It’s Not OK To Treat People Special Based on Race, But it is OK based on the “Neighborhood”

Legal Pad (Cal Law) via a kind reader’s email:

That’s the gist we got out of the First District’s ruling today, in a constitutional challenge to Berkeley’s way-complicated system for assigning students to different elementary schools, and to different programs in high school. The upshot: The appeals court unanimously said Berkeley’s system is A-OK, despite Prop 209, because it doesn’t consider a student’s own race at all. Instead, all students in a neighborhood are treated the same — and the way the neighborhood is treated is based on a bunch of things, like average income level, average education level, and the neighborhood’s overall racial composition. The court’s opinion calls things like this “affirmative policies” fostering social diversity. That term doesn’t sound familiar at all.

The Opinion 49K PDF
Perhaps this is what new Madison School District Superintendent Dan Nerad had in mind:

Still, Nerad has clearly taken notice. Given the new numbers, he plans to ask state lawmakers to allow Madison to deny future requests based on family income levels, rather than race, to prevent disparities from further growing between Madison and its suburbs.

2009/2010 Madison Open Enrollment information. Much more on Wisconsin Open Enrollment here.

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Giving up A’s and B’s for 4’s and 3’s…..

Winnie Hu:

There is no more A for effort at Prospect Hill Elementary School.
Parents have complained that since the new grading system is based on year-end expectations, 4s are generally not available until the final marking period.
In fact, there are no more A’s at all. Instead of letter grades in English or math, schoolchildren in this well-to-do Westchester suburb now get report cards filled with numbers indicating how they are faring on dozens of specific skills like “decoding strategies” and “number sense and operations.” The lowest mark, 1, indicates a student is not meeting New York State’s academic standards, while the top grade of 4 celebrates “meeting standards with distinction.”
They are called standards-based report cards, part of a new system flourishing around the country as the latest frontier in a 20-year push to establish rigorous academic standards and require state tests on the material.
Educators praise them for setting clear expectations, but many parents who chose to live in Pelham because of its well-regarded schools find them confusing or worse. Among their complaints are that since the new grades are based on year-end expectations, 4s are generally not available until the final marking period (school officials are planning to tweak this aspect next year).
“We’re running around the school saying ‘2 is cool,’ ” said Jennifer Lapey, a parent who grew up in Pelham, “but in my world, 2 out of 4 is not so cool.”

Much more on standards based report cards here.

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Goal of Preschool for All Tests Education System

Robert Tomsho:

When Mateus Bontempo started preschool at a public school in Long Branch, N.J., he rarely talked and was so shy he’d stand in the classroom doorway until a teacher came to escort him inside.
Anna Dasilva, his mother, says educators worked with Mateus on his social skills, sometimes taking him to other classrooms to meet new children. Four years later, the eight-year-old third grader plays trumpet, participates in math competitions and performs in plays. “They really helped him along,” says Mrs. Dasilva, who thinks all children should have the same preschool opportunity.
So does President Barack Obama. As one of the main goals of his education plan, he wants to spend $10 billion to encourage states to offer universal preschool and expand federal early-learning programs like Head Start. The recently passed stimulus bill includes half that spending goal, or $5 billion, for Head Start and related early-childhood efforts.
But the current economic crisis may blunt state-level efforts to broaden access to preschool. Even in better times, building a “universal” preschool system would likely be a slow and expensive proposition, given the patchwork nature of what currently exists.
And as state and federal efforts target early learning programs toward disadvantaged students, some middle-class parents feel that their children are being left out. According to a recent study by Pre-K Now, families earning more than about $40,000 a year are already ineligible for free preschool in most of the 20 states that use income to determine eligibility.

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Why College Towns are Looking Smart

Kelly Evans:

ooking for a job? Try a college town.
Morgantown, W.Va., home to West Virginia University, has one of the lowest unemployment rates in the U.S. — just 3.9% — and the university itself has about 260 job openings, from nurses to professors to programmers.
“We’re hurting for people, especially to fill our computer and technical positions,” says Margaret Phillips, vice president for human relations at WVU.
Of the six metropolitan areas with unemployment below 4% as of January, three of them are considered college towns. One is Morgantown. The other two are Logan, Utah, home of Utah State University, and Ames, Iowa, home of Iowa State University. Both have just 3.8% unemployment, based on Labor Department figures that are not seasonally adjusted.
The pattern holds true for many other big college towns, such as Gainesville, Fla., Ann Arbor, Mich., Manhattan, Kan., and Boulder, Colo. In stark contrast, the unadjusted national unemployment rate is 8.5%.
While college towns have long been considered recession-resistant, their ability to avoid the depths of the financial crisis shaking the rest of the nation is noteworthy. The ones faring the best right now are not only major education centers; they also are regional health-care hubs that draw people into the city and benefit from a stable, educated, highly skilled work force.

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Allonzo Trier Is in the Game

Michael Sokolove:

After school on a recent afternoon, Allonzo Trier, a sixth grader in Federal Way, outside Seattle, came home and quickly changed into his workout gear — Nike high-tops, baggy basketball shorts and a sleeveless T-shirt that hung loosely on his 5-foot-5, 110-pound frame. Inside a small gymnasium near the entrance of his apartment complex, he got right to his practice routine, one he has maintained for the last four years, seven days a week. He began by dribbling a basketball around the perimeter of the court, weaving it around his back and through his legs. After a few minutes, he took a second basketball out of a mesh bag and dribbled both balls, crisscrossing them through his legs. It looked like showboating, Harlem Globetrotters kind of stuff, but the drills, which Trier discovered on the Internet, were based on the childhood workouts of Pete Maravich and have helped nurture his exquisite control of the ball in game settings — and, by extension, his burgeoning national reputation.
One of the Web sites that tracks young basketball prospects reports that Trier plays with “style and punch” and “handles the pill” — the ball — “like a yo-yo.” He is a darling of the so-called grass-roots basketball scene and a star on the A.A.U. circuit — which stands for Amateur Athletic Union but whose practices mock traditional definitions of amateurism.

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L.A. district to end high-profile dropout-prevention program

Howard Blume:

A high-profile and lauded dropout-prevention program is falling victim to budget cuts — although top Los Angeles school officials insist that they’ll provide a more effective program in its place.
The precarious Diploma Project is emblematic of the financial crisis slowly working its way across the nation’s second-largest school system as ripples of a statewide budget shortfall touch counselors, teachers and other school employees whose work directly affects children enrolled in the Los Angeles Unified School District.
Nearly 9,000 employees — about 10% of the full-time workforce — received notice of a possible layoff this month as the district seeks to cut hundreds of millions of dollars from its nearly $6-billion general fund. But there’s more going on than financial pain.
Reshaping system
After taking the helm in January, Supt. Ramon C. Cortines, one of the country’s most experienced educators, has attempted to reshape the school system. Cortines is seizing the moment to trim or gut some of the central bureaucracy, while also moving dollars and responsibility to schools. The superintendent wants schools to decide for themselves whether to pay for additional counselors, arts programs and librarians, among other things.
The new setup must save money, but it also should be more effective, he said.

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The Education Wars

Dana Goldstein:

Like any successful negotiator, Randi Weingarten can sense when the time for compromise is nigh. On Nov. 17, after the Election Day dust had cleared, Weingarten, the president of both the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and its New York City affiliate, the United Federation of Teachers, gave a major speech at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. In attendance were a host of education-policy luminaries, including Weingarten’s sometimes-foe Mayor Michael Bloomberg of New York City, Service Employees International Union President Andy Stern, National Education Association (NEA) President Dennis van Roekel, and Rep. George Miller of California.
“No issue should be off the table, provided it is good for children and fair for teachers,” Weingarten vowed, referencing debates within the Democratic coalition over charter schools and performance pay for teachers — innovations that teachers’ unions traditionally held at arm’s length.
The first openly gay president of a major American labor union, Weingarten is small — both short and slight. But she speaks in the commanding, practiced tones of a unionist. In speeches, newspaper op-eds, and public appearances, Weingarten, once known as a guns-blazing New York power broker, has been trying to carve out a conciliatory role for herself in the national debate over education policy. It is a public-relations strategy clearly crafted for the Obama era: an effort to focus on common ground instead of long-simmering differences.
Notably absent from the audience for Weingarten’s post-election speech was D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee. In the summer of 2007, Rhee, a Teach For America alumna and founder of the anti-union New Teacher Project, took office and quickly implemented an agenda of school closings, teacher and principal firings, and a push toward merit pay. These actions met with their fair share of outrage from both parents and teachers and especially from the local teachers’ union. At the time of Weingarten’s speech, Rhee and the AFT-affiliated Washington Teachers’ Union (WTU) were stalemated over a proposed new contract for teachers.

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Keeping coaches in check

Rosanlind Rossi & Steve Tucker:

Chicago public school coaches are in for a crackdown under a proposed city policy that explicitly bans everything from pushing, pinching or paddling athletes to “displays of temper.”
The massive overhaul of the Chicago Public High Schools Athletic Association bylaws follows allegations that began emerging last fall that at least four CPS coaches had paddled or hit athletes.
The new policy creates the possibility that coaches can be banned for life for just one rule violation. Previously, such punishment followed only “knowing and repeated” rule violations.
It also mandates annual coaching training, requires that all coaches undergo criminal background checks and fingerprint analysis, and establishes a “pool” of thoroughly screened candidates from which principals must now pick their coaches.
Prohibitions against corporal punishment and even “forcing a student to stand or kneel for an inordinate time” were listed elsewhere in CPS policy, but after the paddling scandal, CPS wanted to take a clear stand against a wide variety of corporal punishment, said CPS counsel Patrick Rocks.

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Strip-Search of Girl Tests Limit of School Policy

Adam Liptak:

Savana Redding still remembers the clothes she had on — black stretch pants with butterfly patches and a pink T-shirt — the day school officials here forced her to strip six years ago. She was 13 and in eighth grade.
An assistant principal, enforcing the school’s antidrug policies, suspected her of having brought prescription-strength ibuprofen pills to school. One of the pills is as strong as two Advils.
The search by two female school employees was methodical and humiliating, Ms. Redding said. After she had stripped to her underwear, “they asked me to pull out my bra and move it from side to side,” she said. “They made me open my legs and pull out my underwear.”
Ms. Redding, an honors student, had no pills. But she had a furious mother and a lawyer, and now her case has reached the Supreme Court, which will hear arguments on April 21.

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Public money for private schools?
Lawmaker: S.C.’s schools fail minorities; state should subsidize private school choice.

Roddie Burris:

State Sen. Robert Ford is putting a new face on the long-running fight over whether to spend public education dollars to pay for private schools.
To the dismay of his African American colleagues, the Charleston Democrat is hawking a bill that would give students a publicly paid scholarship or tuition grant to go to a private school.
So far, the push for school choice has had mostly white faces out front. But Ford, who is seeking the Democratic nomination for governor, is making the case that the students who would benefit most from a voucher-style program in South Carolina are African Americans who attend poorly performing schools.
He dismisses those who say his program would hurt already struggling public schools, framing the argument as a choice between protecting schools or giving children the lifeline they need to succeed.
“You’re damn right I’m hurting public education, because public education is hurting our kids,” Ford said.

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Parents in dark about kids’ school life

Kelly Fiveash:

Becta has warned that a three-way communication breakdown between schools, parents and kids could have a harmful affect on individuals’ educational performance.
Unsurprisingly the UK government’s technology agency, which published a new report today, was keen to underline what it sees as the importance of IT in the classroom to help improve parent dialogue with their children.
Becta surveyed 1,000 school kids aged seven to 14 and 1,000 parents to find out the level of ill communication that existed between adults and children when it comes to talking about school.
It found more than a third (37 per cent) of kids had difficulty speaking to their parents about their education, while 43 per cent of parents questioned admitted they struggled to get information from their child about their school day.
According to the Oh, Nothing Much report, eight in ten parents confessed they didn’t know as much about their kids’ day at school as they would like.

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