Jim Zellmer – Page 439 – School Information System

Reports surface that teens are taking cow drugs for abortions

Veterinary and medical professionals in Wisconsin said Friday that they have been warned about a potentially alarming practice among the state’s rural youth: teenage girls ingesting livestock drugs to cheaply and discreetly end their unwanted pregnancies.
So far, the professionals in animal and human health and the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction are treating the reports of girls inducing their own abortions with prostaglandins – drugs commonly used by cow breeders to regulate animals’ heat cycles – as rumors, because no cases have been officially confirmed by the Wisconsin Department of Health Services.
But Anna Anderson, the executive director of Care Net Pregnancy Center of Green County in Monroe, maintains that she has identified at least 10 girls ages 14 to 18 in a three-county area who admitted to taking some form of cow abortifacient in the past year.
Anderson said the girls told her they took it because they found it to be a cheap and easy way to end their pregnancies without their parents finding out.
At the American Veterinary Medical Association, Assistant Director Kimberly May said Friday that her organization first heard the rumor about the teenagers in mid-February from the Wisconsin Veterinary Medical Association. Since then, the American Animal Hospital Association has also posted an advisory about the issue on its Web site.
Injected properly in livestock, prostaglandins shorten a heat cycle so a female animal can be bred again, May said.

Some Rich Districts Get Richer as Aid Is Rushed to Schools

Sam Dillon:

Dale Lamborn, the superintendent of a somewhat threadbare rural school district, feels the pain of Utah’s economic crisis every day as he tinkers with his shrinking budget, struggling to avoid laying off teachers or cutting classes like welding or calculus.
Just across the border in Wyoming, a state awash in oil and gas money, James Bailey runs a wealthier district. It has a new elementary school and gives every child an Apple laptop.
But under the Obama administration’s education stimulus package, Mr. Lamborn, who needs every penny he can get, will receive hundreds of dollars less per student than will Dr. Bailey, who says he does not need the extra money.
“For us, this is just a windfall,” Dr. Bailey said.
In pouring rivers of cash into states and school districts, Washington is using a tangle of well-worn federal formulas, some of which benefit states that spend more per pupil, while others help states with large concentrations of poor students or simply channel money based on population. Combined, the formulas seem to take little account of who needs the money most.
As a result, some districts that are well off will find themselves swimming in cash, while some that are struggling may get too little to avoid cutbacks.

Teachers Alleging Attacks by Youths Find Themselves Scrutinized

Bill Turque:

Woodson Academy teacher William Pow had just finished writing on the blackboard one January afternoon, he said, when he turned to face his algebra class and saw the textbook “Mathematics in Life” hurtling toward his head.
He ducked, he said, but it caught him in the neck and shoulder. His colleagues at Woodson have not been as lucky. English teacher Randy Brown said he was hit just above the left ear by a book thrown by a student last month. He was treated for a concussion and said he has since suffered from headaches and nausea.
“They think it’s a game to hit people in the head,” said Brown, who, like Pow, has not returned to school.
They say the 260-student ninth-grade academy, housed at Ronald H. Brown Middle School in Northeast Washington while a new Woodson High is under construction, is overcrowded and dangerous. Brown and Pow count five other teachers or administrators who they said have been attacked this academic year, including one who was pelted by textbooks and another pinned to a desktop and choked. Other teachers, Brown and Pow said, are routinely subjected to verbal threats of violence.

Price Drop: Stocks, Homes, Now Triple-Word Scores

Carl Bialik:

A trio of words — one that’s slang for pizza, another defined as a body’s vital life force and a third referring to a snoring sound — have conspired to change the game of Scrabble.
“Za,” “qi” and “zzz” were added recently to the game’s official word list for its original English-language edition. Because Z’s and Q’s each have the game’s highest point value of 10, those monosyllabic words can rack up big scores for relatively little effort. So now that those high-scoring letters are more versatile, some Scrabble aficionados would like to see the rules changed — which would be the only change since Alfred Butts popularized the game in 1948.
For non Scrabble-rousers, there are analogs for the proposed re-evaluations in other leisure pursuits. Some notable mispriced assets: Vermont Avenue in Monopoly, three-point field goals in basketball and football and overtime losses in hockey. Yet traditionalists say rules should endure; it’s up to players to exploit them.
In Scrabble, players form words on a 15-by-15-space board using 100 tiles — two of them blanks that can stand in for any letter, and 98 tiles with letters and corresponding point values. Players draw seven tiles to start the game and refresh their set after each turn.

A Summary of the Wisconsin DPI Superintendent Candidate Event

Greg Bump:

WisPolitics: Evers, Fernandez question each other in We The People debate
3/20/2009
By Greg Bump
WisPolitics
Tony Evers questioned opponent Rose Fernandez’s qualifications for the state’s top education spot Friday night, while Fernandez countered by trying to portray him as a crony of Wisconsin’s largest teacher’s union.
The two, vying for the post of superintendent of Public Instruction, laid out competing visions in a We The People debate.
Evers, the deputy superintendent at DPI, touted his 34 years of experience in education while contrasting his resume with the credentials of Fernandez, who is a nurse by trade and has never worked in a public school.
Fernandez, a virtual school advocate, countered by continually trying to lay problems with the state’s educational system at the feet of Evers, who has held the No. 2 post at the agency for eight years.
Given the opportunity to question each other, Evers pointed out Fernandez represented virtual schools and has zero experience in the administration of public schools. He asked how parents with children in public schools can trust her to invest in their education rather than funneling money toward special interests.
“My own special interest is the boys and girls growing up in the state of Wisconsin,” Fernandez shot back.
Fernandez then stressed Evers’ endorsement by the Wisconsin Education Association Council and the “hundreds of thousands of dollars” the union has spent to support his campaign. She asked him to list three reforms he has supported that WEAC opposed.
Evers answered that the union was unhappy with a settlement DPI reached on allowing virtual schools — in which districts allow students to take courses on-line — to continue. He also said he has been a strong advocate of charter schools — which operate without some of the regulations of other public schools — something the union has opposed.
“I started charter schools. I know what charter schools are about,” Evers said. “I don’t need a lecture about charter schools.”
Evers also stressed his support from school boards, child advocates, parents and others.
“That’s why you have to have a broad coalition,” Evers said. “This isn’t about this overwhelming group of people driving policy at the state level. That just isn’t fact.”
Fernandez ripped DPI for not doing enough to help the struggling Milwaukee Public School system address issues like dropout rates and the achievement gap for minority students.
Evers countered that he has worked on the issue with educators in Milwaukee, but there are also socioeconomic factors that are hampering achievement.
“Laying this issue on my lap is irrational,” Evers said.
Fernandez also brought up a piece of Evers’ campaign lit that referred to voucher schools in Milwaukee as “a privatization scheme.”
“Some of the schools have been scheming, and those schools we have drummed out of the program,” Evers replied.
Evers warned that Fernandez would run DPI through the prism of the “special interest” of choice schools.
Both candidates agreed that a merit pay system for educators could have benefit, but they disagreed on the details. Fernandez indicated that she would base her merit pay system more on classroom outcomes, while Evers stressed that rewards for training were equally important.
They differed more prominently on the qualified economic offer, which Gov. Jim Doyle has proposed eliminating in his 2009-11 budget plan. Fernandez wants to retain it, saying that without the control on teacher compensation, property taxes could rise sharply.
“Children may become the enemy of the taxpayer,” she said.
Evers said he has bargained on both sides of the table, and he opposes the QEO because it hurts the state’s ability to stay competitive in teacher pay.
Evers embraced the coming federal stimulus cash, which will pump $800 million into state schools as “a historic event” that acknowledges “educators are the lever that can turn our economy around.” He said he would appoint a trustee to oversee the allocation of the funds in Milwaukee schools to ensure the money is getting to the classrooms.
In contrast, Fernandez said she looked upon the federal stimulus with caution in that it is one-time funding that won’t be there in the future
And while Evers touted the state’s ACT and SAT scores as being among the highest in the nation, Fernandez said those tests are only administered to college-bound students and aren’t indicative of the academic struggles in districts like Milwaukee.
We the People/Wisconsin is a multi-media that includes the Wisconsin State Journal, Wisconsin Public Television, Wisconsin Public Radio, WISC-TV, WisPolitics.com and Wood Communications Group.

Wisconsin DPI Superintendent Candidate Tony Evers Advocates Charter Schools

Tony Evers campaign, via email:

Tony Evers today pledged to continue his long commitment to Wisconsin’s charter schools, which provide innovative educational strategies. Dr. Evers has played a major educational leadership role in making Wisconsin 6th in the nation, out of all 50 states, in both the number of charter schools and the number of students enrolled in charter schools.
“We are a national leader in charter schools and I will continue my work for strong charter schools in Wisconsin,” Evers said. “As State Superintendent, I will continue to promote our charter schools and the innovative, successful learning strategies they pursue as we work to increase achievement for all students no matter where they live.”
Evers, as Deputy State Superintendent, has been directly responsible for overseeing two successful competitive federal charter school grants that brought over $90 million to Wisconsin. From these successful applications, Evers has recommended the approval of over 700 separate planning, implementation, implementation renewal, and dissemination grants to charter schools around the state since 2001.
During the past eight years, the number of charter schools in Wisconsin has risen from 92 to 221 – an increase of almost 150%. The number of students enrolled in charter schools has increased from 12,000 students in 2001 to nearly 36,000 today.
Evers has also represented the Department of Public Instruction on State Superintendent Elizabeth Burmaster’s Charter School Advisory Council. The council was created to provide charter school representatives, parents, and others with the opportunity to discuss issues of mutual interest and provide recommendations to the State Superintendent.

Boosting Schools Without Spending a Dime — Your Ideas

Jay Matthews:

My suggestions last month [Metro Monday column, Feb. 16] for raising achievement in budget-cutting times inspired an outpouring of reader ideas. Some were interesting, such as tougher honor rolls, more reading clubs and more speaking practice. Some were wild, such as my favorite, eliminating school buses.
A lot of people yearned, as I did, for simpler approaches that drew parents into schooling, thus strengthening family ties and improving education while saving money. Most of us admitted that few, if any, of our suggestions will be adopted, but keep in mind that hardly anyone believed the Boston Red Sox would ever win the World Series again.
I had seven ideas: replace elementary school homework with free reading; eliminate barriers to charter school growth; have teachers call parents to praise their kids; have parents e-mail educators to laud their teaching; require high school students to read at least one nonfiction book; call on every child in every class; and declare a national holiday on which everyone reads. As I expected, my charter school notion was unpopular, but President Obama has since made it a top priority anyway. Good luck with that, Mr. President. All the rest won reader support, particularly the first idea on homework. I will get to that after we review the most intriguing of your suggestions.

Wisconsin’s Budget Picture

Christian Schneider:

We’ve made the case numerous times on this blog that Governor Doyle’s proposed budget uses too much one-time money to balance the state budget. Just yesterday, the Legislative Fiscal Bureau estimated the structural deficit for 2011-13 at $1.5 billion – and keep in mind, that’s with $3 billion in new ongoing taxes added to the rolls.
It seems that some local government officials are starting to pick up on the house of cards Doyle has built. In Madison ( of all places), a school board member has written a criticism of Doyle’s use of one-time money, understanding the peril which awaits school budgets in the future:

Study: Charter school students may be more likely to graduate, go to college

Martha Woodall:

Charter schools generally cannot take credit for boosting test scores, but there is intriguing evidence that students at charter high schools may be more likely to graduate and attend college, a national study concludes.
The Rand Corp. study, which was released Wednesday, examined charters in eight states. Rand, a nonprofit research organization in Santa Monica, Calif., also examined charters in Chicago, San Diego, Denver, Milwaukee, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Texas and Florida.
A year ago, a Rand report on charter schools in Philadelphia found that their students performed about the same as students in district-run schools.
Charter school research has become politically charged, with dueling views. Some reports have concluded that students at the nation’s 4,100 charter schools outperform their counterparts in traditional public schools. Other investigators have said charter students do no better than public school students and often do worse.
Researchers involved with the Rand report said they had used performance data of individual students over time to try to evaluate charter schools more accurately. Their work received financial support from several nonprofit foundations, including the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the William Penn Foundation. Bill Gates supports charter schools, and the Gates Foundation has provided millions of dollars to help successful ones expand.

Ron Zimmer, Brian Gill, Kevin Booker, Stephane Lavertu, Tim R. Sass, John Witte:

The first U.S. charter school opened in 1992, and the scale of the charter movement has since grown to 4,000 schools and more than a million students in 40 states plus the District of Columbia. With this growth has also come a contentious debate about the effects of the schools on their own students and on students in nearby traditional public schools (TPSs). In recent years, research has begun to inform this debate, but many of the key outcomes have not been adequately examined, or have been examined in only a few states. Do the conflicting conclusions of different studies reflect real differences in effects driven by variation in charter laws and policies? Or do they reflect differences in research approaches — some of which may be biased? This book examines four primary research questions: (1) What are the characteristics of students transferring to charter schools? (2) What effect do charter schools have on test-score gains for students who transfer between TPSs and charter schools? (3) What is the effect of attending a charter high school on the probability of graduating and of entering college? (4) What effect does the introduction of charter schools have on test scores of students in nearby TPSs?

Teen Births on the Rise for Second Year in a Row

Rob Stein:

The rate at which teenage girls in the United States are having babies has risen for a second year in a row, government statistics show, putting one of the nation’s most successful social and public health campaigns in jeopardy.
The birth rate among 15- to 19-year-olds rose 1.4 percent from 2006 to 2007, continuing a rise that began a year earlier when the rate jumped 3.4 percent, reversing what had been a 14-year decline. Although researchers will have to wait at least another year to see whether a clear trend emerges, the two consecutive increases signal that the long national campaign to reduce teen pregnancies might have stalled or possibly even reversed.
“We may have reached a tipping point,” said Stephanie J. Ventura of the National Center for Health Statistics, which issued the report today. “It’s hard to know where it’s going to go from here.”
Other experts said the two-year data probably represent a trend and fit with other research showing a stall in the long drop in sexual activity among teens, as well as a decrease in condom use.

Just Say No….to Smarties? Faux Smoking Has Parents Fuming

Dionne Searcey:

Summit Middle School in Frisco, Colo., is a tobacco-free campus. Students who smoke cigarettes are suspended.
But when a lunchtime crew of sixth-graders last fall started “smoking” Smarties, the tart, chalky candy discs wrapped in cellophane, lunchroom monitors and the school nurse were flummoxed.
The children didn’t light the candy. They crushed it into a fine powder in its wrapper, tore off one end, poured the powder into their mouths and blew out fine Smarties dust, mimicking a smoker’s exhale.
“It was freaky,” says Corinne McGrew, a nurse for Summit School District. “My biggest concern was that they would aspirate the wrapper or a whole Smarties and it would be a choking hazard.”
The fad at Summit Middle School died down after a few days and some harsh words from the lunchroom staff. But at other schools and across the Internet, “smoking Smarties,” as the activity has been labeled, is gaining popularity. Some children have even taken to snorting it, all to the horror of parents, teachers and the 60-year-old company that manufactures the candy.

To improve education, improve teacher training

Marc Bernstein:

Last week, President Barack Obama challenged parents, school leaders and teacher unions to raise their expectations for our children’s educational achievement, warning that we cannot maintain our global economic competitiveness otherwise. So Obama has increased the federal government’s financial commitment to education and strongly recommended both an increase in the number of charter schools and merit pay for teachers whose students show progress.
But these two initiatives are stopgaps. The real need is to improve the quality of all our teachers. And that goal starts with the colleges of education that prepare new teachers to enter the classroom.
What we need most is a total revamping of teacher-preparation programs. Until this occurs, we’ll continue to have second-rate schools no matter how much money we spend.
And now is the time to act. In addition to a president who’s identified education as a top priority, we have Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, who led one of our country’s largest school districts and has a reputation for getting things done; teacher unions that support higher standards for new teachers; and, perhaps most importantly, a $5 billion pot of stimulus funds at Duncan’s disposal for educational improvement initiatives.

57 apply to operate new Milwaukee voucher schools

Alan Borsuk:

In each recent year, the number of people saying they are opening voucher schools was similar to this year’s total and the number who made it into operation was in the single digits. The schools have substantial hurdles to clear, including getting a building that meets codes and signing up students and teachers.
In addition to the 57 new applicants, just about all of the current roster of voucher schools – around 120, including a few that do not appear to be operating at the moment – have applied to remain in the program next year.
Rising ranks of students
Put it all together and DPI is forecasting the number of low-income students using the state voucher program next year will be equal to about 20,500 full-time students, up from about 19,500 this year, an increase that is line with the pattern of recent years. (The actual number of students is higher than the “full time equivalent” figure because four-year-old kindergartners are funded at a fraction of other students. The actual number in September was 20,244.)

Dallas ISD records show school held ‘cage fights’

Emily Ramshaw and Tawnell Hobbs:

The principal and other staff members at South Oak Cliff High School were supposed to be breaking up fights. Instead, they sent troubled students into a steel utility cage in an athletic locker room to battle it out with bare fists and no head protection, records show.
Documents obtained by The Dallas Morning News say the “cage fights” took place between 2003 and 2005. The records don’t say how many fights may have taken place.
Donald Moten, who was principal at South Oak Cliff High at the time, denied any wrongdoing when contacted Wednesday.
District investigators learned of the fights as part of an investigation into grade-changing for student athletes that ultimately cost the school its 2006 boys state basketball championship.
Internal district reports obtained by The News describe a culture of sanctioned violence in which school employees and even the principal relied on “the cage” to settle disputes and bring unruly students under control.

Advocating Rose Fernandez for Wisconsin DPI Superintendent

Wisconsin State Journal Editorial:

Wisconsin voters have a clear choice in the April 7 race for state superintendent of the Department of Public Instruction.
The race features a consummate and careful insider, Tony Evers, versus a spirited and straightforward outsider, Rose Fernandez.
The State Journal endorses Fernandez.
The pediatric nurse and mother of five will be a strong advocate for change — someone who will use the mostly symbolic post of state schools superintendent as a bully pulpit to press for reforms, many of which President Barack Obama favors.
With so many high school students failing to graduate in Milwaukee, with so much at stake for Wisconsin in the changing, knowledge-based economy, Fernandez is the best candidate to invigorate DPI.
Fernandez, of Mukwonogo, drew public attention last year for her advocacy of public online charter schools. She helped push for a bipartisan legislative compromise that allowed virtual schools to continue serving thousands of students online with more accountability.

Madison Schools to Deny Open Enrollment Applications Based on Income?

Seth Jovaag, via a kind reader’s email:

In February 2008, the Madison school board – facing mounting legal pressure – overturned a policy that allowed the district to deny transfer requests based on race. Before that, white students were routinely told they couldn’t transfer. Madison was the only district in the state with such a policy, which aimed to limit racial inequalities throughout the district, said district spokesman Ken Syke.
With that policy gone, Madison saw a nearly 50 percent increase in students asking to transfer, from 435 to 643.
Madison superintendent Daniel Nerad notes that Madison’s numbers had been steadily increasing for years. But he acknowledged that the policy change likely explains some of this year’s jump.
“I think we do see some effect of that, but I’m not suggesting all of it comes from that, because frankly we don’t know,” he said.
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.
Other districts that border Madison – including Monona Grove, Middleton and McFarland – are seeing more transfer requests from Madison this year, too.
“The change Madison made … that certainly increased the application numbers,” said McFarland’s business director, Jeff Mahoney.
In addition, Verona school board member Dennis Beres said he suspects many Madison parents are trying to transfer their kids from the chronically overcrowded Aldo Leopold elementary school, which is just two miles northeast of Stoner Prairie Elementary in Fitchburg.

Fascinating. I would hope that the Madison School District would pursue students with high academic standards rather than simply try, via legislative influence and lobbying, to prevent them from leaving…. The effects of that initiative may not be positive for the City of Madison’s tax base.
Related: 2009/2010 Madison Open Enrollment applications. Much more on open enrollment here.

‘Relentless Pursuit’: A Year Teaching America

Talk of the Nation:

Donna Foote followed four elite college graduates in the Teach For America program. They were assigned to one of the worst schools in one of the toughest neighborhoods of Los Angeles, and Relentless Pursuit is their story.
TFA recruits are a remarkable group, and the program is an incredibly popular destination for new college grads. In 2008, roughly 10% of Georgetown, Harvard and Yale’s graduating seniors applied.

Thanks to Rick Kiley for the link.

D.C. Schools Chief Turns To Rookie Teacher Corps

Claudio Sanchez:

Michele Rhee, the District of Columbia’s public schools chancellor, has done a lot to shake up schools in the nation’s capital.
But for some, change can’t come soon enough.
So Rhee is intent on attracting young teachers who aren’t vested in the old contractual arrangements with the teachers’ union, which Rhee thinks is getting in the way of her reform efforts.
In other words, Rhee is looking for a “new breed” of teachers, mostly 20-somethings fresh out of college, who may not have majored in education but are drawn to teaching; like 22-year-old Meredith Leonard, a sixth-grade English teacher at Shaw-Garnet-Patterson Middle School.
Like many first-year teachers who’ve poured into Washington, D.C., in the past few years, Leonard is receptive to the changes that Rhee is proposing, such as merit pay and doing away with tenure.

American Adults Flunk Basic Science

Science Daily:

Are Americans flunking science? A new national survey commissioned by the California Academy of Sciences and conducted by Harris Interactive® reveals that the U.S. public is unable to pass even a basic scientific literacy test.
Over the past few months, the American government has allocated hundreds of billions of dollars for economic bailout plans. While this spending may provide a short-term solution to the country’s economic woes, most analysts agree that the long-term solution must include a transition to a more knowledge-based economy, including a focus on science, which is now widely recognized as a major driver of innovation and industry.
Despite its importance to economic growth, environmental protection, and global health and energy issues, scientific literacy is currently low among American adults. According to the national survey commissioned by the California Academy of Sciences:
Only 53% of adults know how long it takes for the Earth to revolve around the Sun.

New online dictionary redefines ‘look it up’

Jina Moore:

Erin McKean doesn’t look much like a revolutionary. She speaks softly. She sews her own skirts and writes a daily blog entry about vintage patterns. She does work out of a basement, but it’s got carpeting and good lighting and roughly 1,500 books, many of whose titles involve the word “words.” Her suburban Chicago home is not exactly the picture of subversion.
This week, though, she is slated to launch what may be the biggest revolution in the printed word since, well, printed words.
Ms. McKean’s brainchild is called Wordnik, and it combines the best practices of the old-fashioned desk reference with Internet innovations. Words can be tagged like a blog entry, their pronunciation recorded and replayed like streaming radio, their related words cataloged like a list of books customers also bought at an online book depot. When the paper page gives way to the Web page, everything about the way we think of words will change, McKean says. “This project,” she predicts in a quiet voice devoid of bravado, “is going to completely revolutionize all of dictionarymaking forever.”
Granted, a dictionary is closer to a database than a mystery thriller, its authors nothing like, say, John Grisham. But to McKean, nothing has ever seemed more fascinating than collecting and organizing American words.

Madison School Superintendent Dan Nerad on Poverty and Enrollment: “For every one student that comes into the MMSD, three leave it”

Kristin Czubkowski, via Jackie Woodruff:

All of the speakers were good, but I will admit I really enjoyed listening to Madison Metropolitan School District Superintendent Dan Nerad talk on the issue of poverty in our schools.

“Oftentimes, the statement is used as follows: Our children are our future. In reality, we are theirs.”

Nerad made one more point I found interesting, which was his explanation for why for every one student that comes into the MMSD, two to three students leave it. While MMSD has been well-recognized for having great schools and students, many of the schools have high concentrations of poverty (17 of 32 elementary schools have more than 50 percent of students on free or reduced lunch programs), which Nerad said can lead to perception issues about how MMSD uses its resources.

“From my perspective, it’s a huge issue that we must face as a community — for every one child coming in, two to three come out right now. I worry that a lot of it is based on this increasing poverty density that we have in our school district … Oftentimes that’s based on a perception of quality, and it’s based on a perception based on that oftentimes that we have more kids in need, that we have more kids with more resource needs, and oftentimes people feel that their own children’s needs may not be met in that equation.”

Recent open enrollment data.

Advocating Mayoral Control of Schools – in Milwaukee

Bruce Murphy:

Not long ago, the idea of placing the Milwaukee Public Schools under control of the city’s mayor was getting considerable discussion. Then two things happened. The Public Policy Forum did a study of other cities, which found no clear-cut answers as to whether a governance change improved their school districts.
The Forum also convened a panel of community leaders to discuss this, and the feeling was unanimous that this would make no difference to the success of MPS. From teachers union head Dennis Oulahan to business leader Tim Sheehy, there was not “a great deal of support for a change in governance,” moderator Mike Gousha concluded.
That seems to have killed the idea. After all, if the experts agree it wouldn’t do anything, and the study is equivocal, it must be a bad idea, right?
Wrong. The idea has great merit, and nothing in the study – or the statements of experts – proves otherwise. A system in which, say, the mayor appoints the school board members, much as he appoints the Fire and Police Commission, could have many benefits, including:
More attention to the problem: School Board members are elected in low-turnout elections in which a minuscule percentage of city residents vote. Mayoral elections are high-interest affairs that would automatically elevate the issue of education, while making the city’s most important officeholder accountable for the schools. We vote for the mayor based on how he does on property taxes and crime, but not on education, which is just as important to the city’s success. Why put so little value on the schools?
A less parochial school board. The teachers union routinely gets candidates elected who readily vote for increases in salaries and benefits. The typical opponent of the union is the business community. The board has swung back and forth between these interests, as their respective candidates get elected. By contrast, the mayor is answerable to the full spectrum of voters. His choices for the board are likely to be more independent.

Hudson, New Hampshire Fights Free Kindergarten

Dan Gorenstein:

itizens of Hudson, N.H., are backing their school board’s decision to reject an unfunded state mandate to provide free kindergarten. The case gets a hearing Wednesday.

Hudson School District web site. Many links here, and here.

A State by State Look at High School Steriod Tests

AP:

A state-by-state look at results of results of steroids tests in high schools:
Florida
Tests administered: 600
Positive results: 1
Notes: Florida had a statewide testing program only during the 2007-08 school year.

Software Tests Patience in Prince George County Schools

Nelson Hernandez:

A $4.1 million computer program designed to put Prince George’s County students’ grades, attendance and discipline data online has been plagued with errors in its first year, leading to botched schedules, an over-count of students and report cards that were delayed or, in some cases, simply wrong.
Since going online Aug. 19, SchoolMax has crashed four times, once for 17 hours, said W. Wesley Watts Jr., the school system’s chief information officer. Errors led to the duplication of 3,600 student identification numbers in the 128,000-student system; almost 300 were double-enrolled, leading to an inaccurate count of the student population. The delivery of report cards was delayed last semester, and some students have found they’ve gotten E’s instead of A’s. There have been problems doing things as straightforward as printing an alphabetical directory of students.
The latest hit is a six-day delay in the distribution of third-quarter progress reports, which will be distributed Thursday “due to the closure of schools because of snow on March 2 and a recent computer network outage,” administrators said in a statement.
“There are a lot of issues with SchoolMax. Some of them are technical. Some of them are data-related,” Watts told the school board. “If there is an issue, we need to know what that issue is. Telling us the grade book doesn’t work, or it stinks, doesn’t help me or our team.”

Verona High school students study the federal stimulus bill

Gena Kittner:

It’s 7:30 in the morning and about 30 high school students are chomping on doughnuts and debating the merits of federal dollars used to fund everything from building child-care centers on U.S. Army bases to lead reduction programs.
The scene is a weekly occurrence at Verona High School where advanced placement students are analyzing the 407-page American Recovery and Reinvestment Act — commonly known as the stimulus bill — as part of an extra credit project.
The students must report the dollar amount appropriated under each title, summarize that section and react to how the money’s being spent.
“I frankly don’t see how that will help the economy or is a pressing need,” Kaitlin McLean, a Verona senior, said of about $90 million going to facilities that deal with passports and training. “Couldn’t $90 million be used to create jobs somewhere else?”
The goal is to have the entire document read by April 3 — an ambitious objective considering many legislators probably haven’t done the same.

Steve Coll has been blogging (and reading) the stimulus/splurge documents.

The Immigrant Paradox

Joanne Jacobs:

The first generation comes to America and struggles, but their children do better and the third generation does even better. That’s how it’s supposed to work. But scholars are trying to understand the “immigrant paradox,” reports Education Week. The Americanized children of immigrants often do worse in school than the foreign-born generation, despite fewer English problems. American-born children have more health problems and are more likely to abuse alcohol and drugs and act violently.

Pennsylvania’s Cyber Charter Schools

Daveen Rae Kurutz:

When thousands of students ditch home computers and gather in makeshift classrooms across the state today, the future of their cyber charter schools is uncertain.
Testing begins on reading and math portions of the Pennsylvania System of School Assessment, the measure by which the state determines whether public schools are making “adequate yearly progress” under the federal No Child Left Behind Act. Last year, only three of the state’s 11 cyber schools — which educate more than 19,000 students — achieved AYP.
Traditional schools that fail to do so face corrective action from the state that increases in severity each succeeding year, up to a state takeover. Cyber schools face the threat of the state not renewing their five-year charters, effectively shutting them. Six charters are up in the next two years, and test scores will be a big factor in renewals, said Leah Harris, spokeswoman for the Pennsylvania Department of Education.

Bill Tucker has more.

Interest surges in leaving other jobs for teaching

Libby Quaid:

Plenty of people dream of leaving their jobs to become teachers. Today, more people are actually doing it.
Peter Vos ran an Internet startup. Now he teaches computer science to middle school kids in Maryland.
Jaime McLaughlin used to do people’s taxes. Now he teaches math to sixth graders in Chicago.
Alisa Salvans was a makeup artist at Saks department store. Now she teaches high school chemistry in suburban Dallas.
These teachers, with real-life experience and often with deep knowledge of their subjects, are answering a call to service that is part of a strategy to dramatically boost the size and quality of the teaching work force.
Career switchers make up about one-third of the ranks of new teachers, and that number has jumped in the past decade. Now, as the recession deepens, even more people are deciding to become teachers.

Our Lady Queen of Peace School Principal Steve Bolser dies

George Hesselberg:

Steve Bolser, the man with the Snoopy tie and the Charlie Brown “Never, ever give up” attitude, the principal at “QP” who really was a pal, died Saturday, a year after being told he had a cancerous brain tumor.
Bolser, 56, was the principal at the 470-student Our Lady Queen of Peace School since 1994 but had been in Catholic education for many years, working as a teacher at Edgewood Campus School and as principal of Edgewood High School.
The news of his illness was delivered last year while students were already coping with the death of a fellow student from brain cancer, and after Bolser had brought in specialists to train staff on how best to help children cope with illness and death.
“We were very grateful that along the whole journey the family was in constant communication with us, our pastor, and it was their desire to keep everyone full informed, it was a huge gift to everyone,” said Patty Chrsyt, acting principal at the school.
Bolser had a combination of teaching gifts to go along with his faith, she said, that endeared him to student and staff alike.

A Look at Wisconsin State Tax Funded K-12 Spending

TJ Mertz:

Not only is one time revenue being used for ongoing expenses (which may be acceptable in these economic circumstance), but all this revenue is being used to offset state funds. When combined with the “current law” revenue cap increases estimated at $277 and $286 per member for the two years, this shifts the burden to local property taxpayers in significant ways.
However things go down, the state will move further from the 2/3 support concept and consequently the local property tax portion of school revenues will be increasing at a faster rate than the state portion (unless districts don’t tax to the limit, but that has some bad effects in subsequent years). I am still confused about the Governor’s and the LFB thoughts on IDEA and Title I, which appear to be at least partially contrary to the “supplement not supplant” provisions. I do know that there is lobbying going on from many quarters to expand the loopholes and allow more of the stimulus money to be used to fund existing, not expanded programs and services.
There are also some positives. Revenue cap increases are included at past levels, school safety, nurses and transportation are eased; the low revenue ceiling is raised, Special Education isn’t actually cut, SAGE and 4 K are given increases, albeit insufficient ones. It could be worse.

Madison School District Cuts Busing Costs by $926,343,09

Thanks to Erik Kass for sending this along.

We Should Not Be Surprised at These Outcomes, When We Teach our Children PowerPoint

A recently released “slideument” from General Motors. This document [PDF or [PPT] “explains” their March, 2009 buyer and dealer incentives. Via the Truth About Cars.
Related: “The Cognitive Style of Powerpoint“, “slideuments“, PowerPoint and Military Intelligence, PowerPoint does Rocket Science and Two Decades of PowerPoint, is the World a Better Place?
I am frequently amazed at the information sent around in such slideuments.

Will school finances end in tragedy?

Maya Cole:

The headlines are dramatic: a state running billions in debt with declining revenue and a legislature waiting anxiously for federal money to show up.
“All the world’s a stage” — beyond a doubt. The feat is to decide whether this is a comedy or tragedy amid a dismal economy and different players.
Like stock characters, lobbyists continue to collect in the halls of government to sell their wares.
The predictable talk of paying for education plays to the citizenry. Don’t raise taxes and do more with less — it’s the same old dichotomy. Lately there’s new irony, as suggested by Gov. Jim Doyle, that school boards should go to the table with “more creative ways” to bargain and without the QEO (qualified economic offer).
We’ve been focusing in the wrong place, according to Doyle. All we need is a “creative teacher compensation package.” Problem solved. So school boards just need to get more creative and drop the discussion on school finance and educational excellence? Talk about a plot twist!
The cynical souls suggest that now is the time for caution and control, no time to attempt school finance reform, though the current formula was a short-term solution whence it began. They heed us to plod along with conventional plans and wait for — who and when? Next year? The year after?

Transforming Workers and Work: Learning how to read the new knowledge economy.

Jack Falvey:

THOUSANDS OF PROFESSIONAL JOBS IN THIS COUNTRY have been downsized or offshored, and the Americans who held them have been laid off. Where are those people now? Few have starved to death or the tabloids would have told us. Few have jumped from bridges or the security camera footage would be all over YouTube. All those poor souls somehow have continued to earn enough for bare subsistence, or better.
Like it or not, the underemployed eventually realize that they have become small-business people. They did not register with the SBA for loans; they just began creating wealth for themselves by selling stuff or services to others.
We live in the most adaptable organism on earth. With a computer and a link to a network, we can use our knowledge to adapt and create wealth.
FARMERS AND FACTORY WORKERS could tell us that economic activity has always had a knowledge component. It’s hard to create much wealth without skills. Now, for the first time in human history, knowledge is becoming the dominating determinant of wealth creation.
There are giant companies, such as Microsoft, that manufacture almost nothing. They don’t ship anything except computer disks loaded with data, and sometimes not even that. Even an old-line “heavy-iron” company like IBM has transformed its manufacturing business into a different kind of wealth-creating enterprise, in which 60% of sales come from service contracts.

Paying It Forward as a Full-Time Job

Elizabeth Garone:

When Trevor Patzer was growing up in Ketchum, Idaho, he received an unusual offer from family friend Ric Ohrstrom: get admitted to New Hampshire’s prestigious St. Paul’s School, and Mr. Ohrstrom would foot the entire bill for his schooling there.
Mr. Patzer was accepted and graduated three years later. He says the experience of someone offering to pay for his high-school education had a profound effect on him, and the gift was always in the back of his mind, even as he moved to college and into the work world.
After graduating from Brown University, Mr. Patzer, now 35, headed off to Andersen Consulting to be a systems integration consultant. “It was that or investment banking,” he says. But it didn’t take him long to realize that there was more to life than “coding someone else’s computers,” he says. “I knew it wasn’t the best fit for me. I’m a people person.” Still, he kept plugging away in consulting for two more years.
During one of his vacations in 1998, he decided to visit Nepal and see “the biggest mountain in the world.” While there, Mr. Patzer had another life-changing experience and it had little to do with the majestic awe of Mount Everest. His tour guide for the trip was Usha Acharya, an author and the wife of Nepal’s former ambassador to the United Nations. While they took in various historic sites together, she talked to Mr. Patzer about the plight of poor children in Nepal. He decided on the spot that he wanted to fund the education of a Nepalese child, in the same spirit Mr. Ohrstrom had funded his education. When Mr. Patzer asked Ms. Acharya if she knew of such a child, she spoke of a young girl who could benefit from his philanthropy.

Oakland officials sue over charter school funding

Jill Tucker:

The Oakland school board has sued State Superintendent of Public Instruction Jack O’Connell, saying he violated state law and financial common sense when he gave city charter schools $450,000 out of the district’s bank account.
The lawsuit, filed Thursday, is the latest volley in a fight for power and authority over the Oakland schools. O’Connell has controlled the purse strings since the state bailed out the nearly bankrupt district with a $100 million loan in 2003.
O’Connell said giving additional funding to the district’s 32 charters schools – about $60 for each of their 7,500 students – was an equity issue. The alternative public schools were left out of a parcel tax passed by voters a year ago.
“Clearly all of the public schools in Oakland are deserving of resources, including the district’s charter schools,” said O’Connell spokeswoman Hilary McLean.

Duncan: Schools must improve to get stimulus money

Libby Quaid:

Education Secretary Arne Duncan says schools must make drastic changes to get money from a special $5 billion fund in the economic stimulus bill.
“We’re going to reward those states and those districts that are willing to challenge the status quo and get dramatically better,” Duncan said Monday at the White House.
Those who keep doing the same old thing, however, won’t be eligible for the money, he said.
Schools will be getting tens of billions more dollars through regular channels. On top of that, Duncan will have an unprecedented $5 billion to award for lasting reforms.
To get an award, schools and states must show they have been spending their money wisely. They are supposed to find innovative ways to close the achievement gap between black and Latino children who lag behind their white counterparts in more affluent schools.
Specifically, states are supposed to:

Improve teacher quality and get good teachers into high-poverty schools;
Set up sophisticated data systems to track student learning;
Boost the quality of academic standards and tests;
Intervene to help struggling schools.

It will be interesting to see how real this is.

An Outbreak of Autism, or a Statistical Fluke?

Donald McNeil, Jr.:

Ayub Abdi is a cute 5-year-old with a smile that might be called shy if not for the empty look in his eyes. He does not speak. When he was 2, he could say “Dad,” “Mom,” “give me” and “need water,” but he has lost all that.
He does scream and spit, and he moans a loud “Unnnnh! Unnnnh!” when he is unhappy. At night he pounds the walls for hours, which led to his family’s eviction from their last apartment.
As he is strapped into his seat in the bus that takes him to special education class, it is hard not to notice that there is only one other child inside, and he too is a son of Somali immigrants.
“I know 10 guys whose kids have autism,” said Ayub’s father, Abdirisak Jama, a 39-year-old security guard. “They are all looking for help.”
Autism is terrifying the community of Somali immigrants in Minneapolis, and some pediatricians and educators have joined parents in raising the alarm. But public health experts say it is hard to tell whether the apparent surge of cases is an actual outbreak, with a cause that can be addressed, or just a statistical fluke.

Obama’s Education Chief Knows Stars Are Aligned for Real Change

Gerald Seib:

U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner may be the Obama cabinet member facing the biggest crisis — the economic one — but Education Secretary Arne Duncan may be the one holding the biggest opportunity in his hands.
It is this: He inherits the best chance in a generation to really shake up an American education system that is uneven and underperforming. And he knows it.
“I see this as an extraordinary opportunity,” Mr. Duncan says in an interview. “We have a couple of things going in our direction that create what I call the perfect storm for reform.”
If the economy ever heals, and if Afghanistan doesn’t blow up, this quest to change the way Americans educate their kids may emerge as one of the biggest dramas of the Obama term. Here are the components of that perfect storm for change that Mr. Duncan describes:
There’s virtually a national consensus — one that certainly includes business leaders panting for a better-prepared work force — that America’s ossified education system needs a big shake-up. Moreover, a bipartisan trail toward real change was blazed by the Bush administration (which gets too little credit for doing so).

Sweden’s School Choice: Vouchers for All

“Education is so important that you cannot leave it to just one producer” – Sweden’s former Education Minister, Per Unckel; Video by Lance Izumi. Izumi is co-author of “Not as Good as You Think: Why the Middle Class Needs School Choice“.

France Set to Raise Drinking Age

David Gauthier-Villars:

Garçon! A glass of red.
Teenagers under the age of 18 could soon lose the right to drink wine in France because of a new bill that would tighten restrictions on alcohol sales.
The government of President Nicolas Sarkozy has drafted the bill, which would raise France’s minimum drinking age for wine and beer to 18 from 16. The government says it would reduce a dangerous addiction among youths. A vote on the bill is expected to take place Wednesday at the National Assembly, where it is likely to pass, as Mr. Sarkozy’s center-right coalition has a majority of the votes. A final vote in the Senate could take place in April.
France has had a liberal approach to alcohol thus far. Unlike most other countries, France has two drinking ages: Young people can drink or purchase wine and beer from the age of 16 and hard liquor from 18. Bartenders and shopkeepers don’t usually check the identification cards of their customers, however young.
The powerful lobby of French winemakers says it won’t try to derail the law, but thinks the government is making a big mistake. A stricter law, winemakers say, could reverse the age-old French custom of parents teaching children how to taste and appreciate wine at the family meal.
The risk of the new law, they say, is a habit of binge drinking imported from the U.S., where the drinking age is 21, and the U.K., where studies show one in four adult men and one in three adult women are heavy drinkers.

Milwaukee Schools Chief Seeks to Disrupt the Status Quo

Alan Borsuk:

Superintendent William Andrekopoulos on Sunday called for using tens of millions of dollars in federal economic stimulus money “to disrupt the status quo” in Milwaukee Public Schools in a bid to increase student achievement.
Making school days for kindergarten through eighth grader longer by something less than an hour a day and pushing the entire MPS system to switch to a “year-round” schedule, in which summer vacation is shortened, were two of the ideas suggested by Andrekopoulos.
He also called for improving teaching quality by giving staff members more time to prepare for class and collaborate with other teachers and by providing teachers more training.
Andrekopoulos said the short time frame being set for spending economic stimulus money and the urgency of improving student achievement mean that MPS should aim to implement the changes by the start of the coming school year. Decisions must be made by about May 1, he said.
A set of public meetings will be held, beginning Wednesday, to get public reaction and allow people to make their own suggestions on what MPS should do.

Grade Inflation at American Colleges and Universities

gradeinflation.com, via a kind reader:

This web site is an outgrowth of an op-ed piece that I wrote on grade inflation for the Washington Post, “Where All Grades Are Above Average” In the process of writing that article, I collected data on trends in grading from about 30 colleges and universities. I found that grade inflation, while waning beginning in the mid-1970s, resurfaced in the mid-1980s. The rise continued unabated at virtually every school for which data were available. By March 2003, I had collected data on grades from over 80 schools. Then I stopped collecting data until December 2008, when I thought it was a good time for a new assessment.
I now have data on average grades from over 180 schools (with a combined enrollment of over two million undergraduate students). I want to thank those that have helped me by either sending information or telling me where I can find it. I especially want to thank Chris Healy and Lee Coursey who, combined, uncovered over 50 web sites with detailed data. Chris Healy has written a research paper with me on the topic of grading at American colleges and universities that we finished March 2, 2009; preprints are available upon request. I also want to thank those that have sent me emails on how to improve my graphics. Additional suggestions are always welcome.

View University of Wisconsin-Madison grades by College and Department from 1998 onward here.

“Dumbing Down” UK University Standards

BBC:

wo senior academics at a Manchester university have accused it of “dumbing down” higher education.
Sue Evans and Walter Cairns, both lecturers at Manchester Metropolitan University (MMU), said the marks of failing students had been “bumped up”.
They also claim the university will not take action against students who fail to turn up for lectures.
Deputy vice chancellor Kevin Bonnett said the comments were an “insult” to the university and its students.

The Daily Mail:

A group of university lecturers have painted a bleak picture of the falling standards of British higher education in a 500-page dossier presented to an MPs’ inquiry.
The academics warn of an across-the-board dumbing down with degrees becoming increasingly easy, widespread plagiarism and institutional pressure from university bosses to award students higher grades than they deserve.
The lecturers come from a wide range of universities including Oxford, Birmingham, Cardiff, Sussex and Manchester Metropolitan, reported The Sunday Times.
Graduates throwing mortarboards in the air
The aim of the dossier, which blames the problems on university expansion without adequate funding, is to force Universities Secretary John Denham to take action to safeguard standards of higher education.
One academic to give evidence is Stuart Derbyshire, a senior lecturer in psychology at Birmingham University.

More from Greame Paton and Yojana Sharma.

Where Education and Assimilation Collide

Ginger Thompson:

Walking the halls of Cecil D. Hylton High School outside Washington, it is hard to detect any trace of the divisions that once seemed fixtures in American society.
The United States has experienced the greatest surge in immigration since the early 20th century, with one in five residents a recent immigrant or a close relative of one. This series examines how American institutions are being pressed to adjust.
Students in Hylton High School’s program for English learners, like Leon Peng and Nuwan Gamage, at right, cross paths in the hallways with mainstream students. But the groups seldom socialize. More Photos >
Two girls, a Muslim in a headscarf and a strawberry blonde in tight jeans, stroll arm in arm. A Hispanic boy wearing a Barack Obama T-shirt gives a high-five to a black student with glasses and an Afro. The lanky homecoming queen, part Filipino and part Honduran, runs past on her way to band practice. The student body president, a son of Laotian refugees, hangs fliers about a bake sale.
But as old divisions vanish, waves of immigration have fueled new ones between those who speak English and those who are learning how.
Walk with immigrant students, and the rest of Hylton feels a world apart. By design, they attend classes almost exclusively with one another. They take separate field trips. And they organize separate clubs.

Why is NEA cheering Obama’s education ideas?

Elizabeth Hovde:

The National Education Association appears to be humming “Stand By Your Man,” even after President Barack Obama promoted both merit pay and an expansion of charter schools in his recent comments about education.
What gives? Whenever a conservative leader talks about pay differences for educators instead of one-size-fits-all raises, teachers’ unions say “no,” “no” and, “hell, no.” And whenever a Republican supports charter schools, NEA members start calling politicians enemies of public schools.
In a statement released after Obama’s “cradle-to-career” education speech last week, NEA President Dennis Van Roekel welcomed Obama’s “vision” for strengthening public education and said, “He’s off to a solid start. … His ‘cradle-to-career’ proposal mirrors what NEA and its 3.2million members have been advocating.”
The union clearly heard what it wanted to hear (more money) and ignored much of Obama’s talk. Merit pay, charter school expansion and more school accountability are not what the union has been advocating. Given the NEA’s glowing review, I wondered if the union would even have blinked if the president demanded an end to undemocratic, mandatory unionism. (That was not on Obama’s radar, needless to say.)

Wisconsin DPI Superintendent Debate Friday 3/21/2009

AP:

A debate between the two candidates for Wisconsin state superintendent will be broadcast statewide Friday night on public television and radio.
Tony Evers and Rose Fernandez are running to be the next superintendent of the Department of Public Instruction. The election for the nonpartisan position is April 7.
Evers currently serves as the deputy superintendent. Fernandez is a leading advocate of virtual schools.

How To Stop Google From Following You

Lauren Aaronson:

A simple tool lets you opt out of advertising programs that track your Web clicks
Hundreds of thousands of Web sites show ads provided by Google, such as those little text ads that offer you everything from diets to dog training. Now Google has announced plans to track your clicks across all these sites, and then serve up ads personalized to your tastes. Visit a bunch of electronics-related sites, say, and the next site you view may show you an ad for the latest must-have gadget, even if you’re now reading about ways to reduce stress through yogic meditations.
As Big Brother as it sounds, this is actually something that many advertising companies already do. But don’t worry: There’s a way to stop Google–and all the others–from prying.
First, Google has offered up several ways to change and reduce the info it stores about you. Using its new Ads Preferences Manager, you can delete any of the interests that Google believes you have, such as Entertainment or Travel. You can even add interests, if you happen to like personalized advertising.

Push for financial literacy spreads to schools

Amy Green:

Create a budget and stick to it. Shop around for the best price. Pay off credit-card balances each month.
Roy Kobert set aside his work as a bankruptcy attorney one Friday morning to teach these and other personal-finance lessons at Boone High School. He starts by showing the 11 students of this senior-level business class a Saturday Night Live sketch in which Chris Parnell touts a book called, “Don’t Buy Stuff You Can’t Afford.” He garners laughs then delves into the basics.
The students listen up. Three say they already have credit cards. One says his dad makes him read books by personal finance expert Suze Orman. All say most of their friends have no idea how to manage money.
“They spend stuff on little stuff,” says Hillary Haskins, a 17-year-old senior. “It adds up.”
Mr. Kobert knows many adults never will master what he’s teaching. But with the economy spiraling, interest in financial literacy is growing. Nationwide, a movement is spreading, with the emphasis on children and young adults who advocates want to reach before credit-card companies do.

Congress vs. Washington DC Kids

Andrew Coulson:

Congressional Democrats succeeded this week in crippling a school choice program operating in the nation’s capital. For the last five years, the D.C. Opportunity Scholarships have made private schooling affordable to 1,700 poor children. Rather than reauthorizing the program for another five-year term, Democrats have all but ensured it will die after next year.
House Appropriations Committee Chairman David R. Obey, Wisconsin Democrat, has asked D.C. Public Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee to prepare for the return of voucher students to the city’s broken public schools.
Sen. Ted Kennedy’s office claims the senator opposed the voucher program from the start because it “takes funds from very needy public schools to send students to unaccountable private schools.” (The House Budget Committee holds hearings today on the U.S. Education Department budget).
But just how needy are D.C. public schools? To find out, I added up all the K-12-related expenditures in the current D.C. budget, excluding preschool, higher-education and charter school items. The total comes to $1.29 billion. Divide that by the official enrollment count of 48,646 students, and it yields a total per-pupil spending figure of $26,555.

Milwaukee’s St. Anthony to add high school

Alan Borsuk:

Govanne Martinez said it will be an honor to be in the first ninth-grade class at St. Anthony School.
Sebastian Pichardo said, “I want to test how smart I am, how much I can achieve.” The best way to do that, he thinks, is to stay at the school where he has been since he was 4 years old.
The two St. Anthony eighth-graders are among more than 90 students who have enrolled in what will be the first new Catholic high school in the Milwaukee archdiocese in more than 25 years. It also will be the first Catholic high school to operate on the south side and within the boundaries of the city of Milwaukee since St. Mary’s Academy closed in 1991.
St. Anthony is already the largest kindergarten through eighth-grade school in Milwaukee, with 1,045 students, all but a handful participants in the publicly funded private-school voucher program. That makes the school one of the largest Catholic grade schools in the United States
And now: St. Anthony, the high school.
School leaders plan to add a grade a year and reach 400 students or more by the fifth year.
A building just north of W. Mitchell St. on S. 9th St. is expected to house the high school for the first couple years, said Terry Brown, president of the school. That’s in the block north of St. Anthony church and the several buildings used now by the school’s upper grades.

SAT Question: Do You Think It is Sometimes Necessary to Be Impolite to Get Your Wa

Bob Sutton:

My daughter took the SAT this morning. The essay question she was asked to answer was more or less what you see in the headline. How is that for a coincidence? She thought it was pretty funny to see the question, and in talking to her about her answer she wrote, I got the first hint ever that she had actually read The No Asshole Rule, or at least parts of it. I hope it helped…..

Information Technology Academy

University of Wisconsin-Madison:

Sponsored by the UW-Madison Division of Information Technology (DoIT), ITA is an innovative, 4-year pre-college technology access and training program for talented students of color and economically disadvantaged students attending Madison Public Schools. Our mission is to prepare students for technical, academic, and personal excellence in today’s Information Age.
Each year, ITA competitively recruits 30 students in their final semester of 8th grade to participate in the program. Selected students receive four years of intensive training in preparation for high tech, IT related careers; in addition to intensive academic support in preparation for competitive University admissions and study. The Academy’s dual focus on academic excellence and technological literacy prepares promising students for learning and leadership in the 21st century digital age, and continues the University of Wisconsin’s long tradition of excellence and service.
Through hands-on training, mentoring, leadership development, community service, and internship opportunities, ITA students develop the knowledge and skills to increase their own, as well as their community’s access to technology; while gaining valuable skills and experiences as future leaders and professionals.
ITA is one of only five information technology outreach programs for high school students in the State of Wisconsin, and the only program of its kind and scope in the Madison area.

MPS’ Parental Enticement Program Spent Freely, Widely But, oh, the questionable expenditures. Now some are banned.

Mike Nichols:

Tax dollars intended to help parents improve their children’s academic achievement have for years routinely been spent by Milwaukee public schools on everything from roller skating to bowling to water-park field trips, an investigation by Wisconsin Interest has found.
Thousands of dollars were also spent on fast food, DJs, prizes, gift certificates and other goodies and giveaways. One school spent $556 in parental-involvement money to buy 250 pumpkins. Another spent $686 for a Milwaukee Bucks “Family Night.”
Even when a clear academic purpose is evident, there are often questions about excess. Two schools, according to invoice descriptions, spent more than $17,000 to rent hotel and banquet-hall space for student recognition ceremonies.
Research, as well as common sense, has long shown that having engaged and informed parents is one of the most important ways to increase a child’s success in school – and in life. Recognizing that, the federal government has funneled “parental involvement” tax dollars to many school districts across the country.
This year alone, schools run by MPS will receive $38.2 million from the federal government’s Title I program. Like other large districts, MPS must set aside at least 1% for parental-involvement initiatives. The district goes further and sets aside 2% – which would amount to about $764,000 in the 2008-2009 school year.

Minnesota Democrats Propose $1 Billion Education Cut

Tom Scheck:

Democrats in the Minnesota Senate are proposing deep cuts in education funding to help balance the state’s budget. Their plan includes a cut in early education through 12th grade funding of nearly $1 billion dollars. They would also cut state funding for higher education by $221 million dollars. The Senate DFL plan is the first proposal from state lawmakers to erase the state’s $4.6 billion deficit.
The plan would cut spending by 7 percent across all budget areas. The largest programs hit are schools, health and human services and aid to local government. In total, the plan cuts $2.4 billion in spending. The plan also relies on $2 billion in unspecified new revenue.
At a news conference, DFL Senate Majority Leader Larry Pogemiller said the cuts are needed to stabilize the budget in the long term. He said Governor Pawlenty’s proposal to use one-time money, accounting shifts and spending cuts does not adequately address the problem.
“It’s a day of reckoning for Minnesotans, both for elected officials both in the executive branch and the legislative branch,” Pogemiller said. “We need to do our duty to balance the state budget for the long-term financial health of the state.”
What is most notable is that Senate Democrats are proposing $1 billion in cuts to early childhood education and K thru 12 schools. K-12 funding is required under the Minnesota Constitution and lawmakers have been reluctant to cut those programs for fear of angering voters. Senate Education Finance Chair Leroy Stumpf, of Plummer, said the depth of the budget problem, along with a sputtering economy, mean all programs have to be on the table.

Runaway daughters

Katharine Mieszkowski:

Debra Gwartney was trying to escape a failed marriage when she moved from Tucson, Ariz., to Eugene, Ore., in the early ’90s with her four daughters in tow. What the newly single mother didn’t foresee was that, as she fled from her past to a different city and job, her relationship with her girls would be forever transformed, too. Enraged by the divorce and the move, her two oldest daughters, Amanda and Stephanie, soon ran away, seeking adventure on the streets and shelter in abandoned buildings with other teenagers like them.
In “Live Through This: A Mother’s Memoir of Runaway Daughters and Reclaimed Love,” Gwartney relives the private desperation and shame of being a mother whose teenage daughters disappear for days at a time, only dropping in occasionally when no one else is home to stock up on supplies, leaving empty beer cans, fetid clothes, empty cigarette boxes and puddles of brilliant Manic Panic hair dye behind. As the girls’ absences stretch to weeks and months, Gwartney recalls her frantic searches for them, first in Eugene and then in San Francisco. Along the way, she delves into her own culpability in the family dynamic that drove them away.
A former correspondent for the Oregonian and Newsweek, Gwartney wrote about her relationship with her eldest daughter, Amanda, in Salon back in 1998. Debra, Amanda and Stephanie also appeared together on “This American Life” in March 2002, in an episode tellingly titled “Didn’t Ask to Be Born.”

Teachers to Face Individual, School Evaluations of Student Success

Bill Turque:

District teachers will be evaluated on their individual effectiveness and their school’s overall success in improving student performance under an assessment system to be unveiled this fall, Schools Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee said yesterday.
In her most detailed public comments to date on planned changes to the evaluation system, Rhee said at a D.C. Council hearing that the approach would combine standardized test scores where practical, intensive classroom observation and “value added” measurements of students’ growth during the year.
Teachers would also be allowed to set buildingwide goals for achievement that would be used in evaluating their performance.
Rhee said the Professional Performance Evaluation Program, which the District has used in recent years, is inadequate and does not reflect a teacher’s worth or how much he or she has helped students grow. She said the federal No Child Left Behind law, as written, is too narrowly focused on test results and not student progress from year to year.

The Early-Ed Big Lie

Adam Schaeffer:

In a speech on education this morning at the U.S. Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, President Obama repeats questionable statistics in support of his bid to expand the government’s monopoly on education back to the womb, asserting that “$1 of early education leads to $10 in saved social services.”
Unfortunately he’s referring to small-scale programs that involved extensive and often intensive total-family intervention rather than simple “early education.”
In contrast to the- real-world school choice programs have been tested extensively with solid, random-assignment studies. Nine out of ten of these studies find statistically significant improvement in academic achievement for at least one subgroup.

Chancellor, Superintendent address the “business” of education

KVBC-TV:

Education depends on state funding to survive, but that funding is not the only key to its success. Some educators say business leaders have plenty to do with it. It might not be the most obvious connection, but education and business go hand in hand.
It certainly does if you ask our top educators, such as Higher Education Chancellor Jim Rogers and Clark County School District Superintendent Walt Rulffes. Both attended a business luncheon Thursday to deliver a message: Even in tough times, education will bring good returns.

Obama on Math

Michael Alison Chandler:

President Obama outlined his reform agenda yesterday for the nation’s public schools in a speech before the US Hispanic Chamber of Commerce. He promoted extending the school day, adopting performance pay for teachers, and encouraging the proliferation of charter schools, to name a few.
But what did he say about math, you are wondering.
Here it is – the math report. Obama’s speech mentioned math education explicitly four times:
1. He reminded the nation that economic development and academic achievement go hand in hand and that the federal government can play a significant role.
“Investments in math and science under President Eisenhower gave new opportunities to young scientists and engineers all across the country. It made possible somebody like a Sergei Brin to attend graduate school and found an upstart company called Google that would forever change our world,” he said.

Examining Obama’s Education Numbers

Larry Abramson:

In his education speech earlier this week, President Barack Obama described the U.S. education system in some pretty dire terms. He used some dramatic numbers to back up his claims.

audio

Middleton-Cross Plains schools ask voters for funds to ease overcrowding

Samara Kalk Derby:

No time is really a good time to ask taxpayers to vote on three expensive school referendums, but in the current economic climate, Ellen Lindgren hopes Middleton and Cross Plains voters choose hope over fear.
“Some people think that it’s bad timing,” said Lindgren, president of the Middleton-Cross Plains Area School Board. “But unfortunately we didn’t have a say on when the economy tanks.”
The Middleton-Cross Plains Area School Board voted in November to ask taxpayers for extra spending to ease overcrowding in Middleton elementary and middle schools.
“We are out of space, and we have a need to provide for basic classrooms for students,” said Middleton-Cross Plains Area School District Superintendent Don Johnson.
Johnson said the district’s elementary schools are about 350 students over capacity, and the middle schools are struggling with about 150 more children than they can fit in the space.
The district will also ask voters on April 7 for funds to beef up security and to purchase instructional materials, including textbooks and computers.

‘No Picnic for Me Either’

David Brooks:

The problem is that as our ability to get data has improved, the education establishment’s ability to evade the consequences of data has improved, too. Most districts don’t use data to reward good teachers. States have watered down their proficiency standards so parents think their own schools are much better than they are.
As Education Secretary Arne Duncan told me, “We’ve seen a race to the bottom. States are lying to children. They are lying to parents. They’re ignoring failure, and that’s unacceptable. We have to be fierce.”

Five Ways to Survive the April College Crunch

Jay Matthews:

I was born in April. I used to have positive feelings about the month, notwithstanding T. S. Eliot’s observation about its cruelty, although lately my birthday has become just another reminder of my rapid decline into irrelevancy and ruin. The other problem with April is that it is, by far, the worst month for college-bound high school seniors. Twelfth-graders are among my best sources, so I sense their pain and want to help ease it.
Everything piles up in April. The month starts with often frightful news about which colleges accepted you and your friends, and which didn’t. By the end of the month you have to decide which school should get your unrefundable deposit to reserve a place in its freshman class. Your favorite school may have wait-listed you, and you have to figure out what to do about that. Your Advanced Placement or International Baccalaureate final exams are just a month away, and you don’t want to embarrass yourself. It’s spring, so your social life may be heating up, maybe for the first time in your adolescence if you were a bookworm like me. You have to worry about your parents interfering in all these important personal decisions. They will be concerned about how college is going to fit into the family finances, which don’t look so good this year.
Here is my helpful guide to surviving April. Since it is still March, you have time to think and prepare. Let me know how it works for you.

An Interview with US Education Secretary Arne Duncan

The NewsHour:

JUDY WOODRUFF: Next, the new secretary of education and what’s on his plate. President Obama earlier this week called for big changes in education. The NewsHour’s special correspondent for education, John Merrow, has a look at how the president’s point-man plans to approach that.
JOHN MERROW, NewsHour Correspondent: This time last year, former pro basketball player Arne Duncan was leading the Chicago public schools and occasionally playing basketball with friends, including then-Senator Barack Obama. A lot has changed since then.
BARACK OBAMA, President of the United States: I think we are putting together the best basketball-playing cabinet in American history.
JOHN MERROW: Thanks to President Obama, Arne Duncan has the opportunity to become the most powerful U.S. secretary of education ever.
ARNE DUNCAN, Secretary of Education: This was not something I aspired to do. Frankly, were it anyone but him, I wouldn’t probably do it.

Written Bomb Threat at Madison West High School: Letter to Parents

Principal Ed Holmes [9K PDF] via a kind reader’s email:

When Madison Schools receive any information that jeopardizes or threatens the safety of our schools, we immediately report the incident to Madison Police and consult with them to determine what the best course of action should be.
The Madison School District has well-defined protocols that are implemented anytime a threat is made against schools. The decisions regarding a response to safety situations are always made in close consultation with the Madison Police Department and other law enforcement agencies.
The safest place for students is in school where we provide structure and supervision. Therefore any decision to remove students from that environment has to be weighed carefully with a potential for placing them in a less structured environment that potentially raises other safety concerns.
These procedures were followed today at West High in response to a written bomb threat.
After consulting with District Administration, the building was searched at 6:00 a.m. using trained Madison Metropolitan School district engineers, architects and custodial supervisors. This procedure has been used in other schools under similar circumstances. Our goal is to maintain a safe educational environment for all students and staff. We have an excellent relationship with our students and encourage them to talk with us about possible issues. We ask you, as families, to help keep our lines of communication open by encouraging your students to talk about their concerns.
West High continues to be a safe place. We pledge that we will continue to focus our time, attention, and resources to keep it so.
Ed Holmes, Principal
Madison West High School [Map]

Related: Police calls near Madison high schools 1996-2006 and recent Madison police calls (the event referenced in the letter above is not present on the police call map as of this morning (3/13/2009)).

San Francisco Apparently Loves Charter Schools

Jill Tucker:

San Francisco Unified hasn’t always had the best reputation when it comes to welcoming charter schools.
And yet, the district was warmly awarded “Authorizer of the Year” this week by the California Charter Schools Association.
They called Superintendent Carlos Garcia a “champion for charter school equity,” saying he helped the charters get funding from the city’s Rainy Day Fund and Proposition A’s parcel tax.
The bestowers of the award also pat the school board on the back.
“The SFUSD Board of Education has also played a strong authorizing role in recent years and recognizes the special contributions charter schools make to public schools in San Francisco,” the association said in its announcement.

I would not be surprised if Madison has more charter schools – in 10 years.

Battling childhood obesity in the US: An interview with Robert Wood Johnson’s CEO

Matt Miller & Lynn Taliento:

Obesity used to be a privilege reserved for wealthy people in wealthy countries. Now, however, this and other lifestyle diseases also afflict better-off people in poorer countries and poorer people in richer ones, particularly the United States. In 2007, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation–the biggest US philanthropy devoted solely to health care and health, with roughly $8 billion in assets–announced that it would award $500 million in grants to reverse the soaring incidence of US childhood obesity over the past 40 years. These grants support programs designed to raise levels of physical activity and improve nutrition for kids; to identify other levers for reversing the childhood obesity epidemic; and to determine, advocate, and implement the requisite policy and environmental changes. The foundation also focuses on issues such as improving the quality of the US health care system; increasing access to stable, affordable health care; strengthening the public-health system; and addressing the health needs of vulnerable populations.
Risa Lavizzo-Mourey, who holds both an MD and an MBA, has been president and CEO of the foundation since late 2002. Matt Miller, a senior adviser to McKinsey, and Lynn Taliento, a principal in the Washington, DC, office, interviewed her at the foundation’s headquarters,…

HERE COMES THE FUTURE OF EDUCATION. ARE WE READY?

Mitch Joel:

It’s not enough to just worry about how your revenues are going to look at the end of this quarter, and it’s also not enough to be thinking about how your business is going to adapt to new realities in the coming years. We need to take a serious step back and also analyse the state of education, and what it’s going to mean (and look like) in the future.
None of us are going to have any modicum of success if we can’t hire, develop and nurture the right talent out of school. It’s also going to be increasingly challenging if those young people are not prepared for the new realities of the new workplace.
While in New York City recently for a series of meetings, I was introduced to a senior publishing executive who was intrigued by the topic of my forthcoming book (Six Pixels of Separation, expected in September). It turns out said executive has a son who is about to complete his MBA at an Ivy League school. The problem (according to this industry executive) is: “Where is he going to work? All of those jobs are either gone, or people with tons more experience are willing to do them for a fraction of what they were paying only six months ago.” It’s not an uncommon concern, and the obvious fear in this father’s tone of voice is becoming much more apparent in conversations with other business professionals who have young adult children about to enter the workforce.

Ending the “Race to the Bottom”

New York Times Editorial:

There was an impressive breadth of knowledge and a welcome dose of candor in President Obama’s first big speech on education, in which he served up an informed analysis of the educational system from top to bottom. What really mattered was that Mr. Obama did not wring his hands or speak in abstract about states that have failed to raise their educational standards. Instead, he made it clear that he was not afraid to embarrass the laggards — by naming them — and that he would use a $100 billion education stimulus fund to create the changes the country so desperately needs.
Mr. Obama signaled that he would take the case for reform directly to the voters, instead of limiting the discussion to mandarins, lobbyists and specialists huddled in Washington. Unlike his predecessor, who promised to leave no child behind but did not deliver, this president is clearly ready to use his political clout on education.

Cutting Back On the Kum Ba Yah

Anjali Athavaley:

Last summer, Lisa Bailey put down a $650 deposit each to send two of her children this year to Camp Saginaw in Oxford, Pa. She and her husband, Doug, planned to pay the $12,100 total in camp fees out of the bonus and stock options they expected from his job as finance director at a pharmaceutical company.
Then, about six weeks ago, Ms. Bailey, a 41-year-old communications worker for a Philadelphia cancer center, withdrew her deposit. “Options aren’t worth what they were, and bonuses are lower,” she says. “We are just trying to get by paying for what we have to.” The family has applied to the camp for financial assistance but hasn’t heard back.
For many families, camp is an annual tradition that teaches kids independence, keeps them busy during slow summer months and gives parents some alone-time in the house. But in this year of recession, some parents are still on the fence about whether they can afford the expense. Other families are seeking discounts and cheaper alternatives — or even skipping camp altogether.

Keeping Kids’ Spending on Track With Prepaid Credit Cards

Jane Kim:

Parents have another way to control their teens’ spending.
Today, Discover Financial Services launched a new prepaid debit card aimed at teens. The card, dubbed the Current Card, works like a standard debit card. Parents can deposit funds directly onto the card at no cost from their credit card, bank account or through recurring deposits.
Sure, most teens could open their own checking account or parents could give them a debit card linked to their own checking accounts. But Discover’s Mike Boush says the card eliminates the risk of overdraft fees, since teens can’t spend more than is loaded into their account. “The spend is limited and the control is established by the parent,” he says. Although the cards are aimed at teens, there are no eligibility requirements, so consumers can use the cards for other people, such as elderly parents or babysitters.
One drawback: Unlike credit cards, debit cards don’t help users establish a credit history, which may hurt teens once they leave school and need to shop around for a loan.
Nevertheless, prepaid cards can be an alternative for parents who are worried about their teens accumulating thousands of dollars in credit-card debt. The cards generally allow parents to track spending online, block certain merchant categories such as bars and liquor stores and get email or text-message alerts when certain spending limits are reached.

Nine Mouths to Feed

Mike Tierney:

Travis Henry was rattling off his children’s ages, which range from 3 to 11. He paused and took a breath before finishing.
This was no simple task. Henry, 30, a former N.F.L. running back who played for three teams from 2001 to 2007, has nine children — each by a different mother, some born as closely as a few months apart.
Reports of Henry’s prolific procreating, generated by child-support disputes, have highlighted how futile the N.F.L.’s attempts can be at educating its players about making wise choices. The disputes have even eclipsed the attention he received after he was indicted on charges of cocaine trafficking.
“They’ve got my blood; I’ve got to deal with it,” Henry said of fiscal responsibilities to his children. He spoke by telephone from his Denver residence, where he was under house arrest until recently for the drug matter.
Henry had just returned from Atlanta, where a judge showed little sympathy for his predicament during a hearing and declined to lower monthly payments from $3,000 for a 4-year-old son.

The Insider vs. the Upstart: Wisconsin DPI Superintendent Race

Erik Gunn:

It’s a classic political face-off: a seasoned professional with a mile-long résumé and a host of influential backers versus a relative neophyte with a fervent grassroots base.
It happened in last year’s presidential contest between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, and it’s happening in Wisconsin now, in the race to run the state Department of Public Instruction.
Standing in for Clinton is Tony Evers (tonyevers.com), currently deputy superintendent to retiring DPI head Elizabeth Burmaster. Evers, 57, is the choice of the state’s education establishment, including unions and professional groups representing teachers and administrators.
This kind of backing has been critical to Burmaster and her predecessors, who’ve had little trouble dispatching challengers over the last two decades. The easy analysis is that heavy union spending should ensure Evers’ victory April 7.
That is, unless Rose Fernandez (changedpi.com) pulls an Obama.
Fernandez, 51, who finished a close second in the five-way Feb. 17 primary, is a pediatric nurse who became a parent activist on behalf of families of children enrolled in “virtual” schools. She led the charge for the online academies after their existence was threatened by a court ruling sought by DPI.
The race is officially nonpartisan, and both candidates eschew identifying with political parties. But as in past races, the candidates and their supporters seem to fall into two camps: center/left (Evers) or right (Fernandez). And the campaigns reflect the ideological fissures dominating discourse regarding education reform.

Dissolving School Boards: For More Mayors, School Takeovers Are a No-Brainer Oversight by City Hall Can Help Push Through Reforms, but Some Parents and Teachers See Too Much Bullying

John Hechinger & Suzanne Sataline:

More U.S. cities are considering scrapping a longstanding tradition in American education, the elected school board, and opting to let mayors rule over the classroom.
Dallas and Milwaukee are currently mulling mayoral control of the city’s schools, and Detroit is under pressure to try it — for the second time. A dozen major school systems, including New York, Boston, Chicago and Washington, D.C., already have a form of mayoral control.
Advocates say the structure, in which mayors generally appoint school boards and have the power to pick superintendents, enables tough-minded reforms by promoting stable leadership and accountability. Giving the idea more currency, U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan, until recently the Chicago schools chief, is a fan and product of mayoral control. And, this week, President Barack Obama promoted some controversial initiatives that have been pushed heavily in districts with mayoral control: charter schools, merit pay for teachers, and accountability, based on rigorous testing standards.
“I would anticipate that over the next few years we will see a new wave” of switches to mayoral authority, says Kenneth Wong, director of Brown University’s urban education policy program, who studies mayoral control of schools.
But critics say that results on student achievement are mixed, and mayoral control can shut out dissent, especially from parents and teachers. That concern is fueling a debate over the reauthorization of a seven-year-old state law this June that gives New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg control over the city’s schools. His hard-charging chancellor, Joel Klein, who has introduced more school and teacher accountability, has also alienated some politicians and parents, leading to questions about whether the law should be changed or eliminated.

Miracle at St. Marcus

Sunny Schubert:

Henry Tyson shows how urban education can succeed in the right setting.
“I never wanted to be involved in helping the poor. My mother was born in Africa and was always very sympathetic toward the poor and people of other races. But the whole inner-city thing came about during my senior year at Northwestern,” says the superintendent of Milwaukee’s St. Marcus School.
“I was majoring in Russian, so in the summer of my junior year, I went to Russia. I absolutely hated it – just hated it. So when I got back to school, I realized I had a problem figuring out what to do next,” he remembers.
About that time, he was having a discussion with a black friend, “and she basically told me I didn’t have a clue what it was like in the inner city. She challenged me to do an ‘Urban Plunge,’ which is a program where you spend a week in an inner-city neighborhood.
“We were in the Austin neighborhood, on the West Side of Chicago. It was a defining moment for me,” he says. “I was so struck by the inequity and therefore the injustice of it all. I couldn’t believe that people lived – and children were growing up! – in such an environment, such abject poverty.”
“I knew after that week that I wanted to work with the urban poor. I felt a deep tug, like this was what I was meant to do. In my view, it was like a spiritual calling.”

MPS’ Parental Enticement Program Spent Freely, Widely

Mike Nichols:

Tax dollars intended to help parents improve their children’s academic achievement have for years routinely been spent by Milwaukee public schools on everything from roller skating to bowling to water-park field trips, an investigation by Wisconsin Interest has found.
Thousands of dollars were also spent on fast food, DJs, prizes, gift certificates and other goodies and giveaways. One school spent $556 in parental-involvement money to buy 250 pumpkins. Another spent $686 for a Milwaukee Bucks “Family Night.”
Even when a clear academic purpose is evident, there are often questions about excess. Two schools, according to invoice descriptions, spent more than $17,000 to rent hotel and banquet-hall space for student recognition ceremonies.
Research, as well as common sense, has long shown that having engaged and informed parents is one of the most important ways to increase a child’s success in school – and in life. Recognizing that, the federal government has funneled “parental involvement” tax dollars to many school districts across the country.
This year alone, schools run by MPS will receive $38.2 million from the federal government’s Title I program. Like other large districts, MPS must set aside at least 1% for parental-involvement initiatives. The district goes further and sets aside 2% – which would amount to about $764,000 in the 2008-2009 school year.

Self-Education Resource List

Self Made Scholar:

The internet is an invaluable resource to self-educated learners. Below is a list of some of the most helpful sites out there including opencourseware materials, free libraries, learning communities, educational tools, and more.
Including links to individual classes would make this list too long. So, I’ve added umbrella links that will help you find the material you need with just a little searching. For example, instead of listing individual classes, I’ve provided links to college opencourseware websites and course directories. From there, you’ll be able to find the individual subjects you’re interested in.

What to do when old photos of you appear on Facebook

Brain Braiker:

I am not a digital native. I was born 1975 and didn’t send my first e-mail until I was a sophomore in college. I spent my junior year abroad, where e-mail came in handy and Internet porn would have, if only I had known about it. Don’t get me wrong, I’m no Luddite. These days I love the Web like Joanie loves Chachi. (That’s a pre-digital cultural reference for all you youngsters.) But I came of age at a time when most photographs ended up in a shoe box or a photo album. I never spent hours snapping self-portraits with a digital camera trying to get that perfect profile pic. And I always assumed that any pictures taken of me before I had graduated from college were forever safe from Google’s tentacles.
That was until Caroline, a high-school friend’s little sister, joined Facebook. She scanned a batch of her pics from the late ’80s and early ’90s, posted them to her page, and tagged them–identifying the people in pictures and, if they were on Facebook, announcing to their entire networks that these photos had been uploaded. I signed on one day to find that she had posted a picture of our friend Dan in all of his 1990 glory: blousy white shirt, jeans that may or may not have been acid-washed, righteous mullet. He is standing beside Kim, who is wearing a floral print dress and a scrunchie around her wrist. Of course I left a comment, something to the effect of “HAHAHAHAHAHA!” Caroline commented back, ominously, “ur next braiker.”

The Reader

Scott McLemee:

Sometime after my 15th birthday, to judge by the available evidence, I began inscribing my name on the inside of each new book that came into my library, along with the date of acquisition – a habit that continued for 20 years and more. The initial impulse seems very typically adolescent: a need to claim ownership of some little part of the world, and to leave your mark on it.
But there was a little more to it than that. It was a ceremony of sorts, a way to mark the start of my relationship with the book itself. For a while, I also noted when I started and finished reading it.That level of precision came to an end soon enough. In my twenties, the record dwindled to just an indication of the month and year the book reached me. By my thirties the whole routine started collapsing, overwhelmed by the sheer volume of printed stuff coming across my desk. The wide-eyed expectation that any given book might open some new chapter in my life was worn away. It happened, but not that often. Moments of inner revolution occur only just so frequently. In the meantime you had to keep moving.
The impulse to “brand” certain volumes was still there: I developed a fairly precise system for annotating texts, when necessary. But experience had proven the wisdom of Francis Bacon who responded to the publishing explosion of the early 17th century with a plainspoken call for a system of triage in handling the claims on one’s attention.

Madison Says No to a Nuestro Mundo Charter Middle School, Opting for Dual Immersion Across the District

TJ Mertz comments on Monday’s Madison School Board meeting:

At Monday’s Board of Education Meeting an administrative recommendation to move forward with planning for a dual language district middle school program at Sennett was approved by a vote of 7-0 and the request for a memo of understanding with Nuestro Mundo Inc in order to qualify a charter dual language immersion middle school program for planning grants was not acted on. The lack of action was an expression of non support for the charter, as the comments by the Board members made clear.

I applaud the Board for their action and inaction.

Background here.

Intel Science Winners Announced: Two from Wisconsin

Brooke Crothers:

Intel has announced the winners of the pre-college Intel Science Talent Search 2009.
The winner, Eric Larson, 17, of Eugene, Ore., was awarded a $100,000 Intel Scholarship. Larson won for his research project “classifying mathematical objects called fusion categories. Eric’s work describes these in certain dimensions for the first time,” Intel said in a statement.
Larson’s background is described on this Siemens Foundation site, which discussed his project and his background last year. The Siemens post states that Larson, in addition to his mathematics prowess, is a piano player and a four-time winner of the Oregon Junior Bach Festival.
He is the son of Steven Larson and Winifred Kerner of Eugene, both members of the music faculty at the University of Oregon, according to the The Oregonian newspaper.

Philip Streich, 18, of Platteville, Wis placed third (home school) and Gabriela Farfan of Madison placed tenth (Madison West High School). Congratulations all around!

On Obama’s Education Speech: “You had Me at Reform”

Andrew Rotherham:

The President’s speech today includes a lot of interesting tidbits, a shout-out for performance pay, a call to lift charter school caps, and even a very pro-Broad Prize signal embedded in the data section. I’ve been lukewarm on some of the stimulus, more on that later, but this is an important speech. They’re scrambling on 16th Street…
Update: It’s on? AP’s Libby Quaid breaks some news on the lines that are being drawn:
[National Education Association President Dennis] Van Roekel insisted that Obama’s call for teacher performance pay does not necessarily mean raises or bonuses would be tied to student test scores. It could mean more pay for board-certified teachers or for those who work in high-poverty, hard-to-staff schools, he said.
However, administration officials said later they do mean higher pay based on student achievement, among other things.
Hmmm…doesn’t seem like they both can be right…

Life Stories: Children Find Meaning in Old Family Tales

Sue Shellenbarger:

When C. Stephen Guyer’s three children were growing up, he told them stories about how his grandfather, a banker, lost all in the 1930s, but didn’t lose sight of what he valued most. In one of the darkest times, Mr. Guyer says, when his grandfather was nearly broke, he loaded his family into the car and took them to see family members in Canada. The message: “There are more important things in life than money,” says Mr. Guyer, of Littleton, Colo.
The tale took on new relevance recently, when Mr. Guyer downsized to a small house from a more luxurious one. He was worried that his children, a daughter, 15, and twins, 22, would be upset. To his surprise, they weren’t. Instead, their reaction echoed their great-grandfather’s. “What they care about,” Mr. Guyer says his children told him, “is how warm are the people in the house, how much of their heart is accessible.”
As parents cut budgets, many are finding family stories have surprising power to help children through hard times. Storytelling experts say the phenomenon reflects a growing national interest in telling tales, evidenced by a rise in storytelling events and festivals. New research bears out the value of family stories, linking teens’ knowledge of them to better behavior and mental health.
An Emory University study of 65 families with children ages 14 to 16 found kids’ ability to retell parents’ stories was linked to a lower rate of depression and anxiety and less acting-out of frustration or anger, says Robyn Fivush, a psychology professor. Knowing family stories “helps children put their own experience in perspective,” Dr. Fivush says.

Washington State High School Math Text Review

W. Stephen Wilson: 285K PDF via a kind reader’s email:

A few basic goals of high school mathematics will be looked at closely in the top programs chosen for high school by the state of Washington. Our concern will be with the mathematical development and coherence of the programs and not with issues of pedagogy.
Algebra: linear functions, equations, and inequalities
We examine the algebraic concepts and skills associated with linear functions because they are a critical foundation for the further study of algebra. We focus our evaluation of the programs on the following Washington standard: A1.4.B Write and graph an equation for a line given the slope and the y intercept, the slope and a point on the line, or two points on the line, and translate between forms of linear equations.
We also consider how well the programs meet the following important standard: A1.1.B Solve problems that can be represented by linear functions, equations, and inequalities.
Linear functions, equations, and inequalities in Holt
We review Chapter 5 of Holt Algebra 1 on linear functions.
The study of linear equations and their graphs in Chapter 5 begins with a flawed foundation. Because this is so common, it will not be emphasized, but teachers need to compensate for these problems.
Three foundational issues are not dealt with at all. First, it is not shown that the definition of slope works for a line in the plane. The definition, as given, produces a ratio for every pair of points on the line. It is true that for a line these are all the same ratios, but no attempt is made to show that. Second, no attempt is made to show that a line in the plane is the graph of a linear equation; it is just asserted.
Third, it not shown that the graph of a linear equation is a line; again, it is just asserted.

Schools Try Separating Boys From Girls

Jennifer Medina:

Michael Napolitano speaks to his fifth-grade class in the Morrisania section of the Bronx like a basketball coach. “You — let me see you trying!” he insisted the other day during a math lesson. “Come on, faster!”
Across the hall, Larita Hudson’s scolding is more like a therapist’s. “This is so sloppy, honey,” she prodded as she reviewed problems in a workbook. “Remember what I spoke to you about? About being the bright shining star that you are?”
They are not just two teachers with different personalities. Ms. Hudson, who is 32 and grew up near the school, has a room full of 11-year-old girls, while Mr. Napolitano, a 50-year-old former special education teacher, faces 23 boys. A third fifth-grade class down the hall is co-ed.
The single-sex classes at Public School 140, which started as an experiment last year to address sagging test scores and behavioral problems, are among at least 445 such classrooms nationwide, according to the National Association for Single-Sex Public Education. Most have sprouted since a 2004 federal regulatory change that gave public schools freedom to separate girls and boys.

Older Fathers Linked to Lower I.Q. Scores

Roni Caryn Rabin:

The children of older fathers scored lower than the offspring of younger fathers on I.Q. tests and a range of other cognitive measures at 8 months old, 4 years old and 7 years old, according to a study released Monday that added to a growing body of evidence suggesting risks to postponing fatherhood.
The study is the first to show that the children of older fathers do not perform as well on cognitive tests at young ages. Although the differences in scores were slight and usually off by just a few points on average, the study’s authors called the findings “unexpectedly startling.”
“The older the dads were, the slightly worse the children were doing,” said Dr. John J. McGrath, the paper’s senior author and a professor of psychiatry at the Queensland Brain Institute in Brisbane, Australia. “The findings fit in a straight line, suggesting there may be some steady beat of mutations happening in the dad’s sperm.”
Earlier studies have found a higher incidence of schizophrenia and autism among the offspring of men who were in their mid-to-late 40s or older when they had children. A study published in 2005 reported that 16-year-olds and 17-year-olds with older fathers scored lower on nonverbal I.Q. tests, as did the offspring of teenage fathers.

As LAUSD layoffs loom, debate over teacher seniority resurfaces

Jason Song & Seema Mehta:

Richard Rivera joined the Algebra Project at exactly the wrong time.
After three years at charter schools, Rivera returned to the Los Angeles Unified School District last year as a math coach — a kind of roving instructor and supervisor — at Luther Burbank Middle School in Highland Park. He also agreed to work on the Algebra Project, a new program designed to keep low-achieving students involved in math.
But even though Rivera spent a decade teaching in the district, he lost his seniority with L.A. Unified because of his foray into the charter world. Because the district lays off teachers based on the amount of time they’ve worked for the school system, Rivera is now in danger of losing his job, and the Algebra Project might stall before it even begins.
If Rivera and other younger teachers involved in the program leave, the school goes “right back to square one,” said John Samaniego, the principal at Burbank, where test scores have slowly been rising.
Samaniego’s dilemma is common throughout the state as districts prepare to issue preliminary layoff notices to teachers by Friday and principals try to determine their plans for next year. The Los Angeles Board of Education is scheduled to vote today on whether to issue these notices to about 9,000 employees, including 5,500 teachers, because of an expected $700-million budget shortfall.

Sun Prairie sells naming rights to baseball field

Gena Kittner:

With the announcement of the new Summit Credit Union Baseball Field, Sun Prairie has likely become the first Dane County school district to sell the naming rights for a specific school facility.
And the high school’s varsity baseball field could be just the beginning: District officials want to sell naming rights to everything from the classrooms and the cafeteria to trophy cases and field lights at the new high school slated to open in the fall of 2010.
“Our goal is to have as many of the big items named before the school opens,” said Jim McCourt, Sun Prairie School Board treasurer and member of the Naming Rights Subcommittee.
The subcommittee has a tentative goal of selling more than $3 million in naming rights. However, district officials say business or individual monikers would be presented tactfully, such as a plaque bearing a person’s name on the back of an auditorium seat or above a classroom doorway.
“It’s not like we’re going to have banners all over the school,” McCourt said.
On Tuesday the district announced Summit Credit Union as the first company to be granted naming rights for a district facility, under the new policy to allow for names of businesses attached to facilities, in exchange for donations.
The School Board approved the naming rights agreement with Summit on Monday night, which will be in effect for 20 years. The credit union donated $99,537, which pays for about a third of the cost of the field that will have artificial turf on the infield.

On Obama’s Education Speech

Jay Matthews:

President Obama’s education speech this morning was, in my memory, the largest assemblage of smart ideas about schools ever issued by one president at one time. Everyone will have a different favorite part — performance pay models for teachers, better student data tracking systems, longer school days and years, eliminating weak state testing standards, more money for schools that improve, more grants for fresh ideas, better teacher training, more charter school growth, faster closing of bad charters and many more.
The speech puts Obama without any further doubt in the long line of Democratic party leaders who have embraced accountability in schools through testing, even at the risk of seeming to be in league with the Republican Party. His explicit endorsement of the tough Massachusetts testing system — a favorite of GOP conservatives — will irritate many teachers and education activists in his own party, but that group of Democrats has not had a champion who has ever gotten closer to the presidency than former Vermont governor Howard Dean, and we know how his candidacy turned out.
The problem, which the president did not mention, is that he has limited power to make any of these things happen. His speech was full of encouraging words to state and school district officials, who will be the true deciders. True, he has some money to spread around for new ideas. But the vast bulk of the budget stimulus dough will go, as he said, to saving jobs in school systems.

Scott Wilson has more.

Indian business blasts education reform move

James Lamont:

India’s business leaders have reacted strongly to government opposition to the opening up of higher education to private investment that might help millions of young people.
The Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry has expressed “strong reservations” about the rejection by education bodies of recommendations by the National Knowledge Commission, set up by Manmohan Singh, prime minister, on measures to attract greater private investment.
India faces the challenge of finding ways to give skills to a large population of whom more than 550m are under the age of 25.
Over the next six years, India needs to create 1,500 universities, by some estimates, but faces a big funding gap. Educational institutions in the UK, US and elsewhere are lining up to help with the tertiary level expansion through faculty partnerships, distance learning and by setting up campuses.
The federation fears that advances by some institutions, such as the Indian School of Business, Hyderabad, Manipal University and the Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani, may stall without public-private partnerships to promote global academic standards and more flexible fee structures.
The supply of education is out of touch with an economy that grew at 9 per cent over the past three years. The prize for many young people is a place at an overstretched institute of technology or management.

Obama Education Push to Include Merit Pay

Laura Meckler:

President Barack Obama is laying out his “cradle to career” agenda for education Tuesday, including a controversial plan to boost pay for teachers who excel.
The White House plan also includes new incentives for states to boost quality in their preschool programs, to raise standards for student achievement and to reduce the high school drop-out rate. And the president is fleshing out his plan to increase financial aid for college students, senior administration officials said.
In a speech to the U.S. Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, the president will also call on Americans to take responsibility for their children’s education and their own, the officials said.
The speech will build on comments made during his address to Congress, where Mr. Obama dramatically declared that those who drop out of school are failing not just themselves, but their country.
The speech was described by three administration officials speaking on condition of anonymity in advance of the official announcement, and in a fact sheet provided by the White House.
The merit pay proposal would significantly expand a federal program that increases pay for high-performing teachers to an additional 150 school districts, officials said. “What he’ll be calling for…is to reward good teachers that are improving student outcomes,” said one official.

Schools to Retain Controversial Math Curriculum

Michael Birnbaum:

Prince William County elementary schools will continue to teach mathematics with a textbook series that has drawn parent criticism and national scrutiny, despite deep divisions in the community over whether students should be given other options.
The curriculum from Pearson Education, “Investigations in Number, Data, and Space,” which is used in thousands of classrooms nationwide, has been debated virtually since Prince William began using it three years ago under the administration of Superintendent Steven L. Walts. Critics say it fails to help students learn basic skills and facts.
Their contention was buttressed last month by a federally sponsored study of first-grade test scores in schools that used four kinds of textbooks. “Investigations,” known for a student-centered approach that emphasizes creative ways to solve problems, trailed in the comparison.
But educators who have championed “Investigations” say it helps students develop a deeper conception of math fundamentals before they take on complicated topics. The debate shows no signs of going away.
Last week, the Prince William School Board split 4 to 4 on a proposal that would have allowed parents to choose between “Investigations” and a more traditional math curriculum. Opponents of the proposal, which failed Wednesday on the tie vote, said that it would have been cost prohibitive and that education would have suffered.

60 Minutes on Lowering the Drinking Age

Radley Balko:

The video below aired a couple of weeks ago, but it’s a pretty good look at the drinking age debate, with lots of camera time for Amethyst Initiative founder John McCardell.
(Note: If video isn’t working below, you can watch it here.)
One quibble: At one point in the segment, Lesley Stahl suggests that the “conundrum” for policymakers is that raising the drinking age has reduced alcohol-related traffic fatalities, but may be contributing to fatalities associated with underage binge drinking.
But there may not be a conundrum at all. When I interviewed McCardell for the February issue of Reason, he explained why the argument that raising the drinking age is responsible for the 20-year drop in highway deaths doesn’t hold water:

A cruel school move

Chicago Tribune Editorial:

We wrote last week about Democratic efforts to strip 1,900 low-income Washington children of $7,500 “opportunity scholarships” to attend private schools.
It’s an experiment in school vouchers, an experiment with little potential downside. But it’s an experiment that was launched in 2004 by a Republican-controlled Congress. Today it’s on the verge of extinction because the Democratic-controlled Congress wants to do the bidding of public-school teachers unions. The unions see vouchers that let poor kids go to private schools as aiding the enemy.
Language passed by the House as part of a massive $410 billion spending bill would effectively doom the federally funded program. The 1,900 kids would have to leave their schools and re-enter public schools in Washington, which has some of the worst schools in the nation.
The measure, by the way, is referred to as “the Durbin language” for sponsoring Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois.

A Family Illness, and Fewer Friends Who Can Help

Vanessa Fuhrmans:

Chris and Vickie Cox’s health insurance never covered the full cost of treating their children’s bone-marrow disorder. They relied on donations from their church, neighbors and family to plug the holes in their coverage, which ran as high as $40,000 a year.
That safety net is now unraveling. The slumping economy is pulling down fragile networks of support that in better times could keep families with insurance but big bills from falling into a financial hole.
The three Cox children have a rare disease called Shwachman Diamond Syndrome, which curtails the production of bacteria-fighting blood cells and digestive enzymes needed to absorb nutrients properly. It can lead to life-threatening infection, bone-marrow failure or a deadly form of leukemia.
After Samuel, 7, Grace, 12, and Jake, 15, were diagnosed with the genetic disease earlier this decade, landing a job with good health benefits became the biggest priority for Mr. Cox. He gave up plans to run his own home respiratory-care business to work as a salaried medical-equipment salesman. In 2006, the family moved to North Carolina from Kansas City to be closer to specialists at Duke University.

New superintendent Gray injects optimism into Waukesha schools

Erin Richards:

From the start, Todd Gray knew it wasn’t going to be easy.
On the day he signed the Waukesha Public School District superintendent’s contract, he was told that he might have to close one or two schools because of finances – something nobody brought up in his interviews.
Eight months later, Gray hasn’t closed those schools. Instead, he’s trying to create new ones as part of a sweeping reform effort for Waukesha that may include the implementation of 4-year-old kindergarten, a new middle school structure and expanded business partnerships with the community.
Gray’s emphasis on collaboration and innovation, and his fiscal skills gleaned from years as a certified public accountant, might make him the adrenaline shot that Waukesha’s schools have needed for years.
His guiding principles are inclusive and simple: We can educate kids better, and we can do it for less money.
“Whatever we throw out has to improve education and fit our current goals,” said Gray, who grew up near Lake Geneva and had worked as a deputy superintendent for Oshkosh schools.
When he started in Waukesha this past summer, Gray inherited a report from the former superintendent that suggested closing a school or two to consolidate space and save money. He distanced himself from it, spending weeks studying alternatives.

Milwaukee’s Educational Options

Becky Murray:

Our urban and suburban school districts are under tremendous pressure to be all things for all students. Special learning needs and unique learning styles complicate the process of providing each student with a Free Appropriate Public Education (FAPE).
I have served in conventional schools and public charter schools in the Milwaukee area. I’ve found that every school has its strengths as well as its needs to improve.
I am currently a speech therapist in two Milwaukee public charter schools, the Downtown Montessori Academy and Inland Seas High School. Yes, charter schools are actually public schools. Yes, many public charter schools provide special education services for frequently occurring disabilities.
Teaching at a charter school allows me to think outside the box as I serve my students. Public charter schools can offer teachers greater autonomy to be innovative in the classroom. For example, if a school’s reading program is not serving the needs of a classroom, charter schools have the autonomy to make changes as needs are identified. I think the ability to initiate necessary changes is where the “can-do” attitude of fellow teachers in charter schools comes from.
Many of Milwaukee’s charter schools are based on cutting-edge curriculums that serve a variety of learning styles. One option is referred to as “project based,” where students design and carry out a learning project of their particular interest. Another option is the student-led, teacher-guided Montessori environment. Direct instruction is a teacher-led style of learning that uses the repetition of very small, specifically targeted learning goals.

Colleges share applicants’ anxiety

Larry Gordon:

Economic uncertainties prompt private institutions to admit more students in order to meet enrollment targets. But public schools, including UC and Cal State, are taking fewer students.
It’s not much solace for nervous college applicants awaiting acceptance or rejection letters, but there is plenty of anxiety this month inside college admissions offices as well.
Many colleges and universities in California and around the country report unprecedented uncertainty about how the depressed economy and state budget cuts could affect fall enrollments. As a result, they say they cannot rely this year on the admission formulas that typically help them hit enrollment targets without overcrowding dorms.