No Common Denominator: The Preparation of Elementary Teachers in Mathematics by America’s Education Schools, June 2008



National Council on Teacher Quality (3MB PDF):

American students’ chronically poor performance in mathematics on international tests may begin in the earliest grades, handicapped by the weak knowledge of mathematics of their own elementary teachers. NCTQ looks at the quality of preparation provided by a representative sampling of institutions in nearly every state. We also provide a test developed by leading mathematicians which assesses for the knowledge that elementary teachers should acquire during their preparation. Imagine the implications of an elementary teaching force being able to pass this test.

Brian Maffly:

Most of the nation’s undergraduate education programs do not adequately prepare elementary teachers to teach mathematics, according to a study released Thursday by an education-reform advocacy group. Utah State University is among the 83 percent of surveyed programs that didn’t meet what the National Council on Teacher Quality calls an emerging “consensus” on what elementary teachers must learn before joining professional ranks.
“There’s a long-standing belief in our country that elementary teachers don’t really need to get much math. The only thing you need to teach second-grade math is to learn third-grade math,” said Kate Walsh, executive director of the Washington, D.C.-based group. “We haven’t put much attention to fact the elementary teachers are the first math teachers kids get. Their foundational skills have long-term ramifications whether that child will be able to do middle and high school math.”
The NCTQ’s findings are similar to a reading report the group released two years ago, claiming that 85 percent of undergraduate elementary education programs fail to adequately prepare students to teach reading.

Joanne has more. It will be interesting to see of the Madison Math Task Force addresses the question of teacher content knowledge. Related:




Middle school critical to students’ success in high school



Russell Rumberger:

More than 100,000 California students quit high school each year, but the path toward dropping out begins long before high school. Three new studies from the California Dropout Research Project reveal how and why academic success in middle school is critical to graduating from high school.
The studies, based on data from four of California’s largest school districts, found that both middle school grades and test scores predicted whether students graduated from high school. The strongest predictor was whether students passed all their core academic subjects in math, English, history and science.
In the Los Angeles Unified School District, only 40 percent of students who failed two or more academic classes in middle school graduated within four years of entering ninth grade. In Fresno, Long Beach and San Francisco only a third of the students who failed two or more courses in seventh grade graduated on time.




Universal preschool students perform better



Greg Toppo:

An ambitious public pre-kindergarten program in Oklahoma boosts kids’ skills dramatically, a long-awaited study finds, for the first time offering across-the-board evidence that universal preschool, open to all children, benefits both low-income and middle-class kids.
The large-scale study, by researchers from Georgetown University’s Public Policy Institute and Center for Research on Children in the United States, looked at the skills of about 3,500 incoming kindergartners in Tulsa, where state-funded pre-kindergarten has been in place for 18 years — and offered universally for nearly a decade.
The researchers found that as the kids entered kindergarten those enrolled in the state program had better reading, math and writing skills than kids who were either not enrolled in preschool or who spent time in the federally funded Head Start program.
Previous research has shown that high-quality preschool pays off in better skills, especially for low-income kids. But until today’s findings, even the biggest studies stopped short of making the case that universal programs, with children from all backgrounds, benefit virtually all of them.

National Institute for Early Education Research.




Q&A with the US Education Secretary: Challenge Assumptions about Time and Teachers



Des Moines Register:

Education has long been a passion of U.S. Education Secretary Margaret Spellings, stretching back to the 1980s, when she worked in the Texas Legislature. While serving as chief domestic policy adviser to President George W. Bush, she was an architect of the 2001 federal No Child Left Behind Act. Its goal is for all children to become proficient in math and reading by 2014.
In 2005, the same year she became education secretary, Spellings convened the Commission on the Future of Higher Education to look at how to improve post-secondary institutions. Spellings is the first mother of school-age children to serve as education secretary, and only the second woman to be appointed to the post. In her final few months on the job, much of her time has been devoted to shoring up support for the No Child Left Behind law.
Q. Does the United States need to create world-class schools in every community, and, if so, why?
A. Absolutely, emphatically, yes. And why? Because we pride ourselves on being the center of innovation and creativity, and that has brought us the Internet and other technologies, but we are at risk of losing that. Our country has gotten more diverse [in terms of poverty and children learning to speak English as a second language], so some of the work is more challenging. More education is necessary for everybody. We have to pick up the pace. No Child Left Behind is about that.




Massachusetts Governor Patrick unveils sweeping plan for education reform



Tania deLuzuriaga:

any of the governor’s proposals, such as those aimed at closing achievement gaps, better preparing teachers, and reducing the number of school districts in the state, have been unveiled over the past two days. Patrick has talked a lot this week about his ideas for pre-kindergarten to Grade 12.
However, the report issued this morning provides fresh details and outlines a few initiatives that had yet to be unveiled.
For example, the plan contains a host of recommendations for higher education. They include: closing the pay gap between faculty at Massachusetts colleges and universities and those at peer institutions in other states; increasing needs-based financial aid in the 2010 budget; guaranteeing that credits will be transferrable between the state’s public higher-education institutions; and supporting legislation that would allow undocumented children to pay in-state rates at public colleges and universities.

Related: Fearing for Massachusetts School Reform.




Errors found in Michigan school progress reports



Tim Martin:

A new audit says Michigan’s annual school progress reports from 2004-05 and 2005-06 contained some errors that might have artificially improved some schools’ results.
The Office of the Auditor General report [1.6MB PDF] released Wednesday dealt with the Michigan Department of Education’s school report cards and adequate yearly progress reports based on federal No Child Left Behind rules.
The problem stemmed in part from inaccuracies and inconsistencies in computer programming logic used to calculate the scores. But there were other problems cited in the audit, including insufficient monitoring of data supplied by school districts — some of which may contain inflated favorable self-reporting and missing information.




Oregon Students May Choose Their Graduation Exam



Julia Silverman:

The plan makes Oregon one of several states moving past the “one-size-fits-all” high-stakes testing that became commonplace in many U.S. high schools in the 1990s. In Pennsylvania, the Board of Education is considering a three-pronged approach similar to Oregon’s plan, while in Maryland, students who can’t pass the state tests could be allowed to do a senior project instead.
But some say such choices allow some students _ and states _ to take the easy way out.
Daria Hall, assistant director for K-12 policy at Education Trust, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit that advocates for poor and minority children, points to New Jersey, where up to 80 percent of students at high schools in poor cities like Newark and Camden receive alternative diplomas after not passing the state tests. The number falls to about 3 percent in wealthy areas like Princeton, N.J., she said.




Baltimore County Should Invest in Online Education



The Baltimore Sun:

In an increasingly wired (and wireless) world, an online presence is becoming indispensable for institutions ranging from businesses to nonprofits to government agencies. Grasping this new reality, Baltimore County education officials last year wisely launched a pilot online education program that served 106 students – almost all of them previously home-schooled.
This initiative deserves to be made permanent. The county executive’s office disagrees and denied a $2 million request for online education in the 2008-2009 school budget, blaming poor economic conditions. That reasoning is understandable but shortsighted.
Unless the school board can find the funding in its current budget to keep the program, it stands to lose state dollars when some – perhaps most – of those 106 students return to home-schooling in the fall. Worse, it would also lose the opportunity to become a pioneer in an area that will doubtless play a major role in the future of education.




Public Milwaukee Boarding School by 2011?



Dani McClain:

A coalition of prominent Milwaukeeans working to establish an urban boarding school for at-risk youth today announced its intention to raise between $30 million and $40 million in private funds to support opening a school in three years.
The Wisconsin Coalition for a Public Boarding School also plans to attempt to persuade legislators to allocate state funding for the college-prep program, the initiative’s leaders said today at a media event at the Charles Allis Art Museum.
The school would open in 2011 with 80 sixth-grade students and with an initial state contribution of around $2 million. If the coalition can persuade the Legislature to back the initiative, the school would reach full public funding by 2017 with an annual state contribution of around $10 million, said Jeanette Mitchell, community adviser to the Washington, D.C.-based SEED Foundation.

More from the Milwaukee Business Journal.




Reaching Students via Podcast



Felicia Fonseca:

It’s called podcasting, and is increasingly popular in education, with many colleges and universities offering free online lectures. A podcast is an audio or video file that automatically downloads to subscribers over the Internet, and is often listened to or watched on a mobile media player such as an iPod or Zune.
For Fort Sumner Spanish teacher Sandra Wertheim’s class, the boost from the little device made it much easier to deal with weekly vocabulary words: Her voice rang through the ears of students who got the lesson through the Zune.




California: Education Data Tells a Sorry Story



Dan Walters:

“Most incoming (community college) students are not ready for college-level work,” the report says. “In addition, relatively few of these students reach proficiency during their time (in community college).”
That’s interesting, but it also raises this question: Since virtually all of those community college students graduated from high school, what is that telling us about the level of K-12 instruction?
One presumes, perhaps naively, that if someone possesses a California high school diploma, thus signifying 12 years of education costing taxpayers around $130,000, that someone must possess basic reading, writing and computational skills.
Remember, we’re not talking about the roughly one-third of California’s teenagers who don’t graduate from high school; with few exceptions we’re talking about graduates who have enough gumption to attend community college, and yet, this report says most don’t have the appropriate basic skills for college-level studies. By the way, that also doesn’t count the large numbers of high school graduates – well over a third – who require remedial instruction after being accepted into the California State University system.




To Avoid Student Turnover, Flint Parents Get Rent Help



Erik Eckholm:

Because he has moved so often, 9-year-old Richard Kennedy has already attended four different schools in Flint. In his mother’s latest rental house the other day, he described how it felt to enter an unfamiliar classroom.
…
In New York, board of education officials said that while they did not have data on trends in student mobility, it had been a prime reason behind efforts to standardize curriculums, so students switching schools would not find their math classes, for example, far out of sync.
High turnover can undermine a multiyear improvement plan. “It becomes a different school, because the core of the students you’re educating has changed,” Dr. Kerbow said.
Even the students who do not switch schools suffer, because teachers must spend more time reviewing materials for newcomers and tend to introduce less material, Dr. Kerbow said, citing what his research had found in Chicago. “The learning trajectory over time is flattened,” he added.

Seems like a useful idea, rather than trying to standardize curriculum across the board. Locally, Mayor Dave recently proposed using suburban housing assistance to reduce urban low income concentration.




156 Wisconsin Schools Fail to Meet No Child Left Behind Standards



Channel3000:

The number of Wisconsin schools that didn’t meet standards set by the federal No Child Left Behind Act and could face sanctions increased from 95 to 156 this year, including the entire Madison Metropolitan School District.
Of the 156 schools on the list released Tuesday by the state Department of Public Instruction, 82 were in the Milwaukee Public School district. Seven of the schools on the list were charter schools.
Besides individual schools on the list, four entire districts made the list for not meeting the standards. That lists includes the school districts of Beloit, Madison, Milwaukee and Racine.

Bill Novak (Interestingly, this Capital Times article originally had many comments, which are now gone):

Superintendent Art Rainwater told The Capital Times the list is “ludicrous,” the district doesn’t pay attention to it, and the district will do what’s best for the students and not gear curriculum to meet the criteria set by the federal government.
“As we’ve said from the day this law was passed, it is only a matter of time before every school in America is on the list,” Rainwater said. “It’s a law that impossible to meet, because eventually if every single student in a school isn’t successful, you are on the list.”

No Child Left Behind allows states to set their own standards. The Fordham Institute has given Wisconsin’s academic standards a “D” in recent years. Neal McCluskey has more on states setting their own standards:

NCLB’s biggest problem is that it’s designed to help Washington politicians appear all things to all people. To look tough on bad schools, it requires states to establish standards and tests in reading, math and science, and it requires all schools to make annual progress toward 100% reading and math proficiency by 2014. To preserve local control, however, it allows states to set their own standards, “adequate yearly progress” goals, and definitions of proficiency. As a result, states have set low standards, enabling politicians to declare victory amid rising test scores without taking any truly substantive action.
NCLB’s perverse effects are illustrated by Michigan, which dropped its relatively demanding standards when it had over 1,500 schools on NCLB’s first “needs improvement” list. The July 2002 transformation of then-state superintendent Tom Watkins captures NCLB’s power. Early that month, when discussing the effects of state budget cuts on Michigan schools, Mr. Watkins declared that cuts or no cuts, “We don’t lower standards in this state!” A few weeks later, thanks to NCLB, Michigan cut drastically the percentage of students who needed to hit proficiency on state tests for a school to make adequate yearly progress. “Michigan stretches to do what’s right with our children,” Mr. Watkins said, “but we’re not going to shoot ourselves in the foot.”

Andy Hall:

Madison’s Leopold and Lincoln elementary schools were among the list of schools failing to attain the standards, marking the first time that a Madison elementary school made the list.
Three Madison middle schools — Sherman, Cherokee and Toki — also joined the list, which continued to include the district’s four major high schools: East, West, La Follette and Memorial. Madison’s Black Hawk Middle School, which was on the list last year, made enough academic progress to be removed from it.




Education in Mexico: Testing the Teachers



The Economist:

The main problem lies not with salaries for teaching, which are competitive with other jobs in Mexico, but with the quality of teachers. The government has been trying to solve the problem since 1992, when it introduced annual bonuses linked to teachers’ participation in training courses and their scores on tests. This system is far from perfect. A study last year by the Rand Corporation, an American think-tank, found that the tests given to teachers required “only low level cognitive responses”, while the criteria for evaluation were fuzzy and subject to manipulation.
The new agreement between Mr Calderón and Ms Gordillo has two aims. First, there is a promise to improve the fabric of the 27,000 schools—around one in eight—that are in poor repair (though no new money was allocated to this as part of the agreement). Second, it seeks to break the hold of the union over teachers’ careers. Under the agreement, teachers would be hired and promoted according to how they fare in a set of tests devised and marked by a new independent body.




The Nation’s Most Elite Public High Schools



Jay Matthews:

I am ranking them by one of the most common, and to me most annoying, measures of high school worth–average total reading and math SAT scores. Those test results are most closely tied to the income of the families that raise these fine students. There is something of that relationship at these schools too. But once you get this many bright students together, SAT becomes largely irrelevant, since they have all gone far beyond the 10th-grade reading comprehension and math puzzles that make up those exams. Notice, for instance, the surprises. Some very well-known elite schools have much lower average SATs than some others. Some selective high schools with terrific reputations, like Lowell in San Francisco, do not have high enough SAT averages to make the Public Elites list and so remain on the main list. It shows how little significance SAT numbers have.
I am still amazed that there are high schools whose average scores would be high enough to get any student who got that score, with a little luck, into the Ivy League. Our rule is if a non-traditional school’s average is 1300, or 29 or above on the ACT, it goes on the Public Elites list. We picked 1300 and 29 because those scores are just above the highest average scores of any regular enrollment public school in the country.

The list:

  1. Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology (SAT 1495)
  2. University Laboratory High School, Urbana, Ill. (SAT 1409)
  3. Stuyvesant High School, New York (SAT 1405)
  4. High Technology High, Lincroft, NJ (SAT 1395)
  5. Hunter College High School, New York (SAT 1395)
  6. Oklahoma School of Science and Mathematics, Oklahoma City (SAT 1383)
  7. Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy, Aurora, Ill. (SAT 1373)
  8. South Carolina Governor’s School for Science and Mathematics, Hartsville, S.C. (SAT 1362)
  9. North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics, Durham, N.C. (SAT 1356)
  10. Bergen County Academies, Hackensack, N.J. (SAT 1355)
  11. Whitney High School, Cerritos, Calif. (SAT 1343)
  12. Maggie L. Walker Governor’s School for Government and International Studies, Richmond, Va. (SAT:1340)
  13. Jefferson County International Baccalaureate, Irondale, Ala. (SAT 1315)
  14. Union County Magnet High School, Scotch Plains, N.J. (SAT 1314)
  15. International Community School, Kirkland, Wash. (SAT 1309)
  16. University High School, Tucson, Ariz. (SAT 1304)
  17. Bronx High School of Science, New York (SAT 1301)



Does State Education Funding Shortchange Our Children?



Marietta Nelson:

Schools receive local property tax money through levies and federal money, but the majority of funding comes from the state.
The current public education funding system emerged from a 1977 state Supreme Court decision in which Seattle schools sued the state over inadequate funding. The ruling held that the state must fund equally across districts a “basic education” program that went beyond reading, writing and math. Subsequent court rulings over the years have expanded the formula, resulting in an extremely complex system.
It’s been called antiquated, outdated, ossified. Even Byzantine.
“Our system is pretty equitable now in that everyone gets ripped off,” Hyde said. “Just think, do you live now like you lived 30 years ago?”
The formula begins with all schools receiving a basic education allocation per student. The allocation varies from district to district based on teacher experience and education levels, teacher-student ratios, allocations for administrators and classified staff and several other factors.

The article includes a number of interesting comments.




SAT will let students pick which scores to show colleges



Seema Mehta & Larry Gordon:

High school students seeking to put the best shine on their college applications will soon be able to choose which of their SAT scores to share with admissions officers and which to hide, the College Board said Friday.
The new policy, starting with the class of 2010, will allow students to take the widely used college entrance exam multiple times without admissions officers seeing their less-than-stellar efforts. Now, colleges receive scores of all the times a student attempted the dreaded test, whether the results were spectacular, mediocre or worse.
“Students were telling us the ability to have more control over their scores would make the test experience more comfortable and less stressful,” said Laurence Bunin, senior vice president of the SAT. “. . . We can do that without in any way diminishing the value and integrity of the SAT.”




And the Band Honked On: A Professional Musician Teaches 6th Graders



Daniel Wakin:

It was early in the school year. A young professional French horn player named Alana Vegter, a thoroughbred musician trained by elite teachers, took a handful of trumpet and trombone players into an equipment supply room. Speaking in the flat tones of the Chicago suburb where she grew up, Ms. Vegter tried to coax notes out of each player. A tall sixth-grade trumpeter named Kenny Ocean, his pants sagging around his hips, played too high, then too low. A smile spread across his face when he hit it right.
“You see, every time you do it, it gets easier,” Ms. Vegter said. On her cue they all bleated together. “I’m starting to hear everybody making nice, healthy sounds,” she said, half in praise, half in hope.
So began Ms. Vegter’s year in Ditmas Junior High School, Intermediate School 62, in the Kensington section of Brooklyn. It was a year that would teach her the satisfaction of tiny victories in a place where homelessness means that some kids cannot take their instruments home to practice, where chronic asthma forces some to switch from wind instruments to percussion, where the roar of a lunchroom leaves a newcomer stunned.
Ms. Vegter, 25, was there as part of a well-financed experiment by some of the nation’s most powerful musical institutions. The experiment is called, clumsily, the Academy — a Program of Carnegie Hall, the Juilliard School and the Weill Music Institute (the institute being an arm of Carnegie).
In its second season, which ended this month, the academy extended fellowships to 34 graduates of leading music schools to receive high-level coaching and lessons in a two-year program. They play concerts on Carnegie’s stages and participate in master classes. Part of the deal is a commitment to teach one and a half days a week at a New York public school, which pays the academy $13,200 for the service.

Clusty Search: Lemont High School Band.




Return of the Math Wars



Debra Saunders:

1997 saw the height of the Math Wars in California.
On the one side stood educrats, who advocated mushy math – or new-new math. They sought to de-emphasize math skills, such as multiplication and solving numeric equations, in favor of pushing students to write about math and how they might solve a problem. Their unofficial motto was: There is no right answer. (Even to 2 +2.)
They were clever. They knew how to make it seem as if they were pushing for more rigor, as they dumbed down curricula. For example, they said they wanted to teach children algebra starting in kindergarten, which seemed rigorous, but they had expanded the definition of algebra to the point that it was meaningless.
On the other side were reformers, who wanted the board to push through rigorous and specific standards that raised the bar for all California kids. Miraculously, they succeeded, and they took pride in the state Board of Education’s vote for academic standards that called for all eighth-graders to learn Algebra I.

Math Forum Audio, Video and links.




IB or Not IB



Cynthia Lardner:

Over the last several years, the references to “IB” schools seem to be just about everywhere. IB, or International Baccalaureate, Schools are schools certified by the International Baccalaureate Organization (IBO). President George W. Bush cited IB programs as a model for boosting student achievement in science and math. The U.S. Department of Education started a pilot program to bring IB programs to low-income students. The Michigan Department of Education, in its 2006 recommendations to the State Board of Education for College Credit Earning Opportunities, recommends that Advanced Placement (AP) or IB courses be made available to every student in every high school in Michigan. University admissions offices are working to determine their scoring or ranking for students matriculating with an IB diploma. Oakland University is spearheading an IBO teacher certification program. This article will look at the International Baccalaureate (IB) program, explain its roots, mission, programming, and try to assess whether an IB program is a good fit for gifted students.




Does 8th-Grade Pomp Fit the Circumstance?



Jane Hoffman:

Andre Cowling, who just finished his first year as principal of Harvard Elementary, one of the poorest-performing schools in Chicago, said the South Side’s eighth-grade celebrations are like “Easter Sunday on steroids.”
In a speech last Sunday at a Chicago church, Barack Obama took on the pomp and purpose of these ceremonies. “Now hold on a second — this is just eighth grade,” he said. “So, let’s not go over the top. Let’s not have a huge party. Let’s just give them a handshake.” He continued: “You’re supposed to graduate from eighth grade.”
Mr. Obama was wading into a simmering debate about eighth-grade ceremonies and their attendant hoopla. Do they inspire at-risk students to remain in high school and beyond? Or do they imply finality?
While some educators are grateful that notice is still being paid to academic achievement, others deride the festivities as overpraising what should be routine accomplishment. Some principals, school superintendents and legislators are trying to scale back the grandeur. But stepping between parents and ever-escalating celebrations of their children’s achievements can be dicey, at best.




Growth in Minnesota Charter School Enrollment



Norman Draper:

At a time when overall Minnesota school enrollment is declining, enrollment in charter schools in the state soared by a record number last year, according to a study released Thursday.
The study, conducted by the Center for School Change at the University of Minnesota’s Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs, found that the number of students attending charter schools rose by 4,337 during the 2007-08 school year. That marks the biggest enrollment increase since 1991-92, when the charter school option was first made available to Minnesota students and parents.
Total enrollment for charter schools stands at 28,206. That’s almost three times the enrollment in the 2001-02 school year. The total public school enrollment last year in Minnesota was 796,757, a number that has been declining for several years.




Education system 8-track in an iPOD world, Jeb Bush says



Ron Matus:

U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings and former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush rallied the troops Thursday, telling a supportive crowd that their often-unpopular visions of reform are the best path to modernizing schools.
“The world is much more interconnected, much more technologically advanced and it is much more interdependent,” Bush told a packed ballroom at a Disney resort. “And yet our education system is an eight-track system living in an iPod world.”
The duo delivered brief, keynote addresses at a summit organized by the Foundation for Excellence in Education, which Bush formed last year.
Among the 400 guests expected to attend over two days were dozens of policy wonks who believe more school choice and testing can help deliver a higher quality education to more students.
Spellings mounted a vigorous defense of No Child Left Behind.




Massachusett’s School Overhaul Plan: Let 16 Year Olds Graduate



AP:

The school overhaul plan being unveiled next week by Gov. Deval Patrick includes a proposal to allow high school students as young as 16 to take an international evaluation test that would allow them to graduate, The Associated Press learned today.
A report from the year-old Readiness Project will also include recommendations to make credits universally transferrable through the state college, community college and university system. It also features a so-called dual-enrollment program that would allow high school students to receive credit for classes taken on college campuses, a senior administration official familiar with the report said.
Overall, the goal is to personalize education rather than continuing to rely on the more formulaic approach in which all students march in annual progression from elementary school through high school and undergraduate education — all between the ages of 6 and 22.

Related: Fearing for Massachusetts School Reform.




High School Hackers Load Spyware To Change Grades



Mark Selfe:

Omar Khan and Tanvir Singh, both 18-years old, face more than just a trip down to the Principal’s office as they are both charged for breaking into and then hacking Tesoro High School computers in Orange County California.
According to prosecutors, the two individuals used stolen passwords and usernames to hack into school computers to change their grades from D’s and C’s to A’s and B+’s. Khan was also accused of stealing tests before they had been given and for loading spyware which would enable him access servers remotley to change the grades of 12 other students.




Unthinkable Futures



Kevin Kelly & Brian Eno:

While hunting in my archives for something else I dug up this exercise in scenarios. It was a small game Brian Eno and I played to loosen up our expectations of what might happen in the near future. We were both struck at how improbable current events would be to anyone in the past, and how incapable we are at expecting the improbable in the future.
This list of unthinkable futures — probabilities we tend to dismiss without thinking — was published 15 years ago in the Summer, 1993 issue of Whole Earth Review. Our intent was less to correctly predict the future (thus the silliness) and more to predict how unpredictable the actual future would be.
* American education works. Revived by vouchers, a longer school year, private schools and for-profit schools, the majority of Americans (though not the most disadvantaged) get the best education in the world.




No Child Left Behind may be a drag on the gifted



By Anya Sostek, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette:

The school accountability movement is leaving the nation’s most gifted students behind, according to a report released yesterday by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute.
The report, “High-Achieving Students in the Era of NCLB,” uses scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress to compare changes in the top 10 percent and the bottom 10 percent of students since the introduction of No Child Left Behind.
The good news is that NCLB seems to be making progress toward its goal of closing the “achievement gap,” states the report: In fourth-grade reading, for example, NAEP scores for the bottom tenth increased 16 points from 2000 to 2007, compared to 3 points for the top tenth.
But what does the narrowing of that gap mean for students scoring at the top of the spectrum?
“The progress of our top students has been modest at best,” said the report, noting that the focus of NCLB on bringing students to the “proficient” level might result in the neglect of gifted students who are already proficient.
“People can look at this data and say, ‘This is great news,’ and maybe that’s what our national education policy should be,” said Michael J. Petrilli, a vice president at the Fordham Institute. “But you see that the performance of the high-achieving students is languid, and the question is whether languid is going to cut it in a global economy.”




A Robin Hood Effect: Does the focus on students who are furthest behind come at the expense of top students?



Ann Duffett, Steve Farkas, Tom Loveless: High Achieving Students in the era of NCLB.

This publication reports the results of the first two (of five) studies of a multifaceted research investigation of the state of high-achieving students in the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) era.
Part I: An Analysis of NAEP Data, authored by Brookings Institution scholar Tom Loveless, examines achievement trends for high-achieving students (defined, like low-achieving students, by their performance on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP) since the early 1990s and, in more detail, since 2000.
Part II: Results from a National Teacher Survey, authored by Steve Farkas and Ann Duffett of Farkas Duffett Research Group, reports on teachers’ own views of how schools are serving high-achieving pupils in the NCLB era.

Locally, these issues have manifested themselves with a controversial move toward one size fits all curriculum: English 10 and mandatory academic grouping, High School Redesign and a letter from the West High School Math teachers to Isthmus. Dane County AP Class offering comparison.
Report Sees Cost in Some Academic Gains by Sam Dillon:

And about three-quarters of the teachers surveyed said they agreed with this statement: “Too often, the brightest students are bored and under-challenged in school — we’re not giving them a sufficient chance to thrive”.

Download the complete 7.3MB report here.
Thanks to a reader for emailing the report.




Maths review: toddlers should learn through number play



Laura Clout & Lucy Cockcroft:

Pre-school children should spend time cooking with their parents and playing with numbers to help improve their maths skills, a Government review has recommended.
The report by Sir Peter Williams, Chancellor of Leicester University, also advised that every primary school should have a specialist maths teacher and called for more mental arithmetic in class.
He called for urgent action to change England’s “can’t do attitude” to the subject, and said that every child should have mastered the basics of the subject by the age of seven.
To help achieve this children should be playing with shapes, time, capacity and numbers to foster their “natural instincts” from a young age




Dan Nerad Assumes the Madison Superintendent Position July 1, 2008



Tamira Madsen:

Hailed as a hard worker by district peers and teachers, in person, Nerad is a quiet and astute listener who weighs opinions, questions and ideas in a thoughtful manner.
It’s the quiet that marks the greatest contrast with outgoing Superintendent Art Rainwater, a former football coach with a commanding physical presence. Rainwater’s assertive, booming voice resonates in the Doyle Administration Building’s auditorium with or without a microphone.
Asked what the biggest difference is between Rainwater and Nerad, School Board President Arlene Silveira said it “will be Dan being out in the community and being more communicative. I think he will be more available and more accessible to the community as a whole. … I think people should feel very comfortable and confident that stepping in, he will be able to start making decisions and leading us from day one. I think that’s a big deal and very positive for us.”

Notes, Links, Audio and Video of Dan Nerad. Nerad’s public appearance.




A 24-hour boarding school can be part of the answer to helping inner city youth help the state by becoming high school and college graduates.



Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel Editorial:

Her learning marked her as different in her neighborhood and her home. And that was the conundrum she presented to the benefactor driving her home for summer break from the last day of school on Thursday.
Her family lives in one of the roughest housing projects in Washington, D.C. But for the past three years, the 15-year-old ninth-grader has been attending the SEED School in that city, which meant she lived at the school five days a week, except in the summer. It is a boarding school of the type that a core group of influential Milwaukeeans wants to establish here — providing remedial and college-prep, wraparound services that cocoon students from tough family and neighborhood circumstances so that they may better acquire the academic and life skills to succeed.
This girl represents one of the reasons Milwaukee and state leaders should get behind this proposal, contributing to a capital campaign that must raise $30 million to $60 million in private money and injecting a commitment in the governor’s upcoming budget for direct state funding in 2011.
“Ms. Poole, I’m concerned,” the girl said, as Lesley Poole, the schools director of student life, tells it on the day it happened. “I think I’m getting smarter and know more than anyone in my house, and that’s unfair to my mom. I know more words than she does. . . . I can out talk her.”




Three Wisconsin students best in Braille



Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction:

Students from Kenosha, Green Bay, and Madison are among the top Braille users in the United States and Canada, winning a competition held earlier this spring at the Wisconsin Center for the Blind and Visually Impaired in Janesville, as a part of the international Braille Challenge.
The three Wisconsin winners are eligible to attend the finals of the international Braille Challenge, which will be held in Los Angeles on June 27th.
The winners, Baylee Alger of Green Bay, Zachary Morris of Kenosha, and Amelia King of Madison, competed in reading comprehension, proofreading, spelling, dictation, and charts and graphs events as part of the challenge. Alger and Morris won top honors in the apprentice category for students in the first and second grades. Both attend their local school districts and receive Braille instruction from teachers of the blind: Alger from Kathleen Ford and Morris from Harry Ostrov. King has placed as a finalist twice before and won the competition in 2004. She currently attends the Wisconsin School for the Visually Handicapped in Janesville and has been a student at Madison Memorial High School.




Wisconsin Moving Toward New Academic Standards



Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction:

Wisconsin took an important step Wednesday toward new academic standards which will provide the rigor and relevance students need to succeed in the 21st century.
During the Partnership for 21st Century Skills (P21) Best Practices Forum (Institute.21) in Madison, State Superintendent Elizabeth Burmaster received final recommendations for revising and then implementing Model Academic Standards in English language arts and mathematics.
The recommendations represent the work of leadership and design teams made up of educators, legislators, parents, and business representatives.

Wisconsin’s standards have been criticized by the Fordham Foundation. The Madison School District is planning to use “Value Added Assessment” based on the state standards.




Raising Minority Graduation Rates in College



Jay Matthews:

The Catholic University and Trinity Washington University are well-regarded institutions located next to each other in a verdant section of northeast Washington. Yet there is a huge gap between them in the relative graduation rates of their black and white students.
Trinity, with an enrollment of about 1,600 mostly female undergraduates, graduated 51 percent of its black students entering in 2000 within six years, higher than the national black graduation rate of about 40 percent and almost identical to Trinity’s white graduation rate, 53 percent. Catholic, with an enrollment of about 6,200, has a six-year graduation rate of 25 percent for black students and 72 percent for white students who entered in 2000, one of the largest discrepancies in the country in this vital statistic.
Kevin Carey, a noted graduation rate researcher, merely reveals this interesting divergence in the data about the two schools. He does not explain it. But his startling new report, “Graduation Rate Watch: Making Minority Student Success a Priority,” which can be found online at http://www.educationsector.org/research/research_show.htm?doc_id=678433, identifies the most likely sources of such differences and provides more hopeful data about raising the graduation rates of low-income and minority students than I have seen gathered in one place.




Education: As the twig is bent …



Jerry Large:

Wouldn’t it be great if there were a single solution to our most vexing problems?
We could add productive workers, cut crime, reduce teen pregnancies and save money, too. Well, just click your heels, because we already have that power; we just have to recognize it and act on it.
The magic lies in early education: all the emotional, physical, social and cognitive learning kids do between birth and 5.
But when people talk about the power of education, it’s usually only K-12 education they’re thinking about, which may be why we just keep talking.
Last week a group of educators and social activists declared education a civil-rights issue.
The head of the school systems in New York City and Washington, D.C., were among the people who formed a new group to advocate for shaking up public education to eliminate achievement gaps based on race and income.
Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels wrote in The Seattle Times last week about urban areas as the foundation of U.S. prosperity and said the quality of education kids get affects our ability to address other problems cities face.




Art, music give students skills to succeed in tomorrow’s world



Ray Binghamand Lisa Gonzales Schoennauer:

Budget cuts. Teacher layoffs. In this time of budget crisis, can our public schools really afford to continue funding arts and music education?
The appropriate question is: Can California schools afford not to?
The Dana Arts and Cognition Consortium recently identified a direct correlation between arts experiences and both academic achievement and personal development. The research shows that students who are exposed to the arts demonstrate increased overall academic success beyond just test scores, are connected to the world outside of school, and have more self-confidence.
What’s more, the report found that training in the arts leads to higher levels of reading acquisition, motivation, extended attention spans, information recall in long-term memory, and understanding of geometric representation. For example, specific pathways in the brain can be identified and improved during performing and visual arts instruction.
Not convinced by the academic research? Then look at the economics.




Germans eye kindergarten for next engineers



Richard Milne:

Germany’s shortage of engineers has become so acute that some of its leading companies are turning to nursery schools to guarantee future supplies.
Industrial giants such as Siemens and Bosch are among hundreds of companies giving materials and money to kindergartens to try to interest children as young as three in technology and science.
Many European countries from Switzerland to Spain suffer shortages of graduates. But the problem is especially acute in Germany, renowned as a land of engineering. German companies have 95,000 vacancies for engineers and only about 40,000 are trained, according to the engineers’ association.
“It is a new development in that we have seen we need to start very early with children. Starting at school is not good enough – we need to help them to understand as early as possible how things work,” said Maria Schumm-Tschauder, head of Siemens’ Generation21 education programme.




Madison Math Task Force Minutes



March 7, 2008 Meeting [rtf / pdf]. Well worth reading for those interested in the use of Connected Math and Core Plus, among others, in our schools.
A few interesting items:

  • Mitchell Nathan proposed a change to the name of the Work Group to more authentically describe its intent. There was consensus to accept the change in designation for the Work Group from “Curriculum Review and Research Findings” to “Learning from Curricula.”
  • “Addresses the misconception that there is one curriculum. There are a number of curricula at play, with the exception of the narrowing down at the middle school level, but teachers are also drawing from supplementary materials. There are a range of pathways for math experiences. The work plan would give an overview by level of program of what exists. “
  • “Could say that variety is good for children to have places to plug into. Could expand on the normative idea of purchasing commercial curricula vs. richer, in-house materials. Standards tell the teachers what needs to be taught. Published materials often are missing some aspect of the standards. District tries to define core resources; guides that help people with classroom organization.” Fascinating, given the move toward one size fits all in high school, such as English 9 and 10.
  • “Want to include a summary of the NRC report that came out in favor of Connected Math but was not conclusive—cannot control for teacher effects, positive effects of all curricula, etc. “
  • “Would like to give some portrayal of the opportunities for accelerated performance — want to document informal ways things are made available for differentiation. “
  • “Include elementary math targeted at middle school, e.g., Math Masters. There is information out there to address the Math Masters program and its effect on student achievement.”
  • “Data are available to conclude that there is equity in terms of resources”
  • “District will have trend data, including the period when Connected Math was implemented, and control for changes in demographics and see if there was a change. No way to link students who took the WKCE with a particular curriculum experience (ed: some years ago, I recall a teacher asked Administration at a PTO meeting whether they would track students who took Singapore Math at the Elementary level: “No”). That kind of data table has to be built, including controls and something to match teacher quality. May recommend that not worth looking at WKCE scores of CM (Connected Math) student or a case study is worth doing. “
  • The Parent Survey will be mailed to the homes of 1500 parents of students across all grades currently enrolled in MMSD math classes. The Teacher Survey will be conducted via the district’s web site using the Infinite Campus System.
  • MMSD Math Task Force website

Math Forum audio / video and links.




The Fate of The Sentence: Is the Writing On the Wall?



Linton Weeks:

The demise of orderly writing: signs everywhere.
One recent report, young Americans don’t write well.
In a survey, Internet language — abbreviated wds, 🙂 and txt msging — seeping into academic writing.
But above all, what really scares a lot of scholars: the impending death of the English sentence.
Librarian of Congress James Billington, for one. “I see creeping inarticulateness,” he says, and the demise of the basic component of human communication: the sentence.
This assault on the lowly — and mighty — sentence, he says, is symptomatic of a disease potentially fatal to civilization. If the sentence croaks, so will critical thought. The chronicling of history. Storytelling itself.
He has a point. The sentence itself is a story, with a beginning, a middle and an end. Something happens in a sentence. Without subjects, there are no heroes or villains. Without verbs, there is no action. Without objects, nothing is moved, changed, destroyed or created.
Plus, simple sentences clarify complex situations. (“Jesus wept.”)

Related:




Stop Cheering on Charter Schools



Matthew Taylor (the south area chairman for United Teachers Los Angeles, has taught English in Los Angeles schools for 23 years.) :

It’s apparent from The Times editorial, “Hope for Locke High,” and two previous articles why this newspaper deserves its poor reputation among local educators and informed community members when it comes to public education. A runaway bureaucracy, top-down authoritarian school administrations and a decided lack of collaboration are the real issues. It’s too bad that they remain hidden behind The Times’ blame-the-bad-teacher cries and charter-school cheerleading.
Can we at least talk about the real problem, the state budget, for a moment? Because California is one of the largest economies in the world, it’s a crime that the state ranks among the lowest in per-pupil spending and has such large teacher-student ratios. It would make sense to give a much greater financial priority to public education. What we don’t spend on now, we will have to spend much more on later. Incarceration, healthcare and welfare already cost our society too much.
Senior Deputy Supt. Ramon C. Cortines (who really should be called the superintendent in light of the vacant leadership of David L. Brewer) was clear and correct in taking responsibility for the latest outburst of violence at Locke High School. The Los Angeles Unified School District has “abdicated [its] responsibility” for too many years at a host of schools in inner-city Los Angeles. Years of inexperienced or despotic administrators have helped drive excellent, experienced teachers away. A lack of true collaboration with teachers and parents, turning a blind eye to the collective bargaining agreement and ignoring student-centered reforms lowered morale. When teachers aren’t valued, they try to find places where they are.

Related: Fearing for Massachusetts School Reform.




100 Black Men of America:
African American History Bowl Challenge Finals



Teams from 100 Black Men of Charlotte and 100 Black Men of Madison faced each other in Friday evening’s Junior Division finals [Photo (Charlotte Left, Madison Right)]. Madison (Cherokee Heights Middle School) prevailed.
100 Black Men of Jackson (MS) faced 100 Black Men of Chicago in the Senior Division Finals [Photo (Jackson Left, Chicago Right)]. Chicago won.
Madison’s team: Marshaun Hall, Maria Lee and Carrie Zellmer. The team was coached by Cherokee Middle School’s Learning Coordinator Jeff Horney. Enis Ragland, founding President of the Madison chapter and Ken Black, current President of the 100 Black Men of Madison accompanied the team (a team from Madison Memorial High School competed in the Senior Division).
Finally, this photo of the Madison team notifying friends and loved ones that they advanced to the finals provides a useful look at the zeitgeist of a 14 year old, circa 2008.
March, 2008 Madison African American History Challenge Bowl.
100 Black Men of America.




Dane County, WI Schools Consider MAP Assessement Tests After Frustration with State WKCE Exams
Waunakee Urges that the State Dump the WKCE



Andy Hall takes a look at a useful topic:

From Wisconsin Heights on the west to Marshall on the east, 10 Dane County school districts and the private Eagle School in Fitchburg are among more than 170 Wisconsin public and private school systems purchasing tests from Northwest Evaluation Association, a nonprofit group based in the state of Oregon.
The aim of those tests, known as Measures of Academic Progress, and others purchased from other vendors, is to give educators, students and parents more information about students ‘ strengths and weaknesses. Officials at these districts say the cost, about $12 per student per year for MAP tests, is a good investment.
The tests ‘ popularity also reflects widespread frustration over the state ‘s $10 million testing program, the Wisconsin Knowledge and Concepts Examination.
Critics say that WKCE, which is used to hold schools accountable under the federal No Child Left Behind law, fails to provide adequate data to help improve the teaching methods and curriculum used in the classrooms.
They complain that because the tests are administered just once a year, and it takes nearly six months to receive the results, the information arrives in May — too late to be of use to teachers during the school year.
The testing controversy is “a healthy debate, ” said Tony Evers, deputy state superintendent of public instruction, whose agency contends that there ‘s room for both WKCE and MAP.
….
“It ‘s a test that we feel is much more relevant to assisting students and helping them with their skills development, ” said Mike Hensgen, director of curriculum and instruction for the Waunakee School District, who acknowledges he ‘s a radical in his dislike of WKCE.
“To me, the WKCE is not rigorous enough. When a kid sees he ‘s proficient, ‘ he thinks he ‘s fine. ”
Hensgen contends that the WKCE, which is based on the state ‘s academic content for each grade level, does a poor job of depicting what elite students, and students performing at the bottom level, really know.
The Waunakee School Board, in a letter being distributed this month, is urging state legislators and education officials to find ways to dump WKCE in favor of MAP and tests from ACT and other vendors.

The Madison School District and the Wisconsin Center for Education Research are using the WKCE as a benchmark for “Value Added Assessment”.
Related:




“Charter Schools Shouldn’t Promote Islam”



Katherine Kersten:

At what point does a publicly funded charter school with strong Islamic ties cross the line and inappropriately promote religion?
That’s a question now facing us in Minnesota. For the past five years, the Tarek ibn Ziyad Academy Britannica, in Inver Grove Heights, Minn., has operated in close connection with the Muslim American Society of Minnesota. The school accepts public funds, and thus the broader constitutional requirements placed on all public schools. Nonetheless, in many ways it behaves like a religious school.
The school is named for the Muslim general who conquered Spain in the eighth century. It shares a building with a mosque and the headquarters of the Muslim American Society of Minnesota. The cafeteria serves Halal food. Arabic is a required subject. There is a break for midday prayers.
On Fridays, many students join with Muslim teachers and attend religious services in the school’s gym. There are voluntary Islamic Studies classes held “after” school, but before the buses leave to take the school’s 400 students home. Most of the students are the children of low-income Muslim immigrants.




Obama & School Reform



David Brooks:

The question of the week is: Which camp is Barack Obama in?
His advisers run the gamut, and the answer depends in part on what month it is. Back in October 2005, Obama gave a phenomenal education speech in which he seemed to ally with the reformers. Then, as the campaign heated up, he shifted over to pure union orthodoxy, ripping into accountability and testing in a speech in New Hampshire in a way that essentially gutted the reformist case. Then, on May 28 in Colorado, he delivered another major education speech in which he shifted back in a more ambiguous direction.
In that Colorado speech, he opened with a compelling indictment of America’s school systems. Then he argued that the single most important factor in shaping student achievement is the quality of the teachers. This seemed to direct him in the reformist camp’s direction, which has made them happy.
But when you look at the actual proposals Obama offers, he’s doesn’t really address the core issues. He’s for the vast panoply of pre-K and after-school programs that most of us are for. But the crucial issues are: What do you do with teachers and administrators who are failing? How rigorously do you enforce accountability? Obama doesn’t engage the thorny, substantive matters that separate the two camps.
He proposes dozens of programs to build on top of the current system, but it’s not clear that he would challenge it. He’s all carrot, no stick. He’s politically astute — giving everybody the impression he’s on their side — but substantively vague. Change just isn’t that easy.
Obama endorses many good ideas and is more specific than the McCain campaign, which hasn’t even reported for duty on education. But his education remarks give the impression of a candidate who wants to be for big change without actually incurring the political costs inherent in that enterprise.

Letters in response to Brooks’ column.




“Why is the education lobby so afraid of giving parents more choice?”



Letters to the Seattle Times:

I agree with virtually everything Web Hutchins wrote questioning the value of the test-based WASL, Advanced Placement and the very real value of small class sizes [“Test-based education is shortchanging students,” Times, guest commentary, June 11]. He does leave out a few things, however.
I’ve always thought that the education lobby has resisted teacher-competency evaluation to the point that testing students with the WASL has become the alternative to testing and evaluating teachers. What does education certification really mean? It certainly doesn’t mean competence in the classroom. Why is the education lobby so afraid of giving parents more choice in the selection of schools and teachers? I don’t think it’s about classroom size.




D.C. Leaders Chart Progress, Academic Goals



V. Dion Haynes:

D.C. Mayor Adrian M. Fenty and education officials marked the first anniversary of his takeover of the city’s beleaguered public schools yesterday by listing a series of improvements, mainly in business functions and school facilities, and outlined their goal of improving student achievement in the second year.
School system officials acknowledge that the efforts, while serving as a foundation for better instruction, probably will show little immediate effect on performance, as rated on test scores due later this summer.
A five-page, mostly single-spaced handout detailed 46 initiatives. They include a new textbook distribution system, refurbished high school athletic fields, spruced-up buildings, more art and music teachers and digitized personnel files that eliminated 4.6 million documents in disarray.




“Magical Thinking on Education and Vouchers”



Diane Roberts:

This week’s summit — as sponsors call it — of Jeb Bush’s Foundation for Excellence in Education might seem like a mere “school choice” pep rally with a bonus excursion to the Magic Kingdom, but it’s happening at a time when the Legislature has decimated school funding. Moreover, this is an election year.
Headliners at the conference at the Disney World Contemporary Resort include New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, U.S. Education Secretary Margaret Spellings, a slew of usual suspects from the Heritage Foundation and the Cato Institute, plus Barbara Bush and state Sen. Dan Webster, whose valedictory piece of legislation was a resolution instructing Floridians to pray away hurricanes on June 1.
And, of course, Jeb Bush himself.
Three of the nine amendments Floridians will vote on this November will determine the course of public education in this state. Amendment 5 (Clusty / Google) gets rid of local property taxes designated for schools, requiring the Legislature to raise sales taxes or perform some other voodoo economics to make up the funding gap. Amendments 7 (Clusty / Google) and 9 (Clusty / Google) would demolish Florida’s separation of church and state and repeal the part of the Constitution that calls for a “uniform, efficient, safe, secure, and high quality system of free public schools that allows students to obtain a high quality education.” The state would simply be obligated to provide education “fulfilled at a minimum and not exclusively” by public schools.
Out of office ain’t out of power — Amendments 7 and 9 come courtesy of Jeb Bush and his band of true believers.

Diane Roberts is professor of English at Florida State University.




Pacific Collegiate Charter School Climate



J.M. Brown:

For its advancement placement courses and high test stores, PCS was named California’s top charter school in 2006, followed by rankings in two national news magazines as a top U.S. charter school and public high school. But Goldenkranz’s departure is one of many big changes to hit the school of nearly 440 students in what has become a sweeping period of transition.
In April, a fractured board voted to support increasing enrollment over the next few years as a way to increase ethnic and socioeconomic diversity, as well as create more revenue for teacher salaries. Goldenkranz supported the growth, as did a majority of the school’s 31 faculty members.
In May, Santa Cruz City Schools announced the district and PCS had failed to reach accord on renewing the school’s lease. PCS officials said the district wanted the school to more than double its current annual $200,000 lease payments.
Ross said the nine-year-old school, which educates grades seven through 12, is preparing a Proposition 39 request of the district to provide facilities for the 71 percent of PCS students who live within its boundaries. PCS has waived its rights under Prop. 39 for the past five years in order to keep all of its students together, but now says it can’t afford the market rates the district wants to charge.
District supporters say the school could pull from its healthy reserves to pay more rent or buy a building. According to records at the county education office, PCS currently has a $1.2 million ending fund balance, equal to more than a third of its overall $3 million 2007-08 operating budget.
Watkins said he unsuccessfully encouraged the district to work out an arrangement to allow the school to stay put.

Pacific Collegiate Charter School website.




100 Best First Lines from Novels



American Book Review:

1. Call me Ishmael. —Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (1851)
2. It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife. —Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (1813)
3. A screaming comes across the sky. —Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow (1973)




Madison Shabazz Grads Grads Celebrate Marching To Their Own Drummer



Jason Smathers:

Instead of flinging mortar boards into the air, students playfully batted around a beach ball. “Pomp and Circumstance” was replaced by an all-staff rendition of Crosby Stills Nash and Young’s “Teach Your Children.” One student even replaced the traditional cap and gown with a tie-dyed bandana, peace sign T-shirt and pearl white blazer.
It was just another normal graduation for Shabazz City High School (Map).
The school honored its graduates Thursday night in an informal ceremony where teachers described their students’ strengths and most memorable experiences. All 36 graduates were given time to speak their mind and thank the teachers and parents who helped them along the way.
“I learned so much more here than at any other school I’ve ever been to,” said departing senior John Baudhuin in a short speech echoed by many other students. “If I hadn’t gone here, there is no way this many doors would be open to me.”




Studying Abroad – Two American Students Discuss Their Experiences



Open Education:

From 1991-92 through 2004-05, the number of students studying abroad has more than doubled according to Open Doors 2004. Representing an increase of roughly 145%, the raw numbers translate to about 71,000 students in 1991-92 to almost 175,000 in 2004-05.
Many in recent years have steered away from studying in Europe due to the falling dollar. Though most still list places like Rome, Paris, London, Barcelona and Amsterdam as their number one choices, sticker shock has many students turning towards other areas of the world.
However, at least two young ladies have followed their dreams of studying abroad in Europe. Emily and Rachel are both graduate students at the University of Amsterdam where they are in the ‘Brain and Cognitive Sciences’ master’s program run by the Cognitive Science Center, Amsterdam (CSCA).
Each has also made the most rare of commitments – neither is doing a simple semester or year abroad. Each has made the commitment to complete an entire degree program in a foreign land.




Louisiana Senate Approves Voucher Program



Bill Barrow:

Gov. Bobby Jindal moved one step closer Wednesday to final approval for a $10 million pilot program that would pay private school tuition for some children in Orleans Parish public schools.
The 25-12 Senate vote sends House Bill 1347 by Rep. Austin Badon, D-New Orleans, back to the lower chamber for its reconsideration. Some form of the measure, one of Jindal’s top legislative priorities, is now certain to reach the governor’s desk, with the plan slated to start this fall.
The vote represents another victory for social conservatives since Jindal took office in January. The grants also would pierce a philosophical veil, adding Louisiana to the list of states willing to direct public money to private K-12 schools.
Sen. Ann Duplessis, D-New Orleans, called that a great victory for 1,500 children who she said are more important than doctrinaire allegiance to public schools.




Madison’s Cherokee Middle School Wins the 100 Black Men of America Championship




A team from Madison’s Cherokee Middle School (100 Black men of Madison) defeated students from Charlotte, NC (100 Black Men – Charlotte) in this evening’s middle school African American History Challenge Bowl at the 100 Black Men of America Annual Conference in Orlando.
A team from Madison Memorial High School participated in the event’s initial round Thursday evening.
Photos and links from the March, 2008 Madison competition.
The above photo was taken at the March, 2008 Madison competition.




More on McCain’s K-12 Plans



Maria Glod:

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) hasn’t said much about how to fix America’s schools. But an adviser yesterday said the presumptive Republican presidential nominee supports using federal dollars for teacher merit pay and wants to change the No Child Left Behind law championed by President Bush.
Lisa Graham Keegan, former Arizona superintendent of public instruction and a McCain education policy adviser, said McCain wants annual testing to stay, and that schools would continue to be required to report those scores. But she said he wants educators to have more say in how to fix struggling schools.
“The federal government cannot position itself continually as the bully in this,” Keegan told a group of reporters today at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a nonprofit involved in education reform. “No more will we say that’s what 50 states are going to do, because he doesn’t believe that’s our best hope for improvement.”




To solve racial disparities, parents, schools call truce



Tim Nelson:

Minneapolis schools are hoping a new cooperative agreement with African-American parents will smooth some of the hard feelings over school closings last year and help close the district’s student achievement gap.
The idea is for black parents to help get their children ready to learn while the school district works with parents to help the kids succeed.
On average, black kids in Minneapolis schools do about half as well as their white classmates. They get disciplined more often. They get fewer diplomas.
That education gap has been the source of an increasingly bitter struggle in the city, but a group of parents and the school board have decided to call a truce.
The district voted Tuesday, to work with parents on what they’re calling a memorandum of agreement. It’s modeled on other agreements, like a pact with the NAACP and St. Paul Police and American Indian families and Minneapolis schools.




Schools can’t take gifted students for granted



Niki Paul
With the recent news about Salem-Keizer’s talented and gifted program under scrutiny again, I would like to commend the parents for their continual push and voice. Too often, important issues in education are dropped because the matters are not repeatedly brought to light.
Gifted students deserve appropriate learning opportunities and academic challenges so that they may become talented. We certainly reward competent athletes. It would be unthinkable to eliminate varsity or college football; we value the process of preparing professionals. Should we not then strive to add to our society highly talented artists, exceptional engineers, literary geniuses and the like?
School districts do not worry about their gifted students because from them, districts get better attendance, great test scores and graduates. School leaders view the parents as an annoyance and tune out their voices whenever possible. Yet the message has been sent and stands clear: Gifted and talented students are a special population needing special services.
What happens to bright, active learners when they aren’t challenged is they challenge the system. The underperforming gifted and talented become intellectually depressed in an academic environment that fails to challenge them. They are the “too smart for their own good” students who can pass every test without doing any of the time-filling work created to fill mandatory seat time.
When a gifted learner senses that learning opportunities are absent, he or she responds with challenging behavior. Wouldn’t it be wiser for teachers to be in the place of challenging learners rather than creating and managing challenging behaviors?
Again, district and schools respond to the needs of gifted and talented learners with blank stares, especially at the high school level. Students who attend, pass state tests and graduate do not arouse the attention of bureaucrats. Teachers cannot implement what is not programmatically available. They need tools, resources and time to challenge learners.




College Track



Carolyne Zinko:

The educational nonprofit was founded in East Palo Alto in 1997 to help low-income students boost their grades, apply to college and obtain scholarships.
Students must apply to the after-school supplement to their high school studies and maintain a 3.0 grade point average. Those who falter are steered into a counseling group called Inspire, which tries, through group chat sessions, to motivate them to try harder.
There’s fun, too – summer field trips to Yosemite and Tahoe, because many students have never experienced the outdoors. And tucked into all this is counseling. College Track officials find there are times when they have to cajole parents into allowing their children to attend college out of the Bay Area or out of state. Parents who don’t speak English often look to their children as leaders, relying on them for help with translating and enlisting them in child care duties. They want their children close to home.

www.collegetrack.org




The Swedish Model
A Swedish firm has worked out how to make money running free schools



The Economist:

BIG-STATE, social-democratic Sweden seems an odd place to look for a free-market revolution. Yet that is what is under way in the country’s schools. Reforms that came into force in 1994 allow pretty much anyone who satisfies basic standards to open a new school and take in children at the state’s expense. The local municipality must pay the school what it would have spent educating each child itself—a sum of SKr48,000-70,000 ($8,000-12,000) a year, depending on the child’s age and the school’s location. Children must be admitted on a first-come, first-served basis—there must be no religious requirements or entrance exams. Nothing extra can be charged for, but making a profit is fine.
The reforms were controversial, especially within the Social Democratic Party, then in one of its rare spells in opposition. They would have been even more controversial had it been realised just how popular they would prove. In just 14 years the share of Swedish children educated privately has risen from a fraction of a percent to more than 10%.
At the time, it was assumed that most “free” schools would be foreign-language (English, Finnish or Estonian) or religious, or perhaps run by groups of parents in rural areas clubbing together to keep a local school alive. What no one predicted was the emergence of chains of schools. Yet that is where much of the growth in independent education has come from. Sweden’s Independent Schools Association has ten members that run more than six schools, and five that run ten or more.

Interesting.




Who can make school boards stronger?



Laura Diamond:

A group of education and business leaders are trying to improve school boards across Georgia.
This new Commission for School Board Excellence was formed at the request of the State Board of Education. The group includes representatives from the Georgia and Metro Atlanta Chambers of Commerce and the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools (SACS).
The new group listed a few places where weak board struggle: micromanagement of staff, poor decision-making and mismanaging money.
These are severe problems. This new group may have good ideas on how to help school boards, but do you think board members will listen to the advice?

Related: How to Reform Your Local School Board by Steve Loehrke.




Study of Small High Schools (Small Learning Communities or SLC) Yields Little on Achievement



David Hoff:

High schools receiving $80 million in annual federal funding to support “smaller learning communities” can document that they are taking steps to establish learning environments more intimate than found in the typical comprehensive high school.
But, according to a federal study, such smaller schools can’t answer the most significant question: Is student achievement improving in the smaller settings?
The evaluation of the 8-year-old program found that schools participating in it show signs of success. In the schools, the proportion of students being promoted from 9th to 10th grade increases, participation in extracurricular activities rises, and the rate of violent incidents declines.
But the evaluation found “no significant trends” in achievement on state tests or college-entrance exams, says the report, which was prepared by a private contractor and released by the U.S. Department of Education last week.

Related:




Education Secretary’s US Roadshow for No Child Left Behind



Sheryl Gay Stolberg:

Margaret Spellings is not running for office — at least, not yet. But in the waning days of the Bush presidency, she is running one last campaign.
On a cold and soggy morning in March, Ms. Spellings, the relentlessly cheery and sometimes sassy United States secretary of education, turned up here, at a little brick elementary school across the Ohio River from Cincinnati. She had been on the road for months, promoting President Bush’s beleaguered education initiative, No Child Left Behind, delivering one sales pitch after another.
“I’m pretty sure that the new president, whoever it is, will not show up and work on George Bush’s domestic achievement on Day 1,” she told a group of civic leaders and educators, promising to do “everything in my power” to improve the law before the White House changes hands.
For Ms. Spellings, a longtime and exceedingly loyal member of the Bush inner circle, it was a startling, if tacit, admission that the president’s education legacy is in danger. No Child Left Behind — the signature domestic achievement, beyond tax cuts, of the entire Bush presidency — has changed the lives of millions of American students, parents, teachers and school administrators. Yet its future is in grave doubt.




Out of Sight



Bob Herbert:

“Schools have not made much of an effort to bring this population back in,” said Mr. Jones. “Once you fall out of the system, you’re basically on no one’s programmatic radar screen.”
So these kids drift. Some are drawn to gangs. A disproportionate number become involved in crime. It is a tragic story, and very few people are paying attention.
The economic policies of the past few decades have favored the wealthy and the well-connected to a degree that has been breathtaking to behold. The Nation magazine has devoted its current issue to the Gilded Age-type inequality that has been the result.
Just a little bit of help to the millions of youngsters trying to get their first tentative foothold in that economy should not be too much to ask.




Schools Give Teachers a New Kind of Apple



Erin Richards:

It was after lunch in a social studies classroom at North Shore Middle School in Hartland when seventh-graders began tapping out messages to students in Germany, France, Kosovo and Bosnia on a fleet of shiny Apple laptops.
The modernized electronic version of paper-and-stamp correspondence the children were using, called ePals, is one of several programs being piloted in suburban districts this year as teachers and curriculum coordinators seek ways to extend learning beyond the physical limitations of the classroom.
The next big step, say officials in suburban districts, as well as in Milwaukee Public Schools, is exploring a 1-to-1 student laptop initiative or the possibility of issuing every student a hand-held computer, such as an iPod touch.
“There’s a far greater use of technology (in schools) when you make it mobile,” MPS Director of Technology Jim Davis said.




Education fundamental building block



Martin Shields:

Because economists tend to point out things like this, it is not surprising that I was not invited to give a commencement address. But if I had been, my message would have been a simple one.
Don’t worry. You made the right decision.
Recent earnings data indicates the essentiality of education. According to the Current Population Survey (CPS) annual earnings for Colorado’s full-time workers without a high school diploma averaged $25,916 in 2006. For Centennial State residents holding a high school degree only, annual earnings averaged $34,698. Over just 15 years, a (crude) calculation shows the high school diploma is worth about $132,000.
High school graduates are also less likely to live in poverty. CPS data from 2005 indicate 22.1 percent of Colorado’s adult population without a high school diploma lived in poverty. By comparison, the state’s high school only graduates had poverty rates of 11.6 percent.




Columbia, Missouri ACT Results Compared with Math Curriculum



Columbia Parents for Real Math:

CPS Secondary Math Curriculum Coordinator Chip Sharp provided average ACT scores reported by course enrollment which are used in the figures below. Plotting the data in several ways gives food for thought regarding the differences between algebra and integrated math pathways offered at CPS.
The data don’t distinguish between which students are sophomores, juniors or seniors when they take the ACT, which students may have repeated courses or what year they started the pathway (7th, 8th or 9th grade). But it does give some idea of how much math “preparation” each course pathway provides at least for the years for which data is available.

I’ve heard that Madison’s Math Task Force will render a report prior to Superintendent Art Rainwater’s June 30, 2008 retirement. Related: Math Forum.




Education: Failing schools? Failing government, more like
Many children can’t read or write when they reach secondary school



Alice Miles:

pare a thought this morning for teachers whose schools have the lowest results in the country, waking up to a warning from the Government that they have 50 days – 50 days! – to produce an “action plan” or face closure or merger.
Some of these schools may deserve the opprobrium that ministers are inviting us to heap upon them. Many more will not. Most “failing” schools take the toughest kids from the most socially disadvantaged areas. They are not dealing with the problems you and I might be worrying about: whether the curriculum is broad enough for Sophie’s myriad interests, or when Jamie will fit in the third language you want him to learn.
These schools are dealing with children with deprived and disruptive family backgrounds many of whom cannot read or write English, lack any positive parental support and have already given up on their chances in life before they walk through the school gates at 11.




Imperial College ditches A levels and sets its own entrance exam



Alexandra Frean:

One of Britain’s leading universities is to introduce an entrance exam for all students applying to study there from 2010 because it believes that A levels no longer provide it with a viable way to select the best students.
Sir Richard Sykes, Rector of Imperial College, London, suggested that grade inflation at A level meant that so many students now got straight As that it had become almost “worthless” as a way of discriminating between the talented and the well drilled.
Last year one in four A-level marks was a grade A and 10 per cent of A-level students achieved at least three As.
“We can’t rely on A levels any more. Everybody who applies has got three or four As. They [A levels] are not very useful. The International Baccalaureate is useful but again this is just a benchmark,” Sir Richard said.




The Enemy Within British Education



Melanie Phillips via a kind reader:

In my book All Must Have Prizes, first published in 1996, in which I charted the disintegration of education and deconstruction of knowledge in Britain, I noted that this onslaught had resulted from the hijack of education by left-wing ideologues hell-bent on destroying British society. These people were entrenched in university departments of education. So when the government tried to address education decline by imposing a national curriculum and turned to the ‘experts’ to help them do so, the people who wrote that curriculum and sat on the curriculum boards and other education quangos were the very people who were doing the damage in the first place.
Twelve years on, Britain’s education system has disintegrated yet further and exactly the same kind of people are doing the same damage. Today’s Daily Mail reports that Professor John White, who specialises in ‘the philosophy of education’ and a government adviser on curriculum reform, says that children should no longer be taught traditional subjects at school because they are ‘middle-class’ creations and ‘mere stepping stones to wealth’ and that lessons should teach ‘personal skills’ instead.

The professor believes the origins of our subject-based education system can be traced back to 19th century middle-class values. While public schools focused largely on the classics, and elementary schools for the working class concentrated on the three Rs, middle-class schools taught a range of academic subjects.
These included English, maths, history, geography, science and Latin or a modern language. They ‘fed into the idea of academic learning as the mark of a well-heeled middle- class’, he said last night. The Tories then attempted to impose these middle-class values by introducing a traditional subject-based curriculum in 1988. But this ‘alienated many youngsters, especially from disadvantaged backgrounds’, he claimed.




Computer program helps students shape their writing



Alan Borsuk:

If Alegra Holt had $100, she would spend $1 on candy, buy some clothes, give some to charity and see if she had enough left to buy a Chihuahua.
If Alegra had to write a short essay on what she’d do if she had $100, she’d sign on to a program called My Access, using a computer in the basement computer lab of Carleton Elementary School, 4116 W. Silver Spring Drive.
The 10-year-old fifth-grader at Carleton would fill in blanks in a “cluster web” on her screen to begin shaping her essay. From the central idea of using $100, she would put “buy candy” in one branch of the web, with what kind of candy or what store she’d go to in sub-branches, then do the same in other branches for her other plans.
Then she’d begin to type the assignment in sentences and paragraphs.




Hard work translates to success at La Tinaja school in Ocampo



Macarena Hernandez & Gary Jacobson:

The elementary school at La Tinaja — Escuela Primaria 18 de Marzo — is named after one of the most famous dates in Mexico history. On March 18, 1938, President Lazaro Cardenas nationalized the country’s oil industry, kicking out foreign-owned companies.
Principal Socorro Lara has been at the school 15 years and in the Ocampo municipality 35. She doubles as a teacher. In the mornings, she substitutes, and in the evenings, she teaches kids who are struggling.
There are a total of about 50 schools in Ocampo, and this is the best, municipality education official Jose Juan Salazar says.
Why?




Transforming Inner-City Schools To Train Tomorrow’s Work Force



Joe Barrett:

One day in August 2005, Dan Swinney went to the Chicago public schools for help in his crusade to revive manufacturing here. Instead, Mr. Swinney left his meeting with some homework: design a new high school to train the workers needed to make that revival happen.
This past fall, the school, Austin Polytechnical Academy, opened inside a building that had once housed a mammoth, violence-prone high school on the city’s struggling West Side. Now, Mr. Swinney, chairman of the Chicago Manufacturing Renaissance Council, has plans to open two more high schools and an elementary school in other areas of the city.
Mr. Swinney says American manufacturing is adapting to globalization by shifting to higher-value products. But with the baby boomers’ looming retirement, the education system isn’t producing the workers and managers needed to take over the highly skilled jobs that are most in demand.
“There’s a window that’s open that will allow us to sustain and expand our competitive advantage, but it’s only open for a few years,” Mr. Swinney says. Training poor students to fill these positions can “address deep social problems,” while giving industry the work force it needs.




For English Studies, Koreans Say Goodbye to Dad



Norimitsu Onishi:

On a sunny afternoon recently, half a dozen South Korean mothers came to pick up their children at the Remuera Primary School here, greeting one another warmly in a schoolyard filled with New Zealanders.
The mothers, members of the largest group of foreigners at the public school, were part of what are known in South Korea as “wild geese,” families living separately, sometimes for years, to school their children in English-speaking countries like New Zealand and the United States. The mothers and children live overseas while the fathers live and work in South Korea, flying over to visit a couple of times a year.
Driven by a shared dissatisfaction with South Korea’s rigid educational system, parents in rapidly expanding numbers are seeking to give their children an edge by helping them become fluent in English while sparing them, and themselves, the stress of South Korea’s notorious educational pressure cooker.




Slowly but surely, universities in France—and across all of Europe—are reforming



The Economist:

BENEATH the medieval cloisters and bleak 1960s campuses of Europe’s universities, the ground is trembling. For years, Europeans have talked of doing something about higher education, so as to prepare better for the “knowledge economy”. But lingering taboos—over tuition fees, private finance, or competition—have inhibited the timid and frustrated the bold. Now, however, there are the first stirrings of genuine change.
The shortcomings of Europe’s universities are well-known. Only two European universities (Cambridge and Oxford) are in Shanghai Jiao Tong University’s global top 20. Europeans spend an average of $10,191 per student, measured at purchasing-power parity, next to $22,476 in America. They devote only 1.3% of GDP to higher education, compared with 2.9% in America, and—unlike in America—almost all of it is public money. Only 24% of working-age Europeans have a degree, compared with 39% of Americans. And Europe bags an ever-declining share of Nobel prizes.




IS AP Good for Everyone?



Jay Matthews:

I am no match for Chester E. Finn Jr. in a debate. The president of the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation and author of “Troublemaker: A Personal History of School Reform Since Sputnik” (Princeton University Press) is feared by many ideological adversaries for his sharp wit and inexhaustible erudition. But I am taking him on anyway in this column because he suggested recently in his own weekly Gadfly column that I was promoting Advanced Placement courses for all students, even those unable or unwilling to handle their difficulties. I thought this would also be a good way to explore the limits of the movement to make high schools more challenging, a very lively issue in our highest-performing schools. Here we go:
Mathews: I want to get to the broader issues pretty quickly, but let’s deal first with your wicked poke in my ribs. I don’t believe I have ever said AP is for everyone. My view has always been that AP is for far more people than are allowed to, or encouraged to, enroll in AP (and International Baccalaureate) courses. There is lots of data to support this, including College Board analysis of PSAT scores showing two or three times as many people could handle and benefit from AP than actually take the course. Have you got a citation showing I said any such silly thing? If not, please debase yourself with an apology to my readers so we can get to the fascinating topic of how much AP and IB should kids have.

Related:




Statistics Made Happily Real



Patrick McIlheran:

A new report says students in Milwaukee’s private choice high schools are much more likely to graduate: Such schools had a graduation rate of 85% last year, compared to 58% in the Milwaukee Public Schools.
In flesh-and-blood terms, that means Babatunde Saaka unexpectedly has a future.
The figures are the latest from what is now a five-year report by University of Minnesota sociologist John Robert Warren. Milwaukee students using vouchers are pulling farther ahead. If 2003’s MPS freshmen had done as well in 2007 as students in choice schools, there’d be 1,517 more high school graduates in Milwaukee.
That’s a theoretical number. In life, graduation is more concrete – do or don’t, succeed or fail.
Saaka once expected to fail. When the Milwaukee teen graduates from the Hope School this weekend as part of its first graduating class, he will be the first in his family merely to make it through high school. A young man who grew up in fatherless poverty, he’s going on to Wisconsin Lutheran College, planning to become a youth counselor, to make a difference for other poor children.




In Big Easy, Charter School Era



Jay Matthews:

The storm that swamped this city three years ago also effectively swept away a public school system with a dismal record and faint prospects of getting better. Before Hurricane Katrina, educator John Alford said, he toured schools and found “kids just watching movies” in classes where “low expectations were the norm.”
Now Alford is one of many new principals leading an unparalleled education experiment, with possible lessons for troubled urban schools in the District and elsewhere. New Orleans, in a post-Katrina flash, has become the first major city in which more than half of all public school students attend charter schools.
For these new schools with taxpayer funding and independent management, old rules and habits are out. No more standard hours, seniority, union contracts, shared curriculum or common textbooks. In are a crowd of newcomers — critics call them opportunists — seeking to lift standards and achievement. They compete for space, steal each other’s top teachers and wonder how it is all going to work.




Leftist thinking left off the syllabus



Marla Dickerson:

Leftist ideology may be gaining ground in Latin America. But it will never set foot on the manicured lawns of Francisco Marroquin University.
For nearly 40 years, this private college has been a citadel of laissez-faire economics. Here, banners quoting “The Wealth of Nations” author Adam Smith“>Adam Smith — he of the powdered wig and invisible hand — flutter over the campus food court.
Every undergraduate, regardless of major, must study market economics and the philosophy of individual rights embraced by the U.S. founding fathers, including “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”
A sculpture commemorating Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged” is affixed to the school of business. Students celebrated the novel’s 50th anniversary last year with an essay contest. The $200 cash prize reinforced the book’s message that society should reward capitalist go-getters who create wealth and jobs, not punish them with taxes and regulations.




A Goal of 100%



Maureen Downey:

Next time it rewrites its statewide standardized math test, the state Department of Education might consider this challenging question:
With a statewide high school graduation rate of 58.1 percent in 2005 and an improvement rate of 2.6 percentage points over the previous five years, when can Georgia expect to achieve a 100 percent graduation rate?
Answer: 2110.
One hundred and two years is a long, long time —- too long, in fact. But with the sluggish response of state leaders to holistic and meaningful education reform, accelerating that time frame will be very difficult.
While Gov. Sonny Perdue has introduced graduation coaches to identify and deflect potential dropouts in high school, there’s far more to be done to reclaim children in the early grades, where most kids wander off track. And rather than whittling away at instructional funding, as Georgia has done in recent years, the state ought to be investing in programs to prepare low-income 3-year-olds for school and to help struggling third-graders learn to read.
To truly transform its low-performing schools, Georgia has to take an honest look at its financial commitment to education. That starts with the governor, who continues to maintain that his administration has not shortchanged education and is, in fact, spending more than ever on a per-pupil basis.




Why Education Reform is Like Baseball



Jeanne Century (an adviser to Obama’s 2008 campaign):

Moneyball tells about a system that did not want to change; of practices held steadfast in tradition; and of how a leader, with the right motivation and insight, innovated for success. So, as this season winds down and you sit watching nine innings, consider these nine lessons for educators drawn from an unlikely place: America’s simple favorite pastime—baseball.
1. Don’t go for the home runs … just get on base and the rest will come. Beane didn’t win baseball games by hoping for home runs. Home runs are rare, and hope doesn’t win games. He understood that individual players don’t win games; teams do—when they work together in a process of creating runs. In education, we identify isolated strategies that we hope will be our home runs. But experience tells us that a better approach is to get solidly and clearly “on base.” Then, the system can work, each piece supporting the other, stepping up when necessary and stepping back to “sacrifice” if that is what will win the game. The only way the system can work is if everyone buys in and does his or her part.
2. Money is important, but it is not the answer. Beane had to spend his team’s meager $40 million wisely; other clubs had several times that amount. So he set out to identify ways he could use his money more efficiently. As Lewis writes, “[I]n professional baseball it still matters less how much money you have than how well you spend it.” Instead of investing in one big star, Beane sought out those players who were regularly and consistently getting on base (see lesson one). We in education need to find ways to get on base. Small steps are enough if they are consistent and well informed. The smartest strategies don’t necessarily cost the most money. Indeed, some of them don’t cost anything at all.

Related: On education, McCain & Obama may not be far apart.




What is Public Education?



Lisa Graham Keegan – an adviser to McCain’s 2008 campaign:

One constant cry in the debate over educational reform is that we must save our public schools. But proponents of that argument assume that a public school system must be exactly what we have today: schools clustered in districts governed by centralized bureaucracies that oversee every detail of what goes on in individual schools, from budgets to personnel to curricula. That’s like saying that our steel industry should center on open-hearth furnaces and giant corporations rather than the nimble mini-mills that have largely superseded them. Let’s agree, for argument, that a public school system is a good thing: but why should it look just like it does today—which is what it looked like 50 years ago?
There’s nothing sacrosanct, after all, about the current structure of our public education system. Its roots go back to the nineteenth century, when a geographical community would club together to hire and pay a teacher and later, when things got more complicated, would tax property to provide a local school and then appoint or elect a few people to a small board that would oversee it and hire its teacher. As the communities grew into towns and cities, it seemed logical to expand the governing mechanisms already in place. Tiny school boards slowly swelled into today’s bloated and dysfunctional school districts, responsible for running not one but 5 or 25 or 50 schools.
If we want to save the public schools, we mustn’t confuse the ideal of public education—that every child has the right to a good K-12 education at public expense—with any particular system, including the one we’ve got. Surely we can come up with a modernized definition of public education fit for a new millennium. In Arizona, where I’m Superintendent of Public Instruction, that’s just what we’re trying to achieve. Our new approach, aimed at shifting power from bureaucrats to students and families, has three key, equally essential parts: student-centered funding, parental choice, and tough, objectively measurable, standards.
Start with student-centered funding. In Arizona, we’ve all but replaced an older and more typical system, in which school districts assess and use local property taxes to fund schools, with one in which the state raises the money (including for capital construction) through a statewide tax, straps an equal amount of it to each student’s back, and releases it only when he walks into the school of his choice.
Today’s district is a rigid command-and-control system that offers dissatisfied parents no choices except, if they don’t like the district school, to send their kids to private school or to home-school them. Moreover, like the Soviet Union with its five-year plans, the districts do a poor job of management, for the reason F. A. Hayek pointed out: command-and-control systems suffer from an information deficit. How can a distant district office bureaucrat know how to run a school better than the principals and teachers who work there? Too often, the district just lays down a single set of policies to govern all its schools, imposing one-size-fits-all curricula and disciplinary policies on schools that may have very different needs. The system also seems impervious to reform from within. In my experience, those who join district boards, even those who start out reform-minded, eerily become co-opted and wind up defending the system tooth and nail. It’s just like watching Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
If you need an additional reason to abolish the traditional property-tax funding system, consider this: it’s unfair. Funding education through local property taxes is deeply regressive. It lets rich districts spend more per pupil, at much lower tax rates, than poor districts. After all, a rich district’s citizens who pay $3,000 per year on their $300,000 houses are paying 10 percent in taxes; the poor district’s citizens who pay $1,200 on their $100,000 houses are paying 12 percent.

The Green Bay School District, currently run by incoming Madison Superintendent Dan Nerad spent $11,441 per student ($232,232,000 total budget) in 2006/2007 while Madison spent $12,422 per student ($329,596,000 total budget) during the same period according to School Facts 2007 by WISTAX.
A few other interesting comparisons between the Districts (2006/2007):

Equity Fund Balance Enrollment Low Income Staff % Revenues from Property Taxes
Green Bay $21,900,000 (9.3%) 19,863 44.9% 2445.6 31.8%
Madison $18,437,000 (6%) 24,908 44.1% 3544.6 67.9%

Related: On education, McCain & Obama may not be far apart.




On education, McCain & Obama may not be far apart



Greg Toppo:

Jeanne Century, director of Science Education, Research and Evaluation at the University of Chicago’s Center for Elementary Mathematics and Science Education (CEMSE), is an adviser to Obama. Lisa Graham Keegan, the former superintendent of public instruction in Arizona and a two-term member of the Arizona House of Representatives, has McCain’s ear on educational issues.
To anyone casually observing the two in an effort to divine differences between the candidates, the disagreements seemed small.

  • Both Obama and McCain believe in rigorous standards and rich curricula to help students compete in a global economy. Century even suggested that American kids should be “trilingual,” not just bilingual, to compete with the rest of the world.
  • Both candidates support publicly funded, but privately run, charter schools.
  • For now at least, both oppose using taxpayer dollars for large-scale voucher programs. (In a later session with reporters, though, Keegan pointed out that McCain actually supported the push in 2003 for a small-scale voucher that now operates in Washington, D.C., public schools. She added that if a state asked McCain to support a voucher program, “he might be supportive.” But she said he doesn’t currently support changing the provisions of No Child Left Behind to allow for private school vouchers. Currently, students in under-performing schools can get taxpayer dollars for free tutoring or transfer to a better-performing public school.)
  • Speaking of No Child Left Behind, both candidates would tweak it in ways that, for the most part, only education wonks can appreciate. They’d both fund it differently. Keegan says McCain would figure out more efficient, focused ways to spend what she says is NCLB’s “unprecedented” increase in funding to schools. Century says Obama believes NCLB “was insufficiently funded and poorly implemented.”

They both bemoan the law’s inability to ensure that low-income children get high-quality teachers and they’d both push for so-called “value added” provisions that would give schools credit for test score gains that children make each year, even if all children don’t meet a pre-set proficiency goal in reading or math.




Finland’s schools may lead the world, but its universities are nothing special



The Economist:

This bothers the Finnish government. “As a country that thinks its future is purely dependent on its know-how, we cannot afford average results in universities,” says Jyrki Katainen (pictured), the finance minister.
This is my last appointment before I fly back to London, and Mr Katainen is telling me that his government thinks greater independence and a bit of capital may help the country’s universities to specialise and innovate. So it has offered any universities willing to set up charitable foundations a deal too good to refuse: any money they raise by 2010, the government will top up by 2.5 times as much.
Finland is hardly the only country worried about the global reputation of its universities. As with schools, the advent of international rankings has made list-watchers of everyone. The Shanghai Jiao Tong and THE rankings are enormously important both for universities, which are increasingly reliant on international students, and for countries, who take their positions on the charts quite seriously.




Robert F. Kennedy at the 1965 Hearings about the Elementary and Secondary Education Act



Jenny D:

In honor of RFK on the 40th anniversary of his death, I offer excerpts from the transcripts of the hearings on ESEA in 1965. RFK called for accountability among educators and proposed national testing to make sure that those receiving federal funds were using it improve student learning.
He proposed NCLB 35 years before Bush did. To be fair, NCLB is just the reauthorization of ESEA with a new name.
It was conceived to send federal dollars to offer more educational opportunities to disadvantaged students, and was packaged as part of LBJ’s larger War on Poverty. Student failure in school was linked to adult poverty, so Congress got to work to pass Johnson’s bill to help educate poor kids.
This is from the hearing on ESEA, by the Senate Education subcommittee, 89th Congress. Congress was considering whether to spend an additional $1 billion in the following year to improve education, which would double federal spending on schools. Most of the additional money would go to Title I.




Mary Olsky, EAGLE School co-founder, decides to retire



Kurt Gutknecht:

Twenty-six years ago, Mary Olsky was looking for a more challenging educational environment for her children. What ultimately happened has helped thousands of students over the years.
“I didn’t see this happening,” she said recently of Eagle School, which she co-founded with Betty Connor in 1982. Olsky is stepping down as co-director of the school, which now has 182 students, 20 teachers and six to 10 parent aides, and an expansive building at 5454 Gunflint Trail in Fitchburg.
In the 1980s, Olksy had recently moved to the Madison area with her husband and four children, ages 4 to 10, from Chicago. She thought Madison would provide a better educational environment for her children, but was disappointed.
Shortly after meeting Connor, they visited several schools around the country and rented a room in Hoyt School, which the district had closed and was renting rooms to a variety of organizations. They collected materials from a variety of sources and started with 12 students, including two of her children.
By 1985, they had outgrown their space and moved to another former school in Madison. One of the parents was a developer and helped them purchase land and build a school in Middleton. After adding two additions, they purchased land in Fitchburg and constructed the current building.
“We had sworn that we’d never have more than 100 kids or build our own building. What happened has become part of our general philosophy, which is to see problems and try to solve them instead of being rigid,” Olsky.




Fearing for Massachusetts School Reform



via a kind reader’s email – David A. Mittell, Jr., a fascinating look at the political sausage making and special interests behind, or blocking school “reform”:

THE (Deval) PATRICK administration is big on reform when it comes to organizational charts, which in the to and fro of politics are accidents of history; are aesthetically displeasing to social scientists; and more often than not downright inefficient. It is the last point that deserves attention. The Patrick administration seems partly inhabited by people concerned with the second point and partly by people impatient for more power to do what they want by direct administrative order, rather than having to cajole semi-autonomous boards and authorities.
Mitt Romney had plans along the same lines and was pleased with himself when, early in his term, he was able to persuade the legislature to eliminate the notoriously inefficient Metropolitan District Commission and transfer its functions to the Department of Conservation and Recreation. How much actual efficiency was achieved is debatable.
Mr. Romney also tried to eliminate the Massachusetts Turnpike Authority. As a Republican governor he had no chance of eradicating this termites’ nest, despite its many public failings. Thereafter, wisely, he resolved to do what he could with the rusty tools that hehad. The danger of persisting in trying to clean up the flow chart in the face of political opposition was that, even had he succeeded to some extent, he would have spent his whole term doing it. Redirectin the mission of state government would have been lost.
With more than a third of his own term gone by, Mr. Patrick faces the same conundrum. He too wants to put the Turnpike Authority and all other transportation-related agencies under his direct control. That will need a column of its own. Here I want to deal with his partly completed effort to put all education-related agencies under his control.
Critics, especially those concerned about the foundering success of the Education Reform Act of 1993, see an attempt by the governor to gut the aspects of education reform that his political supporters in the education establishment do not like. On a partial list of suspected “gutters” are assorted state bureaucrats, the Massachusetts Association of School Committees, the Massachusetts Association of School Superintendents and the Massachusetts Teachers’ Association.
That’s not my list and I do not endorse it. But the evidence to date is that the critics have the politics right. Not only does Governor Patrick seem to be moving to quash some of the most hopeful aspects of education reform, appointed minions are acting on his behalf in petty and vindictive ways:

(more…)




Toyota Chief: Refrain from Using PowerPoint



Garr Reynolds:

An article that got some attention in Japan last week was this one (in Japanese), which says the Toyota Motor Corporation CEO Katsuaki Watanabe urged employees to show self-restraint and stop the wasteful practice of using PowerPoint for the creation of documents (what I call slideuments). The CEO made this statement while talking about the need to reduce costs at Toyota. He is reminding employees to be cost conscious and he used the practice of using PowerPoint as an example of waste. Watanabe said that (in the good old days?) they used to use one piece of paper to make a clear point or proposal, or to summarize an issue, but now everything is in PowerPoint, he says, which uses many sheets of paper and expensive colors…but it’s a waste. The CEO is not saying that PowerPoint is necessarily harmful (he does not mention its use for actual presentations), but he is saying printed “documents” made with the presentation tool tend to have less content, less clarity, and yet use more paper/ink and take more time. In the context of a challenging economy and an atmosphere of reducing costs, what would you say of any business practice that (1) takes more time, (2) costs more money, and yet (3) appears to be less effective? In the spirit of kaizen (continuous improvement), even if the waste is small, it must be eliminated.

The Poverty of PowerPoint by Gregory McNamee:

Many forces are at work in the dumbing-down of the world: censorship, historical amnesia, the collapse of general education, doctrinaire domination of the airwaves and other media outlets, the spread of religious fundamentalism, creationism, and other forms of ignorance.
And then there’s PowerPoint.
Microsoft’s market-leading “slideware”—software that produces virtual transparencies for use in public presentations—is responsible for “trillions of slides each year,” writes the statistician, publisher, and design guru Edward R. Tufte in his provocative booklet The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint. And not just any old slides. PowerPoint’s popular templates, Tufte argues, are responsible for an explosion in useless data stupidly displayed, for these ready-made designs “usually weaken verbal and spatial reasoning, and almost always corrupt statistical analysis.”




What happened after California abolished bilingual education



The Economist:

TEN years to the day after California banned teaching in any language other than English, Erlinda Paredes runs through a new sentence with her kindergarten class. “El payaso se llama Botones”, she intones—“the clown’s name is Buttons”. When a pupil asks a question in English, she responds in Spanish. It is an improbable scene. But the abolition of bilingual education has not worked out in quite the way anybody expected.
Before 1998 some 400,000 Californian children were shunted into classes where they heard as little as 30 minutes of English each day. The hope was that they would learn mathematics and other subjects in their native tongue (usually Spanish) while they gently made the transition to English. The result was an educational barrio. So that year Ron Unz, a software engineer, sponsored a ballot measure that mandated teaching in English unless parents demanded otherwise. Proposition 227 passed easily, with considerable support from Hispanics. Voters in two other states, Massachusetts and Arizona, have since followed suit.
In Santa Ana, a mostly poor Latino city in Orange county, the number of children in bilingual classes promptly halved. Demand would have been even less had schools not prodded parents to request waivers for their children. In the past few years demand for bilingual education has fallen further. This year 22,000 pupils in Santa Ana are enrolled in “structured English immersion” programmes, where they hear little but that language. Just 646 are taught bilingually.




Follow the Special Ed Money



Joanne Jacobs:

Jay Greene is dubious about Response To Intervention — trying to educate children well so they’re not diagnosed as learning disabled — because he thinks schools have an incentive to put kids in special ed.

Essentially, RTI frees-up money to get schools to do what they presumably should have been doing already — providing well-designed instruction in the early grades. Unless we think that the main impediment to well-designed instruction was that schools lacked the funding to do it, diverting 15% of special education money to early-grade instruction will not get them to do anything significantly different from what they were already doing.




More on Finland’s Schools



The Economist:

THE OECD’s PISA studies are exhibit A for the excellence of Finland’s schools. Finland routinely comes top, or occasionally second, in tests every three years of 15-year-olds’ abilities in reading, mathematics and science. It is impressive, but the suspicious-minded (or perhaps just the begrudgers?) wonder if it is really all down to brilliant schools.
I have a suspicion of my own. When I lived in Finland in the 1990s I learnt rather little Finnish (they speak great English, and I’m lazy), but I learnt to read words and say them correctly in about half an hour. Each letter corresponds to one sound, and only one; there are no exceptions and no combinations of letters that make different sounds, like “sh” or “th”. If a letter is repeated, it is simply said for twice as long. Is it, perhaps, just easier to learn to read and write in Finland than practically anywhere else?




A School Milwaukee’s District Could Learn From



Dolores Herbstreith:

There is a school on Milwaukee’s near south side that should be a beacon of light to the many schools in the Milwaukee Public Schools that are having trouble keeping about 50% of their students in attendance and graduating.
It is Notre Dame Middle School, a Catholic school for girls in fifth through eighth grade. I tutored there for almost two years, and it was a great experience.
The school accepts Hispanic girls from that area who have spent the first few years of elementary school at MPS. Few come from what could be called “advantaged” homes. Most struggle with their studies. Many of them speak only Spanish at home because that is the only language their parents know. Then they must adjust to English the next morning when they return to school.
In spite of these challenges, the school shows an impressive record, with 96% of the girls graduating from high school after they leave Notre Dame and 76% of those continuing with a post-secondary education. How do they do it when more advantaged students drop out of school rather than apply themselves




Real World Skills School Projects



Anita Clark:

When a local businessman asked teacher Dick Anderson if his woods technology students could build a covered bridge, Anderson said “sure.”
He envisioned an ornamental garden structure.
Instead, what the client wanted — and what the high school students built — is a 14-ton, 44-foot long timber-frame covered bridge that spans a ravine and can carry fully loaded trucks.




High school, city farm to build “green” garage



Karen Herzog:

A partnership between a city farm and a Milwaukee trade school will build an urban agricultural training space atop a “green” garage in the Riverwest neighborhood, complete with year-round, rooftop garden.
The project, called Growing Spaces, is a joint venture of the non-profit farm Growing Power Inc., 5500 West Silver Spring Road, and Bradley Tech High School, 700 S. 4th St. Details are to be announced at a 3 p.m. press conference today at the school.
Bradley Tech seniors in carpentry, electrical and plumbing classes will build the 3.5-bay garage beside a private home in Riverwest, starting in the fall. The homeowner, Kate Halfwassen, will coordinate the project and lease the garage back to Growing Power in what amounts to at least a five-year donation of the space, Halfwassen said Tuesday.




On Finland’s Schools



The Economist:

I AM feeling nostalgic. I spent two years in Finland in the late 1990s on a European Union post-doctoral fellowship at the University of Jyvaskyla in central Finland, and haven’t been back since. I wonder how much things will have changed—the country had only just joined the European Union back then, and has since joined the euro and experienced an economic boom.
First stop this morning is Kulosaari comprehensive school, in a suburb of Helsinki. Finnish comprehensives teach children from seven to 16; after that almost all youngsters spend another three years in either grammar or vocational schools.
Kulosaari school is lovely. The children are calm (far calmer than those at my son’s primary school in Cambridge, England) and talk to adults respectfully, but as equals.
Dan Wood, from Maidstone in England, one of two native English speakers on the staff, teaches children in the school’s bilingual programme. He has been in Finland for ten years now, and has no intention of leaving. “My mum works in a school at home,” he tells me. “I really just don’t want to go back to that system, the stress of school inspections.”




Seattle School Board’s New Goals



Linda Shaw:

The Seattle School Board approved a five-year plan Wednesday that sets specific targets for raising test scores, graduation rates and even the number of credits earned by ninth-graders.
By 2012, for example, the district wants 88 percent of third-graders to pass reading on the Washington Assessment of Student Learning, and 95 percent of the 10th-graders to do the same. Some of the most ambitious goals are in math and science, especially a passage rate of 80 percent on the science section of the 10th-grade WASL. In spring 2007, 33 percent passed.
To reach those and other goals, the plan calls for everything from better math and science instruction, to more consistency in what’s taught from school to school, more tests to track student progress, and hiring teachers earlier so classes don’t start the year with substitutes.
District officials have described the goals as ambitious, but achievable. And some of the most ambitious ones simply match what’s required under the federal No Child Left Behind Act, or reflect increasingly tough graduation requirements for high-school students.
Superintendent Maria Goodloe-Johnson at Wednesday’s School Board meeting said her plan doesn’t cover everything, but that a strategic plan is meant to focus on “deficits.”




Education in Sweden



The Economist:

I SPEND my second day in Sweden with representatives of Kunskapsskolan, Sweden’s biggest chain of independent schools (it has 21 secondaries and 9 gymnasiums). It has recently been awarded a contract to open two “academies”—independent state schools—in London, and I have been intrigued by what I’ve heard about its highly personalised teaching methods.
At Kunskapsskolan Enskede, a few kilometres from the centre of Stockholm, I am met by Christian Wetell, its head teacher, and Kenneth Nyman, the company’s regional chief. They explain the “voucher system” from which they make their money. For each pupil the school teaches, it receives from the local government what it would have spent educating the pupil in one of its own schools; in return, independent schools cannot charge anything extra, and must accept all students who apply. Provided schools follow Sweden’s national curriculum, they have wide latitude in their methods and pacing.
Kenneth sheds an interesting light on the thorny comparison with Finland. You have to look, he says, at what sort of students each country’s system wants. Sweden aims to produce socially conscious generalists. The Finnish system, by contrast, drives rather narrowly at academic success.




Experimental audio/visual therapies help some schools teach students to focus



Greg Toppo:

A small but growing number of schools are using experimental therapies to retrain students’ hearing and vision, in essence reteaching them to hear and see. It’s a bid to reverse problems with the ability to focus and learn brought on by years of excessive TV, poor nutrition and, for some, in vitro drug exposure.
At Gordon Parks Elementary School, a charter school in Kansas City, Mo., 60% of kindergartners in 2004 failed a visual-skills test. Most had 20/20 vision, but they struggled to focus on moving objects, track lines of print and refocus from near to far.
That fall, Gordon Parks began regular lessons in visual skills. Therapist Cheryl Steffenella says dangerous neighborhoods and the ubiquity of TV and video games means many of her students “aren’t doing kid things” — climbing trees, jumping and running — that help develop visual and motor skills. Even playing video games that require a lot of eye movement exercises children’s vision minimally, she says.




“Schools should not rely on only WKCE data to gauge progress of individual students or to determine effectiveness of programs or curriculum”



Peter Sobol on the 2007 Wisconsin DPI State test results (WKCE):

The results for the WKCE test administered in November 2007 were finally released on May 30th. That is more than six months after the test was given. Worse, the data files containing the detailed results that can be used for proper statistical analysis of the results are STILL not available for download. Assessments are information that degrades over time. The fact that it takes six months to get the data out (whatever its other shortcomings) cheats the taxpayers of the full value of their investment.
At the very least the WI DPI should be embarrassed by the fact it takes this long to release the test results. Personally I find it outrageous. I had an email exchange with DPI officials concerning this long delay and the loss of value, this is an excerpt from part of that response (italics mine):

… 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.

Does anyone else find the fact that the state issues WKCE results to individual students surprising given the above statement?

The Madison School District, together with the Wisconsin Center for Education Research is using local WKCE results for “Value Added Assessment“.
Much more on the WKCE here.
Minnesota recently administered their first online science test.




Accelerated Math Adds Up To a Division Over Merits



Daniel de Vise:

Next fall, 26 of the sharpest fifth-grade minds at Potomac Elementary School will study seventh-grade math. The rest of the fifth grade will learn sixth-grade math. Fifth-grade math will be left to the third- and fourth-graders.
Public schools nationwide are working to increase the number of students who study Algebra I, the traditional first-year high school math course, in eighth grade. Many Washington area schools have gone further, pushing large numbers of students two or three years ahead of the grade-level curriculum.
Math study in Montgomery County has evolved from one or two academic paths to many. Acceleration often begins in kindergarten. In a county known for demanding parents, the math push has generated an unexpected backlash. Many parents say children are pushed too far, too fast.
Sixty Montgomery math teachers complained, in a November forum, that students were being led into math classes beyond their abilities.

Related links:




Students find the ’08 presidential race is not politics as usual



Greg Toppo:

It was the first week of February, and Jesse Sharkey’s students were doing the math.
They were not amused.
Most of his juniors and seniors at Chicago’s Senn High School are Barack Obama supporters — Obama is from Chicago, after all. So they wanted to know why Obama, who had won 14 of 22 states on Super Tuesday, had barely scored more delegates than Hillary Clinton.
(Answer: Democrats award delegates based on percentage of votes received.)
And why was he still behind in the total count? And what’s a superdelegate anyway?