On Dec. 13, The Washington Post will mark the 10th year of the Challenge Index, my high school rating system, with our latest ranked list of all 185 public schools in the Washington area. Since 1998, Newsweek magazine also has been publishing its national best high schools list using the same method.
I am particularly excited this time because we have some competition. U.S. News & World Report, at the urging of Andrew J. Rotherham, my friendly adversary on this issue, has just published its own “America’s Best High Schools” list at usnews.com. I have long celebrated what I call the School Rating Scoundrel’s Club, composed of those of us who think that rating and ranking — despite their many critics — are useful ways to help readers figure out which schools are best for them. I admire the U.S. News college rankings and am intrigued by its new high school list. It is strengthened by Rotherham’s commitment to improving schools, but it is also too complicated for its own good.
The Challenge Index rates and ranks schools by just one number, the college-level test participation rate, calculated by dividing the number of Advanced Placement, International Baccalaureate or Cambridge tests — college-level exams given in high school — by the number of graduating seniors. The U.S. News list mixes together several numbers. It looks for schools in the 40 states for which it has data whose average state test scores exceed statistical expectations and whose minority proficiency rates exceed state averages for those groups. Schools that survive that initial screening are then ranked based on a weighted formula that includes both AP test participation and AP test scores.
The essential differences between the two ways of ranking reflect the differences between Rotherham and me. Only 36, Rotherham has served as an education adviser to President Bill Clinton, has founded two education policy and research organizations and is a member of the Virginia Board of Education, the youngest appointee to that board in modern times. He is a policy maker. His high schools list is based on key factors in the policy process: test scores, minority achievement and college readiness as measured by AP participation and success. U.S. News and the statisticians at Standard & Poor’s, led by Paul Gazzerro, the director of analytical criteria for School Evaluation Services, have compiled the list using a basic policy-making tool–data collected each year by state government
Girls Make History by Sweeping Top Honors at a Science Contest
Girls won top honors for the first time in the Siemens Competition in Math, Science and Technology, one of the nation’s most coveted student science awards, which were announced yesterday at New York University.
Janelle Schlossberger and Amanda Marinoff, both 17 and seniors at Plainview-Old Bethpage John F. Kennedy High School on Long Island, split the first prize — a $100,000 scholarship — in the team category for creating a molecule that helps block the reproduction of drug-resistant tuberculosis bacteria.
Isha Himani Jain, 16, a senior at Freedom High School in Bethlehem, Pa., placed first in the individual category for her studies of bone growth in zebra fish, whose tail fins grow in spurts, similar to the way children’s bones do. She will get a $100,000 scholarship.
The three girls’ victories is “wonderful news, but I can’t honestly say it’s shocking,” said Nancy Hopkins, a biologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
More here.
Two Marshfield High Students Are Wisconsin’s AP Scholars
The students with the highest Advanced Placement exam scores in Wisconsin are both graduates of Marshfield High School.
Noah Elmhorst and Jamie Robertson, Wisconsin ‘s 2007 Advanced Placement state scholars, were to be recognized at a ceremony at the school, Assistant Principal Elizabeth Dostal said last week.
“We have had past AP State Scholars, but we have never had the top male and the top female in the same year, ” Dostal said. “We were just pleasantly surprised. ”
Marshfield High has 1,385 students and offers 23 AP classes, Dostal said. Elmhorst took 17 of the advanced classes, while Robertson took 13, she said.
Statewide, 25,020 Wisconsin students took 39,811 AP exams in the 2006-2007 school year. More than 68 percent of those students earned a grade of three or higher.
Nationwide, more than 1.4 million high school students took more than 2.5 million AP exams in 2007.
Parents are the Problem (WEAC & Wisconsin DPI Sue to Kill the Wisconsin Virtual Academy)
Rose Fernandez, via a reader’s email:
On Tuesday of this week, in a Waukesha courtroom, the state governmental agency responsible for our public schools and a labor union came before the Wisconsin Court of Appeals and pleaded with the judges to keep parents out of public schools. Yes, that’s right. The state and the teachers union are at war with parents and I’m mad as heck about it. (Madder than heck, actually, but trying to keep this blog family friendly).
According to the Department of Public Instruction and the state teachers’ union, parents are the problem. And these bureaucracies know just how to fix it. They want to keep parents, and indeed anyone without a teaching license, out of Wisconsin public schools.
Of course WEAC, the state teachers’ union, likes that idea. Licenses mean dues. Dues mean power.
DPI likes it because ……..well, could it be just because WEAC does?
The lawsuit before the Court of Appeals was filed by WEAC in 2004 in an effort to close a charter school that uses an on-line individualized curriculum allowing students from all over the state to study from home under the supervision of state certified faculty. The school is the Wisconsin Virtual Academy (WIVA). The Northern Ozaukee School District took the bold step of opening this new kind of school in the fall of 2003 after DPI approved their charter. Hundreds of families around the state enrolled their children under open enrollment that first year and mine was one of them. WIVA has grown every year since and this year has more than 800 students.
In January of 2004, WEAC filed their lawsuit against the school and DPI who authorized its existence. Later that year in a stunning reversal DPI switched sides and moved to close its own public school. DPI alleges that parents are too involved in their own children’s education.
That’s right. They argue parents are too involved.
I’ve always thought parental involvement in a child’s education was a good thing. What do I know? I don’t have a teacher’s license.
This issue was discussed extensively by Gregg Underheim during the most recent Wisconsin DPI Superintendent race (April, 2005). Audio / Video here.
Much more on the Wisconsin Virtual Academy. Also check out www.wivirtualschoolfamilies.org.
Teachers draft reform plan
In this education nirvana, teachers would decide what to teach and when. Teachers and parents would hire and fire principals. No supervisors from downtown would tell anyone — neither teachers nor students — what to wear.
These are among the ideas a delegation of teachers and their union officers are urging L.A. schools Supt. David L. Brewer to include in the school reform plan he will present to the school board Tuesday.
If Brewer passes on the delegation’s proposals, the union can go directly to the seven-member Board of Education. Employee unions recently have had success in getting the board to overrule the superintendent on health benefits for some part-time workers and on school staffing.
At stake now is the Los Angeles Unified School District’s effort to turn around its 34 most troubled middle and high schools. The data suggests the urgency: As many as three-quarters of the students in these “high priority schools” scored well below grade level across multiple subjects on last year’s California Standards Tests.
Whatever remedy emerges is likely to become a blueprint for widespread reform efforts. Brewer and his team are working on their 11th draft; the drafts have evolved significantly since September because of resistance inside and outside the school system.
It’s past time to abandon assembly-line education
Wisconsin has the worst black/white achievement gap in the country. The Milwaukee Public Schools have big truancy, security and parental apathy problems. The system graduates about 50% of its students. How hard can it be to graduate from MPS with D’s, yet half don’t? Encounter an illiterate adult, and it’ll break your heart.
You’d think parents, the education establishment and politicians would be running around like their hair was on fire, but they’re not even cutting their bangs.
Don’t look to the teachers union for answers. They’re advocates for teachers, not kids. They just go with the slogan “Every kid deserves a great school” because it has a better ring to it than “We want more money.” The slogan also implies that they think MPS is great. They will even protect some bad teachers.
Prufrock’s Gifted Child Information Blog
When I took my first serious history course in college, the president of the university (a history buff himself) spoke to our class and encouraged us to submit our papers to various journals for publication. Being rather inexperienced, it had never occurred to me to submit anything I had ever written to anyone for publication. In my mind, I was “just” a student and couldn’t imagine anyone being interested in what I wrote.
Now it is possible not only for serious college students to publish their work, but it is also possible for serious high school history students to publish the papers that they have researched. The Concord Review gives young people this opportunity. The Review is the only quarterly journal in the world to publish the academic expository research papers of secondary history students. Papers may be on any historical topic, ancient or modern, foreign or domestic.
Many of these young authors have sent reprints of their papers along with their college application materials. Their research has helped them to gain admission to some of the nation’s (and world’’s) best universities.
Young, Gifted and Skipping High School
As Jackie Robson rushed off to Japanese 101, a pink sign on the main door of her college dorm reminded her to sign out. There were more rules: an 11 p.m. curfew, mandatory study hours, round-the-clock adult supervision and no boys allowed in the rooms.
Jackie is 14. She never spent a day in high school.
Like the other super-bright girls in her dorm, the Fairfax County teen bypassed a traditional education and countless teenage rites, such as the senior prom and graduation, to attend the all-female Mary Baldwin College in the Shenandoah Valley.
The school offers students as young as 12 a jump-start on college in one of the leading programs of its kind. It also gives brainy girls a chance to be with others like them. By all accounts, they are ready for the leap socially and emotionally, and they crave it academically.
Last spring, Jackie finished eighth grade at Langston Hughes Middle School in Reston. This fall, she’s taking Psychology 101, Japanese 101, English 101, Folk Dance and U.S. History 1815-1877: Democracy and Crisis.
Online Courses Catch On in U.S. Colleges
When today’s college graduates get together for a reunion someday, they may decide to do it by computer. That’s because right now, nearly one in five college students takes at least one class online, according to a new survey.
For professors, the growth of e-learning has meant a big shift in the way they deal with students.
Take professor Sara Cordell of the University of Illinois-Springfield: Her day doesn’t end at 6 p.m., as it does for some college professors.
Cordell sits at her computer in her campus office to chat with a half-dozen students gathered in front of their screens: One is in Tennessee, another in California’s central valley, another in Ohio. They’re all here to talk about Thomas Hardy’s 19th-century novel Tess of the D’Urbervilles.
Unemployment Training (The Ideology of Non-Work Learned in Urban Schools)
Via a kind reader email: Martin Haberman:
For many urban youth in poverty moving from school to work is about as likely as having a career in the NBA.While urban schools struggle and fail at teaching basic skills they are extremely effective at teaching skills which predispose youth to fail in the world of work.The urban school environment spreads a dangerous contagion in the form of behaviors and beliefs which form an ideology.This ideology “works” for youngsters by getting them through urban middle and secondary schools.But the very ideology that helps youth slip and slide through school becomes the source of their subsequent failure.It is an ideology that is easily learned, readily implemented, rewarded by teachers and principals, and supporting by school policies.It is an ideology which schools promulgate because it is easier to accede to the students’ street values than it is to shape them into more gentle human beings.The latter requires a great deal of persistent effort not unlike a dike working against an unyielding sea.It is much easier for urban schools to lower their expectations and simply survive with youth than it is to try to change them.
The ideology of unemployment insures that those infected with it will be unable to enter or remain in the world of work without serious in-depth unlearning and retraining.Urban youth are not simply ill prepared for work but systematically and carefully trained to be quitters, failures, and the discouraged workers who no longer even seek employment.What this means is that it is counterproductive to help urban schools do better at what they now do since they are a basic cause of their graduates living out lives of hopelessness and desperation.
The dropout problem among urban youth–as catastrophic as it is–is less detrimental than this active training for unemployment.We need be more concerned for “successful” youth who graduate since it is they who have been most seriously infected.They have been exposed longest, practiced the anti-work behaviors for the longest period, and been rewarded most.In effect, the urban schools create a pool of youth much larger than the number of dropouts who we have labeled as “successful” but who have been more carefully schooled for failure.
Clusty Search on Martin Haberman. Haberman is a Distinguished Professor of Education at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.
Longer school day appears to boost MCAS scores
Last fall, 10 Massachusetts public schools embarked on an experiment: Lengthen the school day by at least 25 percent, give students extra doses of reading, writing, and math, and let teachers come up with creative ways to reinforce their lessons.
The extra time appears to be working.
As a whole, schools with longer days boosted students’ MCAS scores in math, English, and science across all grade levels, according to a report to be released today. And they outpaced the state in increasing the percentage of students scoring in the two highest MCAS categories.
The data, to be presented at a national conference in Boston on expanded learning time, is the first comprehensive look at the effectiveness of extra time. The promising state test results show that a longer school day, with more opportunities for hands-on learning, has had a positive impact on student achievement, educators said.
What Exactly are Kids Reading in those “Reading Blocks”?
Whenever I hear about elementary schools that have cut out social studies and science instruction in order to devote 90 minutes or even two hours a day to reading instruction, my main question is, “What on earth are the kids reading for all that time?”
It’s a rhetorical question because I pretty much know what they are reading—they are reading folk tales, adventure stories, relationship stories, some humor (the author of Captain Underpants must be very wealthy by now). Sometimes they will read some non-fiction, but not usually in any kind of coherent fashion. The kids will read a story about butterflies and then one about bicycles and one about Martin Luther King, Jr. None of this is objectionable, but it is not providing them the real intellectual nutrition children need and crave—a carefully chosen course of reading in science and history that will allow them to understand those stories about butterflies and Martin Luther King, Jr.
The reading blocks kids have been sentenced to are not devoted solely to reading. They often spend an inordinate amount of time on “reading strategies,” which give me a headache just thinking about them—predicting, summarizing, outlining, making text-to-text connections, identifying the “purpose” of reading a particular work—the list goes on and on. Not that there’s anything wrong with any of them, but a little of them goes a long way. The countless hours that are being spent on reading strategies would be much better spent on building the store of background knowledge children need to be able to comprehend sophisticated text, including textbooks, newspapers, magazines, and all the things educated citizens are expected to be able to read.
Watch or listen to a recent Madison speech by Karin Chenoweth.
Best High Schools 2008
We analyzed data from thousands of schools to produce our list of the nation’s best. The top schools are a diverse bunch, and each one has found its unique way to best teach our future leaders.
Wisconsin high schools can be found here. Andrew Rotherham has more, along with Maria Glod.
Certain high schools have a remarkable record of sending their students to elite colleges
As college-application season enters its most stressful final stretch, parents want to know if their children’s schools are delivering the goods — consistently getting students into top universities.
It’s a tricky question to answer, but for a snapshot, The Wall Street Journal examined this year’s freshman classes at eight highly selective colleges to find out where they went to high school. New York City private schools and New England prep schools continue to hold sway — Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass., is a virtual factory, sending 19 kids to Harvard this fall — but these institutions are seeing some new competition from schools overseas and public schools that focus on math and science.
The 10 schools that performed best in our survey are all private schools. Two top performers overall are located in South Korea. Daewon Foreign Language High School in Seoul sent 14% of its graduating class to the eight colleges we examined — that’s more than four times the acceptance rate of the prestigious Horace Greeley High School in Chappaqua, N.Y.
No ranking of high schools is perfect, and this one offers a cross-section, rather than an exhaustive appraisal, of college admissions. For our survey, we chose eight colleges with an average admissions selectivity of 18% and whose accepted applicants had reading and math SAT scores in the 1350-1450 range, according to the College Board: Harvard, Princeton, MIT, Williams, Pomona, Swarthmore, the University of Chicago and Johns Hopkins. Some colleges that would otherwise have met our criteria were excluded from our study because information on their students’ high-school alma maters was unavailable. All the colleges in our survey received a record number of applications last year.
The Secret to Raising Smart Kids
Hint: Don’t tell your kids that they are. More than three decades of research shows that a focus on effort—not on intelligence or ability—is key to success in school and in life.
Growing Pains
- Many people assume that superior intelligence or ability is a key to success. But more than three decades of research shows that an overemphasis on intellect or talent—and the implication that such traits are innate and fixed—leaves people vulnerable to failure, fearful of challenges and unmotivated to learn.
- Teaching people to have a “growth mind-set,” which encourages a focus on effort rather than on intelligence or talent, produces high achievers in school and in life.
- Parents and teachers can engender a growth mind-set in children by praising them for their effort or persistence (rather than for their intelligence), by telling success stories that emphasize hard work and love of learning, and by teaching them about the brain as a learning machine.
Update on Credit for non-MMSD Courses, including Youth Options Program:
At the November 26, 2007 meeting of the MMSD BOE’s Performance and Achievement Committee [18MB mp3 audio], the District’s Attorney handed out a draft of a policy for the District’s Youth Options Program dated November 20, 2007. It is a fine working draft. However, it has been written with rules making it as difficult as possible for students to actually take advantage of this State-mandated program. Thus, I urge all families with children who may be affected by this policy now or in the future to request a copy of this document, read it over carefully, and then write within the next couple of weeks to all BOE members, the District’s Attorney, Pam Nash, and Art Rainwater with suggestions for modifications to the draft text. For example, the current draft states that students are not eligible to take a course under the YOP if a comparable course is offered ANYWHERE in the MMSD (i.e., regardless of whether the student has a reasonable method to physically access the District’s comparable course). It also restricts students to taking courses at institutions “located in this State” (i.e., precluding online courses such as ones offered for academically advanced students via Stanford’s EPGY and Northwestern’s CTD).
The Attorney’s memorandum dated November 21, 2007 to this Committee, the BOE, and the Superintendent outlined a BOE policy chapter entitled “Educational Options” that would include, as well, a policy regarding “Credit for Courses Taken Outside the MMSD”. Unfortunately, this memo stated that this latter policy as one “to be developed”. It has now been almost 6 years (!) since Art Rainwater promised us that the District would develop an official policy regarding credit for courses taken outside the MMSD. A working draft available for public comment and BOE approval has yet to appear. In the interim, the “freeze” the BOE unanimously approved, yet again, last winter has been ignored by administrators, some students are leaving the MMSD because of its absence, and chaos continues to rein because there exists no clearly written policy defining the rules by which non-MMSD courses can be taken for high school credit. Can anyone give us a timetable by which an official BOE-approved policy on this topic will finally be in place?
Links:
- 11/26/2007 Performance & Achievement Committee Meeting Video and Audio
- October 26, 2006: Latest on the Madison School District’s Policy Change Regarding Credit for Non-MMSD Courses
- December 11, 2006 Performance & Achievement Committee Minutes | Additional comments.
- Dual Enrollment, Up From Obscurity
In Praise of “Thought Competition” (Writing, Math and other Academic Competitions)
Monday: After a long day at his New York City private school, Ben, 16, heads to my creative writing lab to work on his heartfelt memoir about his parents’ bitter divorce. Tuesday: Alison, 15, rushes from her elite private school in the Bronx to work on her short screenplay about a gifted, mean and eccentric boy. Lily, 13, pops in whenever she can to polish her hilarious short story narrated by an insomniac owl.
Ben, Alison and Lily, along with another few dozen who attend my afterschool writing program, also attend top-notch New York private schools that cost upwards of $25,000 a year. So why, one might wonder, do these kids need an extracurricular creative writing coach? The answer is simple, though twisted: Their schools — while touting well-known athletic teams — are offshoots of the “progressive education” movement and uphold a categorical belief that “thought competition” is treacherous.
Administrators of these schools will not support their students in literary, science or math competitions, including the most prestigious creative writing event in the country: the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards. So we at Writopia Lab help these kids to join the 10,000 young literati from across the country who are hurrying to meet the event’s January deadline, as well as deadlines for other competitions.
For decades now, psychology and pedagogy researchers have been debating the impact of competition on young people’s self-esteem, with those wary of thought competition taking the lead. Most New York parents of public or private school students have felt the awkward reverberations of this trend — which avoids naming winners — when Johnny takes home a certificate for “participation” in the school’s science fair. (Do you hang that one up on the wall?)
But some, and ironically those who attend some of the most desirable schools in the region, feel the reverberations in deeper, more painful ways. “Two years after my son left a school that prohibited him from entering a national math competition,” says one mother, “he still writes angry essays about why the jocks in his former school were allowed to compete throughout the city while he wasn’t allowed to win the same honors for his gifts.” Sam, her son, felt uncool in the eyes of his peers, and undervalued (and sometimes even resented) by the administration.
Mel Levine, a professor at the University of North Carolina and one of the foremost authorities in the country on how children learn, believes the impact of the collaborative education movement has been devastating to an entire generation. When students are rewarded for participation rather than achievement, Dr. Levine suggests, they don’t have a strong sense of what they are good at and what they’re not. Thus older members of Generation Y might be in for quite a shock when they show up for work at their first jobs. “They expect to be immediate heroes and heroines. They expect a lot of feedback on a daily basis. They expect grade inflation, they expect to be told what a wonderful job they’re doing,” says Dr. Levine.
Links:
Wave of the Future: Why charter schools should replace failing urban schools
In a decade and a half, the charter school movement has gone from a glimmer in the eyes of a few Minnesota reformers to a maturing sector of America’s public education system. Now, like all 15-year-olds, chartering must find its own place in the world.
First, advocates must answer a fundamental question: What type of relationship should the nascent charter sector have with the long-dominant district sector? The tension between the two is at the heart of every political, policy, and philosophical tangle faced by the charter movement.
But charter supporters lack a consistent vision. This motley crew includes civil rights activists, free market economists, career public-school educators, and voucher proponents. They have varied aspirations for the movement and feelings toward the traditional system. Such differences are part of the movement’s DNA: a National Alliance for Public Charter Schools (NAPCS) study found that the nation’s charter laws cite at least 18 different goals, including spurring competition, increasing professional opportunities for teachers, and encouraging greater use of technology.
Because of its uniqueness, chartering is unable to look to previous reform efforts for guidance. No K–12 reform has so fundamentally questioned the basic assumptions—school assignments based on residence, centralized administrative control, schools lasting in perpetuity—underlying the district model of public education. Even the sweeping standards and assessments movement of the last 20 years, culminating in No Child Left Behind, takes for granted and makes use of the district sector.
Rotherham has more.
Using Data to Improve Student Achievement
The Data Quality Campaign and the National Center for Educational Accountability (NCEA):
conducted a survey in September 2007, with the support of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, about state data systems to determine the number of states that have built the infrastructure to tap into the power of longitudinal data. Similar surveys were conducted by NCEA in 2003, 2004, 2005 and 2006. This website provides an overview of the findings of the survey in addition to a state-by-state analysis of the policy implications of each state’s data system.
The Power of Longitudinal Data
Longitudinal data matches individual student records over time, from pre-kindergarten through 12th grade and into post secondary education. States are spending hundreds of millions of dollars to improve student achievement. But without quality data, they are essentially flying blind. Policymakers need to act now to put in place the policies and resources to ensure that each state has a longitudinal data system and the culture and capacity to translate the information into specific action steps to improve student achievement. When states collect the most relevant data and are able to match individual student records over time, they can answer the questions that are at the core of educational effectiveness. Longitudinal data (data gathered on the same student from year to year) makes it possible to:
The Secret Gripes of Professor Klein: An AP-IB Drama
David Klein, a mathematics professor at California State University at Northridge, says he was pleased to review Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate math courses for the Thomas B. Fordham Institute. He respects institute President Chester E. “Checker” Finn Jr., a longtime leader in the movement to improve U.S. schools. Among the views Klein shares with Finn is that overuse of calculators can interfere with students’ mastery of analytical skills.
But their collaboration on Fordham’s analysis of AP and IB did not turn out the way either of them hoped.
On June 4, Klein submitted his report on two courses, AP Calculus AB and IB Mathematics SL. Klein’s analysis of AP and IB math was more negative and his grades lower than what the experts on AP and IB English, history and biology courses submitted to Fordham. He would have given the AP math course a C-plus and the IB math course a C-minus. The other reviewers thought none of the courses they looked at deserved anything less than a B-minus.
Still, Klein says, he got no indication from the Fordham staff of any problems until the edited version of his material came back to him for review on Sept. 28, a week before the deadline for completing the report. Many of what he considered his strongest points, he discovered, had been deleted. He had Fordham remove his name as a co-author of the report, “Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate: Do They Deserve Gold Star Status?” which was released Nov. 14.
After agreeing to the name removal, Finn told Klein in an e-mail: “I imagine we’ll also reduce your overemphasis on calculator use and probably change the grades (upward). Thanks, tho, for your help.” Klein’s grade of C-plus for AP was not changed, but his grade of C-minus for IB got a big jump to a B-minus, meaning the report was saying that IB math was better than AP math, the opposite of what Klein had said.
Related:
- Math Forum
- UW Math Professor Emeritus Richard Askey’s posts (Askey is also a member of the National Academy of Sciences)
- Connected Math posts.
- Math topics on SIS
- Klein’s Evaluation of AP Calculus AB and IB Math SL
- Much more about David Klein
New York Grades Set Off Debate on Judging Schools
Elissa Gootman & Jennifer Medina:
Not long after Schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein announced plans last year to give grades of A through F to schools, principals at some of New York City’s coveted specialized high schools grew concerned. With the city looking to reward gains among the lowest-achieving students, how would the elite schools be judged?
The principals peppered the administration with ideas for extra credits for their schools: perhaps counting how many Advanced Placement tests students pass or the college credits they accumulate. In the end, the city decided to tie bonus points for these schools to high scores on state Regents exams.
That served the gold-standard Stuyvesant High School well, propelling it from a high B to a comfortable A. But the principal of Brooklyn Technical High School, Randy J. Asher, called the decision “ridiculous,” saying it contradicted a core principle of the report cards: the need to gauge how far students have come, rather than simply how they perform.
“I think we all really came to the table saying, let’s find something fair for schools like ours,” Mr. Asher, whose school earned a B, said in a recent interview. “And I don’t think we succeeded.”
Parents of Disabled Students Push for Separate Classes
Last fall, groups who favor placing disabled students in regular classrooms faced opposition from an unlikely quarter: parents like Norette Travis, whose daughter Valerie has autism.
Valerie had already tried the mainstreaming approach that the disability-advocacy groups were supporting. After attending a preschool program for special-needs students, she was assigned to a regular kindergarten class. But there, her mother says, she disrupted class, ran through the hallways and lashed out at others — at one point giving a teacher a black eye.
“She did not learn anything that year,” Ms. Travis recalls. “She regressed.”
As policy makers push to include more special-education students into general classrooms, factions are increasingly divided. Advocates for the disabled say special-education students benefit both academically and socially by being taught alongside typical students. Legislators often side with them, arguing that mainstreaming is productive for students and cost-effective for taxpayers.
Some teachers and administrators have been less supportive of the practice, saying that they lack the training and resources to handle significantly disabled children. And more parents are joining the dissenters. People like Ms. Travis believe that mainstreaming can actually hinder the students it is intended to help. Waging a battle to preserve older policies, these parents are demanding segregated teaching environments — including separate schools.
More on from the Wall Street Journal on Mainstreaming.
Joanne has more.
Pennsylvania to revamp gifted education
They’re not mentioned under No Child Left Behind. They’re not assisted by federal funding or programs.
Gifted students in Pennsylvania must rely on the state Department of Education to make sure public schools challenge them intellectually.
So with changes proposed to the state’s gifted education regulations, known as Chapter 16, a network of parents and advocates are weighing in.
As they see it, the changes being reviewed in Harrisburg don’t go far enough.
”The state board missed an opportunity so far in making any meaningful difference to help parents and schools avoid conflicts,” said Jay Clark of Lancaster, a parent of two gifted children who has testified before legislative committees about the proposals.
Milwaukee Public School options gain share in education marketplace
If your definition of “public school” is the regular public school system, you are talking about a slice of Milwaukee’s educational infrastructure in which the student population is getting smaller each year.
But if your definition means any school where public dollars pay for children’s educations, you’re talking about a bigger pie, with more ingredients – a pie unlike anything served elsewhere in the United States.
Voucher schools, charter schools, alternative schools, ways of sending kids to schools in other communities – parents, especially those with low income, continue to have a wide array of choices in Milwaukee, all of them funded by public dollars.
Thousands of parents are taking advantage of that. Enrollment statistics for this year show more than 30% of all Milwaukee kids whose educations are paid for with tax dollars attend schools outside the main roster of Milwaukee Public Schools. That appears to be the highest percentage on record.
While enrollment in MPS elementary, middle and high schools fell almost 4% to 81,681, the number of students using publicly funded vouchers to attend 122 private schools in the city rose 8% to 19,233.
‘No Child’ Law May Slight The Gifted, Experts Say
Some scholars are joining parent advocates in questioning whether the education law No Child Left Behind, with its goal of universal academic proficiency, has had the unintended consequence of diverting resources and attention from the gifted.
Proponents of gifted education have forever complained of institutional neglect. Public schools, they say, pitch lessons to the broad middle group of students at the expense of those working beyond their assigned grade. Now, under the federal mandate, schools are trained on an even narrower group: students on the “bubble” between success and failure on statewide tests.
Teachers struggling to meet the law’s annual proficiency goals have little incentive, critics say, to teach students who will meet those goals however they are taught.
“Because it’s all about bringing people up to that minimum level of performance, we’ve ignored those high-ability learners,” said Nancy Green, executive director of the District-based National Association for Gifted Children. “We don’t even have a test that measures their abilities.”
Thinking About Mistakes
On one hand, as children we’re taught that everyone makes mistakes and that the great thinkers and inventors embraced them. Thomas Edison’s famous quote is often inscribed in schools and children’s museums: “I have not failed. I have just found ten thousand ways that won’t work.”
On the other hand, good grades are usually a reward for doing things right, not making errors. Compliments are given for having the correct answer and, in fact, the wrong one may elicit scorn from classmates.
We grow up with a mixed message: making mistakes is a necessary learning tool, but we should avoid them.
Carol S. Dweck, a psychology professor at Stanford University, has studied this and related issues for decades.
“Studies with children and adults show that a large percentage cannot tolerate mistakes or setbacks,” she said. In particular, those who believe that intelligence is fixed and cannot change tend to avoid taking chances that may lead to errors.
Often parents and teachers unwittingly encourage this mind-set by praising children for being smart rather than for trying hard or struggling with the process.
For example, in a study that Professor Dweck and her researchers did with 400 fifth graders, half were randomly praised as being “really smart” for doing well on a test; the others were praised for their effort.
Then they were given two tasks to choose from: an easy one that they would learn little from but do well, or a more challenging one that might be more interesting but induce more mistakes.
The majority of those praised for being smart chose the simple task, while 90 percent of those commended for trying hard selected the more difficult one.
The difference was surprising, Professor Dweck said, especially because it came from one sentence of praise.
Facing Down the Skeptics in Education
Whenever I speak about my book, It’s Being Done: Academic Success in Unexpected Schools, I know I will face at least a few skeptics—and sometimes more than a few. They can easily be identified by their questions and comments. For example, they ask whether the schools I profile in the book are magnet schools or in some way select their students. I patiently explain that they don’t. Or, they will say, “I have unions in my school,” as though that would explain why they can’t make any improvements. Since some of the most impressive schools I profile in the book are in New York, Philadelphia, and St. Paul—all places with very powerful and serious teacher unions—I tell them that unions by themselves don’t seem to be an obstacle. Or, they say, “I have a lot of low-income kids in my district,” allowing that fact to speak for itself as an explanation for why their schools are low-performing.
I always answer as fully as I can, but I know that I probably haven’t convinced them that the schools are as I report them to be—high achieving or rapidly improving with student populations that are mostly either students of poverty or students of color or both. I know many people in my audience simply cannot envision schools that are as good as I say they are or educators who are as uncompromising and frank as I portray them.
Chenoweth recently appeared in Madison.
On Plagiarism
In 2003, the American Historical Association got out of the business of adjudicating complaints of plagiarism, saying that the association could best promote good scholarship by issuing standards and promoting education about them. Journals, other publishers and colleges and universities are better suited than an association to consider plagiarism complaints, the AHA said, and they all have various sanctions they can impose.
The move was controversial within the association, in part because it came at a time of several well publicized incidents of alleged plagiarism in the profession.
The association has just released an analysis on how plagiarism is handled by journals in the discipline and the answer appears to be that editors favor ad hoc approaches over policy.
“Very few journals have written plagiarism policies, and many journals are reluctant to develop them,” said the study, which was published in the AHA’s magazine, Perspectives. At the same time, the study found that 9 of the 35 history journals participating in the survey reported dealing with plagiarism accusations at least once.
How to Fix Struggling High Schools
I think the people running our high schools, as well we parents, need to stop making compromises that sustain the cycle of failure. Kind and thoughtful educators and parents, such as the ones in Parker’s articles, are trying to get through each day without hurting too many feelings or forcing too many confrontations. When the choice is between letting standards continue to slip or making a scene, few people want to be drama queens, which is too bad.
The best inner-city educators begin each day knowing they are going to have to confront apathy again and again. They shove it away as if it were a kidnapper trying to steal their children. To succeed, a high school like Coolidge needs a unified team of such people, who follow the same standards of regular attendance, daily preparation for school, high achievement and attention and decorum in the classroom.
It sounds impossible, but it’s not. There are inner-city schools right now, including some charter, religious and private schools that operate that way. It takes strength and intelligence and humor and love for young people, and an abhorrence for the limp compromises that have created such sickly schools as Coolidge.
I asked several expert educators how they would fix schools like that. Michael A. Durso, principal of Springbrook High School in Silver Spring, said: “These problems did not occur overnight and will not be resolved easily or in a short time.” Michael Riley, superintendent of the Bellevue, Wash., schools, said: “Anyone who thinks there is a quick fix, that taking a couple of dramatic steps will make this situation better overnight, is kidding himself.”
Time to think global in testing U.S. students
Today, it’s less important how students in Iowa or Oregon compare to those in Alabama or Virginia on a national test. What matters most is how students in North Carolina or Texas compare to those in Denmark or Russia, and so on.
In short, educational protectionism is outdated and ignores the realities of the 21st century global economy.
In the Global Competitiveness Report 2007–2008 released last month by the World Economic Forum, the United States again ranked as the world’s most competitive economy. Yet the 2003 Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) study, administered in 46 countries, found that U.S. eighth-graders ranked 14th in mathematics achievement. And on the 2003 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) survey, U.S. students placed below average in math, science and problem-solving among countries belonging to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development. This is a major concern because the most important factor in competitiveness is education and training of the labor force. Thus, U.S. education performance today is the best indicator of America’s competitiveness tomorrow.
The rewriting of history
Earlier this year it organised a conference for history teachers at which Mr Putin plugged a new history manual to help sort out what he called “the muddle” in teachers’ heads. “Russian history did contain some problematic pages,” Mr Putin told the teachers. “But so did other states’ histories. We have fewer of them than other countries. And they were less terrible than in some other countries.” His message was that “we can’t allow anyone to impose a sense of guilt on us.”
This is the thrust of the manual, entitled “A Modern History of Russia: 1945-2006: A Manual for History Teachers”. Were it not for the Kremlin’s backing, it would probably be gathering dust on bookshelves. But Mr Putin’s endorsement has made it one of the most discussed books of the year. New textbooks based on it will come into circulation next year. Russian schools are still free to choose which textbook to teach. But the version of history now proposed by the Kremlin suggests that freedom may not last.
The manual’s choice of period is suggestive: from Stalin’s victory in the “great patriotic war” to the victory of Mr Putin’s regime. It celebrates all contributors to Russia’s greatness, and denounces those responsible for the loss of empire, regardless of their politics. The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 is not seen as a watershed from which a new history begins, but as an unfortunate and tragic mistake that hindered Russia’s progress. “The Soviet Union was not a democracy, but it was an example for millions of people around the world of the best and fairest society.”
Madison School District Administration Presentation on High School Redesign
The Madison School viewed a presentation from the Administration Monday evening on their proposed High School redesign. Listen via this mp3 audio file (or watch the MMSDTV Video Archive).
Susan Troller:
“Sometimes institutional history can be a weight around your neck,” Rainwater noted. “This can be an opportunity to bring in new ideas, and new blood,” he added.
Rainwater has said change is necessary because high schools today look and feel much like they have for generations but that students will live and work in a world that has changed dramatically, and which demands new skills and abilities.
He acknowledged that the path was likely to be bumpy, and noted that the plan — which has been developed thus far without public input — recognizes that there are major concerns in the community regarding changes to Madison’s school system.
Some of those concerns include worries about trying to balance resources among students of widely varying abilities, about “dumbing down” the curriculum with inclusive classrooms, the potential for the high schools to lose their unique personalities and concerns that addressing the broad ranges of culture in the district will not serve students well.
Background:
- West High Math Teacher Letter on math rigor. This issue is particularly important in light of Superintendent Art Rainwater’s comments (mp3 audio file) regarding “dumbing down the curriculum“.
- High School Redesign Committee (currently there are no parent or community members – Susan Troller “which has been developed thus far without public input“)
- Proposed East High redesign halted.
- Many more notes and links on Madison’s high school redesign.
Curriculum Acceleration/Middle School Charter Meeting: November 26 at 11:30 a.m.
A group of parents will be gathering to discuss developing a public school charter (or other educational alternatives) for middle schoolers who need an advanced level and faster pace of instruction (curriculum acceleration). Our first meeting will be Monday, November 26 at 11:30 am for lunch at the Sun Print Cafe, 1 South Pinckney Street [Map], in the US Bank building. If interested, please email Bonnie at pbe@terracom.net.
Seeking a ‘Gold Standard’ in D.C. Charter Education
In the charter school movement’s endless quest to recruit students, some of the best independent public schools support each other by word of mouth. The KIPP DC: KEY Academy, a high-performing middle school, has sent 15 graduates to Washington Mathematics Science Technology, one of the better charter high schools. But KIPP teachers steer their graduates away from some charter schools.
“If I said which they were, the principals would kill me,” said Susan Schaeffler, KIPP DC’s executive director.
Now, some charter leaders in the city that is a national epicenter for their movement are planning to take the next step in this sifting process. They say they want to create a “gold standard designation,” to publicly identify for the first time which charters are doing the most to raise teaching quality and academic achievement for low-income students.
Ramona Edelin, executive director of the D.C. Association of Chartered Public Schools, likened the initiative to a certification system to show “what high quality really means in terms of children of color from impoverished backgrounds, which is the vast majority of the students charter schools educate here.”
UK Fuzzy Math Discussion
Soon after the first sudoku puzzles began to appear in newspapers a couple of years ago, there came hurried reassurances from worried editors. Sudoku might be a number grid, they soothed, but don’t let all those nasty ones, twos and threes frighten you, because you don’t need to be any good at maths to do it.
It was a message that summed up the national attitude to maths. Numbers are something inherently difficult, to be feared and mistrusted. The subject carries a lasting memory of childhood shame and frustration from which we never recover. Maths is for geeks, nerds and misfits; the rest of us get by on a wing, a prayer and a calculator.
Andrew Hodges, maths lecturer at Wadham College, Oxford, takes a different view of the addictive puzzle. “Sudoku may not require long multiplication or division,” he says, “but it is a very good puzzle that replicates the pattern of thinking required to solve quite complex logical problems in maths. But no one dares mention the association, for fear of putting off all those who like doing it.”
Joanne has more.
Book: Amy’s Game: The Concealed Structure of Education
Amy’s Game: The Concealed Structure of Education :
Amy’s Game is a field manual for parents, teachers, and leaders who want to give our children the education they deserve. The author draws on over 30 years experience and hundreds of studies to expose education’s hidden structure responsible for our schools’ decline. Tactics for reversing that slide are given along with inexpensive, well-researched instructional methods that anyone-parent to professor-can use to improve our children’s education.
Amazon Link. Thanks to Larry Winkler for the link.
Minnesota’s Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics Forums
In the process of researching where the U.S. ranks internationally in science and math education, I discovered that one of the Democratic presidential candidates (the one who’s governor of a Southwestern state) keeps citing our nation’s current rank as No. 29 (or, on a good day, No. 28) after our having been No. 1 throughout the world.
Apparently neither statistic is true, however, which suggest that it may be Bill Richardson himself who needs a bit of remedial math.
This is not the first time our national educational system has been politicized. Fifty years ago, a global scientific effort called the International Geophysical Year (IGY) encompassed 11 Earth sciences: aurora and airglow, cosmic rays, geomagnetism, gravity, ionospheric physics, longitude and latitude determinations (precision mapping), meteorology, oceanography, seismology and solar activity.
The Soviet Union celebrated IGY by launching the first artificial satellite (Sputnik) one month into the event on Oct. 1, 1957. We countered with the discovery of the Van Allen radiation belts and the discovery of mid-ocean submarine ridges, which was an important confirmation of plate tectonics.
Immediately following the successful orbiting of Sputnik, attendant paranoia regarding U.S. loss of the space race converted our collaboration with the country into a major retooling of the nation’s school curricula. The focus would now be on science and mathematics.
It’s impossible to deny a general decline in these areas nationally versus India and a handful of other countries that emphasize science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) education on a cultural level. In recent years, Minnesota has been adamant and resolute about creating and maintaining collaboration between the private and public sectors to improve these areas of learning among K-12 students statewide.
School Math textbooks rife with errors, tentatively approved
Proposed math books for elementary school children and their teachers have resulted in one computation that publishers would just as soon erase – 109,263.
That’s the number of errors that were uncovered in proposed math textbooks that are under review by the State Board of Education for distribution to schools in the fall of 2008.
The total number of errors was nearly five times the total for last year, thanks to one publisher whose books contained more than 86,000 errors – 79 percent of the total.
Publishers will have until the spring to clean their books up. After that, they can be fined up to $5,000 for every error that makes it into the final editions of books shipped to Texas schools.
Excuses are not an option
There are casual days at Milwaukee College Preparatory School when it comes to what students can wear. Polo shirts (red for almost all the students and yellow for standouts who have earned privileges) are the uniform for those days. Other days, students have to wear blazers and ties.
But there are no casual days at the school when it comes to academics, even down to the kindergartners.
“Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go, let’s go,” eighth-grade math teacher Edward Richerson exhorts his students as a half dozen head toward the blackboard to solve some equations. They’re not moving fast enough for him.
A couple of them falter in their explanations. “What I’ve told you not to do is get lazy on these equations, which is what you’ve done,” Richerson says. If you’re not getting them, it’s not because you’re not smart enough, he says. “Since we are overachievers,” he begins as he tells them why they have to be as picky about the details of the answers as he is.
In a 5-year-old kindergarten class, children do an exercise in counting and understanding sequences of shapes. Four-year-olds are expected to be on the verge of reading by Christmas.
In national education circles, phrases such as “no excuses” and names such as “KIPP” have come to stand for a hard-driving approach to educating low-income urban children, and that includes longer days, strict codes of conduct, an emphasis on mastering basics and a dedication among staff members approaching zeal. The Knowledge Is Power Program, or KIPP, operates 57 schools in cities around the country and has a record that is not perfect but is noteworthy for its success.
Milwaukee College Prep, 2449 N. 36th St., is the prime example in Milwaukee of a no-excuses school. The charter school, which is publicly funded and was chartered through the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, is not formally a KIPP school, although it is affiliated with the KIPP movement.
Milwaukee College Preparatory School’s website.
U.S. students ‘middle of the pack’ compared with world
Click for a larger version of this image.
Greg Toppo:
Educators and politicians these days make a point of saying that U.S. schoolchildren aren’t just competing locally for good, high-paying jobs — they’re competing globally.
A detailed study lets them know just how well kids may do if they really compete globally someday — and it’s not exactly pretty.
Crunching the most recent data from a pair of U.S. and international math and science exams for middle-schoolers, Gary Phillips, a researcher at the non-profit American Institutes for Research (AIR), a non-partisan Washington think tank, finds a decidedly mixed picture: Students in most states perform as well as — or better than — peers in most foreign countries.
But he also finds that even those in the highest-scoring states, such as Massachusetts and Minnesota, are significantly below a handful of top-scoring nations such as Singapore, Hong Kong, South Korea, Taiwan and Japan.
In mathematics, students in 49 states and the District of Columbia are behind their counterparts in Singapore, Hong Kong, South Korea, Taiwan and Japan. Students in Massachusetts are on a par with Japanese students, but trail the other four nations. In science, students in Massachusetts, Minnesota, Montana, New Hampshire, North Dakota, South Dakota, Vermont and Wisconsin trail only students in Singapore and Taiwan, while performing equal or better than students in the other 45 countries surveyed.
“More than a century ago Louis Pasteur revealed the secret to invention and innovation when he said ‘chance favors the prepared mind’. The take away message from this report is that the United States is loosing the race to prepare the minds of the future generation,” said Dr. Phillips.
Students in the District of Columbia had the lowest U.S. performance in mathematics (they did not participate in the science test). In math, the average D.C. student is at the Below Basic level, putting them behind students in 29 countries and ahead of those in 14 countries. In science, nine states are at the Below Basic level: Florida, Arizona, Louisiana, Nevada, New Mexico, Alabama, Hawaii, California and Mississippi.
Clusty Search: National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) | Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMMS)
The Pangloss Index: How States Game the No Child Left Behind Act: Wisconsin Tied for #1
This report includes an updated Pangloss Index, based on a new round of state reports submitted in 2007. As Table 1 shows, many states look about the same Wisconsin and Iowa are tied for first, distinguishing themselves by insisting that their states house a pair of educational utopias along the upper Mississippi River. In contrast, Massachusetts—which is the highest-performing state in the country according to the NAEP—continues to hold itself to far tougher standards than most, showing up at 46th, near the bottom of the list.
Wisconsin – especially the state Department of Public Instruction – continues to avoid taking steps to increase the success of low-performing children in the state, a national non-profit organization says in a report released today.
For the second year in a row, Education Sector put Wisconsin at the top of its Pangloss Index, a ranking of states based on how much they are overly cheery about how their students are doing. Much of the ranking is based on the author’s assessment of data related to what a state is doing to comply with the federal No Child Left Behind education law.
“Wisconsin policy-makers are fooling parents by pretending that everything is perfect,” said Kevin Carey, research and policy manager for the organization. “As a result, the most vulnerable students aren’t getting the attention they need.”
DPI officials declined to comment on the new report because they had not seen it yet. In 2006, Tony Evers, the deputy state superintendent of public instruction, objected strongly to a nearly identical ranking from Education Sector and said state officials and schools were focused on improving student achievement, especially of low-income and minority students on the short end of achievement gaps in education.
The report is the latest of several over the last two years from several national groups that have said Wisconsin is generally not doing enough to challenge its schools and students to do better. The groups can be described politically as centrist to conservative and broadly supportive of No Child Left Behind. Education Sector’s founders include Andrew Rotherham, a former education adviser to President Bill Clinton, and the group describes itself as non-partisan.
Several of the reports have contrasted Wisconsin and Massachusetts as states with similar histories of offering high-quality education but different approaches toward setting statewide standards now. Massachusetts has drawn praise for action it has taken in areas such as testing the proficiency of teachers, setting the bar high on standardized tests and developing rigorous education standards.
The Education Sector report and Carey did the same. The report rated Massachusetts as 46th in the nation, meaning it is one of the most demanding states when it comes to giving schools high ratings.
Carey said that in 1992, Wisconsin outscored Massachusetts in the nationwide testing program known as NAEP, the National Assessment of Educational Progress. But Wisconsin is now behind that state in every area of NAEP testing, he said.
“Unlike Wisconsin, Massachusetts has really challenged its schools,” Carey said.
Additional commentary from TJ Mertz and Joanne Jacobs. All about Pangloss.
AP vs. IB vs. Neither: A Plea for Peace and Love
Watch out. Tumultuous days are ahead in the war of advocates for college-level high school courses such as Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate, particularly with the rise of some schools that say their teachers can do a better job without AP or IB.
Insults are flying. Good people could get hurt. I have a peace plan, but first let’s inspect the battlefield.
The AP vs. IB topic on my Admissions 101 discussion group at the Web site has 1,233 posts and more are pouring in. At the same time, educators who want to banish AP from their schools just launched a new Web site, ExcellenceWithoutAP. On Wednesday, the Thomas B. Fordham Institute at edexcellence will release one of the most detailed AP vs. IB comparisons ever: “Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate: Do They Deserve Gold Star Status?”
The Fordham report looks like a peace-making gesture, since it concludes that both programs “set high academic standards and goals for learning” and provide exams that allow students to “apply their knowledge in creative and productive ways.” But the AP vs. IB combatants will likely squabble over slight differences in the grades Fordham gave AP and IB courses in biology and math. And the ExcellenceWithoutAP people are going to hate the parts of the Fordham report that warn against attempts, like theirs, to make college-level courses in high school more thematic and deny students — at least in Fordham’s view — the solid facts, such as “the names, dates, events, documents and movements important to our history.”
The College Board still dominates the battlefield, with more than 14,000 high schools using its AP program. IB has only about 500. ExcellenceWithoutAP lists about 50 schools that have dropped or never had AP. This is a big jump from the 12 schools identified in this column two years ago. But even this group is made up of schools so small that they produce less that one-fifth of 1 percent of U.S. high school seniors graduating each year.
Teacher certification is no guarantee
A piece of paper does not a teacher make.
So while the Milwaukee School Board considers whether teachers in charter schools should be certified in each academic subject they teach, an inconvenient truth remains: A teaching certificate is not a guarantee of teaching competence.
Yes, a teaching certificate proves that certain standards have been met, that the bearer has studied education theory and teaching techniques and demonstrates basic mastery of an area of academic study. But does this translate directly into the ability to help individual students? A roomful of students?
If a teacher is certified to teach English but not science, does that mean science is hopelessly out of his league? Or does it merely mean that the teacher in question has jumped through the hoops required to gain an English certificate?
The teachers union would have you believe that a teaching certificate is akin to a sacred talisman, as if only those who possess the talisman are qualified to share their unique knowledge. Actually, it would be preferable if the union phrased it that way – it would be easier to recognize the union’s specious argument. Instead, the union tries to frame it as a quality-control problem.
“Professional is professional,” said Dennis Oulahan, president of the Milwaukee Teachers’ Education Association at an October School Board committee meeting, according to an Oct. 12 Journal Sentinel article. “If we’re willing to play with that, how serious are we about moving student achievement forward in this district?”
Report Gives Good Grades to Precollege Courses
Peter Schmidt in The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that “(t)he Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a nonprofit research organization, favorably reviews several Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate programs in a report scheduled to be released this week.
The study evaluated course materials, teacher’s guides, and examinations used in connection with Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate programs in biology, English, history, and mathematics. Based on reviews of the materials conducted by experts in the fields covered, the report concludes that the courses generally merit praise. The biology offerings in particular deserve high marks, it says.
The researchers did not examine how well the courses are actually being taught, and its report warns that “successful implementation of these programs depends on the availability of talented, motivated, and well-educated teachers.”
The institute plans to make the report available online as of Tuesday, although it is not scheduled for release to the public until the following day.”
“Educrats (WEAC, DPI) to parents: Bug off”
My daughter asked the other day about why the sky is blue. It turned into a talk about light waves. Sure, it was a teachable moment but my bad; I’m not a licensed teacher.
I now know how wrong I was. I heard it from a state lawyer arguing before an appeals court about the Wisconsin Virtual Academy. Parents are incompetent to recognize such moments – that’s what he actually said – so the public charter school needs to be shut down now.
The lawyer, who represents the Department of Public Instruction, was siding with the big teachers union, the Wisconsin Education Association Council. The union four years ago sued the department to shut down the academy, a public school that offers classes to 850 students statewide. Now, the state has switched sides and says the school is breaking the law, a claim already rejected in court. All the school is breaking is paradigms.
Here’s how it works: Children log on with software made for virtual schooling. They go to a virtual class with a live teacher, or they have lessons assigned by a teacher, or they do one-on-one work with a teacher, or they get their homework evaluated by a teacher, or they talk on a phone or meet face to face with a teacher. Notice who’s involved.
Why, it’s the child’s parent, claim the educrats and the union. The nub of the case is that because parents help when children are stuck or act as an on-hand coach, it means they’re really the teachers. They’re unlicensed; ergo, the school’s illegal. Let this be a warning when your tot asks for homework help.
The state’s lawyer, Paul Barnett, said that when teachable moments come to academy kids, parents can’t recognize them. “This school depends on unlicensed, untrained, unqualified and, um, adults who are not required to prove competence,” he told the court.
He later says that the state wants parents involved in schools. Just wipe your boots first, you peasants.
Aside from what insults the state hurls at the academy’s parents, “it really is almost demeaning to the work our teachers do,” says Principal Kurt Bergland.
“I home-schooled before,” says parent Julie Thompson of Cross Plains. “This is different.”
The academy does mean that Thompson’s seventh-grade daughter learns at home, except when she joins other academy kids for hands-on science. But Thompson doesn’t plan the curriculum, teach the lessons or evaluate progress. The school’s 20 teachers do. Children move on only when those teachers say they’re ready.
The parents’ role adds to this. Some describe it as being a teachers aide, and Bergland, for years a teacher and administrator in a brick-and-mortar public school, says they get training similar to what aides get. “But the thing that they have way beyond most aides I’ve worked with is an understanding of their learner,” he says.
Naturally, the results are good. Even the state’s lawyer said so, only he claims they’re irrelevant.
Experts debate Arizona student testing model
Arizona’s student testing model is flawed, and the state’s top education official is exaggerating student success on standardized tests, a conservative researcher charged Thursday.
“It’s a bit like watching Barry Bonds and Sammy Sosa beating these baseball records,” said Matthew Ladner, vice president of research at the Goldwater Institute. “It could be that they’re just better baseball players. Or it could be that the ball is juiced or the players are taking steroids.”
Ladner debated Tom Horne, Arizona’s superintendent of public instruction, at an annual meeting of education researchers held at Arizona State University’s Downtown Phoenix Campus.
Horne called Ladner a “demagogue” and said the Goldwater Institute is selective with facts and spreads false information as a scare tactic.
“They can’t stand the idea that there could be anything good in public education,” Horne said.
Montgomery School’s New Take On Ability Grouping Yields Results
Via a reader email – Daniel de Vise:
In a notebook on her desk at Rock View Elementary School, Principal Patsy Roberson keeps tabs on every student: red for those who have failed to attain proficiency on Maryland’s statewide exam, an asterisk for students learning English and squares for black or Hispanic children whose scores place them “in the gap.”
Roberson and the Rock View faculty are having remarkable success lifting children out of that gap, the achievement gap that separates poor and minority children from other students and represents one of public education’s most intractable problems.
They have done it with an unusual approach. The Kensington school’s 497 students are grouped into classrooms according to reading and math ability for more than half of the instructional day.
The technique, called performance-based grouping, is uncommon in the region. Some educators believe it too closely resembles tracking, the outmoded practice of assigning students to inflexible academic tracks by ability.
Educators say Rock View, however, is using the same basic concept to opposite effect, and the results have been positive. While some other Montgomery County schools serving low-income populations have posted higher test scores, few have shown such improvement or consistency across socioeconomic and racial lines.
Joanne has more.
St. Louis Mayor Invites Charter Schools
Mayor Francis Slay has laid the groundwork for a new system of hand-picked public charter schools, meant to rival the city’s sinking school district and draw families back to the city.
Today, Slay’s office will send roughly 70 letters to local educators, Midwest nonprofit education groups, and big charter school companies across the country.
Those letters will invite each of them to start a school here.
His goal is to open quality schools. How many? Realistically, he thinks two or three a year, adding as many as 30 in the next 10 years.
The schools would steer thousands of kids away from the St. Louis Public Schools.
“Our city is cleaner, safer and more beautiful than it has been in a long time,” Slay wrote in the letter. “In short, St. Louis has it all — except enough quality public schools.”
But some say the plan would create a cycle disastrous to the city school district.
“It sounds like a plan, then, to abandon half the children in St. Louis,” said Peter Downs, president of the elected St. Louis School Board. “It’s like setting up two fire departments, two police departments. If you try to do it at the same cost, you have a lot more impoverished schools.”
Imperfect though it is, New York’s attempt to improve its schools deserves applause
IN THE 1990s New York City’s success in cutting crime became a model for America and the world. Innovative policing methods, guided by the “broken windows” philosophy of cracking down on minor offences to encourage a culture of lawfulness, showed that a seemingly hopeless situation could be turned around. It made the name of the mayor, Rudy Giuliani, now a presidential aspirant.
Hopeless is how many people feel about America’s government-funded public schools, particularly in the dodgier parts of big cities, where graduation rates are shockingly low and many fail to achieve basic levels of literacy and numeracy. As with urban crime, failing urban schools are preoccupying countries the world over. And just as New York pointed the way on fighting crime, under another mayor, Michael Bloomberg, it is now emerging as a model for school reform.
On November 5th Mr Bloomberg announced a new “report card” for the city’s schools, designed to make them accountable for their performance. The highest-graded schools will get an increased budget and perhaps a bonus for the principal (head teacher). Schools that fail will not be tolerated: unless their performance improves, their principals will be fired, and if that does not do the trick, they will be closed. This is the culmination of a series of reforms that began when Mr Bloomberg campaigned for, and won, direct control of the school system after becoming mayor in 2002. Even before the “report cards”, there have been impressive signs of improvement, including higher test scores and better graduation rates.
Progress Reports grade each school with an A, B, C, D, or F. These reports help parents, teachers, principals, and others understand how well schools are doing—and compare them to other, similar schools. Most schools received pilot Progress Reports for the 2005-06 school year in spring 2007. Progress Reports for Early Childhood and Special Education schools will be piloted during the 2007-08 academic year.
To find the Progress Report for your school, go to Find a School and enter the school’s name or number. This will bring you to the school’s Web page. Click on “Statistics,” which is a link on the left side of the page, where various accountability information can be found for each school. You can also ask your parent coordinator for a copy of your school’s Progress Report or e-mail PR_Support@schools.nyc.gov with questions. Click here to view the Progress Report results for all schools Citywide.
Schools that get As and Bs on their Progress Reports will be eligible for rewards. The Department of Education will work with schools that get low grades to help them improve. Schools that get low grades will also face consequences, such as leadership changes or closure. This is an important part of our work to hold children’s schools accountable for living up to the high standards we all expect them to achieve.
Bringing accountability and competition to New York City’s struggling schools.
THE 220 children are called scholars, not students, at the Excellence charter school in Brooklyn‘s impoverished Bedford-Stuyvesant district. To promote the highest expectations, the scholars—who are all boys, mostly black and more than half of whom get free or subsidised school lunches—are encouraged to think beyond school, to university. Outside each classroom is a plaque, with the name of a teacher’s alma mater, and then the year (2024 in the case of the kindergarten), in which the boys will graduate from college.
Like the other charter schools that are fast multiplying across America, Excellence is an independently run public school that has been allowed greater flexibility in its operations in return for greater accountability, though it cannot select its pupils, instead choosing them by lottery. If it fails, the principal (head teacher) will be held accountable, and the school could be closed. Three years old, Excellence is living up to its name: 92% of its third-grade scholars (eight-year-olds, the oldest boys it has, so far) scored “advanced” or “proficient” in New York state English language exams this year, compared to an average (for fourth-graders) across the state of 68% and only 62% in the Big Apple. They did even better in mathematics.
On American School Reform: the pressure for change is coming from parents, which bodes well
The Economist (Los Angeles & New Orleans):
OUTSIDE New York, as usual, it is a different story. Most American mayors look longingly at Michael Bloomberg’s accomplishments and wish they were equally mighty. West of the Mississippi, none has succeeded in seizing control of a school system. Nor are they likely to be able to do so: the early 20th century progressive movement, strongest in the West, severely blunted their powers. “We haven’t had reform from the top here,” says Eli Broad, a Los Angeles philanthropist. “So instead we’re seeing change from the bottom up.”
In the vanguard are charter schools like the Academy of Opportunity [Ask Google Live Yahoo] in south-central Los Angeles. Here 13- and 14-year-olds, almost all of them black or Hispanic, firmly shake your hand and outline their plans to go to Yale and Stanford. They work long hours—from 7.30am to 5pm five days a week, plus four hours every other Saturday. The grind pays off. At the end of their first year in the school just 28% of pupils are proficient or advanced in maths, compared to 48% of pupils elsewhere in California. By the time they leave, three years later, they far outperform their peers.
Students in Boston’s Pilot School Outpacing Others
When Lindsey Jones was deciding which high school to attend in a district that offers nearly three dozen options for secondary education, she was swayed by the Boston Community Leadership Academy’s claims that it would prepare her well for college. She didn’t realize how well until she started classes at the 400-student academy, part of a network of small schools the Boston district established more than a decade ago to provide alternatives outside its traditional system of large, comprehensive high schools and selective exam schools.
A four-year study of that network, released this week, shows that the academy and the nine other “pilot” high schools in the 56,000-student district are seeing more students through to graduation than regular high schools here. They also have significantly higher promotion and graduation rates, fewer dropouts, and fewer disciplinary issues.
Conceived in 1994 as the district’s response to charter schools, pilot schools have won praise from educators, business leaders, and community groups for providing school choice and innovation within the city’s public school system.
Still, some observers say their results are due more to the schools’ ability to choose or remove teachers, lower proportions of high-needs students, and the control they have in selecting students or weeding out those who are not likely to succeed in them.
Strong Results, High Demand, a Four Year Study of Boston’s Pilot High Schools 4.3MB PDF.
Malcolm Gladwell talks about our working future
If you feel like work is getting harder, it’s not just your imagination, says Malcolm Gladwell.
The bestselling author of Blink and The Tipping Point says the mental demands of the workplace are steadily growing — and we’re all going to have to smarten up if we want to succeed.
“I’m quite prepared for the possibility that the next revolution is not going to come from a machine,” says Mr. Gladwell, 44, a staff writer for New Yorker magazine, who has carved out his own niche as a business guru. “It’s going to come from creating a more thoughtful work force and giving people the opportunity to be thoughtful.”
Among his recommendations: Business leaders should get more involved in education policy debates, Canada should consider other countries’ models for teaching advanced mathematics, and hiring managers should stop looking for a perfect fit when scouting for employees.
When you say that the cognitive demands of the workplace will be growing, what do you mean?
We will require, from a larger and larger percentage of our work force, the ability to engage in relatively complicated analytical and cognitive tasks. So it’s not that we’re going to need more geniuses, but the 50th percentile is going to have to be better educated than they are now. We’re going to have to graduate more people from high school who’ve done advanced math, is a very simple way of putting it.
Seeking Parents’ Help in Saving a Great Elementary School Program
The program is a small, mixed-age classroom for first through third graders at the Montessori Children’s House on Madison’s west side, where my eldest child currently attends preschool. It is in danger of being eliminated because of diminishing enrollment. I think that this would be a horrible loss to many academically talented children who would do so well there. They do so many things right there, such as:
- Nurturing, home-like environment in which intense curiosity is normal
- Mixed-age classroom, which encourages children to work at their own pace
- Elegant learning materials
- Freedom of movement and plenty of outside time
- Freedom to follow their own intellectual curiosity
- No busy work
- No homework (unless the child chooses to keep working on something after school)
- Emphasis on peace and global citizenship
- Healthy snacks provided, healthy lunch to be brought from home
- Parental involvement welcomed (the school is a parent run co-op)
As a small community, it would only take a few more children to keep the program viable. If you are the parent of a child who would benefit from such an environment, would you please look at the school’s website http://www.madisonmontessori.org/programs/elementary/Elem_intro.html
and maybe take some time to observe the classroom?
Our family is committed to public schools, and we know that a school district needs talented kids and engaged families to thrive. This program would allow kids to integrate back into the public schools at a fairly young age, while protecting and nurturing them through a critical period of development.
Upon re-reading this message, it sounds like I’m making a blatant marketing pitch (which, frankly, I am). Please forgive me and understand that my only interest in the program is that it survive so that it is an option for my two children, ages 4 and 1, when they are old enough to need it. I hope that there are a few families here who might find a home there. Sincerely, Dawn M. Rappold [drappold@gmail.com]
Free online materials could save schools billions
Since March, Dixon Deutsch and his students have been quietly experimenting with a little website that could one day rock the foundation of how schools do business.
A K-2 teacher at Achievement First Bushwick Elementary Charter School in Brooklyn, N.Y., Deutsch, 28, has been using Free-Reading.net, a reading instruction program that allows him to download, copy and share lessons with colleagues.
He can visit the website and comment on what works and what doesn’t. He can modify lessons to suit his students’ needs and post the modifications online: Think of a cross between a first-grade reading workbook and Wikipedia, the popular online encyclopedia written and edited by users.
If Deutsch wants to see a lesson taught by someone who already has mastered it, he clicks on a YouTube video linked to the site and sees a short demo. “I find it’s more teacher-friendly than a textbook,” he says.
Related: Open Source Reading Instruction.
CAN COMPUTERS FREE TEACHERS TO TEACH MORE CREATIVELY?
At a party of a friend recently I got into a discussion with someone about education and the use of computer technology. The person I was conversing with suggested that educational software could and should be developed to relieve teachers of the technical aspects of teaching. Why should each teacher have to figure out how to teach reading or arithmetic when the best minds could solve that problem and create a computer program to teach the children these basic skills? Having software relieve teachers of this technical aspect of teaching, he argued, would free teachers to do the work that needed human interaction teaching critical and creative thinking. This suggestion makes me uncomfortable.
We agree that helping students to learn to use their minds well, in critical and creative ways, is given far too little attention in the large majority of classrooms. This is especially true in classrooms serving low-income and minority students. Because these students generally do less well on standardized tests, the schools that serve them are pressured to focus on raising those test scores.
Learning Goes Beyond School Hours at Mimosa Elementary
“I didn’t have any of my own children at the time when I started doing this,” Guy said. “The program started through our church and I thought investing time instead of just writing a check would be a great way to give back.”
At many schools, Guy would stand out as a hero for his volunteerism.
Here, he’s a star, but stars don’t stand out. There’s just too many of them.
Mimosa Elementary, a public kindergarten through fifth-grade Fulton County elementary school, bills itself as The Little School That Could.
The school is a throwback of sorts — or maybe it’s a look ahead. Despite its 808 students, it is a place where everyone knows your name. It is the community-gathering place, catering to children and adults, where people look after each other. That’s mostly by design, said Principal Cheryl Williams, who has worked 17 years at the school, the past three as principal. As the community around Mimosa changed, so did the needs of the students and the parents.
The more Mimosa got involved in the community, the more at ease parents became. And with time, the easier it got for Mimosa to apply for, and receive, grant money to offset the costs of some of the before-school and after-school programs.
“Mimosa’s success is because of how the staff here and the teachers support the kids,” Williams said. “There are nights when I have to make teachers leave the building at 8:30 or 9 at because they were still here doing some kind of volunteer work.”
Video/Audio: Madison United for Academic Excellence Meeting on Charter Schools 10/29/2007
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Paula Sween and Dory Witzeling from the Odyssey-Magellan charter school for gifted students in grades 3-8 in Appleton and Senn Brown of the Wisconsin Charter Schools Association participated in a recent Madison United for Academic Excellence event. Ms. Sween was one of the founders of the Odyssey-Magellan program. She is currently the TAG Curriculum Coordinator for the Appleton school district. Ms. Witzeling is a teacher and parent at the school. Click on the photo to view the video. |
Dane County, WI AP High School Course Comparison
A quick summary of Dane County, WI High School 2007-2008 AP Course Offerings (source – AP Course Audit):
- Abundant Life Christian School (3 Courses)
- Cambridge (1)
- DeForest (7)
- Madison Country Day (International Baccalaureate – IB. However, Madison Country Day is not listed on the approved IB World website.)
- Madison East (11)
- Madison Edgewood (11)
- Madison LaFollette (10)
- Madison Memorial (17)
- Madison West (5+1 2nd Year Calculus which “prepares students for the AP BC exam”)
- Marshall (5)
- McFarland (6)
- Middleton – Cross Plains (7)
- Monona Grove (7)
- Mount Horeb (5)
- Oregon (9)
- Sauk Prairie (10)
- Stoughton (6)
- Sun Prairie (13)
- Verona (10)
- Waunakee (6)
- Wisconsin Heights (6)
Links and course details are available here.
Related: Dual Enrollment, Small Learning Communities and Part and Full Time Wisconsin Open Enrollment.
Via a kind reader’s email.
Open Source Reading Instruction
Free-Reading is an “open source” instructional program that helps teachers teach early reading. Because it’s open source, it represents the collective wisdom of a wide community of teachers and researchers. It’s designed to contain a scope and sequence of activities that can support and supplement a typical “core” or “basal” program.
Via a reader’s email.
Educational Rewards
Paul Peterson & Matthew Chingos:
For-profit management of public schools is still in its infancy, and many wonder whether it can have a positive effect on student learning. In Philadelphia, that idea has been put to the test. The results, as we report in a paper issued last Friday by the Harvard Program on Education Policy and Governance, would not surprise Adam Smith.
The 18th-century economist explained that those who need to make a profit have strong incentives to do well by their customers. But can Smith’s theory actually work when one is talking about educating students in the most challenging of urban schools — at the very heart of a major metropolis? The answer appears to be yes.
When for-profit management of public schools was first proposed in Philadelphia six years ago, many in that city were extremely skeptical, if not aggressively hostile. So the Philadelphia School Reform Commission, the entity responsible for the innovation, gave only the 30 lowest performing schools to for-profit companies, while another 16 were given to nonprofit organizations, including two of the city’s major universities (Temple and the University of Pennsylvania). Others were reorganized by the school district itself.
Is iTunes U for You?
In an empty classroom on the campus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Walter H.G Lewin, a physics professor, is practicing one of his lectures on the science of everyday phenomena.
Lewin has been teaching at MIT since the 1960s, and his courses are legendary among generations of students there. But he wants to get this lecture — where he dives into the science of rainbows, musical instruments and pacemakers — exactly right. The audience is not just his students at MIT. It could be anyone around the world with access to a computer and Apple’s iTunes store.
MIT is one of 28 colleges that have posted courses, campus speeches and other events on a section of iTunes known as iTunes U. Since the site was launched last spring with 16 institutions, material from it has been downloaded more than 4 million times.
Unlike other offerings from Apple’s music store, where songs cost 99 cents, everything on iTunes U is free. Penn State University offers instruction on information management. Users can download a general chemistry class from Seattle Pacific University, a lecture on the psychosocial aspects of health care from Northeastern University or a class on Ben Franklin from Stanford University. (No universities in the Washington area participate.)
If only the good news about Wisconsin education was true
Finally, there was some really good news about education. According to the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction, the percentage of proficient readers in the third grade had increased from 64.8% in 1998 to 87.4% in 2005. And this improvement was broad-based – every minority group advanced substantially.
If only it were true
Deception No. 1: Test questions, their scoring and definitions of “proficiency” changed constantly. The number of test items, the kinds of items (multiple choice vs. short answer) and their content varied every year the test was given. The score needed for proficiency dropped more than 40%, from 50 in 1998 to 29 in 2005.
That sleight of hand entailed complex statistics to estimate how hard the revised test might be for the next crop of third-graders. That estimate, rather than criteria for effective reading, became the cutoff for proficiency. Obviously, even if mathematics could prove that two tests are equally hard, changing the questions every year meant that subsequent tests weren’t assessing the same thing. The tests were apples and oranges, and the mathematics a red herring.
Deception No. 2: Reading skills were less important than student guessing, and the test’s margin of error. Fifty-three of the test’s 58 items were multiple choice with four possible answers. So on average, students guessed 13 answers correctly. In addition, the test’s margin of error was six points.
Now remember, only 29 correct were needed for “proficiency” in 2005. So with 13 for guessing and six for test error, we have 19 of those 29 (65%). And that’s only the beginning. The statistical estimates of proficiency contributed additional error margins that were never added to the students’ scores.
A Long Weekend? How About a Whole Year?
WHEN Peter and Jill Feuerstein sit around the dinner table with their teenage children, Betsy and Ben, it’s not unusual for them to have an animated discussion about a remote village in China, India or Zimbabwe. But unlike many people in their hometown of Larchmont, N.Y., the Feuersteins have a personal connection with these places. In June 2002, they embarked on a yearlong journey around the world with their two kids, then ages 14 and 11, in tow.
“The result is that all of these places matter to us now,” Mr. Feuerstein said. “The trip was a watershed experience for all of us.”
They are not alone. A growing number of American families with school-age children are turning their wanderlust into reality, say travel experts. Missions to expose children to cultural diversity and spend quality time together are among the reasons some parents are willing to exchange violin lessons and after-school sports for, say, a chance to dig for sapphires in New Zealand or to learn about land mines in Laos.
Seven Warnings and One Mistake in High School Reform
I receive many reports on how to improve our schools. This is an occupational hazard. Reading them is often confusing, depressing, disorienting and maddening. But there is no help for it. The academic papers, commission recommendations and task force action plans are usually written by some of the smartest experts in the country. They have stuff I need to know, so I plow through them.
It is best that I be vague, however, about what the margins of these reports look like after I have finished with them. I have just gone through, for instance, a paper by two leading experts, W. Norton Grubb of the University of California, Berkeley, and Jeannie Oakes of the University of California, Los Angeles. I looked forward to reading their report, “‘Restoring Value’ to the High School Diploma: The Rhetoric and Practice of Higher Standards. 432K PDF” It was published by the Education and the Public Interest Center at the University of Colorado at Boulder and the Education Policy Research Unit at Arizona State University. They focus on the push for rigor in high schools and argue that the discussion spends too much time on narrow definitions of rigor, based on test scores and demanding courses, and ignores other conceptions, such as more sophisticated levels of understanding and the ability to apply learning in unfamiliar settings.
The authors write well and know their stuff. Nonetheless, here are some of the words I wrote on the margins: “stupid,” “so what?” “no! no!” “recipe for disaster,” “booo!” “who cares?” and a few others I may not quote on a family Web site.
Ordinarily, I would use this column to flay Grubb and Oakes for disagreeing with me on how to fix high schools, my favorite topic. But I am writing this on a lovely Saturday, with the leaves turning and the birds happily washing themselves in the little puddles left by my garden-watering wife. Why don’t I, just this once, write about this report’s good points? They include at least seven astute warnings about sloppy thinking in the high school reform debate. Here they are, plus one mistake in their thinking that I could not resist trashing.
Related:
- High School Redesign Links & Notes [RSS]
- Small Learning Communities (SLC) [RSS]
- Bruce King’s evaluation of the Madison West High School SLC implementation.
The making of a UPS driver
When big brown found that its twentysomething drivers were flunking out in droves, it had a serious problem on its hands: how to train generation y for a hard blue-collar job.
It’s 9:45 A.M., and at 93 degrees and 1,000% humidity, Saddle Brook, N.J., feels more like the Serengeti than suburbia. I’m in a doorless truck, wearing high-waisted shorts, facing a day full of handcarts and heavy boxes. When I arose at 5:45 this morning – an hour I haven’t seen the daytime side of since … ever – the day had something of the adventurous about it. Like more of my Generation Y peers than one might expect, I’d never worn a uniform, or even properly nine-to-fived it for that matter, and here at last was my chance.
UPS would soon fix me, though. At 8:15, after touring the huge open warehouse of concrete and conveyor belts that is UPS’s Saddle Brook center, I met Vincent “Vinny” Plateroti, a UPS “driver service provider,” or DSP – that’s UPS for driver – of 21 years and my escort for the day. At 8:45, we attended the “pre-work communications meeting,” or PCM – UPS for morning meeting – which included reports from the previous day and a short but detailed lecture on hydration.
Academic Achievement
By Michael Strand
Critics with a bent for sarcasm, for years, have derided the No Child Left Behind law by giving it what they think is a more descriptive title.
No Child Allowed Ahead, they call it.
And it’s not hard to see why. Newspapers and news magazines across the country have documented state after state and district after district gutting or eliminating millions of dollars in funding for programs for their highest-achieving students, diverting that money into programs for low-achieving students in order to meet the mandates of the law.
“I don’t think we’ve seen a tremendous change in our district, for which I’m grateful,” said Salina School Board president Carol Brandert, who later described the situation as “fortunate.”
If Brandert — a former English teacher well-known for being a stickler for using the right word — is using words that sound oddly passive, there’s a reason.
The question of cutting programs for top students has never come up, she said.
When Kay Scheibler first started heading the gifted program at Salina Central High School, 13 states mandated programs for top students. Today, Kansas is the only state with such a mandate.
“It’s mandated, so we’re not going to see any major changes without some legislative action,” she said.
“We’re unique, one out of 50,” confirmed Kansas Commissioner of Education Alexa Posny.
State law regarding those formally identified by their school as gifted closely parallels that for special education students, even using the same terminology — gifted students have an “Individual Education Plan.”
Challenges welcome at school
I wrote on Friday that St. Anthony’s, largest elementary school in Milwaukee’s choice program, shows that parents will opt for rigor. It shows, as well, that choice schools can handle difficult cases.
Virtually all of St. Anthony’s students are from low-income families. About 98% come from homes where Spanish is the language, says Principal Ramon Cruz. Many come, he says, because of St. Anthony’s approach to language.
You wouldn’t think that. Classes are not bilingual. The school is an immersion in English from the first day. Parents want this, says Cruz. They can get the alternative, having their children taught for at least a while in Spanish, at the nearby public school.
“The parents come to me and say, ‘We want the kids to learn the English language,’ ” says Cruz, an ex-MPS principal for whom English is a second language.
So tots in 4-year-old kindergarten are working on their English vocabulary. Nearby, another group works with a Spanish-fluent aide, in English, on letter names. They’ll start to read by January, says school president Terry Brown.
Rethinking How to Teach the New Teachers
SCHOOL enrollments are increasing year by year, but qualified teachers are leaving the classroom in droves. More than a million veteran teachers are nearing retirement, and more will follow.
More than two million new teachers will be needed in the next decade alone, according to the National Education Association, and we should hope that they start lining up soon.
Economic research shows that an educated work force is the foundation of a stable economy. A good education does more than just increase a person’s earning potential. Studies find that regions that produce well-educated high school graduates have a higher rate of business start-ups and more economic activity. Graduates also provide communities with a continuing pool of taxpaying labor.
As teacher rosters shrink, the question is this: How long will such regions be able to hold onto those benefits?
MIT’s Open Courseware Updates
Updated this fall with the publication of nearly all MIT courses.
Courses by Department. What a fabulous resource.
Madison’s approach to this issue.
Wingra School proves that progressive education works. Could it be a model for a public charter school?
Inside Wingra School, the day is just beginning, and already Lisa Kass is commandeering a discussion about violence sparked by storyboards written by her fourth- and fifth-grade students.
“Why do you play violent videogames?” she asks. “Do you think the violence affects you?” This leads to a 45-minute discussion that temporarily pushes back a math lesson.
“It’s cartoon violence, it’s not real violence,” says one boy. “Well, really the goal is to kill people,” admits another. That, says a third student, is why he plays mostly strategy videogames.
The students at Wingra are articulate, reflective and eager to share their opinions. They refine their thoughts as Kass prods them to be more specific or clearer.
Kass, a 19-year veteran Wingra teacher, says later: “I don’t want to censor them, but I want them to think about what’s appropriate and what effects violence might have on them and others.”
Related:
- Madison School Board Discussion of School Models, Including Basic and Alternative Approaches
- Where have all the students gone?
- Competition in Public Education
- A History of the Madison Studio School Initiative.
Parents prove charter schools work
The magic of charter schools isn’t so much the innovation they strive to achieve. The magic is the effect these schools have on parents.
At the Nuestro Mundo charter school on Madison’s East Side, you have to win a lottery to get your child into the program. This is true even for parents like me who live just a few blocks from Allis Elementary School, where Nuestro Mundo (which means “Our World ” in Spanish) is housed.
Imagine that — parents flooding a city school with enrollment applications for their kids. This is the opposite trend that Madison fears and must avoid.
Though rarely discussed in a frank way, Madison is increasingly nervous about middle- to upper-income parents losing faith in city schools and moving to the suburbs. As so many Madison leaders love to say: “As the schools go, so goes the city. ” Madison doesn ‘t want to become Milwaukee.
Related: Where have all the students gone?
A new International Baccalaureate program is raising the game in middle school
The letter published in the Reston Connection four years ago said the program at Langston Hughes Middle School promoted “socialism, disarmament, radical environmentalism, and moral relativism, while attempting to undermine Christian religious values and national sovereignty.”
The Middle Years Program, part of the International Baccalaureate system, was just getting started at Langston Hughes, and it wasn’t the first time an IB program had been slapped around in Fairfax County. W.T. Woodson High School had thrown out its IB courses in 1999, in part because some parents and teachers thought they were too global and played down American history. Syndicated columnist Thomas Sowell reported in 2004 that Fairfax parents were in revolt against IB. It was an exaggeration, but there was enough of a fight to raise concern about the program’s future in the Washington area’s biggest school district.
Some parents and teachers at Langston Hughes, and next door at South Lakes High School, where the MYP continued for ninth- and 10th-graders, distrusted a program invented in Switzerland and alien to what they remembered of their own more traditional middle school days. Other parents and teachers thought the MYP was wonderfully rigorous, with its commitment to global awareness, foreign languages and writing. The differences of opinion appeared to reflect tension between Americans who thought the country was too soft and those who thought the country was too dumb.
Who won? A visit to Langston Hughes this fall reveals that the people favoring smarter students have beaten those fearing foreign influence to an apparently invisible pulp. It is hard to find anyone who even remembers when the school’s unusual curriculum was considered a threat to American values. Instead, past and present Langston Hughes parents are greeting an unexpected jump in SAT scores at South Lakes — the biggest this year in Fairfax County — as proof that they were right to go with the MYP, perhaps the most challenging middle school program in America for non-magnet schools.
High school dropouts’ price is high
High school dropouts are costing North Carolina taxpayers millions of dollars each year, according to a new report, but there’s sharp disagreement on what is the best way to solve the problem.
The report released Wednesday by the Milton & Rose D. Friedman Foundation says a single year’s group of dropouts costs the state’s taxpayers $169 million annually in lost sales tax revenue and higher Medicaid and prison costs. It’s the first time a specific dollar figure has been given for the cost of dropouts in this state.
“In additional to the personal consequences it has on dropouts, this has a very real cost for taxpayers,” said Darrell Allison, president of Parents for Educational Freedom in North Carolina. The group instigated the report as part of its efforts to get public money vouchers for students to attend private schools.
The report’s recommended solution of using taxpayer-funded vouchers to help students pay for private schools has drawn a sharp dividing line between supporters and critics of public schools.
Special ed is drawn into exam debate
With thousands of special-education students in Maryland high schools failing the state’s graduation exams, parents and advocates are deeply divided about whether these students should have to pass the tests.
The discussion is taking place as part of a larger debate by the state school board over whether all students, beginning with the Class of 2009, must pass High School Assessments in English, algebra, biology and American government before they can receive a diploma.
While about two-thirds or more of students are passing the tests, only about one-third of those in special education are doing so. There are about 30,000 special-education students in Maryland high schools.
Madison School Board Discussion of School Models, Including Basic and Alternative Approaches
The Madison School Board’s Performance and Achievement Committee recently discussed alternative education models. Watch the video here (or download the mp4 file via a CTRL Click. mp4 files can be played back on many portable media players such as iPods). Listen via this mp3 audio file.
Related:
- Where Have all the Students Gone?
- Competition in Public Education
- A History of the Madison Studio School Initiative
Finding Online Homework Help
With school in full swing, many kids are shouldering hours of nightly homework. When students are stumped, they can turn to their (sometimes clueless) parents or head to a flurry of online homework help sites.
We looked around for sites appropriate for our sixth-grade tester. And we wanted help solving this geometry problem: what is a better buy? A square pizza measuring 8 inches by 8 inches that costs $10 or a round pizza with a 9-inch diameter that also costs $10?
Our first site was thebeehive.org. Created by the not-for-profit One Economy Corp. as a tool to help low-income families, the site offers easy access to information on a wide range of topics. By clicking on “school” on the home page (none of the other topics looked at all relevant), we got right to homework help. The section is divided into elementary-, middle- and high-school help.
Our answer was just a few clicks away. “Math” in the high-school section took us to Webmath.com, which offered a coherent explanation of how to do the problem along with a “circle calculator” on which to do the arithmetic. We went to “geometry problem solver,” then to “geometry-circles,” and there was the formula; we plugged in the information we had, the diameter, to get the answer: the square pizza is bigger.
Sham Standards
Kate Riley’s 10-year-old son received a letter of congratulations signed by Washington’s governor and state superintendent.
“Congratulations!’ it started. “… We are very proud of you, and you should be very proud of yourself.”
Apparently, my son “achieved the state reading, writing and mathematics learning standards.”But her autistic son, who spends most of his time in a special-education classroom, is years behind. He “can read some words, can add a little and can barely draw a straight line.”
An editorial writer, Riley has backed high standards since she tutored a 30-year-old high school graduate with a third-grade reading level. But she agreed that students with special needs should have alternative ways to show mastery of the standards, such as providing a portfolio of work.
Education & Regrets
Its topic, in brief, is the relationship between education and regret – how each one creates the conditions for the other. The books you read at a certain age can put you on the wrong path, even though you don’t recognize it at the time. You are too naively ambitious to get much out of them — or too naive, perhaps, not that it makes much difference either way. And by the time you realize what you should have read, it’s too late. You would understand things differently, and probably better, had you made different choices. You would be a different person. Instead, you wasted a lot of time. (I know I did. There are nights when I recall all the time spent on the literary criticism of J. Hillis Miller and weep softly to myself.)
The booklet consists of transcripts of two meetings of N+1 contributors (a mixture of writers and academics, most in their 20’s and 30’s) as they discuss what they regret about their educations. Each contributor also submits a list of eight “Books That Changed My Life.”
The structure here seem to involve a rather intricate bit of irony. There is an explicit address to smart people in their teens, or barely out of them, offering suggestions on what to read, and how. It can be taken as a guide to how to avoid regret. The reflections and checklists are all well-considered. You could do a lot worse for an advice manual.
How to Educate Yourself Online
The web is an amazing educational resource. The quantity of information available on any given topic is more than most people will ever need, and probably more than they can handle. This vast amount of information is the web’s greatest strength, but also creates major usability problems. If you try to educate yourself online without a clear strategy, you’ll quickly find yourself frustrated and misinformed.
Effective online education goes beyond finding answers. It requires you to process numerous information sources, evaluate them based on credibility and relevance, and piece together a mosaic-like picture of the truth.
Schools Raise Bar for Classes for the Gifted
In an effort to transform the city’s gifted and talented programs, which he has long derided as a hodgepodge of offerings that have favored children in certain neighborhoods and with well-connected parents, Schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein announced a plan yesterday to limit the programs to students who score in the top 5 percent on admissions tests.
At a news conference yesterday announcing his plan, the chancellor estimated that roughly half the children in gifted programs now might not meet the new standards because they did not score in the 95th percentile or above on admissions tests. There have been no standard citywide cutoffs on admissions exams; last year, available slots in gifted programs were filled by the top scorers in each school district, and before that the admissions process varied throughout the city.
“In some districts you’ll find that half the kids that got in wouldn’t have met the 95th percentile threshold, and in other districts you’ll find a much different number,” Mr. Klein said. “The number is significant, and if you talk citywide, about half, that could be certainly in the ballpark.”
If You Want Good High School Grades, Move to Texas
Ten years ago, I had the good fortune to win the confidence of two energetic teachers, Cliff Gill and Don Phillips at Mamaroneck High School in Westchester County, N.Y. They told me exactly how they assessed their students.
Gill, a math teacher, was tough. If a student missed two homework assignments, five points were subtracted from the student’s 100-point report card grade. A third missed assignment meant another five points off. Everyone at that school knew how hard it was to get an A in Mr. Gill’s class.
Phillips, a social studies teacher, was easy. He called himself the Great Grade Inflator. If a student with poor writing skills did his best on a paper, Phillips was inclined to give the student just as high a grade as a top student who turned in college-quality work. About 90 percent of the grades in Phillips’s history courses were 90 or above on that 100-point scale.
No one asked Phillips to raise his standards. No one asked Gill to ease up. Grading at Mamaroneck High, as at most of the public high schools I have visited, is considered the teacher’s prerogative, a matter of academic freedom. A teacher who gives many F’s may be pressured to raise some of those grades to keep parents happy, but that is about as far as principals will go in interfering with teachers’ assessment decisions.
Robert M. Hartranft, a retired nuclear engineer in Simsbury, Conn., does not like this at all. He cannot understand why public school administrators, who so often declare their commitment to equal treatment of every student, put up with such outrageous and inexplicable variation in what remains the most important assessments their students get–grades on report cards.
Madison’s charter schools offer unique options
n its fourth year, the Madison school district’s Spanish-English charter school is so popular that the parents who helped found the East Side school are having trouble getting their children in and there’s talk of expanding the program.
The district’s other charter school, Wright Middle, is one student above capacity and this year has a waiting list for the first time.
A growing number of residents say Madison needs more places, like charter schools Nuestro Mundo and Wright, that offer unique options to students. In response, the School Board has begun probing possibilities.
“The critical issue is, ‘What do we need to do to engage a broader range of students in what’s happening in school?'” board member Carol Carstensen said at an Oct. 22 Performance and Achievement Committee meeting that examined ways the district could create programs or schools.
In Dane County, charter schools operate in the Madison, Verona, Middleton-Cross Plains, Monona, Marshall and Deerfield districts.
Few Wisconsin Schools Receive Federal Charter Aid
In a move applauded by some charter school advocates, the state Department of Public Instruction has approved only 10 of 50 applications so far this year for federal funding aimed at expanding independent public schools.
Triggering the new scrutiny was a reminder this year from the U.S. Department of Education about requirements for the grants. That included ensuring Wisconsin applicants met the federal definitions for such terms as “eligible applicant” and “charter school,” according to Education Department spokeswoman Elaine Quesinberry.
The 20% approval rate contrasts to previous years, when state administration of charter school grants helped fuel a boom of such schools. In 2006 alone, the DPI approved 100 of 121 applications, an 83% acceptance rate.
The federal intervention addresses concerns about the degree to which entities using the charter school title are autonomous and accountable, said Todd Ziebarth, a policy analyst with the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools.
New Media Literacy And Education: What To Teach? Public Voice – Part 2
New media literacy is the key missing component from our schools curricula. If you are to provide to your kids the mental tools and the manual skills required by today society you must help your sons master early in their teenage years how to express and communicate in person as well as through analog and digital media.
The teachers your government pays for are often the least media literate people you can find around, while leaving this key education component to the self-learning opportunities that the online world offers without any preparation, is akin to trying to learn singing from soccer stadium fans.
But the heart of the matter is not just the training of young mind in the skilled use of new media technologies, but rather the development of their critical thinking skills, their research and analysis methods, as well as their own individual and very personal voice: their public voice.
Online Education: Tailoring, Measuring and ‘Bridging’
As information technology leaders convened for the Educause meetings Thursday in Seattle, they talked about some of the same issues that are attracting attention in higher ed outside of technology circles: links to K-12, making courses more engaging and measuring what students learn.
Looming over the proceedings was the stepped-up pressure from state governments, accreditors and the Department of Education that has led in recent years to a greater focus on assessment and learning outcomes. The implication of the accountability movement on information technology is clear in an example offered by Blackboard’s Peter Segall, the company’s president for higher education in North America: The two-year public colleges in Mississippi have adopted the company’s outcome system to track student progress against specific goals, he said. The reason? To “demonstrate accountability” to the citizens of the state.
Teacher Credentials and Student Achievement in High School: A Cross-Subject Analysis with Student Fixed Effects
Charles T. Clotfeler, Helen F. Ladd and Jacob L. Vigdor [488K PDF]:
We use data on statewide end-of-course tests in North Carolina to examine the relationship between teacher credentials and student achievement at the high school level. The availability of test scores in multiple subjects for each student permits us to estimate a model with student fixed effects, which helps minimize any bias associated with the non-random distribution of teachers and students among classrooms within schools. We find compelling evidence that teacher credentials affect student achievement in systematic ways and that the magnitudes are large enough to be policy relevant. As a result, the uneven distribution of teacher credentials by race and socio-economic status of high school students – a pattern we also document – contributes to achievement gaps in high school.
Teach Program
Intel Teach uses a “Train the trainer” model to provide both face-to-face and online instruction to help teachers around the world integrate technology into their classrooms. Teachers create lesson plans that can be immediately implemented and that meet local and national education goals and standards.
Working with governments – national, regional or local – worldwide, Intel introduces the program in interested countries and communities, which are selected based on strength of their commitment to the program. Intel then works with an initial group of teachers to help them become Intel Teach trainers themselves. These trainers in turn are responsible for sharing their new skills with other teachers in their region.
To ensure that program curriculum maintains relevancy and reflects lessons learned from feedback and research, Intel regularly provides updated material to the Intel Teach trainers.
iTunes U Welcomes Off-Campus Content
The Chronicle of Higher Education:
On its iTunes U portal, Apple’s digital-music store has already built up an impressive empire of recorded college lectures and events, all available for downloading. Now iTunes U is casting its gaze outside the ivory tower.
The portal has unveiled a new section, “Beyond Campus,” which collects educational material from museums, radio stations, and other public institutions. iTunes users can still watch lectures from Berkeley and guest speeches from Duke, but they can now also view live music performances from the Smithsonian Institution’s Global Sound Live series and take video walkthroughs of Richard Serra’s sculptures the Museum of Modern Art.
Too Graphic: Sex, Literature, and Our Schools
Nate Fisher isn’t teaching English any more at Guildford High in Guildford, Connecticut. The untenured teacher resigned under pressure after being accused by a ninth-grade girl’s parents of giving her a graphic novel, Eightball #22, by Daniel Clowes, an acclaimed artist who recently drew a cartoon series for the New York Times. The book, also known as Ice Haven, depicts or discusses sex, partial nudity, and a man watching a woman in the shower.
Dual Enrollment Courses — Up From Obscurity
Dual enrollment courses are usually community college or four-year college courses taken by high school students, either at the college or at their high schools with instructors paid by, or at least supervised by, the college. Looking at the records of 299,685 dual enrollment students in Florida, the researchers found that taking dual enrollment courses correlated to higher rates of high school graduation, enrollment in two-year and four-year colleges and academic performance in college. Students who took dual enrollment courses while enrolled in Florida high schools had higher college grade point averages and more college credits three years after high school graduation than similar students who had not done dual enrollment.
A review of the records of 2,303 New York students found those in the “College Now” dual enrollment program were more likely to pursue a bachelor’s degree and have better college grades their first semester than students of similar backgrounds who did not do dual enrollment.
Despite the evidence that these college courses — like AP and IB — give high school students a taste of college rigor that can bring college success, the researchers reported that many students are being denied a chance to take them. The ill-considered limits on high schoolers who want to take college-level courses is also a big problem for AP, and suggests that most of our high school administrators and many state education officials are in dire need of an attitude adjustment.
Nash’s “Guidelines” state that no credit will be permitted for non-MMSD courses whenever THEY deem they offer a comparable course (i.e., regardless of format) ANYWHERE in the MMSD. Even when the MMSD doesn’t offer a comparable course, they will permit a maximum of TWO ELECTIVE credits, i.e., they can not be used to fulfill specific requirements for graduation. Thus, if these Guidelines are allowed to stand, no credit whatsoever will be permitted for any high school or college course the district offers that a student takes, instead, via WCATY, EPGY, UW-Extension, online, correspondence, etc., regardless of the student’s ability to access the District’s comparable course.
Online IPS classes help teens catch up, get ahead
Andrea Martin needed high school credits in biology and health, but the alternative school in Indianapolis Public Schools she attends doesn’t offer those classes.
Instead of forgoing the credits, Martin enrolled in IPS’ new virtual school, which offers basic courses for students like her, remedial courses for those who have fallen behind, and advanced courses.
Each evening after her shift at a KFC restaurant, Martin goes home and logs on to her classes for up to five hours a night. She likes that she can go as fast or slow as she wants but sometimes wishes a teacher were there to help answer a question or clarify a point.
“It’s good, but sometimes it’s a little hard because you’re teaching yourself, and it’s hard to find the answers,” she said. “It’s kind of hard where you can’t ask but have to do it on your own.”
A teacher is available to consult with students, but the online classes are much more self-directed than a typical high school classroom. So far the costs have been small but will increase as staff and courses are added.
Video
I Just Couldn’t Sacrifice My Son
When a high school friend told me several years ago that he and his wife were leaving Washington’s Mount Pleasant neighborhood for Montgomery County, I snickered and murmured something about white flight. Progressives who traveled regularly to Cuba and Brazil, they wanted better schools for their children. I saw their decision as one more example of liberal hypocrisy.
I was childless then, but I have a 6-year-old now. And I know better. So to all the friends — most but not all of them white — whom I’ve chastised over the years for abandoning the District once their children reached school age:
I’m sorry. You were right. I was wrong.
After nearly 20 years in the city’s Takoma neighborhood, the last six in a century-old house that my wife and I thought we’d grow old in, we have forsaken the city for the suburbs.
Related:
- Where Have All the Students Gone?
- This is Not Your Grandchild’s Madison School District
- Promises Betrayed
Megan McArdle has more.
All Students Feel the Effects of Trying to Meet a Higher Standard
What that advice overlooks is that when a school is in danger of not meeting the AYP standards, all students in the school are affected, not just those who are in danger of failing the test. Last year at our neighborhood elementary school in Silver Spring, the principal said there was a real chance the school would not meet the standard. Consequently, the entire focus of the school was on the Maryland School Assessment tests. For example:
All the students at the school, even kindergartners, were drilled on how to answer “brief constructed responses” (short written answers to essay questions), because they are an important part of the MSA. My son was in second grade last year and did not even take the assessment tests, but BCRs came home regularly in his backpack.
The focus of the leadership meetings in the school is on the MSA. I’m active in the school and attended one of those leadership meetings last year, and know from other parents who attended other meetings that most of the discussion at those meetings is on the MSA and what the school needs do to ensure it will make AYP.
What works in education: the lessons according to McKinsey
THE British government, says Sir Michael Barber, once an adviser to the former prime minister, Tony Blair, has changed pretty much every aspect of education policy in England and Wales, often more than once. “The funding of schools, the governance of schools, curriculum standards, assessment and testing, the role of local government, the role of national government, the range and nature of national agencies, schools admissions”—you name it, it’s been changed and sometimes changed back. The only thing that hasn’t changed has been the outcome. According to the National Foundation for Education Research, there had been (until recently) no measurable improvement in the standards of literacy and numeracy in primary schools for 50 years.
England and Wales are not alone. Australia has almost tripled education spending per student since 1970. No improvement. American spending has almost doubled since 1980 and class sizes are the lowest ever. Again, nothing. No matter what you do, it seems, standards refuse to budge (see chart). To misquote Woody Allen, those who can’t do, teach; those who can’t teach, run the schools.
Why bother, you might wonder. Nothing seems to matter. Yet something must. There are big variations in educational standards between countries. These have been measured and re-measured by the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) which has established, first, that the best performing countries do much better than the worst and, second, that the same countries head such league tables again and again: Canada, Finland, Japan, Singapore, South Korea.
Experimental School Gets Rid of Classes, Teachers
NPR:
Minnesota New Country School is not your typical high school. There are no classes, no teachers and no walls. Students work on projects at their own computers. The experiment seems to be working: The school sends 90 percent of its graduates to college.
The Once and Future University
Mike Caulfield points to this video which, he says, “does a nice job of showing what a museum a university education has become.” The large lecture hall shown in that video certainly reinforces the point. Seeing it reminds me of a telling episode this past April. I was writing about Darwin and I recalled something I’d heard in a biology lecture I’d heard the previous spring on one of the Berkeley podcasts.
I went back to the site and wound up referring to the current year’s version of that lecture in video form. As I scrubbed back and forth on the timeline looking for the part I remembered, my daughter — who was then between high school and college — watched over my shoulder. Eventually she said: “So, the students just sit there?”
That was the first of three revelations. The second was my realization that I’d certainly absorbed those lectures more fully on a series of bike rides, breathing fresh air and soaking up sunshine, than had the students sitting in the lecture hall.
The third revelation came when I found the part I was looking for, and realized that it wasn’t as good as last year’s version, which had been overwritten by the current version.
WHEN NONENGINEERS THINK ABOUT ENGINEERING, it’s usually because something has gone wrong: collapsing levees in New Orleans, the loss of the space shuttle Columbia in 2003. In the follow-up investigations, it comes out that some of the engineers involved knew something was wrong. But too few spoke up or pushed back — and those who did were ignored. This professional deficiency is something the new, tuition-free Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering wants to fix. At its tiny campus in Needham, Mass., outside Boston, Olin is trying to design a new kind of engineer. Most engineering schools stress subjects like differential calculus and physics, and their graduates tend to end up narrowly focused and likely to fit the stereotype of a socially awkward clock-puncher. Richard K. Miller, the president of the school, likes to share a professional joke: “How can you tell an extroverted engineer? He’s the one who looks at your shoes when he talks to you.” Olin came into being, Miller told me last spring in his office on campus, to make engineers “comfortable as citizens and not just calculating machines.” Olin is stressing creativity, teamwork and entrepreneurship — and, in no small part, courage. “I don’t see how you can make a positive difference in the world,” he emphasized, “if you’re not motivated to take a tough stand and do the right thing.”
Now, as then, everyone says higher education is more important than ever to America’s future. But interesting enough to become a topic of national obsession? Controversial enough to fight a gubernatorial campaign over? Hardly. The kids do have their own war now, but not much of an antiwar movement, much less building takeovers. College campuses seem to have lost their centrality. Why do college and college students no longer lead the culture? Why does student life no longer seem all that important?
Here’s one answer: College as America used to understand it is coming to an end.
For nine years I’ve lived in the shadow of the University of Chicago — as an undergraduate between 1988 and 1992 and again since 2002. After growing up in a suburb that felt like a jail to me, I found my undergraduate years delightfully noisy and dissident. I got involved with The Baffler, the journal of social criticism edited by Thomas Frank, who went on to write “What’s the Matter With Kansas?”; every Sunday, I trekked down to the neighborhood jazz jam session, where ’60s continuities were direct. The bass player was a former Maoist, the drummer a former beatnik.
Early in May of this year I had lunch with the beatnik, Doug Mitchell, who received his undergraduate degree in 1965 and then went to graduate school here and is now an editor at the University of Chicago Press. “I suspect I got in this university primarily because I had a high-school friend who got a pirated copy of Henry Miller’s ‘Tropic of Capricorn,’ ” he said. “I put that on my reading list. And the admissions counselor was utterly astonished: ‘How did you get this?’ It was truly banned in 1960.” He settled into an alienated suburban kid’s paradise. “We had a social life that kind of revolved around the dorm lounge, because that’s where everybody hung out after midnight. And some people got way into it and didn’t survive. They would never go to class. They would argue night and day in the lounge!”
Ed Hughes and Marj Passman on Madison’s Small Learning Community Climate and Grant Application
I sent an email to Ed and Marj, both of whom have announced their plans to run for Madison School Board next spring, asking the following:
I’m writing to see what your thoughts are on the mmsd’s high school “reform” initiative, particularly in light of two things:
- The decision to re-apply for the US Dept of Education Grant next month
- The lack of any public (any?) evaluation of the results at West and Memorial in light of their stated SLC goals?
In other words, how do you feel about accountability? 🙂
They replied:
Marj Passman:
I am generally supportive of small learning communities and the decision to reapply for a Federal grant. Our high schools continue to provide a rich education for most students — especially the college bound – but there is a significant and maybe growing number of students who are not being engaged. They need our attention. The best evidence is that well implemented small learning communities show promise as part of the solution to increasing the engagement and achievement of those who are not being well served, do no harm and may help others also. My experience as a teacher backs up the research because I found that the caring relationships between staff and students so crucial to reaching those students falling between the cracks on any level of achievement are more likely to develop in smaller settings. Some form of small learning communities are almost a given as part of any reform of our high schools and if we can get financial help from the Federal government with this part of the work, I’m all for it.
I think it is important not to overestimate either the problems or the promise of the proposed solutions. The first step in things like this is to ask what is good that we want to preserve. Our best graduates are competitive with any students anywhere. The majority of our graduates are well prepared for their next academic or vocational endeavors. We need to keep doing the good things we do well. If done successfully, SLCs offer as much for the top achieving students as for any group – individual attention, focus on working with others of their ability, close connection to staff, and consistent evaluation.
You also asked about “accountability” and the evaluations of the existing SLCs. Both evaluations are generally positive, show some progress in important areas and point to places where improvements still need to be made. Neither contains any alarming information that would suggest the SLCs should be abandoned. The data from these limited studies should be looked at with similar research elsewhere that supports SLC as part of the solution to persistent (and in Madison) growing issues.
Like many I applauded when all the Board members asked for a public process for the High Schools of the Future project and like many I have been woefully disappointed with what I’ve seen so far. Because of this and the coming changes in district leadership I’d like to see the redesign time line extended (the final report is due in April) to allow for more input from both the public and the new superintendent.
Thanks for this opportunity
Marjorie Passman
http://marjpassmanforschoolboard.com
Ed Hughes:
From what I know, I am not opposed to MMSD re-applying for the U.S. Dept. of Education grant next month. From my review of the grant application, it did not seem to lock the high schools into new and significant changes. Perhaps that is a weakness of the application. But if the federal government is willing to provide funds to our high schools to do what they are likely to do anyway, I’m all for it.
Like you, I am troubled with the apparent lack of evaluation of results at West and Memorial attributable to their small learning communities initiatives. This may seem inconsistent with my view on applying for the grant, but I do not think we should proceed further down an SLC path without having a better sense of whether in fact it is working at the two schools that have tried it. It seems to me that this should be a major focus of the high school redesign study, but who knows what is going on with that. I asked recently and was told that the study kind of went dormant for awhile after the grant application was submitted.
My own thoughts about high school are pointing in what may be the opposite direction – bigger learning communities rather than smaller. I am concerned about our high schools being able to provide a sufficiently rich range of courses to prepare our students for post-high school life and to retain our students whose families have educational options. The challenges the schools face in this regard were underscored last spring when East eliminated German classes, and now offers only Spanish and French as world language options.
It seems to me that one way to approach this issue is to move toward thinking of the four comprehensive high schools as separate campuses of a single, unified, city-wide high school in some respects. We need to do a lot more to install sufficient teleconferencing equipment to allow the four schools to be linked – so that a teacher in a classroom at Memorial, say, can be seen on a screen in classrooms in the other three schools. In fact, views of all four linked classrooms should simultaneously be seen on the screen. With this kind of linkage, we could take advantage of economies of scale and have enough student interest to justify offering classes in a rich selection of languages to students in all four high schools. I’m sure there are other types of classes where linked classrooms would also make sense.
This kind of approach raises issues. For example, LaFollette’s four block system would be incompatible with this approach. There would also be a question of whether there would need to be a teacher or educational assistant in every classroom, even if the students in the classroom are receiving instruction over the teleconferencing system from another teacher in another school. I would hope that these are the kinds of issues the high school re-design group would be wrestling with. Perhaps they are, or will, but at this point there seems to be no way to know.
There are some off-the-top-of-my-head thoughts prompted by your question and by Maya Cole’s post about the high school re-design study. Feel free to do what you want with this response.
Related Links:
- Involving the Community (in High School Reform) by Maya Cole
- Madison Small Learning Community Grant Application / US Department of Education Response
- Examining the Madison West High SLC Grant Community Connection Results
- Examining the Madison West High SLC Grant Results
- Examining the Data from Earlier Grants, Part 1 (Memorial High School)
- Where does the MMSD get its numbers from?
Thanks to Ed and Marj for taking the time to share their thoughts on this important matter.
High-quality standards, a curriculum based on critical thinking can enlighten our students
ne of the central lessons of No Child Left Behind is that if school sanctions are tied to test scores, the testing tail can wag the schooling dog. And a key problem for the United States is that most of our tests aren’t measuring the kinds of 21st century skills we need students to acquire and that are at the core of curriculum and assessment in high-achieving countries.
While a debate rages about whether our tests should be created at the national or state level, this argument is focused on the wrong issue.
We need to focus on the quality of our standards and assessments rather than fighting over who administers them. Unless we change the way we think about learning and testing, it won’t matter who makes the tests. They will still be a major part of the problem of American education, rather than the solution.
The plain truth is that the United States is falling far behind other nations on every measure of educational achievement. In the latest international assessments, the United States ranked 28th out of 40 countries in math – on par with Latvia – 20th in science, and 19th in reading, even further behind than a few years ago. In addition, these other countries surpass us in graduation rates and, over the last decade, in higher education participation as well.
Milwaukee Considers Expanding Gifted Program to High School
What if Milwaukee’s Samuel Morse Middle School expanded its programs for the gifted and talented to cover sixth through 12th grades?
What if the whole program were moved into the Marshall High School building, giving it more room, and maybe even taking the Marshall name?
Milwaukee Public Schools leaders are doing a lot of thinking along those lines, prodded by a strong desire by Morse Principal Rogers Onick and others at his school to expand into high school programming.
“There currently are discussions with the staff at Morse Middle School about relocating,” MPS Superintendent William Andrekopoulos said. “There seems to be some interest in pursuing that.”
Behind those cautious statements lies a potentially bold change in MPS. Onick says there is no high school in Wisconsin whose entire program is aimed at gifted and talented students.
And if Morse took that route, it could have an impact on high schools such as Rufus King and Riverside, generally college-bound programs that are frequently the choice of Morse graduates.
Author Finds Fault with Federal Testing
Alan Borsuk & Linda Pearlstein:
Q.You were obviously unhappy in the book at times about what kids (at Tyler Heights) weren’t doing – social studies, geography, just orientation to the world, opening their minds in a broader sense. . . . What were kids missing by having this kind of testing and drill-oriented curriculum?
A. I think critical thinking. Skills that they really needed to be starting to build at that age that they weren’t necessarily developing outside of school, as you would have liked. Also, engagement in what this all is about. . . . I think a lot of teachers felt sort of constrained by the sort of structure they were in and couldn’t take the tangents they wanted to take to help the kids understand, and sometimes couldn’t take the time they wanted when the kids needed to back up and learn some basic skills but the pacing guide insisted you need to move along. . . . It was just a very sort of structured and sometimes even Spartan day.
Q.You went to Maple Dale (School) in Fox Point yourself. Compare Maple Dale and Tyler Heights.
A. If I had to say the two things that they had in common, they were: an abundance of adults who clearly cared about the children and connected with them, and I still appreciate that to this day. That was evident at Tyler Heights. . . . The other thing was that we had resources. We had all the books we needed, we had a perfectly acceptable facility, the building was clean, and we had the equipment and tools we needed. Tyler Heights, even though the student population is low income, has a lot of resources, mainly because it is in an affluent district and it receives Title 1 funding from the federal government.
