MISSED ADJUSTMENTS and OPPORTUNITIES RATIFICATION OF Madison School District/Madison Teachers Collective Bargaining Agreement 2011-2013



The Madison Metropolitan School District Board of Education and the Madison Teachers, Inc. ratified an expedited Collective Bargaining Agreement for 2011-2013. Several significant considerations were ignored for the negative impact and consequences on students, staff and taxpayers.
First and foremost, there was NO ‘urgent’ need (nor ANY need at all) to ‘negotiate’ a new contract. The current contract doesn’t expire until June 30, 2011. Given the proposals regarding school finance and collective bargaining processes in the Budget Repair Bill before the legislature there were significant opportunities and expectations for educational, management and labor reforms. With such changes imminent, there was little value in ‘locking in’ the restrictive old provisions for conducting operations and relationships and shutting the door on different opportunities for increasing educational improvements and performances in the teaching and learning culture and costs of educating the students of the district.
A partial listing of the missed adjustments and opportunities with the ratification of the teacher collective bargaining agreement should be instructive.

  • Keeping the ‘step and advancement’ salary schedule locks in automatic salary increases; thereby establishing a new basis annually for salary adjustments. The schedule awards increases solely on tenure and educational attainment. This also significantly inhibits movement for development and implementation of ‘pay for performance’ and merit.
  • Continues the MOU agreement requiring 50% of teachers in 4-K programs (public and private sites combined) to be state certified and union members
  • Continues required union membership. There are 2700 total or 2400 full-time equivalent (FTE) teachers, numbers rounded. Full-time teachers pay $1100.00 (pro-rated for part-time) per year in automatic union dues deducted from paychecks and processed by the District. With 2400 FTE multiplied by $1100 equals $2,640,000 per year multiplied by two years of the collective bargaining unit equals $5,280,000 to be paid by teachers to their union (Madison Teachers Inc., for its union activities). These figures do not include staff members in the clerical and teacher assistant bargaining units who also pay union dues, but at a lower rate.
  • Continues to limit and delay processes for eliminating non-performing teachers Inhibits abilities of the District to determine the length and configuration of the school day, length and configuration of the school year calendar including professional development, breaks and summer school
  • Inhibits movement and placement of teachers where needed and best suited
  • Restricts adjustments to class sizes and teacher-pupil ratios
  • Continues very costly grievance options and procedures and litigation
  • Inhibits the District from developing attendance area level teacher/administrator councils for collaboration in problem-solving, built on trust and relationships in a non-confrontational environment
  • Continues costly extra-duties and extra-curricular agreements and processes
  • Restricts flexibility for teacher input and participation in professional development, curriculum selection and development and performance evaluation at the building level
  • Continues Teacher Emeritus Retirement Program (TERP), costing upwards to $3M per year
  • Does not require teacher sharing in costs of health insurance premiums
  • Did not immediately eliminate extremely expensive Preferred Provider (WPS) health insurance plan
  • Did not significantly address health insurance reforms
  • Does not allow for reviews and possible reforms of Sick Leave and Disability Leave policies
  • Continues to be the basis for establishing “me too” contract agreements with administrators for salaries and benefits. This has impacts on CBAs with other employee units, i.e., support staff, custodians, food service employees, etc.
  • Continues inflexibilities for moving staff and resources based on changes and interpretations of state and federal program supported mandates
  • Inhibits educational reforms related to reading and math and other core courses, as well as reforms in the high schools and alternative programs

Each and every one of the above items has a financial cost associated with it. These are the so-called ‘hidden costs’ of the collective bargaining process that contribute to the over-all costs of the District and to restrictions for undertaking reforms in the educational system and the District. These costs could have been eliminated, reduced, minimized and/ or re-allocated in order to support reforms and higher priorities with more direct impact on academic achievement and staff performance.
For further information and discussion contact:
Don Severson President
Active Citizens for Education
donleader@aol.com
608 577-0851
100k PDF version




It’s time for schools to focus on quality, not politics or structure



Alan Borsuk:

I’m tired of talking about systems and governance and structures for education. If we’ve proved anything in Milwaukee, we’ve proved that these things make less difference than a lot of people once thought.
Since 1990, Milwaukee has been one of the nation’s foremost laboratories of experimentation in school structures. This has been driven by hope (some national experts used the word panacea) that new ways of creating, running and funding schools would bring big progress.
A ton of data was unloaded during the last week, including test results from last fall for every school in Wisconsin, a new round of studies comparing performance of students in Milwaukee’s publicly funded private school voucher program with Milwaukee Public Schools students and – for the first time – school-by-school test results for those voucher schools.
And what did I learn from all this?
1.) We’ve got big problems. The scores, overall, were low.
2.) We’re not making much progress overall in solving them.
3.) Schools in all three of the major structures for education in Milwaukee – MPS, voucher schools and charter schools – had about the same overall results.
4.) Some specific schools really did much better than others, even when dealing with students with much the same backgrounds as those in schools that got weaker results.
In my dreams, all of us – especially the most influential politicians, policy-makers and civic leaders – focus a lot more on the fourth point than we have been doing.

Related: Ripon Superintendent Richard Zimman’s 2009 speech to the Madison Rotary Club:

Zimman’s talk ranged far and wide. He discussed Wisconsin’s K-12 funding formula (it is important to remember that school spending increases annually (from 1987 to 2005, spending grew by 5.10% annually in Wisconsin and 5.25% in the Madison School District), though perhaps not in areas some would prefer.
“Beware of legacy practices (most of what we do every day is the maintenance of the status quo), @12:40 minutes into the talk – the very public institutions intended for student learning has become focused instead on adult employment. I say that as an employee. Adult practices and attitudes have become embedded in organizational culture governed by strict regulations and union contracts that dictate most of what occurs inside schools today. Any impetus to change direction or structure is met with swift and stiff resistance. It’s as if we are stuck in a time warp keeping a 19th century school model on life support in an attempt to meet 21st century demands.” Zimman went on to discuss the Wisconsin DPI’s vigorous enforcement of teacher licensing practices and provided some unfortunate math & science teacher examples (including the “impossibility” of meeting the demand for such teachers (about 14 minutes)). He further cited exploding teacher salary, benefit and retiree costs eating instructional dollars (“Similar to GM”; “worry” about the children given this situation).

I appreciate and approve of Borsuk’s sentiment.




Autism sufferer Lo Yip-nang found a way to express himself through art – and his work is dazzling thousands



Oliver Chou:

A joyful kaleidoscope in clay, Lo Yip-nang’s display of intricate patterns in jewel tones entranced thousands of people who visited his exhibition at the Jockey Club Creative Art Centre in Shek Kip Mei. Although many were eager to talk to the artist, he kept working with his slivers of coloured clay, giving monosyllabic replies to queries.
“You’ve been working all day; are you tired?” asks one woman. “No,” he says after a long pause. “People like your work, does that make you happy?” asks another. “Yes.”
Lo wasn’t playing the temperamental artist, though. The 30-year-old is autistic and his two-week exhibition last month is a personal triumph – and a sign of hope that people with the disability can live independently.
Autism stems from glitches in neurological development that cause sufferers to be socially impaired. Unable to interpret what people are expressing or to communicate how they feel, they typically become engrossed with specific objects instead or find comfort in repetitive behaviour and routine. But Lo, or Nang as he is affectionately known, is a rare autistic person who found a way to express himself.




An Anti-College Backlash?



Professor X:

Americans are finally starting to ask: “Is all this higher education really necessary?”
Since the appearance in The Atlantic of my essay “In The Basement of the Ivory Tower” (2008), in which I questioned the wisdom of sending seemingly everyone in the United States through the rigors of higher education, it’s become increasingly apparent to me that I’m far from the only one with these misgivings. Indeed, to my surprise, I’ve discovered that rather than a lone crank, I’m a voice in a growing movement.
Also see:
In the Basement of the Ivory Tower: The idea that a university education is for everyone is a destructive myth. An instructor at a “college of last resort” explains why.
The Truth About Harvard: It may be hard to get into Harvard, but it’s easy to get out without learning much of enduring value at all. A recent graduate’s report. By Ross Douthat
What Does College Teach? It’s time to put an end to “faith-based” acceptance of higher education’s quality. By Richard H. Hersh
I hadn’t expected my essay, inspired by the frustrations of teaching students unprepared for the rigors of college-level work, to attract much notice. But the volume and vehemence of the feedback the piece generated was overwhelming. It drew more visitors than almost any other article on the Atlantic’s web site in 2008, and provoked an avalanche of letters to the editor. It even started turning up in the syllabi of college writing classes, and on the agendas of educational conferences.
In the months and years since then – and especially now, as I prepare to add to the critical tumult with a book expanding on that original article – I find myself noticing similar sentiments elsewhere. Is it merely a matter of my becoming so immersed in the subject that I’m seeing it everywhere? I don’t think so. Start paying attention, and it becomes readily apparent that more and more Americans today are skeptical about the benefits of college.




Higher Education Governance Agreement in Oregon, For Now



Doug Lederman:

In contrast to some other states (yes, that means you, Wisconsin), Oregon’s politicians and the leaders of its public colleges and universities are on the same page about changes the state should make in how it manages higher education. But don’t blink, or you might miss the moment.
Governor John Kitzhaber and the president of the University of Oregon, Richard Lariviere, agreed Tuesday that the university would postpone for a year its push for legislation that would give it a new financing stream and an independent governing board separate and apart from the existing State Board of Higher Education.
Under the agreement, which was memorialized in an exchange of letters, Lariviere said the university would throw its support behind the governor’s plan to create a single statewide board to oversee pre-K to postsecondary education. While Kitzhaber did not openly state in return that he would fully back the university’s autonomy plan, Lariviere said in an interview Thursday that he was heartened by what university officials had heard in their discussions with the governor and his staff. “What we have received is as strong and as clear an endorsement of our ideas as we could reasonably expect at this stage,” he said.




Boxer Calls on American Bar Association to Ensure Accurate and Transparent Data Reporting by Law Schools



Boxer.Senate.Gov:

U.S. Senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA) today called on the American Bar Association (ABA) to improve its oversight of admissions and post-graduation information reported by law schools across the country.
Boxer’s letter follows news reports that have highlighted several law schools allegedly using misleading data to enhance a school’s position in the competitive and influential U.S. News and World Report annual rankings. Such inaccurate post-graduation employment and salary data can mislead prospective students into believing they will easily be able to find work as an attorney and pay off their loans despite a sharp decline in post-graduation full-time employment.
The full text of the Senator’s letter is below:




Vouchers Aren’t the Answer



Lisa Kaiser:

Today the Department of Public Instruction (DPI) released new results for the statewide exam.
Not surprising to those who have been paying attention, Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS) did better than schools in the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program (MPCP), otherwise known as the voucher program.
Overall, MPS had 47.8% of its students scoring as proficient in math, with 59% proficient in reading.
Among economically disadvantaged kids, MPS scored 43.9% in math and 55.3% in reading.
Those scores are lower for students in the voucher program–all of whom are economically disadvantaged, although that could change if Gov. Scott Walker has his way and opens up the program to middle-class and wealthy kids. Only 34.4% of voucher students scored proficient in math, while 55.2% were proficient in reading, about the same as MPS.




Behind The Scenes: How Do You Get Into Amherst?



Tovia Smith, via a kind reader’s email:

Admissions committees at selective colleges sometimes have to plow through thousands of applications to choose the members of next year’s freshman class. The committee at Amhest College in Mass., will accept only 1,000 of the more than 8,000 students who applied.
RENEE MONTAGNE, host:
Spring is a mean season for high school seniors. It’s college acceptance time. And if students don’t get in, they never find out why.
LINDA WERTHEIMER, host:
Was it that C in Algebra 1, the lukewarm recommendation, the essay that should have gone through spell check?
MONTAGNE: NPR’s Tovia Smith got a rare chance to sit in on an admissions committee at Amherst College in Massachusetts. The liberal arts college will accept only 1,000 of more than 8,000 students who applied.
TOVIA SMITH: High school kids may imagine the admissions officials deciding their fate as a bunch of tweedy old academics in spectacles and suits.




Green Bay Catholic & Public School Test Scores



Patty Zarling:

Many families choose to enroll their children in Catholic schools for religious reasons, but educators say kids also get academic benefits.
The Green Bay Area Catholic Education system for the first time compared test scores from 10 local Catholic schools with scores from area public schools. Catholic educators say the comparison showed students at the parochial schools are generally more proficient or advanced in math, reading and language arts than their peers at public schools.
Catholic school advocates say the scores highlight the strong quality of education at those schools at a time when they’re working hard to attract students. That effort ramps up this week, which is National Catholic Schools Week.
GRACE president Carol Conway-Gerhardt said bringing together 10 local Catholic schools into one system allowed administrators to compare test scores from those students with those at public schools.




Raising an Accidental Prodigy



Sue Shellenbarger:

onrad Tao, it goes without saying, is precocious. He started playing the piano at 18 months, began violin lessons at 3 and made his concert debut playing Mozart with an adult orchestra at 8. At age 9, he began studying at the Juilliard School in New York. Now 16, he has performed solos with symphonies in Philadelphia, San Francisco, Baltimore and other cities in the U.S. and Europe.
For all the parents who relentlessly drive their children to succeed, there is a quieter group, like Conrad’s parents. Mingfang Ting, Conrad’s mother, says she has long worried that her son would feel pressured or that his prodigious talent would upend their own lives.
When Dr. Ting first heard Conrad playing the piano as a toddler, “I would literally think there was something wrong with him,” she says. Unnerved, she sometimes called her husband, Sam Tao, at work, held up the phone and said, ” ‘Listen, he’s playing again.’ It was a little scary,” she says.




Retired Teachers in California Earn More Than Working Teachers in 28 States



Mike Antonucci:

I came across the most recent summary report for the California State Teachers’ Retirement System (CalSTRS) and I thought its pared-down tables and graphs nicely encapsulated the pension situation in the state.
First note that the average annual salary in 2010 for active working educators enrolled in the system was $64,156. The next table states that the average retirement benefit paid out in 2010 was $4,256 per month. That’s $51,072 annually. In other words, the average retired teacher in California made more than the average working teacher in 28 states, according to the salary rankings published by NEA.
The final graph in the report provides the big picture. While the value of the pension system’s assets has increased fairly steadily over the past nine years, the accrued liabilities have grown non-stop during the same period, leaving the fund at 78% of full coverage. What’s more, CalSTRS operated on an assumed annual return of 8 percent. Last year, the pension board lowered that expectation to 7.75 percent, which means projections for the future will show even more of a gap.




How to Raise the Status of Teachers



Room for Debate:

Michael J. Petrilli is the executive vice president at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute and a research fellow at the Hoover Institution.
Raising the “status” of teaching is like chasing a mirage: It looks great from a distance but it never seems to materialize. Teachers today are one of the most respected members of our society, according to opinion polls. The growing backlash against perceived “teacher-bashing” in Wisconsin and elsewhere is more testament that Americans like their teachers. So what exactly is the problem the status-boosters are hoping to solve? Raising teachers’ self-esteem?
On the other hand, it’s true that teaching today is not among the most attractive careers open to talented young people. Making it more attractive is an objective we can do something about.
Today’s teacher compensation system is perfectly designed to repel ambitious individuals. We offer mediocre starting salaries, provide meager raises even after hard-earned skills have been gained on the job and backload the most generous benefits (in terms of pensions) toward the end of 30 years of service. More fundamentally, for decades we’ve prioritized smaller classes over higher teacher pay. If we had kept class sizes constant over the past 50 years, the average teacher today would be making $100,000.




D.C. to review high rates of erasures on school tests



Marisol Bello and Jack Gillum:

The D.C. State Board of Education will hold a hearing next week on irregularities in standardized test scores, board President Ted Trabue said Monday.
The hearing comes in response to a USA TODAY investigation that found 103 public schools in the nation’s capital where tests showed unusually high numbers of answers that had been changed from wrong to right.
“It’s disturbing,” Trabue said. “You never want to see the system being gamed.”
The board is a group of elected officials who advise the state superintendent, the District of Columbia’s equivalent to a state education department.




Mandating Betamax



Jay Greene:

I just returned from the Association for Education Finance and Policy annual conference in Seattle, which was a really fantastic meeting. At the conference I saw Dartmouth economic historian, William Fischel, present a paper on Amish education, extending the work from his great book, Making the Grade, which I have reviewed in Education Next.
Fischel’s basic argument is that our educational institutions have largely evolved in response to consumer demands. That is, the consolidation of one-room schoolhouses into larger districts, the development of schools with separate grades, the September to June calendar, and the relatively common curriculum across the country all came into being because families wanted those measures. And in a highly mobile society, even more than a century ago, people often preferred to move to areas with schools that had these desired features. In the competitive market between communities, school districts had to cater to this consumer demand. All of this resulted in a remarkable amount of standardization and uniformity across the country on basic features of K-12 education.
Hearing Fischel’s argument made me think about how ill-conceived the nationalization effort led by Gates, Fordham, the AFT, and the US Department of Education really is. Most of the important elements of American education are already standardized. No central government authority had to tell school districts to divide their schools into grades or start in the Fall and end in the Spring. Even details of the curriculum, like teaching long division in 4th grade or Romeo and Juliet in 9th grade, are remarkably consistent from place to place without the national government ordering schools to do so.




Caire, Nerad & Passman Wisconsin Senate Bill 22 (SB 22) Testimony Regarding Charter School Governance Changes



Madison Urban League President Kaleem Caire 13mb .mp3 audio file. Notes and links on the Urban League’s proposed IB Charter school: Madison Preparatory Academy. Caire spoke in favor of SB 22.
Madison School District Superintendent Dan Nerad 5mb .mp3 audio file. Nerad spoke in opposition to SB 22.
Madison School Board Member Marj Passman 5mb .mp3 audio file. Passman spoke in opposition to SB 22.
Much more on SB 22 here.
Well worth listening to. Watch the hearing here.




Milwaukee Voucher School WKCE Headlines: “Students in Milwaukee voucher program didn’t perform better in state tests”, “Test results show choice schools perform worse than public schools”, “Choice schools not outperforming MPS”; Spend 50% Less Per Student



Erin Richards and Amy Hetzner

Latest tests show voucher scores about same or worse in math and reading.
Students in Milwaukee’s school choice program performed worse than or about the same as students in Milwaukee Public Schools in math and reading on the latest statewide test, according to results released Tuesday that provided the first apples-to-apples achievement comparison between public and individual voucher schools.
The scores released by the state Department of Public Instruction cast a shadow on the overall quality of the 21-year-old Milwaukee Parental Choice Program, which was intended to improve results for poor city children in failing public schools by allowing them to attend higher-performing private schools with publicly funded vouchers. The scores also raise concerns about Gov. Scott Walker’s proposal to roll back the mandate that voucher schools participate in the current state test.
Voucher-school advocates counter that legislation that required administration of the state test should have been applied only once the new version of the test that’s in the works was rolled out. They also say that the latest test scores are an incomplete measure of voucher-school performance because they don’t show the progress those schools are making with a difficult population of students over time.
Statewide, results from the Wisconsin Knowledge and Concepts Exam show that scores didn’t vary much from last year. The percentage of students who scored proficient or better was higher in reading, science and social studies but lower in mathematics and language arts from the year before.

Susan Troller:

Great. Now Milwaukee has TWO failing taxpayer-financed school systems when it comes to educating low income kids (and that’s 89 per cent of the total population of Milwaukee Public Schools).
Statewide test results released Tuesday by the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction include for the first time performance data from the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program, which involves about 110 schools serving around 10,000 students. There’s a total population of around 80,000 students in Milwaukee’s school district.
The numbers for the voucher schools don’t look good. But the numbers for the conventional public schools in Milwaukee are very poor, as well.
In a bit of good news, around the rest of the state student test scores in every demographic group have improved over the last six years, and the achievment gap is narrowing.
But the picture in Milwaukee remains bleak.

Matthew DeFour:

The test results show the percentage of students participating in the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program who scored proficient or advanced was 34.4 percent for math and 55.2 percent for reading.
Among Milwaukee Public Schools students, it was 47.8 percent in math and 59 percent in reading. Among Milwaukee Public Schools students coming from families making 185 percent of the federal poverty level — a slightly better comparison because voucher students come from families making no more than 175 percent — it was 43.9 percent in math and 55.3 percent in reading.
Statewide, the figures were 77.2 percent in math and 83 percent in reading. Among all low-income students in the state, it was 63.2 percent in math and 71.7 percent in reading.
Democrats said the results are evidence that the voucher program is not working. Rep. Sondy Pope-Roberts, D-Middleton, the top Democrat on the Assembly Education Committee, said voucher students, parents and taxpayers are being “bamboozled.”
“The fact that we’ve spent well over $1 billion on a failed experiment leads me to believe we have no business spending $22 million to expand it with these kinds of results,” Pope-Roberts said. “It’s irresponsible use of taxpayer dollars and a disservice to Milwaukee students.”
Rep. Robin Vos, R-Rochester, who is developing a proposal to expand the voucher program to other cities, took a more optimistic view of the results.
“Obviously opponents see the glass half-empty,” Vos said. “I see the glass half-full. Children in the school choice program do the same as the children in public school but at half the cost.”

Only DeFour’s article noted that voucher schools spend roughly half the amount per student compared to traditional public schools. Per student spending was discussed extensively during last evening’s planning grant approval (The vote was 6-1 with Marj Passman voting No while Maya Cole, James Howard, Ed Hughes, Lucy Mathiak, Beth Moss and Arlene Silveira voted yes) for the Urban League’s proposed Charter IB School: The Madison Preparatory Academy.
The Wisconsin Knowledge & Concepts Examination (WKCE) has long been criticized for its lack of rigor. Wisconsin DPI WKCE data.
Yin and Yang: Jay Bullock and Christian D’Andrea.
Related: “Schools should not rely on only WKCE data to gauge progress of individual students or to determine effectiveness of programs or curriculum”.




Racial achievement gap narrows state-wide, but remains a problem in Madison



Matthew DeFour:

Statewide the gap between the percentage of white and black students scoring proficient or advanced closed 6.8 percentage points in math and 3.9 points in reading between 2005-06 and this year. Comparing white students to Hispanics, the gap closed 5.7 points in math and 3.7 points in reading.
In Madison the gap between white and black students closed 0.4 percentage points in math and 0.6 points in reading. Among Hispanics, the gap increased half a point in math and decreased 1 point in reading.
Madison Superintendent Dan Nerad was unavailable to comment Monday on the results.

The Wisconsin Knowledge & Concepts Examination (WKCE) has long been criticized for its lack of rigor.
Related: “Schools should not rely on only WKCE data to gauge progress of individual students or to determine effectiveness of programs or curriculum”.




ALO versus Differentiated Teaching



Melissa Westbrook:

A thread was requested about ALOs (Advanced Learning Opportunities, the third tier of the Advanced Learning program) and differentiated teaching. Differentiated teaching is a teacher knowing his/her students’ strengths, challenges and readiness and being able to adjust teaching to the different levels in the classroom. (This doesn’t necessarily mean teaching to every single student’s level but rather knowing that there are different abilities in the classroom and trying to meet those needs.)




‘Value-added’ teacher evaluations: Los Angeles Unified tackles a tough formula



Teresa Watanabe:

In Houston, school district officials introduced a test score-based evaluation system to determine teacher bonuses, then — in the face of massive protests — jettisoned the formula after one year to devise a better one.
In New York, teachers union officials are fighting the public release of ratings for more than 12,000 teachers, arguing that the estimates can be drastically wrong.
Despite such controversies, Los Angeles school district leaders are poised to plunge ahead with their own confidential “value-added” ratings this spring, saying the approach is far more objective and accurate than any other evaluation tool available.
“We are not questing for perfect,” said L.A. Unified’s incoming Supt. John Deasy. “We are questing for much better.”

Much more on “Value Added Assessment“, here.




College daze: The insanity of the application process



George Will:

For many families, this is March madness — the moment of high anxiety concerning higher education as many colleges announce their admittance decisions. It is the culmination of a protracted mating dance between selective institutions and anxious students. Part agony, part situation comedy, it has provoked Andrew Ferguson to write a laugh-until-your-ribs-squeak book — “Crazy U: One Dad’s Crash Course in Getting His Kid into College.”
He begins in Greenwich, Conn. — a hedge fund habitat — watching Katherine Cohen, an “independent college admissions counselor,” market her $40,000 “platinum package” of strategies for bewitching Ivy League admissions officers. “Everyone in the room,” writes Ferguson, “was on full alert, with that feral look of parental ambition. They swiveled their tail-gunning eyes toward Kat when she was introduced.” Kat introduced them to terror:
“There are 36,000 high schools in this country. That means there are at least 36,000 valedictorians. They can’t all go to Brown. You could take the ‘deny pile’ of applications and make two more classes that were every bit as solid as the class that gets in.”




Bill bans trans fats in schools



Associated Press:

A bill that would ban trans fats in Nevada public schools got support from health advocates and some mild opposition from administrators who don’t want to be food police.
A Senate committee on Friday heard Senate Bill 230, which bans trans fats from vending machines, student stores, and school activities. The current bill version exempts school lunches, but pending rules through the national school lunch program would ban trans fats there, too.
Trans fats raise levels of harmful cholesterol and decrease levels of healthy cholesterol. They are common in processed snack foods, fried foods and baked goods.




Corbett’s vision for Pennsylvania schools: His plan includes voter approval of budgets.



Dan Hardy:

When it comes to changing public education in Pennsylvania, Gov. Corbett’s proposed billion-dollar funding cut to school districts this year could be just the beginning.
The governor also is pushing a legislative agenda that could significantly affect the way children are taught, the teachers who instruct them, and how schools craft their budgets.
One proposal that many suburban school boards fear and many taxpayers relish calls for voter approval of proposed district budgets when tax increases exceed inflation. If this were in effect now, more than 80 percent of the districts in Philadelphia’s suburbs probably would have to vote.
Other Corbett initiatives would:
Give school boards, for the first time, a free hand to lay off teachers to cut costs, with the decider in the furloughs being classroom performance, not seniority.
Create vouchers providing state funding so low-income children in struggling schools could transfer to private ones. The role of charter schools would also be expanded.




Audience Participation



I remember once, in the early 1980s, when I was teaching at the high school in Concord, Massachusetts, I visited a class in European History taught by my most senior colleague, a man with a rich background in history and many years of teaching.
He presented a lot of historical material in that class period, interlaced with interesting historical stories and anecdotes which the students seemed to enjoy. While I envied him for his knowledge and experience, I began to notice that the students were, for the most part at least, laid back and simply being entertained.
They were not being asked to answer challenging questions on the material, or demonstrate the knowledge they had gathered from their homework or outside reading in history, or, in fact, do anything except sit there and be entertained.
This was before the IPod, IPhone, IPad or laptops appeared in classrooms, so no one was texting anyone, but I did see that a few students were not even being bothered enough to be entertained. Here was this fine, educated instructor offering them European history and they were just not paying attention.
I understand that high school classes are only partly voluntary, that if students want a high school diploma they have to take some courses, and history is generally less demanding than calculus, chemistry or physics.
Nevertheless it stayed with me that there was so little “audience participation” from these Juniors and Seniors. I couldn’t see that any of them felt much obligation, or opportunity really, to do the work or take part in the class.
Perhaps the teacher was trying to entertain them because a junior colleague was visiting the class, but I don’t think that was it. I think that good teacher, like so many of us, and so many of his colleagues to this day, had bought the idea that it was his job to entertain them, rather than to demand that they work hard to learn history for themselves.
He told good stories, but the students said nothing. They, too, had adopted the notion that a “good” teacher would keep them entertained with the absolute minimum of effort on their part, as though it was the teacher’s responsibility to “make learning happen,” as it were, to them.
The memory of this classroom visit comes back to me as I see so many people in and out of education these days, talk about selecting, monitoring, controlling, and, if necessary removing, teachers who are not sufficiently entertaining, who do not “make students learn” whether they want to or are wiling to work on it themselves or not.
As a high school student in Pennsylvania recently commented, “It’s a teacher’s job to motivate students.” Of course, football and basketball coaches are expected to motivate their athletes as well, but not while those athletes do nothing but sit in the stands and watch the coach do “his thing.” They are expected to take part, to work hard, to get themselves into condition and to carry their load in the enterprise of sports.
A sports clothing store near me sells sweatshirts which say; “Work all Summer, Win all Fall.” I confirmed with the store owner, a part-time high school football coach, that “Work” in this case does not mean get a summer job and save some money. Rather, it means run, lift weights and generally put time in on their physical fitness so that they will be in shape to play sports in the Fall.
I do not know of any equivalent sweatshirt for high school academics: “Study all Summer, Get Good Grades all Fall.” I don’t think there is one, and I think the reason is, in part, that so many of us, including too many teachers, have decided that teachers are the ones who need to work on, and take responsibility for, student academic learning. Their job goes way beyond the coaches’ task of motivating young athletes who “Work all Summer” and come expecting to give it their all in the Fall.
Those who keep saying that the most important variable in student academic achievement is teacher quality simply conspire with all those others, including too many students, who support the idea that academic work and student learning are the teachers’ problem, and not one in which the students have a major share. Of course teachers who are forced out of teaching because their students don’t do any academic work suffer, but we should also be concerned with the consequences for so many of our students who have been led down the primrose path of believing that school is not their primary job at which they also must work hard.
——————-
“Teach by Example”
Will Fitzhugh [founder]
The Concord Review [1987]
Ralph Waldo Emerson Prizes [1995]
National Writing Board [1998]
TCR Institute [2002]
730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24
Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776-3371 USA
978-443-0022; 800-331-5007
www.tcr.org; fitzhugh@tcr.org
Varsity Academics®
www.tcr.org/blog




Misplaced Priorities At a Session on Chicago Schools



James Warren:

Terry Mazany, interim chief of Chicago Public Schools, was like a baseball manager beckoning a star relief pitcher an inning early to hold a lead. Rather than Mariano Rivera, he waved in Kate Maehr to last week’s Board of Education meeting.
He had opened an ultimately melancholy session dominated by budget woes by suddenly and without explanation defending the Breakfast in the Classroom program, quietly pushed through in January.
The defense was due partly to an earlier mention in this column that generated lots of “Huh, are they serious?” responses among parents and others, according to board officials. The program mandates that the first instructional class open with pupils having breakfast at their desks, even at schools already offering pre-class breakfast.




Cost of borrowing to send child to a for-profit college may be too high



Dear Liz: My son will be going to a for-profit technical school about 120 miles away from home. Unfortunately, we have not saved any money for his college education. What are our best options for borrowing to pay for his college education, which will cost about $92,000 for four years? He is not eligible for any financial aid other than federal student loans. Our daughter will graduate debt free with her bachelor’s degree in December. Since we concentrated on her education first, our son kind of got left behind.
Answer: Please rethink this plan, because your family probably cannot afford this education.




A Mentor’s Goal: Keeping At-Risk Chicago Teens Alive



David Schaper:

In Chicago last school year, 245 public school students were shot, 27 of them fatally.
It’s a high toll. To try to find out who might be next, Chicago Public School officials developed a probability model by analyzing the traits of 500 shooting victims over a recent two-year period. They noted that the vast majority were poor, black and male, and had chronic absences, bad grades and serious misconduct.
Using this probability model, they identified more than 200 teenagers who have a shockingly good chance of being shot — a better than 1 in 5 chance within the next two years.
Project Director Jonathan Moy says the probability model isn’t perfect, but it’s working.




Community College vs. Student Loan Debt



Ron Lieber:

One of the articles in our special section on Money Through the Ages (produced in partnership with the public radio program Marketplace Money) is about an 18-year-old high school senior with a choice to make. Should he go into at least $6,500 in debt each year to attend a private college or university like Juniata or Clark, or is he better off working part time and attending community college for two years before transferring to one of those colleges?

Zac Bissonnette, the author of Debt-Free U and a senior in college himself, encourages students and families to take on as little debt as possible. He urged the subject of our profile, Mino Caulton of Shutesbury, Mass., to consider the University of Massachusetts, though Mr. Caulton was worried that he wouldn’t get enough individual attention there.




Race, Poverty and the Public Schools



Letters to the New York Times:

Re “Separate and Unequal,” by Bob Herbert (column, March 22):
In spite of the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision by the Supreme Court, sadly the struggle goes on. The Department of Education reported in 2008 that 70 percent of white schoolchildren attend schools where at least 75 percent of the students are white, whereas more than half of all black children in industrial states attend schools where over 90 percent are members of minority groups. Go into any urban school and it is clear that 57 years after Brown, the schools have largely remained segregated.
Years of social science research have cited the benefits of integrated schools. In our work with the West Metro Education desegregation initiative in Minneapolis public schools, the students in grades 3 to 7 who got on the bus to attend suburban schools made three times the progress in both reading and math when compared with similar students who did not participate.
Teacher quality remains a consistent important factor. Ultimately, though, students in diverse classrooms benefit from collaboration and teamwork with those whose family circumstances are different from theirs. Eric J. Cooper
President, National Urban Alliance for Effective Education
Stamford, Conn., March 22, 2011




What do students miss with a virtual education?



Christopher Dawson:

I had the chance to speak at a local university on Tuesday, talking to a class on cloud computing about the impact of technology (especially, of course, the cloud) on higher education. The class was great and was, itself, focused on team-based learning and simulations using a variety of cloud and web-based tools. What was even better, though, was the Q&A session with the students and my follow-up conversations with faculty and staff.
Let me start with something that ZDNet’s digital video and photo blogger, Janice Chen, wrote in an unrelated discussion we were having about ZDNet’s upcoming 20th anniversary:




The College Derby Andrew: Ferguson’s delightful plea for sanity about college admissions.



Timothy Noah:

I have this problem. I can’t read self-help books. Like everybody else, I’ve experienced my share of life challenges–“life challenges” being the self-help euphemism for “problems”–and I would never pretend not to need any help in facing them, solving them, or at least getting through them. I accept the principles of, and am myself no stranger to, modern psychotherapy. But whenever I try to cope with one of life’s predictable stress points by reading a self-help book, I can’t manage it. My eyes glaze over. I think “This person is an idiot,” or “This person thinks I’m an idiot,” or “Maybe I am an idiot, because I can’t follow this.” Within minutes I toss the book aside and start digging around for a decent novel.
hat I’ve come to believe is that psychological advice isn’t worth much if it isn’t rooted in personal experience. So instead of reading self-help books I read memoirs about the kinds of experience I’m trying to cope with. It doesn’t especially matter whether the author went about confronting his problem in a sensible way, nor even, necessarily, whether the author came out of the experience with a clear understanding of what he did right and what he did wrong. For instance, just about the last person I’d look to for personal advice about anything is Joan Didion. But when my wife died six years ago, I devoured Didion’s best-selling memoir about widowhood, The Year of Magical Thinking, and then for good measure I read the script she wrote when she adapted it into a one-person show starring Vanessa Redgrave. (If asked to blurb either, I’d write, “Loopy but compelling.”) I read Donald Hall’s lovely book of poems about his wife’s death, Without, and Hall’s more tedious nonfiction reworking of the same material, The Best Day, The Worst Day. I read a mediocre book called Widow written three decades earlier by a publicist for Little, Brown named Lynn Caine, and a brilliant book–the gold standard on widowhood–called A Grief Observed, written four decades earlier by C.S. Lewis, an author I’d previously avoided like the plague. Some of these books were more helpful than others, but all provided some form of “self-help.” Meanwhile, a stack of self-help books pressed on me by well-meaning friends gathered dust.




How Miami students can get a free college education



Stacy Teicher Khadaroo:

Miami Dade College announced Wednesday the American Dream Scholarship. The ‘free college’ offer could help boost college graduation rates – a goal of President Obama’s.
College tuition is going up and financial aid is on the chopping block in many states, but in the Miami area, one college is offering successful high school graduates a price tag that’s hard to refuse: free.
Miami Dade College – the largest institution of higher education in America, serving more than 170,000 students on eight campuses – announced its American Dream Scholarship on Wednesday. It will cover 60 credits at a value of about $6,500 – enough to earn a two-year degree or start in on one of the four-year programs offered by the community college.
This spring’s high school graduates in Miami-Dade County will be the first to benefit from the “free college” offer. To qualify for the new scholarship, students must have a 3.0 grade-point average and score well enough on entry tests to show they don’t need remedial math or reading courses. Normally, about a third of the college’s entering students pass at that level.




In Preschool, What Matters More: Education or Play?



Bonnie Rochman:

It’s practically been relegated to superstar status in the annals of parenting lore: the Manhattan mom who sued her daughter’s $19,000-a-year preschool on grounds that the 4-year-old was not sufficiently prepared to tackle the entrance test for private kindergarten.
Earlier this month, Nicole Imprescia filed her lawsuit against the York Avenue Preschool, claiming that her daughter, Lucia, was not primed to take the intelligence test and was instead relegated to a mixed-age classroom where talk revolved around — oh, the horror — shapes and colors. As a result, Imprescia withdrew her daughter from the preschool. (More on Time.com: Perspective on the Parenting Debate: Rich Parents Don’t Matter?)
“The school proved to be not a school at all, but just one big playroom,” the suit stated.




Parents want child with peanut allergy removed from school



Amy Graff:

As more kids are diagnosed with food allergies, more schools are faced with figuring out how to deal with students who require a special environment. Should schools be expected to inconvenience all students when only one of them has a severe peanut allergy? This debate is currently playing out at a school in Florida.
A 6-year-old girl at a school in Florida has a peanut allergy so severe that she could have a reaction if she were to breath traces of nut dust in the air. Her elementary school in Edgewater, Fl., has taken extraordinary measures to accommodate her.
All students are now required to wash their hands and rinse out their mouths before stepping inside the classroom. Desks must be regularly wiped down with Clorox wipes. School administrators have banned all peanut products and snacks are no longer allowed in the class. Earlier this month, a peanut-sniffing dog walked through the school to make sure everyone is following the rules.
The school is legally obligated to take these safety precautions because of the Federal Disabilities Act, according to Nancy Wait, the the spokeswoman for Volusia County Schools.




Hundreds attend, testify at legislative hearing on charter school changes



Susan Troller:

Testimony at the Capitol over a controversial bill that would strip control over charter schools from locally elected officials and place it in the hands of a politically appointed state-wide authorizing board drew hundreds on Wednesday to a standing-room-only Senate education committee hearing.
Senate Bill 22, authored by state Sen. Alberta Darling (R-River Hills) would also fund independent charter schools ahead of traditional public schools. I wrote about the bill on Tuesday and it’s generated a robust conversation.
Madison Superintendent Daniel Nerad testified in opposition to the bill, and so did local school board member Marjorie Passman. Kaleem Caire, president and CEO of the Urban League of Greater Madison and a strong proponent of the proposed boys-only Madison Preparatory Academy for minority students, testified in support of the bill. Madison Prep, if approved, will be a publicly funded charter school in Madison.




Harvard Isn’t Worth It Beyond Mom’s Party Chatter: Amity Shlaes



Amity Shlaes:

Anxious families awaiting April college admission news are living their own March Madness.
Their insanity is captured in Andrew Ferguson’s new book, “Crazy U: One Dad’s Crash Course in Getting His Kid Into College” (Simon & Schuster). He describes the vanity of a desperate mother at a cocktail party who is dying to announce her daughter’s perfect SAT scores:
“‘We were really surprised at how well she did,’ the mother would say, running a finger around the rim of her glass of pink Zinfandel.
Her eyes plead: Ask me what they were, just please please ask.”




Separate and Unequal



Bob Herbert:

One of the most powerful tools for improving the educational achievement of poor black and Hispanic public school students is, regrettably, seldom even considered. It has become a political no-no.
Educators know that it is very difficult to get consistently good results in schools characterized by high concentrations of poverty. The best teachers tend to avoid such schools. Expectations regarding student achievement are frequently much lower, and there are lower levels of parental involvement. These, of course, are the very schools in which so many black and Hispanic children are enrolled.




As Little Girls and Boys Grow, They Think Alike



Avery Johnson:

Boys’ and girls’ brains are different–but not always in the ways you might think.
A common stereotype is that boys develop more slowly than girls, putting them at a disadvantage in school where pressure to perform is starting ever younger. Another notion is that puberty is a time when boys’ and girls’ brains grow more dissimilar, accounting for some of the perceived disparities between the sexes.
Now, some scientists are debunking such thinking. Although boys’ and girls’ brains show differences around age 10, during puberty key parts of their brains become more similar, according to recent government research. And, rather than growing more slowly, boys’ brains instead are simply developing differently.




Why Do We Let Them Dress Like That?



Jennifer Moses:

In the pale-turquoise ladies’ room, they congregate in front of the mirror, re-applying mascara and lip gloss, brushing their hair, straightening panty hose and gossiping: This one is “skanky,” that one is “really cute,” and so forth. Dressed in minidresses, perilously high heels, and glittery, dangling earrings, their eyes heavily shadowed in black-pearl and jade, they look like a flock of tropical birds. A few minutes later, they return to the dance floor, where they shake everything they’ve got under the party lights.
But for the most part, there isn’t all that much to shake. This particular group of party-goers consists of 12- and 13-year-old girls. Along with their male counterparts, they are celebrating the bat mitzvah of a classmate in a cushy East Coast suburb.




It’s School Admissions Season in New York City: Does your 18-month-old have what it takes?



Katie Roiphe:

When T.S. Eliot wrote about the cruelest month “mixing memory and desire”, he might also have had in mind that this is the season of school admissions in New York City. So as the sooty piles of snow melt into gray puddles, parents obsess over the letters they will and won’t receive from the school that will or won’t confer on their radiant progeny the blessing of its approval. It seems to be a challenge in this season for even the more sensible parents among us, even those who really have better things to do, not to fall prey to the prevailing fantasy that if your child is rejected from one of these desirable and enlightened places, he or she will be destined for a life of drug addiction, grand theft auto, or general exile.
My 18-month-old recently had his first school interview. Apparently he sailed through it, though how is somewhat mysterious to me. Especially since he calls all fruits “apples” and sentences such as “Mommy. Moon. Get it” are not necessarily indicative of a huge understanding of the workings of the universe. However, no one is too young for the system, and a small obstacle like language cannot be permitted to get in the way of the judging and selecting and general Darwinian sorting to which it is never too soon to accustom yourself in this city. I have been asked to write recommendations for other one-and-a-half-year-olds for this same lovely school, and have thought of, but did not actually write, “He knows a lot about trucks.”




An interview with Henna Virkkunen, Finland’s Minister of Education



Justin Snider:

The Hechinger Report: It’s well-known that Finland’s teachers are an elite bunch, with only top students offered the chance to become teachers. It’s also no secret that they are well-trained. But take us inside that training for a moment – what does it look like, specifically? How does teacher training in Finland differ from teacher training in other countries?
Virkkunen: It’s a difficult question. Our teachers are really good. One of the main reasons they are so good is because the teaching profession is one of the most famous careers in Finland, so young people want to become teachers. In Finland, we think that teachers are key for the future and it’s a very important profession–and that’s why all of the young, talented people want to become teachers. All of the teacher-training is run by universities in Finland, and all students do a five-year master’s degree. Because they are studying at the university, teacher education is research-based. Students have a lot of supervised teacher-training during their studies. We have something called “training schools”–normally next to universities–where the student teaches and gets feedback from a trained supervisor.
Teachers in Finland can choose their own teaching methods and materials. They are experts of their own work, and they test their own pupils. I think this is also one of the reasons why teaching is such an attractive profession in Finland because teachers are working like academic experts with their own pupils in schools.




College Degree Fails to Promote Active Civic Engagement Beyond Voting



Intercollegiate Studies Institute:

nlightened Citizenship: How Civic Knowledge Trumps a College Degree in Promoting Active Civic Engagement is the fifth report to the nation issued by ISI’s National Civic Literacy Board. While each past study has had a different point of emphasis, all share a common thread of examining the relationships that exist between higher education, civic knowledge, and citizenship.
Unfortunately, the results of ISI’s past civic literacy research does not inspire confidence that our institutions of higher learning are living up to their educative and civic responsibilities, responsibilities that almost all American colleges recognize as critical to their overall public missions.
In 2006 and 2007, ISI administered a sixty-question multiple-choice exam on knowledge of American history and institutions to over 28,000 college freshmen and seniors from over eighty schools. In both years, the average freshman and senior failed the exam.
In 2008, ISI tested 2,508 adults of all ages and educational backgrounds, and once again the results were discouraging. Seventy-one percent of Americans failed the exam, with high school graduates scoring 44% and college graduates also failing at 57%.




On Creative Writing



Andrew Cowan:

Creative writing is an academic discipline. I draw a distinction between writing, which is what writers do, and creative writing. I think most people in the UK who teach creative writing have come to it via writing – they are bona fide writers who publish poems and novels and play scripts and the like, and they have found some way of supporting that vocation through having a career in academia. So in teaching aspirant writers how to write they are drawing upon their own experience of working in that medium. They are drawing upon their knowledge of what the problems are and how those problems might be tackled. It’s a practice-based form of learning and teaching.
But because it is in academia there is all this paraphernalia that has to go with it. So you get credits for attending classes. You have to do supporting modules; you have to be assessed. If you are doing an undergraduate degree you have to follow a particular curriculum and only about a quarter of that will be creative writing and the rest will be in the canon of English literature. If you are doing a PhD you have to support whatever the creative element is with a critical element. So there are these ways in which academia disciplines writing and I think of that as Creative Writing with a capital C and a capital W. All of us who teach creative writing are doing it, in a sense, to support our writing, but it is also often at the expense of our writing. We give up quite a lot of time and mental energy and also, I think, imaginative and creative energy to teach.




Let Kids Rule the School



Susan Engel:

IN a speech last week, President Obama said it was unacceptable that “as many as a quarter of American students are not finishing high school.” But our current educational approach doesn’t just fail to prepare teenagers for graduation or for college academics; it fails to prepare them, in a profound way, for adult life.
We want young people to become independent and capable, yet we structure their days to the minute and give them few opportunities to do anything but answer multiple-choice questions, follow instructions and memorize information. We cast social interaction as an impediment to learning, yet all evidence points to the huge role it plays in their psychological development.
That’s why we need to rethink the very nature of high school itself.




Teachers must be evaluated by what students learn



Doug Lasken & Bill Evers:

Students in California public schools are not achieving at the levels they should. Too many students are unprepared for jobs or have to take remedial courses when they start college. In California, we judge student achievement through student scores on statewide tests. These tests assess how much students know about subject-matter content that is specified in an official set of state academic-content standards. Research has long shown that effective teachers are among the best ways to bring up student achievement. But in order to improve teaching effectiveness, it is helpful to know where the challenges are.
We’ve heard a lot in California recently about the move to factor student test scores from statewide standards-based tests into teacher evaluations. Yet did you know that for more than a decade, it has been the law in California to do just that?




Guido Sarducci and the Purposes of Higher Education



Sandy Baum and Michael McPherson:

The way college courses generally work is that a teacher presents a group of students with some subject matter, then attempts through tests and papers to determine how well the students have mastered the subject matter. Those judgments are summarized in a letter grade. A list of those subject matters and grades constitutes the transcript that describes what the student has learned and what the student’s performance was overall.
The students and the teacher are focused on the subject matter, and the implied view is that the learning in college is captured in the exercises that inform those grades. The limitations of this “subject matter recall” model of higher education are hilariously captured in Don Novello’s comic performance on Saturday Night Live as Father Guido Sarducci, who marketed the “Five Minute University”: http://youtu.be/kO8x8eoU3L4




Teacher says debate has ignored a crucial issue: parents



Robert King:

Evan Camp’s frustration had built up to the point where he couldn’t shed it even by feverishly cleaning his house.
To him, all the talk about education reform seemed to be about punishing teachers, especially the part about tying teacher pay to test scores.
So Camp, a middle school science teacher in Greenwood, started jotting down thoughts as he cleaned one Saturday afternoon. Soon, he had enough material to write a tome for beleaguered teachers that would become an open letter to Gov. Mitch Daniels and state Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Bennett.




The Classroom vs. the Workshop



Edmund de Waal:

When I was a child there was a truism that anyone could make something (a rabbit hutch, say) or mend something (a bicycle) if they had a classical education. It was felt that using intellectual tools–parsing a bit of Latin history, constructing an argument–was training enough for taking on the material world. Learning gave you a steady approach to the tricksiness of the world of things. Lurking behind this belief was an attitude of de haut en bas; condescension towards those working with their hands.
This annoyed me. Partly because I could only stumble through my Latin lessons but mostly because my afternoons were spent in a pottery workshop learning to throw pots. It was clear to me–a white apron over my school uniform as I kneaded the clay to take out the air bubbles and give it the right consistency, pulled the long twisted wire made from rabbit snares, divided it into 4-ounce balls and sat at my kick wheel in the corner readying myself for my hours of practice–that this was different from classroom learning.




Demonize data on teaching at our state’s (California) peril



Jim Wunderman:

The facts are hard.
A generation ago, California had what was considered the best education system on the planet.
Today, our daughters and sons attend one of the worst-performing education systems in the industrialized world.
We are failing on the rock-bottom basics. California students’ ability to read is ranked 49th in the country by the U.S. Department of Education. Our kids’ ability to do math is ranked 47th and we are second to worst in science. Compared globally, the situation darkens further. Of the top 35 nations, the United States is ranked 29th in science and 35th in math. Your neighborhood school might be good by California standards, but that is a very low bar indeed. Our education crisis is a human tragedy and a looming economic disaster.
The Bay Area Council resolutely refuses to accept this crisis as our state’s fate. Let’s get past the political gridlock and get down to the real business of dramatically improving California schools. We know, as every honest study has shown, that it will take a combination of real dollars and major changes in the way we deliver education.




In Virginia assault case, anxious parents recognize ‘dark side of autism’



Theresa Vargas:

When a Stafford County jury this month found an autistic teenager guilty of assaulting a law enforcement officer and recommended that he spend 101/2 years in prison, a woman in the second row sobbed.
It wasn’t the defendant’s mother. She wouldn’t cry until she reached her car. It was Teresa Champion.
Champion had sat through the trial for days and couldn’t help drawing parallels between the defendant, Reginald “Neli” Latson, 19, and her son James, a 17-year-old with autism.




Teachers shouldn’t be judged by test scores alone



David Sanchez:

There are those who think the best way to determine teacher effectiveness is by looking only at students’ test scores. The simplicity of this approach can be seductive, but it is inherently flawed. This approach only makes sense if you assume all children come to school with the same abilities, have the same educational resources and opportunities and return home to the same support systems. As a kindergarten teacher for more than 30 years, I can confirm what you already know to be true: Every child is different.
The fact of the matter is student achievement and teacher effectiveness aren’t simple to measure, and the results of one test are not going to offer a complete assessment of either. Many different measures must be used in order to determine true effectiveness.
So how do you define teacher effectiveness? How to evaluate it? How to reward it? These are all good questions. Most research will tell you an effective teacher is one of the most important factors in a student’s education, and I would agree. Research will also tell you that many other factors can and do influence student success: poverty, hunger, homelessness, language skills, parental involvement and education, the learning environment, hormones and personal motivation.




Life Beyond Autism



Janet Grillo:

It’s been 81 years since Virginia Wolff published her famous essay, more than 20 since I read it, and even more before I followed her advice that “a woman must have a room of her own, if she is to write.”
When my mother was my age, she considered the best part of her life as behind her. When my grandmother was this age, considered herself “old.” And my great-grandmother most certainly was. But that was then, and this is the era of longevity, vitality and change. We’ve rewritten all the rules. But maybe rules are only scaffolds we construct to contain what we can’t control. Which is just about everything.
My dreams and expectations changed radically when my child was diagnosed with Autism. From that moment, and for the next decade, every thought in my head, urge in my heart and pulse in my body was redirected to helping him. When your child is diagnosed as on the Spectrum, you’re told that much can improve, but most profoundly before the age of 5. My son was already three. So the clock was ticking, the meter was running, and I had a choice to make; pursue my needs, or save his life. So I put away the screenplay I was writing, abandoned the film collective I was trying to form, and forgot any notion of going back to a traditional job. In their place, I organized a line of behavioral therapists, occupational therapists, auditory training technologies, and casein-free diets. And thanked God each day that I had the resources so I could.




5 Ways the Value of College Is Growing



Derek Thompson:

“It’s no longer true that having a college degree guarantees that you’ll get a good job, and it’s becoming less true with each passing decade,” Paul Krugman writes today.
Krugman is right that more school is no total panacea for our jobs crisis. But he’s wrong that college is losing its edge. The fact is that that the bonus from a college education for men and women has doubled since the 1970s. Although the costs of an advanced degree have never been higher, the benefits of post-secondary education are growing similarly. Here are five reasons not to doubt the value of a college education today.
1. Seven of the ten fastest growing jobs in the next 10 years require a bachelor’s degree or higher




Revolt of the Elites



N + 1:

Has any concept more completely defined and disfigured public life over the last generation than so-called elitism? Ever since Richard Nixon’s speechwriters pitted a silent majority (later sometimes “the real America”) against the nattering nabobs of negativism (later “tenured radicals,” the “cultural elite,” and so on), American political, aesthetic, and intellectual experience can only be glimpsed through a thickening fog of culture war. And the fog, very often, has swirled around a single disreputable term.
The first thing to note is the migration of the word elite and its cognates away from politics proper and into culture. Today “the cultural elite” is almost a redundancy – the culture part is implied – while nobody talks anymore about what C. Wright Mills in 1956 called “the power elite.” Mills glanced at journalists and academics, but the main elements of the elite, in his sense, were not chatterers and scribblers but (as George W. Bush might have put it) deciders: generals, national politicians, corporate boards. “Insofar as national events are decided,” Mills wrote, “the power elite are those who decide them.” The pejorative connotations of “elite” have remained fairly stable across the decades. The word suggests a group of important individuals who have come by their roles through social position as much as merit; who place their own self-maintenance as an elite and the interests of the social class they represent above the interests and judgments of the population at large; and who look down on ordinary people as inferiors. Today, though, it’s the bearers of culture rather than the wielders of power who are taxed with elitism. If the term is applied to powerful people, this is strictly for cultural reasons, as the different reputations of the identically powerful Obama and Bush attest. No one would think to call a foul-mouthed four-star general an elitist, even though he commands an army, any more than the term would cover a private equity titan who hires Rod Stewart to serenade his 60th birthday party. Culture, not power, determines who attracts the epithet.




Do Charters Discriminate Against Kids with Disabilities?



New Jersey Left Behind:

Acting Comm. Christopher Cerf directly rebutted “myths” about charter schools at a State Board of Education meeting, according to The Record. Contrary to claims by anti-charter proponents, says Cerf, NJ’s charter school admit very poor kids and children with disabilities, and perform better than traditional public schools in Abbott districts.
Here’s the powerpoint.
For example, in NJ 15.87% of kids are classified as eligible for special education services. (We rank second in the nation in this category. First is Massachusetts. Then again, the classification rate at Wildwood High is 24.6%, Asbury Park High is 20.2%, John F. Kennedy in Paterson is 24.1%, and Camden Central High is a stunning 33.6%. But back to charters.)




Study Hard to Find If Harvard Pays Off



Laurence Kotlikoff:

The notion that education pays and that better education pays better is taken for granted by almost everyone. For college professors like me, this is a very convenient idea, providing a high and growing demand for our services.
Unfortunately, the facts seem to disagree. A recent study by economists Stacy Dale and Alan Krueger showed that going to more selective colleges and universities makes little difference to future income once one accounts for the underlying ability of the student. Their work confirms other studies that find no financial benefit to attending top-tier schools.
It’s good to know that Harvard applicants can safely attend Boston University (my employer), and that “better” higher education doesn’t pay better. But does higher education pay in the first place?




My hard lessons teaching community college



Kate Gieselman:

“Stand up if you have ever been told that you weren’t college material,” the school president booms during the commencement ceremony.
In answer to his question, dozens of students stand and pump their fists; cheers go up; an air horn blasts. He goes on:
“Now, stand if you are the first member of your family to go to college.”
Dozens more rise.
“Stand if you started your degree more than 10 years ago,” and then the president tells them to stay standing as he ticks off intervals of time, “Fifteen years? Twenty years? Twenty-five years?”




Can the Brain Explain Your Mind?



V.S. Ramachandran:

Is studying the brain a good way to understand the mind? Does psychology stand to brain anatomy as physiology stands to body anatomy? In the case of the body, physiological functions–walking, breathing, digesting, reproducing, and so on–are closely mapped onto discrete bodily organs, and it would be misguided to study such functions independently of the bodily anatomy that implements them. If you want to understand what walking is, you should take a look at the legs, since walking is what legs do. Is it likewise true that if you want to understand thinking you should look at the parts of the brain responsible for thinking?
Is thinking what the brain does in the way that walking is what the body does? V.S. Ramachandran, director of the Center for Brain and Cognition at the University of California, San Diego, thinks the answer is definitely yes. He is a brain psychologist: he scrutinizes the underlying anatomy of the brain to understand the manifest process of the mind. He approvingly quotes Freud’s remark “Anatomy is destiny”–only he means brain anatomy, not the anatomy of the rest of the body.




USA Today series forces look at cheating



Jay Matthews:

The Los Angeles Board of Education shocked the city, and much of the education world, last week by ordering six charter schools shut down after a charter official was found to have orchestrated cheating on state tests. It is rare for a school board to close that many charters at once. Even the local teachers union, often hostile to charters, advised against it.
But more surprising, and perhaps a sign of a significant shift in the national debate over testing, is the fact that the jump in scores at the Crescendo charter system was investigated at all. USA Today, in a series of stories launched this week, has compiled nationwide evidence of inexplicable test score gains, followed by equally puzzling collapses, that experts say suggest cheating but are ignored by the officials responsible for those schools.




‘Insanity,’ ‘stupidity’ drive education reform efforts



Susan Troller:

A big crowd packed into the University of Wisconsin’s Memorial Union Theater on Tuesday night to hear education historian Diane Ravitch, considered one of the most influential scholars in the nation on schools.
In her talk, she ripped into Gov. Scott Walker’s budget, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan’s Race to the Top, the obsession with measuring student progress through high stakes testing, privatization of education through charters and vouchers and No Child Left Behind legislation that is closing schools and punishing teachers.
Her gloomy assessment of the current passion for “fixing” education and vilifying teachers is particularly striking because Ravitch herself is a former proponent of school testing and accountability and an early supporter of the No Child Left Behind legislation.




Dad, I Prefer the Shiraz Do Parents Who Serve Teens Beer and Wine at Home Raise Responsible Drinkers?



Melinda Beck:

Parents teach their children how to swim, how to ride a bicycle and how to drive. Should they also teach their teenagers how to drink responsibly?
The volatile issue is seldom discussed at alcohol-awareness programs. But some parents do quietly allow their teens to have wine or beer at home occasionally, figuring that kids who drink in moderation with their family may be less likely to binge on their own.
Many other parents argue that underage drinking of any kind is dangerous and illegal, and that parents who allow it are sending an irresponsible message that could set teens up for alcohol abuse in later years.
U.S. government surveys have started tracking where and how teenagers obtain alcohol–and that at least some of the time, parents are the suppliers.




Math Night a chance for kids, parents to learn, have fun



Pamela Cotant:

The teacher-run Math Night at Madison’s Olson Elementary was a chance for parents and children to play math games together, but there’s more to the event.
“The real reason behind it is to have families and kids think a little differently about math,” said Dawn Weigel Stiegert, instructional resource teacher at Olson.
At the recent second annual event, the activities focused on geometry, measurement and math facts/number work. Each area had games designed for different grade levels and chosen by the teachers to fit with math standards for the various grades. The games allow parents, who learned math differently when they were in school, to see the expectations at the different grade levels and how their children are learning math, Weigel Stiegert said.




Tested: Covering schools in the age of micro-measurement



LynNell Hancock:

Eleven New York City education reporters were huddling on e-mail last October 20, musing over ways to collectively pry a schedule of school closings out of a stubborn press office, when the chatter stopped cold. Word had filtered into their message bins that the city was about to release a set of spreadsheets showing performance scores for 12,000 of the city’s 80,000 teachers–names included. Few understood better than the beat reporters that this wonky-sounding database was a game changer.
The Los Angeles Times already had jolted newsrooms across the country back in August, when it published 6,000 public school teachers’ names next to its own performance calculations. New York education reporters, though, were considerably more reluctant to leap on this bandwagon. They found themselves with twenty-four hours to explain a complex and controversial statistical analysis, first to their editors and then to the public, while attempting to fend off the inevitable political and competitive pressure to print the names next to the numbers, something nearly every one of them opposed. “I stayed up all night kind of panicked,” said Lindsey Christ, the education reporter for the local NY1 television station, “writing a memo to everyone in the newsroom explaining what was coming and what was at stake.”




`Illiterate’ boy takes on state



Agence France Press:

A 15-year-old Australian boy is suing the government after allegedly being left illiterate and innumerate despite being taught at a state-run school, officials confirmed yesterday.
The Victoria state education department said it was defending the claim made by the boy from Melbourne.
Lawyers for the student reportedly told the Federal Court that the state government promises a “world-class” education for students, but the boy had been severely bullied at school and left illiterate and innumerate.




After Amputation, Wrestler Tries to Ease Rival’s Pain



Dirk Johnson:

When Heriberto Avila lost his leg as a result of an accident during a high school wrestling match in January, he and his family could have started calling lawyers. They could have turned bitter or angry.
But on the day Heriberto, a Belvidere North High School senior known as Eddie, woke up in a hospital bed and tearfully struggled to deal with the shock that his left leg had been amputated, he reminded his family and his pastor, who were in the room with him, that he was not the only one who needed solace.
He was worried about his wrestling opponent, Sean McIntrye, a senior at Genoa-Kingston High School, whose legal take-down had caused the broken bones and the rupture in a blood vessel that led to the amputation.




Private-School Strivers Increase by 10%



Shelly Banjo:

In another sign that the city’s economic recovery is flourishing, demand for the city’s private schools increased by nearly 10% this year, according to new data to be released Monday.
The number of parents willing to spend upwards of $30,000 a year for elite private schools increased sharply last year, as the number of children who took the admission tests jumped to 4,668, according the Educational Records Bureau, which administers the tests.
The last time private schools saw this kind of increase was between 2006 and 2007, when the city’s real-estate market was in a frenzy, the stock market was at an all-time high and the number of students taking the admissions tests shot up by 12%. When the financial crisis hit in 2008, test takers dipped by nearly 2%; they fell by 5% in 2009.
“We had a banner year in 2007 with a surge in test takers, but where we are now even surpasses that jump,” ERB’s executive director, Antoinette DeLuca, said.




High School Football Recruiting’s New Face



Pete Thamel:

Sony Michel is still a high school freshman, yet he has shown flashes of Hall of Fame potential. A tailback for American Heritage in Plantation, Fla., Michel has rushed for 39 touchdowns and nearly 3,500 yards in two varsity seasons.
“He’s on par to be Emmitt Smith, on par to be Deion Sanders, on par to be Jevon Kearse,” said Larry Blustein, a recruiting analyst for The Miami Herald who has covered the beat for 40 years. “He’ll be one of the legendary players in this state.”
Michel’s recruitment will also be a test case for a rapidly evolving college football landscape. The proliferation of seven-on-seven nonscholastic football has transformed the high school game, once defined by local rivalries, state championships and the occasional all-star game, into a national enterprise.




Requiem for Multiculturalism



Noel Williams:

Stop the presses! The British, French and German heads of state agree on something: Cameron, Sarkozy and Merkel have all recently declared multiculturalism a failure.
Like the related dogma of diversity, multiculturalism is so deeply embedded in the lexicon of liberalism that it has become axiomatic. Proponents hold it so dear that the faintest doubt poses an existential threat.
With the stakes so high, agnostics face sanctimonious wrath: if you don’t believe in multiculturalism there is simply something wrong with you; maybe you’re even nuts. While I have reservations I think I’m basically sane, and I sure as heck hope the aforementioned world leaders are operating with a full deck.
It’s important to distinguish between diversity and multiculturalism, which are often lumped together in liberal orthodoxy. Diversity is inherently good; but multiculturalism too often leads to separation and resentment that foments extremism.




On School Choice



Patrick McIlheran:

Take the school John Norquist sent his son to when he was mayor of Milwaukee. It’s private because it bought into the decidedly non-mainstream Waldorf movement. The Norquist family obviously felt it was worth the tuition, which the mayor could afford.
The school also accepted children via Milwaukee’s school choice program, so poor children could attend. Who was left out? Children from families neither poor nor well-off, including children whose parents worked for Norquist as firefighters and cops.
This is one reason Norquist says Gov. Scott Walker is right to expand school choice. By letting in the middle class, said Norquist, Walker makes better options available to middle-income parents in Milwaukee.
Norquist swiftly adds that he agrees with nothing else Walker has proposed lately. The ex-mayor goes on at length that he believes Walker wrong to limit public-union bargaining power.
That said, he vigorously favors more school choice. Milwaukee has school choice for the middle class, only it amounts to moving out to somewhere that the public schools are good. “One of the reasons people leave the city is because they feel they don’t have good choices for their kids,” Norquist said. “This bill changes that.”




Higher education: An Iowa success story



Robert Downer:

Iowa has been widely known as an “education state” throughout its existence. Because of population shifts and changing educational needs for our K-12 students, this part of our education system receives a great deal of attention.
There is another component of Iowa’s education system which internally has probably not attracted as much attention but which has brought both distinction and tens of thousands of high school graduates to our state for more than a century and a half.
That component is higher education – public universities under the governance of the Board of Regents, private colleges and universities, and area community colleges. All have made great contributions to Iowa, the United States and the world. Their economic impact within Iowa might be described as “hidden in plain sight.”




The Way You Learned Math Is So Old School



NPR:

Your fifth-grader asks you for help with the day’s math homework. The assignment: Create a “stem-and-leaf” plot of the birthdays of each student in the class and use it to determine if one month has more birthdays than the rest, and if so, which month? Do you:
a) Stare blankly
b) Google “stem-and-leaf plot”
c) Say, “Why do you need to know that?”
d) Shrug and say, “I must have been sick the day they taught that in math class.”
If you’re a parent of a certain age, your kids’ homework can be confounding. Blame it on changes in the way children are taught math nowadays — which can make you feel like you’re not very good with numbers.
Well, our math guy, Keith Devlin, is very good at math, and he tells Weekend Edition Saturday host Scott Simon that there’s a reason elementary schools are teaching arithmetic in a new way.
“That’s largely to reflect the different needs of society,” he says. “No one ever in their real life anymore needs to — and in most cases never does — do the calculations themselves.”




China’s College Applicants: What Defines ‘Cheating’?



Lucia Pierce:

Thank you to those who have commented on my blog of February 28.
One reader made a thoughtful point about letters of recommendation and my use of the word “cheat.” The writer points out that in writing a letter of recommendation, the student has a chance for self-evaluation and that there is also transparency if the student writes and the teacher signs — both know what was said.
While I agree that self-evaluation and transparency are both good qualities, letters of recommendation for colleges are supposed to be confidential comments by a teacher about a student. In the States, it is rare for a teacher to agree to write a letter of recommendation if it will be negative, but a thoughtful letter that gives some detail about the work of a student, how a student interacts with others in the class, the degree of maturity shown, and the strengths and even some weaknesses as a way of showing where a student has worked hard to improve, are things that admissions people want to see; it’s one of the many efforts to get to know many aspects of the applicant.




Inside the multimillion-dollar essay-scoring business



Jessica Lussenhop:

Dan DiMaggio was blown away the first time he heard his boss say it.
The pensive, bespectacled 25-year-old had been coming to his new job in the Comcast building in downtown St. Paul for only about a week. Naturally, he had lots of questions.
At one point, DiMaggio approached his increasingly red-faced supervisor at his desk with another question. Instead of answering, the man just hissed at him.
“You know this stuff better than I do!” he said. “Stop asking me questions!”
DiMaggio was struck dumb.
“I definitely didn’t feel like I knew what was going on at all,” he remembers. “Your supervisor has to at least pretend to know what’s going on or everything falls apart.”
DiMaggio’s question concerned an essay titled, “What’s your goal in life?” The answer for a surprising number of seventh-graders was to lift 200 pounds.




How Chinese Students Struggle to Apply to U.S. Colleges



Lucia Pierce

As I’ve worked with Chinese students who want to attend college or university in the US, there are some, not surprising, generalizations that apply to the process and there are also constant and gratifying distinctive stories that keep me from being too stereotypical in my assumptions.
Today the generalizations.
The US college application preparation is 180-degrees different from preparing to attend college in China. At the most basic level it is a difference between one test score (in China) and a process of many forms, the occasional interview, and each school’s idiosyncratic process (in the States). In China, “universities” are the desired place for undergraduate education; “colleges” are three-year institutions more like our vocational schools. This difference can lead to some confusion at the outset of talking with Chinese students and parents about undergraduate education in the US.




New Berlin teen with Asperger’s finds he belongs on the stage



Laurel Walker:

When Judy Smith was looking for someone to play the central role of stage manager in “Our Town,” the classic Thornton Wilder play about life in small-town America, she wasn’t expecting to cast a boy with Asperger’s syndrome.
Yet when 14-year-old Clayton Mortl auditioned more than six weeks ago, Smith said she experienced a director’s “quintessential moment.” He was perfect for the role.
Legendary actors like Paul Newman have brought powerful performances to the play – a staple of Broadway, community theater and classrooms since its 1938 debut, said Smith, the performing arts center manager and theater arts adviser at New Berlin West Middle / High School.
But when the 18-member middle school cast takes the stage Thursday, at 10 a.m. and 7 p.m., Clay’s performance may be legendary in its own right.
Though everyone is different, people with Asperger’s – an autism spectrum disorder – have impaired ability to socially interact and communicate nonverbally. Their speech may sound different because of inflection or abnormal repetition. Body movements may not seem age appropriate. Interests may be narrowly focused to the extent that common interests aren’t shared.




Charter school effort stirs fight in N.Y. district



Fernanda Santos

The guests sipped wine and nibbled sushi, guacamole and Gruyere – lawyers, bankers, preschool teachers, managers and consultants of various kinds, bound together by the anxious decision they must confront in the months ahead: where their 4-year-olds will go to school in the fall.
Downstairs, a flyer by the doorman’s desk had greeted them with a provocative question: “Why should you have to spend college tuition on kindergarten?” Back upstairs, in the stylish apartment on West 99th Street, Eva S. Moskowitz, a former City Council member who runs a network of charter schools in Harlem and the Bronx, delivered a tantalizing sales talk.
“Middle-class families need options too,” she said.
But Moskowitz is trying to expand her chain into a whole new precinct of the city, the relatively well-off Upper West Side. And outside the parties she has organized to drum up interest, the reaction has been anything but warm from the neighborhood’s stridently anti-charter political establishment.




‘Crazy U,’ by Andrew Ferguson, about his family’s college admissions experience



Steven Livingston:

My daughter’s college applications are all in, and now we can quietly go nuts while admissions fairies from coast to coast get busy, as Andrew Ferguson wonderfully puts it, “sprinkling pixie dust and waving wands, dashing dreams or making them come true.”
It’s an apt metaphor because, as anyone who’s been in it knows, the family caravan to collegeland is magical and terrifying: You begin wide-eyed and innocent, skipping along with outsized hopes, only to shrink before the fire-breathing ogres of the SAT, the essay, the deadlines, the costs. In “Crazy U,” Ferguson invites you to join him on the dream-mare that he and his son endured.
The book is both a hilarious narrative and an incisive guide to the college admissions process. Ferguson, a senior editor at the Weekly Standard, has done his research, poring over mountains of published material and interviewing admissions officers, college coaches, academics and the guy behind the U.S. News & World Report college rankings.




American Teaching Standards: Don’t know much about history



The Economist:

Many states emphasise abstract concepts rather than history itself. In Delaware, for example, pupils “will not be expected to recall any specific event or person in history”. Other states teach children about early American history only once, when they are 11. Yet other states show scars from the culture wars. A steady, leftward lean has been followed by a violent lurch to the right. Standards for Texas, passed last year, urge pupils to question the separation of church and state and “evaluate efforts by global organisations to undermine US sovereignty through the use of treaties”.
Some states fare better. South Carolina has set impressive standards–for example, urging teachers to explain that colonists did not protest against taxation simply because taxes were too high. Other states, Mr Finn argues, would do well to follow South Carolina’s example. “Twenty-first century skills” may help pupils become better workers; learning history makes them better citizens.

Related: The State of State U.S. History Standards 2011: Wisconsin = F.




Can parents effectively reclaim duties after funding cuts?



Alan Borsuk:

This is a boom time for parental choice in education. Frankly, that’s pretty scary to me.
I’m not talking about the school voucher program or charter schools, or other things like that.
I’m talking about the choices parents make in how they raise their children – how they can do (or not do) things that maximize the chances of their children becoming well-educated, well-balanced, constructive adults.
Since, say, the 1960s, expectations have grown for schools to take care of an increasing range of children’s needs. That goes for academics, of course, but also for social development, recreation, mentoring and, in many cases, providing nutrition, clothing and some basics of health care. That’s especially true for schools serving low-income kids, but you’d be surprised how often it is true in all schools.
I believe that one of the things we are seeing in the continuing chaos in Madison is that the tide is cresting for schools to play such roles. Teachers and staff members are simply going to be unable to do some of the things they’ve done to make up for what parents aren’t doing.




More Flexibility to Raise Tuition?



Dr. Sara Goldrick-Rab:

Central to debates over the New Badger Partnership is the question of whether additional flexibilities that make it possible to raise tuition are desirable.
Evidence can and must be used to make these decisions. A robust, evidence-based debate on our campus is obviously needed but to date has not occurred. Instead, to many of us outside Bascom it seems as though administrators have mostly relied on the input of a few economists and some other folks who work in higher education but are not scholars of higher education. It also seems like seeking advice from those mostly likely to agree with you. (Please–correct me if I’m wrong–very happy to be corrected with evidence on this point.)
It would be wonderful to see a more thorough review of existing evidence and the development of an evaluation plan that will assess positive and negative impacts of any new policy in ways that allow for the identification of policy effects– not correlations. (Let’s be clear: comparing enrollment of Pell recipients before and after the implementation of a policy like the MIU does not count.)
A few years ago I blogged about studies on the effects of tuition and financial aid on individual decision-making. To summarize– effects of each are relatively small (especially when compared to effects of academic under-preparation, for example) but usually statistically significant. Also, what we call “small” reflects our value judgments, and we must recognize that.




Chicago’s Urban Prep Academies Visits Madison: Photos & a Panorama



.
Students from Chicago’s Urban Prep Academies visited Madison Saturday, 2/26/2011 in support of the proposed Madison Preparatory IB Charter school. A few photos can be viewed here.
David Blaska:

I have not seen the Madison business community step up to the plate like this since getting Monona Terrace built 20 years ago.
CUNA Mutual Foundation is backing Kaleem Caire’s proposal for a Madison Prep charter school. Steve Goldberg, president of the CUNA Foundation, made that announcement this Saturday morning. The occasion was a forum held at CUNA to rally support for the project. CUNA’s support will take the form of in-kind contributions, Goldberg said.
Madison Preparatory Academy for Young Men would open in August 2012 — if the Madison school board agrees. School board president Maya Cole told me that she knows there is one vote opposed. That would be Marj Passman, a Madison teachers union-first absolutist.
The school board is scheduled to decide at its meeting on March 28. Mark that date on your calendars.
CUNA is a much-respected corporate citizen. We’ll see if that is enough to overcome the teachers union, which opposes Madison Prep because the charter school would be non-union.




On teachers unions, the devil is in the details



Robert Maranto
:

Here are the fiscal facts. Unlike most employees, few Wisconsin teachers have to contribute more than marginally to their retirement and health care costs. My colleague Bob Costrell, who has done substantial work in Milwaukee, calculates that the city’s public school teachers get a remarkable package of benefits equal to 74% of salary, roughly double the normal benefits for workers calculated by the Bureau of Labor Statistics but in line with other Wisconsin teachers.
And that’s not all. By collective bargaining agreement, the Wisconsin Education Association Council has a lock on health insurance coverage for members, not necessarily a great service for teachers but a wonderful profit center for the union.
What explains this? As one who has served in government and taught public personnel management, the answers are three-fold, and in combination explain why allowing a broad scope for collective bargaining undermines transparency and, ultimately, democracy.
First, teachers unions play a big role in politics, meaning that, as Terry Moe writes in “Teacher Unions and School Board Elections” (published in a Brookings Institution book on school boards), “the fact that school boards are elected means that the teacher unions can actually participate in choosing – or even literally choose – the management they will be bargaining with.”
In the California school districts Moe studies, unions fund candidates and mobilize voters in (low-turnout) school board elections and often recruit the candidates. Unions thus control both sides of the collective bargaining table. Surveys of school board members suggest that business interests, in contrast, have little power.
I have not seen comparable research on Wisconsin, but I suspect similar dynamics.




A Payday for Your Kids?



Rachel Emma Silverman:

Giving kids’ allowances raises lots of questions for parents: How much to pay? Should the money be tied to chores – and if so, which ones? Can the kids spend the money freely, or must they save part of it?
One family I read about in the Journal of Financial Planning paid their kids $6 a week, but allowances weren’t tied to chores. The purpose of chores, said the parents (a financial planner and psychiatrist) was to develop a work ethic, while the purpose of an allowance was to help kids “learn to think, chose and consider alternatives when it comes to money.” The $6, though, was divvied up very specifically: $2 went directly to the kids, who could spend it however they chose; $2 went to a charity of the kids’ choice and $2 went to the bank. At the end of the year, the kids could withdraw half the money saved and spend it, leaving the other half to grow for longer. The purpose of the plan is to help the kids learn how to make smart decisions regarding finances and learn about the three main uses of money: spending, saving and giving.
I recently learned about another novel way to give allowance. One mom of a 4-year-old daughter, Alisa T. Weinstein, decided to forgo the traditional idea of paying for household chores. Instead, she compiled a list of careers and simple “kiddified” tasks associated with them. (A market researcher, for example, could do a small verbal survey of classmates’ favorite ice cream flavors, or a banker could give different denominations of change.) Each week or so, her daughter would take on the role of a certain profession and perform the associated work. At the end, Weinstein rewarded her daughter with a “payday,” according to the New York Times’ Bucks blog, which profiled Weinstein.




A Fund-Raiser Grown Wild



Shirene Saad:

The word “fund-raiser” evokes an image of endless speeches, bland evening gowns and even blander buffets, but Edible Schoolyard’s yearly benefit should veer a little more toward the wild side. With three fabulous hostesses (the food artist Jennifer Rubell, the fashion buyer Julie Gilhart and the 303 gallerist Lisa Spellman) and a storied downtown locale (the Odeon), the event promises to be more Studio 54 than Cipriani Ballroom. “It’s the kind of fund-raiser that I would love to attend, a fund-raiser that is not boring” says Rubell, just back from the opening of her “Engagement” show at the Stephen Friedman gallery in London. “My favorite women in the city will be there, including Lynn Wagenknecht” — the restaurant’s owner — “who came up with the idea.”
The $50 cover charge goes toward supporting Edible Schoolyard, the Alice Waters-founded organization that creates small farms in public schoolyards to reconnect children with the food-growing cycle. “I think kids should be exposed to the aesthetics of food from a very young age,” Rubell says. “And growing food is so exciting.”




Cutting Tuition: A First Step?



Room for Debate:

Despite the outcry over high college costs, tuition rates are still going up. Princeton, Brown, Stanford and George Washington, for example, all announced increases in the last few weeks.
But a Tennessee college, the University of the South, better known as Sewanee, is reducing the cost to attend the school next year by 10 percent.
Tuition, fees, and room and board are all affected, with the overall cost falling from around $46,000 to about $41,500. The university said it will alter its student aid formula, but officials say no students will pay more next year than they pay now, and most will pay less.




Future of education? Droids teaching toddlers



Charles Choi:

Robots could one day help teach kids in classrooms, suggests research involving droids and toddlers in California.
A robot named RUBI has already shown that it can significantly improve how well infants learn words, and the latest version of the bot under development should also be able to wheel around classrooms, too.
The idea to develop RUBI came to Javier Movellan, director of the Machine Perception Laboratory at the University of California, San Diego, when he was in Japan for research involving robots and his kids were in a child care center.
“I thought, ‘Let’s bring robots to the child care center,’ and the children got really scared. It was a really horrible experience,” Movellan recalled. “But it showed that the robots really got their attention, and that if we got the experience right, it could be potentially very powerful at evoking the emotional responses we’d want.”




Your Life Torn Open, essay 1: Sharing is a trap



Andrew Keen:

The author of The Cult Of The Amateur argues that if we lose our privacy we sacrifice a fundamental part of our humanity.
Every so often, when I’m in Amsterdam, I visit the Rijksmuseum to remind myself about the history of privacy. I go there to gaze at a picture called The Woman in Blue Reading a Letter, which was painted by Jan Vermeer in 1663. It is of an unidentified Dutch woman avidly reading a letter. Vermeer’s picture, to borrow a phrase from privacy advocates Louis Brandeis and Samuel Warren, is a celebration of the “sacred precincts of private and domestic life”. It’s as if the artist had kept his distance in order to capture the young woman, cocooned in her private world, at her least socially visible.
Today, as social media continues radically to transform how we communicate and interact, I can’t help thinking with a heavy heart about The Woman in Blue. You see, in the networking age of Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare, the social invisibility that Vermeer so memorably captured is, to excuse the pun, disappearing. That’s because, as every Silicon Valley notable, from Eric Schmidt to Mark Zuckerberg, has publicly acknowledged, privacy is dead: a casualty of the cult of the social. Everything and everyone on the internet is becoming collaborative. The future is, in a word, social.




New Way to Check Out eBooks



Katherine Boehret:

Get out your library cards: Now you can wirelessly download electronic books from your local library using the Apple iPad or an Android tablet.
Last week, OverDrive Inc. released OverDrive Media Console for the iPad, a free app from Apple’s App Store. With the app, you can now borrow eBooks for reading on the go with a tablet.
You can already borrow an eBook from a library using an eReader, including the Sony Reader and Barnes & Noble Nook, but you’ll need a PC and a USB cable for downloading and synching. Amazon’s Kindle doesn’t allow borrowing eBooks from libraries.
For the past week, I borrowed and wirelessly downloaded digital books onto tablets primarily using OverDrive, the largest distributor of eBooks for libraries. I tested the OverDrive Media Console for the iPad. I also used the Dell Streak 7 tablet to test the app on the Android operating system; this app also works on Android smartphones. An iPhone app is available.




Milwaukee & Madison Public Schools to be Closed Monday, 2/21/2011 Due to Teacher Absences



Tom Kertscher:

Milwaukee Public Schools is closed Monday for Presidents Day, according to a statement on the home page of the district’s website.
Superintendent Gregory Thornton said in the statement he wants to “assure families that we intend to have classes on Tuesday as scheduled.”
The home page also includes a “fact sheet for families” about the demonstrations in Madison. It says MPS closed schools Friday because more than 1,000 MPS teachers attended the demonstrations. Another day of school will be added to make up for Friday, and teachers who were absent without leave face possible disciplinary action ranging from pay deductions to termination, according the fact sheet.
Members of the Milwaukee Teachers’ Education Association union plan to participate in demonstrations in Madison on Monday.
The Madison Metropolitan School District, which was scheduled to be open for Presidents Day, will close because of “substantial concerns about significant staff absences,” according to a statement issues Sunday evening by the district.
However, classes are scheduled to resume Tuesday because the district “received assurances” that teachers would return then, the statement said.




Why the world’s youth is in a revolting state of mind



Martin Wolf:

In Tunisia and Egypt, the young are rebelling against old rulers. In Britain, they are in revolt against tuition fees. What do these young people have in common? They are suffering, albeit in different ways, from what David Willetts, the UK government’s minister of higher education, called the “pinch” in a book published last year.
In some countries, the challenge is an excess of young people; in others, it is that the young are too few. But where the young outnumber the old, they can hope to secure a better fate through the ballot box. Where the old outnumber the young, they can use the ballot box to their advantage, instead. In both cases, powerful destabilising forces are at work, bringing opportunity to some and disappointment to others.
Demography is destiny. Humanity is in the grip of three profound transformations: first, a far greater proportion of children reaches adulthood; second, women have far fewer children; and, third, adults live far longer. These changes are now working through the world, in sequence. The impact of the first has been to raise the proportion of the population that is young. The impact of the second is the reverse, decreasing the proportion of young people. The third, in turn, increases the proportion of the population that is very old. The impact of the entire process is first to expand the population and, later on, to shrink it once again.




Madison School District’s “K-12 Literacy Program Evaluation”



Prepared by the Literacy Advisory Committee with support from the Hanover Research Council, 6MB PDF Recommendations and Costs pages 129-140, via a kind reader’s email:

1. Intensify reading instruction in Kindergarten in order to ensure all No additional costs. Professional development provided by central students are proficient in oral reading and comprehension as office and building-based literacy staff must focus on Kindergarten. measured by valid and reliable assessments by 2011-2012. Instruction and assessment will be bench marked to ensure Kindergarten proficiency is at readinQ levels 3-7 {PLAA, 2009).
2. Fully implement Balanced Literacy in 2011-12 using clearly defined, Comprehensive Literacy Model (Linda Dorn), the MMSD Primary Literacy Notebook and the MMSD 3-5 Literacy Notebook.
a. Explore research-based reading curricula using the Board of Education Evaluation of Learning Materials Policy 3611 with particular focus on targeted and explicit instruction, to develop readers in Kindergarten.
b. Pilot the new reading curricula in volunteer schools during 2011-12.
c. Analyze Kindergarten reading proficiency scores from Kindergarten students in fully implemented Balanced Literacy schools and Kindergarten students in the volunteer schools piloting the new reading curricula incorporated into a
Balanced Literacy framework to inform next steps.
d. Continue pilot in volunteer schools in Grade 1 during 2012-13 and Grade 2 durino 2013-14. 2011-12 Budget Addition Request $250,000
3. Incorporate explicit reading instruction and literacy curricula into 6th grade instruction.
…..
3. Review previous Reading Recovery recommendations, with Additional Reading considerations to:

  • Place Reading Recovery Teachers in buildings as needed to (displaced rate when new teacher is hired).reflect the needs of 20% of our District’s lowest performing first graders, regardless of what elementary school they may attend;
  • Analyze the other instructional assignments given to Reading Recovery teachers in order to maximize their expertise as highly skilled reading interventionists
  • Ensure standard case load for each Reading Recovery teacher at National Reading Recovery standards and guidelines (e.g. 8 students/year).
  • Place interventionists in buildings without Reading Recovery. Interventionists would receive professional development to lift the quality of interventions for students who need additional support in literacy.

Additional Reading Recovery and/or Interventionist FTE costs. 1 FTE-$79,915 (average rate when teacher is re-assigned). 1 new FTE-$61,180 (displaced rate when new teacher is hired).

Related:




Urban Prep Academy of Chicago celebrates perfect college acceptance



WALB

Every member in an Illinois school’s senior class has been accepted into college for the second time in the school’s two-year history.
“No other public school in the country has done this,” said Tim King, CEO and founder of Urban Prep Academy in Chicago.
The school was established to battle the low high school and college graduation rates among black men.
“We are Urban Prep men,” said Israel Wilson, a 2010 graduate and student at Morehouse College. “And at Urban Prep, we believe.”




ACE Statement Regarding MMSD (Madison School District) Actions



Don Severson, via email:

Attached is the Active Citizens for Education statement regarding the MMSD Board of Education and Administration actions related to the Governor’s Budget Repair Bill.
Here is the link to the video of the MMSD Board meeting on 02/14/11
http://mediaprodweb.madison.k12.wi.us/node/601 go to the 9:50 minute mark for Marj Passman.
Letters from the Board and Superintendent to Governor Walker are accessible from the home page of the MMSD website.
http://www.madison.k12.wi.us/

Glaringly, there is no leadership from the Madison Metropolitan School District Board of Education nor administration for the overall good of the community, teachers nor students as evidenced by their actions the past few days. Individual Board members and the Board as a whole, as well as the administration, are complicit in the job action taken by teachers and their union. The Board clearly stepped out of line. Beginning Monday night at its Board meeting, Board member Marj Passman took advantage of signing up for a ‘public appearance’ statement as a private citizen. She was allowed to make her statement from her seat at the Board table instead of at the public podium–totally inappropriate. Her statement explicitly gave support to the teachers who she believed were under attack from the Walker proposed budget repair bill; that she was totally in support of the teachers; and encouraged teachers to take their protests to the Capital. Can you imagine any other employer encouraging their employees to protest against them to maintain or increase their own compensation in order to help assure bankruptcy for the organization or to fire them as employees? All Board members subsequently signed a letter to Governor Walker calling his proposals “radical and punitive’ to the bargaining process. With its actions, including cancellation of classes for Wednesday, the Board has abdicated and abrogated its fiduciary responsibility for public trust. The Board threw their responsibility away as elected officials and representatives of the citizens and taxpayers for the education of the children of the District and as employers of the teachers and staff. The Board cannot lead nor govern when it abdicates its statutory responsibilities and essentially acts as one with employees and their union. Under these circumstances, it is obvious they have made the choice not to exercise their responsibilities for identifying solutions to the obvious financial challenges they face. The Board will not recognize the opportunities, nor tools, in front of them to make equitable, fair and educationally and financially sound decisions of benefit to all stakeholders in the education of our young people.

Don Severson
President, ACE

Much more, here.




Clips from Madison Superintendent Dan Nerad’s News Conference on Closed Schools & Teacher Job Action



Matthew DeFour: (watch the 15 minute conference here)

Madison School District Superintendent Dan Nerad discusses on Wednesday Gov. Scott Walker’s bill, teacher absences, and Madison Teachers Inc.



Related:

Dave Baskerville is right on the money: Wisconsin needs two big goals:

For Wisconsin, we only need two:
Raise our state’s per capita income to 10 percent above Minnesota’s by 2030.
In job and business creation over the next decade, Wisconsin is often predicted to be among the lowest 10 states. When I was a kid growing up in Madison, income in Wisconsin was some 10 percent higher than in Minnesota. Minnesota caught up to us in 1967, and now the average Minnesotan makes $4,500 more than the average Wisconsinite.
Lift the math, science and reading scores of all K-12, non-special education students in Wisconsin above world-class standards by 2030. (emphasis added)
Wisconsinites often believe we lose jobs because of lower wages elsewhere. In fact, it is often the abundance of skills (and subsidies and effort) that bring huge Intel research and development labs to Bangalore, Microsoft research centers to Beijing, and Advanced Micro Devices chip factories to Dresden.

Grow the economy (tax base) and significantly improve our schools….




Colorado school district has wealth, success — and an eye on vouchers



Nicholas Riccardi:

Douglas County, a swath of subdivisions just south of here that is one of the nation’s wealthiest, is something of a public school paradise.
The K-12 district, with 60,000 students, boasts high test scores and a strong graduation rate. Surveys show that 90% of its parents are satisfied with their children’s schools.
That makes the Douglas County School District an unlikely frontier in the latest battle over school vouchers.
But a new, conservative school board is exploring a voucher system to give parents — regardless of income — taxpayer money to pay for their children to attend private schools that agree to abide by district regulations. If it’s implemented, parents could receive more than $4,000 per child.
The proposal’s supporters argue that competition can only improve already-high-performing schools.

Related: A School Board Thinks Differently About Delivering Education, and spends less.
Colorado’s Douglas County School District spends $8512.74 per student ($476,977,336 for 56,031 students in 2009). Madison spent $15,241 per student in 2009, a whopping $6,728.26, 79% more than the “wealthy Denver suburbs”.




Young people need hope to thrive in school, beyond



Bruce Fuller:

Rising stock prices signal upbeat expectations – echoed by employers and consumers – that the economy is finally bouncing back, Federal Reserve Chief Ben Bernanke says.
California’s young people aren’t so sure.
Three in 5 of them, age 16 to 22, now express sharp worries about finding a job or working long hours to pay for college, according to an eye-opening poll out last week. No civilization thrives when the next generation lacks optimism and chutzpah.




Open High Blazing New Path



Tom Vander Ark:

Imagine “one-on-one tutoring for every student in every subject” and you get a picture of Open High School, a virtual charter school serving 250 Utah students in ninth and tenth grades, expanding to up to 1500 students 9-12 by 2014.
Aptly named, the Open High School of Utah Trailblazers are forging new paths in multiple arenas,s but what sets them apart is their commitment to use open education resources (OER) where possible and to share what they develop under Creative Commons licenses.
The curriculum is hosted on MoodleRooms learning management system (but they miss their BrainHoney gradebook).