From the Wisconsin Charter Schools Association:

You’re invited to join educators, environmentalists and others at the Environmental Charter Schools Workshop.
Date: May 2, 2007, Wednesday
Time: 9:00am to 2:30pm
Site: MADISON, UW Arboretum
Workshop Program: Unique features of “green” charter schools, integrated environmental curriculum, standards and accountability, charter partners supporting sustainable schools, and implementing a green charter school. Learn more at Green Charter Schools.
Presenters, Partners & Discussion Leaders: JIM McGRATH, founder and former principal of Oshkosh Environmental Charter School; VICTORIA RYDBERG, Teacher, River Crossing Charter School; JULIE SPALDING, Educator, Fox River Academy, and INGRID BEAMSLEY, WCSA Deputy Director
Registration: The registration fee is only $20, which covers the conference, lunch and materials. Send registrant’s name and email address, along with a $20 check payable to the WCSA, to: Wisconsin Charter Schools Association, PO Box 1704, Madison, WI 53701-1704 . Questions? Contact the WCSA at: Tel: 608-661-6946 or Email: info@wicharterschools.org or FAX: 608-258-3413
Links to 40 “GREEN” charter schools.
Read about “Green Charter Schools” in Wisconsin Trails magazine.

Madison West Student Natalia Thompson:

Re “In Homework Wars, Student Wins a Battle: More Time to Unwind on Vacation” (On Education column, April 4):
As a 15-year-old high school sophomore with a demanding course load, I read your article with interest.
On regular weekdays, my evenings fill up quickly with daily homework assignments and extracurricular activities. My weekends are my opportunity to catch up on projects and essays, review notes and study for upcoming tests — which leaves hardly any time to relax.
Spring break is a rare occasion for me to unwind, reflect, rejuvenate and prepare for the onslaught of work when I return to school. It’s the only way I keep going.

David Cole:

“Could you repeat the question?”
In recent years, that has become the most common response to questions I pose to my law students at Georgetown University. It is usually asked while the student glances up from the laptop screen that otherwise occupies his or her field of vision. After I repeat the question, the student’s gaze as often as not returns to the computer screen, as if the answer might magically appear there. Who knows, with instant messaging, maybe it will.
Some years back, our law school, like many around the country, wired its classrooms with Internet hookups. It’s the way of the future, I was told. Now we are a wireless campus, and incoming students are required to have laptops. So my first-year students were a bit surprised when I announced at the first class this year that laptops were banned from my classroom.
I did this for two reasons, I explained. Note-taking on a laptop encourages verbatim transcription. The note-taker tends to go into stenographic mode and no longer processes information in a way that is conducive to the give and take of classroom discussion. Because taking notes the old-fashioned way, by hand, is so much slower, one actually has to listen, think and prioritize the most important themes.

The Economist:

Across the world, approaches to teaching children about their nation’s past are hotly contested—especially at times of wider debate on national identity.
IF THE past is a foreign country, the version that used to be taught in Irish schools had a simple landscape. For 750 years after the first invasion by an English king, Ireland suffered oppression. Then at Easter 1916, her brave sons rose against the tyrant; their leaders were shot but their cause prevailed, and Ireland (or 26 of her 32 counties) lived happily ever after.
Awkward episodes, like the conflict between rival Irish nationalist groups in 1922-23, were airbrushed away. “The civil war was just an embarrassment, it was hardly mentioned,” says Jimmy Joyce, who went to school in Dublin in the 1950s.

Amit Paley:

Educational software, a $2 billion-a-year industry that has become the darling of school systems across the country, has no significant impact on student performance, according to a study by the U.S. Department of Education.
The long-awaited report amounts to a rebuke of educational technology, a business whose growth has been spurred by schools desperate for ways to meet the testing mandates of President Bush’s No Child Left Behind law.
The technology — ranging from snazzy video-game-like programs played on Sony PlayStations to more rigorous drilling exercises used on computers — has been embraced by low-performing schools as an easy way to boost student test scores.

AP & Amy Hetzner:

The Bush administration is letting more children with disabilities take simplified tests under the No Child Left Behind education law.
The change, outlined in final regulations Wednesday, would triple the number of children who can take tests that are easier than those given to most students under the 2002 law.
Roughly 10% of special education students – those with the most serious cognitive disabilities – currently can take simplified, alternative tests and have the results count toward a school’s annual progress goals.
Under the new rules, about an additional 20% of children with disabilities could take alternative tests and have those count toward a school’s progress goals.

From the Education Week Web site:

A major federal study of reading and mathematics software has found no difference in academic achievement between students who used the technology in their classrooms and youngsters who used other methods.
The $10 million study of 15 educational software products is the most extensive federal study yet to follow methods that the U.S. Department of Education considers scientifically rigorous.

A consultant to the National Reading Panel blogs about “…the perfect storm in reading.”

When parents need a tutor for their children, they can find a wide variety in Madison. Several have been pleased with the progress their children made at the Madison Reading and Learning Center.

Erin Richards:

When sixth-grade teacher Rachel Yurk created a blog for her classroom this year, she began the online learning experiment with a simple, engaging question: “What’s your favorite book and why?”
By that night, Yurk’s e-mail had exploded with about 200 messages – each one notifying her that another comment had been posted to the online discussion.
Safely nested in Virtual Office, a secure system that New Berlin Public Schools is piloting and plans to take districtwide by next year, Yurk’s classroom blog engages students in a common discussion tool without exposing them to uncensored activity in the real-world blogosphere.
“The students are more willing to talk about things, and they can type so fast,” Yurk said. “Pencil and paper is boring to them. The first day we opened up Virtual Office, one student’s sister – a high school kid – thought it was cool and put up a post about what book she thought the younger students should read.”
Blogs, or online discussions that usually host time-stamped entries in order of newest to oldest, have struggled to gain acceptance in mainstream K-12 education.

This is a very useful example of why it’s important for us not to continue to be caught up in the Frederick Taylor style education process as the world changes around us.

Join Education Week on Monday, March 19, from noon to 1 p.m., Eastern time, for a live Web chat with Karen Isaacson and Tamara Fisher, the co-authors of “Intelligent Life in the Classroom—Smart Kids & Their Teachers,” a new book from Great Potential Press of Scottsdale, Ariz. This is the second in a regular series of chats on education books.
http://www.edweek-chat.org
Isaacson and Fisher make a unique writing pair: Isaacson is the mother of five gifted children, while Fisher is the K-12 gifted education specialist for a school district located on an Indian reservation in northwestern Montana.

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Jay Matthews:

While we are gathering this data, I want to use the next few columns to dig into the meaning of high school quality. This has become a controversial topic. Educators have a wide range of views. Some tell me the Newsweek list, which rates schools on the very narrow basis of participation in college-level tests, is a wonderful way to recognize schools with great staffs who are working hard to prepare average and sometimes below-average students for college. Others say the list distorts the images of many schools, particularly those in wealthier neighborhoods, by giving less emphasis to test scores and by ignoring special school qualities that cannot be reduced to a single number.
It is not just educators and journalists who are concerned about how we measure schools. Probably the most enthusiastic consumers of high school data are real estate agents, and their millions of clients. A recent study on how school statistics affect home prices dramatizes once again how powerful average test scores are in shaping public perceptions, even when many experts think there are better ways to assess schools.

This post came from a listserve on reading:

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Smart and successful
March, 2007
By Superintendent Art Rainwater
For children growing up today, becoming a successful adult requires much more than mastering reading, writing and arithmetic. The requirements for success are very different in an era when work on a single project may involve several countries, languages and cultures. Success requires much more than “book learning.” Success means having the “basic skills” to interact productively and have positive relationships with people who come from many different backgrounds.
The ability of today’s students to play a vital role in this changing world requires us to think differently about what constitutes a “basic” education. For many years we lived by the credo that students must primarily have the basic skills of reading, writing and arithmetic. No one disputes the essential nature of these skills. There are people who still believe that these are the only essential skills needed for success. In a world that brings together a truly diverse group of people every day in the workplace and society, being successful means much more than the advanced application of reading, writing and arithmetic.

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John Hechinger & Susan Warren:

Jessica Stark, a 17-year-old from Abilene, Texas, earned $600 for some hard work last year. It wasn’t flipping burgers or waiting tables. She made the money for passing six of the toughest examinations in high school at $100 apiece.
Ms. Stark is part of a movement that is going national: paying kids to take Advanced Placement tests. Success on these exams, administered by the nonprofit College Board, often gives students college credit and sometimes encourages them to pursue study and careers in the field. Ms. Stark plans to become an engineer and has already been admitted to the Colorado School of Mines. “I do homework all the time,” she says. “I don’t have too much of a social life. … Study parties — we’re pretty good at those.”
A new initiative, aimed at encouraging careers in math and science, plans to replicate these AP bonuses across the country. Teachers get them, too — at times, $5,000 annually or more — for helping their kids pass AP classes in math, science and English. The money is provided by a network of private donors. Along with cash, students in Texas sometimes get gifts, such as iPods, as door prizes for attending weekend prep classes.
The program’s proponents say AP incentives have succeeded at getting more students to pass the tests in Texas, and they expect the broader initiative to encourage more students to go on to careers in math and science. But some critics question whether cash bonuses are an appropriate and effective way to engage students in the subjects. Robert Schaeffer, public education director for the National Center for Fair and Open Testing, a critic of standardized tests, calls the approach “basing education reform on a series of bribes to kids and bounties to teachers” and says the money would be better spent on broader efforts to improve instruction.

Bob Herbert:

It’s an article of faith that the key to success in real estate is location, location, location.
For young black boys looking ahead to a difficult walk in life, the mantra should be education, education, education.
We’ve watched for decades — watched in horror, actually — as the lives of so many young blacks, men and boys especially, have been consumed by drugs, crime, poverty, ignorance, racial prejudice, misguided social pressures, and so on.
At the same time, millions of blacks have thrived, building strong families and successful careers at rates previously unseen. By far, the most important difference between these two very large groups has been educational attainment.
If anything, the role that education plays in the life prospects of black Americans is even more dramatic than in the population as a whole. It’s the closest thing to a magic potion for black people that I can think of. For boys and men, it is very often the antidote to prison or an early grave.

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Danielle Repshas:

“Still, there is not an absolute guarantee that a course [called] one thing someplace has the same rigor somewhere else,” Reason said.
Part of the challenge is judging the standards of one AP class from another at different high schools, and Reason said the level of trust colleges and secondary schools have with one another is one way colleges try to establish relationships with high schools. But Reason said he is concerned about the competition level at high schools in terms of coursework because schools in some areas do not have the same rigor in their coursework with respect to others.

The article includes a comment regarding Madison West High School’s limited approach:

In fact, there are only a handful of AP classes at Madison West, and most students aren’t interested in them. They’d rather take more stimulating and challenging classes.

Marcia Gevelinger Bastian touched on the issue of West’s limited number of AP classes here.

Jakob Nielsen:

Schools should teach deep, strategic computer insights that can’t be learned from reading a manual.
I recently saw a textbook used to teach computers in the third grade. One of the chapters (“The Big Calculator”) featured detailed instructions on how to format tables of numbers in Excel. All very good, except that the new Excel version features a complete user interface overhaul, in which the traditional command menus are replaced by a ribbon with a results-oriented UI.
Sadly, I had to tell the proud parents that their daughter’s education would be obsolete before she graduated from the third grade.
The problem, of course, is in tying education too tightly to specific software applications. Even if Microsoft hadn’t turned Excel inside out this year, they would surely have done so eventually. Updating instructional materials to teach Office 2007 isn’t the answer, because there will surely be another UI change before today’s third graders enter the workforce in 10 or 15 years — and even more before they retire in 2065.

Tom O’Neill:

SB1 would provide $10,000 grants to help schools start advanced-placement courses. Students scoring highly on the AP exams and who receive free or reduced-price lunches would be eligible for $200 to $300 in state scholarships.
Under SB2, teachers could get salary bumps if they perform well on the teacher-certification tests in math, chemistry and physics.
The two-year cost of the bills is estimated at $4.7 million and $9.2 million, respectively. The savings to students from exam costs and tuition assistance is estimated at $7.9 million for the two years.
By comparison, giving every teacher in Kentucky a 1 percent raise would cost the state $23 million a year, Kelly said.
The Senate has passed both bills, and they are now awaiting assignments to House committees.
Supporters of the measures include University of Kentucky President Lee Todd and the influential Lexington-based Prichard Committee for Academic Excellence.
The primary opponent is the KEA, which represents 38,000 public school teachers in Kentucky.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb:

It fosters entrepreneurs and creators, not exam takers, bureaucrats or, worse, deluded economists. So the perceived weakness of the American pupil in conventional and theoretical studies is where it very strength lies — it produces “doers”, Black Swan hunting, dream-chasing entrepreneurs, or others with a tolerance for risk-taking which attracts aggressive tinkering foreigners. And globalization allowed the U.S. to specialize in the creative aspect of things, the risk-taking production of concepts and ideas, that is, the scalable and fat-tailed part of the products, and, increasingly, by exporting jobs, separate the less scalable and more linear components and assign them to someone in more mathematical and “cultural” states happy to be paid by the hour and work on other people’s ideas. (I hold, against the current Adam Smith-style discourse in economics, that the American undirected free-enterprise works because it aggressively allows to capture the randomness of the environment — “cheap options”— not much because of competition and certainly less because of material incentives. Neither the followers of Adam Smith, nor to some extent, those of Karl Marx, seem to be conscious about the role of wild randomness. They are too bathed in enlightenment-style causation and cannot separate skills and payoffs.)

Taleb’s excellent “Fooled By Randomness” is a must read.

NY Times Editorial:

Congress, which is preparing to reauthorize both the No Child Left Behind Act and the Higher Education Act, needs to take a hard look at these scores and move forcefully to demand far-reaching structural changes.
It should start by getting the board that oversees the National Assessment of Educational Progress testing to create rigorous national standards for crucial subjects. It should also require the states to raise the bar for teacher qualifications and end the odious practice of supplying the neediest students with the least qualified teachers. This process would also include requiring teachers colleges, which get federal aid, to turn out higher quality graduates and to supply many more teachers in vital areas like math and science. If there’s any doubt about why these reforms are needed, all Congress has to do is read the latest national report card.

Jay Matthews:

But more important, let’s say that for the sake of argument that only 10 percent of America’s children suffer from homework overload (although we believe it’s much more). Isn’t it still a problem for that 10 percent, for all the reasons listed by the many psychologists, educators and health experts whom we interviewed? If “only” 10 percent of America’s children suffered from depression or diabetes, wouldn’t it still be worth addressing? We found many such children and they are definitely suffering and losing their love of school and learning. Just because homework overload might not affect every child doesn’t make it any less serious.

Amy Hetzner:

What’s bad, according to Roby Blust, Marquette’s dean of undergraduate admissions, is that some of those courses labeled as AP aren’t really Advanced Placement courses, as trademarked by the College Board.
“They’re not going through what we know is the AP curriculum for English, but they’re listing it as an AP course,” Blust said. “So they’re mislabeling, I guess.”
That could be about to change.
Pressured by colleges and universities with similar stories, the College Board is launching its first major oversight effort of the popular courses this year. By fall, the organization responsible for the AP program and its associated tests expects to have reviewed detailed descriptions of what’s being taught in about 120,000 courses throughout the world bearing the AP label.

Joanne Jacobs:

. . . last year i reported some of my teachers who didn’t teach me to the state, all we did was watch “R”movies and my other teacher fight and drew chairs, but the school did nothing and they gave me “A’s.
(The principal) is doing nothing about it he tells my mom that the SCHOOL has more rights and power than me and the parent.

Diana Day:

Teachers, take back the online research process! (If you are asking the question: “Did we ever have control of the online research process in the first place?” then you get a gold star for your healthy skepticism).
Before Google and other search engines got so good, I think we did have some control. I remember the days, not so long ago, when kids couldn’t always find material for their research topics using Google, especially if their topics were just a little unusual or offbeat. They would then be forced to ask for help, and I took advantage of some great teachable moments to help students refine their keywords and search techniques.
Being with students as they refine search skills leads naturally to the next opportunity: helping students evaluate the reliability and credibility of the sites we’d find together.
These teachable moments worked well.

Wisconsin ranked 13th in the percentage of public school students scoring 3 or higher on an AP exam during their high school years.
The College Board:

Almost 15 percent (Wisconsin = 15.8%) of public school graduates from the class of 2006 achieved during their high school years an AP® Exam grade of 3 or better (the score predictive of college success 1). This achievement represents a significant improvement since the class of 2000, when just 10 percent of public school graduates were achieving this result. The College Board, the not-for-profit membership association that administers the AP Program, released the third annual Advanced Placement Report to the Nation, which also showed that since 2000, all 50 states and the District of Columbia achieved an increase in the percentage of high school graduates that had earned an exam grade of 3 or higher on the college-level AP Exams.
The Report also highlights new independent research, which bolsters previous research findings that students who participate in AP have significantly better college grades and college graduation rates than academically and economically similar students who did not take the demanding courses and exams.
Media and others occasionally rank states, districts, and schools on the basis of AP Exam results, despite repeated warnings that such rankings may be problematic. AP Exams are valid measures of students’ content mastery of college-level studies in academic disciplines, but should never be used as a sole measure for gauging educational excellence and equity.

92K Wisconsin Summary pdf.
Sam Dillon:

More high schools across the nation are offering Advanced Placement courses to help students get into college and get ready for its academic rigors. In the process, however, many minority students who often need help most urgently are missing out.
“Taking rigorous courses is good for high school students, and there’s a lot of evidence that kids who have taken A.P. courses — even if they don’t do well on the tests — do better in college,” said Mike Cohen, president of Achieve Inc., a nonprofit organization created by state governors and business leaders that works to raise academic standards.
As increasing numbers of high schools offer the courses, minority enrollment in them has become a focus of study. Although African-American students were underrepresented last year, Asian students were the opposite; 11 percent of students who took the tests were Asian, while only 6 percent of the student population was Asian. About 62 percent of students who took the exams were white, while 65 percent of the nation’s student population was white, the report said.

Jay Matthews:

How many Advanced Placement courses are enough? Here in the Washington area, a hotbed of AP mania, the College Board provided an answer for the first time yesterday: Five is plenty in a high school career. Any more, the official response suggested, might be just showing off.
Trevor Packer, executive director of the AP program, said he had spoken to a number of college officials about how many of the college-level courses were needed to impress admissions officers and prepare for the rigors of higher education. They told him that “three, four or five AP courses are sufficient” in a high school career, he said. Under that scenario, a student could max out with one AP course as a sophomore and two each in junior and senior years. “Beyond that, they are interested in seeing students participate in other activities.”

A story by Sol Stern posted on City Journal highlights the success of Reading First and includes striking parallels to our superintendent’s response to the program:

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Non-union teachers could be used online
By Susan Troller
The prospect of a virtual school program in Madison is causing a confrontation in the real world between the Madison school district and John Matthews, executive director of Madison Teachers Inc., the teachers’ union.
At issue is whether the Madison district will be violating its collective bargaining contract with local teachers if it develops a virtual school learning program that includes courses taught online by instructors who are not members of MTI.
A virtual learning proposal, under development by the district for over a year, will be presented to the school board for consideration within the next month or so.
“Our position is that only MTI teachers can instruct kids,” Matthews said in an interview. “If someone providing the online instruction is not a licensed teacher in our district, I can’t tell you what the quality of the education will be.”
Matthews wrote a letter this week chastising Board President Johnny Winston Jr. for his advocacy of the online school proposal.

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Teacher Magazine:
Published: January 1, 2007
Tough Love
Bill Cosby talks about what teachers need to do better.
By Denise Kersten Wills
Bill Cosby made headlines in October when he urged teachers to do a better job of explaining to students the importance of the subjects they teach.
—Erinn
The comedian, best known as the beloved Dr. Huxtable from TV’s long-running hit The Cosby Show, has been outspoken in recent years about what the black community needs to do to close the racial achievement gap.
The Cos isn’t a classroom veteran, but neither is he a stranger to education—he holds master’s and doctorate degrees in the field.
We followed up with Cosby and asked him to explain his remarks.
Recent newspaper accounts said you had attacked teachers for not doing enough to help kids.
They heard me, but they didn’t print what I did. What came out was, ‘Well, he’s at it again, and now he’s after the teachers.’
Subscription Required

Message from the Vice President, AERA
November 14, 2006
Christine Sleeter
California State University, Monterey Bay
christine_sleeter@csumb.edu
Being a teacher educator these days can be a strange experience. Over the past several months, I have given numerous presentations depicting teaching as intellectually challenging, complex work. Using case studies of teachers in diverse classrooms, I have argued that learning to teach well is complicated, partly because excellent teachers know how to engage their students in thinking deeply about things that matter, while embedding the teaching of skills and basic content in broader ideas and problems that have relevance to their students. Ron Berger’s descriptions of teaching and learning in An Ethic of Excellence are not only brilliant and inspiring, but helpful illustrations of what classroom teaching and learning can be.
As teacher educators, this is the kind of teaching we try to promote. Linda Darling-Hammond’s most recent book Powerful Teacher Education develops excellent portraits of the best in preservice teacher education. [Highlights Alverno College in Milwaukee – LJW]. In New Zealand, the Ministry of Education has been sponsoring an Iterative Best Evidence Syntheses program, connecting research on teaching to diverse students’ learning, and to teacher professional development. For example, professional development linked to enhanced children’s learning incorporates teachers’ knowledge and skills, provides theoretical content knowledge related to practice, involves teachers in analyzing data from their own settings, and engages them in critical reflection that stretches their thinking and challenges their assumptions most recent issue of Harvard Educational Review, Betty Achinstein and Rod Ogawa examine two cases of beginning teachers whose students were out-scoring those of their peers on state tests, but who were pushed out of their teaching positions because of their refusal to follow the script.
What is going on here? It is true that teacher education as a whole has not done nearly as well as it could in preparing teachers to teach all students well. At the same time, reducing learning to teach to learning to follow a script greatly shortchanges what teaching and learning could be. It is ironic that teaching has become exceedingly prescribed and determined at a time when the U.S. is aggressively exporting its version of democracy and personal liberty. Not only is tolerance for diverse perspectives currently the lowest it has been in my lifetime, but support for intellectual inquiry and creativity in education seems to have disappeared.
To prompt consciousness-raising, curriculum theorist Thomas Poetter wrote a novel, The Education of Sam Sanders. Set in about 2030, it tells the story of a student who rebelled against rote learning and test preparation because he wanted to read whole books of his own choosing. His rebellion awakened some teachers’ memories of a time when teaching and learning involved harnessing reading, writing, and math skills to explore interdisciplinary themes of significance to the lives of students. Books that had been banned were brought out of a locked vault. Teachers began working collaboratively to design engaging curricula. You’ll have to read the book to find out what happened.
I believe it is essential that we demand more for students. In part, this means demanding more from our own teacher education programs. Our work as teacher educators needs to be grounded in the realities of the diverse students who populate classrooms today. But rather than acquiescing to formulas and scripts, we must re-invigorate a vision of, in the words of Maria de la Luz Reyes and John Halcón, The Best for our Children.

What does it take to truly create a school where no child is left behind?
That question defines what is probably the most pressing issue facing American public education, and a high-poverty school on Madison’s north side west of Warner Park seems to have figured out some of the answers.
Mendota Elementary is among a small handful of schools in Madison where the percentage of children from low-income families hovers above 70 percent. But contrary to what most research would predict, Mendota’s standardized test scores meet or beat Madison’s generally high district averages, as well as test scores from throughout the state, on the annual Wisconsin Knowledge and Concepts Exam.
In fact, Mendota’s test scores even exceed those of many other local schools where the majority of students come from more affluent homes with a wealth of resources to devote to child raising, including both time and money.
From “Successful schools, successful students” by reporter Susan Troller, The Capital Times, January 26, 2007.

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Sarah Carr:

When her 5-year-old lost his winter hat, he somberly apologized to his mother, saying: “I know it’s my responsibility.” Without Lecus asking, her 7-year-old holds doors open for other people. And her fourth-grader has become a leader on the playground, helping other kids when they struggle or fall.
Lecus does not take all the credit. Instead, she cites a new character education program at Milwaukee’s Whittier Elementary School, where her children attend. With the nudging of a parent, Whittier has started making a more conscious effort to teach students values such as honesty and responsibility.
In doing so, Whittier joined what Michael Swartz, superintendent of the Jefferson School District, west of Waukesha, calls a “national movement.”
Motivated by a declining sense of values in a society in which people are more likely to curse and less likely to offer their seat on the bus, schools in Wisconsin and across the country are turning the teaching of character into a formal part of the curriculum.

CBS Evening News:

We’re often told that problems aren’t always as big as they seem, and that a little creativity may bring a solution.
So when North Carolina’s governor confronted his big problem — one of the worst high school dropout rates in the country — his creativity kicked into overdrive, CBS News correspondent Lee Cowan reports.
“One way to get the high school dropout rate down is to do away with high school,” says Gov. Michael Easley.
Sound far-fetched? The Legislature didn’t think so.
“When I put this in the budget for the first time, I thought there’d be a big fight over it. And everybody said ‘this is a great idea, let’s do it,'” the governor says.

Erica Perez:

A three-year, $2 million grant from the U.S. Department of Labor will allow the Milwaukee Area Technical College to recruit and train 1,600 workers in five areas of advanced manufacturing where local businesses are projected to have critical shortages.
The money also will help MATC build a more strategic career-planning system, said Duane Schultz, associate dean in the division of technology and applied sciences for MATC. The goal: to anticipate earlier what jobs will be available locally and train students in those areas.
MATC surveyed about 30 local companies, including Master Lock, General Automotive Manufacturing and Rockwell Automation. In all, they said they would have roughly 1,745 openings in the next three years for computer numeric control machinists, welders and fabricators, maintenance technicians, quality inspectors and production manufacturing technicians.
Average entry-level wages for these jobs range from $11 to $15 an hour.
“We targeted our (program) around manufacturing because it’s such a strong part of the southeast Wisconsin job base,” said John Stilp, vice president of MATC’s Mequon campus.

On a sunny September morning in 2005 Preston Hollow Elementary School hosted Bike to School Day. Dozens of grinning children with fair skin played and talked outside in the courtyard, relaxing happily after rides through their North Dallas neighborhood of garish mansions and stately brick homes. Parents shared tea and fruit, capturing the smiles of their kids with digital cameras. A police officer gave the group a friendly lecture on bicycle safety. Inside the classrooms surrounding the courtyard, other children watched glumly. Many of them lived in the modest apartment complexes off Central Expressway, separated from their school by busy roads and shopping centers. Those kids, nearly all them Hispanic and black, took the bus to school.
As their classmates parked their bikes and snacked on fruit and juice the other children waited in English as a second language (ESL) classes. A federal judge would later rule that many of them shouldn’t have been there. Their language skills were good enough to be in the same classes as the kids who rode their bikes to Preston Hollow.

From Dallas Observer, January 11, 2007.

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With the debate about high school redesign and the furor over the four-block schedule at LaFollette, I looked at DPI data for Madison’s high schools. On nearly every indicator, LaFollette ranks third behind West and Memorial, with East ranking fourth.
See the data
here.

This note comes from a listserve, and I thought that it was worthwhile to pass it on:

Direct Instruction is just curriculum that uses direct, systematic, and explicit instruction. Any one of the direct instruction curricula would improve academic performance if it were used in the MMSD.
This comes from an Education Week article in 1999:

When an independent research group evaluated the research backing up 24 popular school reform models this year, it found two surprises.
The first surprise was that only three programs could point to strong evidence that they were effective in improving student achievement. The second surprise was that Direct Instruction, a program long scorned by many educators and academics for its lock-step structure, was one of them.
Direct Instruction grew out of studies on the teaching of beginning reading that Siegfried Engelmann began at the University of Illinois in the 1960s. Thirty years later, only 150 schools across the country use on a schoolwide basis the program he developed. By comparison, Success for All, another reform model with high marks for its solid research base, is used in more than 1,100 schools.
Thousands more schools, however, use Direct Instruction’s commercially produced materials–usually in remedial classrooms, special education resource rooms, or special programs for disadvantaged students.
“We were sort of like the plague for regular education,” says Mr. Engelmann, now 67 and a professor at the University of Oregon. “Regular education would have nothing to do with us. It wasn’t until the last few years that we started to break the mold.”

NY Times Editorial:

The No Child Left Behind Act broke new ground when it required the states to educate impoverished children up to the same standards as their affluent counterparts, in exchange for federal aid. The law did not just drop out of the sky. It represented a deliberate attempt by Congress to ratify and accelerate the school reform effort that swept the country in the early 1990’s, when the states began to embrace standards-based accountability systems that quickly showed promising results.
The achievement gains have fallen far short of what Congress hoped for when it passed the landmark federal law — and also far short of what the country needs to keep pace with its economic rivals. In addition, student performance has flattened in recent years. In many cases, that is because states that reaped all of the early, easy gains that are typically achieved by merely paying attention to a long-neglected problem failed to do the tougher work necessary to sustain their reforms.
Recent studies offer sobering news about the challenges that lie ahead. Happily, there is also encouraging news from the states that have stayed the course and continued to build rigorous, standards-based reforms.

Ian Shapira:

Educators, parents and teenagers in Northern Virginia say there is a growing demand for exclusive magnet schools similar to Thomas Jefferson, a regional “governor’s school” in the Alexandria section of Fairfax that admits fewer than 20 percent of applicants. They believe such schools are more desirable because their high-level math and science courses and stringent application process make them look formidable to university admissions officers.
Prince William’s proposal comes two years after neighboring Loudoun County created its own exclusive magnet school, the Academy of Science. It screens students based on grades, performance on a standardized test and a creative writing sample. The school on average admits fewer than 30 percent of students who apply. Academy Director George Wolfe said it is the only public school in Northern Virginia aside from Thomas Jefferson that has rigorous academic admissions criteria for the entire student body.