Texas lawmakers, more than ever, are looking for a way to get the most bang for the buck in education.
And they may have found it.
Complex ratings have been developed by the state comptroller’s office and at least one private company that provide a look at how much money is really needed to provide Texas students with a good education.
Faced with a record budget shortfall, the state will most likely have to consider cuts to education spending. School superintendents say any reduction in funding will lead to teacher layoffs and cuts to instructional programs. They argue they need more money, not less.
That’s why looking at the data may become important in the debate. The systems show not only where students have the best academic performance but which districts spend the least to achieve those results.
Broad Alum Busted in Seattle Public School Scandal for Lying to Advance Corporate Ed Reform
Jim Horn, via a Den Dempsey email
Brad Bernatek began his Broad Residency in Urban Education Cohort 2006 with Seattle Public Schools and became the chief honcho for accountability in 2008. From the Broad website:
Brad Bernatek serves [for now] as Director of Research, Evaluation and Assessment for Seattle Public Schools. In this role, Bernatek runs the department responsible for student statistics including enrollment, demographics, evaluation and standardized testing. During his Residency, Bernatek served the district as interim manager for research, evaluation and assessment and as special assistant to the chief operations officer.
When a new strategic plan was being put together in 2008 with the new superintendent, Maria Goodloe-Johnson (Broad Supt. Academy, Class of ’03), the Broadies needed some really embarrassing piece of information about SPS that could be used to leverage the changes they wanted to initiate: ending the remains of the school integration plan killed by the Roberts Court in 2007, more testing, closing more schools, opening more corporate charters, longer school days, teacher pay and evaluations based on test scores, working to end tenure, and the bringing in Teach for America to replace professional faculty. In short, the disaster capitalists needed a disaster to bring about change before anyone could regain their composure.
Indiana high schools struggle to improve
More Hoosier schools are making progress toward state and federal student achievement standards, but high schools locally and across the state have failed to keep up with the gains made by elementary and middle schools, according to data released Tuesday by the Indiana Department of Education.
The problem with high schools boils down to “a combination of generally low performance and no significant improvement,” Jeff Zaring, the department’s chief of results and reform, told the State Board of Education.
As a result, the board voted to put three-quarters of Indiana’s high schools into “academic watch” and “academic probation” categories based in part on standardized test scores and how they’ve changed over the past three years. Locally, that includes Henryville, Silver Creek, Borden, Clarksville, Charlestown, Jeffersonville, New Albany, North Harrison, Corydon Central and South Central high schools.
Cedarburg School District will contact families who opted out of sex ed
Over the next few weeks, the Cedarburg School District will contact 111 families that did not return opt-in forms to have their children participate in sensitive issues of the human growth and development curriculum.
Last year, only a handful of parents opted their children out of the sex education curriculum.
In a move that caused controversy among community members, the Cedarburg School Board voted to reverse the process – mandating that parents had to specifically opt their children into the programming by signing a permission slip by Nov. 1. If no form was returned, it was assumed they opted out.
That change in policy drew the attention of the state Department of Public Instruction, which notified the district in a letter that it could face a legal challenge if the board didn’t return to an opt-out policy. Since then the board has discussed the policy at its last two regular meetings.
Schools Find Achievement Gap Tough To Close
Despite ongoing research and theorizing, the educational achievement of black boys and young black men continues to lag behind their white peers, nationwide. James Earl Davis of Temple University’s College of Education and Pedro Noguera, author of The Trouble With Black Boys discuss.
Superintendent/Student Ratios
Everyone’s talking about superintendent salary caps. The Record reports that the New Jersey Association of School Administrators filed a motion in State Superior Court claiming that just because Gov. Christie has proposed caps doesn’t mean he can enforce them right now. The association also argues that Acting Commissioner Rochelle Hendricks “broke the law” by advising our 21 Executive County Superintendents to veto any contracts above the caps.
In other litigation, the Parsippany-Troy Hills School Board filed suit in the appellate division of Superior Court regarding the Morris County Executive County Superintendent’s refusal to approve the new contract for Superintendent Le Roy Seitz, which will pay him $234,065 by the fifth year of the 5-year contract.
A new mess at Central Falls High in Rhode Island
A new disciplinary program that stressed leniency has failed to rein in dozens of students who caused serious disruptions; kids who come to school or class late, or who have even threatened teachers, received minimal or no punishment, said a number of teachers, who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear of retaliation. Some teachers have reported being assaulted by students.
Teachers have made hundreds of referrals of students for disciplinary measures, but, some teachers said, the administration does little if anything in the way of punishment.
After first denying any problem, school officials have said part of the program would be reviewed. This admission occurred after a meeting with the Central Falls police chief, Capt. Col. Joseph Moran III, who is also head of the Rhode Island Police Chiefs’ Association.
Some teachers also said they are some of their colleagues have been threatened and/or disciplined by administrators for merely disagreeing with policy, and that they believe the administrators are using some of the cameras installed in the school to monitor them.
Evanston Township High seeks to diversify advanced classes
Diane Rado, via a kind reader’s email:
When he scans the faces in his honors science courses at Evanston Township High School, chemistry teacher William Farmer can easily see who’s missing: minority kids.
“Out of 26, you might have three nonwhite students,” he said.
One of the most racially mixed high schools in Illinois, Evanston has a mission of embracing diversity and promoting equity and excellence for all students. But its own data show that few minority students make it into the school’s most rigorous courses that will best prepare them for college and the future.
Honors classrooms dominated by white students have been common in Illinois and across the nation, a byproduct of a century-old and controversial tradition of tracking, or sorting, students into different levels of classes.
Madison Preparatory Academy School Board Presentation 12/6/2010
Kaleem Caire, via email:
The initial proposal for Madison Preparatory Academy for Young Men will be presented to the Madison Metropolitan School District Board of Education’s Planning and Development Committee on MONDAY, DECEMBER 6, 2010 at 6:00pm in the McDaniels Auditorium of the Doyle Administration Building (545 West Dayton St., Madison 53703). The committee is chaired by Ms. Arlene Silveira (asilveira@madison.k12.wi.us). The Madison Prep proposal is the first agenda item for that evening’s committee meeting so please be there at 6pm sharp. If you plan to provide public comment, please show up 15 minutes early (5:45pm) to sign-up!
Please show your support for Madison Prep by attending this meeting. Your presence in the audience is vital to demonstrating to the Board of Education the broad community support for Madison Prep. We look forward to you joining us for the very important milestone in Madison history!
The Mission
Madison Prep will provide a world class secondary education for young men that prepares them to think critically, communicate effectively, identify their purpose, and succeed in college, 21st century careers, leadership and life. For more information, see the attachments or contact Ms. Laura DeRoche at lderoche@ulgm.org.
Get Involved with Madison Prep
- Curriculum & Instruction Team. This design team will develop a thorough understanding of the IB curriculum and define the curriculum of the school, including the core and non-core curriculum. They will also develop a thorough understanding of the Harkness teaching method, outline instructional best practices, and address teacher expectations and evaluation. Both teams will address special education and English Language Learners (ELL).
- Governance, Leadership & Operation Team. This design team will help develop the school’s operations plan, define the governing structure, and address the characteristics and expectations of the schools Head of School.
- Facility Team. This team will be responsible for identify, planning, and securing a suitable facility for Madison Prep.
- Budget, Finance & Fundraising Team. This team will be involved with developing Madison Prep’s budget and fundraising plans, and will explore financing options for start-up, implementation, and the first four years of the school’s operation.”
- Community Engagement & Support Team. This team will develop strategies and work to establish broad community support for Madison Prep, develop criteria for partnering with others, and establish partnerships that support teaching, learning, leadership, and community engagement.
Related: an interview with Kaleem Caire.
Madison Preparatory Academy Overview 600K PDF and executive summary.
How to help African-American males in school: Treat them like gifted students
I wanted to cry when I read about the recent widely publicized report from the Council of Great City Schools about the underachievement of African-American males in our schools. Its findings bear repeating: African-American boys drop out at nearly twice the rate of white boys; their SAT scores are on average 104 points lower; and black men represented just 5 percent of college students in 2008.
When I was the executive director of instruction and professional development for the New York City Public Schools, I grew keenly aware of the challenges schools face in educating African-American males. For many reasons, far too many boys don’t get the support at home or in the community they need to thrive as adults. Instead, that job falls almost completely on their schools. And that means it comes down to their teachers.
Driven by the intense focus on accountability, schools and teachers used standardized test scores to help identify and address student weaknesses. Over time, these deficits began to define far too many students so that all we saw were their deficits – particularly for African-American males. As a result, we began losing sight of these young boys’ gifts and, as a consequence, stifled their talents.
UK Teacher training reform is vital to Michael Gove’s plans
The Government’s determination to repair Britain’s educational system is becoming clearer by the day. This week, a White Paper will propose scrapping “bite-sized” GCSE examinations, which chop the qualification into modules that pupils can re-take in order to boost their grades. This move will cut the number of exams pupils have to sit – and, in doing so, increase academic rigour. That fact alone tells us something about Labour’s wretched education policies: in the rest of the world, exams actually raise standards. In place of the dumbed-down courses will come GCSEs in which, to quote Michael Gove, the Education Secretary, pupils will be “examined on everything they have learnt at one time”.
The White Paper will also address the gross devaluation of A-levels by cutting the number of modules; Ofsted inspections will focus more sharply on teaching standards; and trainee teachers will spend more time in the classroom and less in teacher training colleges in which tired, Left-wing theories of education hold sway.
This last proposal is extremely significant. Mr Gove’s plans to improve education extend far beyond his championing of Free Schools. He aims to increase parental choice, restore discipline and ensure that lessons are devoted to academic subjects rather than politically correct children’s entertainment. But introducing these reforms will be a huge challenge. They will not take root without the co-operation of this generation of teachers and the next.
News Corp buys education software company
Rupert Murdoch is making his first significant foray into school rooms with the $360m acquisition of Wireless Generation, a US education technology company, just days after the chief of New York’s schools announced he would join News Corp to scout for education deals.
News Corp, whose interests range from its 20th Century Fox film studio to a planned iPad-only newspaper, will buy 90 per cent of the privately-held New York-based company in cash from its founders, who will retain the remaining 10 per cent.
Poorest would have to travel furthest in Madison schools’ 4K plan
“It would be completely crazy to roll out this 4K plan that is supposed to really, fundamentally be about preparing children, especially underprivileged, and not have the centers in the neighborhoods that most need the service,” School Board member Lucy Mathiak said.
Deputy superintendent Sue Abplanalp, who is coordinating implementation of the program, acknowledged some students will have to travel outside their school attendance areas to attend the nearest 4K program, “but it’s not a long drive, especially if they’re in contiguous areas.”
“We will make it work,” Abplanalp said. “We’re very creative.”
The school district is conducting its own analysis of how the distribution of day care providers and existing elementary school space will mesh under the new program. Some alternative programs may have to move to other schools to make room, but no final decisions have been made, Abplanalp said.
Detailed information has not been shared with the Madison School Board and is not expected to be ready before the board votes Monday on granting final funding approval for the program. The approval must happen then because the district plans to share information with the public in December before enrollment starts in February, Abplanalp said.
Much more on Madison’s proposed 4K program, here. The District has a number of irons in the fire, as it were, including high school curricular changes, challenging reading results and 4K, among many others. Can 4K lift off effectively (both in terms of academics and costs)?
Teachers’ degree bonuses under fire
Every year, American schools pay more than $8.6 billion in bonuses to teachers with master’s degrees, even though the idea that a higher degree makes a teacher more effective has been mostly debunked.
Despite more than a decade of research showing the money has little impact on student achievement, state lawmakers and other officials have been reluctant to tackle this popular way for teachers to earn more money.
That could soon change, as local school districts around the country grapple with shrinking budgets.
Just last week, U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan said the economy has given the nation an opportunity to make dramatic improvements in the productivity of its education system and to do more of what works and less of what doesn’t.
Duncan told the American Enterprise Institute on Wednesday that master’s degree bonuses are an example of spending money on something that doesn’t work.
On Friday, billionaire Bill Gates took aim at school budgets and the master’s degree bonus.
Strife strains Atlanta school board
Kristina Torres and Heather Vogell
Atlanta schools Superintendent Beverly Hall’s announcement that she will step aside when her contract ends June 30 comes at a time when the district is facing uncertainty on multiple fronts.
Feuding among city school board members, in which one faction of the board has sued the other over leadership changes, has caused the system’s accrediting agency to say the board’s capacity to govern is “in serious jeopardy.”
The two sides have a court date Tuesday.
The system also faces two inquiries — one by federal prosecutors, the other by special investigators appointed by Gov. Sonny Perdue — into test cheating allegations that could bring criminal charges against school officials.
As the result of a related investigation, local officials reported more than 100 city educators to the state teacher certification body, although their cases are on hold until state investigators wrap up their work. That is expected to happen early next year.
West Bend Charter school proposal at crossroads
A publicly funded school proposed by a Baptist pastor has gained support among School Board members despite objections by the district’s administrators over the school’s use of “a standard parochial curriculum with evangelical leanings.”
The School Board is scheduled to vote Monday on whether to enter into contract negotiations with First Baptist Church Pastor Bruce Dunford over his plans to open Crossroads Academy as a charter school next school year.
The school would teach a traditional curriculum that includes more classical readings and would have a more structured discipline system than other public schools, Dunford said. The school also would support the values of a majority of the West Bend community, he said, in response to concerns that he’s heard about bullying and a lack of modesty and morality in the public schools.
He said the school would be operated separately and not on the grounds of his church, where West Bend School Board member Tim Stepanski is a deacon. Unlike most charter schools in which staff is employed by the chartering district, Crossroads would be a so-called non-instrumentality charter school – one that employs its own staff and has more independence from the School Board on its curriculum and how it runs its day-to-day operations.
“I just simply believe the taxpayers, the parents of the community, should have options available to them,” Dunford said. “There should be a quality education that conforms to the value standards, convictions, whatever you want to call it, of a large part of our community.”
African-centered education has a strong backer
Milwaukee educator Taki Raton sees the problem with failing black students in very stark terms.
For him, the issues are black and white with very little gray.
“Black people are the only ones who can teach black children, it’s as simple as that,” he told me, in no uncertain tones.
Raton, currently a writer and lecturer who runs an educational consulting firm, also founded Blyden Delany Academy, a well-respected private school, which operated under Milwaukee’s choice program for 10 years. Raton closed the school a few years ago because of financial concerns, but while Blyden Delany was open, it was consistently praised by black parents in Milwaukee with children enrolled in the institution.
Raton doesn’t think that was anything out of the ordinary. Blyden Delany was African-centered – some call it Afrocentric – in its approach to teaching black students. Raton and a legion of similarly minded black educators in Milwaukee and across the nation believe that distinction makes all the difference.
“We know what we’re doing,” he said, referring to African-centered schools in general. “We don’t have the kind of problems other schools have because we’re following a classical model for African-centered education.”
UW-Madison School of Education Lecture Series: Diane Ravitch, Daniel Nerad, Howard Fuller, Gregory Thornton, Michael Thompson, Adam Gamoran
t has been said that universal education for every citizen is a cornerstone of American democracy. The importance we attach to schooling and the attention we pay to educational issues are in evidence daily–from what we tell our children when they bring home their report cards to how we vote on school funding matters. Not a day goes by without accounts of perceived successes at “model schools,” of remarkable teachers who made a difference, and of new public policy initiatives designed to deliver better results. But not a day goes by without reports about failures in education–poor test scores, questions surrounding teacher performance, and inadequate funding.
In “Education Is Fundamental,” a special three-part Academy Evenings series brought to you in conjunction with the UW-Madison School of Education, leading historians, researchers, and administrators in the field of education come together to discuss the most important educational challenges facing Wisconsin–a picture of dysfunction but also innovation–and offer their ideas for repair.
Related: Adam Gamoran interview.
School districts evaluate merits of merit pay
They call it the War Room.
It looks like any other classroom inside Carrick High School, a sprawling structure that towers like a stone fortress over this working-class neighborhood on the city’s south side. It’s still dark out as 16 teachers and counselors – some clutching coffee or energy bars – sit in a circle, dissecting with brutal candor their students’ performance.
In addition to their classroom duties, these teachers serve as advisers to every ninth- and 10th-grader in the school, and they show up 45 minutes before school starts each day to talk about where their students need to be. No punches are pulled; no feelings are spared.
As part of the Promise Readiness Corps, these teachers are eligible for financial bonuses.
In Pittsburgh, the Corps is one element of a new plan that overhauls the way the district hires, trains, evaluates, pays and dismisses teachers. Under a new performance-pay system, incoming district teachers whose students learn, on average, at 1.3 times their grade level can earn $100,000 a year within seven years of being hired.
Raising the quality of teaching in America has been a priority of President Barack Obama’s administration, and reforms receiving the most attention right now include stronger teacher evaluation systems and financial incentives to attract, reward and retain quality educators.
Rhode Island’s 3-tiered high school diploma system described
Jennifer Jordan, via a kind reader’s email:
State education officials appear ready to move forward with their plan to establish a three-tier high school diploma system tied to student performance on state tests, and will start drafting changes to the regulations.
At a well-attended work session Thursday, the Board of Regents for Elementary and Secondary Education discussed the details of the plan, which differs significantly from the regulations the Regents approved in 2008.
Regent Colleen Callahan expressed concerns with the proposal, saying it places too much weight on the standardized tests, which were not designed to be high-stakes or to determine what kind of diploma a student receives.
“I’m worried about tests being the determining factor, as opposed to other parts of the system,” Callahan said, a reference to grades and student portfolios or projects.
What Ready to Learn Really Means
The phrase “ready to learn,” frequently applied to young children, is rather odd when you stop to think about it, because the implication is that some kids aren’t. Have you ever met a child who wasn’t ready to learn — or, for that matter, already learning like crazy? The term must mean something much more specific — namely, that some children aren’t yet able (or willing) to learn certain things or learn them in a certain way.
Specifically, it seems to be code for “prepared for traditional instruction.” And yes, we’d have to concede that some kids are not ready to memorize their letters, numbers, and colors, or to practice academic skills on command. In fact, some children continue to resist for years since they’d rather be doing other kinds of learning. Can you blame them?
Then there’s the question of when we expect children to be ready. Even if we narrow the notion of readiness to the acquisition of “phonemic awareness” as a prerequisite to reading in kindergarten or first grade, the concept is still iffy, but for different reasons.
Atlanta Newspaper files complaint with state over school cheating scandal
The AJC asked Attorney General Thurbert Baker to determine whether the district’s denial in July of a request for the report was a criminal violation of the Georgia Open Records Act.
The newspaper’s complaint calls the district’s refusal to produce the report a “willful and premeditated violation.”
“The purpose of the Open Records Act is to prevent government officials from burying information in this way,” said Tom Clyde, an AJC attorney.
District spokesman Keith Bromery said Friday that officials were reviewing the complaint and would not comment.
The complaint comes amid federal and state probes into the falsification of hundreds of Atlanta students’ scores, with dozens of GBI agents questioning teachers and administrators at schools across the district.
A Dilemma For Schools Seeking To Reform
On the eve of a Board of Education meeting in February where the death knell was to sound for five schools, Ron Huberman, the chief executive of Chicago Public Schools, granted an 11th-hour reprieve.
The low enrollment and poor academic record at Paderewski Elementary had made the South Side school a target for closing, and its students were being sent to Mason Elementary, the only nearby school that had higher test scores. Mr. Huberman said he changed his mind after walking from Paderewski to Mason and discovering that students would have to cross a wide intersection of four streets, a situation he concluded was too dangerous.
Although the pardon for Paderewski might have been a relief for some teachers, parents and students, it did not address the problems at a low-performing, underutilized school. Other poorly performing schools are also being spared as resistance to closing them has grown, confronting the next mayor with a longstanding question: What can be done with neighborhood schools where enrollment is shrinking and academic improvement is slow?
A School Board Thinks Differently About Delivering Education, and spends less
The school board in a wealthy suburban county south of Denver is considering letting parents use public funds to send their children to private schools–or take classes with private teachers–in a bid to rethink public education.
The proposals on the table in Douglas County constitute a bold step toward outsourcing a segment of public education, and also raise questions about whether the district can afford to lose any public funds to private educators.
Already hit hard by state cutbacks, the local board has cut $90 million from the budget over three years, leaving some principals pleading for family donations to buy math workbooks and copy paper.
“This is novel and interesting–and bound to be controversial,” said Chester E. Finn Jr., president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a conservative, educational think tank in Washington, D.C.
…
Douglas County School District board members are also considering letting students enrolled in public schools opt out of some classes in favor of district-approved alternatives offered at for-profit schools or by private-sector instructors. Students might skip high-school Spanish, for example, to take an advanced seminar in Chinese, or bypass physics to study with a rocket scientist, in person or online.
Another proposal under review calls for expanding publicly-funded services for families that home-school their children.
Superintendent Elizabeth Celania-Fagen said she is not sure which proposals she might support. But in a recent letter to parents of the district’s 56,000 students, she said her leadership team “did not find the ideas alarming” and pledged the district would “set the stage for new thinking in education.”
“These days, you can build a custom computer. You can get a custom latte at Starbucks,” said board member Meghann Silverthorn. “Parents expect the same out of their educational system.”
Related: The ongoing struggle for credit for non Madison School District courses.
Colorado’s Douglas County School District spends $8512.74 per student ($476,977,336 for 56,031 students in 2009). Madison spent $15,241 per student in 2009, a whopping $6,728.26, 79% more than the “wealthy Denver suburbs”.
Bay State 12th-graders top nation in NAEP test results
High school seniors in Massachusetts are ranked highest in the nation in reading and math ability, according to new test results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress.
The first state-specific results for Grade 12 in 2009 showed that Massachusetts students had the highest scaled score in both the reading and math exams. The Bay State was one of 11 states to participate in the pilot program for states to receive state-specific Grade 12 results.
In a ceremony at Medford High School, Governor Deval Patrick, surrounded by state education officials and hundreds of students, heralded the results as proof of the state’s position as a leader in public education.
The Shadow Education System
Entrepreneurs are working very hard to build education systems outside of the formal higher ed and public ed systems. One day, they will merge with the increasingly archaic structures of public ed, but for now, they will remain outside.
Is it possible that companies like this will form partnerships with Knewton.com or Facebook? University of Phoenix made $3.7 billion in 2009 [the source I used this morning was off by just a bit, this page says that the University of Phoenix made $3.9 billion in revenue, and a net income of US$598 million. The entire Apollo Group’s revenue was $5 billion. Hat tip to Tom Vander Ark for the specifics and the links.], and that was during a recession. Facebook’s revenue was only, ONLY, $800 million. Can you imagine what happens when Facebook puts a learning curriculum into its platform? Could they make more money than University of Phoenix? Could they offer a more adaptive and successful learning system than Duke University? If you think that knowledge and skills needed usually need to be utilized in the shorter term, then maybe. Maybe. If we truly live in a knowledge economy, then it will be our social value online that measures our ability to rise first to a challenge, be the first to be relied upon to fix the problem, and it will have less to do with our degree, than with how we treated someone in our day to day life.
That’s why relationships are so important. That’s why online and working out in the open is so important. You can exchange knowledge with strangers, send them contact lists, and if you don’t use other people’s knowledge for selfish benefit, and include people in your circle, then you will increase your social value among others.
Future Teachers Most Likely to Cheat in College?
This is of course the weakest of anecdotal evidence and no one should take it as gospel (particularly the seminary students who apparently also contract out papers to the same ghost writer). But let’s say, for the sake of argument, that it’s true–that ed school students are the most common consumers of fraudulent papers. How could we explain that?
There’s no reason to believe that future teachers are any more ethically deficient than their peers in other fields, so that’s an unlikely explanation. Could it be that ed school students are less well prepared for college? Certainly it’s an uncomfortable truth that the SAT scores of those applying to ed school (both undergraduate and graduate) consistently rank below those of applicants to most other college programs. But it is also widely acknowledged that the academic standards of ed schools are commensurately below those of other college disciplines, so future teachers shouldn’t have any more difficulty completing their assignments than students in other fields.
‘Defend the Humanities’–a Dishonest Slogan
College foreign language and literature programs have been in decline for some time, first shrinking, then being consolidated with other departments, and now in a growing number of cases actually closed down. But the recent decision to eliminate French, Italian, Russian and Classics at SUNY Albany appears to have struck a nerve, and caused an outcry: “Defend the Humanities!”
It’s a cry that has been heard many times in the past. As the segment of the university that has no direct link to a career-providing profession, the humanities have regularly been called upon to justify their usefulness, but the justification is easy to make, and it is an honorable one that instantly commands respect.
The case generally goes like this: exposure to the best of our civilization’s achievements and thought gives us the trained minds of broadly educated people. We learn about ourselves by studying our history, and understanding how it has shaped us and the institutions we live by. As European civilization developed it produced a range of extraordinary thinkers who grappled memorably with questions that will always be with us, leaving a rich and varied legacy of outstanding thought on philosophical, ethical, religious, social and political matters. Its creative writers left a record of inspired reflection on human life and its challenges. Studying the humanities make us better prepared for civic life and for living itself, and better citizens.
Math and reading test scores: Massachusetts excels, West Virginia lags
For the first time, the “Nation’s Report Card” includes rich state-level data on the math and reading skills of America’s 12th-graders.
Eleven states volunteered to have their results itemized in the 2009 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), allowing for comparisons across state lines and over time. Beyond the overall test scores, the state results also look at everything from achievement gaps between racial groups to the amount of reading the students do on a daily basis.
The data come at a time when the majority of states are trying to move toward a common set of reading and math standards, aimed at better ensuring that students graduate from high school with the skills they need for higher education or job training.
Seattle School Board considers request to pull ‘Brave New World’ from curriculum
A request by a Seattle parent to have the 1931 novel “Brave New World” removed from Seattle Public Schools’ literature curricula will be considered — and possibly decided — at a Seattle School Board meeting Wednesday evening.
Parent Sarah Sense-Wilson has persuaded Nathan Hale High School administrators to drop the distopian Aldous Huxley novel from its Language Arts class, which her daughter took last year. But she has not been as successful in her attempts to have the book removed from literature curricula districtwide.
Having been denied by Superintendent Maria Goodloe-Johnson, Sense-Wilson will make her case this evening to the board, the final appeal under district rules.
Sense-Wilson, a Native American, said she and her daughter found the book offensive for its numerous uses of the word “savages.”
UW-Madison Education school hosts ceremony to celebrate building renovations
Everyday masses of students march up and down Bascom Hill at the University of Wisconsin and on their way, pass a piece of history.
Many students headed to class or exams Monday however, passed festivities taking place inside the more than 100-year-old Education Building.
To kick-off American Education Week, UW’s School of Education planned a two-day event to showcase the renovation of the building, Dean Julie Underwood said.
In particular, the re-dedication of the building Monday morning brought together students, faculty, staff and alumni not only to celebrate the building, but those who made it possible.
UW alumni John and Tashia Morgridge donated $34 million to renovate the building, and those in attendance treated them to many standing ovations as well as thanks.
This Raging Fire
When I was a kid my Uncle Robert, for whom I was named, used to say that blacks needed to “fight on all fronts, at home and abroad.”
By that he meant that while it was critically important to fight against racial injustice and oppression, it was just as important to support, nurture and fight on behalf of one’s family and community.
Uncle Robert (my father always called him Jim — don’t ask) died many years ago, but he came to mind as I was going over the dismal information in a new report about the tragic conditions confronting a large portion of America’s black population, especially black males.
We know by now, of course, that the situation is grave. We know that more than a third of black children live in poverty; that more than 70 percent are born to unwed mothers; that by the time they reach their mid-30s, a majority of black men without a high school diploma has spent time in prison. We know all this, but no one seems to know how to turn things around. No one has been able to stop this steady plunge of young black Americans into a socioeconomic abyss.
New Teacher Education Program Headed to Eight States
ALBANY, N.Y. — Eight states are beginning a national pilot program to transform teacher education and preparation to emphasize far more infield, intensive training as is common practice in medical schools.
“Teaching, like medicine, is a profession of practice,” said State University of New York Chancellor Nancy Zimpher, who is co-chairwomam of the expert panel that released a report on the recommended changes Tuesday in Washington. “Making clinical preparation the centerpiece of teacher education will transform the way we prepare teachers.”
The pilot program developed by school and higher education officials with teachers unions to improve instruction is being done in California, Colorado, Louisiana, Maryland, Ohio, Oregon and Tennessee as well as New York. The states agreed to implement the recommendations of the Blue Ribbon Panel on Clinical Preparation and Partnerships for Improved Student Learning created by the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education.
Duncan: Education System Must Reward Excellence
Education Secretary Arne Duncan asked business executives to pressure policymakers at every level of government to improve an education system that is falling behind the rest of the world.
The U.S., in a single generation, fell from first in the world in college graduates to ninth, Duncan told The Wall Street Journal’s CEO Council. Too many students are dropping out of high school, he said. And in math and science education, at least 20 countries beat the U.S.
“We’re simply not producing the citizens, the workers, that you guys need,” Duncan said. “We have not had enough passion, enough push from the business community, and your collective voice is extraordinarily powerful.”
Higher Standards + More Practice for Teacher Training
A panel of education experts has called for an overhaul of U.S. teacher-preparation programs, including a greater emphasis on classroom training as well as tougher admission and graduation standards for those hoping to teach in elementary and secondary classrooms.
The panel’s sweeping recommendations, released Tuesday, urge teacher-training programs to operate more like medical schools, which rely heavily on clinical experience.
Teacher candidates should spend more time in classrooms learning to teach–and proving that they can boost student achievement–before they earn a license to teach kindergarten through twelfth grade, the panel said.
“We need large, bold, systemic changes,” said James Cibulka, president of the National Council for the Accreditation of Teacher Education, the group that convened the expert panel. “As a nation, we are expecting all of our students to perform at high levels, so it follows that we need to expect more of our teachers as they enter the classroom.”
PEREMPTORY CHALLENGES
There are many suggestions that the best teachers have an obligation to teach in the worst schools. Perhaps they would be more likely to do so if they were granted a few privileges, such as the peremptory challenge available to lawyers in court trials….
PEREMPTORY CHALLENGES
Will Fitzhugh, The Concord Review
15 November 2010
The conductor pauses, waiting for the coughing to die down before he raises his baton. The surgeon looks over her team, making sure all are in place and ready to work, before she makes the first incision. The prosecuting attorney pauses to study the jury for a little while before making his opening statement.
All these highly trained people need certain conditions to be met before they can begin their vital work with the necessary confidence that it can be carried out well. If the audience is too noisy, the conductor must wait. If the team is not in their places, the surgeon will not begin. If the members of the jury have not been examined, the attorney will not have to present his case before them.
Only schoolteachers must start their classes in the absence of the calm and attention which are essential to the careful exchange of information and ideas. Only the schoolteacher must attempt the delicate surgery of attaching knowledge and removing ignorance, with no team to help. Only schoolteachers must accept all who are assigned to the class, without the benefit of the peremptory challenges the attorney may use to shape his audience, and give his case the benefit of the doubt.
The Sanskrit word for a teaching, sutra, is the source of the English word, suture, and indeed the stitching of learning to the understanding in young minds is a particularly delicate form of surgery. The teacher does not deal with meat, but with ideas and knowledge, attempting to remove misconceptions and provide truth. The teacher has to do this, not with one anaesthetized patient, and a team of five, but with twenty-five or thirty students and no help.
Those who attend concerts want to be quiet, so that they and their fellows can hear and appreciate the music. Those who come in for surgery want the doctor to have all the help she needs and to have her work under the very best possible conditions, because the outcome of the operation is vital to their interests. The legal system tries to weed out jurors with evident biases, and works in many ways to protect the process which allows both the prosecution and the defense to do their best within the law. The jury members have been made aware of the importance of their mission, and of their duty to attend and to decide with care.
Students, on the other hand, are constantly exposed to a fabulously rich popular culture which assures them that teachers are losers and so is anyone who takes the work of learning in school seriously. Too many single parents feel they have lost the power to influence their offspring, especially as they become adolescents, and many are in any case more concerned that their youngsters be happy and make friends, than that they respect and listen to their teachers, bring home a lot of homework, and do it in preparation for the serious academic work that awaits them the next day.
Students are led to believe that to reject authority and to neglect academic work are evidence of their independence, their rebellion against the dead hand of the older generation. We must of course make an exception here for those fortunate children, many but not all Asian, who reject this foolish idea, and instead apply themselves diligently to their studies, grateful for the effort of their teachers and for the magical opportunity of 12 years of free education.
But what they see as a privilege worthy of their very best efforts, many other students see as a burden, an wanted intrusion on their social and digital time of entertainment. A study of the Kaiser Foundation last year found that the average U.S. student spends more than six hours each day with some form, or combination of forms, of electronic entertainment, and the Indiana Study of High School Student Engagement studied 80,000 teenagers and found that 55% spent three hours or less each week on their homework and still managed to get As and Bs.
We hear stories about the seriousness of students in China and India, but we are inclined to ignore them, perhaps as the Romans discounted rumors about the Goths and the Visigoths until it was too late. We hear about our students doing more poorly in international academic competitions the longer they stay in school, but we prefer to think that our American character and our creativity will carry us through somehow, even as we can see with our own eyes how many of the things we use every day are “Made in China.”
Part of the responsibility lies with our teachers in the schools, overburdened and unappreciated as they are. Their unions fight for better pay and working conditions, but say nothing about their academic work. Teachers, too, like lawyers, should demand peremptory challenges, so that they can say they will not be able to teach this one and that one, without damaging the work of the whole class. They, as much as the surgeons who are cutting meat, must be able to enforce close attention to the serious work of suturing learning in their classes. And like the conductor, they must be given the attention that is essential if the music of their teaching is to be heard and appreciated. Teachers who do not demand these conditions are simply saying that their academic work is not important enough to deserve such protections and conditions, and as a result, parents and students are encouraged to see it in the same light.
“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
Charters vs. Non-Charters in Newark
Bruce Baker. Associate Professor in the Graduate School of Education at Rutgers and blogger at SchoolFinance101, looks at performance in 4th and 8th grade math of charter schools versus traditional public schools in NJ. In “Searching for Superguy in Jersey” he’s created a statistical model for schools within urban centers and weighted achievement for free and reduced lunch rates, homelessness, rates, and student racial composition. His conclusion is fair and reasonable:
As you can see, there are plenty of charters and traditional public schools above the line, and below the line. The point here is by no means to bash charters. Rather, this is about being realistic about charters and more importantly realistic about the difficulty of truly overcoming the odds. It’s not easy and any respectable charter school leader or teacher and any respectable traditional public school leader or teacher will likely confirm that. It’s not about superguy. It’s about hard work and sustained support; be it for charters or for traditional public schools.
Dr. Baker’s scattergrams place both charters and non-charters at the high end of performance (“Beating the Odds”) and low end (“Underperforming”). He also features Newark-specific scattergrams.
Harvard Study Measures Wisconsin Student Performance in a Global Context
What do to 8th grade students in Wisconsin have in common with 8th grade students in Russia and Lithuania? They’re just as likely to post advanced scores in math testing as their Eurasian counterparts.
A new study released by Harvard University measured how America’s students stack up across the world in advanced knowledge of math and other school subjects. Not surprisingly, the results didn’t weren’t exactly encouraging for us Yankees. The United States ranked 31st out of 57 participating countries when it came to the percentage of students testing at an advanced level or better in 8th grade math. In all, 16 of those countries had at least twice as many advanced students than America, according to recent test data.
The report, authored by education policy stalwarts Eric Hanushek, Paul Peterson, and Ludger Woessman, dug even deeper to America’s lag. The trio produced specific results for readers to compare individual states against the rest of the world. Wisconsin, despite ranking 11th in the country, fails to match up favorably against other developed countries.
More students leaving failing schools
More parents in Southwest Washington are taking advantage of a federal law that allows them to transfer their kids out of failing schools.
The federal No Child Left Behind Act allows parents to bus their children from a “failing” school to another school at district expense.
More than 160 elementary students in the Longview and Kelso school districts are using the school choice provision of the law this year, The Daily News reported.
That’s still a small percentage of the 5,510 students eligible to transfer in both school districts. But it’s up sharply from the 24 Longview students who switched out of failing schools last year.
Shakedown: The Current Conspiracy against the American Public School Parent, Student, and Teacher.
he above shakedown is similar to but not the same as
Shakedown: The Continuing Conspiracy Against the American Taxpayer (Hardcover)
by Steven Malanga.
In his book Mr. Malanga speaks of how the Government has financed an entire “Cottage Industry of Activists” for causes that advocate for what he sees as the Shakedown of the American taxpayer. I see that he makes a strong case and do not disagree with him.
I think a similar case can be built around
Shakedown: The Current Conspiracy against the American Public School Parent, Student, and Teacher.
This shakedown is financed by foundations and other forces (often business related) that finance the faux grassroots organizations that pose as pushing for Better Public Schools, while neglecting the significant data that shows what they advocate for is very ill advised.
The Obama/Duncan “Race to the Top” is a perfect example of this Shakedown. It is founded on attempting to define problems and then mandate particular actions as the solutions to these problems. The real problem with “RttT” is that while the problems defined may in fact be real, unfortunately the changes advocated are NOT solutions.
No more waiting for (Wisconsin) school reform
Wisconsin Gov.-elect Scott Walker hasn’t seen the film “Waiting for Superman” yet, about America’s struggling public school system. The demands of campaigning and now preparing to take office don’t allow much time for movies.
But Walker did have “a good chat” with U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan last week. “In many ways,” Walker told the State Journal, “our ideas on reform follow a similar path.”
That’s encouraging because Walker has a huge opportunity to reshape our state’s schools. The incoming GOP governor needs to think big and act boldly, just as the Democratic president’s impressive education secretary has.
Duncan last month called the release of “Waiting for Superman,” by director Davis Guggenheim, “a Rosa Parks moment.” Duncan hopes the vital film — now playing at Sundance Cinemas in Madison — will spark discussion and action aimed at the incredibly serious challenges facing public education.
Talking Numbers Counts For Kids’ Math Skills
In almost every home and pre-school in America, young children are being taught how to recite the alphabet and how to say their numbers.
A new study by University of Chicago psychology professor Susan Levine finds that simply repeating the numbers isn’t as good as helping kids understand what they mean.
According to her study, for children to develop the math skills they’ll need later on in school, it is essential that parents spend time teaching their children the value of numbers by using concrete examples — instead of just repeating them out loud.
“Just about all 2-year-olds can rattle off the sequence from one to 10,” Levine tells Weekend All Things Considered host Guy Raz. “But then, if you ask them to give you three objects … they’ll just grab a handful.”
Grading teachers is no easy assignment
Norma Mortimer moves about her high school classroom with confidence born of 41 years’ experience.
Directions to students are clear; she knows when to push for an answer and when to let a question hang.
The English teacher formerly taught music, composed and arranged marching band music, and performed at the Bristol Renaissance Faire.
“It all adds into what I bring to the classroom,” she said.
Once every three years as a tenured teacher, performance evaluations provide her with feedback, something she looks forward to even though she knows she’s not slipping.
Still, evaluations never flag what she considers her weakest area – teaching effectively when the class is in small groups. Last year, she never received her post-evaluation conference with the principal.
In the growing national debate on how to raise the quality of public school teaching in America, performance evaluations have become both a lightning rod and a sticking point.
Most evaluation systems in public schools provide little information to properly assess teachers’ strengths and weaknesses. And because teachers are rarely dismissed over their performance, formal evaluations seldom carry much weight.
The Radical School Reform You’ve Never Heard Of With ‘parent trigger,’ families can forcibly change failing schools.
Debates about education these days tend to center on familiar terms like charter schools and merit pay. Now a new fault line is emerging: “parent trigger.”
Like many radical ideas, parent trigger originated in California, as an innovation of a liberal activist group called Parent Revolution. The average student in Los Angeles has only a 50% chance of graduating high school and a 10% chance of attending college. It’s a crisis, says Parent Revolution leader Ben Austin, that calls for “an unabashed and unapologetic transfer of raw power from the defenders of the status quo”–education officials and teachers unions–“to the parents.”
Parent trigger, which became California law in January, is meant to facilitate that transfer of power through community organizing. Under the law, if 51% of parents in a failing school sign a petition, they can trigger a forcible transformation of the school–either by inviting a charter operator to take it over, by forcing certain administrative changes, or by shutting it down outright.
Schools are eligible for triggering if they have failed to make “adequate yearly progress,” according to state standards, for four consecutive years. Today 1,300 of California’s 10,000 schools qualify.
One-time funds to train 153 Oshkosh teachers to help students with math
New spending approved by the Oshkosh school board would cover a gap in math tutoring services that has left four schools with inadequate help for struggling students since last year.
About 13 percent of Oshkosh elementary school students perform below grade level in math, said Director of Curriculum Shelly Muza.
That’s better than the average Wisconsin district, which has about 25 percent of elementary students performing below grade level. But budget cuts in the 2009-10 academic year stripped Oakwood, Carl Traeger, Lakeside and Green Meadow schools of math support services after the board decided to fund the $295,000 program with federal Title I dollars – money given only to schools with higher rates of poverty – instead of general fund dollars.
The remaining math intervention teachers who work one-on-one with struggling students can barely keep up. The equivalent of 4.25 full-time teachers are split between about 570 students in 12 elementary schools, said Muza.
Two relate links: Math Forum Audio, Video & Links; Math Task Force.
Madison schools have the chance to be bold in helping Spanish-speaking students
For most people, including me and probably much of the education establishment, this child’s future would not appear particularly bright.
But for those willing to peek through the other end of the looking glass, he’s ripe for a talented and gifted program that values advanced, often in-born academic gifts, but might do a better job respecting the advanced, real-world skills of its poorer, less-stereotypically successful students.
Elias is bilingual, after all, which by itself would go a long way toward qualifying him for jobs the rest of us English-only Americans could never hope to get in our rapidly diversifying society: urban newspaper reporter, Spanish-language television executive, United Nations translator.
Feds Seek Education Transformation Through Technology
The Department of Education this week laid out a technology strategy to improve the U.S. educational system.
U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan released the National Education Technology Plan (NETP), which sets goals to achieve by 2015 for how technology can transform the way students learn.
Specifically, the plan — titled “Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology” — outlines a blueprint for changing five aspects of education with technology: learning, assessment, teaching, infrastructure and productivity.
Brains Like To Keep It Real
Text and images may be king on the Internet, but people in a position to buy seem to prefer the real thing
In this age of fierce competition between Internet marketing and traditional retail, merchants want to know: Which approach stirs potential customers most?
Experiments by neuroeconomist Antonio Rangel and his colleagues suggest that the old pop song chorus–“Ain’t nothing like the real thing, baby”–might have it right.
The findings could be relevant to more than shopping, however. They may give insight into the ways our brains assign value in the computational activity that is human choice.
“Whether the stimuli are physically present or not really affects the values you assign and the choices you make,” says Rangel, a California Institute of Technology researcher who published the research results with his colleagues in the American Economic Review in September.
Real ways to improve ‘teacher effectiveness’
The Los Angeles Times decided in August to publish “teacher effectiveness” ratings using “value-added” test scores, an action that not only did a disservice to teachers but also to the children of California. The Times reduced the definition of quality teaching to a simplistic equation: Good teachers produce good test scores.
There is a simple, intuitive appeal to that formulation, but study after study demonstrates that scores on state tests, even using value-added measurement, are affected by too many factors to support simplistic conclusions about individual teachers.
That is not simply our opinion. Every major professional association of education researchers has said so. The National Academies and the Economics Policy Institute have said so as well.
The Original Inhabitants of Crazy Town: Eliminating the Department of Education
It’s with some amusement that I read the overheated debate about abolishing the U.S. Department of Education. For one thing, there is a vast difference between those who want to eliminate the federal role in education, and those who want to return ED to its former home in the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. But since neither of those things is going to happen, I guess it doesn’t matter if they are lumped together.
On the other hand, there are those who think getting rid of ED would “destroy public education as we know it,” and that those abolitionists are “strange bedfellows in Crazy Town.” This attitude only demonstrates the hopelessness of the task. If talk of eliminating or downgrading a Cabinet department is beyond the pale, maybe the Postmaster General should should be returned to his spot.
Less federalism in education would certainly be welcome, from my perspective.
Obama’s New Digital Learning Plan: A Killer App
Education Secretary Arne Duncan unveiled the final version of the National Education Technology Plan on Tuesday — proposals to use social networking, data collection and multi-media to get U.S. kids to learn more. According to Duncan, the plan — almost two years in the making — will help American education “transition to digital classrooms and transform learning” for the Facebook and IPhone generation and beyond.
As a middle school math teacher and a long-time union member, I had heard it all before. Dozens of “solutions du jour” have come and gone — with little if any measurable improvement. I figured that this was one more attempt that was destined to fail.
As I read Duncan’s speech about the plan, my skepticism evaporated. Not only could this plan prompt Democrats and Republicans in the incoming Congress to cross the aisle to focus on a crucial learning roadmap, but the plan — and each of its five very specific goals — makes sense!
Busting a language barrier Some schools succeed with ESL students where others fail
When it’s time to read at Whitman Elementary School, kids don’t get to pick their favorite SpongeBob or Scooby Doo book from the rack.
Reading time here at this quiet little school in outer Southeast Portland is serious business, and for good reason: there are benchmarks to meet, levels to advance.
With one out of three students learning English as a second language at Whitman, Principal Lori Clark makes it a priority to boost literacy not just for those students, but also for every child, through intensive two-hour blocks of reading time each day. The blocks are staggered, to make the most of the school’s two-and-a-half ESL teaching positions and one bilingual assistant.
The Six Major Components of the MMSD High School Plan
Madison School Board Member Ed Hughes
In an earlier post, I provided my understanding of the background of the protest at West High about the proposal for changes in the District’s high school curriculum. I explained how the proposal was an outgrowth of the work that has gone on at the high schools for the last few years under the auspices of a federal grant, known as the REaL grant (for Relationships, Engagement and Learning).
That proposal, which will affect all four of the District’s comprehensive high schools and is now known as the High School Career and College Readiness Plan, has since evolved somewhat, partially in response to the feedback that has been received and partially as a consequence of thinking the proposals through a bit more.
Here is where things currently stand.
The high school proposal should start a conversation that could last for a few years regarding a long-term, systematic review of our curriculum and the way it is delivered to serve the interests of all learners. What’s currently on the table is more limited in scope, though it is intended to serve as the foundation for later work.
The principal problem the proposal is meant to address is that we currently don’t have any district-defined academic standards at the high school level. There is no established set of expectations for what skills students should be learning in each subject area each year. Since we don’t have any basic expectations, we also don’t have any specific and consistent goals for accelerated learning. A corollary of this is that we really don’t have many ways to hold a teacher accountable for the level of learning that goes on in his or her classroom. Also, we lack a system of assessments that would let us know how our students are progressing through high school.
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
- Watch, listen or read an interview with UW-Madison Education Professor Adam Gamoran.
Q&A with Kaleem Caire: Why Madison needs a charter school aimed at African-American boys
CT: How will you bring boys who are already behind a couple of years or more up to grade level so they are fully prepared for college?
KC: One, we will have a longer school day, a longer school year. They will start about 7:30 and end about 5 o’clock. Tutoring will be built into our school program. It will be built into each schedule based on your academic performance. We’re going to use ability grouping to tackle kids who are severely behind, who need more education. We’ll do that if we can afford it by requiring Saturday school for young people who really need even additional enrichment and so we’re going to do whatever it takes so we make sure they get what they need.
CT: What kind of commitment will Madison Prep require of parents or guardians?
KC: They have to sign a participation contract. These are non-binding contracts but it will clearly spell out what their expectations are of us and our expectations are of them. Parents will be given a grade for participation on the child’s report card. There are ways for ALL parents to be involved. You know, some people have asked, ‘What will you do if parents won’t show up to a child’s performance review?’ Literally, we’ll go set up our tables outside their houses and it will be kind of embarrassing but we’ll do it because we won’t allow our kids to be left behind.
CT: You’ve said you’d like to see more flexibility and innovation. Does that mean you’d like to run this school without a union contract?
Watch an interview with Kaleem here. Much more on Kaleem via this link.
Encouraging Deep Learning
Many community college students do not engage in enough classroom activities that enhance their “broadly applicable thinking, reasoning and judgment skills,” according to the latest Community College Survey of Student Engagement released today.
This year’s release of the survey, now in its 10th year, draws from the responses of more than 400,000 community college students in 47 states, the Marshall Islands and the Canadian provinces of Nova Scotia and Ontario. In addition to the annual set of questions about their classroom and campus experiences, this year’s respondents were asked specific questions about “deep learning” techniques — defined as those “abilities that allow individuals to apply information, develop a coherent world view and interact in more meaningful ways.”
The authors of this year’s survey argue that the percentages of students who reported that they engaged “often or very often” in “deep learning” activities indicate that community colleges must do a better job of promoting them in the classroom if they hope to boost student performance.
BLOOMBERG, MURDOCH, AND EDUCATION
Joel Klein, the New York City schools chancellor, is not a popular man among those who have spent their careers working in the school system–but, to judge by the reaction in the edu-blogosphere, any joy engendered by the announcement of his resignation was quickly extinguished when the identity of his successor became known. She is Cathie Black, a career magazine-industry executive with no work experience in education; in appointing her, Mayor Michael Bloomberg is showing that he doesn’t trust educators, even those with reformist reputations, to run the school system. So the toxicity surrounding school reform isn’t likely to disappear.
How Mayor Bloomberg feels about the school system isn’t news anymore. What’s most interesting about yesterday’s announcement was not that Klein is leaving or that Black is replacing him, but that Klein is going to work for Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. to explore possibilities in education. Recently, two famous Wall Street short sellers, James Chanos and Steve Eisman, announced that they see a crash coming in the for-profit education sector, which is heavily dependent on online degrees paid for through federally guaranteed student loans. (For details, see the very viral PowerPoint and speech that Eisman delivered at an investment conference last May, called “Subprime Goes to College.”) The shorts, and the Obama Administration, which is tightening student-loan eligibility, have driven down the prices of education stocks–including that of the Washington Post Company, which depends economically on Kaplan Inc., one of the leading for-profit education companies (and until recently the employer of Joel Klein’s predecessor as New York schools chancellor, Harold Levy).
College Board to revive its AP test in Italian
The College Board announced on Wednesday the revival of the Advanced Placement test in Italian, setting the stage for a renaissance in the study of the language of Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci in U.S. high schools.
Italian teachers had feared nothing less than the demise of their discipline when the college-preparatory nonprofit organization eliminated AP Italian last year, saying the program was underfunded.
Wednesday’s announcement signaled the success of a two-year lobbying campaign by advocates of Italian language and culture in U.S. schools. The turning point came when the Cuomo family, cast in the role of cultural ambassadors, secured a financial commitment from the Italian government.
“These things don’t happen without that level of support. And we are very grateful to Prime Minister [Silvio] Berlusconi for that,” said Margaret Cuomo, daughter of former New York governor Mario Cuomo and sister of Gov.-elect Andrew Cuomo.
LA schools move toward evaluating teachers based on student performance
Los Angeles Unified officials took a big step forward Tuesday toward launching a new controversial method to evaluate teachers based on the performance of their students.
The school board approved two consultant contracts to study and develop the new teacher evaluation method, with a combined cost of up to $4.5 million.
One consultant will develop ways to evaluate teachers based on the test performance of their students over time, called the “value-added” method. The other will help develop new guidelines and “best practices” for teachers.
The value-added method compares student performance from one year to the next to evaluate a teacher’s abilities. It has been sharply criticized by some union leaders and experts as flawed and unfair, but applauded by others, including President Barack Obama.
A Girl, a School and Hope
Given today’s economic difficulties, I thought I’d come to Pakistan to find Osama bin Laden, lug him back home in my duffel bag and declare him at American customs to pick up the $27 million reward.
More on that mission in a moment. First, another conundrum here in Pakistan:
The United States has provided $18 billion to Pakistan in aid since 9/11, yet Pakistan’s government shelters the Afghan Taliban as it kills American soldiers and drains the American Treasury. Meanwhile, only 8 percent of Pakistanis have confidence in President Obama, according to the Pew Research Center. That’s not even half as many as express confidence in bin Laden.
Meanwhile, Pakistan seeks postflood aid from Western taxpayers, yet barely taxes its own affluent citizens at home. And its feudal landholders have historically opposed good schools, for fear that poor Pakistanis — if educated — would object to oppression.
Teaching Math to the Talented
Eric Hanushek, Paul E. Peterson and Ludger Woessmann
In Vancouver last winter, the United States proved its competitive spirit by winning more medals–gold, silver, and bronze–at the Winter Olympic Games than any other country, although the German member of our research team insists on pointing out that Canada and Germany both won more gold medals than the United States. But if there is some dispute about which Olympic medals to count, there is no question about American math performance: the United States does not deserve even a paper medal.
Maintaining our productivity as a nation depends importantly on developing a highly qualified cadre of scientists, engineers, entrepreneurs, and other professionals. To realize that objective requires a system of schooling that produces students with advanced math and science skills. To see how well schools in the United States do at producing high-achieving math students, we compared the percentage of U.S. students in the high-school graduating Class of 2009 with advanced skills in mathematics to percentages of similarly high achievers in other countries.
“We need entirely different schools to fit the needs of students, not the teachers and administrators,” – Kaleem Caire
David Blaska on the recent Community Conversation on Education:
Caire was one of four main presenters, the others being Madison schools superintendent Dan Nerad, the dean of the UW-Madison School of Education, and — sure enough — Madison Teachers Inc. union president Mike Lipp.
Nerad was o.k. He got off a good line: “Children are the future but we are our children’s future.” He even quoted Sitting Bull but on first reference made certain to use his actual Native American name. This IS Madison, after all.
UW Education Dean Julie Underwood was atrocious — a firm defender of the status quo denouncing the “slashing” of school budgets, “negative ads,” and demanding that the community become “public school advocates.” I.E., the whole liberal litany.
Say, Dean Julie, how about the community become advocates for teaching children — in other words, the goal — instead of a one-size-fits-all, government-ordained delivery mechanism? Isn’t competition the American way?
Union apologist Mike Lipp reminded me of Welcome Back Kotter — looks and mien. He could be humorous (I am certain he is a good teacher) but he spent his allotted time on the glories of that holy grail of education: the union’s collective bargaining agreement. I expected an ethereal light beam to shine down on this holy writ, which Lipp lamented that he did not bring with him. His other purpose was to defuse the powerhouse documentary, “Waiting for Superman.”
Indeed, it was that indictment of public education’s “failure factories” and the hidebound me-first teachers unions that prompted Tuesday evening’s “conversation.” I wrote about it, and Kaleem Caire, here.
When Lipp was finished he returned to his table next to union hired gun John Matthews. No sense in sitting with parents and taxpayers.
When it came time for the participants to respond, one parent said of the four presenters that only Kaleem Caire took to heart the evening’s admonition to “keep students as the focus.” I think that was a little unfair to Nerad, who deserves credit for opening this can of worms, but otherwise right on target.
Caire reported that only 7% of African-American students tested as college-ready on the ACT test. For Latinos, the percentage is 14. Those are 2010 statistics — for Madison schools. In these schools, 2,800 suspensions were handed down to black students — of a total black enrollment of 5,300 students!
Related links: The Madison School District = General Motors; Ripon Superintendent Richard Zimman:
“Beware of legacy practices (most of what we do every day is the maintenance of the status quo), @12:40 minutes into the talk – the very public institutions intended for student learning has become focused instead on adult employment. I say that as an employee. Adult practices and attitudes have become embedded in organizational culture governed by strict regulations and union contracts that dictate most of what occurs inside schools today. Any impetus to change direction or structure is met with swift and stiff resistance. It’s as if we are stuck in a time warp keeping a 19th century school model on life support in an attempt to meet 21st century demands.” Zimman went on to discuss the Wisconsin DPI’s vigorous enforcement of teacher licensing practices and provided some unfortunate math & science teacher examples (including the “impossibility” of meeting the demand for such teachers (about 14 minutes)). He further cited exploding teacher salary, benefit and retiree costs eating instructional dollars (“Similar to GM”; “worry” about the children given this situation).
An interview with Kaleem Caire.
How NOT to vote for school board & Who Does the Superintendent Report to
Last week, I voted for several people on the Montgomery County school board, one of the few times I ever thought about that body.
As an education writer, I try to stay away from school boards. I know that sounds odd, but over the years, I have found school board meetings to be as interesting, newsworthy and uplifting as visits to the dentist. I avoid them. I talk to teachers, principals, students and parents instead.
I feel guilty about that. School boards have a vital role in a democratic society. They are the link between us and our schools. If you have a complaint that the school system is not addressing, the school board is pretty much the only place to go. So why don’t I make more of an effort to get to know its members?
The recent election reminded me of one reason. The public sources of information about school board members, such as news articles, voters guides and school district Web sites, rarely tell me the most important things to know about those being elected.
The most important decision school board members make is whom to hire as superintendent. Whether they vote for or against the superintendent’s plans for improving schools is also crucial. Cities, including the District, have transferred that power over superintendents to mayors or city councils because their school boards were too distracted by political or personal feuds and failed to support even effective superintendents.
The Madison School District discussed Superintendent Nerad’s review during their 11/8/2010 meeting. Watch the quite interesting discussion here, starting at about 83 minutes..
Report: “Competency” Should Advance Students
Young people should be assessed and moved through K-12 education at their own pace, after evaluations have determined competencies, rather than the current policy of advancing learners based primarily on seat time, according to a new report published yesterday.
The report, When Failure is Not an Option: Designing Competency-Based Pathways for Next Generation Learners was released today by the International Association for K-12 Online Learning (iNACOL). Support for the report was provided by the Nellie Mae Education Foundation.
The paper explores competency-based pathways, a necessary condition to realizing the potential of next generation learning. The report promotes a deeper understanding of K-12 education policies and practices for implementing student-centered learning through competency-based pathways through a scan of exemplars across the United States. Also touched on in the paper are the many explorations into next generation learning that are sweeping across the country, as well as the technological advancements that are opening up new student-centered, performance-based, “anytime, anywhere” educational opportunities.
Segregating the smart from the not-as-smart helps nobody
I’ve never been accused of having any talent worth nurturing in an Advanced Placement class, although I’m sure there are some who would say I have a gift for irritating people. (Unfortunately, they don’t give out Rhodes Scholarships for that.)
So feel free to take what I’m about to say with a grain of salt, or a healthy dose of sour grapes on my part, but I question the utility of the way we challenge the young brainiacs among us.
Diving deeply into physics or fine arts might make for good rocket scientists and concert pianists, but it would also seem inevitably to exclude a certain less intense, yet broader range of experiences and the people they include.
My new Facebook friends and perhaps the most courteous political insurgents ever, Madison West seniors Joaquin Selva and Jacob Fiksel, admitted to something along those lines when I ran into them Wednesday at the school district’s Community Conversation on Education.
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
- Watch, listen or read an interview with UW-Madison Education Professor Adam Gamoran.
Response to WSJ Article: More Background, Additional Information, Long History of Advocacy
On Sunday, November 7, the Wisconsin State Journal featured a front-page article about the Madison School District’s Talented and Gifted education services: “TAG, they’re it.” The story describes parents’ frustration with the pace of reform since the Board of Education approved the new TAG Plan in August, 2009. It paints the TAG Plan as very ambitious and the parents as impatient-perhaps unreasonable-to expect such quick implementation.
The article includes a “Complaint Timeline” that starts with the approval of the TAG Plan, skips to the filing of the complaint on September 20, and proceeds from there to list the steps of the DPI audit.
Unfortunately, neither this timeline nor the WSJ article conveys the long history leading up to the parents’ complaint. This story did not start with the 2009 TAG Plan. Rather, the 2009 TAG Plan came after almost two decades of the District violating State law for gifted education.
To provide better background, we would like to add more information and several key dates to the “Complaint Timeline.”
November 2005: West High School administrators roll out their plan for English 10 at a PTSO meeting. Most of the 70 parents in attendance object to the school eliminating English electives and imposing a one-size-for-all curriculum on all students. Parents ask administrators to provide honors sections of English 10. They refuse. Parents ask administrators to evaluate and fix the problems with English 9 before implementing the same approach in 10th grade. They refuse. Parents appeal to the BOE to intervene; they remain silent. Meanwhile, parents have already been advocating for years to save the lone section of Accelerated Biology at West.
Brainstorming session to improve Madison public education yields lots of ideas
Hundreds of teachers, parents and students came together Tuesday night to discuss strategies — which the Madison School District hopes to eventually act on — to ensure quality education for all students.
Key ideas included hiring top teachers, encouraging parent involvement and meeting the needs of an increasingly diverse classroom.
“We are our children’s future,” said Superintendent Dan Nerad, adding strong children are essential for a strong community.
School officials who organized the event hoped the release of “Waiting for Superman,” a documentary that examines the state of U.S. public education, would help spark conversation about improving the way students learn in Madison. Attendees were seated in small groups to brainstorm the successes and challenges of public education as well as improvements that need to be made.
Should We Teach Kids to Play to Win?
Political scientist Barry Rubin has an interesting column criticizing the modern tendency to teach kids that playing to win is bad:
My son is playing on a local soccer team which has lost every one of its games, often by humiliating scores. The coach is a nice guy, but seems an archetype of contemporary thinking: he tells the kids not to care about whether they win, puts players at any positions they want, and doesn’t listen to their suggestions.
He never criticizes a player or suggests how a player could do better. My son, bless him, once remarked to me: “How are you going to play better if nobody tells you what you’re doing wrong?” The coach just tells them how well they are playing. Even after an 8-0 defeat, he told them they’d played a great game.
And of course, the league gives trophies to everyone, whether their team finishes in first or last place…..
[A]m I right in thinking that sports should prepare children for life, competition, the desire to win, and an understanding that not every individual has the same level of skills? A central element in that world is rewarding those who do better, which also offers an incentive for them and others to strive….
Teacher’s ed…
The most critical factor in a child’s education outside the home is the quality of the teacher at the front of his or her classroom. A great teacher can lift a struggling student. A mediocre teacher can set a child back months if not years.
So which Illinois education schools are producing great teachers? And which aren’t?
On Tuesday, the Washington-based National Council on Teacher Quality unveiled a no-punches-pulled report that evaluated 111 undergraduate and graduate programs in 53 education schools across Illinois.
The most disturbing finding: The state’s largest producers of teachers — Illinois State University and Northern Illinois University, — earned poor marks. Illinois State, the report said, merited “exceptionally low grades in its undergraduate elementary and special education programs.” Northern Illinois “did only slightly better, with weak grades in its undergraduate elementary and both its undergraduate and graduate special education program.”
Shocking School Achievement Gap for Black Males
The California Academy of Mathematics and Science in south Los Angeles is one of the top high schools in the country, and senior Danial Ceasar is one of its top students, reports CBS News correspondent Bill Whitaker. He’s got an A average, and he’s ambitious – he wants to be a psychiatrist.
“I’m looking at Berkeley and Stanford as my top schools,” Danial said.
But here’s a troubling sign of the times: achieving, black, male students like Danial are increasingly rare in America’s schools.
“The overall academic achievement of African American males was appallingly low, not only in cities, but nationwide,” said Michael Casserly, the executive director of the Council of the Great City Schools.
According to a new study released Tuesday by the Council of the Great City Schools, by fourth grade only 12 percent of black male students read at or above grade level, while 38 percent of white males do. By eighth grade it falls to just 9 percent for black males, 33 percent for whites. Black male students are almost twice as likely as white males to drop out of school. And in some big American cities the dropout rate is around 50 percent.
Palo Alto board to vote on earlier school year start
High school students in Palo Alto will take their winter break next month knowing they’ll have final exams waiting for them when they return, but a school board vote tonight may change that practice for future classes.
Palo Alto Unified School District trustees will decide whether to start the 2011-12 and 2012-13 school years three days earlier than years past, allowing teachers to schedule exams before winter break instead of in mid-January. Students would start classes on Aug. 18 next year and Aug. 16 the following year.
“I think that high school students have for years expressed an interest in having finals before winter break,” Superintendent Kevin Skelly said. “Many, if not most of the schools in our area, are having finals before winter break.”
The proposal has split parents into different camps. The district had received nearly 430 e-mails on the controversial idea as of Oct. 26, the last time it discussed changing the school calendar.
Seattle Schools’ Strategic Plan & School Report Card
t Seattle Public Schools, we truly believe in excellence for all. It’s more than a saying; it’s our commitment to this community and the name of our five-year strategic plan to ensure every child graduates ready for college, career and life.
Seattle Public Schools is providing detailed information on how each school, and the district overall, is performing. These reports also explain what we are doing to increase academic achievement and close the achievement gap in each school and across the district.
The second annual District Scorecard shows how our students are
performing across the district – from test scores to graduation rates. The Scorecard also shows how the district is performing operationally, in areas such as facilities, transportation and family satisfaction. District Scorecard
For the first time, we are issuing individual School Reports. We want to give parents, students and the community important information so we can all learn from and act on the data.
You can read about your school’s academic growth, student climate, accountability, family and staff engagement, and overall school performance. We hope you also take time to read the narrative page,
On Tuesday morning, Seattle Public Schools will unveil detailed new reports on 82 of its schools, and a new ranking system that rates each school on a scale of 1-5 based largely on test scores and whether those scores are moving up or down.
The reports, which will be posted on the school district’s website about 10 a.m., will give parents and the public more information than ever before on the city’s public schools.
In addition to test scores, each school’s report includes data about attendance rates, average class size, percent of high-school students taking college classes and much more. The schools also outline their goals for the year and how they plan to achieve them.
India, US to hold annual education summit
Begining 2011, India and the US will hold annual summits to enhance collaboration in higher education. The first such summit, it will be headed by HRD Minister Kapil Sibal and US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
The summit will see members of the academia, industry, government and other stakeholders from the two nations discuss a range issues related to education, sources said, adding the details are yet to be worked out.
“We have decided to hold a Higher Education Summit next year. Cooperation in the education sector holds a great promise because no two other countries are better equipped to be partners in building the knowledge economy of the future,” Prime Minister Manmohan Singh told his joint press conference with US President Barack Obama.
Early thoughts on Joel Klein, Cathie Black and education reform in New York Yor
New York City Schools Chancellor Joel Klein stepped down today after eight years on the job and will be replaced by Hearst chairwoman Cathie Black. In the coming days, we’ll see many assessments of Klein’s legacy; what’s clear is that he succeeded in projecting an image of order, organization and improvement in the nation’s largest public school system, which educates 1 million children and employs 80,000 teachers. Klein oversaw the establishment of about 100 new charter schools; broke up large comprehensive high schools into smaller, themed schools; and raised the on-time high school graduation rate to 60 percent from about 44 percent in the class of 2004.
What’s less clear is how well-prepared the typical New York City public school grad is for higher education or the workplace; much of the district’s proudly touted gains on state tests disappeared earlier this year when New York declared the tests too easy and recalibrated proficiency rates. On NAEP, the only national test of students’ skills, New York City fourth-graders have improved modestly, but eighth-graders are stagnant.a
N.J. activists, parents warn against promoting charter schools as fix for education system
From Washington to Trenton to Newark, political leaders from both parties – including President Barack Obama and Gov. Chris Christie — are promoting charter schools as an answer to perceived public school failure. And the privately run but publicly funded schools receive support from some of the wealthiest and most famous people on the planet.
But a few activists based in Princeton — some charter school parents — and a Rutgers researcher want their voices heard above the cheerleading. They warn charters are not panaceas.
Russia – Prime Minister Vladimir Putin meets with Minister of Education and Science Andrei Fursenko
Vladimir Putin: Mr Fursenko, the programme for advancing education will expire this year, and the ministry has drafted a new document on this issue. Today, I would like to discuss some aspects of the newly drafted programme. First of all, this concerns the general school education system, as well as vocational education and specific criteria for evaluating the performance of educational establishments.
Andrei Fursenko: Mr Putin, first of all, the principles behind the new programme hinge on the part of the national education project that deals with the comprehensive development of education in the regions. I have told you why this project has turned out well. Therefore the new federal targeted programme stipulates the very same idea, namely, helping to establish regional centres of excellence, centres providing the best early childhood education and the best school education and training centres in the field of primary and secondary vocational education, including the retraining of adults.
The idea of the new programme is to encourage the regions to develop independently. This approach has already been tested, and we believe that assistance through a federal targeted programme will be most effective. In about a year we should switch over to national programmes that will encompass the entire educational system. But these specific guidelines may yield substantial results in the next 12 months.
Madison grapples with how to serve ‘Talented and Gifted’
Gayle Worland, via a kind reader’s email:
Three times a week, Van Hise Elementary fifth-grader Eve Sidikman and two fellow students from her school board a bus bound for GEMS, the Madison school district’s “Growing Elementary Math Students” program for students whose math abilities are so high they aren’t challenged in a standard classroom.
Eve’s bus also makes the rounds to Randall and Thoreau before pulling up to the curb at Shorewood Elementary, where Eve and her GEMS classmates have a two-hour math session taught by a member of the district’s Talented and Gifted staff.
“She teaches it in a creative and fun way,” Eve, who was placed in GEMS after her mother sought out and paid for a national test that proved Eve was capable of acing eighth-grade math, said of her teacher. “I think she’s preparing us for our middle school years well.”
The Madison School district is grappling with how best to serve students deemed “Talented and Gifted,” or TAG in district shorthand — partly to stem a talent drain through open enrollment, partly to satisfy a vocal group of dissatisfied parents, and partly to find more Eves who don’t necessarily have a family with the financial means, determination and know-how to capitalize on their student’s untapped talents.
District critics say change is happening too slowly — something Superintendent Dan Nerad admits — and programs like GEMS are few and far between. Advocates also acknowledge, however, there is skepticism of gifted services among both the public and educators at a time when so many students fail to meet even minimal standards.
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
Watch, listen or read an interview with UW-Madison Education Professor Adam Gamoran. Gamoran was interviewed in Gayle Worland’s article.
Well Worth Reading: Wisconsin needs two big goals
Having worked some 40 years in the business world, mostly abroad, with many leaders in business, politics and religion, I believe the most important ingredient for success is setting one or two ambitious, long-term goals that are routinely and publicly measured against the best in the world.
For Wisconsin, we only need two:
Raise our state’s per capita income to 10 percent above Minnesota’s by 2030.
In job and business creation over the next decade, Wisconsin is often predicted to be among the lowest 10 states. When I was a kid growing up in Madison, income in Wisconsin was some 10 percent higher than in Minnesota. Minnesota caught up to us in 1967, and now the average Minnesotan makes $4,500 more than the average Wisconsinite.
Lift the math, science and reading scores of all K-12, non-special education students in Wisconsin above world-class standards by 2030. (emphasis added)
Wisconsinites often believe we lose jobs because of lower wages elsewhere. In fact, it is often the abundance of skills (and subsidies and effort) that bring huge Intel research and development labs to Bangalore, Microsoft research centers to Beijing, and Advanced Micro Devices chip factories to Dresden.
Our educational standards are based relative to the United States. So even if we “successfully” accomplish all of our state educational goals, our kids would still be in the global minor leagues. How about targeting Finland and Singapore in math, South Korea and Japan in science, Canada in reading?
As the saying goes: “When one does not know where one is going, any road will do” (or not do).
Without clear scorecards, we citizens will have little ability to coerce and evaluate politicians and their excuses, rhetoric and laws from the right and left. If JFK had not set a “man on the moon” stretch target, would we have landed there? Do the Green Bay Packers have a chance at winning another Super Bowl if they never tack that goal to the locker room walls?
Clusty Search: Dave Baskerville.
Lying to HS Students
Failure to educate
The Boston school system is churning out illiterate students whose only skills are to pass predictable standard tests
I DID not attend a graduation ceremony in 25 years as a Boston public high school teacher. This was my silent protest against a skillfully choreographed mockery of an authentic education – a charade by adults who, knowingly or unwittingly, played games with other people’s children.
I knew that most of my students who walked across the stage, amidst the cheers, whistles, camera flashes, and shout-outs from parents, family, and friends, were not functionally literate. They were unable to perform the minimum skills necessary to negotiate society: reading the local newspapers, filling out a job application, or following basic written instructions; even fewer had achieved empowering literacy enabling them to closely read, analyze, synthesize, and evaluate text.
However, they were all college bound – the ultimate goal of our school’s vision statement– clutching knapsacks stuffed with our symbols of academic success: multiple college acceptances, a high school diploma; an official transcript indicating they had passed the MCAS test and had met all graduation requirements; several glowing letters of recommendation from teachers and guidance counselors; and one compelling personal statement, their college essay.
They walked across the stage into a world that was unaware of the truth that scorched my soul –the truth that became clear the first day I entered West Roxbury High School in 1979 (my first assignment as a provisional 12th grade English teacher): the young men and women I was responsible for coaching the last leg of their academic journey could not write a complete sentence, a cohesive paragraph, or a well-developed essay on a given topic. I remember my pain and anger at this revelation and my struggle to reconcile the reality before me with my own high school experience, which had enabled me to negotiate the world of words–oral and written–independently, with relative ease and confidence.
For the ensuing 30-plus years, I witnessed how the system churned out academically unprepared students who lacked the skills needed to negotiate the rigors of serious scholarship, or those skills necessary to move in and up the corporate world.
We instituted tests and assessments, such as the MCAS, that required little exercise in critical thinking, for which most of the students were carefully coached to “pass.” Teachers, instructors, and administrators made the test the curriculum, taught to the test, drilled for the test, coached for the test, taught strategies to take the test, and gave generous rewards (pizza parties) for passing the test. Students practiced, studied for, and passed the test–but remained illiterate.
I also bear witness to my students’ ability to acquire a passing grade for mediocre work. A’s and B’s were given simply for passing in assignments (quality not a factor), for behaving well in class, for regular attendance, for completing homework assignments that were given a check mark but never read.
In addition, I have been a victim of the subtle and overt pressure exerted by students, parents, administrators, guidance counselors, coaches, and colleagues to give undeserving students passing grades, especially at graduation time, when the “walk across the stage” frenzy is at its peak.
When all else failed, there were strategies for churning out seemingly academically prepared students. These were the ways around the official requirements: loopholes such as MCAS waivers; returning or deftly transferring students to Special Needs Programs–a practice usually initiated by concerned parents who wanted to avoid meeting the regular education requirements or to gain access to “testing accommodations”; and, Credit Recovery, the computer program that enabled the stragglers, those who were left behind, to catch up to the frontrunners in the Race to the Stage. Students were allowed to take Credit Recovery as a substitute for the course they failed, and by passing with a C, recover their credits.
Nevertheless, this past June, in the final year of my teaching career, I chose to attend my first graduation at the urgings of my students–the ones whose desire to learn, to become better readers and writers, and whose unrelenting hard work earned them a spot on the graduation list–and the admonition of a close friend who warned that my refusal to attend was an act of selfishness, of not thinking about my students who deserved the honor and respect signified by my presence.
At the ceremony I chose to be happy, in spite of the gnawing realization that nothing had changed in 32 years. We had continued playing games with other people’s children.
Junia Yearwood, a guest columnist, is a retired Boston Public Schools teacher who taught at English High for 25 years.
© Copyright 2010 Globe Newspaper Company.
The New Mexico PreK Evaluation: Impacts From the Fourth Year (2008-2009) of New Mexico’s State-Funded PreK Program
Jason T. Hustedt, W. Steven Barnett, Kwanghee Jung, and Allison H. Friedman
The New Mexico PreK evaluation, from the 2008-2009 school year, finds positive impacts from the state-funded prekindergarten program for young children, consistent with previous findings. With statistically significant increases observed in vocabulary, math, and literacy scores for children participating in New Mexico PreK, the authors find New Mexico PreK is helping prepare young children for later school success. The New Mexico PreK initiative began in 2005 and has expanded rapidly. From the beginning, the National Institute for Early Education Research has been evaluating the program using the regression-discontinuity approach.
Related: Madison’s planned 4K program.
Financial Literacy – A Topic Every Parent Must Teach their Child
New site provides financial literacy curricula for parents, students, and educators.
Our sister site GoCollege has given a great deal of attention to the current student loan crisis. The problem is actually a very simple one, easy access to loans has led naïve students to borrow significant sums of money as they pursue their college degree.
The problem is that too many students are borrowing far too much and thus are literally mortgaging their entire future. I recently highlighted my concerns with what is happening in my own state where students are leaving the state university with some of the highest average debt levels in the country.
Unfortunately, financial literacy is not a typical topic generally taught in public schools. Thus, educating children about money and the concept of using credit in a healthy manner still falls upon parents. In essence, this is a subject where every family must employ the home-schooling concept.
Our View: Maine Governor Elect LePage will get a shot at reforming education
A lot of harsh words are thrown around during a campaign, and Gov.-elect Paul LePage was on the receiving end of many of them, particularly regarding his positions on education.
But now that the votes have been cast the rhetoric can die away. Although there is still considerable flesh that has to be added to the policy bones that LePage campaigned on, we like much of what he proposed in regards to education reform, which includes ideas that we have been championing for some time.
LePage supports public charter schools, funded from the same sources as traditional schools. Charter schools have a mixed track record, but the best ones serve as innovative laboratories for new approaches to teaching and learning.
They also offer school districts a way to pilot alternative programs, like schools that meet at night, during the weekend or combine with a vocational focus, which could bring dropouts back into education.
Schools that go it alone do best – report
The most successful schools ignore government advice and set their own standards for effective teaching, according to a thinktank report published today.
The best schools have an “open culture”, in which heads regularly pop into classrooms informally, the thinktank Reform says.
“The teachers view this as supportive rather than threatening … the best schools foster an expectation and culture of perpetual improvement.”
This change in culture leads to failing teachers either improving or leaving, the report says.
Being taught by a good teacher rather than a poor one improves a student’s results by half a GCSE grade a subject, according to academic research quoted in the report.
By contrast, class size makes little difference.
Korea and Japan, which have bigger class sizes, do better at maths than pupils in England, according to Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) figures.
International Benchmarking: State Education Performance Standards
Gary W. Phillips, Ph.D., via a Richard Askey email
It is worth looking at the data to see how Wisconsin compares with some other states. Here is the mathematics comparison with Minnesota.
The “state” results are the percent of students ranked as proficient on the state test with the current cut scores being used. The international percent was obtained by using the state results on NAEP (National Assessment of Educational Progress) and this was mapped by comparing levels of problems to the level on TIMSS, (Trends in Mathematics and Science Study).
Grade 4 Mathematics Percent proficient
State International
Wisconsin 74 45
Minnesota 68 55
Massachusetts 49 63
Grade 8 Mathematics
Wisconsin 73 33
Minnesota 56 41
Massachusetts 46 52
No, the Massachusetts scores were not reversed here. Their cut score levels are set higher than the TIMSS levels.
It is time for the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction to redo the cut score levels to make them realistic. Parents in Wisconsin are mature enough to be told the truth about how well their children are doing.
Future teachers must show, not just tell, skills: Teacher Performance Assessment program
Standing at the edge of a pond surrounded by her class of fourth-graders, Jasmine Zeppa filled a bucket with brown water and lectured her pupils on the science of observing and recording data. Many of the children seemed more interested in nearby geese, a passing jogger and the crunchy leaves underfoot.
Zeppa’s own professor from St. Catherine University stood nearby and recorded video of it all.
“I think it went as well as it possibly could have, given her experience,” the professor, Susan Gibbs Goetz, said. Her snap review: The 25-year-old Zeppa could have done a better job holding the students’ attention, but did well building on past lessons.
Zeppa is among the first class of aspiring teachers who are getting ready for new, more demanding requirements to receive their teacher license. A new licensing system is being tested in 19 states that includes filming student teachers in their classroom and evaluating the video, also candidates must show they can prepare a lesson, tailor it to different levels of students and present it effectively.
Teacher Performance Assessment program
Influence of teachers unions in question
The groups have been slow to come to terms with the push for reform. Some see them as obstacles to change, and even union sympathizers agree that their voice in the education debate has been muted.
Teachers unions have a well-deserved reputation for exercising political clout. With a nearly unparalleled ability to raise cash and organize their ranks, they have elected school boards, influenced legislation and helped set the public school agenda in major American cities for decades.
Now, that clout is in question.
A nationwide school reform movement with bipartisan support has collided head-on with unions over three ideas that labor has long resisted: expansion of charter schools, the introduction of merit pay for teachers and the use of student test scores in teacher evaluations.
Even the long-held protections and prerogatives conferred by seniority and tenure no longer seem sacrosanct.
Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels explains his plans for education in Indiana
A wave of change and reform has finally begun moving across American public education. Across the political spectrum from President Obama rightward, people now agree that our children must learn much more than they are learning now, and that major change is necessary to enable them to do so. Only the most selfish special interests still insist on defending the status quo.
Indiana has led the nation in many areas lately. Fiscal responsibility, a pro-growth business climate, property tax reduction and infrastructure are good examples, but we can make no such claim about K-12 education. Only one in three Hoosier eighth-graders is able to pass the national reading and math tests; if we compare their scores to those of children in foreign countries, they look even worse.
It’s not that we have made no headway. We have doubled the number of our 5-year-olds with access to full-day kindergarten, although a quarter still do not have it. We have strengthened the ability of teachers and principals to maintain classroom discipline by immunizing them from lawsuits. We have ended the “social promotion” of third-graders who cannot read to the fourth grade and almost certain failure in high school and life.
Much more on Mitch Daniels here.
Big-ticket International education deals this week
US President Barack Obama’s visit to India is set to start to an unprecedented wave of back-to-back, big-ticket international education deals over the coming week aimed at making India a global education destination. India will sign key education pacts with Canada on Tuesday and the UK on Thursday after finalising projects with Obama’s delegation on Monday, top government sources confirmed.
“Don’t forget that the US, UK and Canada are countries that Indians have traditionally thronged for education. It is indicative of India’s role in the global education scenario today that they are coming to India virtually in back-to-back trips we have never witnessed before,” a senior government official said. “These countries need us as much as we need them.”
Systemic changes coming for Wisconsin public school teachers
An educational earthquake aimed at improving the effectiveness of teachers is rumbling across the nation.
So far, the quake is only beginning to affect Wisconsin. But the tremors of change are already being felt here, and more are coming.
In the process, a new world of teaching is being built.
Nationwide, the federal government and giant philanthropies such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation are putting hundreds of millions of dollars into underwriting work in dozens of states and cities on better ways to select teachers, monitor their work and pay them.
President Barack Obama has taken on teachers unions – traditionally partisan allies – over teacher improvement issues, while many Republicans, including Wisconsin Governor-elect Scott Walker, say they support reform in teachers’ pay.
National leaders of teachers unions, long opposed to change, are willing to talk about once-taboo subjects such as making it easier to get weak teachers out of classrooms.
Multiple factors have ushered in this new era. First, it is now widely understood that not only are teachers the most important school-related factor in student learning, but that teacher effectiveness varies drastically. Second, the recession – and the resulting stimulus package – gave Obama a chance to launch large programs focused on increasing teacher effectiveness. Third, data about students and teachers has improved greatly, providing better tools for figuring out the success of many teachers on an individual basis.
Wanted: Unsung high schools with strong college course programs
Other columnists spend the dark winter months reconnecting with their loved ones before a cozy fire or a richly laden holiday feast. I use that time to fill a spreadsheet with the names of high schools and their ratios of college-level tests to graduating seniors.
It doesn’t sound like much fun, but it is to me. Since 1997, when I devised a way to compare all U.S. high schools based how much they encouraged students to take challenging courses and tests, that has been my winter work. I have published the ranked list called America’s Best High Schools, based on my Challenge Index, in the spring.
I am working on a new list now, with a few twists. First, it will no longer be sponsored by Newsweek magazine, but by the Washington Post, and this Web site, washingtonpost.com. The Washington Post Company, my employer for 39 years, just sold Newsweek, so I brought the list over here.
Second, I am going to include in the ranking calculations not only Advanced Placement, International Baccalaureate and Cambridge tests, which are standardized exams that come at the end of college-level courses given in high school, but also the final exams of what are called dual enrollment or concurrent enrollment courses. These are courses given by local colleges to high school students. The students either come to the college campuses for a part of the day or have college professors or specially trained instructors conduct the courses at their high school.
T.S. Eliot and the Demise of the Literary Culture
No one writing in the English language is likely to establish a reigning authority over poetry and criticism and literature in general as T.S. Eliot did between the early 1930s and his death in 1965 at the age of 77. Understatedly spectacular is the way Eliot’s career strikes one today, at a time when, it is fair to say, poetry, even to bookish people, is of negligible interest and literary criticism chiefly a means to pursue academic tenure. Literary culture itself, if the sad truth be known, seems to be slowly but decisively shutting down.
The fame Eliot achieved in his lifetime is unfathomable for a poet, or indeed any American or English writer, in our day. In 1956, Eliot lectured on “The Function of Criticism” in a gymnasium at the University of Minnesota to a crowd estimated at 15,000 people. “I do not believe,” he remarked afterward, “there are fifteen thousand people in the entire world who are interested in criticism.” Eight years earlier, in 1948, he won the Nobel Prize in literature. In later years, when he went into the hospital, which he did with some frequency, suffering from bronchitis and heart troubles, news of his illnesses appeared in the press or over the radio both in England and America; and so too did news of his second marriage, in 1957, at the age of 69, to his secretary, a Miss Valerie Fletcher, 38 years younger than he. He lectured often and everywhere, so much so that Lyndall Gordon, his most penetrating biographer, wrote that his “face acquired a sort of exposed reticence from the habit of looking down from a lectern into rows upon rows of eyes.” Eliot was the equivalent in literature of Albert Einstein in science in that everyone seemed to know that these men were immensely significant without quite knowing for what.
An immitigable highbrow, Eliot was concerned about the slackening of high culture and the diminishing quality of education–concerns that have proved prophetic. The poetry on which his reputation as a leading figure of the modernist avant-garde was based was not easily comprehended. “Poets, in our civilization, as it exists at present, must be difficult,” he wrote, but he also wrote that “genuinepoetry can communicate before it is understood,” which seems to have been the case with his. His criticism, much of which began as lectures, always came from on high. This was not a man who wrote or spoke down to his audience, ever. Which makes all the more curious his widespread fame.
Wisconsin Public schools likely to face cash drain
So let’s think out loud about what might lie ahead:
State aid to schools. It’s hard to see how Republicans are going to keep their campaign promises and fund the same percentage of statewide costs for kindergarten through 12th grade. The state committed itself to paying two-thirds of those costs in the 1990s (under Republican Gov. Tommy G. Thompson). The current rate is a bit below that. But look for Walker to want to do something about this multibillion dollar annual spending. Reductions in state aid would translate into large increases in property taxes (that hardly seems likely, given the state of public opinion) or large cuts in school spending. That leads us to:
Teacher benefits. Look for a lot of action around this. Teachers are deeply defensive of their benefits, especially health insurance plans that are substantially above what almost anybody else has these days. But WEAC, the state teachers union, was among the biggest losers on Tuesday and has few friends in the Capitol now. There’s been talk about trying to bring teachers into the state employees’ health plan, which costs less than most teacher plans. Now is likely to be the time for doing that. Or maybe other ideas will surface.
Teachers contracts are negotiated locally, so the most powerful thing Republicans can do might be just to give local districts less money and let school officials and local unions figure out what to do about it. My guess is that the Milwaukee teachers union agreed recently to a new contract that goes until 2013, two years longer than the normal agreement, in hope of staving off more concessions at least for that long.
School Brings Farming To Big Apple
No one expects to find beets and carrots in a sliver of the South Bronx wedged between Metro-North Railroad tracks and a busy elevated highway.
But there they are, along with late-season eggplant, tomatoes, basil and habanero peppers, all growing in a pocket-sized farm called La Finca del Sur, Spanish for Farm of the South.
The formerly weed-choked vacant lot will be a classroom for a new venture called Farm School NYC: The New York City School of Urban Agriculture.
Starting in January, the school will offer a two-year course aimed at developing “the next generation of leaders who will work to use urban agriculture to transform their communities into healthy food communities,” said executive director Jacquie Berger.
Why We Can’t Afford Not to Create a Well-Stocked National Digital Library System
E-book gadgets have finally cracked the mass market here in the United States or at least have come a long way.
Consider a memorable Kindle commercial from Amazon, in which a brunette in a bikini one-ups an oafish man reading off a rival machine. Mr. Beer Belly asks about her e-reader. “It’s a Kindle,” she says by the pool. “$139. I actually paid more for these sunglasses.” Mad Men would be proud. A year or two from now, count on twice as much ballyhoo and on better machines for less than $99.
I myself own both a Kindle 3 and the Brand X iPad and can attest to the improved readability of the latest E Ink from Amazon’s supplier, even indoors, despite lack of built-in illumination. Outside on walks, as with earlier Kindles, I can listen to books from publishing houses savvy enough to allow text to speech. No matter where I am, I can instantly see all occurrences of a character’s name in an engrossing Louis Bayard novel. I can also track down the meanings of archaic words that Bayard’s detective narrator uses in this murder mystery set at West Point and featuring a fictionalized Edgar Allan Poe.
The Rise of the ‘Edupunk’
The “Edupunks” will inherit the Earth … or at least some attention.
Those in higher education who continue hand-wringing over the relative merits of online learning and other technology-driven platforms will soon find themselves left in the dust of an up-and-coming generation of students who are seeking knowledge outside academe. Such was an emerging consensus view here Monday, as college leaders gathered for the TIAA-CREF Institute’s 2010 Higher Education Leadership Conference.
“We’re still trying to fit the Web into our educational paradigm…. I just don’t think that’s going to work,” said Mary Spilde, president of Lane Community College, in Eugene, Ore.
Tiptoeing around race issue doesn’t solve anything
It was a forum held Wednesday by the Dane County League of Women Voters on “how changing demographics are affecting Dane County schools and human services,” and the speakers — Madison school superintendent Dan Nerad, Sun Prairie district administrator Tim Culver and Dane County director of Human Services Lynn Green — aren’t exactly right wingers.
But it’s odd how the best of intentions can muddle a message, especially when it comes to race, and especially in Madison.
The panel was nothing if not well intentioned, not to mention extremely careful in its language.
Happy- and/or neutral-sounding words like “diversity” and “changing demographics” took the place of the more direct “black” or “Latino” or “poor.” And while it was clear that these changing demographics meant higher rates of poverty and single-parent families, which in turn correlate with more problems in the schools or need for services, the panel chose not to identify them as problems. They were instead “challenges.”
They were also careful to frame their remarks in a spirit of inclusiveness, and Nerad and Culver described efforts to inject “culturally relevant” instruction into their curriculums and to hire more minority teachers.
(I wondered how conservatives would respond to such efforts, widely applauded and rarely questioned in places as liberal as Madison. What does cultural relevancy have to do with learning the three Rs? Do you have to be black to teach a black child?)
The audience was provided with graphics showing student achievement rising during this period of increasing student poverty and diversity, but Nerad and Culver did not make a big deal of that in their remarks. Nerad said after the meeting that too much emphasis on the district’s successes can invite criticism about areas where it isn’t doing so well.
Madison High School Reform: Dual Pathways to Post-Secondary Success High School Career and College Readiness
Enclosed is an update report regarding the High School Career and College Readiness Plan. This plan is written as a complement to the first document entitled “Dual Pathways to Post-Secondary Success”. The original document was intended to outline both a possible structure for organizing accelerated and preparatory courses for high school students. The original document was also intended to serve as an internal document outlining a planning process. Since, the dissemination of the “Dual Pathways to Post-Secondary Success” many questions and concerns have been expressed by a variety of stakeholders. Through feedback and questions brought forth by teachers, students, community members and the Board of Education it is understood that our original plan did not effectively communicate the rationale, scope, scale, and end outcomes as intended. The conversations that occurred as a result of the dissemination of the “Dual Pathways to Post-Secondary Success” have been at times difficult but they have also been the right conversations for us to have in order to move forward as a district. These conversations have highlighted the interconnectedness ofall grade levels, calling on us to proceed with a k-12 district wide curricular alignmentprocessinwhichhighschoolisembedded. hlordertomoreaccuratelycapturetheintentofouroriginal work we have renamed the plan High School Career and College Readiness to accurately reflect the intended goal; for all MMSD graduates will become self-determined learners able to access a wide array ofpost-secondary options. For these reasons, we have not included the original “Dual Pathways to Post-Secondary Success” plan in this report. Rather we have created this document to serve as bridge that more clearly articulates the history, rationale, data, work to date and next steps that are outlined in the original plan. Our Theory of Action, process
and end goals have not changed, but how we articulate this work has become more explicit, transparent and responsive. Weare in process ofcreating a more comprehensive plan to be shared with a broad range ofaudiences. We will share that plan with the Board of Education when finalized. We will also share periodic updates with the Board of Education. ill the meantime, the enclosed report serves to answer questions, concerns received to date and provide more detailed and accurate iuformation. Attached is the original document, unchanged.
Justices Revisit Use of Tax Credits for Religious Schools
The Supreme Court on Wednesday returned to a subject that produced a major and closely divided decision eight years ago: how far may the government go in aiding religious schools?
In 2002, in a 5-to-4 ruling, the court upheld a school voucher system in Cleveland that parents used almost exclusively to pay for religious schools.
Four new justices have joined the court since then, but there was nothing in Wednesday’s arguments to suggest that the issue has become any less polarizing.
The program at issue on Wednesday gives Arizona taxpayers a dollar-for-dollar state tax credit of up to $500 for donations to private “student tuition organizations.” The contributors may not designate their dependents as beneficiaries. The organizations are permitted to limit the scholarships they offer to schools of a given religion, and many do.
Madison’s Fine Arts Task Force Update
Laurie Fellenz, Teacher Leader – Fine Arts
Since the January 2010 Board of Education update, the majority of focus of the Fine Arts Division in Curriculum and Assessment has been on recommendations regarding curriculum revisions, distribution ofequitable essential arts resources, and plans for a proposed fine arts programming financial planning team.
The Fine Arts Task Force Report contains three main areas. This updated report is organized around the recommendations from the Fine Arts Task Force, progress to date, and next steps in these three areas: Curriculum; Equity; and Long-Term Financial Planning.
Creation ofa multi-year funding pIan for arts education will be structured to provide adequate, sustained funding for MMSD students taking k-12 arts education courses, which will offer:
A sequence o f diverse, skill-based classes Expanded, equitable access to co-curricular opportunities Knowledge of and appreciation for world art forms
Asia’s Expanding Middle Class Presents Huge Opportunity for Region, World – Report
Developing Asia’s rapidly expanding middle class is likely to assume the traditional role of the US and Europe as primary global consumers and help rebalance the global economy, says a new report on Asia’s middle class from the Asian Development Bank (ADB).
The report, published in a special chapter of Key Indicators for Asia and the Pacific 2010, the flagship annual statistical publication of the ADB, found that Asia’s consumers spent an estimated $4.3 trillion (in 2005 purchasing power parity dollars), or about one-third of OECD consumption expenditure, in 2008 and by 2030 will likely spend $32 trillion, comprising about 43% of the worldwide consumption.
The special chapter, titled “The Rise of Asia’s Middle Class“, examines the rapid growth of Asia’s middle class, how the poor advance to the middle class, factors that characterize the middle class, and pathways through which they become effective contributors to growth and poverty reduction in the region.
The Post-Election Education Landscape: Vouchers Up, WEAC Down
Alan Borsuk via a Senn Brown email
Two quick education-related comments on Tuesday’s election outcomes in Wisconsin:
First, this was a banner outcome in the eyes of voucher and charter school leaders. Governor-elect Scott Walker is a long-time ally of those promoting the 20,000-plus-student private school voucher program in the city of Milwaukee, and he is a booster of charter schools both in Milwaukee and statewide. But just as important as Walker’s win was the thumpingly strong victories for Republicans in both the Assembly and State Senate, which will now come under sizable Republican majorities.
What will result?
Let’s assume it’s good-bye to the 22,500-student cap on the voucher enrollment in Milwaukee. Will Walker and the Legislature expand the voucher program beyond the city, perhaps, for openers, to Racine? Will they open the doors wider for charter schools, for national charter-school operators to come into Wisconsin, and for more public bodies to be given the power to authorize charter schools? (Currently, UW-Milwaukee, Milwaukee City Hall, and UW-Parkside are the only ones authorized to do that, other than school boards.) Perhaps most important, what will the Republicans do about the per-student payments to voucher and charter schools? School leaders now are chafing under the impact of receiving less than $6,500 per student for each voucher student and less than $8,000 for each charter student. Will this be one of the very few spots where the Republicans increase the state’s financial involvement? Pretty good chance the answer is yes to all of the above.
Change is certainly in the air.
