Samuel Freedman:

Allison Rabenau celebrated an inauspicious milestone on the otherwise unremarkable day of Oct. 18, 2004. Six weeks into her first year as a teacher, she finally taught a class.
Ms. Rabenau had left a long career as a stage manager in the commercial theater to learn how to teach English as a second language to immigrant children in New York’s public schools. The only problem, she quickly discovered, was that the avalanche of paperwork and other assignments meant she actually got to teach only sporadically.
In a perfect, if dispiriting bit of symmetry, her initial year at Public School 123 in Harlem ended the same way it began. Ms. Rabenau lost the last six weeks of the spring term to prepare, administer, then score a standardized test for English fluency.
Essentially, her teaching year, and her students’ learning year, had run only from mid-October to mid-April, with numerous interruptions even then. During the time when the students were entitled to instruction in English, they were sitting in other courses that they may or may not have understood.

The Doyle Report:

Announced two days ago by Mayor Adrian Fenty, Michelle’s appointment is part of two trends. The first is mayoral control of schools; the second is appointing “uncredentialed” or “unlicensed” leaders to fill the post of superintendent (or in the case of DC and NYC, chancellor).
The nightmare of credentialing is ordinarily thought of in terms of teachers, a challenge that reformers like Michelle and Wendy Kopp have taken on in their respective spheres; in their earliest incarnation, credentials were meant to be a floor beneath which teachers would not fall. In their modern incarnation they have become a ceiling through which they may not pass. For example, the head of the Sidwell Friends math program, a trained mathematician with 30 years experience of superlative high school teaching couldn’t get a job in a public school. Nor could Einstein.
By way of contrast, the most ordinary time-server could muddle through a college of teacher education and “earn” a credential. So too administrative credentials. Most important, the credentialitis that afflicts public K-12 education, while originally well intentioned, is not linked to performance.

Tom Ashbrook, Luke Massie, Michael Steel, ,Gary Orfield and Lani Gunier:

Across the country today, American schools and educators are still trying to figure out the full implications of last week’s big Supreme Court ruling on race and school assignments.
A half century after the court declared that “separate but equal” does not work in education, the Roberts court seemed to point straight back to separate but equal. Or maybe forward to some new effort at colorblind equality.
This is bedrock stuff. Critics are shouting “resegregation.” Supporters say “So what?”
This hour On Point: the surprising range of response to the court’s big new message on race and schools.

20mb mp3 audio.

Talk of the Nation:

New York City schools plan to offer dutiful seventh graders up to $500 a year in incentives for attendance and good grades. In an op-ed that appeared in Sunday’s New York Times, a psychology professor argues that the logic behind this new plan is based on flawed assumptions.

Audio.

Eliot Spitzer:

In a 30-minute presentation entitled “Unfinished Business,” given to more than 400 of the state’s most powerful and influential television and radio professionals, Gov. Spitzer made the case his administration has much to be proud of since he took office in January.
Among the educational accomplishments touted in his talk was the doubling of charter school choices across New York. “The more you get alternative models out there, the better,” he remarked. “Even if charter schools never have more than a small piece of the market share, they nonetheless provide an alternative example people can look to for learning.”

Jon Boone:

Two of the world’s most buccaneering education entrepreneurs have teamed up to build 60 multimillion-dollar schools in big cities across the world.
The network of high-end international schools will cater to the children of bankers, diplomats and executives who have to regularly uproot their families.
With annual fees between $15,000 and $40,000, depending on the city, the plan marks a serious departure for Chris Whittle, famous for starting the Edison Schools company, which runs facilities in some of America’s most deprived areas.
His new venture, Nations Academy, has been set up with Sunny Varkey, chairman of Dubai-based Global Education Management Systems, which runs private schools around the world.

Christian:

Mmm. Seems that before we had iPods, we had tiny sheets of paper that were folded up and hidden in shirt sleeves full of answers. And easily chewable after-the-fact. And we also had kids collecting tests over years and passing them down when teachers were predictable about their tests.
What’s really changed? Has iPod really brought the boogey-man into the school? Or are we forgetting simple things? Forgetting the past? The paper version of the past?
Leaves me to wonder something else. Why are the MP3s allowed to be ON and/or the earphones/buds IN the students ears or near their vision?

Susan Moore Johnson:

Presidents of 30 local teachers unions in six states speak candidly about their views on a number of education issues, revealing that they are focused on far more than the traditional union priorities of wages, hours, working conditions, and due process for their members.

Juan Williams:

LET us now praise the Brown decision. Let us now bury the Brown decision.
With yesterday’s Supreme Court ruling ending the use of voluntary schemes to create racial balance among students, it is time to acknowledge that Brown’s time has passed. It is worthy of a send-off with fanfare for setting off the civil rights movement and inspiring social progress for women, gays and the poor. But the decision in Brown v. Board of Education that focused on outlawing segregated schools as unconstitutional is now out of step with American political and social realities.
Desegregation does not speak to dropout rates that hover near 50 percent for black and Hispanic high school students. It does not equip society to address the so-called achievement gap between black and white students that mocks Brown’s promise of equal educational opportunity.
And the fact is, during the last 20 years, with Brown in full force, America’s public schools have been growing more segregated — even as the nation has become more racially diverse. In 2001, the National Center for Education Statistics reported that the average white student attends a school that is 80 percent white, while 70 percent of black students attend schools where nearly two-thirds of students are black and Hispanic.

Juan Williams, a senior correspondent for NPR and a political analyst for Fox News Channel, is the author of “Enough: The Phony Leaders, Dead-End Movements and Culture of Failure That Are Undermining Black America.”

David Herszenhorn:

The Beginning With Children Charter School, housed in a former factory in Brooklyn, landed on the state’s list of high-performing schools this year, thanks to rising English and math test scores among black and Hispanic students.
But its founders and wealthy patrons, Joseph H. and Carol F. Reich, who have poured hundreds of thousands of dollars into the school, think it could be better. “It’s above average,” said Mr. Reich, 72, “but considering the effort and the capability and the resources, we don’t feel we’re getting the best we can.”
So last month, the couple — threatening to cut ties, including financial support — forced most of the school’s trustees to resign in a push for wide management changes, and better student achievement.

Consultants warn of ‘escalated hostility’ if Board of Education, superintendent don’t address dysfunctional management practices

Susan Hong:

New Palo Alto schools’ Superintendent Kevin Skelly and the Palo Alto Board of Education ought to spearhead a “time of healing” in the school district, consultants Geoff Ball and Associates advised the school board Tuesday night.
The recommendation — and numerous others — were outlined in a report commissioned to assess allegations from the Palo Alto Management Association (PAMA) that outgoing Superintendent Mary Frances Callan and her senior cabinet members treated employees unfairly.
Overall, the report found, the district lacks clarity on decision making, meeting management and purposes and is confused about the relative roles of the school board, superintendent and managers, consultants said.

Palo Alto School District. Interestingly, Palo Alto has a High School Task Force underway. The 17 member task force includes a student, 4 teachers and 4 parents among others. There are no University level Ed school folks present, unlike Madison’s.

Karyn Saemann:

A decade after dismissing the idea, Monona Grove High School is once again eyeing a block schedule.
The Monona Grove School Board may be asked next month to consider an alternating block schedule beginning in the fall of 2008 in which each day has four 95-minute periods. The school currently has eight 47-minute periods.
Under the proposal, students would still take eight classes per semester because each class would meet every other day. Over two weeks, students would see each teacher five times.
The board will meet July 12 at 7 p.m. at the district office, 5301 Monona Drive.
Such a schedule is a bit different from a straight block used at Madison La Follette. In a straight block, students typically take four classes per term, meeting every day for 90 minutes.

Jennifer Medina:

Green Dot Public Schools, a charter school operator from Los Angeles, is seeking to expand into New York with the cooperation of the teachers’ union.
Under the proposal, Green Dot, which is heavily financed by the billionaire philanthropist Eli Broad, would open a high school in the South Bronx. The school, which must be approved by the state, would become one of only a handful of charter schools in the city to use a union contract.

Robert Barnes [PDF Opinion]:

A splintered Supreme Court today threw out school desegregation plans from Seattle and Louisville, but without a majority holding that race can never be considered as school districts try to ensure racially diverse populations.
Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. authored the most important opinion of his two terms leading the court. He held that both plans, which categorize students on the basis of race and use that in making school assignments, violate the constitution’s promise of equal protection, even if the goal is integration of the schools.
“The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race,” Roberts wrote.
He was joined by Justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr. But Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, who agreed with the four in striking down the desegregation plans, would not go as far as Roberts in ruling out racial considerations.
“Parts of the opinion by the Chief Justice imply an all-too-unyielding insistence that race cannot be a factor in instances when, in my view, it may be taken into account,” Kennedy wrote. “The plurality opinion is too dismissive of the legitimate interest government has in ensuring all people have equal opportunity regardless of their race.”
The court’s four liberals delivered a scathing dissent — twice as long as Roberts’s opinion. It said the plurality’s decision was, in the words of Justice Stephen G. Breyer, who read his opposition from the bench, a “cruel distortion” of the court’s landmark decision more than 50 years ago in Brown v. Board of Education, which demanded an end to segregated schools.

Links & Commentary:

• David Stout:
  

  n the hours after the ruling, reaction varied greatly, with some groups denouncing it as virtually inviting a return to the days of segregation, and others asserting that it need not be seen that way, in view of Justice Kennedy’s unwillingness to fully embrace Chief Justice Roberts’s opinion.
  The rationale of the chief justice’s opinion relied in part on the historic 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education that outlawed segregation in public schools — a factor that the dissenters on the court found to be a cruel irony, and which they objected to in emotional terms.
  Chief Justice Roberts said the officials in Seattle and in Jefferson County, Ky., which includes Louisville, had failed to show that their plans considered race in the context of a larger educational concept, and therefore did not pass muster.
  “In the present cases,” Chief Justice Roberts wrote, recalling words from an earlier Supreme Court ruling, “race is not considered as part of a broader effort to achieve ‘exposure to widely diverse people, cultures, ideas, and viewpoints.’ ”

• Robert Tomsho: More Schools Likely to Spur
  Diversity via Income.

  By a 5-4 vote, the Supreme Court struck down voluntary school desegregation efforts in Louisville, Ky., and Seattle. The vote “will encourage districts now using race to shift to income,” says Richard Kahlenberg, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation, a New York-based think tank. (See related article.)
  Income-based plans began spreading in the 1990s as race-based policies came under growing pressure in the federal courts. Most seek to limit the percentage of low-income students in any one school by dispersing them beyond their neighborhood schools and assigning higher-income students to schools with a lower-income profile. The programs generally identify low-income students as those qualifying for the federal free- and reduced-price lunch program.

• Sherrilyn Ifill: Supreme Disappointment
• TJ Mertz: “Sad Day, the End of an Era”
• Joanne Jacobs
• Andy Hall notes some local commentary:
  

  Art Rainwater, superintendent of Madison’s public schools, said none of the district’s school-assignment policies would be directly affected by Thursday’s decision, because the district relies upon criteria other than race — particularly poverty — when drawing school boundaries. And it uses poverty and concentrations of special-education students and students with limited English proficiency when staffing the schools.
  “In general, we don’t do anything based on race in our district,” Rainwater said.

• Nina Totenberg:
  

  In a decision with profound implications for the nation’s public schools, the U.S. Supreme Court invalidated two voluntary desegregation plans because they used race in some students’ school assignments in an effort to end racial isolation or prevent re-segregation.

• Wall Street Journal Opinion
• Cato:
  

  “Racial integration advocates will be frustrated and discouraged by today’s Supreme Court ruling striking down the racial assignment programs of Louisville and Seattle. They shouldn’t be. These were not only the right rulings constitutionally, they were also right educationally and socially. The belief that involuntary, race-based student assignment promotes socially and educationally valuable interaction among white and minority students finds little empirical support.”

Q & A on the decision.

Nancy Zuckerbrod:

Taxpayer-funded tutoring for poor children is paying off in some city schools, a federal study has found. Students who received the tutoring under the federal No Child Left Behind law improved on reading and math tests, according to the study conducted by independent researchers for the Department of Education and released Wednesday.
Students in schools that fail to hit academic targets for three years in a row are given free tutoring under the 2002 education law.

Portland Public Schools:

On May 16 and 17, Portland Public Schools, in partnership with the American Institute of Architects along with our sponsors, Innovation Partnership, Comcast, the City of Portland, the Portland Schools Foundation and PGE, held a community summit to identify ideas, explore possibilities and develop a set of guiding principles regarding the nature of Portland Schools Facilities.
Over 200 Portland citizens attended the two-day summit representing a cross section of the community including creatives, teachers, community activists, students, administrators, parents, business leaders, architects, contractors, developers and governmental leaders. They were engaged by speakers from the United Kingdom, New Orleans, Palo Alto, Cincinnati, and Washington D.C. with cutting edge thinking.

Christian has more:

In my opinion? Probably the most impressive effort of a city trying to re-imagine the entire concept of ‘school’ across its entire urban complex. And even more impressive that what started as a consideration of building a few new schools has become a re-imagination of ‘learning’ and communities on a much deeper level.

RELEASE DETAILS FOR CASE# 2007-72110: Arrested Juvenile
Case Date:06/25/07 Case Time:12:19 PM
Release Date:06/26/07 Release Time: 9:55 AM
Released By: PIO Joel DeSpain
Address 2222 E. Washington Ave. (East High School)
Arrested person/suspect Male, Age 14, Madison
Tentative Charges: Batter to a School Official, Battery, and Disorderly Conduct
Male, Age 16, Madison
Tentative Charges: Substantial Battery, Disorderly Conduct
Male, Age 16, Madison
Tentative Charges: Substantial Battery, Disorderly Conduct
Male, Age 15, Madison
Tentative Charges: Violation of a Restraining Order, Disorderly Conduct
Victim/Injuries Male, Age 15, Madison
Taken to a local hospital with multiple cuts/bruises and possible broken arm
Details On June 25th, starting at 12:20 p.m., 7 Madison Police Officers were sent to Madison East High School for a fight. Four teens were arrested. They had teamed up against a 15 year old. One suspect indicated the victim had said something about his mother. He did not like the comment. In the course of the scuffle a Principal was pushed to the ground, and a security guard was jostled. At one point some of the teens rolled down a staircase and the victim’s arm was injured.

Jay Matthews:

Houston, where KIPP was born in 1994, and New Orleans, the site of a preliminary KIPP program before Katrina hit in September 2005, have been welcoming KIPP’s attempts to find more space for families who want a challenging public education for their children. The children who enrolled in KIPP NOW, all of them low-income and 99 percent of them African American, showed what good teaching and longer days could do, even in less than ideal conditions.
I am going to cite scores from nationally standardized tests, many of them given by KIPP teachers to diagnose students’ learning problems without oversight from state officials. These results have to be treated cautiously, but they are similar to KIPP results in dozens of other schools around the country and look legitimate to me. In their first year in Houston, KIPP NOW students did very well. For instance, first graders jumped from the 18th to the 43rd percentile in reading, sixth graders from the 19th to the 66th percentile in math and eighth graders from the 21st to the 40th percentile in reading.

Tom Peters:

Extract “lessons learned” or “best practices.”
Thicken the Book of Rules.
Become evermore serious.
Enforce the rules to increasingly tight tolerances.
Go on defense.
Install walls.
Protect-at-all-costs today’s franchise.
Centralize.
Calcify.
Install taller walls.
Write more rules.
Become irrelevant and-or die.

Peters has a useful quote from Eleanor Roosevelt contained within the above link.

Alan Borsuk:

Nicole Campeau is heading to Arizona after a year teaching in Milwaukee Public Schools for which, she says, no education program could have prepared her.
Jenni Gavin is staying as an MPS teacher after “the most rewarding and exhausting 2 1/2 years of my life.”
The national study listed leadership of a school as a key factor in making or breaking new teachers, and Campeau said her experience fit that.
In an interview, she said that in the classroom, “I was a referee. I was breaking up fights constantly. I was doing little to no teaching.”

The Economist:

Now some supporters of school vouchers, frustrated with state legislators, are testing a new tactic: going to court. Last July a group of parents in New Jersey filed a lawsuit against the state and 25 poorly performing districts. In Crawford v Davy they are arguing that since public schools deny students their constitutional right to a proper education, the court should refund their money so they can spend it at any school they choose. This is not the first attempt to use courts to permit the use of vouchers: similar efforts failed in Illinois and California, for example. But in New Jersey, such a suit might actually succeed. New Jersey’s courts have no qualms about meddling in education—they have been doing so for decades.
In 1973 the New Jersey Supreme Court said the government was failing to provide poor children with the “thorough and efficient” education guaranteed by the state constitution, and that the school-funding formula must change. Since a 1985 case, Abbott v Burke, the court has issued rulings laying out its remedy in detail: the state must send more money to poor school-districts, so that their budgets match those of the state’s highest-spending areas.

Michael Alison Chandler:

“It’s not that you don’t have some terrifically talented people going into teaching. You do,” said Richard J. Murnane, an economist at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Education. “The issue is that you don’t have enough. And many are the most likely to leave teaching, because they have lots of other opportunities.”
A study co-written by Murnane and published this year reports that minorities and poor children are most likely to be taught by teachers with weak academic backgrounds or little preparation. Overall, the proportion of women who pursue teaching after college, as well as the caliber of recruits, has declined significantly since the 1960s.

Sara Rimer:

The Dominican boys in the back of the freshman English class at the high school in Washington Heights were making fun of the timid African-American girl, Queen Bond. One of the boys got down on one knee in front of her as if he were Romeo — they had been studying “Romeo and Juliet” — and delivered the final crushing insult.
“He was saying something about that I smelled,” recalled Queen, now 17. “I just put my head down. I started crying.”
Then something remarkable happened, she said: “Cristal stood up.” Cool, streetwise, 4-foot-11-inch Cristal Pimentel.
“This short, like, two-foot-tall person is standing up to these guys who are up to the ceiling,” Queen said. “She’s screaming, getting angry, waving her arms. She stood up, she defended me. No one ever stood up for me in that way.
“I’m, like, ‘Wow, this girl is the most beautiful person.’ ”
For four years now, Queen and Cristal have been a team: two teenage girls who are striving to make something of themselves in the face of tremendous adversity.

Vaishali Honawar:

Teacher turnover is “spiraling out of control” and is estimated to have cost the nation more than $7 billion in the 2003-04 school year alone, asserts a report released today.
The study from the Washington-based National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future says that despite the staggering expense, virtually no school district now has systems in place to track or control such turnover.
The last attempt to put a price tag on teacher attrition, long acknowledged as a resource drain, was a 2005 report from the Washington-based Alliance for Excellent Education, which came up with the more modest but still hefty estimate of $4.9 billion.
NCTAF officials say their figure of $7.3 billion is higher because it is based on an increased teacher workforce and a slightly higher attrition rate.

Alan Borsuk looks at Milwaukee’s teacher turnover:

Our education system is losing half of all teachers before they reach their peak effectiveness,” the report from the National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future says. “Students, especially those in at-risk schools, are too often left with a passing parade of inexperienced teachers who leave before they become accomplished educators.”
In the Milwaukee Public Schools, the report says, “low-performing schools have double the teacher turnover of high-performing schools.”
Teacher turnover rates in MPS went up as the percentage of students in poverty went up, according to the report, which may be the most elaborate analysis of teacher movement in MPS. The same was true as the percentage of students from minority groups increased and the overall achievement of students decreased.

Nelson Hernandez has more.

In the interest of transparency, I am posting one of the e-mails received in relation to the decision to restart the naming process for the new school on Madison’s far West side. I also am posting my response, which shares the reason for my apology to the Hmong community on Monday night, and also for advocating that the board go back to square one on the naming process.
It is my expectation/understanding that the board will establish a time line for the nomination and selection process at our July 9 meeting. People who nominated names the first time can resubmit the materials without revision. People who want to submit new or alternate names must follow the process (e.g., commentary on public forums does not constitute a nomination or formal objection).

Dear Board members:
Thank you for doing the right thing and removing Vang Pao*s name from the new west side elementary school. I know it was a difficult decision for you, although I*m not sure why. I was a bit disconcerted about the *regret* and apologies issued to the Hmong community about your votes. How much controversy does a person need before he is unacceptable as a name for an elementary school? You would have never considered General Westmoorland*But, I digress. I really do appreciate the political situation you felt yourself to be in and appreciate your vote for what is best for the children of Madison. You are to be commended!
On another note, I*d like to encourage you to amend your policy to proceed with naming by using the three names left on the original list. My concerns are that the community is not going to heal properly if we have to go through all this again. Naming a school shouldn*t be this difficult. You have an opportunity here to take the best way out and allow the community to move on and give yourselves the chance to deal with more pressing issues*like budget!
Please*take the high road and go back to the list of three and let*s be done with this.
Thanks again, for removing Vang Pao*s name. Your courage is greatly appreciated.
Heidi Reynolds

=============
MY RESPONSE:
Dear Ms. Reynolds,
Thank you for taking the time to write. I am not sure that I understand your response, since you so often said – and have gone to great lengths to present yourself to the media as someone who wants to compromise, have nothing against the Hmong, and want to heal the rift between communities.
I cannot speak for my fellow board members, but state for the record that my apologize comes from compassion for the pain and suffering that the Hmong community have experienced in their lives and have been experiencing again since Vang Pao’s arrest. My comments are sincere, just as are my comments that there are no winners in this unfortunate set of events.
As for reopening the process, it seems to me that we have been subjected to repeated allegations that we did not follow board policy the first time around. I cannot speak for my colleagues, but it is my personal hope that by going back to square one we can ensure that the process is followed to the fullest. (There is no policy that mandates going back to the list of finalists in a case such as this, so we are in fact following board policy by starting over.)
Sincerely,
Lucy Mathiak

CJ Hughes:

Not surprisingly, then, towns with blue-ribbon public school systems — like Greenwich, Fairfield and West Hartford — have consistently commanded some of the higher home prices in the state.
But prices within a town can fluctuate, even by neighborhood, based on the strength of the local elementary school, according to a new study by seven professors and students at Trinity College.
The study examined the relationship between grade-school test scores and home prices in West Hartford’s 11 elementary school districts, and found that as one climbed, so did the other, in specific and predictable increments.

Avis Thomas-Lester:

Just walking into Largo High School left Larue Campbell feeling the most profound loss.
Fliers about the school’s upcoming prom reminded him that he never attended his own. Posters announcing commencement ceremonies left him wondering what it would have been like to stroll across the stage in a cap and gown as his loved ones cheered.
But instead of taking part in prom and graduation, Campbell was at Largo for night school classes to prepare for the GED exam. Last spring, he dropped out of high school, one of hundreds of Washington area African American males to do so each year.
“If I hadn’t dropped out, I wouldn’t have to go through this now,” said Campbell of his attempt to earn a high school equivalency diploma. “I thought about going back after I left” school, “but I thought I would be too old. I was kind of embarrassed.”

Howard Rich:

The flattened borders of the 21st century have made networking faster, global trade freer and competition more rigorous — meaning the premium we place on educating future generations is higher than ever before. Yet the nation’s monopolistic approach to education remains a millstone around our children’s necks, with America consistently lagging behind its industrialized peers in academic achievement.
The late Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman understood the central role school choice must play in revitalizing American education. “Empowering parents would generate a competitive education market, which would lead to a burst of innovation and improvement, as competition has done in so many other areas,” he said in December 2005. “There’s nothing that would do so much to ensure a skilled and educated work force.”
By any objective measure, Friedman was right. The success of school choice as a method of empowering parents, raising student achievement and improving public education systems in those markets where it has been implemented is indisputable. The question now becomes how to achieve meaningful school choice for the benefit of all parents, not just a select few?
After this year’s compelling school-choice victory in Utah, the methodology for successfully advancing parental options against the well-funded phalanxes of institutional opposition is crystallizing. Specifically, Utah’s success has proven the efficacy of advocating universal choice initiatives as opposed to limited, means-tested pilot program

Parents in Charge Foundation.

Susan Troller:

Two years ago, these were the students who didn’t look like they were going to make it.
But Thursday night, 14 graduates of the Madison school district’s Work and Learn program at Brearly Street walked down the aisle at little Bolz Auditorium to the strains of “Pomp and Circumstance,” and the applause from family, friends and supporters was deafening. The students’ smiles could have lit up the evening sky.
Some are married. Some are parents. Some were chronically truant from high school because of family illnesses or crisis, or because they just didn’t care. Some had been expelled or suspended from school, or were in trouble with the law.

The Economist:

AMONG the most commercial of cities, Hong Kong follows many markets; but none more intently than the trade in debentures tied to admissions to the city’s international primary and secondary schools. These non-interest-bearing bonds are typically issued to pay for construction or other costs. Bought by parents anxious to do the best by their children, or by employers anxious to attract the best staff, they are then traded at prices set by the city’s volatile economic fluctuations.
Recently, slots in international schools have become precious. The economy is booming in China’s tailwind, attracting well-paid expatriates. Prosperous local residents, meanwhile, are deserting local schools because of what is seen as deterioration in English-language teaching since the reversion to Chinese sovereignty in 1997. It is not just the very rich who are worried: early this month a small group of not very well-off South Asian residents marched through central Hong Kong, demanding more schooling in English, arguing their children were suffering from having to attend classes conducted in Chinese.

Jonah Goldberg:

Here’s a good question for you: Why have public schools at all?
O.K., cue the marching music. We need public schools because blah blah blah and yada yada yada. We could say blah is common culture and yada is the government’s interest in promoting the general welfare. Or that children are the future. And a mind is a terrible thing to waste. Because we can’t leave any child behind.
The problem with all these bromides is that they leave out the simple fact that one of the surest ways to leave a kid “behind” is to hand him over to the government. Americans want universal education, just as they want universally safe food. But nobody believes that the government should run 90 percent of the restaurants, farms, and supermarkets. Why should it run 90 percent of the schools — particularly when it gets terrible results?

April Witt:

When a board appointed by Congress seized control of the D.C. public schools in 1996, its members were eager to give the school system a clean break from its troubled past. They fired Superintendent Franklin L. Smith, replaced him with a war hero, retired Army Lt. Gen. Julius W. Becton Jr., and urged Becton not to bother debriefing Smith.
“I finally decided, ‘This is crazy,’ ” said Becton, who arranged a quiet meeting with his predecessor at a downtown office building. The advice Smith gave was ominous.
“I know you are accustomed to giving orders, turning around and saying, ‘Forward march!’ ” Smith recalled telling Becton. “My only advice is that in this job, you turn around and look to see who is following you. Because every time you think people are following you, they are not. And that includes the inside staff.”
A year and a half later, it was the general’s turn to leave town in frustration, blamed for failing to transform the schools.

Beth Swedeen:

“As a member of the West High community, I want to applaud its success in implementing small learning communities and a rigorous core of courses for freshmen/sophs”

Much more on West high school, English 9 and English 10. Bruce King’s report on Madison West High School’s Small Learning Community Project.

Welcome to the new GREEN CHARTER SCHOOLS NETWORK.
You’re invited to connect with educators, environmentalists, parents, school leaders and others who are creating and operating environmental charter schools throughout the country. Here are examples of more than 40 “green” charter schools.
Wisconsin’s former U.S. Senator and Earth Day founder Gaylord Nelson often stressed the importance of education for sustainable living and young people learning about their environment. We must pass on the conservation legacy to the next generation, he said. See “Green Charter Schools in Wisconsin”.
Led by a group of Upper Midwest public school friends, a GREEN CHARTER SCHOOLS NETWORK has emerged to foster the creation and sustainability of high performance public schools with environment-focused programs. We intend to facilitate sharing and networking among educators, students, environmentalists, policymakers and others through electronic communications, a national conference, regional workshops, state-based green school groups, and online connections.

Channel3000:

Columbus voters decided three school district proposals at a special referendum election Tuesday.
Voters approved only one of the three proposals on Tuesday, WISC-TV reported.
Voters approved the first question to set aside $700,000 over 10 years for maintenance costs.
However, voters soundly defeated a proposal to put $200,000 into a 4-year-old kindergarten program for the next three years. That proposal lost by more than 400 votes, WISC-TV reported.
Voters also rejected spending $300,000 over the next five years for technology improvements, including updating district computers.

Andy Hall:

The number of Wisconsin schools failing to meet federal No Child Left Behind standards this year grew from 87 to 95 and includes all four Madison high schools and three middle schools in the Madison, Middleton-Cross Plains and Mount Horeb school districts.
None of the Madison high schools attained the goal for reading proficiency, according to annual data released Tuesday by the state Department of Public Instruction.
Thirty-two Wisconsin schools — all in Milwaukee — receive Title I funds to assist low-income students and are subject to sanctions imposed by the No Child Left Behind law because they’ve missed the same goal for two or more consecutive years.

Jamaal Abdul-Alim has more as does WEAC President Stan Johnson.
Susan Troller:

“I don’t see this as a reflection on the effectiveness of our high schools,” Madison School Board President Arlene Silveira said this morning. La Follette, East and Memorial have been rapped in past years, as well as this year, for not reaching proficiency standards in some categories.
“There are problems with the inflexibility of the testing methods applied to every student. It uses just one way to measure everyone and doesn’t actually measure what they are learning,” Silveira said.
For example, she said, testing students who are just learning English with an English-only test or requiring students with disabilities who don’t perform well on standardized tests to be part of the testing process affects the results, especially in big, diverse schools.

Michael Alison Chandler:

Higher starting salaries, more rigorous teacher training programs and additional support for first year teachers are just a few of the incentives needed to deal with a projected shortfall of more than 280,000 math and science teachers across the country by 2015, according to a group of business, foundation and higher education leaders.
The recommendations were included in a report released yesterday by the Business-Higher Education Forum, a Washington-based group organized to increase U.S. competitiveness. Its release was timed to coincide with the national debate on teacher quality and pay as Congress prepares to reauthorize No Child Left Behind, the Higher Education Act and the budget for the National Science Foundation.

The complete report can be found here.

Jay Matthews:

And then we come to preschools. They have always struck me as beyond any sensible rating system, which is why I was stunned to find a new Web site, www.savvysource.com, trying to prove me wrong.
I know how my wife and I, and our friends, found preschools when we had children that age. We asked each other if we knew of any good ones. That was not, obviously, a very intelligent approach to the problem. But what else could we do? There wasn’t, and there still isn’t, much information out there, other than the yellow pages. And who has time to call or visit a long list of preschools until you find one you like?
The Savvy Source founder, Stacey Boyd, and her team of mostly young mothers like herself think the Internet could be the solution if they plug into it enough worthwhile information — particularly the views of parents who have had children in the preschools being rated. They are supplying parents and school directors with their survey forms and rating schools on philosophy, teaching quality, discipline, safety, tuition and several other factors.

Don Huebscher:

One of the principles of our republic – as I understand it, anyway – is that those in government derive their power from the consent of the governed.
For that reason, and because I’m in the business of informing the public about matters important to them (not counting Paris Hilton, et al), I’m bothered by the fact that the most important decisions about the size of our property tax bills are negotiated in secret.
I was reminded of this frustrating reality last week when negotiators from the Eau Claire school district and the local teachers union met to set the “ground rules” for their upcoming negotiations on a two-year teachers contract. Initial proposals weren’t released because the school board needed more time to prepare.
It’s unclear whether the eventual exchange of initial proposals will be done in public, because the ground rules agreed to by both sides say only the first negotiating session is open; “all subsequent sessions will be closed to the public.”

Dion Haynes:

The school systems making the largest gains are united by some common threads: Government and school leaders have set aside differences and harnessed their power behind reforms, superintendents have brought an intense, persuasive leadership style to the process, and efforts have concentrated on raising the test scores of the lowest-performing students.
But Philadelphia also illustrates how hard it can be to sustain improvements. The superintendent credited with much of the gain, Paul Vallas, is leaving the city this month as budget projections show a large deficit threatening his reform program.

Howard Blume:

Sherry Lansing retired as head of Paramount Pictures two years ago to head a foundation devoted to education and other causes. What if, she wondered recently, other retirees like her wanted to do the same.
Well, not exactly like her and not precisely the same way. She had in mind a lower-budget, in-the-trenches contribution: namely, becoming a teacher.
That plan blossomed into a media event led by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger on Friday heralding a public-private partnership to lure retirees into teaching math and science.
The effort was unveiled at Roosevelt High, where Lansing worked as a long-term substitute teacher in math shortly after graduating from college some 40 years ago.
Math, science and special education teachers are at a premium, and state officials estimate that 100,000 teachers will retire over the next decade, about one-third of the teacher workforce. Over that same period, California’s schools will need more than 33,000 new science and math instructors.

Paul Tough:

For the Glynn County Board of Education, Payne’s visit was a big deal. It was back in 2005 that Marjorie Varnadoe, the board’s director of professional development, called to request a presentation from Payne, and this particular Thursday, two years later, was the earliest available date. Principals had ordered Payne’s books and DVDs by the boxload, mostly her ur-text, “A Framework for Understanding Poverty,” and they made the books required reading for their staffs. All over the county, which is on the coast, down near the Florida border, schools held small workshops on class and education, using Payne’s “Framework” as a guide, and teachers sat down together for informal discussions and lunchroom chats about poverty and wealth. When the big day came, the entire school system was given the day off, and by 8 a.m. almost every single teacher and administrator in the county was packed into the Jekyll Island Conference Center, along with the school board, the Chamber of Commerce and various local dignitaries.

Clusty Search: Ruby Payne.

Nelson Hernandez:

Maryland will receive an $18.2 million federal grant to fund the expansion of the state’s nascent charter school program, state education officials announced yesterday.
The grant may allow the state to launch as many as 30 additional charter schools during the next three years, a spokesman for the Maryland State Department of Education said. This would more than double the number of charter schools in Maryland, which began its charter program in 2003 as a way of providing alternative methods of public school instruction.

Elizabeth Green:

A money manager recently sent an e-mail to some partners, congratulating them on an investment of $1 million that yielded an estimated $400 million. The reasoning was that $1 million spent on trying to lift a cap on the number of charter schools in New York State yielded a change in the law that will bring $400 million a year in funding to new charter schools.
The money managers who were among the main investors in this law — three Harvard MBAs and a Wharton graduate named Whitney Tilson, Ravenel Boykin Curry IV, Charles Ledley, and John Petry — are moving education-oriented volunteerism beyond championing a single school. They want to shift the political debate by getting the Democratic Party to back innovations such as merit pay for teachers, a longer school day, and charter schools.

Democrats for Education Reform website.

Jamaal Abdul-Alim:

The military features prominently in Room 412 of the Milwaukee Education Center – a special education classroom that contains some of the school’s most challenging students.
A U.S. Marine flag hangs just beneath the American flag. War books are propped up on a blackboard tray.
The teacher at the front of the class is Stan Loper, 44, a beefy, clean-shaven former U.S. Marine who is built like a tank. He begins the school day in a manner not much different from what you might expect from a drill sergeant, telling his students to use “nice and loud outside voices” as they recite their daily affirmation as members of “Club FAITH” – an acronym for Friendly, Able, Intelligent, Talented and Helpful.
“Who are we?” Loper yells.
“Club FAITH!” the students yell back.
Loper found his way into the classroom through Troops to Teachers, a U.S. Department of Defense-sponsored program that, among other things, offers up to $10,000 to get service members, both active and retired, to serve as teachers in the nation’s neediest schools. About 80 teachers around Wisconsin got their start in the program, which began in 1994.

Amit Paley:

The nation’s students have performed significantly better on state reading and math tests since President Bush signed his landmark education initiative into law five years ago, according to a major independent study released yesterday.
The study’s authors warned that it is difficult to say whether or how much the No Child Left Behind law is driving the achievement gains. But Republican and Democratic supporters of the law said the findings indicate that it has been a success. Some said the findings bolster the odds that Congress will renew the controversial law this year.

There has been some controversy over the quality and rigor of state standards, including Wisconsin’s. Sam Dillon has more. Joanne Jacobs adds a few comments and links to this article.

A Capital Times Editorial:

The new elementary school on Madison’s far west side will not be named for Hmong Gen. Vang Pao, who has been arrested by federal authorities on charges of masterminding a plot to use money collected from Hmong refugees in the United States to massacre Laotians in a violent coup.
Whether the Madison School Board recognizes that fact immediately or in a few weeks — after what board President Arlene Silveira describes as an investigation into the “nature of the charges” against Vang — there is no way that Madison, or any other city, is going to build a “Vang Pao Elementary School.”
That’s the first reality of the moment.
It is not a judgment regarding the guilt or innocence of Vang. The charges against the general, who for many years during the Vietnam War era did the dirty work of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, are serious. But just as there must always be an assumption of innocence, there should also be a measure of skepticism when it comes to federal claims regarding conspiracies.

Much more on the Vang Pao Elementary School here.

Washington Post:

Take it from Isabela Guimaraes, a top D.C. high school student who said she has been there and done that: Cramming for an exam is better than not studying at all, but it’s hardly a best practice.
Once, faced with a test in a troublesome trigonometry class, the Georgetown Day School student tried to fill her head with formulas for hours beforehand, only to find that her brain went blank at the critical moment. On her test, she wrote to her teacher:

The Washington Post:

Donald McCabe says he has the research to prove it: Business students probably cheat the most.
“Students in business already have a bottom-line mentality,” said McCabe, founder of the Center for Academy Integrity and a professor at Rutgers University in New Jersey. ” ‘I have to get the job done, and how I get it done is less important.’ That kind of thinking.”

Valerie Strauss:

In libraries, classrooms and coffee shops, with books, computers and calculators, students are trying to squeeze in the last bit of studying for final exams that can spell the difference between a good grade and summer school.
Some schools keep buildings open for late-night, middle-of-the-night and early-morning cramming sessions, while others have official “study days,” when the entire campus is focused on that one task.

LaFollette Teacher Sean Storch:

hen the Madison School Board eliminated two high school athletic director positions to meet state-imposed budget restrictions, the La Follette High School family lost a critically valuable teacher, coach, adviser and school leader. Jim Pliner was modest when he said the surplus move “stings a little bit.”
In another sense, Pliner is quite right to be humble. He is not the only excessively dedicated school leader who works 16-hour days and long weekends trying to hold the school community together.
At La Follette High School alone, add the entire administration, teachers who come in two hours early and leave at least two hours late, and all coaches and extracurricular advisers who volunteer countless hours because they thrive on strengthening their community by nurturing future leaders.