The Chronicle had an interesting story in yesterday’s paper (print-only until Tuesday) about the brain drain in the Oakland school district after the fifth grade.
According to this analysis by the Oakland school district, 28 percent of all fifth-graders — and 40 percent of those who scored “advanced” on this year’s reading test — dispersed to non-OUSD middle schools this year.
At Lincoln Elementary School in Chinatown, the city’s first public, non-charter school to win a National Blue Ribbon Award from the U.S. Department of Education, a staggering 77 percent of last year’s fifth-graders left the district, up from 57 percent a few years ago.
Superintendent Tony Smith told Chronicle reporter Jill Tucker, whose son goes to Peralta Elementary in Rockridge (a school with the fifth-highest “leaving rate” in OUSD – 44 percent), that the loss of top students was one explanation for the drop-off in district test scores at the middle and high school level.
Middleton Cross Plains Professional Development Plan
Middleton Cross Plains School District 60K PDF, via a kind reader:
In a more concerted effort to enhance the manner in which our students are taught to become contributing members of a global society, we would like our schools to emphasize:
- The interconnectedness of the world’s cultures, politics, and economics.
- Recognizing, analyzing, and evaluating trends in global relationships.
- Creative problem solving, critical thinking, and innovative thought processes.
- Understanding issues from cultural perspectives other than our own.
- Encouraging study and travel abroad.
- Technical competence and the critical impact that technology has had in our world.
- Technological innovation that can expand curriculum, opportunity, and our students’ world view.
- Outreach to the community for resources and expertise to further global awareness.
- The role of world languages in preparing students for an international environment. Consideration of Chinese as a new curricular offering.
It is our hope that all students are touched by this initiative, in all courses and at all levels of our curriculum. We appreciate any innovation that can be brought to our students to achieve this goal.
Los Angeles Mayor Villaraigosa takes on teachers union
Patrick J. McDonnell and David Zahniser
In a speech to state leaders, the mayor brands United Teachers Los Angeles as an obstacle to reform as the city stands at ‘a critical crossroads.’
With a hard-hitting speech that branded the city’s teachers union as an unyielding obstruction to education reforms, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa set the stage this week for a new battle over control of the troubled Los Angeles Unified School District, the nation’s second-largest.
In a Sacramento address to state leaders, Villaraigosa — himself a longtime teachers union employee before launching a career in public office — declared that education in Los Angeles stands at “a critical crossroads,” and he assailed United Teachers Los Angeles for resisting change.
During the last five years, the mayor said, union leaders have stood as “one unwavering roadblock to reform.” He called for change in contentious areas such as tenure, teacher evaluations and seniority — all volatile arenas in which teachers unions have balked at proposals for reform as eroding their rights.
Related: Marc Eisen:
Public employee unions look increasingly out of touch and may be forced to swallow wage and benefit cuts.
Too bad a ball-peen hammer wasn’t handy. If so, leaders of the embattled Milwaukee Teachers’ Education Association might have walloped themselves over the head. Instead, they did something even more self-destructive, suing Milwaukee Public Schools for Viagra coverage of its members.
Union president Mike Langyel gamely defends the suit, saying Viagra is used to treat a bona fide medical problem. But even liberal supporters winced at the timing.
Here was a financially strapped school system struggling with an anticipated layoff of almost 500 teachers, and the clueless union was demanding insurance coverage of a sexual aid that could cost taxpayers more than $700,000 a year.
Madison School Board Approves Badger Rock Charter Middle School: “Could Cost More Than Expected”
new one-of-a-kind charter school in the city of Madison could soon become a reality, but an error in crunching numbers may mean more of a burden for city taxpayers.
The error was found just a few weeks ago, and it could put taxpayers on the hook for an additional $380,000 over the next five years.
But proponents of the proposed Badger Rock charter school have been scrambling to find ways to trim costs. And despite the bigger budget numbers, they said they hope the Madison School Board sees the bigger picture and not just dollar signs.
The year-round, agriculture- and green-based school on Madison’s southwest side would start with 50 students in sixth grade. The school would add grades seven and eight in the following two years, for a total of 150 students.
Support for the school has been great until what’s being called a “hiccup” two weeks ago.
As part of the conditions that passed, the board must execute a contract with the school no later than April 1 to operate it for a five-year period. Board member Lucy Mathiak added a sentence saying the contract shall define the district’s financial obligations for each of the five years and shall contain language limiting the district’s financial liability. Mathiak’s amendment passed 6-1.
Much more on Badger Rock here.
It would be interesting to see how the funding/review/political model compares with the ill-fated Studio School proposal and, how current public schools might fare as a “startup” today.
Candidates dwindling for Madison School Board races
One suggestion Severson offered that hasn’t gained much traction in the past is to have board members represent geographic areas rather than the entire city, more like the Milwaukee School Board.
Ruth Robarts, who served on the board for 10 years, said a consequence of at-large seats like those in Madison is that races are more expensive — hers cost $20,000 — and it becomes impossible to campaign door-to-door.
That means candidates rely on the endorsements of Madison Teachers Inc., which Robarts said has “almost overwhelming influence” on local board elections, and other groups, which then tout candidates’ qualifications and get members out to vote.
“However, the big unknown in my mind is whether School Board campaigns would become much more parochial,” she added, referring to district-based elections. “If so, would that lead to good trade-offs needing to happen to get things done or would it lead to political gridlock at this very local level?”
Teachers unions often resist school reforms
The Obama administration could not have set the stage for a better demonstration of the power and priorities of Wisconsin’s teachers unions.
With its Race to the Top competition, the federal government dangled the prospect of a share of $4.35 billion for those states ready to enact reforms, especially related to improving teacher and principal performance.
Eyes on that prize, states launched plans tying teacher pay and promotions to student achievement, giving state officials more control over local schools and overhauling data tracking and assessment systems.
Then the game got tricky: Teachers unions had to be on board.
In the end, only 11 states and the District of Columbia ended up with money from the program this year. Wisconsin got nothing.
The Wisconsin Education Association Council had helped kill or watered down critical parts of the state’s proposal, with the president of the teachers union attaching a letter to the application that one participant described as “grudging.” In the end, only 12% of the union’s local leaders endorsed a plan that might have brought in more than $250 million in school funding to Wisconsin.
Related: WEAC tops lobbyist spending list
The Wisconsin Education Association Council spent nearly twice as much as any other organization to lobby lawmakers in 2009, according to the Government Accountability Board.
The state’s largest teachers union reported spending more than $1.5 million and 7,239 hours lobbying, almost twice as much as the Wisconsin Insurance Alliance, which spent the second-highest amount on lobbying in the state.
One aspect of the union’s lobbying effort was largely successful, with the state Legislature repealing the 16-year-old qualified economic offer law that restricted teachers’ pay and benefits.
Parent Trigger Pulled at Compton’s McKinley Elementary
Not all parents want to see the Parent Trigger Law pulled at McKinley Elementary School, according to Principal Fleming Robinson.
In a statement released Thursday, Robinson said despite recent outcry there are still a lot of parents who support the school and its administration, and a host of others have been misguided.
“Some have said they signed the petition but were harassed or signed under false pretenses, which included beautifying the school,” Robinson said. “A lot of parents weren’t given clear information on what the petition was for.”
However, on Tuesday during a press conference where more than 50 parents, students, guardians and residents spoke before heading to Compton Unified School District headquarters to hand over a stack of parent-signed petitions, Elizabeth Hidalgo, the mother of a child attending McKinley, acknowledged that several parents were up in arms over their attempts and “have been spreading lies” about not receiving all the details.
Study backs ‘value-added’ analysis of teacher effectiveness
Classroom effectiveness can be reliably estimated by gauging students’ progress on standardized tests, Gates foundation study shows. Results come amid a national effort to reform teacher evaluations.
Teachers’ effectiveness can be reliably estimated by gauging their students’ progress on standardized tests, according to the preliminary findings of a large-scale study released Friday by leading education researchers.
The study, funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, provides some of the strongest evidence to date of the validity of “value-added” analysis, whose accuracy has been hotly contested by teachers unions and some education experts who question the use of test scores to evaluate teachers.
The approach estimates a teacher’s effectiveness by comparing his or her students’ performance on standardized tests to their performance in previous years. It has been adopted around the country in cities including New York; Washington, D.C.; Houston; and soon, if local officials have their way, Los Angeles.
The $45-million Measures of Effective Teaching study is a groundbreaking effort to identify reliable gauges of teacher performance through an intensive look at 3,000 teachers in cities throughout the country. Ultimately, it will examine multiple approaches, including using sophisticated observation tools and teachers’ assessments of their own performance
Much more on value added assessment, here.
US Education Secretary Duncan Re-thinks Goals
For two years, backed by a friendly Congress and flush with federal stimulus money, President Obama’s administration enjoyed a relatively obstacle-free path for its education agenda, the focus of which is the $4 billion Race to the Top grant program.
But with Republican deficit hawks taking control of the House next month, Education Secretary Arne Duncan will no longer have billions of dollars to use at his discretion.
The administration is also having to recalibrate its goals for working with Congress to overhaul the main federal law on public schools. Fortunately for the administration, its ambitions for the law, the Bush-era No Child Left Behind effort, are shared by Representative John Kline, a Minnesota Republican who will be the chairman of the House education committee.
Building A Better Teacher: Some unions, management collaborating
Secretary of Education Arne Duncan appeared in Tampa, Fla. alongside the presidents of the two major teachers unions: Randi Weingarten of the American Federation of Teachers and Dennis Van Roekel of the National Education Association.
Praising teacher evaluation, tenure, and pay reforms pursued through a partnership among the local school district, union and the Gates Foundation, Duncan lobbed a message of conciliation into an often-overheated debate over the role of unions in school improvement efforts.
“I don’t think any of us like it when something is imposed on us,” Duncan said. “I think there is so much the country can learn from what’s happening here. You have elevated the profession.”
The news conference – held in Hillsborough County, where it now takes up to four years to earn tenure and teachers are paid, in part, according to how well their students perform on standardized tests – was intended to extend an olive branch to the teachers unions in recognition of an important, though increasingly embattled, Democratic Party constituency.
No High School Scholars Need Apply
Today, The Boston Globe published the latest in a long series of special “All-Scholastics” 14-page (12×22-inch) supplements on good local high school athletes from a variety of sports. These celebrations are produced three times a year (42 pages) with lots of pictures and little bios and lists of all-stars from the Boston area.
Again this Fall, there was no room for any mention by The Boston Globe of any noteworthy academic achievement by local students at the high school level. Christiane Henrich of Marblehead HS, in Marblehead, Massachusetts, wrote a 7,360-word Emerson-prize-winning history research paper on the quality (good for the day) of U.S. Civil War medicine. It was published in the only journal in the world for the academic papers of secondary students…No room in The Boston Globe for that to be mentioned. She is now at Stanford and doesn’t mind, but I mind about all the Boston-area students who are fed a constant diet of praise for athletic achievement by their peers and at the same time are starved of any and all news of the academic achievements of their peers.
In fact, over the years I have published a good number of exemplary history papers by high school students from the Boston area and they did not and do not get mentioned in The Boston Globe, nor do the academic achievements of our high school students in foreign languages (e.g. National Latin Exam, etc.), AP subject tests in Calculus, Chemistry, European history or in any other field, receive any notice from the Globe.
International competitions reveal that we are below average in Reading, Math and Science. Perhaps we should just explain that we don’t care about that stuff as much as we do about swimming, soccer, cross-country, football, golf, field hockey, and volleyball, because achievement by our high school students in those efforts are what we really like to pay attention to, (not that academic stuff), at least when it comes to The Boston Globe.
The Boston Globe (and its subscribers) are, in this way, sending a constant stream of clear messages (42 pages at a time in supplements, not to mention regular daily columns on HS sports) that in Boston (The Athens of America) what we care about is kids doing well in sports. If they do well in academics we don’t think that is worth mentioning. Sick, sad, and self-destructive, but there we are.
—————————
“Teach by Example”
Will Fitzhugh [founder]
The Concord Review [1987]
Ralph Waldo Emerson Prizes [1995]
National Writing Board [1998]
TCR Institute [2002]
730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24
Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776-3371 USA
978-443-0022; 800-331-5007
www.tcr.org; fitzhugh@tcr.org
Varsity Academics®
www.tcr.org/blog
Ask Students
Newsweek reports this week on Michelle Rhee’s new project StudentsFirst, but I have been thinking a lot lately about the fact that, while our High School students have spent some 12,960 hours observing teachers [6 hours x 180 days x 12 years] and giving at least some of their attention to other aspects of school reform that affect them, no one seems to show any interest in actually talking with them to discover what they have learned.
Tony Wagner of Harvard did conduct a focus group for recent grads of a suburban high school he was working with, and he was surprised and intrigued by what he learned from them during the course of the conversation. But he tells me he only knows of three high schools in the whole country (of 20,000 +) which conduct such efforts to learn from students what they have noticed about their schools.
When I left my job at the Space & Information Systems Division of North American Aviation to accept a new job with Pan Am in the early 1960s, they gave me an exit interview to find out why I was leaving, but also to discover what I might offer by way of observations about my tasks and the job environment.
Our high schools, I feel it is safe to claim, do not offer their students exit interviews, either as they finish graduation or a few years later. We pass up the chance to harvest knowledge from those thousands of hours of classroom observation, and from their “hands-on” experience of the educational system in which we placed them for 12 years.
What could be the reasons for this vacuum in our curiosity about education? I believe it comes in part from our attitude that, after all, students are merely students, and that they will not become thinking human beings until long after they leave our buildings.
This is a really stupid attitude, in my view. After all, some of these students have managed calculus, chemistry, Chinese and European history. I know some who have written very very good 11,000- to 15,000-word history research papers. So it should be obvious to us, if we take a moment to think, that not only are they fully capable of noticing something about the the instruction and the other schooling processes they have experienced, but also that they are fully capable of reporting to us some of what they have learned, if we can convince them that we really want to know.
Now, someone may point out that half our college freshman drop out before their sophomore year, that a million of our HS graduates are in remedial courses every year when they get to college, and so on. I know that, so let’s, at least initially, not talk to poorly-performing students. Instead, to get our feet wet, let’s give serious interviews to the ones who will graduate summa cum laude from Yale, Stanford, Princeton, MIT and Harvard. You know, the ones who will get the Nobel Prizes one day. Surely it is not so hard to identify the ten most academically promising and thoughtful of our HS seniors each year, and, after graduation, at least ask them if they would be willing to share some of their observations and thoughts in a conversation with us.
This would give us a small first step, and a fresh one, on the way to putting Students First, and start to put an end to our really dumb neglect of this rich resource for helping us understand how to do our education jobs better for their younger peers.
I can only hope that Mr. Gates, with his hopes to improve teacher training, and Michelle Rhee, with her new push to pay attention to students for a change, are listening to this.
“Teach by Example”
Will Fitzhugh [founder]
The Concord Review [1987]
Ralph Waldo Emerson Prizes [1995]
National Writing Board [1998]
TCR Institute [2002]
730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24
Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776-3371 USA
978-443-0022; 800-331-5007
www.tcr.org; fitzhugh@tcr.org
Varsity Academics®
www.tcr.org/blog
Houston School board OKs creation of a school just for boys
No sagging pants and grungy T-shirts will be allowed at this new Houston school.
Neither will bad attitudes.
And neither will girls.
This school, approved by the Houston board of trustees Thursday, will open next fall with only male students. The campus will start with sixth- and ninth-graders, who will have to apply to attend, and will grow annually to become a full middle and high school.
The boys at this new school in Houston’s Fifth Ward will have to wear blazers and ties. They will take advanced courses, learn a foreign language and- the biggest expectation — go on to earn a college degree.
This will be the first all-boys school started directly by the Houston Independent School District, which last month announced plans to open an all-girls campus next year. The district has two other all-boys schools, but they are run by contractors and one is leaving HISD’s umbrella to become a state charter school.
Related: The Proposed IB Charter Madison Preparatory Academy.
Lessons for America
What education practices can high-performing nations learn from one another?
Learning With the World is an Asia Society initiative that focuses on common educational concerns worldwide, as well as international best-practice solutions. We work with education leaders from nations with the best and quickly improving education systems to discuss the key drivers of educational improvement and the lessons learned.
Madison School Board to reconsider ag charter school: Badger Rock
As the Madison School Board prepares to take a second shot Monday at approving an agriculture-themed charter school on Madison’s South Side, board members remain divided on what was once thought to be a slam-dunk proposal.
“I’m sold on the concept; I’m not sold on the budget,” board member Lucy Mathiak said Friday. “I don’t see anyone being jolly about spending $700,000 a year for 50 kids.”
Badger Rock Middle School, expected to open next fall with 50 sixth-graders mostly from the Sennett Middle School attendance area, has a projected budget shortfall of $43,000 for 2011-12, with a projected budget of $668,600. The gap is projected to grow to $134,000 in the charter school’s third year, when it has 150 sixth-, seventh- and eighth-graders and is expected to cost $1.37 million to run.
Madison Superintendent Dan Nerad 1.3MB PDF::
On February 16,2010, MMSD received BRMS’s Planning
Grant and Executive Summary of its proposed charter school. On August 16, 2010, the DPI approved the Planning Grant and provided BRMS with an award of $200,000.
(Please see communication from DPI attached as Appendix A).
The proposed charter school will be located on 4 acres of property on the grounds of the
Badger Resilience Center in South Madison. The designated site is adjacent to a 7 acre
Madison park that will also be used to foster BRMS’ philosophy of cultural and
environmental sustainability. The site also currently has a working farm, a community
center, a cafe and a gardening and sustainability operation run by Growing Power.
In addition to the previously referenced planning grant, funding for BRMS, including a
school endowment, is being spearheaded by the Center for Resilient Cities. BRMS
reports that “close to a million dollars” has been committed to the project and these, and
future, funds are being provided by private contributors.
BRMS notes that the research-based instructional strategies upon which their pedagogy
will be established are Environmental-Based Education (EBE) and Place -Based
Education (PBE). As noted in BRMS Executive Summary, both EBE and PBE have
been subject to numerous research efforts and have demonstrated positive results for
involved students, and in particular, students at the middle school level. EBE in
particular is also consistent with PI 8.01 which mandates that “environmental education
objectives and activities shall be integrated into the kindergarten through grade 12
sequential curriculum plans.” BRMS also proposes a “year-round” school which would
not increase the number of instructional days, but would lessen the traditional threemonth
summer break.
BRMS has established numerous partnerships with community agencies. These
agencies are detailed in the Executive Summary and Detailed Proposal (See
Appendices B and D)
Much more on the proposed Badger Rock Middle School Charter initiative here.
Do we the courage to address flaws in our education system?
President Barack Obama said Monday in a speech about education that this is “our generation’s Sputnik moment.”
My first question is: How many high school students around here know what Sputnik is?
My second question is: Do you think there are things to be learned from the educational success in countries that are doing better overall than the United States?
The release last week of results from testing of 15-year-olds around the world, including in most of the world’s industrial nations, was one of the main factors underlying Obama’s statement. American students showed a bit of improvement, but overall were in the middle of the pack. That means, among the 34 countries at the center of the study, the U.S. was 14th in reading, 17th in science and 25th in math. The U.S. standings were in line with other results in recent years.
While the rankings from the Program for International Student Assessment got a lot of attention, a set of accompanying reports got little. Among those was one focused on lessons for the United States.
K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: Survey says 55% of Wisconsin residents live paycheck-to-paycheck
More than half of Wisconsin residents are living paycheck-to-paycheck and have no “rainy day” fund that would cover thee months of unanticipated financial emergencies, a survey released this week says.
The Financial Capability Survey conducted by FINRA, the self-regulating agency of the investing industry, said 55% of Wisconsinites report spending all or a little more than their household income, which is similar to the rate nationwide. About 57% of Wisconsin resident don’t have emergency money stashed away, slightly better than the national average of 60%.
Colorado tenure law considered at N.J. hearing
A Colorado state senator told New Jersey lawmakers considering ways to fix tenure Thursday about a new law he pushed to make such job protection a “badge of honor.”
Mike Johnston gave the Senate education committee details of a law passed in spring that requires teachers to get three consecutive years of effective evaluations before they earn tenure, called non-probationary status there. If they have two consecutive years of poor evaluations, they go back on probation. Those teachers can get help to improve and might eventually earn back tenure. If they don’t, a district can dismiss them.
Dropout rate for blacks doesn’t tell full story
The recent figures released by the state Department of Education, which show a statewide public high school dropout rate of 37 percent among African American students, is a symptom of a broader social malaise and not an accurate measure of one group’s performance.
Because when you hear some of the stories of children living in big city, high-crime neighborhoods, you come to understand that steering clear of troubled streets is in itself a full-time job.
I spoke with four young African American men on Thursday, all of them dropouts who returned to school. They attend Dewey Academy, the continuation high school in Oakland, where the high school dropout rate hovers around 40 percent.
Interested Observers
In a Newsweek article for November 28, 2010, Jonathan Alter, in the process of calling educational historian Diane Ravitch “jaundiced,” and “the Whittaker Chambers of school reform,” praises Bill Gates for his broad-minded views of the best way to evaluate teachers, including “student feedback,” which Alter observes parenthetically, is “(surprisingly predictive of success in the classroom)…”
Now, who is it that could be surprised that students might be able to predict which teachers would be successful in the classroom, Mr. Alter? How could it be, he must assume, that young students, after their thousands of hours of classroom observations, might know something about what makes an effective teacher and who might do well at the job?
I find the combination of hubris, ignorance and condescension revealed by that parenthetical aside to be truly astonishing.
Recently Randi Weintgarten told Jay Mathews in an interview that in considering school reform it was important to start from the bottom up, that is with teachers.
Hasn’t a single Edupundit or Union Leader noticed that “below” the teachers, if we want to start from the bottom up, are the students? You know, the ones who have always been there, observing and learning a lot about teachers, who they are, what they can do, and what it would take to make classrooms and schools do their job better. As John Shepard has pointed out to me: “Can we not–using W.C. Field’s paraphrase–see the handwriting on the floor?”
But perhaps someone has indeed thought of asking them. Tony Wagner at Harvard conducted a focus group of recent graduates for a suburban high school and was quite surprised by much of what he learned, but when I asked him how many high schools he knew of which did conduct such inquiries to learn how they could improve, he said he only knew of three in the country.
We are not asking students, so they are not telling us, no surprise there. But perhaps we are not asking them because, don’t you know, they are just kids. I know something about those kids because I was a teacher for ten years and for the last 23 I have been seeking out and publishing their serious academic expository writing. I know that some of my authors have graduated summa cum laude from Harvard, Princeton and Yale, that some of them have become Rhodes Scholars, Marshall Scholars, and doctors, lawyers, and chiefs of various kinds. Why is it so easy for us to forget that every Nobel Prize winner was once a high school student sitting there as an interested observer, learning about teachers, classrooms and schools?
But we don’t think to ask them. We don’t benefit from their years of experience studying the education we are offering them. This stupidity on our part has resulted in hundreds of billions of dollars and centuries of person-years deployed on education reform without making use of any of the knowledge students regularly accumulate about what we are trying to reform. What a sad thoughtless waste of money and time!
Japanese car makers had the sense to allow workers on the assembly line to stop the line if they saw a defect that needed correction, and they have led the world in quality work.
While it is no doubt impossible for us even to imagine giving students the power to stop a teacher who was doing a terrible job, why don’t we at least give some thought, with all our heavy thinkers and all our research budgets, to trying to discover at least
a tiny bit of what some of our more thoughtful students have observed over their decades in our schools?
We could actually consider asking for and even taking some small bit of their advice on how to educate them and their peers better. After all, we landed on the Moon within a decade, didn’t we? And brought the astronauts safely home…surely we could ask a few students a few questions, and listen to the answers, couldn’t we?
More schools join Minnesota teacher reform program, Begin Sharing K-12 Lessons via iTunes
Seven school districts and 23 charter schools are joining Minnesota’s alternative system for evaluating and paying teachers — the signature education initiative under Gov. Tim Pawlenty, who leaves office next month.
Pawlenty on Wednesday announced the largest one-year expansion of the Q Comp program since it began in 2006. With the addition of the new schools next year, nearly a third of Minnesota students will be taught by a teacher in the program.
Also, the Minnesota Department of Education has begun uploading state-approved lessons for teachers and preschool through high school students to the iTunes web site in collaboration with Apple Inc., Pawlenty said.
Next generation workforce: Outperformed in math and science
f you want to get a sense of what’s in store for the American workforce, just take a look at how our students match up against the rest of the world in math and science. After all, most of the professions within the U.S. economy that are growing — healthcare, information technology, and biomedicine — require extensive training in both subjects.
So how are we doing? Not well, at all.
American 15-year old students scored below average in math and were outperformed by 23 other countries and education systems, according to test results released Tuesday by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development’s Program for International Student Assessment.
And they didn’t do much better in science, ranking 19 among the lot of 65 participating countries and education systems (N.B. “educational systems” are individual cities within a country, like Shanghai).
iPods, iPads, cell phones welcome in Green Bay area schools
Green Bay-area school districts are beginning to change long-standing bans on handheld technology, such as cell phones and iPods, after realizing they are increasingly part of students’ everyday lives.
The Pulaski School District, for example, now encourages middle and high school students to bring their cell phones to class. They’re also welcome to carry other electronic gadgets such as netbooks, which are a bit smaller than laptop computers; iPads, handheld tablet computers; or electronic-book readers.
Pulaski school leaders said they decided to drop a ban on cell phone use because it wasn’t practical. Students own the gadgets, administrators say, so why not use them as classroom tools?
Evers says he’d accept lifting Wisconsin Voucher & Virtual School enrollment cap
Governor-elect Scott Walker’s campaign promise to lift the enrollment cap on Wisconsin’s voucher and virtual schools could come to fruition soon, despite opposition from unions.
In an interview this week on the public affairs program “WisconsinEye,” State Superintendent Tony Evers said that he is open to lifting the enrollment limits, something Republicans have pushed for in the face of resistance from unions and public school advocates who see the voucher program as draining resources from Milwaukee schools by diverting public funding to private voucher schools.
“I’m steeped in reality. I’m not sure if what I think makes a lot of difference,” Evers said, alluding to the impending Republican control of the governor’s office and both houses of the Legislature. “People have made clear what their positions are.”
Removing the caps on virtual schools or the choice program would not “fundamentally change the way those programs operate, nor will it dramatically increase the enrollments,” Evers said.
Texas Study suggests education cost savings
Texas Comptroller Susan Combs released a study Wednesday to help school districts and campuses identify cost-saving strategies schools can make without compromising academics.
The newly released study was required by House Bill 3 from the 2009 legislative session. It was conducted by researchers from the state’s top institutions, including the University of Texas at Dallas, among industry experts.
The costs of Texas public education have increased significantly to nearly $55 billion, with per-pupil spending rising by 63 percent, Combs said, in a written letter. With cuts to state-funded budgets expected in the upcoming legislative session, school districts will need to operate more efficiently.
School District Financial Efficiency: Houston School District gets average score
The Houston Independent School District is making above-average gains in student performance but isn’t spending its money as efficiently as other districts, according to a new study released today by Texas Comptroller Susan Combs.
The first-of-its-kind analysis, ordered by the Texas Legislature, rates the financial efficiency compared with students’ academic progress for every district and school. Those boasting gains in student test scores and spending little money per pupil get the highest marks (5 stars in the rating system).
Houston ISD, the state’s largest district, earned three stars. Dallas ISD, the second-largest district and the most comparable to Houston’s, received two stars.
Statewide, 43 districts and charter school operators earned five stars. The list included Angleton, Clear Creek, Conroe, Cypress-Fairbanks, Friendswood, Katy and Pearland.
Financial Allocation Study for Texas
The Comptroller’s office is leading the Financial Allocation Study for Texas (FAST) to examine how our school districts and campuses spend their money – and how this spending translates into student achievement. Our study is intended to identify cost-effective practices that promote academic progress.
In addition to presenting the FAST study findings, this website also allows you to run your own custom reports on school district finances and results. We hope that policymakers and the public alike will use this resource to see how our education dollars are working to prepare the next generation.
More on Madison’s Response to DPI Complaint
In its response to the Department of Public Instruction’s request for information on its talented and gifted services, the Madison School District points out that the National Association for Gifted Children (NAGC) has recently updated its standards for TAG programming. Now, the District argues, the NAGC standards “actually serve as validation of the District’s current practices,” including West High School’s claim that it meets the needs of talented and gifted students through differentiation within regular classrooms. We disagree.
The NAGC issued its revised standards in September, around the same time West High School area parents filed a complaint against the Madison School District for allowing West High to deny appropriate programming to academically gifted students. West has refused for years to provide alternatives to its regular core curriculum for 9th and 10th graders who demonstrate high performance capabilities in language arts and social studies.
The District writes:
Lots of related links:
- “Stand Up Against the MMSD High School Reform”
- Madison school district to consider alternatives to traditional public schools
- Advanced Placement, Gifted Education & A Hometown Debate
- On the Gifted & Talented Complaint Against the Madison School District
- Madison School District 2010-2011 Enrollment Report, Including Outbound Open Enrollment (3.11%)
- Complaint Filed Against Madison Schools
- English 10
- District Small Learning Community Grant – Examining the Data From Earlier Grants, pt. 2
Houston School District magnet audit finds inconsistency in programs
If there’s one theme that emerges from the ongoing audit of Houston ISD’s magnet schools, it’s inconsistency. An interim report [pdf] from Magnet Schools of America, released today, finds that the funding, quality, entrance criteria and student diversity vary from school to school. This is not ground-breaking news for those who have followed the magnet school discussions and media coverage over the last several years. An HISD committee that evaluated the magnet schools in 2006 drew similar conclusions.
The interim report doesn’t name schools or cite specific data, but here are a few of the general points — which shouldn’t necessarily be taken as gospel because three of the auditors noted that “it appeared as though they were observing a specially designed day rather than feeling this is the way we do things at the school every day.” [Editor’s translation: The schools were putting on a dog and pony show for the auditors.]
The honeymoon’s over: After two years at helm, Madison school chief Nerad struggling
For months, there was nothing but enthusiastic buzz surrounding the proposal to start a green charter school in Madison. The organizers of Badger Rock Middle School have broad support throughout the community and have meticulously done their homework. The school district administration was enthusiastic about the school’s focus on urban agriculture, and School Board members, who have the ultimate vote, were too.
Then, just days before the board was expected to give its final approval, the school district released new figures showing it would likely cost hundreds of thousands of dollars a year to staff and operate the new school. This was a reversal from earlier projections that showed Badger Rock would bring no extra costs to the district.
In the current era of pinched budgets and dreary financial prospects, this revelation threw a monkey wrench into the process and caused the board to delay final consideration of the project until later this month.
“I had planned to come in here tonight to vote for this most innovative project,” board member Marj Passman said during the Nov. 29 meeting. “But at the last minute the Badger Rock people and the board were both hit broadside with new information that raises a lot of last-minute questions.”
Much more on Dan Nerad, here. Watch a recent video interview.
New Player in D.C. Schools Teachers’ Union Elects Tough-Talking Chief; Performance Evaluations Targeted
Stephanie Banchero & Neil King, Jr.
The election of a tough-talking new teachers’ union head here could complicate efforts to turn around the capital’s struggling school system, just as the fragile national effort to overhaul public schools faces a change in educational leaders in this and two other big cities.
Officials who took over in the wake of Michelle Rhee’s departure as chancellor of Washington’s school system said Friday they might refine her signature policies, but promised not to backtrack on closing low-performing schools and evaluating teachers based on student test scores.
But they face a new player in Nathan Saunders, who ousted Washington Teachers’ Union President George Parker in an election last week. Mr. Saunders said he wanted to overhaul the teacher evaluation system Ms. Rhee put into place, and would fight to retain many of the 737 teachers termed low-performing by the school district who could lose their jobs at the end of the school year.
Top Test Scores From Shanghai Stun Educators
With China’s debut in international standardized testing, students in Shanghai have surprised experts by outscoring their counterparts in dozens of other countries, in reading as well as in math and science, according to the results of a respected exam.
American officials and Europeans involved in administering the test in about 65 countries acknowledged that the scores from Shanghai — an industrial powerhouse with some 20 million residents and scores of modern universities that is a magnet for the best students in the country — are by no means representative of all of China.
About 5,100 15-year-olds in Shanghai were chosen as a representative cross-section of students in that city. In the United States, a similar number of students from across the country were selected as a representative sample for the test.
Experts noted the obvious difficulty of using a standardized test to compare countries and cities of vastly different sizes. Even so, they said the stellar academic performance of students in Shanghai was noteworthy, and another sign of China’s rapid modernization.
The results also appeared to reflect the culture of education there, including greater emphasis on teacher training and more time spent on studying rather than extracurricular activities like sports.
If I Ran the Schools
There is a new trend in education and frankly, I don’t like it.
Unfortunately, you don’t have to be an educator to be at the helm of an educational system.
Years ago, it was impossible for an educator to rise to the top of the system without having established degrees and qualifications such as a PhD, classroom experience, administrative experience and academic hours in educational management.
The new sense in big city governments is to treat education less as a profession and more as bean counting. The thinking is to manage the process while the children, teachers and parents become peons.
Related: America’s Outmoded Approach to Education Credentials
The Proposed Madison Preparatory Academy IB Charter School Presentation: December 6, 2010
880K PDF via a Kaleem Caire email..
Much more on the proposed IB Charter Madison Preparatory Academy and Kaleem Caire.
Will a boys only, non-union prep school fly in Madison?
Local attorney and former Wisconsin State Bar Association president Michelle Behnke spoke in favor of Madison Prep, saying both she and her now grown children attended Edgewood High School in preference over Madison public schools. “I am not a gambler,” Behnke, who is black, said during her three minute appearance before the board. She noted that the statistics regarding academic success for minority students in Madison were so bleak that neither she nor her parents felt they could risk a public school education.
Steve Goldberg, representing CUNA Mutual, also testified in favor of the school, saying his organization was looking forward to being involved and supportive of Madison Prep.
According to Caire, extreme measures are needed to deal with the extreme problems facing area black and latino youth in public school settings, claiming that conventional efforts have not yielded significant results. Both the achievement gap and the incarceration rate for black males in Dane County are at the bottom of national statistics.
Caire believes Madison Prep could be an experimental laboratory for change, and that if successful it could be replicated across the Madison district and elsewhere.
“We’ve been trying various approaches for 30 or 40 years and it’s still not working,” he says.
Much more on the proposed IB Charter Madison Preparatory Academy and Kaleem Caire.
American Teens Trail Global Peers in Math Scores; But U.S. Students Show Progress in Science
American teenagers made modest progress on an international exam, but still performed below average in mathematics compared with their peers in other industrialized countries, according to results released Tuesday by the U.S. Department of Education.
The test, called the Program for International Student Assessment, has been given every three years since 2000 to 15-year-old students. Last year, when the test was administered, 60 countries participated. It’s coordinated worldwide by the Paris-based Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development.
The results for American students drew a lukewarm response from U.S. education officials as they seek to boost test scores among high-school and college students. “We’re in the middle of the pack; that’s not where we want to be,” said Stuart Kerachsky, deputy commissioner at the National Center for Education Statistics, an arm of the Department of Education that administers the PISA test in the U.S.
Korea and Finland top OECD’s latest PISA survey of education performance:
Korea and Finland top the OECD’s latest PISA survey of reading literacy among 15-year olds, which for the first time tested students’ ability to manage digital information.
The survey, based on two-hour tests of a half million students in more than 70 economies, also tested mathematics and science. The results for 65 economies are being released today.
The next strongest performances were from Hong Kong-China, Singapore, Canada, New Zealand and Japan. Full results here.
The province of Shanghai, China, took part for the first time and scored higher in reading than any country. It also topped the table in maths and science. More than one-quarter of Shanghai’s 15-year-olds demonstrated advanced mathematical thinking skills to solve complex problems, compared to an OECD average of just 3%.
Give all-male charter school a chance
Wisconsin State Journal Editorial
The Urban League of Greater Madison’s dramatic proposal for an all-male public charter school deserves open minds and fair consideration from the Madison School Board.
Don’t dismiss this intriguing initiative just because the teachers union is automatically opposed. A new approach to helping more young black men get to college is justified, given the district’s stark numbers:
- Only 7 percent of black students who took the latest ACT college preparation test were ready for college.
- Barely half of black students in Madison schools graduated in 2009.
- Almost three-quarters of the 3,828 suspensions last school year were black students, who make up less than a quarter of the student body
Much more on the proposed IB Charter Madison Preparatory Academy and Kaleem Caire.
Madison School District Leaders Learn More About Boys-Only Charter School
Madison Metropolitan School District leaders on Monday night learned more about a proposed boys-only charter school and heard from the public.
The school, which would have uniforms and be targeted toward minority students, would be the first of its kind in Wisconsin.
The idea is called Madison Prep, and it would be part of the Madison Metropolitan School District. The school’s goal is for 100 percent higher education acceptance for its students, and to meet that goal it will have a longer school day and school year.
And while it’s never been done here before, the person behind it said that’s the idea. Kaleem Caire, president of the Urban League of Greater Madison, said it’s time to think out of the box to help children be more successful in school — specifically black middle-school children.
Friends, Romans, schoolchildren
The only remotely classical thing about Pegasus Primary School on the Blackbird Leys estate in Oxford is the name and the school logo of a blue winged horse. The logo looks cuddlier than the Pegasus of Greek mythology, sprung from the blood of the gorgon Medusa when the hero Perseus cut off her head.
This is not the Oxford of the dreaming spires; the school is in one of the largest council estates in Europe, close to the former Morris car works at Cowley, where Minis are now made. My taxi driver points out the Blackbird pub, noted for fights, and a supermarket which he claims has been raided five times in the past year.
This well-run primary school in a tough area is doing something culturally counter-cyclical: it is teaching Latin and Greek under the auspices of the Iris Project, a volunteer-run scheme which brings classics to inner-city state schools. As someone who loved classics at public school in the 1970s, when the subject seemed out of date and doomed to oblivion, I find this both incredible and thoroughly heartening.
In Jane Austen 2.0, the Heroines And Heroes Friend Each Other
Ben Kemper, 19, plans to wear a frock coat with cuffs to the annual Jane Austen birthday tea in Boise, Idaho, on Saturday.
The outfit will be “the whole shebang,” says Mr. Kemper, who hopes to scare up some yard work so he can pay for the new threads. He says his costume may include riding boots, a cane, gloves and a buttoned vest.
Mr. Kemper is among an unlikely set of fans of the long-dead Ms. Austen–young people. The English novelist best known for “Pride and Prejudice” and “Sense and Sensibility” has been dead since 1817, yet she is drawing a cultish pack of young people, especially young women, known as “Janeites” who are dedicated to celebrating all things Austen.
Teachers can make their case about reform to policymakers
In the Nov. 28 Star, Matthew Tully contributed an insightful piece highlighting a significant disconnect between education reformers and those who will perhaps be most affected by reforms — teachers (“Teachers hear something else in reform debate”). The article begs us to contemplate the forces underlying educators’ distrust of state-directed education reforms. Teachers will be instrumental in implementation of these reforms. As such, the fracture between policymakers and practitioners demands our attention.
Tully captured the gestalt of the problem when noting that many good teachers think those of us pushing for education reform blame them for their schools’ failures. We’re not. We’re actually making the opposite case: Good and great teachers are responsible for their schools’ successes.
“Education for Innovation,” a live digital town hall
Please join us to watch:
An announcement from Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and Angel Gurría, Secretary General of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), on the standing of U.S. students in reading, math and science literacy compared to other countries around the world;
A two-way conversation with Secretary Duncan and students, teachers and administrators from Olin College of Engineering (Needham, Mass.) and the School of Science and Engineering Magnet (Dallas, TX);
Robert D. Atkinson, President of The Information Technology and Innovation Foundation discuss the results from a new report on science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) education released that morning; and
An interview with Thomas L. Friedman on U.S. competitiveness, innovation and economic growth.
Live Webcast on Tuesday, December 7, 8:45 a.m. EST
Comments on Dane County (WI) High School Graduation Rates
The countywide graduation rate for African-American students also showed a dramatic improvement, going from 64 to 90 percent in the past five years, although individual district graduation rates still lag, including Madison’s.
What’s happened to cause this? United Way began focusing on school dropout and graduation rates in recent years, after an intensive study on what factors cause kids to drop out and fail to graduate. The charitable agency has directed more funding to groups that attack school problems with the goal to get more kids to stay in and finish school.
The superintendents at the meeting also cited other factors, including better tracking of students and creating opportunities for problem students to get another chance to earn their diplomas.
It’s good to know that efforts to solve some of those nagging problems facing our schools are being addressed — and getting results, besides.
Madison School District Talented & Gifted Plan: December, 2010
Madison School District Administration
The last Talented and Gifted (TAG) Education Plan was adopted by the MMSD Board of Education in 1991. With state statute and policy reform, alignment with current District strategic planning, and a desire to utilize research in exemplary practice, approval of a comprehensive Talented and Gifted Plan has become a District priority.
This document is meant to be a guide as the Division aims to achieve its mission in alignment with the MMSD Strategic Plan, the State of Wisconsin statutes and administrative rules for gifted and talented education, and the National Association for Gifted Children standards.
There will be a review of the Plan, with status reports issued to the Board of Education, in January and June 2010. Adjustments to the Plan will be documented at that time.
Wisconsin State Statute 121.02(1) (t), and Administrative Rule PI 8.01(2)(t).2 require school districts to identify those students who give evidence of high performance capability as talented and gifted and provide those students with access to appropriate systematic and continuous instruction. The National Association for Gifted Children (NAGC) standards complements the Wisconsin framework and provides a guide for quality educational programming.
The Plan below identifies the following categories as areas in need of improvement in MMSD Talented and Gifted Programming. The primary focus in developing this Plan has been in the areas of identification, programming, and professional development.
Talking Points for the Proposed Madison Preparatory Academy, an IB Charter School
What are Charter Schools?
- Charter schools are public schools that have more freedom to innovate because they are exempt from many (but not all) policies that govern traditional public schools. There are more than 200 public charter schools in Wisconsin and two in Madison.
- Charter schools employ fully qualified teachers and participate in statewide testing programs just like traditional public schools do.
- Wisconsin has two kinds of charter schools: instrumentality (staff employed by a school district) and non-instrumentality (staff not employed by a school district, but by a nonprofit organization).
Read the initial proposal, here.
How to best educate future educators
Ivelisse Cruz can barely watch the video footage from her first time teaching a math lesson.
The video shows Cruz, a first-semester sophomore at Alverno College at the time, hesitantly starting her lesson seated with a group of seventh-grade students around a small table at Fairview Charter School in Milwaukee. She doesn’t quite explain what the focus of their math lesson will be, looks slightly uncertain and speaks in what she would later criticize as a monotone voice.
“It was terrible, I don’t even know how these kids were even paying attention,” Cruz, now in her senior year at Alverno, said as she watched the video.
Fast forward through three more semesters, learning the art of teaching and spending time working with students.
Now the video shows a more confident woman standing at the front of her class, reviewing her work with the students from the week before, forecasting what the next lesson will be, calling a student to stand beside her at an overhead projector to walk through a practice problem.
Analyzing Literature by Words and Numbers
Victorians were enamored of the new science of statistics, so it seems fitting that these pioneering data hounds are now the subject of an unusual experiment in statistical analysis. The titles of every British book published in English in and around the 19th century — 1,681,161, to be exact — are being electronically scoured for key words and phrases that might offer fresh insight into the minds of the Victorians.
This research, which has only recently become possible, thanks to a new generation of powerful digital tools and databases, represents one of the many ways that technology is transforming the study of literature, philosophy and other humanistic fields that haven’t necessarily embraced large-scale quantitative analysis.
Goal of education is to serve all customers
Consider this a thought that could change the way schools operate throughout the Milwaukee area:
Hold the pickles, hold the lettuce, special orders don’t upset us …
Or, to put the 1970s Burger King jingle into education jargon:
Individualize and customize within a standardized system. (OK, that’s not quite as catchy. )
The promise of Burger King was that they would come up with the best thing for you as an individual. You weren’t just another customer. This would make your experience at Burger King more engaging and more successful. Yet you could count on consistent standards of quality in the outcomes.
Now replace all the food references with educational references and you get at a key to a campaign by area school leaders that aims to bring major change to the basic structures of schooling. They don’t have small goals – the title of the report at the heart of their effort is Transforming Public Education: A Regional Call to Action.
Teacher Ratings Get New Look, Pushed by a Rich Watcher
In most American schools, teachers are evaluated by principals or other administrators who drop in for occasional classroom visits and fill out forms to rate their performance.
The result? More than 9 out of 10 teachers get top marks, according to a prominent study last year by the New Teacher Project, a nonprofit group focusing on improving teacher quality.
Now Bill Gates, who in recent years has turned his attention and considerable fortune to improving American education, is investing $335 million through his foundation to overhaul the personnel departments of several big school systems. A big chunk of that money is financing research by dozens of social scientists and thousands of teachers to develop a better system for evaluating classroom instruction.
The effort will have enormous consequences for the movement to hold schools and educators more accountable for student achievement.
Twenty states are overhauling their teacher-evaluation systems, partly to fulfill plans set in motion by a $4 billion federal grant competition, and they are eagerly awaiting the research results.
What I Learned at the Education Barricades
Over the past eight years, I’ve been privileged to serve as chancellor of the New York City Department of Education, the nation’s largest school district. Working with a mayor who courageously took responsibility for our schools, our department has made significant changes and progress. Along the way, I’ve learned some important lessons about what works in public education, what doesn’t, and what (and who) are the biggest obstacles to the transformative changes we still need.
First, it is wrong to assert that students’ poverty and family circumstances severely limit their educational potential. It’s now proven that a child who does poorly with one teacher could have done very well with another. Take Harlem Success Academy, a charter school with all minority, mostly high-poverty students admitted by lottery. It performs as well as our gifted and talented schools that admit kids based solely on demanding tests. We also have many new small high schools that replaced large failing ones, and are now getting outsized results for poor children.
I-OWL: Building an Interactive Writing Tool to Support 11th and 12th Graders
Educational professionals have enacted initiatives to help high school students improve writing skills critical to success in higher education. In recent years university scholars and high school teachers have invested significant time and resources to better prepare students for college writing.
This project will develop, field test, and scale an interactive, on-line writing lab to help high school juniors and seniors complete school assignments and help prepare them for college level writing.
Using new media technologies, the I-OWL writing lab will help students improve specific writing strategies, transfer writing skills to assignments across three academic disciplines – science, social studies and language arts, and assess their skills in relation to college-level writing.
Interview with Madison Superintendent Dan Nerad
The sum of learning A university education that broadens the mind is worth much more than its market value
As tertiary education becomes more popular and marketable, and investment in human capital a topic of attention, education is today often equated to vocational preparation. As a result, a number of leading academics have raised the alarm. Professor Steven Schwartz, vice-chancellor of Macquarie University in Australia, lamented that universities nowadays focus too much on imparting knowledge and not wisdom. Living in the age of money, modern universities are trying their best to fit in, he said, so that university education is being reduced to vocational training. He urged universities to “wise up”.
In a recent book, Not For Profit, Martha Nussbaum, a professor of law and ethics at the University of Chicago, observed that modern tertiary education has lost its way. She said that if society wants to produce graduates who can empathise as a “citizen of the world”, then it should reverse the current skew towards economic productivity and restore liberal and critical values at universities.
Court: Parents can sue if schools skimp on P.E.
Parents can take their children’s public schools to court to force educators to provide the minimum amount of physical education required by state law, the California Court of Appeal ruled in Sacramento on Tuesday, which could spell trouble for a lot of state schools.
California’s education code requires elementary schools to offer 200 minutes of physical education every 10 days, an amount that rises to 400 minutes in middle or high schools, not including lunch or recess. A small-scale survey of state schools a few years ago found more than half failed to provide the required minutes of physical activity.
The Rise of Online Colleges and Online Education
The 2002 American Community Survey, taken by the US Census Bureau, indicated that 52.7 percent of the American population has some sort of college education; however, only 27.2 percent of Americans actually continue their education long enough to obtain a college degree. These numbers seems pretty dismal when compared with countries like Finland and the Netherlands where the percentage of people with college degrees range from 34 to 40 percent. Fortunately, the number of people taking online classes continues to rise, increasing the percentage of people working towards obtaining a degree. When you take into consideration the benefits online classes offer it’s easy to see why the popularity of online education has grown immensely over the past few years.
Rhee tapped by Fla. Gov.-elect Scott
Former D.C. schools chancellor Michelle A. Rhee has joined the education transition team of Florida Gov.-elect Rick Scott (R), according to a statement from the Scott’s office.
The full text of the statement, after the jump.
FORT LAUDERDALE, FL – Calling the members of his latest transition team “Champions for Achievement,” Governor-elect Rick Scott announced an experienced and distinguished team of education experts, including nationally recognized education reformer, Michelle Rhee, to help him find innovative ways to create a new education system for a new economy.
On a Mission to Find an MBA Strategy
Sally Blount is getting down to business. As the newly appointed dean of the Kellogg school at Northwestern University near Chicago, the chic 48-year-old professor is taking the school back to its roots as one of the few top US business schools that focuses on teaching management rather than finance and economics.
Fast-talking and forthright, and a specialist in negotiation and behavioural decision-making, Prof Blount says she is perplexed about how MBAs have been hijacked by the finance industry.
Madison School District Responds to DPI
On November 29, 2010, the Madison School District responded to a request for information from the Department of Public Instruction (DPI) about Madison’s services for talented and gifted students.
The DPI initiated an audit of Madison’s talented and gifted programming after West High School area parents filed a complaint on September 20, 2010, arguing that West refuses to provide appropriate programs for ninth and tenth grade students gifted in language arts and social studies. West requires all freshmen and sophomores to take regular core English and history courses, regardless of learning level.
(All three of Madison’s other comprehensive high schools-East, LaFollette, and Memorial-provide advanced sections of core subjects before 11th grade. East and LaFollette offer advanced and/or honors sections starting in ninth grade, while Memorial offers English 10 honors and AP World History for tenth graders.)
As part of a Small Learning Community Initiative phased in over the past decade, West implemented a one-size-for-all English and social studies program to stop different groups of students from following different courses of study. Some groups had typically self-selected into rigorous, advanced levels while others seemed stuck in more basic or remedial levels. Administrators wanted to improve the quality of classroom experience and instruction for “all students” by mixing wide ranges of ability together in heterogeneous classrooms.
- “Stand Up Against the MMSD High School Reform”
- Madison school district to consider alternatives to traditional public schools
- Advanced Placement, Gifted Education & A Hometown Debate
- On the Gifted & Talented Complaint Against the Madison School District
- Madison School District 2010-2011 Enrollment Report, Including Outbound Open Enrollment (3.11%)
- Complaint Filed Against Madison Schools
- English 10
- District Small Learning Community Grant – Examining the Data From Earlier Grants, pt. 2
Surprisingly Predictive (you moron!): “…student feedback (surprisingly predictive of success in the classroom)”
Bill Gates is raising his arm, bent at the elbow, in the direction of the ceiling. The point he’s making is so important that he wants me and the pair of Gates Foundation staffers sitting in the hotel conference room in Louisville, Ky., to recognize the space between this thought and every lower-ranking argument. “If there’s one thing that can be done for the country, one thing,” Gates says, his normally modulated voice rising, “improving education rises so far above everything else!” He doesn’t say what the “else” is–deficit reduction? containing Iran? free trade?–but they’re way down toward the floor compared with the arm above that multibillion-dollar head. With the U.S. tumbling since 1995 from second in the world to 16th in college-graduation rates and to 24th place in math (for 15-year-olds), it was hard to argue the point. Our economic destiny is at stake.
Gates had just finished giving a speech to the Council of Chief State School Officers in which he tried to explain how administrators could hope to raise student achievement in the face of tight budgets. The Microsoft founder went through what he sees as false solutions–furloughs, sharing textbooks–before focusing on the true “cost drivers”: seniority-based pay and benefits for teachers rising faster than state revenues.
Seniority is the two-headed monster of education–it’s expensive and harmful. Like master’s degrees for teachers and smaller class sizes, seniority pay, Gates says, has “little correlation to student achievement.” After exhaustive study, the Gates Foundation and other experts have learned that the only in-school factor that fully correlates is quality teaching, which seniority hardly guarantees. It’s a moral issue. Who can defend a system where top teachers are laid off in a budget crunch for no other reason than that they’re young?
In most states, pay and promotion of teachers are connected 100 percent to seniority. This is contrary to everything the world’s second-richest man believes about business: “Is there any other part of the economy where someone says, ‘Hey, how long have you been mowing lawns? … I want to pay you more for that reason alone.’ ” Gates favors a system where pay and promotion are determined not just by improvement in student test scores (an idea savaged by teachers’ unions) but by peer surveys, student feedback (surprisingly predictive of success in the classroom), video reviews, and evaluation by superiors. In this approach, seniority could be a factor, but not the only factor.
President Obama knows that guaranteed tenure and rigid seniority systems are a problem, but he’s not yet willing to speak out against them. Even so, Gates gives Obama an A on education. The Race to the Top program, Gates says, is “more catalytic than anyone expected it to be” in spurring accountability and higher standards.
Gates hardly has all the answers: he spent $2 billion a decade ago breaking up big high schools into smaller ones and didn’t get the results he’d hoped for. Today, he’s too enamored of handheld devices for tracking student performance. They could end up as just another expensive, high-tech gimmick. But you’ve got to give Gates credit for devoting so much of his brain and fortune to this challenge. [BIG BIAS ALERT HERE!] His biggest adversary now is Diane Ravitch, a jaundiced former Education Department official under George H.W. Bush, who changed sides in the debate and now attacks Gates-funded programs in books and articles. Ravitch, the Whittaker Chambers of school reform, gives intellectual heft to the National Education Association’s campaign to discredit even superb charter schools and trash intriguing reform ideas that may threaten its power. When I asked Gates about Ravitch, you could see the Micro-hard hombre who once steamrolled software competitors: “Does she like the status quo? Is she sticking up for decline? Does she really like 400-page [union] contracts? Does she think all those ‘dropout factories’ are lonely? If there’s some other magic way to reduce the dropout rate, we’re all ears.” Gates understands that charters aren’t a silver bullet, and that many don’t perform. But he doesn’t have patience for critics who spend their days tearing down KIPP schools and other models that produce results.
There’s a backlash against the rich taking on school reform as a cause. Some liberals figure they must have an angle and are scapegoating teachers. But most of the wealthy people underwriting this long-delayed social movement for better performance are on the right track. [BIG BIAS ALERT HERE!] Like the rest of us, they know that if we don’t fix education, we can kiss our future goodbye.
Jonathan Alter is also the author of The Promise: President Obama, Year One and The Defining Moment: FDR’s Hundred Days and the Triumph of Hope.
Stephanie Findley learned the hard way that while the public favors school reform, the political system is rigged to kill it.
Stephanie Findley was not just some carpetbagger looking for a job when she decided to run for the Assembly earlier this year.
She had a job — a few of them, actually. She worked as an office manager for Milwaukee District Council 48, a large and politically active labor group. She owned a small business, Fast & Accurate Business Solutions. She taught classes at the Spanish Center in Milwaukee and at Bryant & Stratton College.
A single mother who says she was already pregnant when she walked across the stage to get her Milwaukee Public High School degree some 20 years ago, Findley had overcome poverty and earned a master’s degree from Cardinal Stritch. She was also active in the Democratic Party, was head of the City of Milwaukee’s Election Commission and volunteered for too many organizations to count.
She was a 20-year resident of the 10th Assembly District, which has long been the province of retiring lawmaker Annette Polly Williams — a woman many still call “the mother of school choice” — when she decided to run for the seat herself. Findley, after all, had many of the same struggles and worries her neighbors did — including the high cost of health care, taxes, and the quality of MPS schools.
I, Reader
My books have moved with me from Maine to Connecticut to San Francisco to New York, to Iowa to New York to Los Angeles to Rochester to Amherst and now to New York once again. I’m a writer, also the child of two people who were each the ones in their family to leave and move far away, and the result is a life where I’ve moved regularly, and paid to ship most of my books so often I’m sure I’ve essentially repurchased them several times over. Each time I move, my books have grown in number. Collectively, they’re the autobiography of my reading life. Each time I pack and unpack them, I see The Phoenicians, a picture history book my father gave me as a child, and will never sell; the collection of Gordon Merrick paperbacks I shoplifted when I was a closeted teenager, stealing books no one would ever let me buy. The pages still retain the heat of that need, as does my copy of Joy Williams’s Breaking and Entering, bought when I was a star-struck college student at the Bennington Summer Writers’ Workshop 20 years ago. Each time they were all necessary, all differently necessary.
In the life of a New Yorker, a new book is a crisis the exact size of one new book. I spent three hours scrutinizing the shelves for weak links that could go to the used bookstore, projecting either into the past–When had I read this book and why?–or the future–Would I ever read this again, or even read it?–and filled three bags. I held my two mass-market paperback editions of Joan Didion’s Play It As It Lays, bought at Church Street Books in San Francisco in 1990–one to own and one to lend–and after all this time, put the second into the bag. The one remaining now a reminder that I once had two.
Business brings etiquette training to urban schools
On the way to their new elective class, the seventh- and eighth-graders walked under the fluorescent cafeteria lights and past bagged lunches on tables, awaiting the first lunch shift.
What they saw on the other side of the wall at Concordia University School made many whisper and cast surprised looks at their friends: candles amid a 15-piece table setting, white tablecloth, silver platters and fine china, soup bowls and a centerpiece.
Presentation is everything in Camille Monk’s etiquette class. The 29-year-old has started a business bringing classic social training to urban schools, in the hopes that teaching tolerance and respect will help the students successfully navigate future social situations. The payoff for students who complete the class: a formal five-course lunch or dinner at Bacchus restaurant downtown.
But at a time when budget cuts have eliminated long-established specials such as gym, art and music in many school buildings, financial support for manners training is a struggle, even though experts say soft skills – from properly eating at a dinner table to managing a Facebook page – are critical for today’s students.
Chicago Public Schools report card shows many schools struggling
By Chicago Public Schools’ own reckoning, about a quarter of its elementary schools and more than 40 percent of its high schools are failing, according to internal documents obtained by the Tribune.
Each year, district officials score each school based on academic performance. Last year, they assigned grades A through F based on the numeric scores, and schools chief Ron Huberman talked of publicly releasing them so school and community members would know where they stood. But he never did.
An analysis of the grades shows that a disproportionate number of schools scored in the D range or worse, including 48 percent of elementaries and 68 percent of high schools.
Madison Preparatory Academy for Young Men: Initial Proposal to Establish a Charter School
1.1MB PDF; via a Kaleem Caire email:
Based on current education and social conditions, the fate of boys of color is uncertain.
African American and Latino boys are grossly over-represented among youth failing to achieve academic success, are at grave risk of dropping out of school before they reach 10th grade, are disproportionately represented among adjudicated and incarcerated youth, and are far less likely than their peers in other subgroups to achieve to their dreams and aspirations. Likewise, boys in general lag behind girls in most indicators of student achievement.
Research indicates that although boys of color have high aspirations for academic and career success, their underperformance in school and lack of educational attainment undermine their career pursuits and the success they desire. This misalignment of aspirations and achievement is fueled by and perpetuates a set of social conditions wherein men of color find themselves disproportionately represented among the unemployed and incarcerated. Without meaningful, targeted, and sustainable interventions and support systems, hundreds of thousands of young men of color will never realize their true potential and the cycle of high unemployment, fatherless homes, overcrowded jails, incarcerated talent, deferred dreams, and high rates of school failure will continue.
Madison Preparatory Academy for Young Men (Madison Prep) will be established to serve as a catalyst for change and opportunity among young men, particularly young men of color and those who desire a nurturing educational experience for young men.
Madison Prep’s founders understand that poverty, isolation, structural discrimination, lack of access to positive male role models and achievement-oriented peer groups, limited exposure to opportunity and culture outside their neighborhood or city, and a general lack of understanding – and in some cases fear – of Black and Latino boys among adults are major contributing factors to why so many young men are failing to achieve to their full potential. However, the Urban League of Greater Madison – the “founders” of Madison Prep – also understand that these issues can be addressed by directly countering each issue with a positive, exciting, engaging, enriching, challenging, affirming and structured learning community designed to exclusively benefit boys.
Madison Prep will be a non-instrumentality charter school – authorized by the Madison Metropolitan School District Board of Education – that serves an all-male student body in grades 6-12. It will be open to all males residing in Dane County who apply, regardless of previous academic performance. The school will provide a world class secondary education for young men that prepares them for leadership, service, and success at a four-year college or university.
Madison Prep will employ seven Educational Strategies to achieve this mission: an all-male student body, the International Baccalaureate curriculum, a College Preparatory educational program, Harkness Teaching, an extended school day and year, mentoring and community support, and the “Prep Year.”
Madison Prep will also use four key Operational Strategies in order to support the educational strategies: adequate staffing, target student population, appropriate facilities/location, and sufficient funding.
Eight Core Values and Four Leadership Dimensions will additionally serve as underpinnings for the success of Madison Prep and Madison Prep students. These Core Values – Excellence & Achievement, Accountability, Teamwork, Innovation, Global Perspective, Perseverance, Leading with Purpose, and Serving Others – will also root Madison Prep in the Educational Framework of the Madison Metropolitan School District. The Four Leadership Dimensions – Personal, Team, Thought, and Results Leadership – will serve as criteria for student and staff evaluations.
Madison Prep’s educational program will be bolstered by partnerships with businesses, government agencies, professional and membership associations, colleges and universities, and scholarship-providing organizations that have the capacity to bring talent, expertise and resources into the school community to benefit Madison Prep students, faculty, staff, and parents. Madison Prep will also host special activities to engage parents, family members, and the community in the education of their young men. Invitations will be extended to parents, community leaders, and experts to join young men at the Harkness Table to add to their learning and to learn with them.
Seed funding for the establishment of Madison Prep will come from public and private sources, including planning and implementation grants from charter school investment funds, charitable foundations, government agencies, and individuals. Ideally, Madison Prep will be located in a business or higher education environment with access to quality classroom, athletic and laboratory facilities or the ability to create such facilities.
The Urban League of Greater Madison (ULGM or Urban League) will submit a Detailed Proposal for Madison Prep in 2011 to the Madison Metropolitan School District (MMSD) Board of Education to receive approval to open the school in 2012. If approved, the school will open in August 2012 serving 90 boys in grades 6 and 7. The school will grow by one grade level each year until it offers a full complement of secondary grades (6 -12). At maturity, Madison Prep will serve 315 students and graduate its first class of seniors in 2017-18.
Links: Madison Preparatory Academy and Kaleem Caire (interview).
This plan will be presented at the 12/6/2010 Madison School Board meeting.
In many ways, the outcome of this initiative will be a defining moment for our local public schools, particularly in terms of diffused governance, choice, a different curricular approach (potentially a movement away from the one size fits all model), economics and community engagement. If it does not happen in Madison, I suspect it will with a neighboring district.
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The Madison Prep Difference
Although it is clear that Madison Prep can and will support MMSD objectives, there is no doubt that Madison Prep will be unique. Madison Prep will be the only all-male public school option in Dane County serving young men when it opens in 2012. Furthermore, the school will be the only IB school in the city offering the full continuum of the IB Programme at the secondary level. Young men enrolled in Madison Prep in 6th grade will begin their education in the IB Middle Years Programme and continue in the curriculum until they move into the rigorous two- year Diploma Programme beginning in 11th grade, thereby increasing their likeliness of success. Finally, while MMSD offers after school activities and care, no school in the district offers a significant amount of additional instructional time through an extended school day and extended school year, as Madison Prep will.
Classroom Collaboration Supports Mathematical Generalizations
In mathematics classrooms, generalization is an important part of the curriculum.
When students know how to generalize they can identify commonality across cases, extend their reasoning beyond the range in which it originated, and derive broader results from particular cases. But generalization remains difficult for students to do, and for teachers to support.
UW-Madison education professor Amy Ellis studies the processes that support students’ productive generalizing in their math classrooms. She considers generalization a dynamic social process as well as an individual cognitive activity.
In a recent study she studied an 8th-grade math class during a 3-week unit on quadratic growth. The class sessions focused on relationships between the height and area of growing rectangles (see illustration). As they grew, the rectangles retained the same height-to-length ratio.
U.S. Schools Make Progress, But ‘Dropout Factories’ Persist
In the decade since educators launched a nationwide campaign to improve schools and stop students from dropping out, progress has been made, according to a new report, but more than 1 million public high school students failed to graduate with their class this year and 2 million attend so-called “dropout factory” schools where their chance of graduating is only 50-50.
Being able to read in third grade is an early indicator of whether a student will stay in school.
In the first half of the decade, at least one out of every four public high school students and almost 40 percent of minority students (defined as African-Americans, Hispanics and American Indians) did not successfully graduate with their class. In 2008, the high school graduation rate was about 75 percent, a three-point increase from 2001.
Students can lose interest in school early, according to education experts. Studies show that you can tell who is most at risk for dropping out from third grade reading scores. Half of all low-income fourth-graders who could not read on grade level were put on a “drop out” track, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress.
The Role of Education Faculty in Reform Debates
As soon as a doctor, lawyer, or plumber walks into any social setting, it seems as if they are the sole representatives of their respective professions. Can you help me treat this sore shoulder, sue the person that injured it, and unplug the drain under my sink? With all the press lately on education reform, most of which related to the hoopla enveloping the “Superman” film, I certainly become the local representative of both teachers and higher education most everywhere I go. Questions arise. What did you think of that latest Friedman column in The New York Times? How can my child transfer to a different public school? The kicker: What is wrong with our education system anyway?
The more questions I’m asked, the fewer answers reached than expected by both myself and others. It’s fitting that I’m bringing this up around the holiday season because this is the time families are visited and new acquaintances are made. So, what do you do for a living? I teach teachers. Ah, so how do we get rid of all these crap teachers?
Some find that GEDs earned online aren’t what they claim to be
Becky Ploense’s job was eliminated in 2002, so she figured it was a good time to raise her chances of re-employment and get the high school diploma she never finished.
As the mother of a teenager, she liked the convenience of an online program that allowed her to work from her Hartland home. She enrolled with her credit card, was assessed monthly payments totaling about $500, was sent study materials by mail and completed her work online. It took her about four months to finish the courses in math, reading, social studies, science and English.
But she did not get what she thought she had paid for – her GED, or General Educational Development credential.
She went back to work for another seven years but, last December, lost her job as a team leader when Maysteel LLC in Menomonee Falls closed. Ploense, now 44, approached Anthem College, formerly High-Tech Institute, in Brookfield with hopes of studying massage therapy.
The Middle School Mess: If you love bungee jumping, you’re the middle school type
“Caught in the hurricane of hormones,” the Toronto Star began a 2008 story about students in the Canadian capital’s middle schools. Suspended “between childhood and the adult world, pre-teens have been called the toughest to teach.”
“The Bermuda triangle of education,” former Louisiana superintendent Cecil Picard once termed middle schools. “Hormones are flying all over the place.”
Indeed, you can’t touch middle school without hearing about “raging hormones.”
Says Diane Ross, a middle-school teacher for 17 years and for 13 more a teacher of education courses for licensure in Ohio, “If you are the warm, nurturing, motherly, grandmotherly type, you are made for early childhood education. If you love math or science or English, then you are the high school type. If you love bungee jumping, then you are the middle school type.”
Even in professional journals you catch the drift of “middle-school madness.” Mayhem in the Middle was a particularly provocative study by Cheri Pierson Yecke published by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute in 2005. American middle schools have become the places “where academic achievement goes to die,” wrote Yecke.
Your Child Left Behind
Amanda Ripley, via two kind readers:
FOR YEARS, POOR PERFORMANCE BY STUDENTS IN AMERICA RELATIVE TO THOSE IN OTHER COUNTRIES HAS BEEN EXPLAINED AWAY AS A CONSEQUENCE OF OUR NATIONWIDE DIVERSITY. BUT WHAT IF YOU LOOKED MORE CLOSELY, BREAKING DOWN OUR RESULTS BY STATE AND SEARCHING NOT FOR AN AVERAGE, BUT FOR EXCELLENCE?
Stanford economist Eric Hanushek and two colleagues recently conducted an experiment to answer just such questions, ranking American states and foreign countries side by side. Like our recruiter, they looked specifically at the best and brightest in each place–the kids most likely to get good jobs in the future–using scores on standardized math tests as a proxy for educational achievement.
We’ve known for some time how this story ends nationwide: only 6 percent of U.S. students perform at the advanced-proficiency level in math, a share that lags behind kids in some 30 other countries, from the United Kingdom to Taiwan. But what happens when we break down the results? Do any individual U.S. states wind up near the top?
Incredibly, no. Even if we treat each state as its own country, not a single one makes it into the top dozen contenders on the list. The best performer is Massachusetts, ringing in at No. 17. Minnesota also makes it into the upper-middle tier, followed by Vermont, New Jersey, and Washington. And down it goes from there, all the way to Mississippi, whose students–by this measure at least–might as well be attending school in Thailand or Serbia.
ANUSHEK, WHO GREW UP outside Cleveland and graduated from the Air Force Academy in 1965, has the gentle voice and manner of Mr. Rogers, but he has spent the past 40 years calmly butchering conventional wisdom on education. In study after study, he has demonstrated that our assumptions about what works are almost always wrong. More money does not tend to lead to better results; smaller class sizes do not tend to improve learning. “Historically,” he says, “reporters call me [when] the editor asks, ‘What is the other side of this story?'”
Emphasis added.
The $500 million Question: Charter School Management Organizations
Charter school management organizations (CMOs) have emerged as a popular means for bringing charter schooling to scale. Advocates credit CMOs with delivering a coherent model of charter schooling to a growing number of children across numerous sites. Skeptics have wondered whether CMOs constitute an effective management approach, whether they won’t merely re-create the pathologies of school districts as they grow in size and scale, and whether they are well-suited to make use of new technological tools. In this forum, Robin Lake of the University of Washington’s Center on Reinventing Public Education (CRPE) and Charter School Growth Fund (CSGF) CEO Kevin Hall discuss what we know about the strengths and frailties of CMOs, what the future holds, and what promising alternatives might be.
War veteran barred from CCBC campus for frank words on killing
After publishing essay on addiction to war, Charles Whittington must obtain psychological evaluation before returning to classes
By writing the paper, Charles Whittington thought he would confront the anxieties that had tormented him since he returned from war.
He knew it wasn’t normal to dwell on the pleasure of sticking his knife between an enemy soldier’s ribs. But by recording his words, maybe he’d begin to purge the fixation.
So Whittington, an Iraq veteran, submitted an essay on the allure of combat for his English class at the Community College of Baltimore County in Catonsville. He called war a drug and wrote that killing “is something that I do not just want but something I really need so I can feel like myself.”
Seattle Public Schools superintendent Maria Goodloe-Johnson stands firm, even as her teachers lose faith in her leadership.
SEVEN YEARS AGO, Maria Goodloe-Johnson declined to apply for the job as superintendent of Seattle Public Schools and instead took the same job with the Charleston County School District in South Carolina. “The [Seattle] school board was very confused,” she says. “And I wasn’t interested in confusion.” She won’t get more specific than that when describing the district circa 2003, but it couldn’t have been drastically different than the situation she inherited when she accepted the Seattle school district’s top spot in 2007.
Attendance at South Seattle schools was sinking. The school board had adopted a new student assignment plan without any idea of how to implement it. Schools were teaching to vastly different standards. Heck, the district’s computer system was so outdated, prospective teachers had no means for applying online for jobs at multiple schools at once. SPS lacked accountability and administrative oversight, and Goodloe-Johnson whipped out her ruler and started rapping knuckles almost immediately.
Charter schools benefit struggling students: Madison Prep charter school will help underachieving Madison students
My high school alma mater, Waubonsie Valley High School, was diverse in every sense of the term, but the most striking difference I noticed was the vast disparity in achievement that existed within each classroom.
While some students graduated and went to top universities like MIT, Brown and UW-Madison, others continued to struggle with writing complete sentences or finishing an algebra test in their senior year. A handful of students did not receive the learning experience they needed to prepare them for the future.
This glaring achievement gap is present in the city of Madison–most notably in the African-American population–where only 52 percent of students graduated from high school in 2009.
Fortunately, Kaleem Caire of the Urban League is stepping up and proposing a way to increase graduation rates and overall academic achievement among Madison students.
Caire plans to build an all-male, mostly African-American charter school called Madison Prep for sixth through 12th graders. Madison Prep will take several departures from the normal school model that many students find sufficient, but will focus additional attention on students who need extra help–a necessary resource that is often lacking in Madison schools.
Hiding Online Footprints Makers of Firefox Browser Explore Do-Not-Track Tool After Scrapping Earlier Effort
JULIA ANGWIN And SPENCER E. ANTE
The makers of the popular Firefox Web browser are exploring ways to create a do-not-track mechanism that could offer Internet users a way to avoid being monitored online.
The effort comes just months after Firefox’s creator, Mozilla Corp., killed a powerful and new tool to limit tracking under pressure from an ad-industry executive, The Wall Street Journal has learned. Mozilla says it didn’t scrap the tool because of pressure, but rather out of concern it would force advertisers to use even sneakier techniques and could slow down the performance of some websites.
Teaching in schools: Michael Gove wants to change how and what schools teach, as well as how they are organised
ALLOWING teachers, parents, charities and religious groups to open new schools funded by the state, but independent of local authorities, is a central plank of the government’s plans for improving education in England. Despite the enthusiasm of the education secretary, Michael Gove, for such radical reform, take-up has been lacklustre: he has approved just 25 “free-school” proposals so far. Likewise his bid to encourage existing state schools to become academies–again, funded by the state but independent of local authorities–has failed to take off.
On November 24th Mr Gove unveiled his latest plan for curing ailing schools, this time by changing what is taught in them, and who does the teaching. He is thus revisiting the policy terrain on which the previous Labour government focused (arguing that “standards, not structures” were what mattered) until its final term in office.
Britain’s best independent schools attract pupils from around the world. But most British families cannot afford the steep fees such schools charge. Just 7% of British children are educated privately; the rest attend state schools, where standards are generally much lower. The Labour government doubled school spending in real terms during its 13 years in power; despite the splurge, the attainment gap between the two systems has widened.
More Evidence that Florida’s Education Reforms Succeeding
Eleven years ago, Florida chose sweeping reforms to improve the dire state of education affecting their children. Today, these changes are still paying dividends, and don’t show signs of slowing down anytime soon.
Florida’s graduation rate, once amongst the worst in America, has risen steadily over the past five years, capping off at 79 percent for the 2009-2010 school year. This is over ten percentage points more than in 2005-2006, when the rate held at 68.9, and a 20-point increase from Manhattan Institute estimates of the rate in 2000-2001. Over this span, the state has gone from straggling behind the national average to becoming an above-average performer when it comes to graduating their high school students.
Most encouraging, however, are the state’s results when it comes to the matriculation of minority students. African-American and Hispanic students have made the strongest gains of any group since 2005-2006. These two groups have improved their rates by 13.1 and 13.3 percent, respectively, to become the driving force behind Florida’s overall improvement. Comparatively, white students have only bettered their graduation rate by eight percent over the same time frame. Through the past decade, Florida has proven that the achievement gap can be conquered through dynamic solutions in the classroom.
Milwaukee Public Schools Failure to Properly Use Data
There has been surprisingly little discussion about why Wisconsin did not win a Race to the Top grant. A look at the points awarded for each section of Wisconsin’s application and the accompanying reviewer comments makes it clear that the failure to use student achievement data to inform decisions was the most important contributor to Wisconsin’s loss. More aggressive use of these data would have put Wisconsin within striking distance of winning.
The irony of Wisconsin’s loss is that its largest district, Milwaukee Public Schools, was one of the pioneers of the value-added movement. Ten years ago, it started work on a value-added model that has since spread to other cities and states, including some Race to the Top winners.
This reluctance to use data seems deeply ingrained in Wisconsin’s education culture.
For example, the state defines “highly qualified teachers” in very traditional terms, such as degrees, certifications, courses taken, and years of experience. Unfortunately, most research has found little correlation between these traditional measures and student achievement gains, which Wisconsin ignores.
All Together Now? Educating high and low achievers in the same classroom
Michael Petrilli, via a kind reader’s email:
The greatest challenge facing America’s schools today isn’t the budget crisis, or standardized testing, or “teacher quality.” It’s the enormous variation in the academic level of students coming into any given classroom. How we as a country handle this challenge says a lot about our values and priorities, for good and ill. Unfortunately, the issue has become enmeshed in polarizing arguments about race, class, excellence, and equity. What’s needed instead is some honest, frank discussion about the trade-offs associated with any possible solution.
U.S. students are all over the map in terms of achievement (see Figure 1). By the 4th grade, public-school children who score among the top 10 percent of students on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) are reading at least six grade levels above those in the bottom 10 percent. For a teacher with both types of students in her classroom, that means trying to challenge kids ready for middle-school work while at the same time helping others to decode. Even differences between students at the 25th and at the 75th percentiles are huge–at least three grade levels. So if you’re a teacher, how the heck do you deal with that?
Lots of related links:
- “Stand Up Against the MMSD High School Reform”
- Madison school district to consider alternatives to traditional public schools
- Advanced Placement, Gifted Education & A Hometown Debate
- On the Gifted & Talented Complaint Against the Madison School District
- Madison School District 2010-2011 Enrollment Report, Including Outbound Open Enrollment (3.11%)
- Complaint Filed Against Madison Schools
- English 10
- District Small Learning Community Grant – Examining the Data From Earlier Grants, pt. 2
Badger Rock charter school decision delayed after Madison School Board learns of cost errors
The Madison School Board on Monday delayed approval of an agriculture-themed charter school by two weeks after learning the school could cost the district about $318,000 more than previously thought.
The board had been told Badger Rock Middle School, estimated to cost $596,000 in the 2011-12 school year, would be cost-neutral, but that prediction was based on erroneous information provided by district officials earlier this year. Superintendent Dan Nerad apologized for the error during Monday night’s board meeting.
Erik Kass, assistant superintendent for business services, said his staff told the planning team for Badger Rock in February that it could budget $596,000 for the school.
But the district failed to account for an additional $310,000 needed to create 3.9 new positions in the district to accommodate the new school. The district also determined the school’s proposed utilities budget was $8,000 too low.
Defining a Great University
When I was a student, then faculty member, then administrator at private universities — a mere 40+ years — land-grant institutions were not front and center in my consciousness. Having now moved to a land-grant institution, I have concluded they are one of the most precious if not always most highly visible resources this nation has.
Our nation needs to broaden what “greatness” in a university means. At the very least, we need to expand our conception of greatness to a multidimensional notion, not just a notion of unidimensional rankings as appear in certain magazines. Land-grant institutions, contrary to some popular beliefs, are not merely about agricultural development, but rather, about changing the world in a positive, meaningful, and enduring way. Land-grant institutions perhaps best represent the very core of what greatness means in American society — namely, equal opportunity for all and, through it, the chance to make our society and the world a better place in which to live.
HOW COMMON CURRICULUM CAN HELP RAISE STUDENT ACHIEVEMENT
K-12 curricula needs to be less expensive and of higher quality. Nearly all curricula used in schools and adopted by school districts is print based. The cost of printing keeps open source and small, innovative, for-profit projects from being widely available in print and thus, widely adopted by school districts. The fixed, static nature of print means writers can’t get real time, detailed feedback on their work and can’t change it to meet teacher’s needs.
We make curricula free to create, drastically lowering the costs of production. We help developers make their curricula better by providing opportunities for teachers to give feedback on resources they use. By making curricula free to create and connecting developers to teachers, we lower costs and improve quality.
In praise of cultivation
t’s not often that Slow Lane can claim a scoop but I think I am the first to divulge the contents of a report that has just, rather mysteriously, arrived on my desk. It is called “The Future of BP” and it was commissioned by the UK government from Dr Stradivario Verdi, the noted entomologist and education tsar – until he was forced to step down from his position earlier this year because of damaging rumours about his relationship with a stag beetle.
Verdi calls not simply for a reorganisation of the company affected by a series of environmental and safety disasters culminating in the Deepwater Horizon spill but for a fundamental change in its philosophy. Amazingly, he suggests that BP in the future should be concerned not with making money for shareholders but with something he quaintly terms the public good. This would seem to imply a radical move away from environmentally damaging oil and gas exploration and refining into the development of renewable energy.
Only joking. This absurd caprice is, however, not really any more absurd, when you think about it, than the independent review of higher education and student finance commissioned by the UK government and chaired by the former chief executive of BP, Lord Browne – a businessman, not an educationalist.
How could he have spent much time in serious thought, research or discussion about the purposes of higher education when he was at the helm of one of the world’s biggest corporations?
How to Give Children the Gift of Investing
What present can you give a kid that will outlast the latest must-have toy or gadget? How about some stock in the company that makes it.
You can jump-start a young person’s finances by giving him or her the gift of investing with stocks, bonds and mutual funds. Throw in some lessons on how the markets work — and the common pitfalls investors face — and you could end up giving them some financial savviness as well.
Getting kids investing early “allows them to accumulate knowledge over time on what can be a complex topic,” says June Walbert, a certified financial planner based in San Antonio with financial-services firm USAA.
Individual Stocks. Does your 10-year-old nephew spend most of his free time playing videogames? Harness that interest by giving him stock in the videogame maker. A kid might be more interested in following a company’s stock if it’s linked to a brand he or she is familiar with, such as the company behind a favorite activity, toy, restaurant or snack food.
Trying to steer strong teachers to weak schools
James Sonnenberg has a request for Gregory Thornton, the new superintendent of Milwaukee Public Schools: “Give me the best you have, to work with the children who need the most.”
It’s a logical request. Most business leaders put the most capable employees in the most demanding situations.
But it’s also a very tough request, because, in general, that isn’t the way it works in education, where quality flows uphill, away from the lowest-performing schools and students. As teachers build up experience, seniority and, experts generally say, competence, they head for higher-performing kids, higher-performing schools and, frequently, the suburbs.
Sonnenberg is the highly regarded principal of West Side Academy, an MPS kindergarten-through-eighth-grade school in a tough neighborhood, around N. 35th St. and W. Lisbon Ave. His pursuit of a strong teaching staff is one vignette in a story that runs deep in schools serving high-needs children all across the nation.
Sonnenberg has plenty of weight to put behind his quest for more star power on his teaching staff. Federal law calls for doing more to put good teachers in front of the kids most likely to falter. Research shows those children are likely to benefit the most from having star teachers. There is wide agreement that it is a worthy goal.
Seattle Public Schools: A teachable moment – Inaccurate District Administration Data
It’s hard not to reflect carefully upon the Seattle Public School District’s dramatic acknowledgement that a major data point used by parents, educators, school board members and others to highlight the district’s quality is absolutely wrong. I have been thinking long and hard about this issue since it hit the newspaper last week. Without question, I have been one of the elected officials most guilty of perpetuating the (incorrect) data, and it doesn’t feel good.
While there are some who will see a more cynical conspiracy, I see a profoundly troubling mistake that needs to be discussed openly and courageously in all corners of our community.
The real issue is obviously not that a mistake was made. The district’s admission this week that a key piece of data is wildly inaccurate is more than an embarrassing glitch, it’s a symbolic reflection of a more systematic challenge facing many elected boards statewide that have fiduciary obligations to oversee billions in tax dollars and policy but lack access to the professional, independent staff to do the job.
School districts across the state and nation are well versed in the inconsistent arrangement by which part-time, unpaid community leaders (who campaign for the job) are then expected to volunteer thousands of hours without the ability to get the answers to their tough questions that may run counter to professional staff interests. The real issue is that the district’s administration didn’t strive to aggressively correct the inaccuracy from day one. They need to ask themselves why and, hopefully, share the truth with the community.
Building A New Culture Of Teaching And Learning
f you only watch one video on my site, make it this one.
Are schools designed to help people learn? Are colleges and universities really institutions of higher education? Do students actually learn any science in science classes? Can skateboarding give us a better model for teaching and learning? Watch this video to find out.
Commentary on the Proposed Madison Preparatory Academy, a Charter School
Kaleem Caire, via email: Chris Rickert:
At some point in the next couple months, members of the Madison School Board are almost certain to be in the unlucky position of having to decide whether to admit what is most fairly characterized as a colossal failure.
Approving a charter for Urban League of Greater Madison President Kaleem Caire’s all-boy, mostly black, non-union Madison Preparatory Academy will make it clear that, when it comes to many black schoolchildren, teachers have failed to teach, parents have failed to parent, and the rest of us have failed to do anything about either.
Reject the charter and risk the false hope that comes from thinking that all these children need is another program and more “outreach.” A tweak here and a tweak there and we can all just keep on keeping on. Never mind that the approach hasn’t seemed to work so far, and that if past is prologue, we already know this story’s end.
Caire’s model would be a radical departure for Madison. The district’s two existing charter schools — Wright Middle School and Nuestro Mundo — don’t exactly trample on hallowed educational ground. They employ union teachers and have the same number of school days and teaching hours as any other non-charter and “broadly follow our district policies in the vast majority of ways,” said district spokesman Ken Syke.
I want to thank Kaleem Caire for coming home to Madison and making positive changes. If anyone can make an all-male charter school happen here, he can. The statistics in the article may be alarming to some, but not as alarming to the students and parents who are living these statistics.
I support integration, but how can it be true integration when the education gaps are so large? Who is benefiting? In my eyes, true integration in the school system would support the same quality of education, the same achievement expectations, the same disciplinary measures and so on.
Numbers don’t lie, and what they tell us is that we need to go another route to ensure educational success for black males. If that means opening a charter school to intervene, then let’s do it!
Instead of the headline “All-male charter school a tough sell,” imagine this one, “Loss to society: Madison schools graduated only 52 percent of black male students in 2009.” Then the reaction to the Urban League’s plan to start a charter school intended to boost minority achievement might have been different.
Reaction in the article discussed all the reasons why people will or should oppose the idea of an all-male charter school, despite its benefits. Let’s not talk about why we should be aghast at the cultural performance disparities in Madison’s schools. And let’s not talk about what we lose as a society when almost half of all black males attending Madison schools fail to graduate.
The comments of John Matthews, head of the Madison teachers union, on charter schools are hyperbole. Saying that the Madison School Board will have no control is a cover for the union not having control.
We can’t argue the importance of good teachers. But the idea that a degree in education, and a union membership, make you the only one capable of performing this role is specious. All of us are teachers, or have been taught meaningfully by individuals with teaching skills. Are we going to let successful teachers teach, or are we going to let their union dictate?
According to Carlo D’Este’s book “Warlord: A Life of Winston Churchill at War,” Churchill, during a lull in his career, learned bricklaying. Hearing this, the British Trade Union Council, in a public relations gesture, offered him a Master’s card.
Douglas Alexander:
Madison Urban League President Kaleem Caire applied for a charter school for males because only 52 percent of black males graduate in Madison schools, while black males are suspended significantly more than the majority white students.
Before anyone responds, they should answer two questions:
- Are you concerned about these statistics?
- What are you doing about it?
Much more on the proposed IB Charter school: Madison Preparatory Academy.
Emanuel Vows Fix For Chicago Math and English
Rahm Emanuel made a campaign promise last week that if elected mayor, he would install a new math and English language curriculum in Chicago’s public schools by the end of his first term.
Mr. Emanuel said the new curriculum would be geared toward equipping students with the skills to meet the “common core standards” that education officials in Illinois and more than 40 other states have adopted. In imposing the new standards, the state has left up to the districts the question of how to try to meet those standards.
“I want us, the city of Chicago, to be the first city to adopt the curriculum that teaches toward the common standards,” he said in an interview with the Chicago News Cooperative. “Nobody has taken on the initiative.”
The effort would better prepare high school graduates for college or the workplace, he said.
Is it harder for affluent schools to have good character?
Samuel Casey Carter is, in a way, the Tom Paine of the movement to raise school achievement in low-income neighborhoods. He coined the term “no excuses schools” for those run by people who think that no matter how bad their students’ family lives, with great teaching they should be able to learn just as much as kids from affluent suburban homes.
His new book, “On Purpose: How Great School Cultures Form Strong Character,” puts this in an even wider context. He profiles a dozen schools that, he says, have set high expectations for personal attitudes and behavior and created both good people and good students.
This time, only four of the 12 schools Carter profiles are in low-income communities. Nearly all schools in all communities need some fixing, he says. They need to nourish student character if they want young intellects to grow.
No More A’s for Good Behavior
A few years ago, teachers at Ellis Middle School in Austin, Minn., might have said that their top students were easy to identify: they completed their homework and handed it in on time; were rarely tardy; sat in the front of the class; wrote legibly; and jumped at the chance to do extra-credit assignments.
But after poring over four years of data comparing semester grades with end-of-the-year test scores on state subject exams, the teachers at Ellis began to question whether they really knew who the smartest students were.
About 10 percent of the students who earned A’s and B’s in school stumbled during end-of-the-year exams. By contrast, about 10 percent of students who scraped along with C’s, D’s and even F’s — students who turned in homework late, never raised their hands and generally seemed turned off by school — did better than their eager-to-please B+ classmates.
Madison School District’s Proposed Innovative and Alternative Program Committee
The Innovative and Alternative Program Committee is charged with identifying alternative education and program needs and developing a plan to expand alternative programs and educational options. This will allow the district to articulate a direction and a plan for these types of programs which will be presentedto the Board of Education.
An open approach to alternative education models – an area Madison lags – is a good thing. A simple first step would be to address Janet Mertz’s longstanding quest Credit for Non Madison School District Courses.
Related: A School Board Thinks Differently About Delivering Education, and spends less.
Vision for charter middle school project taking shape; Badger Rock Approval Materials for the Madison School Board
It will be a year-round middle school. And an urban farm. And a cafe with indoor and outdoor seating. And a neighborhood center. And an office space. And a home for small business.
Planners of the Resilience Research Center development have firmed up their vision and timeline for the nearly 4-acre parcel planned to start taking shape in January on the South Side, near the intersection of East Badger and Rimrock roads.
Now they’re working with the city on a somewhat complicated task: Zone this!
“I don’t know of many other projects that have this type of mix with commercial uses and a school on one site,” said Heather Stouder of the city’s planning division.
Much more on the proposed Badger Rock Middle School here
Complete 6.3MB Badger Rock Proposal.
Madison School District Draft Superintendent Evaluation Documents
Beth Moss & James Howard 450K PDF
Attached is the final draft of the Superintendent evaluation document to be used for the summative or end -of-year evaluation to be voted on at the November 29 meeting. The document has two parts. The first part is the Superintendent of Schools Performance Expectations Standards Assessment, a rubric based on the following:
- The Superintendent Position Description, adopted Sept. 21, 2009; and
- Feedback from the formative (mid-year) evaluation for the Superintendent, July 2010
The second part of the evaluation involves feedback on the following elements:
- The Superintendent goals, approved December 15, 2009;
- Two elements from the additional evaluation framework identified by Mr. Howard: Diversity and Inclusion and Safety.
From the original draft sent to the Operational Support Committee on November 8, these are element numbers 3 and 4. In addition to approving a final version of the evaluation plan, the Board needs to discuss the date for evaluations to be submitted for compilation to the Board president and dates for a closed session meeting(s) to discuss the results. To complete the process by February, January 3, 2011 is the recommended date for submittal. January 10, 24, and 31 are possible meeting dates. During this period Board members also need to provide input on the Superintendent’s goals for 2011.
If you have any questions, please email James or Beth.
Much more on the Superintendent evaluation, here. A side note: the lack of annual, substantive evaluations of former Superintendent Art Rainwater was an issue in mid 2000’s school board races. Related: Who Does the Superintendent Work For?
UW-Madison School of Education & Madison School District Contract for Professional Development School Supervisors/Coordinators
MMSD has had a longstanding relationship with the University of Wisconsin- Madison in providing schools as sites for practicum and student teachers to learn throughout their two years in the School of Education. Each of these schools had an Instructional Resource Teacher who provided support to UW students as well as professional development for all school staff. The UW, school, and central office all shared costs of these positions.
Project Description: This agreement provides for the interchange of three teachers in an effort to further the goals of the Madison Professional Development School Partnership (PDS). The teachers will assume the duties and responsibilities of PDS Supervisors/ Coordinators for Memorial High School, West High School, and Midvale/Lincoln Elementary Schools. The teachers will provide assistance in curriculum development and evaluation to teachers at the identified schools; coordinate placement of practicum and student teachers assigned by UW-Madison; give workshops; hold regular seminars for practicum students, student teachers, and building teachers; and assist UW staff in research and curriculum development efforts involving the PDS program
Wisconsin could learn a thing or two from Florida’s school grading system
I heard Jeb Bush give a talk a few months ago in Milwaukee about education policies that he promoted while he was governor of Florida from 1999 to 2007. I should have taken notes, because I think I was listening to at least a few of the pages from the playbook that will be used by Scott Walker when he becomes governor of Wisconsin in about five weeks.
I’m betting that is particularly true for the system of giving every school in the state a grade – A to F – each year. It’s a centerpiece of the “A+ Schools” program that Bush championed in Florida. He credits the grading system with being a key driver of rising test scores over the last decade.
In his campaign platform, Walker called for launching a grading system for Wisconsin schools. He hasn’t spelled out details, but Florida is the primary example of such a system, and Walker is an admirer of Bush. Walker also will have strong Republican majorities in both houses of the Legislature, and I can’t think of any reason he won’t succeed in turning what he said he would do into reality in the not-at-all-distant future.
So let’s look at Florida’s grading system on the assumption it is a lot like what will be used here.
Saturday Morning Classes at Des Moines East High School
There’s a new program at Des Moines East High School that requires students who skip classes to go to school on Saturday mornings.
The Des Moines Register reports that the new Saturday program started earlier this months. The program requires students to attend school from 8 to 11 a.m. on Saturday if they have five or more unexcused absences. The goal is for the students to make up for time lost from the classroom. Principal Dan Conner says students who don’t come on Saturdays face discipline, including in-school suspension.
Much more, here: World Class Schools for Iowa?.
Mom, Dad, Can I Borrow $140,000?
Business is booming at the Bank of Mom and Dad.
As banks have tightened lending standards, growing numbers of families are stepping into the breach. But while intrafamily loans can yield significant financial rewards for lenders and borrowers, families must carefully assess the risks.
While many families handle the process in informal oral agreements, advisers urge clients to document such loans in written contracts, just as a bank would. This can also make it easier for families to comply with tax rules that require lenders to pay income tax on the interest they receive and allow borrowers with mortgages to deduct the interest payments they pay.
Some families choose to go through websites like Prosper and Lending Club, which match lenders and borrowers online–though they also set minimum interest rates.
Unions knocking on charter school doors
It’s become obvious in recent years that charter schools, with their unique and innovative approach to student instruction, are a source of great promise for our nation’s troubled public education system.
That’s why the recent decision by teachers at the Englewood on the Palisades Charter School to join the American Federation of Teachers is so frightening.
For years, our nation’s powerful school-employee unions, like the AFT and the National Education Association, opposed the very concept of charter schools and pressured state governments to cap their numbers or shut them down altogether.
They simply didn’t want the competition.
The ‘highly qualified’ gap No Child Left Behind mandates such teachers in all U.S. schools. A new study shows that little progress has been made in meeting that requirement.
While states and school districts hotly debate the issue of whether student test scores should be used to evaluate teachers, the nation has been virtually ignoring a more basic question: whether those teachers are even qualified in the first place. Too many of them aren’t.
The No Child Left Behind Act mandated that all students be taught by “highly qualified” teachers. And although we disagree with many elements of that 2001 federal school reform act — its rigidity, its use of the wrong measurements to assess student progress — this provision always made more sense.
Among other things, a highly qualified teacher in the secondary schools is supposed to have expertise in the subject he or she teaches, whether that means having majored in the subject in college or having a credential to teach it. Ample research has found that students learn better when their teachers have such formal expertise. Yet a new report by the Education Trust, a nonprofit organization devoted to improving the educational lot of poor and minority students, shows that the problem is widespread and that little progress has been made.
Teachers in the firing line again
Is it any wonder that the government is besieged on all sides by the educational establishment, for it is falling into the trap of all previous governments for the past 30 years: blaming the teachers and the students for the ills of the nation (Bad teachers out, social mobility in: Gove outlines goals, 25 November).
Having been in the field of education as a teacher, deputy head of a large and successful comprehensive school and now an administration manager in another, I weep for teaching staff and children in this country. Teachers and state schools have been forced to obey the whims of successive administrations because they thought they knew better. Despite continual central interference, and constant change in examination systems, teachers delivered time and time again. Standards have improved, and teachers are somehow vilified for it instead of congratulated.
Now we have another set of Harrow, Eton, Westminster and Oxbridge boys who know better than the sensible, pragmatic and logical majority of headteachers, teachers and teaching assistants working out there in state schools up and down the country. This group of privileged career politicians now have the nerve to take us back to the 1950s. All secondary schools will be measured against each other in five subjects: English, maths, science, a foreign language and history or geography. All modular exams will be abolished in favour of one set of exams at the end. Well, isn’t this progress! This is not suitable for all children; what about business, enterprise, design and technology skills? What about even giving a thought for the bottom 20%? What will happen to them? Do they care?
