Tony Barboza and Ashley Powers:

Vang Pao, a key figure among those arrested Monday on suspicion of plotting the overthrow of the communist Laotian government, is so well-known in the local Hmong community that his family always keeps fruit, soda and water on the living room coffee table to greet the constant stream of visitors who drop by his Westminster home.
An aging Pao would often regale them with war stories while seated under portraits of the former Laotian king and other royalty — and one of himself in military dress from his younger days.
But in addition to the nationwide image of patriarch and benefactor, Pao also has another reputation — that of a tough leader who worked for the CIA in its “secret war” in Laos during the Vietnam War more than 30 years ago.

Brittany Schoepp and Andy Hall have more, as does Susan Troller.

David Nakamura:

D.C. government officials will launch an extensive audit of the city’s public schools today designed to pinpoint how the system is spending its $1 billion budget and identify areas of waste and mismanagement.
The audit, scheduled for announcement at a midday news conference, comes as Mayor Adrian M. Fenty (D) prepares to take control of the 55,000-student school system and is patterned after similar studies in other jurisdictions, including New York, St. Louis and New Orleans. But those studies have not always provided clear answers and, in some cases, resulted in new problems created by the auditors.

NPR’s Steve Inskeep:

Some high schools are getting rid of a senior class tradition — naming a valedictorian. They say that lowering competition among students is better for their overall success. Eden Prairie High School in Minnesota will graduate its last valedictorians this year. Next year, exceptional students will receive just an honors diploma.

audio

Susan Troller:

Like countless thousands of other Hmong who had been American allies during the Vietnam War and who became hunted enemies in their own country when the United States withdrew from southeast Asia, Chue Thao lived as a refugee, eventually finding his way to the United States in 1987.
And like many in Madison’s Hmong community, he credits Hmong military and civilian leader Gen. Vang Pao with first establishing a proud Hmong ethnic identity and then opening the door for his people to build a new life in America, based on education and hard work.
Harrowing experiences of discrimination, war and violent dislocation are the rule for local Hmong families who escaped to America, and they help explain the fervent passion many feel towards naming a new west-side elementary school honoring Vang Pao.

Much more on Vang Pao Elementary School here.

Elizabeth Weil:

According to the apple-or-coin test, used in the Middle Ages, children should start school when they are mature enough for the delayed gratification and abstract reasoning involved in choosing money over fruit. In 15th- and 16th-century Germany, parents were told to send their children to school when the children started to act “rational.” And in contemporary America, children are deemed eligible to enter kindergarten according to an arbitrary date on the calendar known as the birthday cutoff — that is, when the state, or in some instances the school district, determines they are old enough. The birthday cutoffs span six months, from Indiana, where a child must turn 5 by July 1 of the year he enters kindergarten, to Connecticut, where he must turn 5 by Jan. 1 of his kindergarten year. Children can start school a year late, but in general they cannot start a year early. As a result, when the 22 kindergartners entered Jane Andersen’s class at the Glen Arden Elementary School near Asheville, N.C., one warm April morning, each brought with her or him a snack and a unique set of gifts and challenges, which included for some what’s referred to in education circles as “the gift of time.”

Amy Hetzner:

Students and their families should enjoy the pomp and circumstance that come with the upcoming graduation season, Milwaukee-area high school officials said.
They just would prefer a little more pomp and a little less circumstance.
So in the interest of preserving the decorum of their graduation proceedings, a number of school districts have drafted agreements with graduating seniors and their guests outlining behavioral expectations.

Julie Bosman:

Schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein announced yesterday that the city school system would spend $80 million over five years on a battery of new standardized tests to begin this fall for most of New York City’s 1.1 million public school students.
The contract awarded to the testing giant CTB/McGraw-Hill will involve a significant expansion of exams, known as periodic tests, which monitor students’ progress and are supposed to help predict how students will perform in the annual state exams. Mr. Klein’s announcement immediately rekindled the debate over whether such testing is emphasized too much or is even a useful tool for teachers.
Pupils in Grades 3 through 8 will be tested five times a year in both reading and math, instead of three times as they are now. High school students, for the first time, will be tested four times a year in each subject. In the next few years, the tests will expand to include science and social studies.

Bob Driehaus:

The 32 students who graduated from the Dayton Early College Academy on Wednesday evening were mostly from low-income families. Few of their parents went to college.
But every member of the graduating class, the school’s first, will attend college in the fall on the strength of their academic achievements and $2 million in scholarship offers, a remarkable success story in a school district plagued by budget shortfalls and challenges endemic to urban schools.
That success, however, may not be enough to save the experimental public high school. Voters rejected a school tax levy on May 8, forcing the school district to cut $30 million from its budget. That could result in the academy’s reverting to a more traditional model.

Sarah Carr:

This winter, at Northern Star School, Parker found a place where she could finally settle in.
Over the past five years, Northern Star’s leaders have created a vibrant school unique to both Milwaukee and the country: a middle school focused on teenage mothers. Milwaukee’s Lady Pitts also works with pregnant and parenting teens, but at the high school level.
Locally and nationally, the teen birth rate continues to decline and cities are closing alternative high schools for pregnant teens, mainstreaming the young women instead. Yet in Milwaukee, Northern Star’s prominence continues to grow.

The Economist:

NO exam question is as perplexing as how to organise schools to suit the huge variety of pupils they serve: rich and poor, clever and dim, early developers and late starters. Every country does it differently. Some try to spot talent early. Others winnow out the academic-minded only at 18. Some believe in parent-power. Others trust the state. Finland has state-run uniform comprehensives; Sweden, another good performer, has vouchers and lots of private schools.
The British system produces some world-class high-flyers, mainly in its private schools and the 164 selective state “grammar” schools that survived the cull in the 1960s and 1970s when the country moved to a non-selective system. But it serves neither its poor children nor its most troublesome ones well. The best state schools, especially the grammar schools, are colonised by the middle classes, and the whole system is disfigured by a long straggling tail of non-achievers.

(more…)

Jay Matthews:

He and his wife, Edythe, have committed more than $250 million to school improvement projects since 1999, and they plan to spend most of the Broad Foundation’s $2.25 billion in assets on education. The Los Angeles couple, along with Bill and Melinda Gates, are widely considered the most influential public education philanthropists in the country.
Broad (rhymes with road) has provided much of the money and advice behind efforts to bring business practices — including freedom from what he considers meddlesome school boards — to New York, Boston, Los Angeles and Philadelphia. Now he has turned his attention to the District. His conversations with D.C. officials, Broad watchers say, are likely to bring more money and expertise to efforts to overhaul the school system.

Kwame Kilpatrick:

Imagine what would happen if Detroit’s auto manufacturers decided to build and sell only mid-size sedans. Despite whatever media campaign they might mount to convince consumers a mid-size sedan was what they should buy, there would clearly still be buyers who would want to purchase SUVs or other types of vehicles. Worse, there would be lots of people whose needs would not be met by a mid-size sedan.
This scenario is no different from thinking that all parents will simply accept whatever school assignment Detroit Public Schools has to offer. Parents will choose what is best for their children.

Jay Matthews:

Blank blue computer screens frustrated thousands of Virginia students this month during online state exams in a series of disruptions that underscored vulnerabilities in the educational testing industry. Such episodes, experts said, could prompt changes in how the nation’s schools assess student performance.
Test software malfunctions in several states, coupled with staff shortages and cutthroat competition in the industry, have fueled a growing debate over whether to cut the number of tests taken under the federal No Child Left Behind law or adjust the testing calendar.
“The system has had a lot of pressure put on it,” said Adam J. Newman, a managing vice president of the market research group Eduventures Inc. in Boston.

Joel Rubin:

Signaling deep discontent and a possible spreading revolt among the city’s public school teachers, faculty at two more Los Angeles high schools met this week with a leading charter school operator to discuss alliances aimed at breaking away from the school district.
The meetings between Steve Barr, founder of Green Dot Public Schools, and faculty members at Santee Education Complex in South Los Angeles and Taft High in Woodland Hills come after a majority of teachers at Locke High School took steps to convert the deeply troubled campus into a series of Green Dot schools.
Teachers at Santee and Taft said the surprise move by Locke’s teachers tapped into a well of frustration and discontent they also feel over the slow pace of reforms and lack of support from leaders of the Los Angeles Unified School District.
“With what happened at Locke, we’ve entered into a new chapter. They’ve instigated reform that all these district hot shots either are unable or unwilling to make happen,” said Santee English teacher Jordan Henry, who arranged the meeting with Barr. “When you see something that looks promising … it behooves you to have a conversation about it.”

Abdul Kargbo:

In today’s debates about how best to improve student performance, little mention is made of how students’ personal views on learning may affect their academic achievement. Specifically, commentators seldom discuss students’ understanding of the utility of an education and the effects of this perception on how much they value education and how well they perform in school. Perhaps because doing so can be controversial.
Ask talk-show host and philanthropist Oprah Winfrey, who faced criticism earlier this year when, in comparing students in South Africa to those in U.S. inner-city schools, she indicated that the American students valued education less. “I became so frustrated with visiting inner-city schools that I just stopped going. The sense that you need to learn just isn’t there,” Winfrey told Newsweek. “If you ask the kids what they want or need, they will say an iPod or some sneakers. In South Africa, they don’t ask for money or toys. They ask for uniforms so they can go to school.” Winfrey quickly drew the disapproval of a Washington Post columnist, who countered that in the inner-city schools he’s visited, most students “desperately want to learn.”
As someone who attended school in both Africa and the United States, I think both Winfrey and her detractors are somewhat off the mark. It’s not enough to argue about whether or not inner-city students want to learn. Rather, we should be asking why these students don’t value education enough to want to do well at it.

Update: A reader emailed this article. by Fred Reed, author of Nekkid in Austin: Drop Your Inner Child Down a Well.

Andy Hall:

A windswept field on Madison’s Far West Side became a place of reverence Wednesday for 60 Hmong residents who attended the groundbreaking ceremony of Vang Pao Elementary, a $12.9 million school whose funding was embraced by taxpayers but whose name remains controversial.
“I just want to take this as a memory,” explained Bee Vang, 47, as he held a softball-sized clod of warm, moist earth. “This will be a really great school.”
Vang said he will show his four children the dirt and tell them that school leaders spoke of giving all people, including Hmong, the opportunity to learn.

There’s widespread disparity between those students that “have” and those that “have-not” in our educational system. We believe we can make a positive change.
We’re dedicated to finding ways to smooth the path for motivated and bright students so that they will be able to participate fully in an increasingly competitive global economy, one where a college degree and critical thinking skills are essential for success.

Paul Shukovsky and Nina Akhmeteli:

Once upon a time, a student who wanted to poke fun at a teacher would have left graffiti on the blackboard. These days, it’s a video clip on YouTube.com and MySpace.com.
It was a sophomoric online video criticizing the hygiene of a teacher that was at issue in U.S. District Court on Monday, when Gregory Requa, a senior at Kentridge High School, asked a judge to order the lifting of his 40-day school suspension for his supposed involvement in producing and posting the video.
Requa’s lawyer, Jeannette Cohen, said the teen didn’t produce the video — taken in an English classroom at Kentridge. But even if he did, his suspension is a violation of the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment guarantee of freedom of speech, she argued in court.

Sean Coughlan:

Google is to ban adverts for essay writing services – following claims that plagiarism is threatening the integrity of university degrees.
There have been complaints from universities about students being sold customised essays on the internet.
The advert ban from the Google search engine has been “warmly welcomed” by university authorities.
But it has angered essay writing firms which say this will unfairly punish legitimate businesses.

David Ammons:

Washington Gov. Chris Gregoire on Monday created a new education council to crack the whip on reforms in early learning, public kindergarten through 12th grade and the state’s higher education system.
Gregoire, who recently headed a two-year reform drive called Washington Learns, said she will serve as chairwoman of the new 11-member council, which will include members from across the education spectrum. She said she will also keep tabs on another study panel that is looking at education financing.
The governor said one of the key goals of the new P-20 Council will be to knock down the “silos” that seem to put preschool, K-12, community colleges and four-year schools in separate worlds. A truly effective system has to be seamless, she said.
P-20, her buzz phrase for the whole system, refers to preschool and other early learning opportunities, followed by K-12, college or trade school and, potentially, graduate school or retraining.

Sara:

Campaigning in Florida today, Senator/Presidential Candidate Hillary Clinton put forward an ambitious policy proposal to move the U.S. towards universal preschool education. This is the first major education proposal rolled out by the Clinton campaign, and it’s a good one. The plan would provide states with matching grants (starting at $5 billion federal investment and scaling up to $10 billion) to expand publicly-funded preschool programs, with a priority on low-income and English language learners, and requires state preschool programs to meet high quality standards as a condition of funding.

Yin to that Yang: Congress passes a 10.5% increase in pentagon spending (Representative Tammy Baldwin’s votes can be found here). Alan Abelson takes a look at the dollar and what it portends for the next few years:

Whatever their provenance, they’ve crafted a quite interesting analysis of what ails the dollar and why what ails it isn’t anything trivial or transient. In fact, they see nothing but mournful things ahead for the buck, including, ultimately, its fall from grace as the world’s reserve currency.
Basically, they size up the dilemma confronting our “policymakers” as whether to tighten the monetary and credit screws to bolster the dollar or to open them up even further to support asset prices. They have no doubts as to the resolution: The folks in charge will continue to do what they’ve always done — “inflate the money supply and promote more credit, thereby sustaining asset prices at the expense of the purchasing power of the dollar.”
That may seem the downward path to financial and eventually economic rack and ruin. But such a trivial consideration has never deterred Washington. You don’t have to swallow whole QB Partners’ gloomy diagnosis and prognosis for the beleaguered buck to find it valuable as well as provocative. Even though we agree there’s plenty of sliding room left for the greenback, we’re not convinced the outlook is as apocalyptic as the duo contends.
The report itself is nicely, almost elegantly, crafted, although at times it lapses into a kind of faux erudition, a tendency compounded somewhat by windy footnotes. Nonetheless, unlike so much of the tomes turned out by Wall Street, it’s very much worth reading.

Ms Cornelius:

For example, in an effort to prevent drop-outs, we abandon our expectation of educational behavior and lower academic standards until they are functionally meaningless. We divorce the expectation of allegiance to academic achievement and academic behaviors from the expectation for membership in the school community, and therefore undercut the very mission of the school. Although the providing of all of those other services and experiences is no doubt noble, and certainly enjoyable, they also serve as static that destroys the message and mission of the school. Shouldn’t the education of our members at least be priority number one in public schools? If not, why not just call schools “community centers” and be done with the hypocrisy?

Sarah Carr:

A new Milwaukee school set to open as soon as next winter would serve children transitioning back into the public school district from correctional institutions and expulsions.
The school was one of several safety-related efforts put forward by the Milwaukee School Board as budget amendments, at a session that ended at 2:21 a.m. Friday.
The board also agreed to set aside an additional $750,000 next school year for violence prevention, conflict resolution and other safety-related efforts in Milwaukee Public Schools.

Yvonne Wenger:

Home-schoolers and students attending public, private or charter schools can take online classes after Gov. Mark Sanford on Thursday signed a new law creating the South Carolina Virtual School Program.
The law, which will be administered by the state Department of Education, will allow students a chance to enroll in online courses that might not otherwise be available to them.
“It’s an incredibly important step forward because, among other things, it represents another choice in education,” said Sanford, who was joined in the Statehouse via the Internet by students at the Governor’s School for Science and Mathematics in Hartsville.
Virtual schools are modeled after regular classroom courses, but students communicate with teachers online and e-mail their homework and other assignments. The law builds on a pilot program first offered last May with summer courses such as geometry and Web design available to students in 11 school districts.
The law will allow students to earn credits in Advanced Placement, remedial and specialty classes online. It will also ease scheduling conflicts, provide individualized instruction and help students meet graduation requirements.

Morning Edition:

Morehouse College President Walter Massey is set to speak to graduates for the final time this weekend. He’s due to retire this summer after 12 years. The all-male, historically black college has such notable alumni as the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Spike Lee. Massey himself attended Morehouse, arriving when he was just 16. Massey tells Steve Inskeep that when he arrived at Morehouse as a student he wasn’t certain that he would succeed.

Susan Lampert Smith:

So kids, what did we learn from the Madison School Board’s decision Monday to reverse itself and not consolidate the half-empty Marquette and Lapham elementary schools?
We learned that no doesn’t really mean no.
We learned that, oops, maybe there is money after all.
And most importantly, we learned that whoever yells the loudest gets it.
The most telling moment at Monday’s board meeting was when the rowdy crowd of Marquette supporters was admonished to “respect the board” after hissing at Lawrie Kobza, who said she was “saddened” by arguments that the schools must stay open to appease residents with “political clout.”
“Respect us,” one man hollered back.
Respect you?
Honey, with the exception of Kobza and Arlene Silveira, who held their ground, the board rolled over for you like a puppy. Tony Soprano doesn’t get this kind of respect.

A Yin to that Yang – Capital Times:

Kindergartner Corey Jacob showed up at this week’s Madison School Board meeting with a homemade “Keep Schools Open” sign.
And he got a terrific lesson.
The board, which had voted to close Marquette Elementary School on the city’s near east side, reversed its wrongheaded decision in the face of overwhelming opposition from parents, teachers and kids like Corey.
The lesson Corey learned is perhaps the most important one that can be taught in public life: No decision is set in stone. When an official body makes the wrong decision, people can and should organize to oppose that decision. And when that happens, the members of the targeted body are duty-bound to reconsider their mistaken move.

More from Bessie Cherry:

er column was ludicrous. Comparing a school board who actually listened to its constituents’ warranted concerns to a parent who gives in to a whiny child?! Lapham Elementary, where my daughter attends kindergarten, is hardly “half empty.” In fact, the students there eat lunch in 18 minute shifts, and the school board’s own projections predict that it will become overcrowded within the next five years.
Smith failed to mention that the velocity behind the vocal backlash against the original decision to consolidate was fueled by the fact that two of the board members won their seats by proclaiming before their election that they would never vote in favor of consolidation. Instead of accusing the board of “rolling over like a puppy” and proving that “whoever yells the loudest gets it”, she should be applauding those parents for exemplifying democracy in action for their children. They organized, yes, the old-fashioned way (a way I much prefer to the prevailing point-and-click passivity of “activism” today), and involved their children by having them sign petitions, hand out flyers– they even staged an elementary school walkout.

Brock Bergey:

25% of students at one Madison high school spend the day at home, and it wasn’t a planned skip day. The students attend Memorial High School, where an alleged threat was supposed to be carried out Wednesday. Nothing happened, but the incident has the district talking policy.
“If we don’t communicate, obviously, it raises the concern of parents,” says MMSD Superintendent Art Rainwater.
He says a new system is opening the lines of communication between administrators and parents.
“(It) allows us to call every single parent and give them a message,” says Rainwater.
A message like the one Rainwater says went out to every Memorial parent Tuesday night. It included information about a non-specific threat found at the school and indicated classes would continue Wednesday, as scheduled.

AFP:

Two Russian-born sisters are due to become assistant professors of finance in New York state later this year, even though they are only 19 and 21, university officials said Wednesday.
Angela Kniazeva and her younger sister Diana were due to take up their new positions in September at the University of Rochester, where half of their students will likely be older than them.
The pair, who already have masters degrees in international policy from Stanford University in California, were picking up their doctorates from New York University’s Stern business school on Wednesday after five years of study.
The talented twosome told the New York Post they did not consider themselves geniuses, despite their achievements.
“I don’t think this is the right word or right way of putting it,” the newspaper quoted Angela as saying. “I think we’ve been given valuable opportunities, and we found ourselves in very fortunate circumstances.”
The duo were home-schooled by their parents and earned the equivalent of their US high-school diploma at the ages of 10 and 11 before graduating college in Russia at the ages of 13 and 14. They graduated from Stanford in 2002.

More at NYU Today. Via Volokh.

2007 Wisconsin Charter Schools Conference WEBCAST
Support for Construction Careers-Focused Charter School & Successful Evolution of RENAISSANCE School for the Arts and ODYSSEY-MAGELLAN Charter School
Links to 40+ Green Charter Schools
Green Charter Schools in Wisconsin
www.GreenCharterSchools.org
New Financing Helps Milwaukee Charter School Expand
HOWARD FULLER, President of the Institute for the Transformation of Learning, Marquette University, has been inducted into the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools’ Hall of Fame. Howard and TED KOLDERIE, Senior Associate, Education / Evolving, were among an inaugural group of 4 charter school pioneers inducted into the Hall of Fame
EDUCATION / EVOLVING
Project Change Charter Recovery School
Number of Small High Schools Multiplying in Milwaukee

Alan Borsuk:

Two men, who often did not work together openly in the past, stood Monday in front of a crowd that, at many times, wouldn’t have been receptive to either of them.
“From our standpoint, this is a remarkable day,” said Sam Carmen, executive director of the Milwaukee Teachers’ Education Association, as he and schools Superintendent William Andrekopoulos made a presentation to a luncheon of about 100 members of the Greater Milwaukee Committee, a private group of civic leaders that has played a big role in charting Milwaukee’s course for decades.
“This is the real deal,” Carmen told the audience, describing the impact that a new strategic plan for Milwaukee Public Schools could have. The draft of the plan, created largely by the teachers union and MPS leaders, was released recently and is expected to be presented for action by the Milwaukee School Board in June. The Greater Milwaukee Committee funded the process of creating the plan.
Carmen said the plan presents “a real opportunity to change teaching and learning in Milwaukee Public Schools.”

Nanette Asimov, Todd Wallack:

Teachers have helped students cheat on California’s high-stakes achievement tests — or blundered badly enough to compromise their validity — in at least 123 public schools since 2004, a Chronicle review of documents shows.
Schools admitted outright cheating in about two-thirds of the cases. And while the number reporting problems represents a small fraction of the state’s 9,468 public schools, some experts think the practice of cooking the test results is more widespread.
That’s because the California Department of Education relies on schools to come forward voluntarily, and to investigate themselves when a potential problem is flagged.
“The vast majority of educators are ethical and play by the rules. (But) when identification of potential cheating hinges largely on self-reports, it is almost certainly underreported,” said Greg Cizek, who teaches testing at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and is the author of “Cheating on Tests: How to Do It, Detect It, and Prevent It.”
Records show that California teachers who unfairly helped students boost scores usually did so during the test. For example:

Friedman Foundation; Dr. Susan L. Aud:

A landmark new study finds that school choice programs throughout the country generated nearly $444 million in net savings to state and local budgets from 1990 to 2006. Contrary to opponents’ predictions, the analysis also finds that instructional spending per student has consistently gone up in all affected public school districts and states.
“School choice saves. It saves children, and now we have empirical evidence that it saves money,” said Robert Enlow, executive director and COO of the Milton and Rose D. Friedman Foundation. “In the face of $444 million in savings, another excuse to deny children a quality education has vanished before our eyes.”
Released by the Friedman Foundation, “Education by the Numbers: The Fiscal Effect of School Choice Programs, 1990-2006” provides the first comprehensive analysis of how the nation’s school choice programs have affected state and public school districts. Of the 12 voucher and tax-credit scholarship programs that began operations before 2006, every program is at least fiscally neutral, and most produce substantial savings. Seven more programs have been created since 2006.

Full Report: 800K PDF

Robert Tomsho & Daniel Golden:

Cazenovia, Wis.
When Eric Hainstock didn’t get his way in kindergarten, he told other children his father would kill them. In fifth grade, he tried to spray a homemade concoction he called blood into the mouths of classmates. In sixth grade, he threatened others, fought, and talked “about killing himself and others.”
Worried about these and other incidents recounted in internal school reports, teachers and a school psychologist recommended that Eric, who was diagnosed in second grade with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, get more one-on-one attention, or be placed in a special private school. Instead, he was one of millions of special-education students mainstreamed in regular classes.
After Eric transferred to Weston Public School here in 2002, his grades plummeted and he was suspended frequently. His only regular help with controlling his outbursts was a weekly, half-hour social-skills class.
On the morning of Sept. 29, 2006, Eric, then 15 years old, walked into Weston Public with two guns and shot dead the school’s principal, John Klang, police reports indicate. He told investigators he was tired of taunting by other students and aimed to “confront” Mr. Klang, teachers and students. He has been charged with first-degree murder.

The Economist:

“HORRIBLY divisive” is how Gayle Fallon, president of the Houston Federation of Teachers, describes the recent distribution of $15m in bonuses to teachers in the largest school district in Texas. Most teachers received payments averaging close to $2,000. But an angry minority received none; and everyone learned what everyone else got when the Houston Chronicle’s website published a list of teachers and amounts. Raising hackles further, 100 teachers were asked to return part of their bonuses because a computer glitch had inflated them.
This was Houston’s first year of doling out such bonuses, and its troubles may have prompted the Texas House of Representatives to vote against a statewide merit-pay programme. The idea of merit pay is a good one: teachers should be paid more for teaching better. At the moment, few teachers in America receive bonuses, and their salaries are based mainly on length of service or their degrees. But the system, put in place early in the 20th century, is not working. Jay Greene of the University of Arkansas says that spending per pupil has doubled in the past three decades, while student-achievement measures such as high-school graduation rates are roughly flat.

New research shows that parental choice raises standards—including for those who stay in public schools

The Economist:

FEW ideas in education are more controversial than vouchers—letting parents choose to educate their children wherever they wish at the taxpayer’s expense. First suggested by Milton Friedman, an economist, in 1955, the principle is compellingly simple. The state pays; parents choose; schools compete; standards rise; everybody gains.
Simple, perhaps, but it has aroused predictable—and often fatal—opposition from the educational establishment. Letting parents choose where to educate their children is a silly idea; professionals know best. Co-operation, not competition, is the way to improve education for all. Vouchers would increase inequality because children who are hardest to teach would be left behind.
But these arguments are now succumbing to sheer weight of evidence. Voucher schemes are running in several different countries without ill-effects for social cohesion; those that use a lottery to hand out vouchers offer proof that recipients get a better education than those that do not.
Harry Patrinos, an education economist at the World Bank, cites a Colombian programme to broaden access to secondary schooling, known as PACES, a 1990s initiative that provided over 125,000 poor children with vouchers worth around half the cost of private secondary school. Crucially, there were more applicants than vouchers. The programme, which selected children by lottery, provided researchers with an almost perfect experiment, akin to the “pill-placebo” studies used to judge the efficacy of new medicines. The subsequent results show that the children who received vouchers were 15-20% more likely to finish secondary education, five percentage points less likely to repeat a grade, scored a bit better on scholastic tests and were much more likely to take college entrance exams.

Joel Rubin:

UCLA professor says officials distorted pass rate on test required for high school graduation. Educators counter that analysis was flawed.
California education officials put forth artificially positive results on the number of students who passed the state’s controversial high school exit exam last year, according to a recent UCLA study.
The analysis also concluded that about 50,000 fewer students statewide earned diplomas last year compared to previous years, raising the prospect that the exit exam requirement is pressuring students to drop out. The decline in graduation rates was most pronounced in poor, heavily minority areas, the study found.
“We’ve constructed a system that sets in place incentives for disinformation,” said John Rogers, the study’s author and co-director of UCLA’s Institute for Democracy, Education and Access. “People who are making education decisions in this state need to think about how this policy is really playing out.”

Susan Troller:

Although the Madison School Board so far has held its ground on a host of unpopular decisions, it may be approaching a tipping point, at least on the issue of school consolidation.
The School Board’s meeting was a multi-ring circus Monday night as a capacity crowd presented a collective howl of anguish about many budget cuts and about the controversial decision to name the community’s newest elementary school for a Hmong military leader revered by his adherents.
It will be up to board members in coming days to decide whether to revisit any of the decisions they have made in recent weeks that are stirring passionate, and often angry, public commentary on topics ranging from the elimination of yellow school buses for parochial school students to a school closing on the near east side to the new school’s name.
Arlene Silveira, elected unanimously Monday night as the board’s new president, said she would return items to the agenda for possible reconsideration if four board members requested them. A supermajority, or five votes, would be necessary to reverse any budget-related decisions. So far, it appears that several board members are willing to revisit the budget item to consolidate Marquette and Lapham elementary schools.

Nelson Hernandez:

John E. Deasy, the superintendent of Prince George’s County schools, issued a decree soon after taking charge a year ago: Each of the county’s 22 high schools will offer at least eight Advanced Placement courses next year.
He got funding for the expansion, which would increase the number of students in the county taking AP courses by 25 percent. Now he just needs the teachers.
The effort to mobilize the teaching corps brought about 80 current and prospective AP teachers to Charles H. Flowers High School on a recent Saturday morning for a series of workshops in AP English, math, social studies and science. The workshops are run by the College Board, which administers the AP exams and recently announced that it will audit courses to ensure that they meet college standards.
“You can’t just say to people, ‘Get more kids in AP classes,’ unless you have the teachers,” Deasy said. He’ll need as many as 200 certified to teach the advanced courses by the fall. As he walked from classroom to classroom, he added: “I can’t hold you accountable for doing something without giving you the skills to do it.”

Jay Matthews:

Schools nationwide are calling on parents to get involved. The Maryland State Board of Education endorsed a broad range of family outreach initiatives in a 2005 report that called public education “a shared responsibility.”
Yet some parents in Montgomery County and elsewhere have discovered limits on the get-involved policy when they ask questions about individual teachers, whether those queries are about alleged abuse of students or a decision to fire a popular instructor.
Dawn Mosisa said she found an information void when she tried to follow up on her daughter’s story about a teacher who allegedly hit another second-grader at Maryvale Elementary School in Rockville. Likewise, scores of parents at Lakewood Elementary School, also in Rockville, said they had a hard time finding out why a teacher they considered top-notch was recommended for dismissal. They also felt their input was ignored.
School officials said they are required to hold back information because of privacy laws, union contracts and potential lawsuits. Some acknowledged that a more open policy would help families handle the repercussions of incidents involving teachers. But the officials said there is little they can do.

The Capital Times:

Members of The Capital Times nonsupervisory staff have chosen reporter Susan Troller as the winner of the 2007 Allegretti Award.
They judged Troller’s work as best carrying on the legacy of former Capital Times reporter and editorial writer Dan Allegretti in exposing injustices in the community.
Troller’s colleagues honored her coverage of Madison’s K-12 schools. The nomination said Troller “has worked tirelessly to bring the human face, the child’s face, to the messy bureaucracy that is our school system.”
Since being assigned to the schools beat in 2006, Troller has consistently brought readers into the classroom as well as chronicling the operations of the district administration and the School Board. Not only has she used words to describe children’s learning experiences, but she was the first staff member to delve into the multimedia world for the paper, creating an audio slideshow to accompany a portrait of the successes of high-poverty Mendota Elementary School.

Props to Susan!

channel3000.com

The decision to name Madison’s newest school after Gen. Vang Pao is creating a divide in Madison.
Opponents said that they plan to bring their concerns to the school board on Monday.
For people in the Hmong community, Gen. Vang Pao is a leader comparable to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. They said that Pao led masses of Hmong refugees to the U.S., WISC-TV reported.
But opponents said that they still hope to convince the school board to change its mind and not honor a man that some say has a questionable past.

The “Stuyvesant of the East” has become one of the most sought-after public schools in the city. It got that way by leaving much of the public out.
Jeff Coplon:

As light faded on the first arctic day of winter, a band of 40 die-hard parents huddled on Seventh Avenue, outside Region 9 headquarters of the Department of Education. Mostly white and middle-aged, armed with signs and certainty, they stood shivah for a dream foreclosed on the Lower East Side: the notorious NEST+m, a school for the best and brightest in all New York.
Braced against the slicing wind, they chanted against the ousting of their founding principal, the feared and revered Celenia Chévere, and grieved for the motto she once posted outside her office door:
A public school with a private-school mission.
The sign dripped with hubris, but it had wooed the striving classes well. Since the troubled birth of New Explorations Into Science, Technology & Math, in 2001, its parents had tithed body and soul and disposable income—for their children, to be sure, but also for the urban impossibility: a truly great public school. In NEST they’d found a hothouse with record test scores, free of the usual tawdry concessions—sardined classes, peeling paint, creeping illiteracy.

Adam Nossiter:

Louisiana on Friday picked one of the nation’s most prominent education reformers to run the troubled school district of New Orleans, as schools here continue to grapple with physical and administrative damage from Hurricane Katrina.
The new superintendent, Paul G. Vallas, who is credited with changes in school systems in Chicago and, most recently, in Philadelphia, was chosen to take on what is seen as one of the more singular challenges in American education: creating a working school district where many of the buildings are ruined, many of the teachers are missing and thousands of students might return suddenly. When they do, they will be among the neediest — the poorest and lowest-achieving — in the nation.
As a superintendent in Philadelphia and Chicago, Mr. Vallas raised test scores with the help of after-school programs, new schools and revised curricula. He is generally regarded by schools experts as one of the more energetic practitioners in the field. But speaking Friday in a shuttered school in the Lower Ninth Ward, he seemed to recognize the special difficulty of this task.

NYT Letters to the Editor regarding Kristoff’s recent column on teachers:

To the Editor:
I retired to South Carolina in 2004 after 35 years as a teacher, administrator and superintendent in New York. I have permanent New York certification in secondary English, special education and as a school district administrator.
Thinking I might teach in South Carolina, I applied for information on certification. I learned that I would need to do the following: fill out an application; submit original college transcripts; submit teacher examination scores from the Educational Testing Service (to ensure that I was “highly qualified”); submit an F.B.I. fingerprint card; submit recommendations from the college where I completed my teacher preparation (36 years ago). There was more, along with a $75 fee.
I am enjoying my full retirement!

More here:

Several teachers argued that it’s ridiculous for someone who has never actually taught for a day in his life to offer proposals for school reform. That strikes me as a fallacy. Obviously doctors aren’t the only people who should offer views on health care reform. And reporters aren’t the only people entitled to views about the failures in the news media. Indeed, if we are going to see improvements in education, it will be only because a broader segment of society became involved. Obviously, teachers bring a special expertise to the discussion, but they have no exclusive claim to these issues.
Another common objection was that there is no way you can solve the school problems as long as parents are apathetic, or students are raised wrong, or resources are not increased. I don’t buy that either. Look, you could have said a generation ago that we’ll never solve the problem of traffic deaths as long as humans enjoy the sensations of speed and alcohol. But in fact we figured out how to engineer cars better, how to require seat belts and air bags, how to crack down on drunk drivers, how to design roads better and improve signs – and the result has been that we now save tens of thousands of lives a year. In the same way, there will always be troubled kids who fall through the cracks – and there are such kids in Singapore, which probably has the best public schools in the planet. But even if schools can’t be perfect, even if the backdrop is challenging, we can improve high school graduation rates, we can improve quantitative skills and ability to read.

Susan Troller:

Marquette Elementary students may be happy to know that if they must move to Lapham Elementary next year as part of a consolidation plan, the teachers they know from Marquette will most likely go with them.
The Madison teachers union and the Madison school district have reached an agreement, similar to one used in similar past situations, that will essentially allow current Marquette teachers to move to Lapham and apply for the job openings that will be available at the new consolidated school.
The School Board voted last Monday to join the two paired schools on the near east side as part of a series of cost-saving moves to keep the district operating in the black.
Currently Lapham, on East Dayton Street, houses kindergarten through second grade students and an early childhood program. Marquette, at 1501 Jenifer St., is home to third- through fifth-graders.
Superintendent Art Rainwater said he appreciated the union’s effort to work with the district to create the least possible disruption for students and staff.

Susan Troller:

When newly elected Madison School Board members Maya Cole and Beth Moss went into Monday night’s crucial budget meeting, both intended to vote against closing schools, consistent with their campaign promises.
But by the time the seven-member board patched together the various cuts, additions and compromises necessary to restore some programs and services while keeping the budget in the black, both Moss and Cole found themselves making a reversal and voting with Lawrie Kobza and Arlene Silveira to consolidate the paired elementary schools Marquette and Lapham at the Lapham site on East Dayton Street.
Now Moss, along with board members Carol Carstensen and Lucy Mathiak, would not mind reopening the discussion with the possibility of reconsidering that vote.
But Cole — who during the campaign was firmer than Moss in her opposition to school closings — says her decision to consolidate Marquette and Lapham is final.

(more…)

Deborah Chamberlin:

Ho, hum. Another sunny morning, another cup of coffee, another disgusting story about the Milwaukee Public Schools. How’s this for an idea? Shut down MPS because it sure doesn’t seem to be working.
Initiate a 13-year plan (pardon the negative connotation) to eliminate grade levels, beginning next year with kindergarten. That way, students (or are they “combatants”?) are free to find other educational solutions from the beginning. No kindergarten means no first grade the next year and so on as the children pass through (or drop out).
Parents will be responsible for vying for precious space in private schools, which don’t seem to have the level of problems that MPS does, probably because they can remove disruptive thugs. Or try home schooling. Let parents sit home with their unruly kids and see how they like it.
Good teachers will have time to look for other employment. There surely will be more entrepreneurs opening schools to replace the MPS holding tanks. Just think – no more guns, no more weapons, no more crowd control. Just lessons, homework and appropriate discussions about grades.
Teachers have been shifted from being educators to baby sitters to interim parole officers. A couple of e-mails I received noted the situation at MPS is much worse than we even know. Worse than a week with two lockdowns, a fight resulting in a staff member being knocked unconscious and a seventh-grader with a gun and ammunition? Those are only the reported incidents.

Winnie Hu:

The students at Liverpool High have used their school-issued laptops to exchange answers on tests, download pornography and hack into local businesses. When the school tightened its network security, a 10th grader not only found a way around it but also posted step-by-step instructions on the Web for others to follow (which they did).
Scores of the leased laptops break down each month, and every other morning, when the entire school has study hall, the network inevitably freezes because of the sheer number of students roaming the Internet instead of getting help from teachers.
So the Liverpool Central School District, just outside Syracuse, has decided to phase out laptops starting this fall, joining a handful of other schools around the country that adopted one-to-one computing programs and are now abandoning them as educationally empty — and worse.
Many of these districts had sought to prepare their students for a technology-driven world and close the so-called digital divide between students who had computers at home and those who did not.
“After seven years, there was literally no evidence it had any impact on student achievement — none,” said Mark Lawson, the school board president here in Liverpool, one of the first districts in New York State to experiment with putting technology directly into students’ hands. “The teachers were telling us when there’s a one-to-one relationship between the student and the laptop, the box gets in the way. It’s a distraction to the educational process.”

Marc Eisen:

What depressing news to read that Lapham School will be merged out of existence.
I sent two kids through Lapham, and it was single best experience our family has had with the Madison schools.
Lapham’s K-2 format was born out of a political compromise that reopened the Depression-era school in 1989 in return for Marquette serving grades 3-5. This turned out to be an inadvertent stroke of educational genius. Separated from the sometimes baleful influence of older kids, Lapham became its own little cozy world, a safe and encouraging place for the youngest of students.
As I wrote in a 2003 column, my kids were lucky enough to have Barb Thompson as principal. She ran a tight ship, kept a watchful eye on her charges and wasn’t afraid to battle “downtown” — the school district administration — for her school.

Bill Lueders:

Heidi Reynolds doesn’t deny that, ultimately, she’d like see the Madison school board rescind its decision to name a new school on Madison’s southwest side after General Vang Pao, a controversial Hmong leader implicated in drug trafficking and summary executions. But for now, “We just want to reopen the debate.”
Reynolds, the parent of children who will attend the new school when it opens in fall 2008, says the board’s April 9 vote to select this name “was done way too quickly, there was not enough debate. It was all done under the radar.”

Erin Richards:

Rick Carlson of SCF Educational Consultants, a company the district engaged at the end of March to help conduct the superintendent search, said seven people applied for the job, and that he had contacted Schmidt this spring to tell him about the opening.
Before becoming Waukesha’s superintendent in 1998, Schmidt worked for 23 years in the Appleton district.
“I spent 10 years there as a teacher, five years as a principal and eight years as a system superintendent,” Schmidt said, adding that his family in the Appleton area, including his wife, made the job attractive to him. “I live here and she lives there and we do weekends,” he said of his current family-work balance.

Redkudu:

Our school volunteered to beta test a new feature whereby parents can log in to the school website and see their students’ grades daily, in real time. Many teachers oppose this. I do not, for a few reasons. I think it’s a great idea for parents and students to be able to access their grades. I feel it places more responsibility on the student to keep up with their grades, and provides teachers another means of “contact” with parents who, perhaps, don’t return phone calls or emails – a last resort.

Kevin Carey:

Nicholas Kristoff gets everything right in his Times column($) about teacher policy, which basically re-summarizes the findings and conclusions of Gordon, Kane, and Stager’s widely-discussed Hamilton Project paper. Long-time Quick and ED readers know all about the report, of course, since we blogged about it on April 14th…of 2006. But better late than never, I say. To quote our post from last year:
“For decades researchers have been struggling to tease out bits of evidence pointing to the small impact of various traditional methods of categorizing teachers–certified, uncertified, alt-route, has a Master’s degree, licensure exam scores, this disposition, that disposition, etc. etc. Some of these things matter a little, or somewhat; some (like having a Masters’ degree) appear not to matter at all. The lack of definitive results has left plenty of room for people of different camps to comfortably keep various ideological arguments going ad infinitum, with little danger of actually resolving the issue and thus having to find something else to do.
But at the same time, research has also consistently found huge variations in teacher effectiveness within any category of teacher you care to name–old or young, certified or not, black or white, short or tall. Some teachers are just much, much better than others, regardless of external labels or credentials.

Henry Cordes & Michaela Saunders:

Sustaining funding for such a major push will be difficult, he said. And no outside group can control the biggest void behind youths who fail: their home life.
“What do you do when the parents aren’t there?” he said. “You can’t regulate that stuff.”
Fred Schott, president and CEO of Boys and Girls Club of Omaha, said the initiative is focusing on “the right six things to make a long-term impact.”
He said, however, that the organizers should be prepared for some suspicion in the community. There’s understandable anger, he said, that it’s taken so long to recognize the area’s poverty.
“Our north Omaha community has seen many task forces,” he said.

Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel Roundtable:

We view education as key to virtually every other effort to revitalize the metro area economically and socially.
Here are excerpts from the rich discussion. You can also watch it here

Madison Country Day School Letter to local parents: [550K PDF]. MCDS web site, more on their IB program. Their letter to parents begins:

Dear Parents,
Open up the newspaper and it’s hard to miss what is happening in our local schools. In the effort to leave no one behind, many of our most talented students are finding themselves ignored. It used to be a simple decision where to send your talented son or daughter to school. Not any more .
Madison County Day School proposes a unique alternative for the greater Dane County community. Upon our accreditation to become an International Baccalaureate (IB) World School, we will offer in the fall of 2008 the IB Diploma Programme to our Upper School junior and senior classes.

Marc Eisen:

In the 1970s, Dmitri Yurasov was a precocious Moscow schoolboy obsessed with Russian history. He began reading the imposing 16-volume Soviet Historical Encyclopedia, which put the official Communist Party stamp to the glorious advances of the Lenin and Stalin years.
Only when Yurasov came across the odd description of a dead scholar as “illegally repressed and rehabilitated after his death” did he get his first inkling that Stalin had jailed and murdered millions in the Great Terror of the 1930s.
As a budding scholar, Yurasov later secured a job working in the Soviet archives and surreptiously burrowed deep into the secret records to begin recapturing the Soviet Union’s suppressed history.

Vikki Kratz:

Ying Vang was just a small boy when Gen. Vang Pao sent a helicopter to rescue his family from the jungles of Laos. He remembers his parents putting their fingers to their lips and saying “Shhh” because North Vietnamese soldiers were nearby. The women and children ran to the helicopter, which airlifted them to safety. Ying Vang’s father stayed behind with the rest of the men to fight.
A couple of years later, Vang Pao came to visit Ying Vang’s school. Despite the chaos, the Hmong general had ordered schools to be built in remote locations of the Laotian jungle. Now he was coming to personally deliver supplies. Ying Vang was in second grade and remembers Vang Pao handing each student a case of paper, pencils and textbooks.

Frank Schultz:

Cullen has proposed a plan of attack he hopes will lead to more money from the state. Several school board members expressed support for the idea.
Members hope to start their push for change May 7, when they meet with the state Sen. Judy Robson, D-Beloit, and Assembly Rep. Mike Sheridan, D-Janesville.
If anything can be done, it must be done soon. The Legislature is working on a two-year budget for the state, with a deadline to pass it by June 30.
Cullen proposes districts like Janesville’s could get relief from the state under a “50-25-25” formula:

Interesting, including former State Senator Tim Cullen’s presence on the Janesville school board. Health care costs are also an issue in Janesville.

Tracy Dell’Angela:

For the second time in a decade, Chicago Public Schools leaders are making a push in Springfield to restrict the power of local school councils to hire and fire principals.
Board President Rufus Williams and other district leaders met with key legislators last week to discuss possible changes to the 1995 School Reform Act, which gave these elected councils of parents and community members broad authority to approve school budgets and select principals. The district wants councils to get approval from the central administration before firing a principal—a movecouncil advocates denounced as a power grab.
Valencia Rias, a director with the reform advocacy group Designs for Change, decried the legislative maneuver during the public comment segment of the Board of Education meeting Wednesday.
“You are trying to gut the power of 575 [local school councils] . . .because of what happened with one LSC,” said Rias, referring to the recent controversy over the council firing of the popular principal at Curie Metropolitan High School. “No one wants to have $110,000 contracts handed out by this board, by the mayor of this city.”

Mark Hornbeck:

Gov. Jennifer Granholm announced this morning she will order a $125-per-pupil cut for public school students to deal with the state’s growing fiscal problem.
Letters to school superintendents informing them of the cuts will go out on Monday, the governor said.
The Legislature would then have 30 days to react. Lawmakers could accept or reject the cuts, or come up with the money to avoid the reductions.
“I’m angry at the Senate Republicans for having an extremist ideology. No matter what happens to Michigan, they won’t consider revenues,” Granholm told reporters this morning.

Michigan has lost many auto industry jobs over the past few years.

Gates Foundation:

Today, more than one million students fail to finish high school, including half of African American and Hispanic students. Of those who do graduate, only half have the knowledge and skills they need to succeed. Over the last seven years, the foundation has made significant investments to reverse these startling statistics.
In her new position, (Vicki) Phillips will join the U.S. Program team and direct the foundation’s education portfolio. The portfolio also includes scholarship programs to remove the financial barriers to college for promising students and an initiative to improve early learning in Washington state. Dr. Phillips will complete the school year in Portland and begin work at the foundation August 1, overseeing and expanding upon more than $3.4 billion in strategic education investments and partnerships.

Related Links:

• Clusty Search on Phillips
• Hurricane Vicki by Beth Slovic
• Vicki Phillips in Portland
• Two Schools of Thought on Phillips

Mara Altman:

Imagine that your boss wants you to sign a document accusing you of something you don’t believe you did—a fireable offense like assaulting someone at work, for example—and your response is not only to refuse to sign, but to let loose a damning accusation that your boss was making up the allegation.
And, for good measure, you call your boss “fat.”
Now, in just about any industry you can think of, this would not bode well for your continued employment. But in this case, we’re not talking about just any kind of workplace, but perhaps the most dysfunctional employee-employer interface in the history of paychecks.
In other words, the New York City public school system.

Jay Matthews:

Some critics decry the way the Knowledge Is Power Program presents itself as the savior of inner city education. My answer: KIPP doesn’t do that. We sloppy journalists do.
Let me present Exhibit A: The latest annual report card from the KIPP Foundation in San Francisco. It has 93 pages of remarkable data. (See, there I go again, making KIPP the miracle cure. Let me change that to “interesting” data.) The report card tells how well each of the KIPP schools is doing, but it does not claim to be saving our cities.
I understand why we education reporters try to make KIPP sound like more than it is. We are starved for good news about low-income schools. KIPP is an encouraging story, so we are tempted to gush rather than report. We don’t ask all the questions we should. We don’t quote critics as often as we ought to. We don’t emphasize how new and incomplete the KIPP data is. But none of that is KIPP’s fault. Data costs money, and KIPP tries to use most of its funds to educate kids.
One of the best things about KIPP, a network of 52 independent public schools in 16 states and the District, is that it tries very hard to make the statistics it has available to everyone. Focusing on results is one of the organization’s basic principles. Anyone can order a free copy of the new report card by going to www.kipp.org. And on page 57 you will find numbers that help explain why KIPP is firing its middle school in Buffalo, N.Y., the sixth time a KIPP school has left the network.

2006 KIPP Report Card.

David Herszenhorn:

The deal would increase base pay by 23 percent, compounded over nearly seven years, and add 15 minutes to principals’ and assistant principals’ workdays. The contract would also revamp how principals are rated on their performance each year, discarding the blunt thumbs-up or thumbs-down system under which they are labeled either satisfactory or unsatisfactory.
It would be replaced by a more nuanced review, aligned to the Education Department’s new accountability system, which grades schools from A to F based on students’ progress.
Starting salaries for assistant principals who work all year rather than just the 10 months that schools are in session would rise to $108,869 from $88,398, and their maximum salary would be $130,100, up from $108,869.
City officials expressed particular pleasure that the contract agreement included incentive provisions that are often opposed by unions. “In the private sector, financial incentives encourage actions that are good for the company,” Mr. Bloomberg said. “And there is no reason we shouldn’t also use financial incentives in the public sector to encourage actions that are good for our schools.”
As part of the deal to end the seniority rights of assistant principals, the city would help find a position for anyone who is left without an assignment. Should an assistant principal still not get an offer from any principal, the city, for the first time, would be able to extend a buyout of up to one year’s pay.
Assistant principals who declined a buyout would be placed in schools where they could be required to teach three periods a day and perform other duties.