Gwinnett County Public Schools is seeking freedom from the state to overhaul its methods for improving student performance.
The proposal, which includes flexible teacher pay, increasing class sizes and using aides as stand-ins for teachers, is being crafted by Gwinnett school administrators to give the state’s largest school district the flexibility to opt out of restrictive state education mandates.
Some school officials view the mandates as hindering the system’s ability to significantly raise standardized test scores.
School administrators have submitted a 104-page draft proposal to the state that details how the system could restructure and reassign teachers with the goal of closing the achievement gap between white, black and Hispanic students by 10 percent annually and improving participation in high-level academic courses.
“We are looking at a number of factors that may be outside the box of what the current rules in the state say,” Gwinnett school board member Louise Radloff said. “The key is making sure students are more successful. Having flexibility would allow us to try some things differently.”
Montgomery County School Consortiums Assessed in Report
Montgomery County’s high school consortiums, set up partly as a tool for desegregation, have done little to reverse racial isolation or white flight, according to a new report from a government oversight group released this week.
But school system leaders say the programs have succeeded in giving students a measure of choice about their education and have allowed administrators to shift school populations without a painful exercise in redrawing school boundaries.
Eight of the county’s 25 high schools belong to two consortiums, which allow students to choose from a menu of programs and schools, rather than settle for a neighborhood school or compete for a selective magnet program.
“They do provide a lot of choice, and we get a lot of positive feedback from parents that they like having those options,” said Marty Creel, director of enriched and innovative programs for the school system.
But the consortium programs have not done much to erase socioeconomic inequities, according to the 64-page report, released Tuesday by the county’s Office of Legislative Oversight. It finds that “neither consortium reversed minority isolation nor improved socio-economic integration.” Poverty rates have continued to increase at schools in the programs, sometimes at a faster rate than in the county as a whole. The percen tage of white students has dwindled at all eight schools, as in the county generally.
An Interview with Will Fitzhugh: About Academic Excellence and Writing
Michael F. Shaughnessy:
1) Will, you recently gave a talk in Madison, Wisconsin. What exactly did you speak about?
WF: A group of professors, teachers, business people, lawyers and community people invited me to speak at the University of Wisconsin in Madison about the work of The Concord Review since 1987, and about the problems of college readiness and academic writing for high school students.
The Boston Public Schools just reported that 67% of the graduating class of 2000 who had gone on to higher education had failed to earn a certificate, an associate’s degree or a bachelor’s degree by 2008. Also, the Strong American Schools program just reported that more than a million of our high school graduates are in remedial education in college each year.
I recommend their report: Diploma to Nowhere, which came out last summer. While many foundations, such as Gates, and others, have focused on getting our students into college, too little attention has been paid to how few are ready for college work and how many drop out without any degree.
2) “We believe that the pursuit of academic excellence in secondary schools should be given the same attention as the pursuit of excellence in sports and other extracurricular activities.” This is a quote from The Concord Review. Now, I am asking you to hypothesize here–why do you think high schools across America seem to be preoccupied with sports and not academics?
WF: In Madison I also had a chance to speak about the huge imbalance in our attention to scholars and athletes at the high school level. I had recently seen a nationally televised high school football game in which, at breaks in the action, an athlete would come to the sidelines, and announce, to the national audience, which college he had decided to “sign” with. This is a far cry from what happens for high school scholars. High school coaches get a lot of attention for their best athletes, but if the coach also happens to be a history teacher, he or she will hear nothing from a college in the way of interest in his or her most outstanding history student.
When Kareem Abdul Jabbar was a very tall high school senior at Power Memorial Academy in New York, he not only heard from the head coaches at 60 college basketball programs, he also got a personal letter from Jackie Robinson of baseball fame and from Ralph Bunche at the United Nations, urging him to go to UCLA, which he did. That same year, in the U.S., the top ten high school history students heard from no one, and it has been that way every year since.
The lobby of every public high school is full of trophies for sports, and there is usually nothing about academic achievement. For some odd reason, attention to exemplary work in academics is seen as elitist, while heaps of attention to athletic achievement is not seen in the same way. Strange…The Boston Globe has 150 pages on year on high school athletes and no pages on high school academic achievement. Do we somehow believe that our society needs good athletes far more than it needs good students, and that is why we are so reluctant to celebrate fine academic work?
Bill and Melinda Gates go back to school
Their crusade to fix schools earned a “needs improvement,” so they have a new plan. The most surprising beneficiaries? Community colleges.
Claudio Wallis & Spencer Fellow:
ince 2000 the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has invested $2 billion in public education, plus another $2 billion in scholarships. Most of it went into efforts to improve high schools that serve poor and minority students – mainly breaking up big, urban high schools and creating smaller, friendlier, and in theory more scholastically sound academies. (All told, the Gates Foundation gave money to 2,602 schools in 40 school districts.) Overall, it hasn’t worked. [Much more on Small Learning Communities]
“We had a high hope that just by changing the structure, we’d do something dramatic,” Gates concedes. “But it’s nowhere near enough.”
The results were a disappointing setback. So Gates and his $35 billion foundation went back to school on the issue. They spent more than a year analyzing what went wrong (and in some cases what went right). They hired new leaders for their education effort, while Gates turned his attention to philanthropy full-time after stepping away from his operating role at Microsoft last summer.
In mid-November, when Gates and his wife, Melinda, were finally ready to unveil their fresh direction, they delivered the news at a private forum at the Sheraton Seattle for America’s education elite, including New York City schools chief Joel Klein, his Washington, D.C., counterpart, Michelle Rhee, Education Secretary Margaret Spellings, and top advisors to President-elect Obama.
The upshot is that Education 2.0 is bolder and more aggressive in its goals, and it involves even more intensive investment – $3 billion over the next five years. This time the focus isn’t on the structure of public high schools but on what’s inside the classrooms: the quality of the teaching and the relevance of the curriculum. It steers smack into some of the biggest controversies in American education – tying teacher tenure and salaries to performance, and setting national standards for what is taught and tested.
And it looks beyond high school. “Our goal, with your help, is to double the number of low-income students who earn post-secondary degrees or credentials that let them earn a living wage,” declared Melinda French Gates at the Seattle gathering.
Feds, teachers differ on ‘highly qualified’
Georgia teachers differ with the federal government as to how qualified they are, according to a national report released Tuesday.
While about 95 percent of Georgia’s middle and high school teachers met the federal requirement of “highly qualified,” only 65 percent of the teachers said in a survey that they had the appropriate certification, according to the study from the Education Trust, a child advocacy group.
The two percentages come from different reports completed during the 2003-04 school year, the last time the teacher survey was conducted by the U.S. Department of Education. The two reports also defined teacher quality differently.
The survey asked teachers to indicate whether they have full state certification in the subject they are assigned to teach.
The “highly qualified” label is mandated by the federal No Child Left Behind Act to ensure that all students have effective teachers. Congress passed the law in 2001 and allowed each state to develop its own definition of what constitutes a “highly qualified” teacher.
Georgia teachers are “highly qualified” if they have an academic degree in the subject matter they’re teaching; or if their college course work is equivalent to a major in that area; or if they pass a state content test in the subject.
How I Got Into College: 6 Stories
Many seniors in the Class of ’09 — that’s more than 3.3 million students — are now applying to college. For many, it’s a time fraught with paperwork, essays, interviews and road trips. And after all that work, it comes down to a letter or an email: In or out?
Admissions are expected to be as competitive as ever, and many schools say even the economic downturn has not slowed the onslaught of early applications. At Cornell University, early applications are up 9% from what they were this time last year; at Amherst College, they are up 5%; and at Barnard College, the rise is 8%. The acceptance odds are still long; many highly selective schools accept fewer than 20% of applicants.
Counselors, admissions staff and parents can all provide useful advice for getting in, but some of the best tips can come from the most recent veterans of the application frenzy: college freshmen. We’ve asked a range of students to share what they’ve learned.
Dare to Dream
Matthew Crowley was set on going to Stanford University last fall, but all the signs told him he wouldn’t make the cut. He plugged his grades and test scores into a computer program that tracked college-acceptance statistics and came out on the low end of a graph for Stanford. Guidance counselors at Kent Denver, a private school he attended in Englewood, Colo., did not include Stanford on a list of suggested colleges. And he says a college adviser his family hired for $2,800 told him not to bother applying.
Letter to the College Board
It’s over. My long-running battle with you and the numbers you seek to define me by is finished. As my final act of surrender, I seek to prove, once and for all, that your tests say nothing about me or any creative student who submits to them.
First of all, to assuage my terrible relationship with math, every day for one month last year I went to my math teacher at six o’clock in the morning to mend it. I go to one of the top and most intense magnet schools in Los Angeles, take challenging classes, and am in the top 10% of my class. I read because I love to read, not because I’m forced to. I respect my teachers and I am absolutely addicted to learning. I am in multiple clubs and hold several leadership positions. I voluntarily wake up early and stay out late on Saturdays to protest for equal rights. I do community service around my city and around the world. I’m highly curious about everything. I play three instruments and write my own music. I have amazing friends from multitudes of cultural backgrounds and I am simply and enthusiastically passionate about living — qualities that don’t amount to a College Board number.
High school trains us to find our own voices, to figure out in our own innovative ways how to make a difference. Colleges advertise themselves as wanting to accept individuals willing to challenge themselves and be involved in their communities. How, then, does it make sense to judge us each by the same exact test?
Study: Math teachers a chapter ahead of students
Math can be hard enough, but imagine the difficulty when a teacher is just one chapter ahead of the students. It happens, and it happens more often to poor and minority students. Those children are about twice as likely to have math teachers who don’t know their subject, according to a report by the Education Trust, a children’s advocacy group.
Studies show the connection between teachers’ knowledge and student achievement is particularly strong in math.
“Individual teachers matter a tremendous amount in how much students learn,” said Ross Wiener, who oversees policy issues at the organization.
The report looked at teachers with neither an academic major nor certification in the subjects they teach.
Among the findings, which were based on Education Department data:
_In high-poverty schools, two in five math classes have teachers without a college major or certification in math.
_In schools with a greater share of African-American and Latino children, nearly one in three math classes is taught by such a teacher.
Math is important because it is considered a “gateway” course, one that leads to greater success in college and the workplace. Kids who finish Algebra II in high school are more likely to get bachelor’s degrees. And people with bachelor’s degrees earn substantially more than those with high school diplomas.
Students Dig Deep For Words’ Origins
For a few hours every other afternoon, Latin and Greek roots rain on Phil Rosenthal’s etymology class at Park View High School in Sterling. Etymology — the study of the origin and evolution of words — might be considered the domain of tweedy types who reek of pipe smoke. But Rosenthal tries to give his 20-some students a sense of the stories and shades behind the words they use every day.
“Kids see a word that to them is foreign, and they run away from it,” Rosenthal says. He started the class with a group of other Loudoun County teachers in 1990, and it remains one of the few of its kind in the country.
Ability Grouping for Gifted Children Podcast
Today’s topic is one that impacts gifted kids in schools on a regular basis. In the past, gifted children were often placed into special gifted classes or special, accelerated learning groups. The thinking went that gifted children learned at a faster pace than other kids, and if you could group gifted children together it was easier for those students and their teachers to move at a faster pace through a class’ subject matter.
However, the practice of grouping students by ability has become a controversial topic in many schools. As a result, during the last few years we have seen the dismantling of special gifted classes. We’ve seen teachers move away from the use of ability groups in their classrooms.
How are gifted students affected by this change and does it make sense to move away from ability grouping?
Schools of Hope project aims to improve Madison students’ algebra performance
Three weeks after its launch, the program at La Follette is operating smoothly, according to officials and students at the school.
Joe Gothard, who is in his second year as La Follette principal, said he sought to bring the tutoring program to the school to involve the community in raising achievement levels.
“We’re not going to settle for our students of color to be unsuccessful,” Gothard said.
Over the past several years, the school’s African American students have been less likely than their peers to complete algebra by 10th grade, although in some years the rate still exceeds the overall average for African American students in the Madison School District.
Gothard is troubled by the patterns on another measure of student achievement, the Wisconsin Knowledge and Concepts Examination, which show that the proportion of 10th graders demonstrating math proficiency ranks lower at La Follette than at any other major high school in Dane County. Just 53 percent of La Follette students received ratings of proficient or advanced on the test, compared to 65 percent in the district and 69 percent in the state.
“Initially there’s that burning in your stomach,” Gothard said, describing his reaction to such data, which was followed by a vow: “We are not going to accept going anywhere but up.”
Va. Math Standards’ Bar Might Be Raised
Kindergartners would be expected to be able to count to 100, not just to 30. Perimeter and area would be introduced and explored in third grade, instead of in second grade.
Those are among many proposed revisions to Virginia’s math standards that are part of a national movement to strengthen and streamline math education to prepare all students to learn algebra and higher concepts.
The standards prescribe in detail concepts students are expected to learn in each grade, and the state verifies whether those expectations are met each year through the Standards of Learning tests. Now the standards are being revised for the second time since their introduction in 1995.
Become an AP Exam Reader
In June, AP teachers and college faculty members from around the world gather in the United States for the annual AP Reading. There they evaluate and score the free-response sections of the AP Exams. AP Exam Readers are led by a Chief Reader, a college professor who has the responsibility of ensuring that students receive grades that accurately reflect college-level achievement. Readers describe the experience as an intensive collegial exchange, in which they can receive professional support and training. More than 10,000 teachers and college faculty participated in the 2008 Reading. Secondary school Readers can receive certificates rewarding professional development hours and Continuing Education Units (CEUs) for their participation in the AP Reading. In addition, Readers are provided an honorarium of $1,555 and their travel expenses, lodging, and meals are reimbursed.
Readers are particularly needed for the following AP courses:
Chinese Language and Culture
Japanese Language and Culture
World History
The Poetry of Pain: Slam poet Gayle Danley teaches children how words can soothe their wounds
She starts off with a poem titled “Round Like Bubbles”: “Round like a big fat green birthday balloon kissing the sky,” Gayle Danley begins, then turns her backside to the audience of fourth-, fifth- and sixth-graders at Deerfield Run Elementary School in Laurel and adds, “Why can’t I have a round one like J. Lo?”
The 275 students giggle nervously, immediately certain that this rather loud 43-year-old woman, a nationally renowned slam poet in jeans and a green maternity blouse, isn’t going to be teaching them any kind of poetry they’ve ever heard before. This stuff doesn’t rhyme. And, what? Did she just mention Jennifer Lopez in a poem?
“How come I don’t look like J. Lo?” the poet nearly shouts, plaintively stressing the word “I,” with a Southern accent, as the children titter. “You ever look in the mirror and go, ‘How come I don’t have hair that sings down my spine? How come?’ ” A few lines later, she switches gears: “I don’t need to be Halle Berry, I don’t need to be Alicia Keys, I don’t need to be bald-headed Britney” — they really crack up at that one — “I have it going on, because I have you.”
Change Our Public Schools Need
Can Barack Obama bring change to American education? The answer is: Yes he can. The question, however, is whether he actually will. Our president-elect has the potential to be an extraordinary leader, and that’s why I’ve supported him since the beginning of his campaign. But on public education, he and the Democrats are faced with a dilemma that has boxed in the party for decades.
Democrats are fervent supporters of public education, and the party genuinely wants to help disadvantaged kids stuck in bad schools. But it resists bold action. It is immobilized. Impotent. The explanation lies in its longstanding alliance with the teachers’ unions — which, with more than three million members, tons of money and legions of activists, are among the most powerful groups in American politics. The Democrats benefit enormously from all this firepower, and they know what they need to do to keep it. They need to stay inside the box.
And they have done just that. Democrats favor educational “change” — as long as it doesn’t affect anyone’s job, reallocate resources, or otherwise threaten the occupational interests of the adults running the system. Most changes of real consequence are therefore off the table. The party specializes instead in proposals that involve spending more money and hiring more teachers — such as reductions in class size, across-the-board raises and huge new programs like universal preschool. These efforts probably have some benefits for kids. But they come at an exorbitant price, both in dollars and opportunities foregone, and purposely ignore the fundamentals that need to be addressed.
What should the Democrats be doing? Above all, they should be guided by a single overarching principle: Do what is best for children. As for specifics, here are a few that deserve priority.
APEC leaders pledge to expand co-op on education, health issues
The leaders supported the efforts of APEC Education Ministers to strengthen education systems in the region including ongoing support to the APEC Education Network.
They welcomed the research-based steps taken by APEC in the areas of mathematics and sciences, language learning, career and technical education, information and communication technologies and systemic reform.
They pledged to facilitate international exchanges, working towards reciprocal exchanges of talented students, graduates and researchers.
Will Fitzhugh’s Madison Talk – Audio
Author, publisher, entrepreneur and good guy Will Fitzhugh recently visited Madison. Listen to the 90 minute event via this 41MB mp3 audio file [CTRL-Click to Download]. (Please note that the audio level varies a bit during the talk – sorry). Video version is available here.
I’d like to thank www.activecitizensforeducation.org, www.madisonunited.org and supporters who wish to remain anonymous for making Will’s visit a reality.
Anything but Knowledge
“Why Johnny’s Teacher Can’t Teach” (1998)
from The Burden of Bad Ideas
Heather Mac Donald
Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2000, pp. 82ff.
America’s nearly last-place finish in the Third International Mathematics and Sciences Study of student achievement caused widespread consternation this February, except in the one place it should have mattered most: the nation’s teacher education schools. Those schools have far more important things to do than worrying about test scores–things like stamping out racism in aspiring teachers. “Let’s be honest,” darkly commanded Professor Valerie Henning-Piedmont to a lecture hall of education students at Columbia University’s Teachers College last February. “What labels do you place on young people based on your biases?” It would be difficult to imagine a less likely group of bigots than these idealistic young people, happily toting around their handbooks of multicultural education and their exposés of sexism in the classroom. But Teachers College knows better. It knows that most of its students, by virtue of being white, are complicitous in an unjust power structure.
The crusade against racism is just the latest irrelevancy to seize the nation’s teacher education schools. For over eighty years, teacher education in America has been in the grip of an immutable dogma, responsible for endless educational nonsense. That dogma may be summed up in the phrase: Anything But Knowledge. Schools are about many things, teacher educators say (depending on the decade)–self-actualization, following one’s joy, social adjustment, or multicultural sensitivity–but the one thing they are not about is knowledge. Oh, sure, educators will occasionally allow the word to pass their lips, but it is always in a compromised position, as in “constructing one’s own knowledge,” or “contextualized knowledge.” Plain old knowledge, the kind passed down in books, the kind for which Faust sold his soul, that is out.
The education profession currently stands ready to tighten its already viselike grip on teacher credentialing, persuading both the federal government and the states to “professionalize” teaching further. In New York, as elsewhere, that means closing off routes to the classroom that do not pass through an education school. But before caving in to the educrats’ pressure, we had better take a hard look at what education schools teach.
The course in “Curriculum and Teaching in Elementary Education” that Professor Anne Nelson (a pseudonym) teaches at the City College of New York is a good place to start. Dressed in a tailored brown suit, and with close-cropped hair, Nelson is a charismatic teacher, with a commanding repertoire of voices and personae. And yet, for all her obvious experience and common sense, her course is a remarkable exercise in vacuousness.
Those who have led now choose to teach
Kerry Hill
Neither man set out to be an educational leader. One did research and taught electrical engineering. The other coached high school football.
Circumstances, opportunities, new interests and inspiration led both from their roots in Evansville, Ind., and Charleston, Ark., to two of the most visible education posts in Madison — chancellor of the state’s flagship university and superintendent of the state’s second- largest public school district.
As leaders, neither shied away from controversy. And, as they stepped down from those posts in mid-2008, accolades far outnumbered criticisms.
Now, John Wiley and Art Rainwater — the former UW-Madison chancellor and Madison Metropolitan School District superintendent, respectively — are sharing their experience and knowledge with current and future leaders through the Department of Educational Leadership and Policy Analysis (ELPA).
The Sidwell Choice: The Obama Family Leads by Example
Wall Street Journal Editorial:
Michelle and Barack Obama have settled on a Washington, D.C., school for their daughters, and you will not be surprised to learn it is not a public institution. Malia, age 10, and seven-year-old Sasha will attend the Sidwell Friends School, the private academy that educates the children of much of Washington’s elite.
Vice President-elect Joe Biden’s grandchildren attend Sidwell — as did Chelsea Clinton — where tuition is close to $30,000 a year. The Obama girls have been students at the private University of Chicago Laboratory Schools, where tuition runs above $21,000. “A number of great schools were considered,” said Katie McCormick Lelyveld, a spokeswoman for Mrs. Obama. “In the end, the Obamas selected the school that was the best fit for what their daughters need right now.”
Note the word “selected,” as in made a choice. The Obamas are fortunate to have the means to send their daughters to private school, and no one begrudges them that choice given that Washington’s public schools are among the worst in America.
Critical Thinking
The Pioneer Institute [April 2006]
A Review of E.D. Hirsch’s The Knowledge Deficit (Houghton Mifflin, 2006)
by Will Fitzhugh, The Concord Review
E.D. Hirsch, Jr., who published Cultural Literacy in 1987, arguing that there was knowledge which every student ought to have, has now published another book, The Knowledge Deficit, (Houghton Mifflin, 2006) suggesting that the bankruptcy of the “transfer of thinking skills” position has lead to preventing most U.S. schoolchildren, and especially the disadvantaged ones who really depend on the schools to teach them, from acquiring the ability to read well.
Not too long after the beginning of the twentieth century, the U.S. mental measurement community convinced itself, and many others, that the cognitive skills acquired in the study of Latin in school did not “transfer” to other important tasks, one of which at the time was teaching students “worthy home membership.”
As a result, not only was the study of the Latin language abandoned for many students, but at the same time the “baby”–of Caesar, Cicero, Horace, Tacitus, Virgil and others–was thrown out with the “bathwater.” In losing the language, we also lost Roman history, law, poetry, and prose.
In place of this classical knowledge which had been thought essential for two thousand years, the mental measurement community offered “thinking skills,” which they claimed could be applied to any content.
Professor Hirsch reaches back beyond the mental measurement folks to Thomas Jefferson, for someone who shares his view of the value of the knowledge in books:
“In our pre-romantic days, books were seen as key to education. In a 1786 letter to his nephew, aged fifteen, Jefferson recommended that he read books (in the original languages and in this order) by the following authors: [history] Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon, Anabasis, Arian, Quintus Curtius, Diodorus Siculus, and Justin. On morality, Jefferson recommended books by Epictetus, Plato, Cicero, Antoninus, Seneca, and Xenophon’s Memorabilia, and in poetry Virgil, Terence, Horace, Anacreon, Theocritus, Homer, Euripides, Sophocles, Milton, Shakespeare, Ossian, Pope and Swift. Jefferson’s plan of book learning was modest compared to the Puritan education of the seventeenth century as advocated by John Milton.” (p. 9)
Gifted and challenged: When enlightening has to strike twice
Sarah Lemagie
Tyler Lehmann could read “Harry Potter” books before he started first grade, yet an anxiety disorder left him unable to speak to his teacher and all but one of his classmates in Woodbury. Simon Fink attends a school for gifted students in St. Paul, but Asperger’s syndrome can make it hard for him to interact with peers and focus on lessons.
School can be tough for kids with challenges ranging from emotional disorders to ADHD or dyslexia. For gifted students, too, it’s not always a cakewalk, between boredom and the sense of isolation that can result from being a “brainiac.”
Then there are students such as Tyler and Simon, who fall into both categories.
Raising children with learning barriers is a task in itself, “but when they’re bright and gifted and have a high IQ, it’s even more frustrating, because the teachers just don’t understand how to work with these kids,” said Bloomington parent Chelle Woolley, whose 17-year-old son, Matt, was in fifth grade when he tested out for both giftedness and attention deficit disorder.
A growing awareness of so-called “twice-exceptional” or “2X” students, many of whom qualify for both gifted and special education services, is prompting some researchers to take a closer look at their needs. This fall, educators at the University of St. Thomas and four metro-area school districts are using a $490,000 federal grant to launch a five-year project aimed at developing better ways to teach 2X children, helping schools identify them and training teachers to work with them.
Ecuador exchange enhances Madison Country Day School
A recent visit by six exchange students from Ecuador enhanced the global view embraced by Madison Country Day School.
The students stayed for two weeks, attending classes at the private school for pre-kindergarten through 12th grade in the town of Westport and staying with students’ families.
They also shared aspects of their culture, in part by dancing at the school’s weekly assembly.
“It’s just one facet of the whole international program here,” said Fabian Fernandez, a sophomore at Madison Country Day School. “The whole culture exchange — it really shakes you out of a routine … . You can really become a member of the global community.”
Some students from the school here have visited Colegio Britanico Internacional, a school in Quito, Ecuador.
Community Input on Math Task Force Recommendations – SAVE THE DATES!
Hi – there will be 2 community input forums to gather input from the community on the recommendations of the Math Task Force. The report of the MTF can be found at:
http://www.mmsd.org/boe/math/
The forums are scheduled for:
Monday, December 8 from 6:00-8:00pm at Memorial High School
Tuesday, December 9 from 6:00-8:00pm at LaFollette High School
I am not sure of the format yet but know this is a busy time of year so wanted to give you an opportunity to mark your calendars if you plan on attending on of the forums. I’ll send more information when available.
Arlene
“The Obamas Walk Away from Public Schools” and a Look at Sidwell Friends
Not that there’s anything wrong with that. In fact, it’s wonderful that the Obamas had such a broad range of public and private school choices available to them. What’s puzzling is that the president-elect opposes programs that would bring that same easy choice of schools within reach of families who lack his personal wealth. By his actions, Senator Obama is demonstrating that he is not willing to wait for his own policy prescriptions to “fix and improve” public schools, but he expects folks with less ample bank accounts to patiently await his hoped-for change.
And while many reports will no doubt trumpet the $25,000+ tuition at Sidwell Friends, implying that this is extravagantly beyond what is spent in D.C. public schools, they will be mistaken. As I wrote in the Washington Post and on this blog, D.C. public schools also spent about $25,000 per child in the 2007-08 school year.
It’s not that president-elect Obama is against spending a lot of money on other people’s kids — he’s just against letting their parents choose where that money is spent.
It is the Quaker ethos that is the most striking feature of Sidwell Friends School, the one chosen by President-elect Obama for his daughters Sasha and Malia. A sense of community, equality and friendship runs through every classroom: children are encouraged to strive for their best, but to value above all their relations with each other and their place in the school family.
For any president trying to ensure that his children enjoy as normal an education as possible, such an ethos is invaluable. However rich, influential or politically important the parents – as many at Sidwell are – what matters is the “inner light” in every child. Pupils are not ranked by academic scores, and Sidwell never releases its SAT scores or college admission list. In race, wealth and nationality and in all else, all are treated the same. The two Obama girls will find their White House address is officially all but irrelevant.
Sidwell, founded in 1883 and now enrolling more than 1,000 children from kindergarten to 18, was a committed pioneer of integration and coeducation. More than one third of its intake belongs to ethnic minorities and one fifth receives financial assistance to help with the fees. The only preference is to those with Quaker connections. Since my wife and I went to Quaker schools, our daughter spent three happy primary years there during my time as bureau chief in Washington.
US officials flunk test of Amerian history, economics, civics
2008-2009 American Civic Liberty Report:
US elected officials scored abysmally on a test measuring their civic knowledge, with an average grade of just 44 percent, the group that organized the exam said Thursday.
Ordinary citizens did not fare much better, scoring just 49 percent correct on the 33 exam questions compiled by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI).
“It is disturbing enough that the general public failed ISI’s civic literacy test, but when you consider the even more dismal scores of elected officials, you have to be concerned,” said Josiah Bunting, chairman of the National Civic Literacy Board at ISI.
“How can political leaders make informed decisions if they don’t understand the American experience?” he added.
The exam questions covered American history, the workings of the US government and economics.
Among the questions asked of some 2,500 people who were randomly selected to take the test, including “self-identified elected officials,” was one which asked respondents to “name two countries that were our enemies during World War II.”
Are Tennessee schools too easy? ACT scores show lack of readiness
Only four Tennessee public high schools are preparing students to pass basic academic courses when they go on to college, if their ACT entrance exams are the indicator.
The ACT is one of the most high-profile, high-stakes tests in the country. In Tennessee, a score of 21 out of a perfect 36 is one of the requirements to earn a lottery scholarship.
Students from Hume-Fogg and Martin Luther King magnet schools in Metro Nashville, Merrol Hyde Magnet in Hendersonville and Gatlinburg-Pittman in East Tennessee averaged ACT scores high enough over a three-year period to be considered ready for basic college coursework. Only 18 percent of Tennessee’s class of 2008 students who took the test met that standard, compared with about 22 percent of students nationally.
Education experts in the state and region say that’s more evidence of what they’ve been saying about Tennessee’s high school curriculum: It’s too easy.
“We see high school valedictorians who are forced to take remedial courses,” said Alan Richard, spokesman for the Southern Regional Education Board, a nonprofit network that focuses on learning in the South. “That means there’s a gulf between what high schools teach and what colleges expect.”
Obama’s Education Transition Team
Darling-Hammond, a teacher-friendly educator, has been tapped by President-elect Barack Obama to head his transition team on education policy.
Her name appears on some – not all – of the guessing-game lists put out by education observers speculating about who Obama will pick to head the huge U.S. Department of Education. And she is the subject of an online petition begun by a teacher in Hawaii that’s attracted thousands of people – many of them teachers – urging the president-elect to choose her.
“I have no idea who it will be,” says Darling-Hammond, switching the topic to what she described as an education agenda “more bold and ambitious than anything we’ve seen since the Elementary and Secondary Education Act in 1965 … and the Education for All Handicapped Children Act” a decade later.
At this point, it’s still all about big money and big concepts: $10 billion to develop preschool programs for all children; $8 billion to narrow the achievement gap in elementary and secondary schools; $11 billion to send more students to college.
Academic Decathlon faces coach shortages
It’s early in the season for Academic Decathlon, but several previously successful Milwaukee-area schools are already out of the game.
The problem isn’t a lack of smarts for the battle of the brains between school teams – it’s a lack of coaches.
Wisconsin Academic Decathlon last week announced the 60 schools that advanced to the regional competition on Jan. 9. Officials from previously successful institutions that failed to make the list – Nicolet, Wauwatosa West, Bay View and Kettle Moraine high schools – said they didn’t field teams because they couldn’t find coaches to lead the groups.
“Funding has been easier to get than teachers,” state Academic Decathlon Director Mollie Ritchie said. “Usually a school drops its program because a coach left or retired.”
For schools around Milwaukee, and Rhinelander High School in northern Wisconsin, filling the shoes of a coach who left or gave up the position has posed problems because of the nature of the job – a time consuming, seven-month commitment if the team is successful, not counting hours inevitably spent fund raising.
Milwaukee Schools Change Teaching, Reading & Writing Strategies; Search for New Teaching & Learning Director
Major changes in how Milwaukee Public Schools teaches reading and writing are coming soon, according to school Superintendent William Andrekopoulos.
He said a team of outside experts has been evaluating MPS literacy efforts and he expects to get its report in December. He said he has been given indications of what the experts will recommend.
“I think you will see this report turning things upside down, changing some past practices, and making some bold changes that we hope will improve the performance of our kids,” he said earlier this week.
He said the state Department of Public Instruction had put together the expert team and was paying for the study as part of plans aimed at bringing MPS into compliance with goals set by the federal No Child Left Behind law.
“We’re going to take it to heart, what’s in that report,” he said. “The status quo is unacceptable. . . . We realize if we just continue to do the same thing, we’re going to get the same results.”
He did not provide details of what is expected to be in the report.
A Surprisingly Sensible 21st-Century Report
Only six weeks have passed since my last cranky diatribe about teaching what are called “21st-century skills” in our schools. I think the 21st-century skills movement is mostly a pipe dream, promoted by well-meaning people who embrace the idea of modernity but fail to consider how these allegedly new and important lessons can be taught by the usual victims of such schemes, classroom teachers.
Now I am forced to calm down, take a breath and consider the possibility that I was wrong about this, because a scholar whose work I admire has produced the first sensible report on 21st-century skills I have read. “Measuring Skills for the 21st Century” was written by Elena Silva, senior policy analyst at the Education Sector think tank in Washington. It is available at http://www.educationsector.org/research/research_show.htm?doc_id=716323. It suggests that this idea is vital, important and ought to be pursued, no matter what I say.
I telephoned Silva to express my concern that we differ on this issue, since she always knows what she is talking about and I sometimes don’t. Our conversation reassured me. She has the same doubts I do about the loose and overheated way the 21st-century skills concept has been marketed, and the failure to give teachers useful guidance on what to do with it. She agrees with me that much of what is labeled 21st-century learning is not new, but represents what our best educators have been teaching for several centuries.
Putting the Student Before the Athlete
I’m dropping the pretense of having no rooting interest this week. I’m rooting for Myron Rolle as if he’s a blood relative. I’m rooting for his flight from Birmingham, Ala., to Baltimore-Washington International Marshall Airport to be on time. I’m rooting for him to make it to Byrd Stadium by halftime at the very latest, for him to get into uniform and play as many snaps as possible for Florida State. Most of all, I’m rooting for him to wow the panelists in his Rhodes Scholarship interview earlier in the day.
Texas Tech and Oklahoma will get the majority of the college football attention this weekend, but Rolle is the best story. He’s not the first football player up for one of 32 Rhodes Scholarships. In fact, a Yale defensive back, Casey Gerald, will be in Houston today as one of 13 region finalists. But while Yale is as much a part of college football’s history as Florida State, let nobody suggest that the football pressures in the Ivy League match those at a school such as Florida State, where Rolle’s defensive coordinator once suggested the kid might be devoting too much time to academics and not enough to football.
Alan Kay: A powerful idea about teaching ideas
TED Talks:
Academic Credit for Sports in Texas
The proposal, which could go into effect as early as next school year, would allow four years of sports to count as elective credits toward graduation instead of the current maximum of two years.
The board’s 10-5 vote followed often emotional debate, with both Dallas members – Republican Geraldine Miller and Democrat Mavis Knight – voting no.
Supporters said the move would keep kids in school and spur them to do well in academic courses. Critics charged that the plan would de-emphasize academics and return to the days of “football comes first.”
Ms. Miller was among the most vocal opponents, insisting the plan would “completely dismantle” many of the education reforms enacted in Texas over the last two decades.
“This takes us back to the way things used to be,” she said. “Our school reform movement put everything in perspective, with academics coming first. Now, we are opening the door to water down all the efforts we have made to strengthen standards in our schools.”
But Craig Agnew, the Brenham High School coach and teacher who petitioned the board to adopt the rule, said an “unfair burden” exists for student athletes who must meet stringent course requirements to retain their athletic eligibility.
Reform Teacher Training & Education Research
Bryk said, noting that less than 0.25 percent of the overall education budget — an estimate based on education as a $500 billion a year industry in the United States — is allocated to research and development. By contrast, he noted, in fields such as medicine and engineering, 5 to 15 percent of the total budget is spent on R&D.
Bryk expressed, moreover, concern that most research is being conducted in the university setting where, as he wrote, “new theory development is more valued than practical solutions.” This environment, he said, is not conducive to the creation of workable solutions in education reform — not as long as scholarly articles in journals are considered the acme of accomplishment in educational research.
The Test Passes, Colleges Fail
FOR some years now, many elite American colleges have been downgrading the role of standardized tests like the SAT in deciding which applicants are admitted, or have even discarded their use altogether. While some institutions justify this move primarily as a way to enroll a more diverse group of students, an increasing number claim that the SAT is a poor predictor of academic success in college, especially compared with high school grade-point averages.
Are they correct? To get an answer, we need to first decide on a good measure of “academic success.” Given inconsistent grading standards for college courses, the most easily comparable metric is the graduation rate. Students’ families and society both want college entrants to graduate, and we all know that having a college degree translates into higher income. Further, graduation rates among students and institutions vary much more widely than do college grades, making them a clearer indicator of how students are faring.
So, here is the question: do SATs predict graduation rates more accurately than high school grade-point averages? If we look merely at studies that statistically correlate SAT scores and high school grades with graduation rates, we find that, indeed, the two standards are roughly equivalent, meaning that the better that applicants do on either of these indicators the more likely they are to graduate from college. However, since students with high SAT scores tend to have better high school grade-point averages, this data doesn’t tell us which of the indicators — independent of the other — is a better predictor of college success.
At Transition High, teens leave past behind
From the corner of N. 27th St. and North Ave., Transition High School looks more like a strip mall than a place where teenagers are turning their lives around.
The Milwaukee public school, which opened in March, is home to students working through challenges beyond the scope of what most traditional high schools can handle. Some have been expelled. Others have served sentences in the House of Correction or a youth facility. Some have been truant for more than a year.
But on a recent day, as they wrapped up online coursework and got ready for an afternoon of off-campus rock climbing, students talked about how safe they felt.
“This is a non-violent place,” said Charles Banster, 16, and a sophomore. “Nobody has problems here.”
Another student, who said he had spent time in a large school on the city’s south side, agreed. The small environment makes him feel like he’s among family.
“I don’t like too many people around me,” said 14-year-old Tim Owens-Rice. “I just feel paranoid.” In the past, that need to define and defend his personal space has led to fights, he said.
Study Abroad Flourishes, With China a Hot Spot
The big-box aesthetic does not immediately lend itself to any other use. The buildings are often upward of 150,000 square feet. There simply aren’t many enterprises that need that much space, and because the buildings are built for a single-use purpose, it’s not so easy to break them up into smaller units. Yet all over the country, resourceful communities are finding ways to reuse these buildings, turning them into flea markets, museums, schools–even churches.
“>Tamar Lewin:
Record numbers of American students are studying abroad, with especially strong growth in educational exchanges with China, the annual report by the Institute on International Education found.
The number of Americans studying in China increased by 25 percent, and the number of Chinese students studying at American universities increased by 20 percent last year, according to the report, “Open Doors 2008.”
“Interest in China is growing dramatically, and I think we’ll see even sharper increases in next year’s report,” said Allan E. Goodman, president of the institute. “People used to go to China to study the history and language, and many still do, but with China looming so large in all our futures, there’s been a real shift, and more students go for an understanding of what’s happening economically and politically.”
Washington DC Schools’ Chancellor Michelle Rhee Proposes Parent Academy, Better Security
Revamped security and discipline policies, more specialized schools, a “Parent Academy” to help District parents take charge of their children’s education and the possibility of more school closures are part of the long-term vision proposed by Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee in a new document.
The 79-page “action plan,” which Rhee will present to the D.C. Council tomorrow, pulls together a broad variety of ideas that have been only hinted at publicly, including a possible end to out-of-school suspensions and an increase in the number of “theme” schools, focusing on high technology, language immersion, or gifted and talented students.
Other goals in the draft document — the need for new and better-paid teachers, higher test scores, closing the achievement gap between white and minority students — are ones she has frequently articulated. Taken together, they provide the most detailed picture of Rhee’s aspirations for the 120-school system, which is affected by declining enrollment and poor academic performance.
You are Invited: Varsity Academics in Madison Tonight, 11/19 @ 7:00p.m.
Wednesday, November 19, 2008; 7:00p.m. in Madison. [PDF Flyer]
Lecture Hall 1345
Health Sciences Learning Center (HSLC)
750 Highland Avenue Madison, WI [Map]
We hope that Mr. Fitzhugh’s appearance will create new academic opportunities for Wisconsin students.
Parking
Metered parking is available at the University Hospital (UWHC) Patient/Visitor Lot [Map], just south of the HSLC. Free parking is available in Lot 85, across the street from the HSLC and next to the Pharmacy Building at 2245 Observatory Drive [Map].
About the Speaker:
Low standards led Will Fitzhugh to quit his job as a history teacher in 1987 and begin publishing the journal [The Concord Review] out of his home in Concord, Mass.
Concerned that schools were becoming anti-intellectual and holding students to low standards, he thought the venture could fuel a national–even international–interest in student research and writing in the humanities.
“As a teacher, it is not uncommon to have your consciousness end at the classroom wall. But I came to realize that there was a national concern about students’ ignorance of history and inability to write,” he said.
During his 10 years of teaching at Concord-Carlisle High School, the 62-year-old educator said in a recent interview, he always had a handful of students who did more than he asked, and whose papers reflected serious research.Those students “just had higher standards, and I was always impressed by that,” Mr. Fitzhugh said. “I figured there have got to be some wonderful essays just sitting out there. I wanted to recognize and encourage kids who are already working hard, and to challenge the kids who are not.”
Fitzhugh will discuss the problems of reading, writing and college readiness at the high school level. There will be an extended discussion period.
For more information, or to schedule some time with Mr. Fitzhugh during
his visit, contact Jim Zellmer (608 213-0434 or zellmer@gmail.com), Lauren Cunningham (608 469-4474) or Laurie Frost (608 238-6375).
Wisconsin Poll on Public Education:
A Slight Majority Believe They Received a Better Education than Students Do Today
Residents Support Major Reforms in Teacher Compensation
Wisconsin Policy Research Institute:
There are some issues that seemingly never change. Twenty years ago 49% of Wisconsin residents thought they had received a better education in elementary and secondary schools than students today. In 2008, 47% of Wisconsin residents had the same view. Twenty years ago 70% of our residents rated their local schools as excellent or very good. Today, 69% rated their local schools as excellent or good.
Twenty years ago 76% of our residents supported merit pay for teachers; today 77% of our residents support merit pay for teachers. Twenty years ago 58% of our residents thought that discipline in our public schools was too lenient; today 60% hold this view.
These are among the key findings about statewide policy issues from the most recent survey of 600 Wisconsin residents conducted by the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute, Inc. and Diversified Research between November 9 and 10, 2008.
The Overall Quality Of Education
47% of the respondents in this survey thought that they had received a better education at the elementary and secondary level than students do today; 44% disagreed. Twenty years ago 49% thought they had received a better education and 45% thought they had not. Demographically there is a large gap in this response based on race–46% of Whites in 2008 thought they had received a better education, but 90% of Black respondents thought they had received a better education and only 10% thought that students today received a better education.
Head of Teachers’ Union Offers to Talk on Tenure and Merit Pay
Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, said Monday that given the economic crisis, her union would be willing to discuss new approaches to issues like teacher tenure and merit pay.
“Faced with declining tax revenues, state and local governments are cutting” education budgets nationwide, Ms. Weingarten said in a speech to education policy makers in Washington.
“In the spirit of this extraordinary moment, and as a pledge of shared responsibility, I’ll take the first step,” she said. “With the exception of vouchers, which siphon scarce resources from public schools, no issue should be off the table, provided it is good for children and fair to teachers.”
It is unclear how much practical effect Ms. Weingarten’s speech will have on the stance her 1.4-million-member union and its locals take in negotiations with school districts or in lobbying state legislatures.
Charter schools to buy three Minneapolis district buildings
The Minneapolis School District is close to finalizing the sale of three of its shuttered buildings. But unlike previous real estate deals, the district this time entertained offers from charter schools.
St. Paul, Minn. — Minneapolis School Board member Pam Costain calls the sale of Franklin, Putnam, and Morris Park Schools “uncharted territory.” That’s because, even though the district has leased space to private schools before, there used to be a policy banning the sale of any of district buildings to charter schools — with the idea that they’re the competition.
But that’s exactly who’s in line to move into these buildings, in North, Northeast, and South Minneapolis.
Not Everyone Wants to Move Toward Rating Educators by Student Progress
For a while, the fight over how to improve public schools seemed to be quieting down. During the presidential campaign, Republican and Democratic education advisers happily finished each other’s sentences on such issues as expanding charter schools, recruiting better teachers and, in particular, rating schools by how much students improve.
Moving to the growth model for school assessment, by measuring each student’s progress, seems to be the favorite education reform of the incoming Obama administration. Up till now, we have measured schools by comparing the average student score one year with the average for the previous year’s students. It was like rating pumpkin farmers by comparing this year’s crop with last year’s rather than by how much growth they managed to coax out of each pumpkin.
The growth model appeals to parents because it focuses on each child. It gives researchers a clearer picture of what affects student achievement and what does not. Officials throughout the Washington area have joined the growth model (sometimes called “value-added”) fan club. The next step would be to use the same data to see which teachers add the most value to their students each year.
Keeping Notes Afloat in Class
Third-graders at Hunters Woods Elementary School are required to learn the fundamentals of the violin. They know how to stand up straight, how to hold their instruments and how to use the tippy tips of their fingers when they press on the strings so they don’t make what their teacher calls “an icky sound.”
After learning a grand total of eight notes, they also know how to make music. Their repertoire one fall morning included pieces from a range of cultures and styles: “Caribbean Island,” “Seminole Chant,” “Good King Wenceslas.”
In Fairfax County and elsewhere, students often begin studying violin in fourth grade. Hunters Woods, an arts and science magnet school in Reston, gives them a one-year head start. Experts say the earlier children begin, the more likely they are to succeed in music.
Hunters Woods, with 950 students, is one of more than a dozen local schools in which teachers are trained through the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts to infuse arts education into other subjects. For instance, students might build instruments from recycled materials, learn science through lessons on sound and vibration or study math through measurement and patterning. Some also compose songs with lyrics inspired by Virginia history.
But music programs and the rest of the education budget are under scrutiny as the county School Board seeks to close a $220 million budget shortfall for the fiscal year that begins in July. One proposal to save about $850,000 would trim band and strings teaching positions, making it tough to keep such programs in third and fourth grades, said Roger Tomhave, fine arts coordinator for Fairfax schools.
This tune sounds familiar. Madison formerly offered a 4th grade strings program (now only in 5th).
Another Look at the Madison School District’s Use of “Value Added Assessment”
The analysis of data from 27 elementary schools and 11 middle schools is based on scores from the Wisconsin Knowledge and Concepts Examination (WKCE), a state test required by the federal No Child Left Behind law.
Madison is the second Wisconsin district, after Milwaukee, to make a major push toward value-added systems, which are gaining support nationally as an improved way of measuring school performance.
Advocates say it’s better to track specific students’ gains over time than the current system, which holds schools accountable for how many students at a single point in time are rated proficient on state tests.
“This is very important,” Madison schools Superintendent Daniel Nerad said. “We think it’s a particularly fair way … because it’s looking at the growth in that school and ascertaining the influence that the school is having on that outcome.”
The findings will be used to pinpoint effective teaching methods and classroom design strategies, officials said. But they won’t be used to evaluate teachers: That’s forbidden by state law.
The district paid about $60,000 for the study.
Much more on “Value Added Assessment” here.
Ironically, the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction stated the following:
“… The WKCE is a large-scale assessment designed to provide a snapshot of how well a district or school is doing at helping all students reach proficiency on state standards, with a focus on school and district-level accountability. A large-scale, summative assessment such as the WKCE is not designed to provide diagnostic information about individual students. Those assessments are best done at the local level, where immediate results can be obtained. Schools should not rely on only WKCE data to gauge progress of individual students or to determine effectiveness of programs or curriculum.”
Related:
- Wisconsin, Mississippi have “easy state K-12 exams” – NY Times
- Much more on Wisconsin’s state exam; the WKCE, here.
- The Fordham Foundation gave Wisconsin’s standards a “D”.
- The Death of WKCE? Task Force to Develop “Comprehensive Assessment System for Wisconsin”
- Alan Borsuk has more
Teachers union talks of big goals in Washington
The head of the American Federation of Teachers signaled the union’s willingness Monday to work broadly on education reform with the incoming Obama administration. It said that, with the exception of school vouchers, “no issue should be off the table.”
AFT president Randi Weingarten cautioned lawmakers nationwide against a “disinvestment in education” in the face of the economic meltdown. She warned that cutting aid to schools “places our economy in a race to the bottom for years to come.”
Weingarten already has told Congress that schools must be included in economic stimulus plans. She testified last month that lawmakers should add $20 billion to a social-services block grant to help state and local governments balance budgets without cutting education. She also said schools need $286 billion for buildings improvements.
Public vs. Private Schooling: Is There A Wrong Answer?
NPR:
As the Obama family prepares to transition into the White House, one of the most pressing matters is choosing a school for their two daughters, Sasha and Malia. Mary Lord, of D.C. State Board of Education; Mark Gooden, an education professor and Jay Matthews, education columnist for the Washington Post talk about the sometimes complicated choice between public or private schooling for children.
New York City’s School Grades
The A-through-F grading system for New York City schools is billed as a public information tool, helping people sort out which schools are teaching children and which schools are just moving them along. Instead of inscrutable education jargon and endless score charts, the letter grades act like billboards broadcasting achievements and failures.
But for parents shopping for the best schools, the letter grades can obscure some of the most salient information, because they are determined largely by how much progress students make year to year rather than how well their skills stand up against objective standards.
While the question of how effective teachers are at moving students forward is a critical one for their bosses, many parents are equally interested in which schools are most likely to, say, have students reading at grade level or ensure that sophomores are mastering algebra. The heavy emphasis on peer comparisons to schools serving similar populations is clearly a fairer yardstick for educators, but it can hide schools burdened by particularly challenging demographics.
Obama and the War on Brains
NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Barack Obama’s election is a milestone in more than his pigmentation. The second most remarkable thing about his election is that American voters have just picked a president who is an open, out-of-the-closet, practicing intellectual.
We can’t solve our educational challenges when, according to polls, Americans are approximately as likely to believe in flying saucers as in evolution, and when one-fifth of Americans believe that the sun orbits the Earth.
Yet times may be changing. How else do we explain the election in 2008 of an Ivy League-educated law professor who has favorite philosophers and poets?
Granted, Mr. Obama may have been protected from accusations of excessive intelligence by his race. That distracted everyone, and as a black man he didn’t fit the stereotype of a pointy-head ivory tower elitist.
An intellectual is a person interested in ideas and comfortable with complexity. Intellectuals read the classics, even when no one is looking, because they appreciate the lessons of Sophocles and Shakespeare that the world abounds in uncertainties and contradictions….
Incompletes
Most from class of 2000 have failed to earn degrees
About two-thirds of the city’s high school graduates in 2000 who enrolled in college have failed to earn degrees, according to a first-of-its-kind study being released today.
The findings represent a major setback for a city school system that made significant strides in recent years with percentages of graduates enrolling in college consistently higher than national averages, according to the report by the Boston Private Industry Council and the School Department.
However, the study shows that the number who went on to graduate is lower than the national average.
The low number of students who were able to earn college degrees or post-secondary certificates in a city known as a center of American higher education points to the enormous barriers facing urban high school graduates – many of whom are the first in their families to attend college. While the study did not address reasons for the low graduation rates, these students often have financial problems, some are raising children, and others are held back by a need to retake high school courses in college because they lack basic skills.
The students’ failure to complete college could exacerbate the fiscal problems in the state’s economy, which requires a highly skilled workforce, say business leaders and educators. While tens of thousands of students around the globe flock to the region’s colleges each fall, many of them leave once receiving their degrees.
Bill Gates: “breaking large high schools into smaller units, on its own guaranteed no overall success”
Excerpt: “A main strategy of the schools, breaking large high schools into smaller units, on its own guaranteed no overall success, Gates said.
He said the New York City small schools were an example of successes in raising high school graduation rates — but a disappointment in that their graduates were no likelier than any city student to be prepared to go onto college.
Gates said the small number of successful schools did well not because they were structured as small schools, but because they enacted many different innovations: improved teaching quality, a longer school day, innovative instructional tools, a focus on tracking student achievement data.”
The implementation of “Small Learning Communities” in Madison has not been without controversy.
Research scientist helps Edgewood eighth-graders explore biochemistry
Students at Edgewood Campus School are learning with the help of a research scientist.
This is the third year Edgewood is participating in the SMART (Students Modeling A Research Topic) Team program where students learn what active research scientists investigate in their labs. Along the way, students learn hands-on molecular modeling to better understand biochemistry and what happens when diseases occur.
“It tries to show students what research science is like,” said Edgewood Campus School teacher Dan Toomey. “Science is not a collection of facts.”
Toomey’s three eighth-grade science classes are participating in the program, which was integrated into his classroom after he first ran it as an after-school program.
For one activity this year, the students created a three-dimensional model of amino acids to learn how they interact.
“It’s a lot easier than, like, seeing a picture,” said eighth-grader Anna Heffernan.
Competing for Grammar School
It’s a brisk Friday morning and a skinny little boy in a large blazer stands shivering by locked school gates. Close beside him are his mother, his father and his two grandmothers, both in saris. The trembling child is right to be anxious. He is about to sit the entrance tests for Queen Elizabeth’s School in Barnet, north London, one of England’s leading grammar schools, and the odds against him passing through this narrow gateway to academic success are extremely slim. There are just 180 places available in the school’s Year Seven each year and 1,200 boys hoping to fill them.
Grammar schools have always been popular but with the financial meltdown affecting many affluent families, a free education in a traditional environment is looking highly attractive to parents of bright 10-year-olds. Fees for three children at independent secondary schools cost £50,000 or more a year, and four out of five parents pay those fees out of income.
Jenny Jones, secretary of the National Grammar Schools Association, a non-political body of parents, teachers and heads promoting grammar schools, confirms that “there have definitely been more applications from families who would normally go to independent schools”.
Universal preK brings new challenges for public elementary schools
In 2005, when Boston mayor Thomas Menino announced his plan to make prekindergarten available to all four-year-olds in the city, parents and early childhood advocates applauded this initiative to add a 14th year to the city’s public school system.
Three years later, after preK classrooms were established in 50 of the city’s 67 elementary schools, educators say implementing the mayor’s vision has proved to be a major challenge. There were facility issues: none of the classrooms had running water or bathrooms, so administrators lobbied to build toilet facilities in the rooms–at the cost of $35,000 each. There were oversight issues: many of the elementary school principals weren’t sensitive to the needs of four-year-olds, so Boston established a professional development academy for administrators faced with the prospect of educating preschoolers.
Then there was the impact on the elementary schools where those four-year-olds were getting ready for kindergarten. When those students turned five, they were so well prepared that the district had to retool its kindergarten curriculum to keep pace with children much more ready to learn.
AP Students Forced to Accept Less
A teacher with the sign-on name of pfelcher posted a provocative comment on the Web version of my Nov. 3 column for the Post’s Metro section. I was repeating for the 4,897th time my view that even low-income students who have not performed well in school can learn in a college-level high school course, like Advanced Placement or International Baccalaureate, if given extra time and encouragement.
Pfelcher would have none of my argument. To support his opinion, he cited a personal experience in his classroom. I always find first-person accounts helpful when debating this issue. I decided to send his comment to a few other AP teachers I knew, and see what they had to say.
Here is the post from pfelcher, whom I do not know and cannot identify further, followed by the reactions of three teachers, plus a student who sent me his view. If we want to make our high schools better, we have to work this out. I think such exchanges help us figure out what to do:
……
It’s not about who wins in a class of students with such disparate preparation and skill; it’s about who loses. The students ready to march ahead are forced instead to grind to a halt as the other students have to be taught the basics with which they should have entered the class.
At the end of the year, those unprepared students who might have gained from my class but who still had too far to go to attain the literacy and competence the test requires, failed miserably on the AP exam. So, did these lower-end students gain from the experience? Yes, they did to some degree, even though egos that had never really been tried suffered when they saw how they compared to the nation.
The Best Places in the USA to Raise Your Children
A Chicago suburb beats out thousands of other communities around the U.S. as the best, most affordable place to raise kids.
Mount Prospect, Ill., is a quiet Chicago suburb with a population of just over 56,000. It is a tight-knit town where over the past eight years Prospect High School’s football team won three state championships, its Marching Knights picked up their 26th straight grand champion title at the annual state marching band festival, and just last month the school itself ranked 12th among all state high schools. Now the town is also the winner of Businessweek’s second annual roundup of the Best Places in America to Raise Kids.
Founded by German immigrants and incorporated in 1917, Mount Prospect hasn’t strayed far from its values of fiscal conservatism and community involvement, even as it has expanded to include new immigrants from Poland, Mexico, Korea, and India. It is a middle-class community with low crime, affordable homes, award-winning schools, ethnic restaurants, a major regional mall, and a small-town charm that makes the big city less than an hour away seem much farther away.
Other cities mentioned include: Euless, TX, Murfreesboro, TN, Huntsville, AL and Eau Claire, WI.
Tempe High relishes chance to become IB school
A 3.7 grade-point average and a schedule stacked with honors classes may be enough for Tempe High School sophomore Fabian De La Cruz to attain his goal of attending Harvard University.
A new program slated for implementation at his school next year could only help the aspiring surgeon reach his dream and become the first person in his family to go to college.
The International Baccalaureate program comprises a rigorous interdisciplinary curriculum that emphasizes an international perspective and critical and creative thinking skills.
Arts Integration Aids Students’ Grasp of Academics
Teacher Karen McKiernan’s science class at Dr. Charles R. Drew Elementary School seemed more like a lesson in art appreciation than the laws of physics as students focused on a poster of an abstract painting propped against the blackboard.
The room buzzed with questions as the fifth-graders at the Silver Spring school queried each other about the piece, “People and Dog in the Sun,” by Joan Miró.
“What would this painting look like if it was not abstract?” 10-year-old Annesha Goswami asked her classmates.
“Why do you think there are so many dark colors and only one bright color?” asked Elizabeth Iduma, 10.
The students, participants in the school’s talented and gifted magnet program, were practicing a thinking routine called “creative questions” which was designed to help them “think outside the box,” McKiernan said. For the class’s next meeting, McKiernan said, she planned to have students relate their thoughts about the artwork to the concepts of force, motion and energy that the fifth-graders had been studying.
India’s Colleges Battle a Thicket of Red Tape
Under the labyrinthine regulations that govern technical colleges nationwide, the Principal K.M. Kundnani College of Pharmacy must provide 168 square feet of building space for each student. The rule is intended to ensure students have enough space to learn. But it effectively caps enrollment at 300, even though students are spread so thinly in the eight-story building that the top floor remains unused, its lecture halls padlocked.
The rules also stipulate the exact size for libraries and administrative offices, the ratio of professors to assistant professors and lecturers, quotas for student enrollment and the number of computer terminals, books and journals that must be on site.
“I am not free to run this school as I wish,” Ms. D’Mello, 51 years old, says. “I am at the whim of unrealistic demands.”
Bill Gates on Ed in ’08 & School Reform Impediments
Erik Robelen quotes Bill Gates:
“We have not found a way to do it. We have not been very successful at it…the problem we tend to run into is that the most influential and well-educated people either have their kids in private schools, or they have their kids in an enclave inside the high school that are called honor’s courses, where the teaching is pretty decent and so, if we go to a school and say, let’s change things here, they say, no way, you’re going to mess our little enclave up. All the kids go through the same front door, but really it’s a separate school inside there that’s allowing us not to be part of that insanity, and so don’t mess with the thing that works well for us. And I do think, if you want to stand up to some of the practices that are not focused on the needs of the students, you need a broad set of parents. I think we’re very weak on this point.
During the presidential election, we had two advocacy efforts. One about global development, and one about education. And we didn’t end up spending the amount of money that we had available for the advocacy because most of what we were causing people to do was to mouth platitudes. … On global development, which I thought was the harder of the two, we actually succeeded because people never even talked about it at all, and we actually got them to talk about it.”
On College-Entrance Exam Day, All of South Korea Is Put to the Test
One foggy morning last November, officer Kang Jin-jin heard the distress call on his police radio: An 18-year-old girl about to take the national college-entrance exam had left her admission ticket at home.
Mr. Kang dashed off to the girl’s apartment, got the ticket from her father, and raced across town on his motorcycle, arriving at the school just in time for the test.
“I had to ignore traffic signs and turn on the siren,” he said. “It was a bit risky, but I tried my best.”
Mr. Kang’s heroic effort is hardly an isolated one. On the day each November that high-school seniors take the college-entrance test — Nov. 13, this year — South Korea is a changed country.
Many offices and the stock market open at 10 a.m., an hour later than usual, to keep the roads free for students on their way to the test. All other students get the day off to keep schools quiet for the test takers. And while students are taking the listening portions of the tests, planes can’t land or take off at the nation’s airports. Aircraft arriving from other countries are ordered to circle at altitudes above 10,000 feet.
BIBLIOPHOBIA
Will Fitzhugh in Madison 11/19 @ 7:00p.m.
Madison meeting details here
The Boston Globe reported recently that Michelle Wie, the 16-year-old Korean-American golfing phenomenon, not only speaks Korean and English, but has also taken four years of Japanese, and is beginning to study Mandarin. She is planning to apply early to Stanford University. I would be willing to bet, however, that in high school her academic writing has been limited to the five-paragraph essay, and it is very likely that she has not been assigned a complete nonfiction book.
For the last two years, and especially since the National Endowment for the Arts unveiled the findings of its large ($300,000) study of reading of fiction in the United States, I have been seeking funding for a much smaller study of the assignment of complete nonfiction books in U.S. public high schools. This proposed study, which education historian Diane Ravitch has called “timely and relevant,” has met with little interest, having so far been turned down by the National Endowment for the Humanities as well as a number of foundations and institutes both large and small.
Still, I have a fair amount of anecdotal evidence some of it from people who would be quite shocked to hear that high school English departments were no longer assigning any complete novels that the non-assignment of nonfiction books on subjects like history is unremarkable and, in fact, accepted.
A partner in a law firm in Boston, for instance, told me there was no point in such a study, because everyone knows history books aren’t assigned in schools. This was the case, he said, even decades ago at his own alma mater, Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, where he was assigned only selections, readings, and the like, never a complete book. A senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, said when I lamented that I couldn’t find anyone who agrees that high school students should read at least one nonfiction book, “The only hope is parents introducing their kids to reading, and that’s a mighty slim hope.”
Page Per Year Plan
Diane Ravitch recently pointed out that, “the campaign against homework goes on. Its success will guarantee a steady decline in the very activities that matter most in education: independent reading; thoughtful writing; research projects.”
It is clearer and clearer that most high school students, when they do read a book, read fiction. The College Board’s Reading List of 101 Books for the College-Bound Student includes only four works of nonfiction: Walden, Emerson’s Essays, Night, and The Autobiography of Frederick Douglass. Nothing by David McCullough, David Hackett Fischer, or any other great contemporary (or past) historian is suggested for the “College-Bound Student.”
The SAT, ACT, and NAEP writing assessments, and most state writing standards, require no prior knowledge and challenge students to write their opinions and personal stories in 25 minutes. Unless college history professors start assigning term papers by saying: “‘History repeats itself.’ See what you can write about that in 25 minutes and turn it in six weeks from now,” our high school graduates will continue to find that they have been sadly misled about the demands for academic writing they will face.
A national study done for The Concord Review in 2002, of the assignment of high school history term papers, found that 81% of public high school history teachers never assign a 20-page paper, and 62% never assign a 12-page paper any more, even to high school seniors. The Boston Latin School, a famous exam school, no longer assigns the “traditional history term paper.”
One reason for this, I believe, is that teachers find that by the time their students are Juniors and Seniors in high school, they have done so little academic expository writing that they simply could not manage a serious history research paper, if they were asked to do one.
How Much Homework is Too Much?
Q: My son is in elementary school and has already gotten far more homework than last year, going from fourth to fifth grade. The work isn’t difficult, but there’s a lot of it. Keeping him on task is a nightly struggle at our house. I’ve talked with his teacher and she says no one else has complained. How much is too much homework?
A: I hate homework. Do I lose my mom sash and crown for admitting that?
I understand the importance of homework: It gives students a chance to review what they’re learning in class; it is feedback for teachers so they’ll know whether students understand the subjects covered in school; it’s a way to extend learning by having students discover new information about a subject; it’s practice; it gives parents an opportunity to be involved in their kids’ education. That’s all positive. But some nights, the homework routine in our house makes me feel like a crinkled, crumpled sheet of notebook paper.
Seattle Public Schools requires its teachers to assign homework. The district’s homework policy was adopted way back in 1983 and hasn’t been modified since. Here are the district’s guidelines for the minimum/maximum amount of homework a student should receive:
Grades K-2: Five to 10 minutes per day or 20 to 40 minutes each week
Grades 3-4: 10 to 20 minutes per day, 40-80 minutes each week
Grades 5-6: 20 to 40 minutes per day, 80-160 minutes a week
Middle School: One to two hours per night, five to 10 hours per week
High School: Two hours per night, 10 hours each week
Obama Is Expected to Put Education Overhaul on Back Burner
Robert Tomsho & John Hechinger:
With the federal government under pressure to rescue banks, auto makers and homeowners, as well as a federal budget deficit that could double to $1 trillion this fiscal year, many observers question whether Mr. Obama will undertake education measures that require significant spending.
Tom Loveless, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a think tank, said he expects Mr. Obama to sidestep most major issues involving public schools and instead focus on small, symbolic initiatives in the mold of former President Bill Clinton’s promotion of school uniforms as a way to instill discipline in classrooms.
Economically, the new president faces a “tough, tough balancing act,” said Arne Duncan, chief executive of the Chicago Public Schools and an education adviser to Mr. Obama. Even so, Mr. Duncan said education has been pivotal to Mr. Obama’s personal story, and he predicted “a very strong, aggressive and comprehensive strategy” on the issue. “This is something that is hugely important to him,” said Mr. Duncan, who has been mentioned as a possible secretary of education in the Obama administration.
Incoming White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, speaking on ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday, said stimulating the economy and getting people back to work will be the new administration’s top priority. But he added that the president-elect sees the financial crisis as an opportunity to make changes in energy policy, health care and education. “Those issues that are usually referred to as long-term are immediate,” he said.
Chinese Language Part Of Day At School
The melody was familiar – “Frere Jacques,” the nursery rhyme sung by generations of schoolchildren – but the words weren’t.
“Xia zhou jian, Xia zhou jian,” intoned Xu Chen to the final notes of the song. Gathered around her, the children attending the first day of the first Panda Academy at the Racine Montessori School followed along even if they didn’t know what they were saying. Roughly translated it meant “See you next week,” and it was the phrase which students would be expected to repeat as they left the room following their first lesson in the Chinese language.
The academy, which began Sept. 27, grew out of a desire to teach adopted Asian children about their heritage, to offer the language of a nation important to modern commerce, and to eliminate long drives for parents.
“I think every community has a burgeoning Asian population and not necessarily by adoption. The percentage of Asians in the country is very small, but it’s the fastest-growing,” said Kelly Gallaher, one of the people who organized the academy.
ACT or SAT? More Students Answering ‘All Of the Above’
For students in the Washington region, picking a college entrance test has become a multiple-choice question.
The SAT has long dominated the bustling college-prep market in the District and its suburbs. But the rival ACT is making inroads, buoyed by a shift in conventional wisdom, which now holds that the tests are of about equal value and that a student would be wise to take both. Colleges are driving the trend because admission officers are spreading the word that it doesn’t matter which test students take.
The ascendance of the ACT has brought Hertz-Avis style competition to the test-obsessed D.C. region. It’s a boon to students, who find they have more ways than ever to impress colleges. The SAT tests how students think. The ACT measures what they have learned. Each is a better fit for some students than others.
Charters lead California’s traditional schools in achievement for poor children, survey finds
Four Southern California charters and one L.A. Unified campus are among the top 15 serving students living in poverty.
The burgeoning charter school movement in California has largely made its mark as an alternative to low-performing inner-city schools. An analysis being issued today suggests that, at their best, charters are doing that job well, outperforming most traditional public schools that serve children in poverty.
Using the Academic Performance Index as a measuring tool, the California Charter Schools Assn. found that 12 of the top 15 public schools in California that cater primarily to poor children are charters.
“These results show that charter schools are opening doors of opportunity for California’s most underserved students, and effectively advancing them on the path to academic success,” said Peter Thorp, interim head of the association. He urged traditional public schools to study the charters to replicate their success.
The association, which is an advocate for charter schools, focused on schools where at least 70% of the children qualify for free or reduced price lunch. Of more than 3,000 public schools statewide that fit that description, the highest API score — 967 — was earned by American Indian Public Charter, a middle school in Oakland whose students are primarily Asian, black and Latino, and have a poverty rate of 98%. It was followed by its sibling, American Indian Public High School, with a score of 958.
On Class Size & Adversity
The man who boasts of walking seven miles to school, barefoot, every morning, happily drives his own grandchildren ten blocks in an S.U.V. We have become convinced that the surest path to success for our children involves providing them with a carefully optimized educational experience: the “best” schools, the most highly educated teachers, the smallest classrooms, the shiniest facilities, the greatest variety of colors in the art-room paint box. But one need only look at countries where schoolchildren outperform their American counterparts–despite larger classes, shabbier schools, and smaller budgets–to wonder if our wholesale embrace of the advantages of advantages isn’t as simplistic as Carnegie’s wholesale embrace of the advantages of disadvantages.
In E. J. Kahn’s Profile, he tells the story of a C.E.O. retreat that Weinberg attended, organized by Averell Harriman. It was at Sun Valley, Harriman’s ski resort, where, Kahn writes, it emerged that Weinberg had never skied before:
Gates Foundation releases new giving plans for education & Plans “National Standards”
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation today unveiled new directions for its education giving, which include working to double the number of students who complete some kind of postsecondary degree.
Efforts also would be made to identify and reward good teaching, help average teachers get better, devise better tests and create a national set of learning standards for high schools.
Bill and Melinda Gates announced these and other plans today to a group of about 100 guests in Seattle that included many big names in U.S. education.
The leaders of the nation’s two largest teachers unions were there, as well as superintendents of some of the biggest districts in the country, including New York, Chicago, and Washington D.C. Advisers to president-elect Barack Obama also were present, as were several people who are rumored to be in the running to be the next U.S. Secretary of Education.
More here.
Madison Business Employees Help Tutor Students; Local Reading Scores
Years after graduation, he’s hearing the ring of the school bell at Sherman Middle School on Madison’s north side.
“I’ve had an effect on a number of the kids’ math scores,” said Schmidt, 44, whose background is in computer software design. “I know they’re doing better because they tell me they’re doing better.”
He said that he isn’t happy to take the credit, which is something that almost has to be pulled out of him. But the five students who he tutors weekly in math as part of the “Schools of Hope” tutoring program sing his praises when he’s out of the room.
“Monty’s awesome,” said seventh-grader Henrietta Allison.
“They know that when he comes in on Monday, he’s going to be asking, ‘Did you do your homework? What are you missing?'” said teacher Chrissy Mitlyng. “They expect that, and I think that’s a really good relationship to have.”
Teachers report that students who work with the tutors are more confident after their sessions, and are more likely to speak up in class and participate in group work. While classroom confidence might be the most notable impact, it trickles down to fill the racial achievement gap the program was designed to help close, WISC-TV reported.
In 1995, 28.5 percent of black students in the Madison Metropolitan School District tested below the minimal standard on the third grade reading test, along with 9.7 percent of Latino students, 24.2 percent of Asian students and 4.1 percent of white students.
On November 7, Superintendent Art Rainwater made his annual report to the Board of Education on progress toward meeting the district’s student achievement goal in reading. As he did last fall, the superintendent made some interesting claims about the district’s success in closing the academic achievement gap “based on race”.
According to Mr. Rainwater, the place to look for evidence of a closing achievement gap is the comparison of the percentage of African American third graders who score at the lowest level of performance on statewide tests and the percentage of other racial groups scoring at that level. He says that, after accounting for income differences, there is no gap associated with race at the lowest level of achievement in reading. He made the same claim last year, telling the Wisconsin State Journal on September 24, 2004, “for those kids for whom an ability to read would prevent them from being successful, we’ve reduced that percentage very substantially, and basically, for all practical purposes, closed the gap”. Last Monday, he stated that the gap between percentages scoring at the lowest level “is the original gap” that the board set out to close.
Unfortunately, that is not the achievement gap that the board aimed to close.
……
What the superintendent is saying is that MMSD has closed the achievement gap associated with race now that roughly the same percentage of students in each subgroup score at the minimal level (limited achievement in reading, major misconceptions or gaps in knowledge and skills of reading). That’s far from the original goal of the board. We committed to helping all students complete the 3rd grade able to read at or beyond grade level as demonstrated by all students in all subgroups scoring at proficient or advanced reading levels on the WRCT.
Faulkner or Chaucer? AP Teachers Make the Call
At Clarksburg High School in Montgomery County, teacher Jeanine Hurley’s English class finished “The Canterbury Tales” and just started “Hamlet.” Senior Raphael Nguyen says he doesn’t spend a lot of time on homework because Hurley doesn’t give much.
At Langley High School in Fairfax County, teacher Kevin Howard’s English class is studying “Othello” after reading William Faulkner’s “Light in August.” Senior Ryan Ainsworth, 17, said he does an average of 75 minutes reading and writing each night because Howard can pour it on.
Although students in these classes don’t read the same works, they are taking the same course: Advanced Placement English Literature and Composition. And their teachers have the same goal: for students to learn how to connect text to meaning through skills assessed on the AP exam in May.
Should Kids Be Able to Graduate After 10th Grade?
High school sophomores should be ready for college by age 16. That’s the message from New Hampshire education officials, who announced plans Oct. 30 for a new rigorous state board of exams to be given to 10th graders. Students who pass will be prepared to move on to the state’s community or technical colleges, skipping the last two years of high school. (See pictures of teens and how they would vote.)
Once implemented, the new battery of tests is expected to guarantee higher competency in core school subjects, lower dropout rates and free up millions of education dollars. Students may take the exams — which are modeled on existing AP or International Baccalaureate tests — as many times as they need to pass. Or those who want to go to a prestigious university may stay and finish the final two years, taking a second, more difficult set of exams senior year. “We want students who are ready to be able to move on to their higher education,” says Lyonel Tracy, New Hampshire’s Commissioner for Education. “And then we can focus even more attention on those kids who need more help to get there.”
Charter School Fights for Funding
AP:
Advocates of a new charter school in this city’s Potowomut neighborhood are fighting for state help after winning a $750,000 federal grant.
Backers of the proposed Nathanael Greene/Potowomut Academy of Technology and Humanities said they were disappointed with budget cuts the state Board of Regents budget made to charter schools.
The group is vowing to pressure lawmakers to include funding for the school in the state budget.
20,000 Milwaukee Students Now Use Vouchers
The number of Milwaukee children attending private schools using publicly funded vouchers has crossed 20,000 for the first time, according to data released by the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction.
At the same time, the number of students in the main roster of Milwaukee Public Schools elementary, middle and high schools has fallen below 80,000 for the first time in well over a decade and declined for at least the 10th year in a row.
Amid a host of other factors shaping the school landscape in Milwaukee, those two trends point to some of the key stresses and looming issues for both MPS, which remains one of the nation’s larger school systems, and the voucher program, the largest, oldest and arguably most significant urban school voucher program in the United States.
For MPS, declining enrollment means greater financial pressure, a need to close school buildings and a continual search for ways to attract students and raise overall levels of achievement.
For the voucher program, the increase means the state-imposed cap on its size is coming into view, and issues related to the property-tax impact of the funding program are becoming more urgent. In addition, with Democrats having gained control of the state Legislature, efforts to impose more regulations on schools with voucher students are likely to become much more serious.
Nationwide, the momentum behind support for voucher programs such as the one in Milwaukee has been limited, and most likely has lost further steam with the election of Sen. Barack Obama to be president. Although Obama favors charter schools – generally, independent publicly funded schools that have more public accountability than private schools – he has not favored vouchers, and the Congress, controlled firmly by Democrats, is not going to support such plans either.
Somewhat related: A Madison School District enrollment analysis discloses an increase in outbound open enrollment.
Athletes Choose Colleges
They’re good to go For some top high school athletes, decision on college comes this week
Her dazzling fastball and sizzling bat have been on the radar of college coaches for quite a while. As a junior at Ashland High School, Nicole D’Argento was named the state’s softball player of the year.
Letters from colleges started arriving for D’Argento, a senior this year, in the summer of 2005, before her freshman year. Now, that stack of letters sits in her living room and “looks at least a foot tall,” she said recently with a laugh.
Softball has long been a year-round commitment for D’Argento. Her older brother, Russ, played baseball at Old Dominion and the University of Connecticut after helping propel Ashland High to the Division 3 state title in 2000.
Last spring, Nicole hurled the Clocker softball team to a perfect 28-0 season, and the Division 2 state title. She has a career earned-run average hovering under 0.50 and she will enter her senior season just 16 strikeouts shy of the exclusive 500 mark for her high school career.
With so many colleges lining up for her services, D’Argento made her decision early.
Last fall, she made a nonbinding verbal agreement to attend Boston College, which nosed out the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and the University of Virginia.
Quality Education
YP Gupta writes from India:
Free and compulsory education for all children in the age group of 6-14 has become a fundamental right under the Constitution. Its objective is to improve the socio-economic status of the backward communities.
But it is not an easy task to enforce this because a majority of the children in this age group continue to remain half-fed and educationally backward. The goal of education for all seems a distant reality because states have been lagging behind in implementing Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan, and owing to poverty there has been severe discrimination against girls in having access to schooling. The World Education Forum has urged removal of gender disparity for equal enrolment of girls and boys to achieve education for all.
At the same time, the need for quality education should not be overlooked. The backward communities must have access to quality education to uplift them to improve their living standards. It is proposed that some seats be reserved for children of poor families in the affluent private schools to provide them with quality education. But it is argued that this step may be detrimental to their interests as the children from a poor background may develop an inferiority complex while interacting with children from a higher status; this could be embarrassing to their respective families
Education Issues for the Republicans in the Obama Era
Decentralization must be accompanied by transparency so the public easily understands how tax dollars are being used or misused. One way to make education financing more transparent is to simplify the way Washington doles out money. Federal dollars could be attached to the individual child — so-called backpacking — and that money would be portable, meaning it would follow the child to whichever school he or she attends.
Dan Lips, an education analyst at the Heritage Foundation, notes that federal Title I dollars, which are supposed to go to disadvantaged students but because of complicated financing formulas result in wide per-student funding differences from school to school, “could be delivered through a simple formula based on the number of low-income students in a state” and “states could be allowed to use Title I funds in ways that make it follow the child.” The result would be a “simple and transparent system of school funding.”
Furthermore, Republicans should advocate for widespread state-based parental empowerment, specifically through school-choice options, to ensure that the state and local affiliates of Mr. Obama’s friends at the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers do not hijack decision-making power. Only if all children, not just those who are poor or have special needs, have an exit ticket out of the public school system through, say, a voucher or a tuition tax credit will state and local officials have the incentive to use their greater powers for the benefit of students rather than special interests.
The Most Promising Schools in America
My publisher and I had a fight over the subtitle of my upcoming book, “Work Hard. Be Nice,” about the Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP). Okay, it wasn’t a fight exactly. My editor at Algonquin Books, Amy Gash, is too polite and professional for that. It was a spirited discussion. Gash said the Algonquin view was that my subtitle, “How Two Inspired Teachers Created America’s Best Schools” was off-putting and hyperbolic. Who was I to say what was best and what wasn’t?
I defended the loaded adjective because I thought it was accurate and would inspire useful arguments about how to make schools better. Nonetheless, Algonquin seemed more interested in selling books than encouraging my pugnacious tendencies, and I saw their point. We considered more than 100 alternatives before settling on “How Two Inspired Teachers Created the Most Promising Schools in America.” That seems like a trivial change, but it’s not. A new research assessment by Columbia University scholar Jeffrey R. Henig suggests it is the right way to think about these intriguing but still developing schools, and about other new approaches to schooling that may bloom in the future.
The 66 KIPP schools in 19 states and the District feed off the work of KIPP co-founders Dave Levin and Mike Feinberg, who started teaching impoverished children in Houston when they were just out of college in 1992. The first KIPP class began in 1994. It had a longer school day, required summer school, required homework, frequent contact with parents, consistent methods of discipline, imaginative and energetic teaching and lots of singing and fun. It has become the best known and most researched network of independent public charter schools in the country.
Green Charter School Conference
“No child will be left inside.”
That’s the theme of the Green Charter Schools Network, an organization headquartered in Madison that links environmental charter schools around the nation. It was also the theme of a conference Saturday at the Pyle Center that drew 200 people from around Wisconsin and more than 10 other states.
“We hope to make this a national movement,” said Jim McGrath, president of the new Green Charter Schools Network. “We have identified 135 green charter schools around the country, and we believe there are another 150.”
That includes 18 in Wisconsin, in locations as far flung as Green Lake, Merrimac, Rhinelander, Oshkosh and Stevens Point.
Charter schools are innovative public schools that provide educational choices for families and school-site accountability for results. Forty states allow charter schools, and they are formed in Wisconsin when a contract is signed between a charter school and its school district or school board. The arrangement gives the school more autonomy, more on-site decision-making, but also considerable responsibility for results.
Fairfax County Schools to Address Tough Grading Policy
Michael Alison Chandler and Michael Birnbaum:
Deputy Superintendent Richard Moniuszko said he will direct principals to prepare a grade distribution chart for this year’s seniors to show, for example, how many students earned 4.0 or 3.0 grade-point averages at a given school. The form, meant to accompany college applications, also will be sent as an addendum to thousands of early applications that have been filed by students in the region’s largest school system.
The action was prompted by parents who are lobbying to change the county’s grading scale, which requires 94 percent for an A and gives no extra credit for honors courses. They say the policy is punitive compared with the 90 percent standard used in many other places, including Montgomery County, and puts their children at a disadvantage in applying for colleges and scholarships. Fairfax County gives half a point for Advanced Placement or International Baccalaureate classes, less than what many other school systems give.
Singing Our Song
6 November 2008
Dear Mr. Fitzhugh,
My name is Lindsay Brown, and I am the chair of the history department at St. Andrew’s School in Delaware. I have been thinking about the role of academics and athletics in college placement for some time, and being at a boarding school I wear many hats and so see multiple sides of this issue. I do a great deal of work with athletes that I coach in the sport of rowing, helping them to be recruits for college coaches. I began talking to people and commenting about how I had never done any recruiting for our top history students, and that there was a significant contrast between athletic and academic interest in the admission process for colleges.
With these vague thoughts, I decided to write something, possibly to send to some publication(?) or maybe just to do some therapeutic venting on my keyboard. I sent a draft of my thoughts to several of my colleagues, including our librarian who is a relentless researcher. In response to my short essay, she sent me your article on the “History Scholar” on very similar ideas–I guess I wasn’t as original as I thought! But I wanted to send you my thoughts, ask if you had a moment to give me any feedback, and then also ask if you think it was acceptable for me to potentially send my essay out–where exactly I’m not sure.
In any case, I was impressed with your work and your information on this topic.
Many thanks,
Lindsay Brown
History
St. Andrew’s School
My essay is copied below and attached:
The headlines are meant to grab our attention and alert us to a crisis in education: “High school graduates are not ready for college” or some variation on this idea that college freshmen can’t do the work their professors demand of them. Colleges and professors lament this situation, and, in a related vein, often complain that athletics and athletic recruiting are running out of control to the detriment of the academic mission of their institutions. And not just the big schools that compete for national championships in football or basketball are sounding this alarm; even top tier, highly selective colleges and universities sing a similar melody. What should happen to correct this situation?
Ironically, I would like to suggest that colleges look to their athletic departments for inspiration and a possible way to improve the academic strength of their student body.
Racine Promise: City officials explore college funding for Racine graduates
A group of city officials are exploring a program that would pay for Racine high school graduates to attend college.
The idea is based on the Kalamazoo Promise, a program started three years ago in Kalamazoo, Mich. to attract families to the city. The program is simple: If a child graduates from a Kalamazoo High School, their tuition is paid to any Michigan university or tech school. That could amount to $36,000 for a student attending the University of Michigan. The only requirement is that a student maintains a 2.0 GPA and makes continual progress toward their high school diploma.
Aldermen Aron Wisneski and Greg Helding, and City Administrator Ben Hughes, are seeking two $8,000 grants to study creating a similar program here. The City Council is expected to grant permission to pursue the grant on Wednesday.
Indiana’s New School Superintendent
The state’s new superintendent of public instruction said he would begin his tenure by taking a long look at the Indiana Department of Education as an organization to make sure it is run as efficiently as possible.
“I want to make this a customer service resource that school districts can depend on,” Republican Tony Bennett said.
He defeated Democrat Richard D. Wood, who had been superintendent of Tippecanoe County Schools, on Tuesday.
Bennett, superintendent of Greater Clark County Schools, said another priority will be to reduce regulations from the state Department of Education so districts can work on improving student achievement.
“We need to see some deregulation,” he said. “Regulation handcuffs the schools from pursuing their agendas. I intend on spending the first 60 to 90 days going through each state regulation and deciding which are restrictive and which are not.”
Uneducated
The issue is not about the quality of education for the children who can afford it. It is about a serious lack of access for those who cannot.
One of our national problems that has been swept under the carpet because of the preoccupation with the current political crisis is our education system.
With a high youth literacy rate and a primary school attendance ratio at 98 per cent, you might feel there is nothing to worry about. But sighing with relief will be our big mistake.
Although the constitution ensures every child’s right to a free 12-year education, many are still falling through the cracks. And that starts early; only 88 per cent of primary school pupils make it to lower secondary and a mere 69 per cent to higher secondary. It is the same pattern when the pupils move up the education pyramid.
The issue here is not about the quality of education for the children who can afford it. It is about a serious lack of access for those who cannot – even though compulsory education is supposed to be free.
According to a recent study by Thai Education Watch Network, more than 1.3 million children still do not have access to compulsory education. They are primarily poor children from ethnic minorities along the borders as well as those in the restive deep South, and immigrant children. Other vulnerable groups include street children, slum children and those who live in very remote villages.
Politics holds new role in high school classrooms
Tuesday’s historic election of Barack Obama was, to most onlookers, a watershed event — a political game-changer, a passing of the generational torch and a defining moment in American race relations.
To the students in Gil Stange’s second-period AP Economics class at Towson High School, it was a chance to test a theory: What if the Republican candidate had been the African American and the Democrat the 72-year-old white guy?
“Is it really overcoming race?” asked Allison Rich, 17, dressed in a bright-red University of New Hampshire sweatshirt. “Or is it just a party issue?”
As the results of the election sank in Wednesday, teachers in high school classrooms across the USA found themselves debriefing a group of young people who are, by all accounts, more informed and civic-minded than any in recent memory. They came of age after 9/11, after all.
Virtual School Chalks Up Gains
Students at Wyoming Virtual School don’t have to worry about what to wear on the first day of school. They just stay home, log on to personal computers lent by K12 Inc., and start the day.
The Herndon, Va., technology-based education company provides specialized curriculum and educational services to students in kindergarten through 12th grade. It launched its first offering seven years ago for 900 students in two states. Since then, it has seen enrollment climb. K12 now enrolls about 40,800 students in 21 states and the District of Columbia.
K12 says virtual schools are a viable alternative for students in a range of different circumstances. For instance, it might help students who are gifted, have special needs, are unhappy with the education in the local schools, or are located in rural areas. The services also can alleviate overcrowding in urban schools, the company says.
One of K12’s founders was William J. Bennett, the former U.S. education secretary, although he subsequently resigned as chairman. The company’s stock went public in December.
K12’s growth may be challenged, however, by education budget cuts on the local, state and federal levels, mounting competition and opposition coming from proponents of traditional education.
Toyota Eyes India Market, Builds School to Get Edge
To get ahead in India’s increasingly competitive auto market, Toyota Motor Corp. is building a new plant and freshening its lineup. It has also made an unusual investment: It opened a school.
Built on a rugged hillside in southern India that is populated by wildcats and monkeys, Toyota’s sprawling technical training school, which opened last year, gives about 180 junior-high-school graduates an education in everything from dismantling transmissions to Japanese group exercises.
Toyota wants to turn students like Satish Lakshman, the son of a poor farmer, into a skilled employee who can boost the auto maker’s fortunes in this key emerging market. “We are learning discipline, confidence and continuous improvement,” says Mr. Lakshman, an energetic 18-year-old.
Competition for entrance to Toyota’s school is tough. The institute received 5,000 applications for 64 slots when it opened last year. The draw for these young men, all from poor families, is a free education and a job if they do well. The first class will graduate from the three-year program in 2010, when Toyota plans to open the plant to make its new small car.
Personal finance urged for Oregon schools
Since she started working at the mall six months ago, Joy Stout has come close to draining her bank account to buy clothes and eat out with friends.
The Cleveland High School senior hoped to save about half the cash from her weekend job at Jamba Juice in the Lloyd Center but found she was going paycheck to paycheck.
She’s getting better — her parents encouraged her to open a bank account and keep track of where her money went. And this fall, only a couple of months into her first personal finance class, she’s learning lessons about spending and saving that can take years to master.
“When you are trying to figure out whether to buy something, you got to ask yourself if you want this or if you need it,” says Stout, 18. “If you only want it, is it worth spending on if you could save money for later? I want to save money to have a car.”
No middle school report cards??!!
I received a newsletter in the mail yesterday from Toki Middle School, where my son is now a sixth-grader. The principal’s letter says:
“With the introduction of standards-based middle school report cards, we decided to send first quarter progress reports only to students currently not meeting grade level standards in curricular areas.”
So, assuming my child meets the standards, he just doesn’t matter? He’s not worth the time to figure out how to fill out the new report cards? The teachers are taking an extra half day today (early release: 11:30) to work more on dealing with these new report cards – and they’ve already taken at least one or two other days – but it’s still too hard to give my child a report card?
What if I want to know how well my child is doing? What if I want to know if he’s EXCEEDING the standards? Oh, wait…. I forgot. MMSD doesn’t care if he exceeds them. They just want to know if he MEETS them. God forbid I learn how MUCH he’s exceeding them by, or if he’s just skating and is merely meeting the standards. Or if he excels in one subject but is simply OK in another. We went through this in elementary school, so I suppose it should be no surprise that it’s happening in middle school.
I know there’s a teacher conference coming up, but if they’re not giving us report cards, then I’m thinking 15 minutes isn’t enough time to really lay out my child’s strengths and weaknesses in several different subjects. It’s not enough time for the teacher to give me a thorough assessment of my child’s progress. Oh, wait….I forgot. MMSD doesn’t care about giving me a thorough assessment. Judging from our experience in elementary school, the teachers just want you in and out of there as quickly as possible. They don’t want to answer my questions about how we can help him at home so he can do better in any subjects. (“Your son is a joy to have in class. He’s doing well in all subjects. He talks a little too much, but we’re working on that. Thanks for coming!”)
They DID send home a note asking if I needed to meet with any of his Unified Arts teachers (in addition to just his homeroom teacher) – but I checked no, because I assumed we’d be getting report cards with information from all his teachers! Nice of MMSD to wait until AFTER those papers had been turned in to let us know we wouldn’t be GETTING report cards. (Yes, I’ll be emailing the principal to let her know I’ve changed my mind.)
Oh, and I CAN sign in to Infinite Campus to see what’s going on with my child’s record (which hopefully is updated more often that the Toki Web site, which we were told would be updated every three or four weeks, but hasn’t been updated since before the beginning of school). But to do this, I have to **go into the school during school hours** with a photo ID. I can’t just use social security numbers or anything else to access this online. Could they be more clear in the message that they’d rather you not use Infinite Campus?
Isn’t it bad enough that MMSD doesn’t do thorough third-quarter report cards, because they believe not enough time has elapsed between the second and third quarters to make any discernible improvement? If my child isn’t making any improvement, if my child’s work isn’t worthy of a report card, then WHAT’S HE DOING IN SCHOOL?
We moved here four years ago, so looking forward to the “great” Madison schools. We couldn’t have been more wrong. My bright children are lagging. My sixth-grade son who tested as gifted before we moved to Madison is no longer (witness his dropping test scores – oh, wait…they’re still average or above, so MMSD doesn’t care).
I’ve brought up my concerns repeatedly. I’ve offered constructive suggestions. I’ve offered to help, at school and at home. I did two years as a PTO president in the elementary school and struggled unsuccessfully to get improvements. I might as well have thrown myself in front of a semi truck for all the good it’s done and for how beaten down I feel by this school system. The minute this housing market turns around, I’m investigating the nearby schooling options with an eye toward getting the heck out of here. I’m SO FED UP with MMSD and it’s reverse-discrimination against children who are average and above.
Class-action lawsuit, anyone?
Boston’s Single Sex Academies hit a Snag
One of the most eye-catching elements of Boston School Superintendent Carol R. Johnson’s reorganization plan – the creation of two single-gender academies – seems to have just one problem: They appear to be illegal in Massachusetts.
Public schools cannot deny a student admission based on gender under state law, which could prevent Boston from trying a strategy that has been gaining momentum in other cities nationwide and that advocates say leads to much higher rates of learning.
The problem could lead to one of several possible changes to the reorganization plan, which Johnson is scheduled to revisit with the School Committee tonight after passionate objections were raised by many parents, students, and teachers who do not want their schools to close.
The School Committee requested more details on the plan to close about a dozen schools, which would leave five buildings empty while the others would be used to house new schools or expand popular ones.
Meet a ‘Mother on Fire’ for public school
Last June, when Los Angeles performance artist and public radio commentator Sandra Tsing Loh helped lead a rally to the California Capitol for more school funding, perhaps no one was more surprised than Loh herself. Her transformation from popular author and comic to public schools activist began four years earlier, when her plans to get her older daughter into a good kindergarten went awry. She eventually started an organization called Burning Moms. Loh recounts the journey in Mother on Fire (Crown, $23). She talks with USA TODAY about her experience.
Q: It’s 2004. You, your musician husband and your two daughters live in Van Nuys. Your 4-year-old is in preschool and you begin searching for a kindergarten. What happens next?
A: We’re a middle-class family, which feels like we’re the last middle-class family in Los Angeles — the last one had packed up the Volvo wagon and gone to Portland a year earlier. When kids hit school age, people just start fleeing the city unexplained. So I didn’t have much real information. … I’d go on www.greatschools.net, look at the statistics, freak out and not even visit my local school, which is what many parents do.
Q: You began looking into private schools, but many had “nosebleed tuition.”
A: I found that the religious ones were more affordable — the more religious, the more affordable. Catholics were more expensive, Lutherans middle and Baptists were the only ones we could afford. The Quakers were off the charts, particularly if there’s the word “Friends” in the title — or if the kids were being taught in an old Quaker wooden schoolhouse with authentic Shaker furniture.
Much more on Sandra Tsing Loh here.
Open Yale Courses
Open Yale Courses provides free and open access to a selection of introductory courses taught by distinguished teachers and scholars at Yale University. The aim of the project is to expand access to educational materials for all who wish to learn.
Open Yale Courses reflects the values of a liberal arts education. Yale’s philosophy of teaching and learning begins with the aim of training a broadly based, highly disciplined intellect without specifying in advance how that intellect will be used. This approach goes beyond the acquisition of facts and concepts to cultivate skills and habits of rigorous, independent thought: the ability to analyze, to ask the next question, and to begin the search for an answer.
Fixing the Freshman Factor
The ninth-grader slouched in the chair one fall day, avoiding the principal’s glare. He had the body of a boy, but he was deciding right there what kind of man he would be.
At the start of the school year, this child’s education was flying off the rails. Mark E. Fossett, principal of Suitland High School in Prince George’s County, called up the boy’s attendance record on a computer and rattled off a lengthy list of days missed and classes cut. Unless something changed, he would fail ninth grade.
As schools push to raise graduation rates, many educators are homing in on ninth grade as a moment of high academic risk. Call it the freshman factor.
Last week, Maryland reported that one of every six seniors statewide is at risk of not receiving a diploma in spring because they have not reached minimum scores on four basic tests in algebra, biology, government and English. At Suitland High and countywide in Prince George’s, more than a third of seniors are in jeopardy. But for many of those students, troubles began in their freshmen year. That’s often when the state algebra test is taken.
Madison School District Enrollment Data Analysis
The Madison Metropolitan School District [724K PDF]:
The following document explores enrollment trends based on four different factors: intemal transfers, private school enrollments, inter-district Open Enrollment, and home based enrollments. The most current data is provided in each case. Not all data are from the current school year. Certain data are based on DPI reports and there are lags in the dates upon which reports are published.
Summary
Most internal transfers within the MMSD are a function of two factors: programs not offered at each home school (e.g., ESL centers) and students moving between attendance areas and wishing to remain in the school they had been attending prior to the move. Notable schools in regard to transfers include Shorewood Elementary which has both a very high transfer in rate and a very low transfer out rate, Marquette which has a high transfer in rate, and Emerson which has a high transfer out rate.
Based on data reported to the Department of Public Instruction (DPI), private school enrollments within the MMSD attendance area have held fairly steady for the past several years, with a slight increase in the most recent two years. The District’s percentage of private school enrollment is roughly average among two separate benchmark cohort groups: the largest Wisconsin school districts and the Dane County school districts. Using data supplied annually to the MMSD by ten area private schools it appears that for the past three year period private school elementary enrollment is declining slightly, middle school enrollment is constant, and high school enrollment has been variable. Stephens, Midvale, Leopold, and Crestwood Elementary Schools, and Cherokee and Whitehorse Middle Schools have experienced declines in private school enrollment during this period. Hawthorne and Emerson Elementary Schools, Toki and (to a lesser extent) Sherman Middle Schools, and West and Memorial High Schools have experienced increases in private school enrollments. The East attendance area has very limited private school enrollment.
Home based education has remained very steady over the past six years based on data reported to the DPI. There is no discernible trend either upward or downward. Roughly 420 to 450 students residing within the MMSD area are reported as participating in home based instruction during this period. Like private school enrollment, the MMSD’s percentage of home based enrollment is roughly average among two separate benchmark cohort groups: the largest Wisconsin school districts and the Dane County school districts.
Open Enrollment, which allows for parents to apply to enroll their Children in districts other than their home district, is by far the largest contributor to enrollment shifts relative to this list of factors. In 2008-09, there are now over 450 students leaving the MMSD to attend other districts compared with just under 170 students entering the MMSD. Transition grades appear to be critical decision points for parents. Certain schools are particularly affected by Open Enrollment decisions and these tend to be schools near locations within close proximity to surrounding school districts. Virtual school options do not appear to be increasing in popularity relative to physical school altematives.
Wide Access To AP, IB Isn’t Hurting Anybody
Jason Crocker, an educational consultant in Prince George’s County, is exasperated with me and my rating of high schools, called the Challenge Index, based on how many college-level Advanced Placement or International Baccalaureate tests schools give. In response to one of my columns, Crocker vowed to refute anything nice I say about AP, particularly in his county.
He reflects the views of many in the Washington area. People wonder why kids are taking wearisome three-hour AP exams (or five-hour IB exams) in history, calculus or physics when their grades aren’t that good and their SAT scores are low. Crocker, who is African American, is particularly worried about what all this testing is doing to black students.
“Mr. Mathews, AP in Prince George’s County is about setting African American students up for failure to satisfy your Challenge Index,” he said. “The flip side of this is that most of these new students taking the exam are not adequately prepared for the exam and Prince George’s County cannot recruit enough teachers to teach the exam who are highly qualified.”
Related: Dane County, WI High School AP course offering comparison.
Vanishing Native Languages
Nicholas Ostler and Francene Patterson, both linguists, discuss the perils of monolingualism and the need to protect endangered languages
A Letter to Jay Matthews
To Jay Matthews:
Let me suggest that Gerald Bracey is not an appropriate person to quote when dealing with mathematics education. First, it was TIMSS in 1995 rather than 1999 when students in the last year of high school were tested. Second, while some of our students who took the advanced math test had only had precalculus, all of them had studied geometry and we did worse in geometry than we did in calculus. Bracey never mentions this. Check the figures yourself to see the disastrous results in geometry.
We had 14% of our students take this test so the fact that some other countries did not test students in vocational tracts is irrelevant since they have a much larger fraction of their students in academic programs than 14%, as we do. About the ETS restudy, while they claim that the original sample was not comparable with other countries, their population was also not comparable with that of other countries. When you take the top say 7% of our students, judged by the courses they take which is not a perfect match but
not bad, and compare them with the top say 20% of the students in another country, that is not the same as comparing them with the top 7% in another country. ETS never mentions this in their press releases on this study.
Richard Askey
Incentives Can Make Or Break Students
The inducements range from prepaid cellphones to MP3 players to gift certificates. But most of them are cash: $10 for New York City seventh-graders who complete a periodic test; $50 for Chicago high school freshmen who ace their courses; as much as $110 to Baltimore students for improved scores on the Maryland High School Assessments.
Desperate for ways to ratchet up test scores and close the achievement gap separating white and minority students, school officials from Tucson to Boston are paying kids who put up good numbers.
The District joined the list this fall, launching a one-year study of 3,300 middle schoolers who can earn up to $100 every two weeks for good grades, behavior and attendance. On Oct. 17, the first payday for the Capital Gains program, students collected an average of $43.
The efforts vary widely in scope and objective. But nearly all trigger pa
