Analysis of Local Schools & Districts Based on 2007 WKCE Data



Madtown Chris, via email:

The 2007 state testing data is out and I thought I’d take another look. Again I’m looking here at Dane County area schools only compared with each other and state-wide as well. The data you will see only includes non-poor students — you can read more about why below.
Some Madison Elementary Schools are Tops
As you can see, Madison schools are simultaneously excellent and terrible. The top 8 are MMSD schools as are 6 of the bottom 10. Wow!
Not only does MMSD have top elementary schools in the area but the top 8 are above the 95% percentile statewide. That means those 8 schools are better (with respect to my measurements) than 95% of the other elementary schools in Wisconsin.
Furthermore, MMSD schools Lowell, Randall, and Van Hise are the #1, #2, and #3 elementary schools STATEWIDE. Yes you heard right. According to my ranking those are the 3 best elementary schools in the state for non-poor students.
Of the top 25 schools statewide, 7 are MMSD schools. No other area schools make the top 25.
You might consider moving to one of those attendance areas because these schools and the students in them are really, really good.

Much more on the WKCE here [RSS].




Wisconsin’s Low State Test Score Standards (“The Proficiency Illusion”)



Alan Borsuk:

The study found that “cut scores” – the line between proficient and not proficient – vary widely among the 26 states, casting doubt on the question of what it means when a state says a certain percentage of its students are doing well. Those percentages are central to the way the federal No Child Left Behind education law works.
The law’s accountability system, which focuses on things such as whether a school or district is making “adequate yearly progress,” is driven largely by how many students meet the standards a state sets for proficiency in reading and math. The goal is that all students, with a handful of exceptions, be proficient by 2014.
“Five years into implementation of the No Child Left Behind Act, there is no common understanding of what ‘proficiency’ means. . . . This suggests that the goal of achieving ‘100 percent proficiency’ has no coherent meaning, either,” says a summary of the study, issued by the Washington, D.C.-based Thomas B. Fordham Institute.
To illustrate the differences among the states, the study’s authors gave an example in which a fourth-grader in Wisconsin would be regarded as proficient if the child could correctly answer a fairly simple question involving cats and dogs, while a child in Massachusetts would not be proficient if he or she couldn’t answer a formidable question about the meaning of a passage by Leo Tolstoy.

From the Fordham Institute report:

Cats and Dogs vs. Tolstoy
Wisconsin
This is a fourth-grade item with a difficulty equivalent to Wisconsin’s proficiency cut score (16th percentile).
Which sentence tells a fact, not an opinion?
A. Cats are better than dogs.
B. Cats climb trees better than dogs.
C. Cats are prettier than dogs.
D. Cats have nicer fur than dogs.
Massachusetts
This is a fourth-grade item with a difficulty equivalent to Massachusetts’ proficiency cut score (65th percentile).
Read the excerpt from “How Much Land Does a Man Need?” by Leo Tolstoy
So Pahom was well contented, and everything would have been right if the neighboring peasants would only not have trespassed on his wheatfields and meadows. He appealed to them most civilly, but they still went on; now the herdsmen would let the village cows stray into his meadows, then horses from the night pasture would get among his corn. Pahom turned them out again and again, and forgave their owners, and for a long time he forbore to prosecute anyone. But at last he lost patience and complained to the District Court.
What is a fact from this passage?
A. Pahom owns a vast amount of land.
B. The peasant’s intentions are evil.
C. Pahom is a wealthy man.
D. Pahom complained to the District Court.
Source: Thomas B. Fordham Institute. The correct answers are B for the first item and D for the second.

Fordham Institute Study.
Much more on Wisconsin’s Knowledge & Concepts Exam here [RSS], including a recent Madison School Board Performance & Achievement Committee discussion on using WKCE to “Measure Student Performance“. Clusty Search on WKCE.
Ian Shapira:

A new study of state achievement tests offers evidence that the No Child Left Behind law’s core mission — to push all students to score well in reading and math — is undermined by wide variations in how states define a passing score.




Through a Lens, Darkly



David Margolick:

During the historic 1957 desegregation of Little Rock Central High School, 26-year-old journalist Will Counts took a photograph that gave an iconic face to the passions at the center of the civil-rights movement—two faces, actually: those of 15-year-old Elizabeth Eckford on her first day of school, and her most recognizable tormentor, Hazel Bryan. The story of how these two women struggled to reconcile and move on from the event is a remarkable journey through the last half-century of race relations in America.
It was a school night, and Elizabeth Eckford was too excited to sleep. The next morning, September 4, 1957, was her first day of classes, and one last time she ironed the pleated white skirt she’d made for the occasion. It was made of piqué cotton; when she’d run out of material, she’d trimmed it with navy-blue-and-white gingham. Then she put aside her new bobby socks and white buck loafers. Around 7:30 a.m. the following day, she boarded a bus bound for Little Rock Central High School.
Other black schoolchildren were due at Central that historic day, but Elizabeth would be the first to arrive. The world would soon know all about the Little Rock Nine. But when Elizabeth Eckford tried to enter Central, and thereby become the first black student to integrate a major southern high school, she was really the Little Rock One. The painfully shy 15-year-old daughter of a hyper-protective mother reluctant to challenge age-old racial mores, she was the unlikeliest trailblazer of all. But as dramatic as the moment was, it really mattered only because Elizabeth wandered into the path of Will Counts’s camera.




Our Schools Must Do Better



Via a reader’s email: Bob Hebert:

I asked a high school kid walking along Commonwealth Avenue if he knew who the vice president of the United States was.
He thought for a moment and then said, “No.”
I told him to take a guess.
He thought for another moment, looked at me skeptically, and finally gave up. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t know.”
The latest federal test results showed some improvement in public school math and reading scores, but there is no reason to celebrate these minuscule gains. We need so much more. A four-year college degree is now all but mandatory for building and sustaining a middle-class standard of living in the U.S.
Over the next 20 or 30 years, when today’s children are raising children of their own in an ever more technologically advanced and globalized society, the educational requirements will only grow more rigorous and unforgiving.
A one- or two-point gain in fourth grade test scores here or there is not meaningful in the face of that overarching 21st-century challenge.
What’s needed is a wholesale transformation of the public school system from the broken-down postwar model of the past 50 or 60 years. The U.S. has not yet faced up to the fact that it needs a school system capable of fulfilling the educational needs of children growing up in an era that will be at least as different from the 20th century as the 20th was from the 19th.
“We’re not good at thinking about magnitudes,” said Thomas Kane, a professor of education and economics at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. “We’ve got a bunch of little things that we think are moving in the right direction, but we haven’t stepped back and thought, ‘O.K., how big an improvement are we really talking about?’ ” Professor Kane and I were discussing what he believes are the two areas that have the greatest potential for radically improving the way children are taught in the U.S. Both are being neglected by the education establishment.

Herbert is spot on. The same old, same old (or, “Same Service”) strategy at ever larger dollar amounts has clearly run its course.
Herbert’s words focus on addressing teacher quality

“Concerned about raising the quality of teachers, states and local school districts have consistently focused on the credentials, rather than the demonstrated effectiveness — or ineffectiveness — of teachers in the classroom.”

, and alternative school models:

The second area to be mined for potentially transformative effects is the wide and varied field of alternative school models. We should be rigorously studying those schools that appear to be having the biggest positive effects on student achievement. Are the effects real? If so, what accounts for them?
The Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP), to cite one example, is a charter school network that has consistently gotten extraordinary academic results from low-income students. It has worked in cities big and small, and in rural areas. Like other successful models, it has adopted a longer school day and places great demands on its teachers and students.
Said Professor Kane: “These alternative models that involve the longer school day and a much more dramatic intervention for kids are promising. If that’s what it takes, then we need to know that, and sooner rather than later.”




Do Charter Schools Improve Behavior?



Jay Matthews:

More than 1.2 million students are attending more than 4,000 charter schools in 40 states and the District, up from 200,000 students in just 600 charter schools a decade ago. Charters are hot commodities, the public school equivalent of hybrid cars or left-handed relief pitchers. But many people are puzzled why that is so.
Charters are independent public schools that don’t have to follow many school district rules. They can usually choose their own curriculums and hire and fire staff without dealing with the teachers union. Those freedoms are enough to win the support of some parents, but most, I think, also want to know what such schools would do for their children.
That is where the allure of charters becomes harder to figure out. Several studies have shown that, on average, they don’t raise student achievement more than regular public schools with students of similar backgrounds. Yet many charters, even some with mediocre academic records, get lots of applications. What is going on?




Utah Voucher Politics Update



Bob Bernick & Lee Davidson:

Utah’s powerful Republican legislative leaders have quietly formed a political issue committee aimed at defeating a referendum on November’s ballot that would repeal a private school tuition voucher law passed by the 2007 Legislature.
That is not the only quiet move in the voucher battle. Loopholes in Utah campaign law are also allowing some groups on both sides of the fight to hide exactly who is providing hundreds of thousands of dollars of their funding.
The state’s voucher law would provide tuition payments of between $500 to $3,000 per child, based on parents’ income, to private schools. An anti-voucher citizen referendum petition drive last spring was successful, and the question of whether to repeal the new law will be on the November ballot.
With anti-voucher sentiment winning in recent public opinion polls in Utah, the GOP legislative leaders decided to take action to “educate citizens” on what the voucher law would really do, said Jeff Hartley, who has been hired by the Informed Voter Project PIC to run the leaders’ campaign.




A gifted student on ID’ing giftedness



Amy Hetzner:

In addition to hearing testimony at three public hearings in August, the state Department of Public Instruction also accepted written statements through the end of the last month on its proposed changes to the rule guiding the identification of gifted students in Wisconsin [PDF File].
Tucked among those 16 pages of comments was this perspective (with some editing for space):

“I am a fifteen-year-old home schooled student, and currently a full-time special student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. I spent nine years at EAGLE School of Madison, and one year at James Madison Memorial HS (MMSD).
“I also belong to two organizations for gifted students: Cogito (cogito.org) and Gifted Haven (giftedhaven.net). Cogito is run by the Center for Talented Youth, an organization sponsored by Johns Hopkins University. It is primarily populated by math- and science-oriented kids and teens who live in the United States, and who participated in a talent search in middle school. Membership is by invitation only. (I am not an active member of the community.)




“U of I, Iowa State Use Student Data to Sell Credit Cards”



Clark Kauffman:

Iowa’s two largest public universities are aggressively marketing credit cards to their students as part of an arrangement that generates millions of dollars for the schools’ privately run alumni organizations.
Publicly, the University of Iowa and Iowa State University have expressed concern over the debt of their students, many of whom graduate with $25,000 to $30,000 in bills to pay. The schools say they are trying to reduce that debt load.




Special Education: When Should Taxes Pay Private Tuition?



John Hechinger:

A decade ago, Tom Freston, then a top Viacom Inc. executive, began a legal battle to force New York City to pay for his son’s tuition at a Manhattan private school for children with learning disabilities.
Today, the U.S. Supreme Court is set to hear arguments to resolve the central question of the case: Must parents of special-education students give public schools a chance before having taxpayers reimburse them for private-school tuition? How the justices respond will have broad implications for school budgets and the movement toward “mainstreaming,” or educating disabled children in regular classrooms. Mr. Freston, pledging to donate any proceeds, has said the fight is about principle, not money.
Under a landmark 1975 special-education law, now known as the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, school systems must provide a “free appropriate” public education to disabled students. Congress, alarmed that schools were warehousing kids with special needs in poorly equipped classrooms, said that, wherever possible, the children should be placed in the “least restrictive environment” — often the same classrooms as their nondisabled peers. In 2005, about 54% of special-education students spent 80% or more of the school day in a regular classroom, up from 33% in 1990.
Nonetheless, the act permits parents to seek public financing for private schools if they can establish that the public schools can’t meet their children’s needs. About 88,000 of the nation’s more than six million special-education students are educated in private schools or in private residential facilities at public expense.




Absent From Class



There are many important variables to consider in evaluating the causes for academic failure or success in the high school classroom. The training of the teacher, the quality of the curriculum, school safety, the availability of books, and so on, are factors studied extensively, and all of them play a part.
But I would argue that the most important variable in student academic achievement is student academic work, including classroom work.
Why do so many of our high school students do so little academic work? Because they can get away with it.
A close study of the academic demands on students in the vast majority of our high school classrooms would disclose, I feel certain, that one of the principal reasons for students’ boredom is that they really have nothing to do but sit still and wait for the bell.
In most classrooms, the chances of a student being called on are slight, and of being called on twice are almost non-existent. If a student is called on and has not done the required reading or other class preparation, most probably the teacher will just call on someone else. There are no real consequences for being unprepared. As a result, many, if not most, students are not contributing in class and that can only deepen their boredom.
By contrast, on the football or soccer field, every player is called on in every practice and in nearly every game. Even for players on the bench, there is a constant possibility that they will be asked to perform at any time. If they don’t know what to do then, the embarrassment and disapproval will be swift and obvious. The same also could be said for high school theater productions, performances of the band or chorus, participation in model United Nations, and most of the students’ other activities.
In extracurricular activities, the student faces a kind of peer pressure to do well that is usually lacking in the classroom. Peers in the classroom may even think it is cool for another student to “get away with” having done no preparation.

(more…)




Against School: How Public Education Cripples our Kids, and Why



John Taylor Gatto:

How do we educate our children to be active, critical thinkers and not dumb passive consumers serving someone else interests? For however strange this may sound to you, it may have been “marketing” itself to bring us the terrible education system most civilized countries have adopted in the last century or so.
“The advent of mass production required a growth in mass consumption as well, but back then most people “considered it both unnatural and unwise to buy things they didn’t actually need“.

“We don’t need Karl Marx‘s conception of a grand warfare between the classes to see that it is in the interest of complex management, economic or political, to dumb people down, to demoralize them, to divide them from one another, and to discard them if they don’t conform.

Mandatory schooling was a godsend on that count. School didn’t have to train kids in any direct sense to think they should consume nonstop, because it did something even better: it encouraged them not to think at all. “

Non-sense, paranoia?

Prof. Cubberley, who was Dean of Stanford’s School of Education, wrote in his 1922 book entitled Public School Administration: “Our schools are . . . factories in which the raw products (children) are to be shaped and fashioned.. . . And it is the business of the school to build its pupils according to the specifications laid down.“

The essay I present here today, “Against School” by John Taylor Gatto, is a definitive eye-opener for all those buying into our present education system without any critical perspective.

“We have become a nation of children, happy to surrender our judgments and our wills to political exhortations and commercial blandishments that would insult actual adults. We buy televisions, and then we buy the things we see on the television. We buy computers, and then we buy the things we see on the computer.

…

And, worst of all, we don’t bat an eye when Ari Fleischer tells us to “be careful what you say“, even if we remember having been told somewhere back in school that America is the land of the free. We simply buy that one too. Our schooling, as intended, has seen to it.“

This is what Prof. Gatto writes without hesitation. He looks in depth at our present education system and analyzes the history and motives that have brought about “school” as we know it today.

And the more I look at it, the more I see how devastatingly negative, traditional school really is. As I have, if you are a parent to some young minds, consider well and deeply where and how to give them an education, and how to avoid the pitfalls of those paralyzing psychological handicaps that the traditional education system imposes on everyone.

“School trains children to be employees and consumers; teach your own to be leaders and adventurers. School trains children to obey reflexively; teach your own to think critically and independently. “

Read this fascinating essay in full:

Against School: How Public Education Cripples our Kids, and Why:

I taught for thirty years in some of the worst schools in Manhattan, and in some of the best, and during that time I became an expert in boredom.
Boredom was everywhere in my world, and if you asked the kids, as I often did, why they felt so bored, they always gave the same answers: They said the work was stupid, that it made no sense, that they already knew it. They said they wanted to be doing something real, not just sitting around. They said teachers didn’t seem to know much about their subjects and clearly weren’t interested in learning more. And the kids were right: their teachers were every bit as bored as they were.
Boredom is the common condition of schoolteachers, and anyone who has spent time in a teachers’ lounge can vouch for the low energy, the whining, the dispirited attitudes, to be found there.
When asked why they feel bored, the teachers tend to blame the kids, as you might expect. Who wouldn’t get bored teaching students who are rude and interested only in grades? If even that.
Of course, teachers are themselves products of the same twelve-year compulsory school programs that so thoroughly bore their students, and as school personnel they are trapped inside structures even more rigid than those imposed upon the children.

Every parent should take some time to read their children’s textbooks, particularly Connected Math, which appears to take a more consumer oriented approach to math education.




An Update on the Foundation For Madison Public Schools



Susan Troller:

“Be true to your school” could be the motto of a challenge the Foundation for Madison’s Public Schools has issued to friends and supporters of public education here.
According to Martha Vukelich-Austin, foundation president, it’s taken less than 10 months for over half the schools in Madison to meet a challenge grant aimed at helping build individual endowments at every local elementary, middle and high school in the city.
The foundation is an independent, nonprofit community group that raises money to help support public education in Madison.
The grant promises to match every dollar raised at each individual school with 50 cents from the Madison Community Foundation — which manages the funds for the Foundation for Madison Public Schools — up to $3,750 at each of 48 schools. Pledges totalling up to $180,000 will yield an extra $90,000 for the schools, for a total of $270,000 to be divided among 48 schools.
…….
For example, Mendota Elementary School, with one of Madison’s highest poverty rates among its students but strong academic scores, had an endowment of $36,745 as of the second week in September. Other elementary schools with impressive endowments include Thoreau, with $54,968, and Shorewood, with $39,047.
East High School has an endowment of $82,944, and tiny Shabazz City High has an endowment of $63,027, compared with West High School’s $26,800, Memorial High School’s $26,397 and La Follette High School’s $13,632.
Among middle schools, Cherokee and Spring Harbor lead the pack with $63,886 and $59,855 respectively.

Local entrepreneur John Taylor provided a $250K “Challenge Grant” in December, 2003. It would be interesting to add his perspective to the the conversation. Clusty Search on John Taylor.




A Law Best Left Behind



Jason Riley:

With its focus on testing, achievement, accountability and transparency, the No Child Left Behind Act has undoubtedly altered the terms of the education debate in the U.S. But the law, which is set to expire this year, remains seriously flawed, and the Bush administration’s weak enforcement of its best provisions argues against renewal.
George Miller, the 17-term liberal Democrat from California who chairs the House Education Committee, has issued a reauthorization draft proposal, and his provisions aren’t entirely without merit — he wants performance pay for teachers — but almost. On balance, his proposals do nothing to close accountability loopholes in NCLB and in most cases would expand them.
Mr. Miller’s “multiple measures” provision is a good example. NCLB uses math and reading test scores to determine whether students in a school are making Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) toward proficiency. Mr. Miller’s changes would allow schools to use less rigorous measures — like social-studies test results, good attendance and dropout rates — to grade AYP. We’ve gotten to the point where some consider merely showing up for school to be the equivalent of learning.
The soft bigotry of low expectations is also apparent in Mr. Miller’s plan to allow “local assessment” of educational progress. Right now, each state is charged with implementing its own academic norms and applying them uniformly in all school districts. Everyone in Illinois takes the same exam to measure AYP. Under the proposed changes, school districts would be allowed to walk away from state standards and create their own tests. The ability to compare districts would vanish, along with another way for parents to hold schools accountable.




How To Calculate School Taxes



Waukesha Taxpayer’s League:

Waukesha Forward has published their new newsletter and much of what they said, we agree with-the support the AB447, AB448 and AB449, the call on the union to slow down the rate of growth of teachers’ salaries. However, while we appreciate the board’s attempt to slow down the administrative salaries, we believe they should have been frozen. If our district adminstrative costs were brought into line with other districts (per position comparison), our district could have saved hundreds of thousands (see WaukeshaForward.org). In addition to slowing down the rate of growth in teacher salaries, we also believe there needs to be changes in the insurance–copays AND contributions to premiums. These are all things that the Waukesha Taxpayers League has supported for a very long time.
Now that we are coming into tax season, we will give a lesson on how to calculate school taxes. This has been an area of contention we have had with the school district and the way the tax increases get underplayed. Sometimes, the newspaper catches the misreprentation and sometimes they don’t.

The slowing real estate market will place more emphasis on “mill rate” increases vs. assessed values.




The New Affirmative Action



David Leonhardt:

In another time, it wouldn’t have been too hard to guess where Frances Harris would have ended up going to college. She has managed to do very well in very difficult circumstances, and she is African-American. Her high school, in the Oak Park neighborhood of Sacramento, was shut down as an irremediable failure the spring before her freshman year, then reopened months later as a charter school. Midway through high school, her father developed heart problems and became an irritable fixture around the home. She also discovered that he was not actually her biological father. That was a man named Leroy who, when her mother took Harris to see him, simply said his name was George and waited for her to leave. In Harris’s senior year, her mother lost her job at a nursing home and the family filed for bankruptcy.
Harris somehow stayed focused on teenage life. She earned an A-minus average and she distinguished herself as a debater. Her basketball teammates sometimes teased her for using big words, but they also elected her co-captain. As she led me on a tour of her school and her neighborhood one day this summer, she introduced me around with an assured ease that most adults can’t manage, even if her sentences are peppered with “like,” “you know” and “Oh, my God.” Her bedroom in the bungalow she shares with her parents is a masterpiece of teenage energy, the walls covered with her prom-queen tiara, her purple-and-white basketball jersey (No. 3) and photos of her friends. “The hardest part of high school,” she says, “was to be smart and cool at the same time.” She decided her dream college was the University of California, Los Angeles.
Ten or 20 years ago, Frances Harris almost certainly would have been admitted. Her excellent grades might not have even been necessary, because Berkeley and U.C.L.A. — the jewels in the U.C. system — accepted almost all of the African-Americans who met the basic application requirements. To an admissions officer, Harris would have seemed like gold: diversity and achievement, wrapped up in a single kid.




Residents Meet to Discuss Future of Madison Schools



Channel3000:

Madison residents met Thursday night to share ideas and concerns about the future of area schools.
A district-wide community roundtable tackled issues dealing with budget cuts, school closures, and school board leadership.
Residents from all over the city also discussed statewide education funding reform, keeping neighborhood schools open and improving the overall budget process.
Organizers said the roundtable helps stimulate new ideas and make current ones stronger.
“Even people who think they know each other and know each other’s points of view, when they really sit down and talk, they realize, ‘Oh, I didn’t know that about you. I didn’t know you shared that concern,'” said Rebecca Kemble, co-chair of the East Attendance Area PTO.
A district-wide forum with the Madison School Board is set for Oct. 21 at 3 p.m. at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Memorial Union.




Donor Of New Atlases Says Schools Shrugged Them Off



Susan Troller:

Don Becker finds it odd and annoying that in a time of dwindling resources and a beleaguered budget he’s had trouble giving money to Madison’s public schools.
It’s not that he hasn’t tried, and hasn’t been successful in the past, at providing help to a number of schools on items ranging from books to bus rides to practice shirts for girls’ athletic teams.
But when it came to signing a check for $2,500 last year to buy updated atlases for classrooms at Muir Elementary School, Becker’s money disappeared into a bureaucratic hole at the Doyle Administration Building for months on end. When he tried to follow up on what happened to his donation, he said he was given several different explanations for the delay in purchasing the books.
The bottom line was that when his wife went back this fall to volunteer in her favorite classroom, there was still no sign of the atlases.
Last week, in frustration, Becker called Rand-McNally, the publisher, and bought the atlases himself at what he says is a better price than the district had negotiated. Then he asked for his money back.
According to Becker, he was initially told by Steve Hartley, the district’s chief of staff, that although he would get his donation returned, the district would not provide its sales tax certificate number to Rand-McNally so that the $127 tax charged to Becker for the purchase of the atlases could be reimbursed.




NAEP Math Results: Ohio and Wisconsin Comparison



The 2007 NAEP results have just been released. There are many interesting results one can learn by looking at this data. In addition to the very serious racial gap in Wisconsin which has been commented on by The Educational Trust [Grade 4 Math NAEP Analysis | 80K PDF ] [Grade 8 Math NAEP Analysis | 80K PDF] and the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction [172K PDF], there are strong indications of other problems in mathematics education in Wisconsin. Consider the following data comparing results for whites and blacks in Ohio and Wisconsin from the first year NAEP results were given by states and the 2007 results. As background, 12 points on NAEP is generally thought to be about the change from one year to the next on a given test. This is not a good estimate when looking over 15 to 17 years, since part of the rise in the test score likely came from changes made in textbooks and in what teachers teach because of the change in the NAEP Framework in the early 1990s.


For example, in Trends in Mathematics and Science Study, TIMSS, fourth grade math was tested in 1995 and 2003, and the results were flat while the NAEP results went up enough to allow statisticians to conclude the increase was statistically significant.


I assume that some of the rise in NAEP over this period is because students are learning more about the topics covered in NAEP, but that this is not the only
reason for the rise in NAEP scores.


The data below is comparison data between the results in two states at two different years, so the point estimate for a year of schooling seems to be a reasonable guideline. If so, Wisconsin has lost about a year to Ohio. Something needs to be done about this.

NAEP Fourth Grade Mathematics
Whites 1992 2007
Wisconsin 233 250
Ohio 222 250 Ohio gained 11 points on Wisconsin
Blacks 1992 2007
Wisconsin 195 212
Ohio 194 225 Ohio gained 14 points on Wisconsin
NAEP Eighth Grade Mathematics
Whites 1990 2007
Wisconsin 279 292
Ohio 268 291 Ohio gained 10 points on Wisconsin
Blacks 1990 2007
Wisconsin 236 247
Ohio 233 258 Ohio gained 14 points on Wisconsin




‘Ho-hum’ says much about school choice foes



Patrick McIlheran:

Ho-hum: Another study suggesting good results from school choice in Milwaukee, not that it will make much of a dent with the opposition.
This tells you something about the opposition.
The latest study links the ability of poor parents to take state aid to religious schools to improvements at Milwaukee Public Schools.
Researcher Rajashri Chakrabarti found that while school choice showed little effect on MPS early on, it showed a much bigger effect after key changes in late 1990s: The Wisconsin Supreme Court cleared the way for religious schools to take part, greatly increasing the options, and changes in funding made MPS feel the loss of students more keenly.
Math, language arts and reading scores at Milwaukee’s public schools showed more improvement after new competition came into the picture, says Chakrabarti. Scores improved more at schools that were more subject to competition – schools where a greater proportion of students were poor and could use a voucher if their parents chose. This shows the improvements weren’t driven by other changes in MPS, such as new leadership. It was the increased competition, she says.
It’s plain to Fuller, a former MPS superintendent, that choice helps public schools, too. “It gives a superintendent leverage,” he says. While there are many in MPS who try improving schools out of professionalism, there are some teachers and administrators who resist reform. Competition strengthens the reformers’ hand.




Five Ways to Boost Charter Schools



Jay Matthews:

Sara Mead and Andrew J. Rotherham, two of my favorite educational researchers, have inspired me to save the charter school movement with five brilliant if perhaps too far-sighted suggestions for reform.
The Washington-based think tank Education Sector www.educationsector.org has just published their paper, “A Sum Greater Than the Parts: What States Can Teach Each Other About Charter Schooling.” They may be horrified by what I have done with their facts and insights, but I think my ideas will push charters in the right direction — more good ones and fewer bad ones.
In theory, charter schools are a great idea. There are now more than 4,000 of them with more than 1 million students in 40 states and the District. These independent public schools give smart educators with fresh ideas a chance to show what they can do without the deadening hand of the local school system bureaucracy around their necks. They also give public school parents more choice. The problem is, as one former state charter school official told me, there are a lot of loons out there starting charter schools. We don’t seem to be able to get rid of their loony schools as easily as the original advocates of charter schools promised. That is one reason why charter schools, despite including some of the best public schools I have ever seen, do no better on average than regular public schools in raising student achievement.
Here are my suggestions for fixing that situation, based largely on what I learned from Mead and Rotherham:
1. Stop letting local school boards authorize charters. Mead, a senior research fellow at the New America Foundation, and Rotherham, co-director of Education Sector and a member of the Virginia Board of Education, used a grant from the Annie E.Casey Foundation to analyze reports they oversaw on charter schools in California, Minnesota, Arizona, Ohio, Texas, Colorado, Florida and Michigan and four cities: New York, Indianapolis, Chicago and the District. They conclude that “perhaps the most significant lesson of the charter school movement to date” is that the number and quality of charter schools depend on who does the authorizing and how well they do it. State school boards, universities and independent bodies like the D.C. Public Charter School Board appear to do a better job of authorizing charters than local school boards, which see charters as competition for students, funds and prestige. California, Colorado and Florida have built strong charter systems with local school boards as the prime authorizers, but only by creating alternative authorizers for charter proposals that get turned down by local school boards.

The complete report is available here: Education Sector Reports: Charter School Series
A Sum Greater Than the Parts: What States Can Teach Each Other About Charter Schooling, by Sara Mead and Andrew Rotherham.




More Notes on the Madison Superintendent Search



Rebecca Kremble: [Additional Links & Background here]

Last week, the consultants hired to organize the superintendent search conducted 31 hour-long individual and focus group sessions to gather information from concerned citizens and stakeholders about the strengths and challenges of the Madison School District, as well as characteristics we would like to see in the next superintendent.
I attended three of these sessions — two general community sessions and the Parent-Teacher Organization representatives ‘ focus group.
Many different opinions were expressed on a broad array of topics, but in each there was widespread agreement about two issues: the need for a more transparent budget process and the vastly underused resource of potential partnerships with parents, businesses and community members who are willing to participate in the creation of a thriving public education system that benefits all of our students.
Many people also expressed the perception that the School Board is powerless in relation to the administration. This perception is fueled by the fact that the board as a whole is actually not connected to its source of power (the residents of the district) in any broad-based, comprehensive way.
It is time for concerned citizens to find common ground on district-wide issues so that we can give the board the support it needs to make principled, proactive decisions about the future of our schools, instead of making decisions that falsely pit schools against each other or that divide taxpayers who have children in public schools from those who do not.
The district is at a point of great opportunity with the promise of a new superintendent, the pressures of a possible referendum, and a School Board that seems willing to engage the public in productive dialogue based on shared concerns rather than divisive ones. (At its planning meeting with the search consultants, the board requested that the written surveys be returned to them so that they could use the input for planning purposes not connected with the superintendent search.)

(more…)




How a Virtual AP Course Changed Her Son



Jay Matthews:

Maria Allen worried about her son Matthew’s prospects in high school and beyond. He had always been regarded as an underachiever by his teachers. He received B’s in middle school with virtually no effort because he did well on what were, she thought, very easy tests.
Every new school year, the Reston mother donned her Super Nag persona, got on his case and tried to turn around his bad habits and attitude. It never worked. By the second quarter, whenever her attention turned to other matters, he stopped working, and his teachers started complaining.
So she was more than a little surprised when Matthew asked if he could take an Advanced Placement biology course online at the beginning of eighth grade, when he was only 14 years old. She knew where he got the idea. His big brother, a high school junior, had signed up for online AP biology so he would have time for other courses during the school day. She laughed. Good joke, Matthew. But he brought it up again. He was serious. Even when she showed him the demanding syllabus on the Web site apexlearning.com, he did not back down.
Well, she thought, why not? Her Super Nag act had not worked. She paid the $600 course fee and waited, without much hope, to see what would happen next.
“Matthew continued to put negligible effort into his middle-school work,” Allen told me, “but in biology, he started to work hard, very hard, in fact. And, even more remarkably, he continued to work hard throughout the year.”
She said he took a full complement of eighth-grade honors courses, but they demanded very little. “Unencumbered by any significant homework,” she said, “Matt had plenty of time available to log on to AP bio for a few hours each evening, and so he often did better on AP quizzes and assignments than my high school junior, who was always swamped with homework and competing deadlines from several other challenging courses.”




The Legacy of Little Rock



Shelby Steele:

ifty years ago today, riot-trained troops from the 101st Airborne Division escorted nine black students through the doors of Central High School in Little Rock. Just 48 hours earlier, President Eisenhower deployed–in a single day–1,000 troops to restore order and to reassert federal authority in Arkansas’s capital city.
For weeks the entire nation had watched on television as a mob of angry white adults gathered each morning to prevent the nine black students from integrating Central High. It would come to be remembered as one of the ugliest and meanest white mobs of the entire civil rights era. And because of television–then still a very new medium–the horrible images of people galvanized by ferocious racial hatred were seared into the national consciousness.
Finally, Arkansas Gov. Orval Faubus succumbed to a kind of madness, if not to a perverse politics of racial hatred, and withdrew the National Guard from Central High, effectively turning the school over to the raging mob. The nine courageous black students, who had suffered so much to integrate the school, were withdrawn for their own protection. So, for a time, the authority of the mob prevailed over all governmental authority–local, state and federal. And this was the provocation that pushed a reluctant President Eisenhower to deploy federal troops.




Happy Birthday, Sputnik.
Fifty years ago, a small Soviet satellite was launched, stunning the U.S. and sparking a massive technology research effort. Could we be in for another “October surprise”?



Gary Anthes:

Quick, what’s the most influential piece of hardware from the early days of computing? The IBM 360 mainframe? The DEC PDP-1 minicomputer? Maybe earlier computers such as Binac, ENIAC or Univac? Or, going way back to the 1800s, is it the Babbage Difference Engine?
More likely, it was a 183-pound aluminum sphere called Sputnik, Russian for “traveling companion.” Fifty years ago, on Oct. 4, 1957, radio-transmitted beeps from the first man-made object to orbit the Earth stunned and frightened the U.S., and the country’s reaction to the “October surprise” changed computing forever.
Although Sputnik fell from orbit just three months after launch, it marked the beginning of the Space Age, and in the U.S., it produced angst bordering on hysteria. Soon, there was talk of a U.S.-Soviet “missile gap.” Then on Dec. 6, 1957, a Vanguard rocket that was to have carried aloft the first U.S. satellite exploded on the launch pad. The press dubbed the Vanguard “Kaputnik,” and the public demanded that something be done.
The most immediate “something” was the creation of the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), a freewheeling Pentagon office created by President Eisenhower on Feb. 7, 1958. Its mission was to “prevent technological surprises,” and in those first days, it was heavily weighted toward space programs.
Speaking of surprises, it might surprise some to learn that on the list of people who have most influenced the course of IT — people with names like von Neumann, Watson, Hopper, Amdahl, Cerf, Gates and Berners-Lee — appears the name J.C.R. Licklider, the first director of IT research at ARPA.
Armed with a big budget, carte blanche from his bosses and an unerring ability to attract bright people, Licklider catalyzed the invention of an astonishing array of IT, from time sharing to computer graphics to microprocessors to the Internet.




End, Don’t Mend, No Child Left Behind



Neal McCluskey:

Congress has taken up renewal of the No Child Left Behind Act, with a major hearing in the House education committee. Unfortunately, despite little evidence that NCLB has done any good, there’s no reason to believe Congress will improve it. After more than a century of industrial-era schooling, policy-makers are still unwilling to do what’s necessary and turn public education on its head.
NCLB’s results have been ambiguous at best. The most positive news has come from the Center on Education Policy, a Washington think tank, which found that scores on state tests have risen under NCLB. But CEP only had usable pre- and post-NCLB scores for 13 states and could do full analyses for only seven.
Nationally representative measures offer worse news: Improvements on National Assessment of Educational Progress math exams have slowed under NCLB, and reading outcomes have either stagnated or declined, depending on the grade.
These outcomes should be no surprise. The federal Institute for Education Sciences recently confirmed that states are in a race to the bottom on standards, setting them as low as possible so they’re easy to hit. But that’s just symptomatic of a more basic problem: No matter how revolutionary politicians say laws like NCLB are, they always preserve the same institutional structures we’ve had for more than a century, in which politicians and bureaucrats have all the power, and parents and children have none.




Waukesha Teacher Compensation: Education over Experience



Amy Hetzner:

Nearly a decade after the School District started shifting its pay scale to emphasize education over experience, about one-third of Waukesha teachers are at the top of the school system’s salary schedule.
More than 300 of 960 district teachers made $70,507 in 2006-’07, the highest salary available to teachers and other certified staff without picking up extra duties.
District officials are careful to point out that the compressed salary schedule, in which teachers can earn large pay boosts for reaching certain benchmarks in graduate and post-graduate education, doesn’t cost the district more than a traditional schedule that pays based on a mixture of experience and education.
But because many of the teachers earning top pay also have seniority privileges protecting them from layoffs, the top-loaded pay system could cause problems as the district looks to more staff cuts to balance its budgets.

More at the Waukesha Taxpayer’s League.




Joppatowne High School’s Homeland Security Career Academy



Chris Colin:

Dedicated to everything from architecture to sports medicine, “career academies” claim to offer high school kids focus, relevancy, and solid job prospects. Now add a new kind of program to the list: homeland security high. In late August, Maryland’s Joppatowne High School became the first school in the country dedicated to churning out would-be Jack Bauers. The 75 students in the Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness magnet program will study cybersecurity and geospatial intelligence, respond to mock terror attacks, and receive limited security clearances at the nearby Army chemical warfare lab.
The new school is funded and guided by a slew of federal, state, and local agencies, not to mention several defense firms. Officials say it will teach kids to understand the “new reality,” though they hasten to add that the school isn’t focused just on terrorism. School administrators, channeling Cheneyesque secrecy, refused to be interviewed for this story. But it’s no secret that the program is seen as a model for the rest of the country, with the Pentagon and other agencies watching closely.
Students will choose one of three specialized tracks: information and communication technology, criminal justice and law enforcement, or “homeland security science.” David Volrath, executive director of secondary education for Harford County Public Schools, says the school also hopes to offer “Arabic or some other nontraditional, Third World-type language.”




“PROXIMITY is not destiny, educationally speaking”



Joanne Jacobs:

A generation of experience with racial integration has taught a clear lesson: Sitting black kids next to white kids in school is not a silver bullet that zaps unequal achievement.
However, the faith that proximity leads to equal achievement remains the cargo cult of education. In June, the U.S. Supreme Court barred school assignments based on race to increase racial diversity. So school leaders immediately began considering economic integration plans instead.
Sit poor kids next to middle-class kids. That should work!
Presidential candidate John Edwards – Mr. Two Americas – has made this the core of his education proposals. He promises “a million housing vouchers” over five years to move poor kids to better schools in the `burbs plus $200 million to create magnet schools that will lure affluent kids to inner-city schools.
The magnet school scheme was tried from 1985 to 1997 in Kansas City, Mo., at a cost of $2billion. To lure suburban white students, Kansas City’s inner-city schools were equipped with lavish facilities: Indoor pools, gymnasia, high-tech science labs, computers, etc. But programs designed for the needs and interests of middle-class white suburbanites did not serve inner-city blacks. And few suburban students were willing to commute to city schools for a luxury athletic complex or a classics magnet. Test scores remained dreadful. By 1997, the district actually had a smaller percentage of white students than when the plan started.
Well, what about moving poor kids to better schools?

Much more on Kansas City here.




www.coleschoolcast.org



In an effort to keep people informed of my activities on the Madison School Board, and to encourage people to participate in school-related activities, I have started a podcast, which I am calling the Maya Cole Schoolcast. You can find it at www.coleschoolcast.org. You can also subscribe to the podcast with iTunes or any other podcast software. You can find it by searching the podcast directory for Maya Cole.
Please feel free to give me your comments and suggestions. This edition includes a discussion with several Madison Alders regarding safe walk to school among other topics.




Michelle Rhee on the Washington, DC School System



Video:

It may not be Cornell ’77, but here and just below (part 1) and here and the second video below (part 2) are videos of a speech Michelle Rhee gave the other night discussing the state of affairs in Washington, D.C. that are well worth checking out. If you want the inside view of the challenges there and the ones facing urban schools more generally, you can’t do much better than this. I keep hearing how there is nothing to any of these issues reformers keep raising…starting to think maybe I’m being snowed…See also this Richard Whitmire post:

The surprise star at last night’s launch of the Democrats For Education Reform was Michelle Rhee, the new DC schools chancellor. With her humor and spunk very much intact in spite of smacking repeatedly against what may be the worst-run school central office in the entire country, Rhee regaled a crowd of about 100 national education reformers at the Hotel Washington across from the U.S. Treasury Department with fresh stories from close quarters bureaucratic combat.




Jesse Jackson, Jr. On School Choice



Democrats for Education Reform:

But the times seem to have changed a bit. At Monday’s night’s DFER DC launch at the Hotel Washington, Jackson seemed to be embracing what I like to call the Anti-Crappy Schools Doctrine. Forget whether a school is a traditional public school, or a charter school, or private school – how do we make sure every kid in America is able to attend a GOOD school?
Nearly a decade after the Milwaukee rally, Jackson Jr. was talking about “alarming dropout rates” the dangers of a “monopoly” filled with failing schools, etc. He was suggesting that every American child be entitled to a good public education “or charter education or whatever kind of education we can to produce the kind of Americans that we’ll all be proud of in the future.”
With the Washington Monument to his left, Jackson Jr. was highlighting the fact that his own parents sought the best for him by sending him to the elite St. Albans Episcopal School in DC as a kid. He talked about “pushing the envelope to make the majority party in this country” approach education with a more open mind.
“We must explore options,” Jackson Jr. said. “Every option for every American child so that every child might have the high-quality education they deserve in their lifetime.”
“We need more competition in the system.”




City Audit Finds Underreporting of School Violence



Randi Weingarten:

[Editor’s note: City Comptroller William C. Thompson, Jr. released an audit on Sept. 19 that found that many safety incidents in New York City public schools are not being reported as required under state law. For the 10 large high schools audited, 21 percent of the sampled incidents were not reported, including 14 percent of those incidents deemed serious.]
While we know the mayor and the chancellor want schools to be safe, this audit confirms a practice educators and the UFT have complained about for years: the failure to report all school incidents. Now with data driving all education decision-making, this audit couldn’t have come at a more important time.




“Politically Correct Trumps Substance Every Time”



Paul Soglin on Why the Prospects for Madison are so Bleak, Part II:

“Struck by the number of residents who said if things don’t improve soon, they’ll consider moving elsewhere.” Good grief. Its been going on for over a decade and really picked up around 2000. The school enrollment figures clearly show that. And go look at the private schools, bulging at the seams, for confirmation.
That’s OK. This is Madison. All is forgiven. Throw a good party on State Street, recycle a few beer cans, vote to impech Bush-Cheney, and it does not matter that we are losing the city.
Politically correct trumps substance every time.

Related: Barb Schrank on “Where have all the Students Gone?”:

MMSD Lost 174 Students While the Surrounding School Districts Increased by 1,462 Students Over Four School Years. Revenue Value of 1,462 Students – $13.16 Million Per Year*




New Study of Teacher Hiring Policies in Milwaukee Shows Success of School-based Hiring, But Forced Placements Still Hamper Efforts to Attract and Retain Quality Teachers



The New Teacher Project:

According to a NEW STUDY, the Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS) and the Milwaukee Teachers’ Education Association (MTEA) have made great strides in their joint efforts to create a more effective teacher hiring and evaluation model. However, the school system’s current school staffing and teacher transfer practices continue to cause dissatisfaction among many teachers. The study, conducted by The New Teacher Project (TNTP), a national non-profit organization dedicated to the improvement of teacher quality in America’s public schools, indicated that such shortcomings hamper Milwaukee’s efforts to build, support, and retain a high-quality teaching force, especially in its highest-need schools.
The New Teacher Project’s extensive study was funded by the Joyce Foundation and conducted with the cooperation of both MPS and the MTEA. TNTP staff conducted a briefing for members of the Milwaukee Board of School Directors at last night’s public meeting. The scope of the study included a detailed survey that drew over 2,000 responses from 5,000 MPS teachers, a survey of MPS principals, an in-depth examination of the MTEA contract with MPS, and interviews with school principals and district administrators. The organization’s final analysis shows that:

Alan Borsuk has more.




Cherokee Middle School’s Back to School Night



I enjoyed a wonderful 90 minutes at Madison’s Cherokee Middle School this evening. The teachers presented course materials and discussed student (and parent) expectations. I particularly appreciated the loudspeaker announcements when it was time to change classrooms and begin a new period. Reminded me of my school days decades ago. Karen Seno runs a great school.




Shabaz Allows Trial For Whistle-blower



Kevin Murphy:

A jury will get to decide if a Madison Metropolitan School District employee speaking out about alleged bid-rigging cost her a promotion, a federal judge ruled.
Linda Martin had worked in the district’s transportation office since 1989, but was passed over in November 2002 for the newly created position of transportation coordinator. A month later, Martin was transferred to the accounting department as her transportation clerk’s job was eliminated.
Although the school district contends Martin wasn’t qualified for the coordinator’s job, that argument is contradicted by the district’s interviewing her for the position, according to U.S. District Judge John Shabaz’s decision issued Thursday. It also is under dispute whether the district’s choice, Jeff Fedler, was more qualified than Martin.
Fedler had worked for a school bus vendor, First Student, formerly Verona Bus, before being recommended in May 2002 by Martin’s supervisor, Rene Bremer, for the job Martin was seeking.




The Changing Racial and Ethnic Composition of U.S. Public Schools



Rick Fry:

The 5-4 decision by the U.S. Supreme Court in June to strike down school desegregation plans in Seattle and Louisville has focused public attention on the degree of racial and ethnic integration in the nation’s 93,845 public schools. A new analysis of public school enrollment data by the Pew Hispanic Center finds that in the dozen years from 1993-94 to 2005-06, white students became less isolated from minority students while, at the same time, black and Hispanic students became slightly more isolated from white students.
These two seemingly contradictory trends stem mainly from the same powerful demographic shift that took place during this period: an increase of more than 55% in the Hispanic slice of the public school population. Latinos in 2005-06 accounted for 19.8% of all public school students, up from 12.7% in 1993-94.
In part because whites now comprise a smaller share of students in the public schools, white students are now more likely to be exposed to minority students. In 1993-94, fully one-third (34%) of all white students attended a nearly all-white school (this report defines a school as “nearly all-white” if fewer than 5% of the students are non-white). By 2005-06, just one in five white students (21%) was attending a nearly all-white school.

Alan Borsuk:

Mix two parts population growth (among Latino and African-American students) and one part population decline (white students). Fold in a continuing pattern in which whites, blacks and Latinos generally live separately from each other. Let the mixture steep in a much cooler climate – legal, political and social – toward integrating schools.
This recipe for re-segregation is the subject of two new national studies.
Both say the tide of desegregation that roiled America from the 1950s through the 1970s has turned, and the reduction in racial separation that often came via court order and school bus is being reversed.
But there is a twist: Largely because there are so many more minority students than in the past, fewer whites are going to schools that are all-white or close to it.
At the same time, the numbers of all-minority schools are increasing.
Within several years, for the first time, fewer than half of the nation’s kindergarten through 12th-grade students will be white.

The Civil Rights Project [192K PDF Report]:

This new report released by The Civil Rights Project at UCLA finds that for the first time in three decades, the South is in danger of losing its leadership as the nation’s most integrated schools. The report examines the effects of the dual processes of racial transformation and resegregation on the educational opportunity of students, as well as the relationship between race and poverty and its implications in light of the recent Supreme Court decisions. The report concludes with recommendations for school districts.

Bruce Murphy has more.




Schools by Age, Not Address



Amy Hetzner:

Theory” and “experiment” were two ways Waukesha School Board members last week described the district’s move to create two schools focused solely on the lower or upper elementary grade levels.
But staff in schools already organized around such grade levels describe the model another way: child-focused.
“Really, the whole building kind of revolves around those early learners,” said Deb Ristow, principal of Pewaukee Lake Elementary School, which has housed students in kindergarten through third grade since 2002.
Although not as common in southeastern Wisconsin, “grade centers” that serve students for a fraction of their elementary years make up one of every five elementary schools nationwide, according to an analysis by the Educational Research Service. The facilities can be kindergarten-only centers, pre-kindergarten through second- or third-grade buildings or third- through fifth- or sixth-grade schools.




Students’ ‘Evolving’ Use of Technology



Andy Guess:

That may not be the most surprising finding from a report released last week by the Educause Center for Applied Research, the analytical arm of the nonprofit group that promotes effective technology use in higher education. But it certainly provides a jumping-off point for an investigation into how students use information technology in college and how it can be harnessed to improve the learning experience.
In at least one central respect, proponents of technology in the classroom are on to something: Most students (60.9 percent) believe it improves their learning.
The changes in technological habits aren’t revolutionary per se, as the authors point out; rather, students are making “evolutionary” gains in access to the Internet for everyday uses, inside the classroom and out. Perhaps the most visible of these changes is the continuing increase in the proportion of students with laptops, which has grown to 73.7 percent of respondents (while an almost-total 98.4 percent own a computer of some kind). More surprisingly, over half of laptop owners don’t bring them to class at all, with about a quarter carrying them to lectures at least once a week.




Put to The Test



American Public Media:

“I read a quote from a young lady in New York. She said, ‘I don’t ever remember taking an exam. They just kept passing me along. I ended up dropping out in the 7th grade. I basically felt nobody cared.'”
There was no national requirement to test and measure all students, to make sure everyone knew how to read and write, do basic math. The president told the crowd in Ohio that the United States needs testing; he called it the “right” thing for America.
“I understand taking tests aren’t fun,” the president quipped. “Too bad. We need to know in America. We need to know whether or not children have got the basic education.”
And testing was just the beginning. The more ambitious endeavor: equalize education. To do that, the law set up a new definition of what it means to be a good school. This new definition, adequate yearly progress, or AYP, requires schools to show they’re raising test scores among each group of students. Schools can’t hide in good averages anymore. They must prove their poor and minority students are passing the tests too. This new definition of what it means to be a good school is having a dramatic impact on everything about education.
Four years after President Bush signed No Child Left Behind, there’s a different kind of celebration going on in the media center of Western Guilford High School in Greensboro, North Carolina. The walls are decorated; there are cakes and casseroles on the tables. Veteran English teacher Angela Johnson is calling it quits, abruptly, in the middle of the school year. Students, colleagues and friends from her 30-year career have gathered to say goodbye. Someone hands her a microphone, and she pulls her glasses up onto her nose, the prepared English teacher, ready with a speech.




More Parents Take Advantage of Free Tutor Service



Jeffrey Solochek:

When Heather Schaeffer heard she could get free tutoring for her children, she didn’t think twice.
“I said, ‘Thank you, God.’ Because I didn’t read until junior high. My father had to get a second job so I could go to Sylvan,” Schaeffer said Wednesday night, as she attended a tutoring provider fair at Northwest Elementary. “I just raced right over.”
Last year, Schaeffer had no problems getting her son, Sylvester, and daughter, Gretchen, into the federally funded program, a component of the No Child Left Behind Act. In Pasco County, as nationally, just a small percentage of the children eligible for services actually took advantage.
This year, the number of eligible students has grown along with the generally favorable word of mouth. Schaeffer worries that her kids won’t get access to the services that the federal government promises to low-income children who attend schools that don’t make adequate yearly academic progress for three or more years.




Kobza decides to not run for school board next year



Andy Hall:

Madison School Board Vice President Lawrie Kobza announced Monday that she won’t seek re-election, and retired teacher Marj Passman immediately jumped into the race to succeed her.
Kobza’s move guarantees that the board will gain two new members in the April 1 election.
“I’ve very much appreciated the opportunity to serve on the School Board, but I have a number of other personal and professional interests which I would like to explore and I just need more time in the week to do so,” Kobza wrote in an e-mail to Board President Arlene Silveira, schools Superintendent Art Rainwater and reporters.
Kobza, a lawyer, will leave the board after serving a single three-year term.

Susan Troller:

Madison School Board Vice President Lawrie Kobza announced this morning that she will not seek re-election in next spring’s School Board race.
Elected to her first term on the board in 2005, Kobza joins longtime board member Carol Carstensen in announcing that she will not run again.
In an e-mail this morning, Kobza said she has a number of personal and professional interests that she hopes to explore and needs the time to do so.
Two candidates, Marj Passman and Ed Hughes, have announced that they will seek slots on the seven-member School Board.




Rookie Chicago Principal Faces Early Challenges



David Schaper:

At the John D. Shoop Academy on Chicago’s South Side, Principal Lisa Moreno ushers students inside for an early breakfast.
She greets her uniformed flock, then heads to the playground, where she keeps a close eye on some of the eighth graders who are already testing her staff.
“You just try to make sure that they don’t think that they run the school,” she says.
Moreno is one of 170 new principals in the Chicago public school system this year. Since 2004, more than 350 of the school system’s principals have retired, taking advantage of early retirement incentives. Like Chicago, many other school systems across the country are facing the same turnover, as baby boomer principals near retirement age. And for the rookie principals, challenges come early and often.




The HOPE (Having Options in Public Education) Coalition



The HOPE (Having Options in Public Education) Coalition is a grassroots group of concerned parents, educators, and community members who believe creating and sustaining new educational options would strengthen MMSD. New options in public schools would benefit students, families, teachers, and our community. Options are needed because “one size does not fit all”! The diversity of students’ backgrounds and learning styles requires a diversity of learning models.
The HOPE Coalition met last week to discuss the superintendent search. We found 3 characteristics to be important for our incoming superintendent. Using the points below, and/or your own words, please make your voice heard! You may copy and paste the below paragraphs if you are pressed for time. The superintendent should:

  • be an innovative problem solver. The candidate should have a demonstrated record of running a district that has successfully implemented new ideas and creative approaches (charter schools, magnet schools, 4K, etc.) to serve a diverse population of learners. The new superintendent should be committed to offering a variety of educational models within public schools so that families have options that can address the needs of students with a wide range of strengths, interests and learning styles.
  • demonstrate a collaborative leadership style. The candidate should have a history of fostering open, frequent communication with parents and other taxpayers; non-profit organizations; university faculty; and city, county and state government officials. The new superintendent should build collaborative partnerships that bring parents, teachers and community members together for the benefit of students.
  • cultivate a climate of less centralized authority throughout MMSD. The candidate should empower staff both at the district and individual school sites, giving them the authority to use their specific expertise to its fullest potential. The superintendent should allow local school administrators the flexibility to run their school, in collaboration with teachers, so that it most effectively addresses the needs of the students and families that it serves. School-based decisions may involve curriculum, budgeting, staffing, extracurricular programming, etc.

Make your voice heard…
… to the Board! Email them all (comments@madison.k12.wi.us) or contact them individually (go to www.mmsd.org/boe and scroll down to find contact information). This may be the most influential means of sharing your opinion!
… to the consultants hired for the search! Complete their survey by going to www.mmsd.org/topics/supt and scrolling down to find the link to it. You will also find information about the community input sessions. Please attend one! and tell us your impression of how successful it was.
Encourage friends, neighbors, and coworkers to make their voices heard too! Please contact Sarah Granofsky (s.granofsky@gmail.com) or Lauren Cunningham (cunningham.lauren@sbcglobal.net) with any questions or suggestions, or if you would like to learn more about HOPE for Madison.




Holes Found in U.S. Rules on Teachers



Debra Viadero:

New reports looking at how the teacher-quality provisions of the No Child Left Behind Act are playing out in the nation’s classrooms suggest that, while compliance with the 5½-year-old federal law is widespread, problems and inequities persist and, in the end, labeling a teacher “highly qualified” is no guarantee of effectiveness.
“I think the high compliance rate suggests there were states that set the bar low and, in a way, grandfathered in a lot of teachers,” said Kerstin Carlson Lefloch, a primary author of “Teacher Quality Under NCLB: Interim Report,” a large-scale study released last week by the U.S. Department of Education [PDF]. “To get to the real story, you have to look below the surface, and that’s where we’re still seeing variation and still seeing inequities.”
Under the wide-ranging federal law, which is up for congressional reauthorization, states had until the end of this past school year to ensure that they were staffing 100 percent of their core academic classes with highly qualified teachers. Such teachers are defined as those who have a bachelor’s degree, are fully certified, and can show mastery of the subjects they teach, either by completing coursework, passing state subject-matter tests, or meeting some other state-set criteria.




Debbie Heimowitz brings cyber bullying to light in a new film



Sam Whiting:

Back when Debbie Heimowitz was a middle schooler in Castro Valley, if you wanted to cut somebody down you talked behind her back. Now you post your putdowns on the Internet. Heimowitz, a 26-year-old grad student at Stanford, has made a film about this online cruelty.
“Cyber bullying is harassing someone using the Internet, cell phones and any sort of digital technology. A common scenario is they will find somebody’s picture on the Internet that they know from school. Let’s say it’s ‘Amy.’ I download the picture, Photoshop it, go to MySpace, create a new account, create a new e-mail address and display this whole ‘I Hate Amy’ MySpace page. Then I have everybody at school write mean things about Amy in the comments section. Amy finds out that now everybody at the school hates her and has no clue who started this page.




Texas: More students taking AP exams, improving scores



Katherine Cromer Brock:

The number of students taking Advanced Placement tests increased almost 10 percent between 2006 and 2007, according to information released Thursday by the Texas Education Agency.
In addition, 52 percent of students who took the test are minorities, compared with 45 percent five years ago. Nationally, 35 percent of test-takers are minorities.
Not only has participation in the AP program increased, but performance has also improved significantly.
Students at most high schools have the option of taking AP classes. They take exams at the end of the course and are given a score of 1 to 5, with 5 being the highest. Most colleges and universities award credit for AP scores of 3 or higher. In 2006, 51.4 percent of tests scored at 3 or higher. In 2007, that number increased to nearly 53 percent.




Where in the world is geography?



Leslie Newell Peacock:

None of the students in Dr. Brooks Green’s geography classes last week could tell him where the Strait of Hormuz was. One of his history students said she knew it was in the Middle East — somewhere.
Green, who is a professor at the University of Central Arkansas in Conway, is dismayed by the fact that none of the 46 students he quizzed knew about what some consider the most important spot on earth currently: The narrow sea lane that provides the only passage to the open ocean for the oil from the Persian Gulf states.
If students don’t know where a country is, or a people, how can they understand them?
With the change in the way Arkansas schools are to teach geography, he fears, ignorance over the world we live in is going to get worse.
Thanks to an increased emphasis on world history in middle school (it was previously taught in elementary grades), geography as a stand-alone course has gone out the window. It will now be “embedded” as one of four social studies “strands” (history, economics and civics are the other three) into other classes in grades K-8.




Sobol v. Sobol



Teachers College: Columbia University News:

On the issue of educational equity, Tom Sobol is an unabashed friend of the people. On the issue of Tom Sobol, he takes a tougher line
When Tom Sobol was superintendent of schools in Scarsdale, New York, there was a guy named Bob who came to all the budget meetings—the classic, thorn-in-your-side self-appointed public citizen who haunts town halls across the nation.
“Bob used to roundly excoriate us for violating the public trust, and I had to hand it to him, he did a great job at doing his thing—he knew the budget better than just about anyone except me,” says Sobol.
It’s a warm spring day, and Sobol, 75, who retired in 2006 as TC’s first Christian A. Johnson Professor of Outstanding Educational Practice, is talking with an interviewer in his new office on the second floor of Grace Dodge Hall. (He still teaches one course per semester.) He is a kind-faced man whom time has given the craggy features of an eagle, with a thatch of white hair atop his head. His voice is soft, the result of medicine he takes for a spinal cord disorder that has left him without feeling in his legs, confined to a powered wheelchair; however, his eyes are clear and steady.
“Well, then Bob’s wife died, and he stopped coming to meetings. And one year, we were going along, and I knew the annual budget hearings were coming up, and I thought, I wonder how Bob is doing. So I picked up the phone and called him. I said, ‘How are you?,’ and he said, ‘Well, it’s hard getting along without Jane.’ I said, ‘Are you up on your numbers?,’ and of course, he was, he wouldn’t have been anything else. I said, ‘Are we going to see you out there at the meeting?,’ and he said, ‘No, I can’t drive anymore.’ And I said—and this was before my own legs gave out—‘Listen, the meeting is at eight, I’ll come around beforehand and pick you up, and we’ll go over together.’ So I did, and we drove over, and the meeting went along, and around nine o’clock, he stood up and roundly excoriated us for violating the public trust. And afterward I drove him home. I’ve always felt good about that.”
The story captures many familiar aspects of Sobol—the good Samaritan, whose many students and friends distributed “Noble Sobol” buttons for his retirement party; the adroit politician whose sense of community interaction (he wrote his doctoral thesis at TC on the subject) helped him become New York State’s Commissioner of Education under Governor Mario Cuomo; the dry, self-deprecating wit who effortlessly mixes quotes from Robert Frost, E.M. Forster and May Sarton with amusing stories of being “parked” by his grandchildren so they can ride around on his motorized wheelchair. Perhaps the most singular, however, is the man so concerned about choosing the moral course of action—and so committed to public engagement as the best means of arriving at it—that he quite literally imports his own toughest critics.




Do Milwaukee’s Public Schools Spend Too Much



Bruce Murphy:

That was certainly the suggestion of a new Wisconsin Taxpayers Alliance study, which was done for the Metropolitan Milwaukee Association of Commerce. The latter’s leader, Tim Sheehy, has been a frequent critic of local governments for paying benefits he believes are too high. In the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel article covering the study, Sheehy was quoted as declaring that the district needed to establish control over its “staffing, pension and benefit costs.”
Blogger Jay Bullock has suggested that the report, the JS story by Alan Borsuk, and an earlier JS story written by me in 2003, were all deliberately timed to pressure the teacher’s union to accept lower salaries and benefits. I doubt that Borsuk cares to be classed with me (he’s probably wearing a bag over his head), and I’m not convinced he was out to get the union. But his story, as well as Bullock’s blog, seemed to miss some of the forest for the trees. So who and what should we believe?
For starters, MPS is spending less per pupil than the Madison system and an amount similar to what other urban districts in Wisconsin spend. But it’s doing that with less-experienced teachers: Milwaukee teachers average 10 years of experience versus 15 years statewide. Since teachers typically get an automatic “step increase” for every year of service, you need to hold the level of experience constant and then measure. That measurement shows MPS teachers are getting 38 percent more than the statewide average in total compensation, the report found.




Does UW’s PEOPLE program help minorities succeed?



Anita Weier:

Aaron Olson is confident he’s ready for UW-Madison.
He graduated from Memorial High School last year with a 3.6 grade point average, scored a 28 on the ACT exam and did it all while being an athlete.
But University of Wisconsin-Madison officials continue to struggle to attract minority students like Olson, and even more importantly, to retain them through graduation.
The freshman enrollment of targeted minorities (meaning all of them except foreigners and Asians not connected to southeast Asia) increased from 254 in 1996 to 541 in 2006. Less than 58 percent of targeted minorities who started college in 2000 had graduated by 2006, however, compared to 79.2 percent of students overall.
So what is it that makes it hard for many minorities to succeed at UW-Madison.

Much more on the People Program, here.




A Lost Art: Instilling Respect



Patricia Dalton:

There’s been a fundamental change in family life, and it has played out over the years in my office. Teachers, pediatricians and therapists like me are seeing children of all ages who are not afraid of their parents. Not one bit. Not of their power, not of their position, not of their ability to apply standards and enforce consequences.
I am not advocating authoritarian or abusive parental behavior, which can do untold damage. No, I am talking about a feeling that was common to us baby boomers when we were kids. One of my friends described it this way: “All my mother had to do was shoot me a look.” I knew exactly what she was talking about. It was a look that stopped us in our tracks — or got us moving. And not when we felt like it.
Now.
These days, that look seems to have been replaced by a feeble nod of parental acquiescence — and an earnest acknowledgment of “how hard it is to be a kid these days.”
In my office, I have seen small children call their parents names and tell them how stupid they are; I have heard adolescents use strings of expletives toward them; and I remember one 6-year-old whose parents told me he refused to obey, debated them ad nauseam and sometimes even lashed out. As if on cue, the boy kicked his father right there in the office. When I asked the father how he reacts at home, he told me that he runs to another room!




Teachers in Trouble, Parents Ignored: Readers React



Jay Matthews:

Twenty-one years later, Suzanne Stradling still remembers her third-grade teacher. The woman passed out math worksheets that each student had to complete and bring to her for a personal assessment. Stradling spent the entire time writing her answers, erasing them and writing them again because she said she was so terrified by the teacher’s yelling at students who did not seem to be working and deriding students when they presented answers. Stradling’s most vivid memory is of a dyslexic classmate named Sean, who stood in the front of the class as the teacher “launched into a tirade about his laziness, stupidity, and probable future failure.”
I received many Web site comments and e-mails like Stradling’s in response to my series of columns on parents left out of decisions about teachers. Many readers shared unhappy memories of abusive teachers and told why they often did not mention what they saw and heard to their parents. “This teacher had a reputation as mean, and I knew that complaining that the teacher was mean would be a non-starter with my parents,” Stradling said. “Of course, ‘mean’ is often school patois for strict teachers.”




Academic cheating is at an all-time high. Can anything be done to stop it?



Regan McMahon:

If there were a test on the current state of cheating in school, I would have gotten an F. My knowledge was as outdated as the stolen answers to last week’s quiz. Ask a high school or college student about cheating, and before you can finish the sentence, the person will blurt out two things: “Everybody does it,” and “It’s no big deal.” Survey statistics back up the first statement, and the lack of serious consequences and lax enforcement of academic integrity policies in schools support the second.
Not only is cheating on the rise nationally – a 2005 Duke University study found that 75 percent of high school students admit to cheating, and if you include copying another person’s homework, that number climbs to 90 percent – but there has also been a cultural shift in who cheats and why.
It used to be that cheating was done by the few, and most often they were the weaker students who couldn’t get good grades on their own. There was fear of reprisal and shame if apprehended. Today, there is no stigma left. It is accepted as a normal part of school life, and is more likely to be done by the good students, who are fully capable of getting high marks without cheating. “It’s not the dumb kids who cheat,” one Bay Area prep school student told me. “It’s the kids with a 4.6 grade-point average who are under so much pressure to keep their grades up and get into the best colleges. They’re the ones who are smart enough to figure out how to cheat without getting caught.”




West and Memorial lead state in National Merit scholars



Susan Troller:

wo Madison high schools easily outpaced any other high schools in Wisconsin in the number of students who qualified as semifinalists for the 2008 National Merit Scholarships. Thirty-one students at West High School qualified and 24 qualified at Memorial in the prestigious scholarship competition.
Schools with the next highest numbers of semifinalists were Mequon’s Homestead High School in Ozaukee County with 17 semifinalists and the University School of Milwaukee with 16 semifinalists.
Four students at East High, two students at La Follette and one student at Edgewood also qualified for a total of 62 National Merit semifinalists from Madison.
Other Dane County high schools with qualifying students include Middleton (10 students), De Forest (5 students), Monona Grove (3 students), Verona (3 students), Oregon (2 students), Sun Prairie (2 students), Mount Horeb (2 students, including a student who is homeschooled), Deerfield (1 student) and Waunakee (1 student).




Did you ride on a plane? Read a book?



Alan Borsuk:

A glimpse of the real life of students in the school: MPS Superintendent William Andrekopoulos asked the sixth-graders some questions about their summer.
How many of you took a trip on an airplane? No hands went up.
How many of you took a trip out of state? Three hands went up (one went to Chicago, one to North Carolina, one moved to Milwaukee from Minnesota).
How many saw a movie? Most of the hands went up. Went to State Fair? Eight or so hands, it appeared. Summerfest? About the same.
How many went swimming? Almost everybody.
How many read a book? Less than a quarter, it appeared.




Madison LaFollette High School and the District’s Athletic Director Changes



from a “Madison Parent”, via email:

I was checking out the MMSD situation with reguards to the Athletic Directors positions and its impact on the schools. I was real suprised to hear that Lafollette has kept on Jim Pliner as a stff member in a position as Dean of Students. It seems that as he cannot be the AD they did find a way to keep Mr. Pliner. I will first say that Jim was and is a great asset to Lafollette. He was a great influence on students in a most positive fashion, not just for athletes but all the student body. BUT…..Lafollette already has one Dean of students. This replaces a Assit. Principal that was eliminated due to enrollment decline and the budget.Now we take and add a dean of students and they assume some of those duties to help the administration cope. What they do not tell parents is the position takes away from a teaching position.So now we have two deans and that means two Faculty positions are gone. Lafollette has created “skinny” classes in some electives so they can still be offered to students but even these are not enough to keep classes avail to most. What was cut from the schedule this year and prior years to keep the “Deans”.And with cuts coming up again, what gets cut again. A look will reveal its not the “prep” courses but a lot of Tech and other electives that the “blue collar” community of Lafollette could use. enough from me..Could someone show mw Im wrong?




Napa High School, a state standout, is considered a federal failure



Nanette Asimov:

Napa High School has so impressed the state’s top education brass that they’ve declared it a California Distinguished School in recognition of its good scores, stellar performing arts programs, and success at helping needy kids.
Rogelio Ramirez was one of those kids. He sold bottled water on the streets of Mexico until 2002, when he immigrated with his family to the United States. He spoke no English, but with help from teachers at Napa High, Ramirez was soon taking one advanced-placement class after another, participating in clubs and sports, and maintaining an A+ average until he graduated in June. Brown University, the highly selective Rhode Island college, snapped him up.
“Academically, I would give Napa an A,” said Ramirez, 18. “It’s a pretty good school.”
But the federal No Child Left Behind Act – the dominant force in public education today – has a different grade for Napa High: F, for failing.

Joanne has more.




When School Works



Laura Vanderkam:

Michelle González has an impressive résumé. She has worked at Booz Allen Hamilton, a consulting company; and Fried, Frank, Harris, Shriver & Jacobson, a law firm; she starts a job at the architecture firm Arquitectonica this month. Even more impressive? She’s only 17 years old. “Every year there’s a new profession thrown at me,” she says.
That’s because she’s a student at Cristo Rey New York High School (CRNYHS), part of a new national network of 19 urban Catholic schools that combine on-the-job work experience with rigorous academics. Five days a month for the past few years, González has traveled from her Bronx home to Manhattan offices. She has answered phones, written letters and filled in Excel spreadsheets. Three other classmates have shared each job with her.
(Illustration by Sam Ward, USA TODAY)
In exchange, her employers have paid $27,500 for each full-time equivalent position to CRNYHS, as do the 80 other companies that employ González’s 300 fellow students. These payments keep tuition at $2,000 a year. That’s important because the majority of students at this East Harlem school, and its sister schools with similar work-study programs in Denver, Los Angeles and elsewhere, come from economically disadvantaged backgrounds.




Private Firm Finds Profits in Special Ed



Will York:

Mark Claypool left social work jaded by how special education students were shuffled around and ignored in public schools. He had one radical idea: The best way to teach special education students would be to turn a profit while doing it.
“It would have been more traditional to do this in a not-for-profit fashion,” Claypool said. “But the CEO for a not-for-profit walks around with his hand out all day long to keep the doors open and the lights turned on. I didn’t want to do that.”
Claypool founded Educational Services of America in Nashville in 1999 as one of the few companies even attempting to make money by running special education private schools.
With programs in 16 states, ESA owns and operates more than 120 private and charter schools. It hires the teachers and sets up the curriculum for about 7,800 students with learning, developmental or behavioral problems.
Critics from within public education have said it’s wrong and ineffective to turn a profit off special education students, but the company generated $75 million in revenue this year, and Claypool expects revenue to grow to $90 million next year. The privately owned company would not disclose profits.




Educational Assistant Struck (and Killed) by SUV in Front of Cherokee Middle School



Madison Police Department:

At 7:13 a.m. on Monday September 10th Madison Police were called to the Cherokee Middle School at 4301 Cherokee Drive for a report of a pedestrian versus motor vehicle crash.
The preliminary investigation shows that a parent driving a red SUV dropped off a student in front of the school. As this was happening, school staff member Becky Sue Buchmann, Age 48, from Oregon WI, was walking across Cherokee Drive while on her way to the school.

Channel3000:

A woman was struck by a car and injured in front of Cherokee Middle School in Madison on Monday morning.
Madison police are investigating the crash, which happened at about 7:30 a.m., WISC-TV reported.
Authorities said that the woman was hit by a red SUV in the street in front of the school and was taken to the hospital with what witnesses said were serious injuries.

The Capital Times:

A Cherokee Middle School staff member suffered potentially life-threatening injuries after being hit outside of the school this morning.
According to Madison Police Department spokesman Joel DeSpain, the woman was hit by a red SUV at 7:13 a.m. Witnesses at the scene told police the woman suffered serious injuries and she was taken by ambulance to the hospital.




Tighter Link Sought Between Spending, Achievement in N.Y.



Michele McNeil:

As states look for ways to hold school districts accountable for how they use big increases in K-12 funding, New York’s experience may offer a test case in directing the flow of that new money.
Under the state’s ambitious “Contracts for Excellence” program, 55 of New York’s 705 districts will share $430 million in extra aid this school year, but are required to file detailed plans that limit the spending to five strategies intended to raise student achievement.
The early signs are that districts are complying with the new rules. According to a review by Education Week of contracts available as of last week—representing some three-quarters of the new funding—about half the increase will be spent this year on reducing class size, one of the five state-mandated categories.
Another quarter of the new money will go to increase students’ time on task in those districts, usually by lengthening the school day or year.




Kansas City: End of Middle School?



Charles Gibson:

The Kansas City, Mo., school superintendent believes he has found the wave of the future in education: Eliminate middle school and test scores will go up.
For 50 years, the model for American public schools has been elementary school, then middle school and then high school.
But Kansas City, Mo., is eliminating the middle schools in favor of a single “elemiddle” school that will go from kindergarten through eighth grade. There, students in all grades stick with one teacher for the most of the day, so older kids will not switch classrooms for every subject as is the practice in middle schools.
“You’re in a nurturing environment,” said Kansas City School Superintendent Anthony Amato. “You don’t see as many teachers as you would in a large environment, [such] as a middle school of 1,000 students.”
He said the kids will calm down when they can be role models for the younger students. And he believes reading and math scores will go up as expulsion rates and drop-out rates go down.
Kids Reactions: ‘Horrible’ to ‘Helpful’




Too $hort, Career Counselor



Eric Arnold:

But the afternoon’s biggest surprise came when Todd Shaw — aka Too $hort, the most iconic Oakland rapper of all time — announced that he was moving back to “tha town” and joining the two-year-old East Oakland community center as a career counselor. $hort’s remarks were met with cheers, and attracted favorable notice from San Francisco Chronicle columnist Chip Johnson four days later — yet also drew pointed criticism from one of Youth UpRising’s most outspoken opponents.




French & British Education Climate Update



The Economist:

  • Bac to School:

    LADEN with hefty backpacks, French children filed back to school this week amid fresh agonising about the education system. Given its reputation for rigour and secular egalitarianism, and its well-regarded baccalauréat exam, this is surprising. What do the French think is wrong?
    Quite a lot, to judge from a 30-page “letter to teachers [Lettre aux éducateurs 326K PDF Google Summary Ministry of Education]” just sent by President Nicolas Sarkozy. Too many school drop-outs; not enough respect or authority in the classroom (pupils, he says, should stand up when the teacher enters); too little value placed on the teaching profession; too little art and sport in the curriculum; too much passive rote-learning; and too much “theory and abstraction”. France, the president concludes, needs “to rebuild the foundations” of its education system.
    The criticisms touch all levels. A government-commissioned report reveals that two in five pupils leave primary school with “serious learning gaps” in basic reading, writing and arithmetic. One in five finish secondary school with no qualification at all. Even the baccalauréat is under attack. This year’s pass rate of 83% is up from just over 60% in the early 1960s. “The bac is worth absolutely nothing,” asserts Jean-Robert Pitte, president of the Sorbonne-University of Paris IV.

  • Parent-Led Schools: B

    Going beyond the call of duty to get good teaching
    THE transition to secondary school is hard for children at the best of times. Imagine, then, that your precious baby must make a 90-minute journey across London twice a day, just to attend a school that has space only because locals have turned up their noses and gone elsewhere. Until this autumn, that was the prospect faced by many parents in West Norwood, South London. Not any more—and they can take the credit for improving their children’s lot.
    On September 10th 180 of the neighbourhood’s 11-year-olds will start their secondary education in the school their parents built. Not quite with their bare hands—the local council, Lambeth, renovated a disused Victorian school to house them until their permanent home is finished in 2009. But certainly with their sweat, and even the occasional tear. For The Elmgreen School is Britain’s first state school to have been set up with parents—not a church, or business, or charity, or council—in the driving seat.

  • Latest Thinking on Education:

    THE Conservative Party knows all too well that education is an emotive issue in British politics—indeed, perhaps the most emotive. In May a restatement of its line on selective grammar schools—that new ones would not be created by a future Tory government, just as they had not been by the last one—provoked a fortnight of internal strife.
    The report of the party’s public-services policy group on September 4th is forcing the Tories to talk about education again. They will be grateful for its many sensible ideas. Setting (selecting classes by students’ ability in specific subjects) is a neat compromise between the inclusive aims of comprehensive secondary schools and grammar schools’ commitment to high-flying performance. There are measures to improve discipline, too.

  • Schools Unchained:

    SOMETHING extraordinary is happening in London this week: in Lambeth, one of the city’s poorest boroughs, 180 children are starting their secondary education in a brand new school. The state-funded school was set up, without a fancy business sponsor, by parents who were fed up with the quality of local education. In countries with more enlightened education systems, this would be unremarkable. In Britain, it is an amazing achievement by a bunch of desperate and determined people after years of struggle (see article).
    Britain’s schools are in a mess. Although British schoolchildren perform reasonably well compared with those in other countries, average standards are not improving despite billions in extra spending, and a stubbornly long tail of underachievers straggles behind. A couple of years ago, a consensus emerged among reformers that councils had too much control and parents too little. There was radical talk in both main parties of encouraging parental choice as the best way to drive up standards: if schoolchildren were free to vote with their feet, taking public funding with them, new schools would open and existing ones would improve in order to compete.




Wisconsin Open Enrollment Closed to White Madison Students



Andy Hall covers a potent issue:

If he lived anywhere else in Wisconsin, Zachary Walton, 12, wouldn’t have this problem.
If he were black, Asian, Hispanic, or American Indian, Zachary wouldn’t have this problem, either.
But he’s in Madison, where growing numbers of white students are discovering that because of their race, the state’s open enrollment program actually is closed.
“I feel like I’m left out,” said Zachary, who wants to attend a public online school — one like his big brother Daniel, 15, enjoys.
Last week, when most students across Wisconsin began a new school year, Zachary began his second year of home schooling in his family’s East Side apartment.
Madison officials, supported by the state Department of Public Instruction, have ruled that Zachary and 125 other students living in the district must stay put this year in the name of racial integration.
The policy is enforced even for dozens of students, such as Zachary, who don’t attend public school but instead go to private schools or receive home schooling.
Laura and Mike Starks, Zachary’s mother and stepfather, believe that Madison and DPI are going overboard. And that it’s depriving Zachary of one-on-one attention needed for him to catch up academically.
“If we had the money, we would have aggressively fought this,” Mike Starks said.

Much more on Wisconsin’s Open Enrollment Law here.
Gloria Ladson-Billings:

The headline in Sunday’s paper – “You can’t transfer, white kids told” – could just as easily have been “School district refuses to re-segregate” or “School district complies with spirit of Brown decision.” Of course, that would not be nearly as provocative as the one designed to sell more papers and allow members of the white community to believe they have fewer privileges than families of color.
School district officials are not ignorant. They know that if every transfer request is granted, some of our schools will become even more racially segregated and inequitable.
Also, it is interesting that your story focuses on the 140 denials rather than the 286 acceptances and, more specifically, on the 77 out of 140 denials that used racial balance as a reason for the denial.
Incidentally, my own daughter was denied a transfer in 1999. I guess if she were white we could have had a feature story about it.

Charles Staeven:

Madison’s enrollment policy racist
I was appalled by the front page of Sunday’s State Journal. Madison, the supposed bastion of progressive thought, has the only school district in the state that is working under a racist policy when it comes to open enrollment.
Even worse, District Administrator Art Rainwater believes his hands are tied. His “we are powerless” statements when facing a blatantly in-your-face racist policy indicate poor leadership.
Please recall Dr. King’s message that it’s not the color of one’s skin, and I believe he meant any color. Come on, get out of the kids’ way!




When Schools and Parents Collaborate



NPR News & Notes:

News & Notes continues its month-long education series with a look at what happens when parents and teachers approach education as a team effort.
Joining the discussion are Joyce Epstein, director of the Center on School, Family, and Community Partnerships at Johns Hopkins University; Pam Dickenson, a parent of two students at KIPP Tech Valley school in Albany, New York; and Daniel Ceaser, principal and math teacher at KIPP Tech Valley.

Audio




Pro / Con on Appleton Charter Schools



Tim Maylander:

As a former charter school student, I can attest to how valuable they can be to a child’s education. When they’re properly planned, a charter school can give a student exactly what he or she needs to succeed later on in life. I feel I owe many of my present successes to my charter school upbringing.
However, we need to cut back on the number of educational options in Wisconsin, specifically in the Fox Valley.
In the last decade, there has been an explosion of charter schools in Appleton alone. Programs like the Classical Charter School, Magellan Charter School, Tesla Engineering School and the Renaissance School for the Arts are examples of the numerous alternative schooling opportunities now available to parents and their children.
Despite my earlier comments about the good qualities of charter schools, the increasing number of programs isn’t beneficial to anyone, especially the student. It is, after all, possible to have too much of a good thing.
Take the charter school I participated in, for example. When most kids would have gone to middle school, my parents opted to send me to the Magellan program. It allowed gifted students to take classes at a high school setting with high school teachers at an accelerated pace.
Not only did the Magellan students learn a great deal more about traditional subjects then they would have normally, they were also exposed to a world of new opportunities at Appleton West, where the program was located. Students in the program were allowed to join the debate team as well as many other character-building activities and organizations.
Magellan was exactly what the students needed — accelerated learning in a high school locale with endless possibilities for development.

Sara Hetland:

A visit to a public school classroom will reveal the immense range of learning styles among students.
There’s the boy sitting seemingly idle in the back corner. He says little, but his test scores indicate he’s among the intellectually gifted.
In the middle of the room is the student who can play anything he wishes on the piano, but simply can’t comprehend long division.
There’s the student who finds it difficult to learn from a lecture, but she makes great academic strides while doing a hands-on project.
Charter schools allow for more academic freedom. They’re publicly funded schools that have been released from some of the regulations that apply to other public schools, and instead are accountable for producing certain results written in the school’s charter.
Charter schools can avoid many of the procedural obstacles that distract other schools’ resources and energy away from the goal of education. Diversity in learning styles, a sense of community and potential benefits to public schools make expanding charter schools in the Fox Valley a good decision.
One reason why charter schools should be expanded is to address the diversity in learning styles.




Arabic-language teaching arrives in New York



The Economist:

“MARCH on,” wrote the Lebanese-American philosopher and poet Khalil Gibran, “and fear not the thorns, or the sharp stones on life’s path.” Thus did the pupils, staff and administrators of the institution named after him march through a storm of controversy and into the doors of the Khalil Gibran International Academy this week.
The school, which will teach Arabic as well as Middle Eastern history and culture and will inevitably discuss Islam, has been under scrutiny since the New York Department of Education announced its creation last February. Conservative commentators have muttered that it will be a training ground for terrorists. Many portrayed Debbie Almontaser, the school’s Yemeni-American principal, as an apologist for suicide-bombers after she insufficiently denounced an Arab women’s group that produces “Intifada NYC” T-shirts.




Latino, Black, Indian And Asian Elementary Kids Likely To Top 50% Of Madison’s Enrollment



Susan Troller:

ased on recent demographic trends, this is likely to be the year when minority students become the majority in Madison’s elementary schools.
While the student census in all districts in Wisconsin will not be verified until Sept. 21, which is the official enrollment count, statistics from the Madison district over the last 10 years suggest a combination of Hispanic, Asian, African-American and American Indian students will exceed 50 percent of the elementary school population during the 2007-08 school year.
“This could be the tipping year when minority students become the majority,” Sue Abplanalp, assistant superintendent for elementary education, confirmed in a recent interview.
During the 2006-07 school year, Madison’s 5,542 American Indian, Hispanic, Asian and African-American elementary students accounted for 49.6 percent of the kindergarten through fifth grade student body, compared to 5,636 white students. Minority enrollment in Madison has been growing by about 2 percent each year for more than a decade.




Teacher Report Cards
Florida has launched a new Web site allowing parents to check on the disciplinary records of teachers. Other states may follow suit.



Peg Tyre:

Just in time for the start of school, the state of Florida has launched an eye-opening Web site that enables parents to see the disciplinary records of their kids’ teachers. The site, called www.myfloridateacher.com, makes public a troubling secret in education: that the people who teach our kids and discipline them sometimes have a few demerits on their own permanent records.




NAACP & Education



Michael Meyers:

Third, the NAACP must make public education the civil-rights issue of our times. Everything else will fall into place if young blacks overcome illiteracy, stay in school, and are inculcated with a love for learning and for the pursuit of excellence instead of trained to accept mediocrity and quotas as a means of social advancement.
Holding school authorities accountable — including black teachers and black-dominated school boards such as in Newark, N.J., and Washington, D.C. — must be the priority. That means tutoring pupils and coaching teachers so that they pass standardized competency tests, and eschewing notions that such examinations are “culturally biased.”
A revamped NAACP should not accept any alibis for blacks’ academic underachievement. It would take the lead in answering those black educators and their paternalistic allies who develop ghetto industries for grants and careers explaining blacks’ deficits. It would confront separatist schemes such as “black paradigms” of learning and Ebonics as the language of Africans in America.




No Child Left Behind Loopholes Decried



Jay Matthews:

Should suburban schools that barely miss federal learning targets be allowed to escape penalties, while inner-city schools that never even hit the dart board are required to give free tutoring and let students transfer to better schools?
That question is at the heart of an emerging argument in Washington over how to improve the federal No Child Left Behind Act. Influential House Democrats and Republicans have circulated a draft proposal that would take many schools off the hook if they raise achievement for most students but miss the mark for a few.
Yesterday, Education Secretary Margaret Spellings pushed back hard against that approach. “To move from reasonable accommodations to big loopholes would be a huge mistake,” she said.
In a speech to the Business Coalition for Student Achievement, which supports the federal law, Spellings said she is willing to consider proposals to allow states to use more than just annual tests in reading and math to rate schools and to treat differently schools that fall only slightly short of targets. But she said she is not willing to bend if the changes mean struggling students won’t get the extra help they need.

Secretary of Education Margaret Spelling’s Speech.




School District Has Dress Code, and Is Buying the Uniforms, Too



Winnie Hu:

Many public schools are supplying their students with an ever-growing list of essentials that go far beyond textbooks to include scientific calculators, personal laptops and free breakfast.
Now they are dressing them, too.
The Elizabeth school district has spent more than $2 million since January 2006 to buy navy blazers, khaki pants, polo shirts, gym shorts and even socks as part of a new policy to put all its students in uniforms.
The district, which serves mostly poor and minority families, has outfitted more than 9,000 students — nearly half its enrollment — so far as it phases in the uniforms a few schools at a time over five years to spread out the cost.
“They’re just getting another school supply; that’s how we see it,” said the Elizabeth superintendent, Pablo Muñoz, noting that schools had long provided uniforms for athletic teams, choirs and marching bands. “If we expect high-quality academic achievement in the Elizabeth schools, not only do we need the staff and the materials, the kids need their uniforms.”




The Toughest Assignment: A Year with Montie Apostolos’ Eighth Grade Class



Stephanie Banchero & Heather Stone:

At a school where every other reform had failed, Montie Apostolos was the last, best chance for students to succeed.
She had been brought in because she produced impressive gains in reading test scores at her last school. She was tough. Her lessons were rooted in the best research, and she was trained for inner-city schools.
She’s an uncompromising, charismatic 56-year-old grandmother with an irresistible life story: She had fought off water cannons, attack dogs and white supremacists to get her own education in the segregated South. Nothing her students faced was going to surprise her.
But on a fall morning last year, at Sherman School of Excellence on Chicago’s South Side, Apostolos’ steely demeanor met its match.
A baby-faced 8th-grade boy stood at a lectern analyzing a poem. In a squeaky voice, he talked about feeling alone and neglected, like the narrator. And, matter-of-factly, he ticked off events that brought him there.
He had been taken away from his crack-addicted mother. His brother had been shot in the heart and head during a gang fight. His young cousin had died of neglect.




Thinking About K-12 Building Maintenance, Spending and School Climate in Colorado



Nancy Mitchell:

Colorado’s speaker of the house is traveling the state in daylong jaunts – driving on unpaved roads to meet with kids, eating lunch in restaurants decorated with rusted farm tools, singing America the Beautiful with the Lions Club – to learn more about rural schools.
It’s not always a pretty picture.
In the San Luis Valley, the high school’s only math teacher is too busy with other subjects to teach calculus; in Ordway, the gym weights are prison castoffs; in tiny Joes, a teacher applies for Gerber Foods grants to buy textbooks.
In repairs alone, K-12 schools statewide need $6 billion to $10 billion. Which is why Romanoff may propose, for the first time in Colorado history, a statewide ballot measure to build and repair schools.




Putting Our Changing (Milwaukee) District to the Test



Alan Borsuk:

As a new school year opens, we look at the new challenges and recurring demands facing education and ask what can be done to aid our classrooms and students
The start of the school year is always a time when children, parents, teachers and administrators have to rush to take care of a zillion small questions, from what to wear on the first day to whether there’s a teacher in every classroom.
But it is also the start of the next round of the wrestling match with the largest questions hanging over education, especially in urban places such as Milwaukee.
Here are 10 of the big questions facing Milwaukee as the school year begins in earnest today and thumbnail thoughts on how they are being answered.
1) What works? Want to hear a recitation of all the reforms that haven’t really succeeded in getting better educational outcomes for Milwaukee children? Neither do we. Nonetheless, there are bright spots on the local education scene – specific schools that are doing well – and they tend to have common traits, including excellent principals, united and stable staffs, a strong commitment to clear education programs and a willingness to keep working with each child to get the child engaged and to the point of success.




No break, no bells in school of the future



Anushka Asthana:

Jared Downer, 17, stared in awe at the curved, concrete walls towering above him. Stepping into the open lobby, more than 15 metres high, he saw sweeping staircases, multi-coloured up-lighting and soundproof glass walls. A striking, arched ceiling stretched above him with retractable panels and mirrors that reflected light back towards the centre-piece – a huge eye-shaped pod filled with computers.
Designed by architects working for Norman Foster, this could have been the futuristic headquarters of a multinational company. It was, in fact, Jared’s new school.
It is more than just the architecture that will be different when the Thomas Deacon Academy opens in Peterborough, Cambridgeshire, next week, replacing three local schools. This project will break apart the traditional notion of how a school should operate. Under head Alan McMurdo, the academy will be a school with no playground, no break time, no bells and no register. A school that McMurdo hopes will help shape the future of British education.
‘People have got to realise that things develop,’ he said, standing by a vast window overlooking the red-brick building that was until recently Deacon’s School. ‘We know more about the brain, about how people work and about effective teaching. It would be an outrage if you went to the doctor and they were still treating you like they did 40 years ago.’

Related: The Big Picture.




Education Roundtable



NPR:

Today we kick off a new month-long series on education. While public school may be free, the price of making sure kids are equipped to learn is out of reach for some parents.
Joining Farai Chideya are Rudy Crew, the superintendent of Miami-Dade County Public Schools and the author of Only Connect: The Way to Save Our Schools; Janelle Thompson, a third grade teacher at Kohne Elementary in the Chicago Public School District; and Genea, a single mom living in Southern California.




Police calls for Madison schools, July 2006-June 2007



Madison Parent:

The tables linked below summarize Madison Police Department calls for service to MMSD schools from July 1, 2006 through June 30, 2007, as follows:
The tables linked below summarize Madison Police Department calls for service to MMSD schools from July 1, 2006 through June 30, 2007, as follows:
By call date
By school, subgrouped by call date
By school, subgrouped by incident type
School subtotals
Incident type subtotals
To repeat the commentary from the last time we posted call data statistics:

Data like this provides a starting point for getting a sense of the type and levels of incidents that affect safety in our children’s schools, and it’ll be useful to compare these numbers from time to time against like categories of data going forward. Context that we need, but don’t have, is information on the number and types of violent or disruptive incidents occurring in the schools as a whole (not just those resulting in police calls), and to what extent policies on summoning law enforcement in response to a violent or disruptive incident vary from school to school (in which case call data alone may be an unreliable index of the school’s relative safety).




Mistaking Attendance



Harold Levy & Kimberly Henry:

HERE’S a math problem only truant officers will get right: How is it possible for many school districts in America to report both that average daily attendance is better than 90 percent and that almost 30 percent of students miss a month of school annually?
(a) Averages hide underlying data. While a few schools have nearly perfect attendance, most have a serious truancy problem.
(b) Elementary schools are large and have high attendance, while middle and high schools have smaller enrollments and miserable attendance. Large numbers of dropouts in the upper grades hide mass absences because enrollments there are lower.
(c) That 90 percent average daily attendance doesn’t mean the same 10 percent of children are out all the time; it could mean 30 percent are chronically absent, only on different days.
Sadly, the answer is:




Paying Parents to “Do the Right Thing”



Raina Kelley:

Paying kids for good grades is a popular (if questionable) parenting tactic. But when school starts next week, New York City will try to use the same enticement to get parents in low-income neighborhoods more involved in their children’s education and overall health. Mayor Michael Bloomberg has raised more than $40 million (much of it from his own money and the Rockefeller Foundation) to pay families a modest amount for small tasks—$50 for getting a library card or $100 to take a child to the dentist—that could make a big difference.
The experimental program, called Opportunity NYC, is modeled on a 10-year-old Mexican program called Oportunidades, which has been so successful in reducing poverty in rural areas that it has been adopted by more than 20 countries, including Argentina and Turkey. International studies have found that these programs raise school enrollment and vaccination rates and lower the number of sick days students take




Top 3 Ways Parents Can Boost Kids



Judie Kleinmaier:

It’s that time of year — a chance for a fresh start for all students. It’s been a long time since I started a school year, but I remember the anxiety and anticipation: Will it be a good year? What do I have to do to be successful?
With that in mind, I e-mailed principals at three Madison schools and asked them to offer a bit of advice. My question was simple and straightforward: What are the three most important things parents can do to help their kids get off to a good start in school this fall?
Their answers brought to mind a book that was a bestseller in the 1980s: “All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten” by Robert Fulghum. The advice from these experienced educators involves a lot of common sense and caring and sharing.
Here are their responses:




Do culture-themed public schools cross a legal line?



Nathanial Popper:

When the Tarek ibn Ziyad Academy opened four years ago in suburban Minneapolis, the school was a bold experiment and its survival was in question. There was the scramble to attract students that any charter school faces, but Tarek ibn Ziyad had the additional worry of a constitutional challenge, given the school’s sponsorship by a nonprofit called Islamic Relief and the curriculum’s emphasis on Muslim culture and the Arabic language.
The school has not only survived but thrived, and there are plans for local expansion. Perhaps the surest sign that the experiment worked came last week, when a new charter school opened up thousands of miles away in Hollywood, Fla.–founded by Jewish parents, Ben Gamla Charter School has kosher food in the cafeteria and Hebrew posters in the classrooms. In the planning of the Florida school, Tarek ibn Ziyad’s experience was taken into account.
The success of Tarek ibn Ziyad’s model, and its adoption outside of Minnesota, heralds a potentially explosive new trend in America’s charter schools: publicly funded schools tied to a particular religion. The founders of Ben Gamla are already promising more branches in other states, and parents from other religions are sure to venture into similar territory, pushing the constitutional limits even further. As Peter Deutsch, the Orthodox Jewish congressman who started Ben Gamla, has said, it “could be a huge paradigm shift in education in America




Make science easier, examiners are told



Adam Kula & Alexandra Frean:

Examiners will have to set easier questions in some GCSE science papers, under new rules seen by The Times. A document prepared by the Joint Council for Qualifications (JCQ), which represents awarding bodies across Britain, says that, from next year, exam papers should consist of 70 per cent “low-demand questions”, requiring simpler or multiple-choice answers. These currently make up just 55 per cent of the paper.
The move follows growing concern about the “dumbing down” of science teaching at GCSE and grade inflation of exam results, which critics claim is the result of a government drive to reverse the long-term decline in the number of pupils studying science.
In the past five years, the proportion of students gaining a grade D or better in one of the combined science papers has leapt from 39.6 to 46.7 per cent.
The latest move has been condemned by an education expert. Last night Professor Alan Smithers, head of the Education and Employment Research Centre at the University of Buckingham, said: “Deliberately increasing the proportion of easier questions is a clear example of lowering the bar.”




Teachers in Trouble, Parents Ignored, Part III



Jay Matthews:

Dawn Henderson’s daughter Kaitlin was crying hysterically when she came home from Hardy Middle School one day in early October 2003. The D.C. sixth grader had a learning disability. She had not understood her social studies homework and was among six students who had not completed it.
Henderson said she knew the teacher to be a young woman new to the profession. During visits to Hardy, Henderson said she heard the teacher yell at some students about failing to do homework.
Kaitlin told her mother that day the teacher had tried something new: She made the six students stand in front of the class and hold all of their textbooks in their outstretched arms for about 15 minutes, until their muscles ached. Kaitlin did not have many books, but they were heavy for an 11-year-old.




Views on Wisconsin’s K-12 School Spending



Frank Lassee:

The third Friday of September is an important date for schools. On that day the final enrollment count is made, then each school district will move to finalize their annual budget. Having the school budgets final by mid October is important for all of us, especially property taxpayers.
Under current law, schools will be allowed to spend $264 more for each student than last year. That is what the Governor and Democratic Senators proposed, as well. The Assembly has shaved it back to $200 per kid each year of the budget (with an incentive of $264 if the teachers agree to negotiate for a less expensive health plan). Last year in Wisconsin, we spent almost $10 billion on our public schools, approximately $5 Billion of state taxes, $4 Billion of local property taxes and $1 Billion from the federal government.

Paul Soglin:

Wisconsin State Representative Frank Lasee (R-2nd) needs to go back to school. I suppose it is an intended public service that he tells us that, “Education is by far the single biggest expense of our state budget.”
O.K. Interesting information, but he never tells us what is the proper level of spending, or for that matter, why home owners should pay more so that businesses can pay less for education.
He makes additional observations such as the fact that, “Total spending divided by the number of teachers works out to nearly $150,000 for each teacher.”
Huh? What does that mean? Lasee thinks that the cost of busing kids to school or the cost of school books is to be measured by the cost per teacher. A figure as useful as knowing the cost of postage to mail a letter to the moon. Most of his comments continue with measures and data that are meaningless, either with no context or a useless context.

Much more on K-12 spending here.




Is Wisconsin’s ACT Rank Inflated?



Bruce Murphy:

Last week, we got the annual good news that Wisconsin “scores near top on ACT once again,” as a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel headline declared. Aping her predecessors, state Superintendent Elizabeth Burmaster hailed the results as proof of how dandy we’re doing in Badgerland. The “composite score speaks well of our students’ academic achievement and the support they receive from their parents and teachers,” she declared.
But are we really doing that well? A close look at the ACT test data offers some reason for caution. Yes, Wisconsin’s average score of 22.3 was high compared to the national average of 21.2 (with scores ranging from 18.9 for Mississippi to 23.5 for Massachusetts), but the percentage of students taking the test here is lower than in 15 states. While 70 percent of Wisconsin students take the test, the percentage is 100 in Illinois and Colorado, 96 in Tennessee and Mississippi, and ranges from 71 to 82 percent for another 11 states.
Why does this matter? As the percentage of students taking the test increases, you are likely to include more low-attendance and low-performance students in the mix, pushing the average score lower.
Burmaster brags that Wisconsin has maintained its high ACT score even as the percentage of students taking the test rose. But the increase was minimal, rising from 68 percent in 2002 to 70 percent last year. That includes a steady rise in the number of African-American and Hispanic students taking the test, but they still remain underrepresented.
“We allow people in this state to pound their chest while ignoring the fact that Milwaukee has significantly fewer kids taking (the ACT),” Milwaukee School Board member Terry Falk declared in the JS story. (Falk, a former contributor to Milwaukee Magazine, sure knows how to give good quotes.)
As a reality check, I looked at state scores combined with the percentage of students taking the test to estimate which states we might actually trail. A state like Mississippi, for instance, can be quickly rejected: Yes, 96 percent of students took the test, but the average score of 18.9 was abysmally low, worst among all 50 states. Even if Wisconsin tested 96 percent of students, its average score would never drop that low.




Beloit College’s Mindset List® for the Class of 2011



Beloit College:

Most of the students entering College this fall, members of the Class of 2011, were born in 1989. For them, Alvin Ailey, Andrei Sakharov, Huey Newton, Emperor Hirohito, Ted Bundy, Abbie Hoffman, and Don the Beachcomber have always been dead.
# What Berlin wall?
# Humvees, minus the artillery, have always been available to the public.

Cathy Lynn Grossman has more:

For this fall’s incoming college class, “off the hook” could mean “excellent” or escaping blame, but for sure it has nothing to do with telephones.
“Here’s Johnny!” That’s Jack Nicholson in The Shining, not the intro for Johnny Carson’s monologue, according to today’s 18-year-olds.
Professors had best update their lingo if they want to communicate with the Class of 2011 (on the assumption that anyone actually finishes in four years anymore).
Here to help is the 10th annual Beloit College Mindset List, released today by the small Wisconsin liberal arts college.




Checking the Kids Homework Over the Internet
Growing Web-Based Software



Christopher Lawton:

After his divorce, Gregg La Montagne found it hard to help his 15-year-old daughter with her schoolwork since she lives in another state. So for her Spanish class recently, Mr. La Montagne told her to write her assignment in an online word-processing application made by Google Inc.
Mr. La Montagne, a sales manager in Austin, Texas, then accessed his daughter’s homework online, using the same software through his Web browser at home. A native Spanish speaker, Mr. La Montagne was then able to suggest grammar changes, which he typed in at the bottom of the paper. His daughter, who was online at the same time, was able to see her father’s notes almost instantaneously as her screen refreshed, and then in turn correct the document for him to see.
“It makes it easier to participate,” says Mr. La Montagne, 50 years old. “It’s not the same as being with her, but it’s at least a step in that direction.”
Mr. La Montagne is one of a growing number of parents now using Web-based applications to review and aid their children’s educational work. Google Docs & Spreadsheets, which Mr. La Montagne used, provides word processing and spreadsheets that a consumer can access using just a Web browser.




New LA Superintendent “Blasts Culture of Low Expectations”



Howard Blume & Joel Rubin:

The L.A. schools chief tells administrators ‘we’re going to teach you how to change.’ They’ll get leadership training and will be held accountable for student achievement, he says.
In his first formal speech to administrators, Los Angeles Schools Supt. David L. Brewer told principals and managers Friday that they must change both themselves and a pervasive culture of “low expectations for brown and black children,” adding that they would receive mandatory leadership training and support but also would be held accountable for student achievement.
Brewer, a devotee of management books, set out eight principles — including creating “a sense of urgency,” “building a team” and “communicating a vision” — that he expects principals and others to follow.
In a later interview, Brewer said the Los Angeles Unified School District would launch a pilot management-training program, with courses shaped by input from universities, outside consultant firms and corporations.
“We’re going to teach you how to change,” Brewer told his audience, promising “world-class leadership and management training” as well as real support from higher-ups. “You’re going to need it,” he said.
Many of the roughly 1,500 administrators in attendance took notes on stationery provided free by a credit union that was trying to drum up business. After Brewer’s morning speech at a hall in the Los Angeles Convention Center, “inspirational” was the adjective of choice for many.




Back to School Picnic



100 Black Men of Madison:

100 Black Men of Madison 11th Annual Back to School Picnic will be held this Saturday August 25th, rain or shine at Demetral Park located on Commercial and Packers Avenue at 11 am.
Over 2,000 free backpacks filled with school supplies will be distributed to students in kindergarten thru eighth grade.
In addition, hamburgers, hot dogs and beverages will be served. This event is first come, first served and students must be in attendance to receive a backpack.
The purpose of this event is to assist students at the beginning the school year with the supplies needed for academic success and to reduce the achievement gap.
For more information please contact, Chris Canty at 244-1259 or cwcanty@gmail.com.

Via a Johnny Winston, Jr. email.




Attempts to make schools healthier are faltering



The Economist:

THE proportion of children in America who are overweight has tripled over the past 20 years and now exceeds 17%, according to the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The health problems that this causes include hypertension and type-2 diabetes, formerly known only among the nation’s overweight adult population. A group sponsored by the National Institute on Ageing has warned that this may be the first generation ever to have a shorter lifespan than their parents.
All the while, the proportion of children who take part in daily exercise at high school has dropped from 42% in 1991 to only 28% in 2004, according to the CDC. Snacking has greatly increased; the Government Accountability Office found in 2003 that 99% of America’s high schools now sell snacks and other food as well as providing lunches.
In an attempt to get the problem tackled at local level, Congress in 2004 passed an act directing school districts that get money from the national school-lunch programme to create “wellness” policies by the start of the 2006-07 school year. The districts were told to set standards for nutrition, physical activity and education about good food, then make sure that schools actually implement them.
One year after the deadline, the results are haphazard. School districts’ plans range from a few paragraphs long to more than 25 pages. Some states, like Texas and Arkansas, have pre-emptively set standards for school districts under their jurisdiction, forcing schools to ban fizzy drinks and junk food while increasing the amount of exercise the pupils take. Others offer guidelines rather than mandates, with no repercussions for schools that don’t comply. And in some areas, schools are being eased into change very slowly. Oregon’s legislature passed a bill in June that gives its schools ten years to meet its new physical-education requirements.




NY State Names 17 More ‘Persistently Dangerous’ Schools



Jennifer Medina:

New York State education officials yesterday added 17 schools to the list of those considered “persistently dangerous,” substantially expanding the list for the second year in a row. All but 2 of the 27 schools on the new list are in New York City, including a dozen schools designed for students with severe disabilities.
The schools ranged from the behemoth Jamaica High School in Queens to smaller schools like Powell Middle School in Harlem and Public School 14 in Staten Island. The list also includes a school in Rochester and Berkshire Junior-Senior High School in Canaan, N.Y.
The federal No Child Left Behind Act requires states to compile annual lists of “persistently dangerous” schools but leaves it to each state to define the term. Many states, including New York, have been criticized for issuing extremely short lists in past years.
“We are utterly determined to make all schools safe,” said Richard P. Mills, the state education commissioner, in announcing the list yesterday at a news conference in Albany.
Mr. Mills said New York’s list had grown because the state had vastly improved its reporting efforts. He noted that the 49 other states had listed a total of only 30 schools as “persistently dangerous” last year, just a hairsbreadth more than the schools now listed by New York.

Madison Parent’s School Safety Site posted 2006/2007 student teacher assaults/injury data here.
Wisconsin DPI “Discipline Data Collection and Reporting” webpage.




Teachers in Trouble – Parents Ignored, Part II



Jay Matthews:

For a long time, Dawn Mosisa had trouble forgiving herself for the way she shrugged off her daughter’s story about the teacher who hit one of her second grade classmates in the spring of 2003. Her daughter said the man ordered the class to count to 10 in French while he hit the boy 10 times with a ruler.
The girl was not in the habit of making up such stories, the mother said, but like most parents, Mosisa did not want to think that any educator would be so cruel, so she chose not to believe it. When the teacher left the school the next year, Mosisa grew more concerned. But she said she could not get anyone at Maryvale Elementary School in Rockville to explain to her or her child exactly what had occurred and how they should respond.
Abuse of a student at school is a parent’s nightmare. Not only do such incidents harm the victims and their parents, but they also trouble the children who may have witnessed the event and their parents. Such cases usually remain undisclosed because parents do not want their children embarrassed or disturbed by public knowledge of what happened. But Mosisa, 44, a student financial services official for a public university, has given an unusually detailed account that sheds light on a rarely examined side of public education.




Flushing Out Life’s Hard Calls



Roger Blitz:

Harvard law school thinks it has found the solution to many of society’s problems, from teenage delinquency to world diplomatic crises: a hand of poker.
The card game that is a game of skill to its advocates, and a potentially ruinous bet on chance to its detractors, is to be taught to disadvantaged US schoolchildren and college students to teach respect, business acumen and even war strategy.




School Employees Serving on School Boards



Chris Moran:

School employees commonly serve on the governing boards of school districts that don’t employ them. What makes a case in South County different is three administrators’ dual roles at Southwestern College and the Sweetwater Union High School District, because they’re in positions to vote on each other’s budgets and salaries.
Greg Sandoval is interim president of Southwestern and a member of the Sweetwater board. Arlie Ricasa is director of student activities at Southwestern and is on the Sweetwater board. Jorge Dominguez is director of the Educational Technology Department at Sweetwater and a member of the Southwestern board.
The arrangement is legal. Governance ethicists raise questions about appearances, though, especially when the crossover votes occur as close together as they have recently.
How close?
In May, Sandoval joined the majority in a 3-2 vote rejecting $500,000 for Dominguez’s department.




Madison and State ACT Scores Rise



Susan Troller:

Madison public school students’ average scores on the ACT college admissions exam outpace those of their counterparts statewide, even as Wisconsin performs well compared to other states.
The average composite score of Madison public high school students on the national test was 24.6 over the 2006-07 school year, the best showing the district has had since it began keeping ACT records 22 years ago. Nearly 70 percent of high school students in Madison took the test last year.
Up from 24.2 in 2005-06, the average score for Madison students compares to 22.3 among students statewide. The average national composite score is 21.2.
Although an achievement gap remains among minority students and their white counterparts in Madison, students from all ethnic groups here perform substantially better than their peers statewide, and nationally. For the second year in a row, all Madison minority sub-groups improved their performance on the ACT.




K-12 Spending More Reliant on Federal Government Since No Child Left Behind Act



Gerald Prante:

New data from the National Center for Education Statistics show that the federal government has been commandeering a continually larger role in K-12 education in recent years, especially since 1999 and the January 2002 passage of the No Child Left Behind Act.
The new statistics include detailed financial data about school districts across the nation for the 2004-05 school year. Five years earlier, during the 1999-2000 school year, public school districts received an average of $578 per pupil from the federal government. By 2004-05, that number had risen to $919. That’s a 60-percent increase, and even after adjusting for inflation, it’s a 39 percent boost in federal aid. In this study we rank the states on how much more reliant they have become on Uncle Sam for this traditionally local government function.
There are several ways to quantify this increasing reliance on the federal government. The two we present in Table 1 are the absolute dollar amounts per pupil that the federal government sent to each state’s school system, and the percentage of each state’s education spending that comes from the federal government. The rightmost column shows how every state’s share of revenue from the federal government has changed since 1999-00.

Related: K-12 Spending Climate.




When Special Education Goes Too Easy on Students



John Hechinger and Daniel Golden:

On June 25, 2006, Michael Bredemeyer threw his tasseled cap in the air and cheered after getting his high school diploma. Two days later, his parents mailed the diploma back.
Michael, now 19 years old, has learning disabilities and finished high school at a seventh-grade reading level, despite scoring above average on IQ tests. The Bredemeyers say he passed some classes because teachers inflated his grades and accepted poor work. By awarding him a meaningless diploma, they say, school officials avoided paying for ongoing instruction.
“I felt proud because he had worked so hard,” says Michael’s mother, Beverly, her voice breaking. “You don’t want to take that away from him. But you knew it wasn’t real. What’s he going to do in the future? Will he be able to go to college and get a job?”
The Bredemeyers represent a new voice in special education: parents disappointed not because their children are failing, but because they’re passing without learning. These families complain that schools give their children an easy academic ride through regular-education classes, undermining a new era of higher expectations for the 14% of U.S. students who are in special education.
Years ago, schools assumed that students with disabilities would lag behind their non-disabled peers. They often were taught in separate buildings and left out of standardized testing. But a combination of two federal laws, adopted a quarter-century apart, have made it national policy to hold almost all children with disabilities to the same academic standards as other students.