Madtown Chris:

• This blog will contain my personal analysis of Dane County schools primarily based on the state testing data. The posts are really intended to be read sequentially, more or less. So far it’s not really a stream-of-consciousness like a normal blog; rather it’s more of a straightforward analysis.
  Why bother with this?
  Our friends recently mentioned that they were concerned with the Madison schools among other things and were thinking about moving to a small town like Lodi. Other people we know are putting their kids in private school. I thought that Madison schools might not be in the dismal situation that seems to be the conventional wisdom today but I couldn’t say for sure.
  I stumbled upon the State of Wisconsin web site that provides test scores for various grades for every school in Wisconsin and decided to conduct an analysis to see what I could discover about the various schools in the area. Should we move? Should they move? Should you be concerned about the schools? I attempt to answer these questions given numerous assumptions.
  Summary of Results
  Madison has the best schools in Dane county and among the best in all of Wisconsin.
  But, and it’s a big BUT, you have to make sure you’re in the right one. Choose poorly and you get a relatively bad school.

• High Schools
• Middle Schools
• Elementary Schools

Joel Rubin and Howard Blume:

The 115-page report — based on previously conducted audits and analyses as well as interviews with more than 100 district employees — describes an operation beset by an almost complete lack of accountability or consequences for poor performance, running from the most senior staff to school principals. Job descriptions are often unclear and evaluations rarely pegged to improved district performance, while communication among various corners of the organization is muddled or nonexistent, the report found.
“The most apparent and inhibiting deficit standing in the way of instructional coherence in LAUSD today is a lack of accountability,” said the report by Florida-based Evergreen Solutions. “Currently, directives are given but few, if any, consequences are enforced for noncompliance.”
Perhaps the overriding message in the report is that past recommendations, made in one study after another, have rarely moved from paper to reality. In an interview, Brewer promised that things would be different this time.

Amy Hetzner:

A joint legislative committee deadlocked Wednesday on whether to study Wisconsin’s class-size reduction program, ultimately defeating the measure in what Republicans called a partisan maneuver and Democrats hailed as supporting a popular initiative.
In proposing an audit of the Student Achievement Guarantee in Education program, or SAGE, Republican lawmakers characterized it as a routine request for a decade-old program that the governor has recommended spending $109 million on in the next school year.
State Rep. Kitty Rhoades (R-Hudson) also raised concerns about the state Department of Public Instruction’s practice of granting waivers that allow school districts to exceed the 15-student class limit called for in the law.
“The waiver process was not established by statute, nor was it established by the Legislature, nor do we even know what it is,” she said during a hearing Wednesday.

Sarah Carr:

After hours of emotional debate, a Milwaukee School Board panel approved a measure Tuesday night that would allow safety aides to use flexible handcuffs to restrain students who demonstrate threatening behavior.
“We’ve been in situations where we’ve had to restrain students for 30 minutes, 40 minutes, an hour,” said Shawn Buford, a safety aide at Custer High School. Buford said he has been out of school three times this school year after being assaulted by students.
But Raphiel Cole called use of handcuffs “a form of pre-institution that you are doing for our kids.”
Cole, who has nieces and nephews in Milwaukee Public Schools, added: “Anything but these handcuffs. You are going to have holding cells for the children, what’s next?”

Ian Shapira:

The Texas-based author says in her book “A Framework for Understanding Poverty”: Parents in poverty typically discipline children by beating or verbally chastising them; poor mothers may turn to sex for money and favors; poor students laugh when they get in trouble at school; and low-income parents tend to “beat around the bush” during parent-teacher conferences, instead of getting to the point.
But many academics say her works are riddled with unverifiable assertions. At the American Educational Research Association’s annual conference in Chicago last week, professors from the University of Texas at Austin delivered a report on Payne that argued that more than 600 of her descriptions of poverty in “Framework” cannot be proved true.
“She claims there is a single culture of poverty that people live in. It’s an idea that’s been discredited since at least the 1960s,” said report co-author Randy Bomer.

Susan Troller’s recent article on possible school closings mentioned that some Madison Schools have smaller populations than others in the District. I’ve posted a simple table that summarizes MMSD elementary, middle and high school student population numbers with those from nearby suburban communities: Middleton-Cross Plains, Monona Grove, Stoughton, Sun Prairie, Verona and Waunakee. MMSD facility map.
I’d like to add more districts to this table along with links to performance data, then plot it all on a map. Let me know if you have some time to help compile the data.
Karyn Saemann’s article on Monona’s search for new young families adds another twist to the discussion.

Denis Doyle:

The case for national standards is so self-evidently powerful that I am always surprised that it has to be made. Indeed, for years I have expected national standards to emerge spontaneously, with state after state seeing the wisdom of pooling resources rather than re-inventing standards 50 times over. After all, America is rich and powerful because we are a democratic, continental common market with a shared language and civic and popular culture. With these traits aligned could national standards be far behind?
Oddly enough, the answer is “yes,” they have been and continue to be far behind. But perhaps not forever. The Council of the Great City Schools – an association of 66 of the nation’s urban districts – has endorsed the idea as have selected think tanks like the Fordham Foundation. Equally important, some of the nation’s premier superintendents are calling for national standards (see Ed Week, vol. 26, no. 26, March 7, 2007, The Case for National Standards in American Education, Rudy Crew, Paul Vallas and Michael Casserly). Times they are a changin’.
The principle reason – and the principled reason — opponents have rejected the idea of national standards is to preserve local control. Such a slender reed on which to lean, reminding me of nothing so much as Janis Joplin’s Saturday Night Swindle: “freedom’s just another name for nothing left to lose…”

MMSD Today:

The Board of Education at its April 9 meeting unanimously voted to name the new elementary school on the far West side for General Vang Pao, a prominent, national Hmong leader.
His name was selected from a list of 39 names that were nominated earlier this year by community members.
Vang led the Hmong in the Secret War against the communists in Laos and Southeast Asia. After he arrived in the U.S. in 1975, he worked to help resettle the Hmong in this country and has been an advocate here for the rights of Hmong people.
The naming process defined by a previously established Board of Education policy also involved holding a public hearing at which dozens of persons spoke to the Board about the various names for the new school. There was also the opportunity for citizens to provide feedback by e-mail and via the Internet.

Winnie Hu:

In an effort to ensure racial diversity, the school system here in northern Westchester County is set up in an unusual way, its six school buildings divided not by neighborhood but by grade level. So all of the second and third graders in the Ossining Union Free School District attend the Brookside School.
But some minority students, the black boys at Brookside, are set apart, in a way, by a special mentoring program that pairs them with black teachers for one-on-one guidance outside class, extra homework help, and cultural activities during the school day. “All the black boys used to end up in the office, so we had to do something,” said Lorraine Richardson, a second-grade teacher and mentor. “We wanted to teach them to help each other” instead of fight each other.
While many school districts have long worked to close the achievement gap between minority and white students, Ossining’s programs aimed to get black male students to college are a new frontier.

Channel3000.com:

The largest cuts in the superintendent’s budget are through the consolidation of some schools.
Lindbergh parents were surprised on Monday night to hear the superintendent is backing a plan that would close their school.
They had anticipated their school being taken off the district’s chopping block.
Many of the parents have been fighting to keep up with the information coming from the board, and now they’re hoping the board will listen to their concerns.
Parent Jeffrey Lewis has had three children go to Lindbergh Elementary, but with a budget plan calling for the close of the school, he’s worried about how it would affect all of the students there.
“The district has looked at this from a monetary standpoint, but never have they addressed how this is going to impact equity,” said Lewis. “How will they maintain the opportunity that kids currently have in small schools?

35 Year Michigan Teacher Ken Feneley:

Brendan Miniter’s description of “how school choice was defeated in South Carolina” (“Cross Country: A Day Late,” op-ed, March 31) perfectly describes the power created by a combination of teacher unions and politicians they help elect to office. What gets lost is what’s best for the kids. In this case, it seems, the paranoid worries about the impact of losing students to schools of choice has outweighed possible benefits that might, just might, happen for 200,000 kids in South Carolina.
There is no apparent competitive spirit among the public school establishment types that is leading them to say what I would have: “Go ahead with school choice and I’ll prove you wrong. Just tell me what I need to do and watch what happens. I’ll change, if needed, and soon you will wish you had had left your kids in my school.”
I would not worry about some lean times while my public school made adjustments. I’d tighten my belt, suck up my pride, take two deep breaths and get to work. I, while teaching for 35 years, fully recognized that the union, the Michigan Education Association, could not have cared less about whether I was a good teacher or not. Its only concern was that I not have more than one prep period per day, did not exceed more than the contracted student numbers per class, that I did not do anything the contract prohibited, that I was paid the same as the teacher down the hall regardless of merit, that teaching and other positions were guaranteed regardless, that as many grievances be filed as possible, and, oh boy, that dues were such that the upper level union employees could be paid better than any contracted teacher in a local school.
Instead, we have this perpetual paranoid promotion of the idea that public schools will decline because of competition. And unionists and unions really do have something to fear, I guess, because if that paranoia dissipates, the teachers union loses its reason for existence: the endless promotion of teacher jobs at union pay rates that support the South Carolina Education Association and the National Education Association infrastructure through union dues. They can’t get along without them.
Notice that student education concerns through my subject matter delivery skills was not mentioned once. Unions don’t care. Obviously, neither do South Carolina politicians.

Sam Dillon:

Now, as the president and the same Democrats push to renew the landmark law, which has reshaped the face of American education with its mandates for annual testing, discontent with it in many states is threatening to undermine the effort in both parties.
Arizona and Virginia are battling the federal government over rules for testing children with limited English. Utah is fighting over whether rural teachers there pass muster under the law. And Connecticut is two years into a lawsuit arguing that No Child Left Behind has failed to provide states federal financing to meet its requirements.
Reacting to such disputes in state after state, dozens of Republicans in Congress are sponsoring legislation that would water down the law by allowing states to opt out of its testing requirements yet still receive federal money.
On the other side of the political spectrum, 10 Democratic senators signed a letter last month saying that based on feedback from constituents, they consider the law’s testing mandates to be “unsustainable” and want an overhaul.
“It’s going to be a brawl,” said Jack Jennings, a Democrat who as president of the Center on Education Policy has studied how the law has been set up in the 50 states. “The law is drawing opposition from the right because they are opposed to federal interference and from the left because of too much testing.”

Amy Hetzner:

Messmer High School is a central-city Catholic school with about 85% of its student body qualifying for federally subsidized meals. Waukesha West High School is a suburban public school where only about 6% of the students live in low-income households.
But when students in Messmer’s National Honor Society heard about the nearly $10,000 fund-raising challenge facing West’s Academic Decathlon team, they saw only fellow students in need.
“Ten thousand dollars to these kids – National Honor Society kids from Messmer, inner-city kids – it just blew them away,” said Bob Monday, a volunteer business teacher at the Milwaukee school.

COMPLAINT [67K PDF] HAS BEEN FILED AGAINST MADISON METROPOLITAN SCHOOL DISTRICT IN THE UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT FOR THE WESTERN DISTRICT OF WISCONSIN
Linda Martin, Plaintiff v. Madison Metropolitan School District and District officials Roger Price, Renee Bremer, Mary Teppo and Donna Williams, Defendants.
The District was Ms. Martin’s employer. Ms. Martin received a right to sue letter from the Equal Employment Opportunities Commission. Allegations include “bid rigging;” discrimination during a hiring process; denial of free speech rights; harassment; wrongful discharge; and intentional violation of federal law.
Susan Troller: School District Sued for Harrassment.

(more…)

Diana Jean Schemo:

States and school districts nationwide are moving to lengthen the day at struggling schools, spurred by grim test results suggesting that more than 10,000 schools are likely to be declared failing under federal law next year.
In Massachusetts, in the forefront of the movement, Gov. Deval L. Patrick is allocating $6.5 million this year for longer days and can barely keep pace with demand: 84 schools have expressed interest.
Gov. Eliot Spitzer of New York has proposed an extended day as one of five options for his state’s troubled schools, part of a $7 billion increase in spending on education over the next four years — apart from the 37 minutes of extra tutoring that children in some city schools already receive four times a week.
And Gov. M. Jodi Rell of Connecticut is proposing to lengthen the day at persistently failing schools as part of a push to raise state spending on education by $1 billion.
“In 15 years, I’d be very surprised if the old school calendar still dominates in urban settings,” said Mark Roosevelt, superintendent of schools in Pittsburgh, which has added 45 minutes a day at eight of its lowest-performing schools and 10 more days to their academic year.

PBS:

Imagine the sight and sound of American nine- and eleven-year-old children performing Shakespeare’s Hamlet or Henry V — and understanding every word they recite. Imagine them performing well enough to elicit praise from such accomplished Shakespearean actors as Ian McKellen and Michael York, and to be invited to perform with the Royal Shakespeare Company in England. Such a spectacle would be highly impressive in the toniest of America’s private schools. But what if the kids were the children of recent Latino and Asian immigrants attending a large Los Angeles inner-city public school in one of America’s toughest neighborhoods?
That is the astonishing story told by the new documentary “The Hobart Shakespeareans,” which discovers how one man’s uncommon commitment and resourcefulness have opened up worlds of opportunity for his “disadvantaged” students — and perhaps have demonstrated a way forward for America’s beleaguered public education system.
The Latino- and Asian-American children crowding Los Angeles’ sprawling Hobart Boulevard Elementary face daunting odds. Their neighborhood in the heart of Central Los Angeles is better known for crime than for opportunity. They grow up in low-income households. Their school, typically for public education in poor districts, is under-funded and overcrowded. Most of their parents do not speak English. No one is giving these kids educational perks, like class trips and intensive tutoring. And no one is expecting any but the smartest and luckiest to rise beyond the limitations of their environment. No one, that is, except Rafe Esquith.

David Rusk & Marc Eisen:

Jason Shepard’s story this week, “How Can We Help Poor Students Achieve More?,” points out the strong correlation between schools with high levels of low-income students and substandard academic performance. As Shepard reports, that same point was made about the Madison schools by urban researcher David Rusk in 2001.
Rusk was a headliner at the “Nolen In The New Century” conference sponsored by Isthmus and several community and media groups. His speech was subsequently adopted for publication in Isthmus and became the first salvo in the campaign for inclusionary zoning. It’s reprinted below.(Readers are welcome to form their own conclusions on whether or not IZ has played out in Madison as Rusk outlined here.)
Rusk is the former mayor of Albuquerque. His Cities Without Suburbs, in the words of the Congressional Quarterly, “has virtually become the Bible of the regionalism movement.” Rusk’s study of census data linked failing cities to their political separation from the suburbs and, conversely, successful cities to their ability to annex or be part of a regional government. His more recent book, Inside Game/Outside Game, argues that regional land-use and tax-revenue policies are more critical to turning around failing neighborhoods than anti-poverty programs.

According to a report from the Madison Police Department:

On 3/22/07 at 10:02 a.m. there was a large disturbance at LaFollette H.S. A school administrator had noticed a large gathering of students and hostilities between some wanting to fight. It was later learned that the disturbance was caused by three females confronting three other females to fight. The Madison Police Department Education Resource Officer (ERO) noted that upon arriving to the scene several hundred students were watching the disturbance, clogging the hallway, and that 10-15 school officials had to restore order. A total of six Madison Police Officers were present in the school to help calm this disturbance. Eventually some students were detained and separated. In one separation, two students went to an office and began fighting again. Police had to respond to that office as well to break up the secondary fight. The above-listed juveniles were arrested and placed in Juvenile Reception until parents were notified.

Nancy L Zimpher:

Cooperative education is now more than 100 years old. The co-op approach, in which students alternate time in the classroom with professionally paid work directly related to their majors, was founded at the University of Cincinnati by Dean Herman Schneider in 1906. There are co-op programs today at 500 institutions in the United States.
The centennial marks a good time to take stock. How effective is co-op? What has been its impact on its three fundamental partners — students, employers, and institutions of higher education? Is co-op still relevant? Still viable? What role should co-op play in 21st century education?
I see empirical evidence of co-op’s value every day at the University of Cincinnati. We have 3,800 students in 44 disciplines participating in co-op opportunities at more than 1,500 employers in 34 states and 9 foreign countries. At graduation, UC co-op students have an enviable head-start in their careers by virtue of their on-the-job work experience (an average of one-and-a-half years for UC students), marketable skills, impressive credentials, and networking connections. Many are hired immediately by the companies where they completed their co-ops.

Tyler Cowen:

1. The federal government will pay for vouchers, to some extent, and thus extend its control over schooling. Admittedly this is happening anyway.
2. No politically feasible vouchers program will apply immediate depth charges to current public schools or even reduce their initial budgets (“oh, you aren’t letting public schools compete…). That means the new money must come from somewhere. That means our taxes will go up.
Vouchers would create a new middle class entitlement, ostensibly aimed at education but often simply capitalized in the form of cash. In the meantime public schools would require additional subsidies to stay open. How pretty a picture is this?

Jay Matthews:

The charter school movement, begun 16 years ago as an alternative to struggling public schools, will today make its strongest claim on mainstream American education when a national group announces the most successful fundraising campaign in the movement’s history — $65 million to create 42 schools in Houston.
The money, which comes from some of the nation’s foremost donors, including the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, would make the Knowledge Is Power Program the largest charter school organization in the country. KIPP, which runs three schools in Washington, has produced some of the highest test scores among publicly funded schools in the District and has made significant gains in the math and reading achievement of low-income students in most of its 52 schools across the country.

Meanwhile, Madison’s proposed Studio School will apparently open this fall as a private organization. I hope we learn more about the Studio School’s interactions with the Madison School District and how the process might improve in the future.

Jane Galt:

But it is not true that these kids are simply genetic train wrecks who we should be prepared to write off. Disadvantaged kids can be taught to read, write, and perform basic mathematical operations, and they can be taught to behave if their parents have neglected that task. In our system, however, any school that manages to do so achieves this feat only through heroic efforts to overcome the institutional barriers put in the way. For various reasons, this is not happening. I have a novel approach to solving this problem: I propose we . . . pay schools on the basis of their ability to educate these children. I plan to call this system something nifty and new-economy, like . . . a market. That has an edgy, new-millenial kind of feel, doesn’t it? I think it’s the juxtaposition of the hard-edged k and t sounds with the soft, sensuous labials of the first syllable.
Can the school system overcome all the handicaps that disadvantaged kids are born with? I doubt it. But it could certainly do better . . . and it could hardly do worse than many urban school districts.

Galt has more on schools here.

Business Tools for Better Schools:

The "Business Tools for Better Schools" toolkit is designed to engage, energize and focus company and business organization efforts in education reform. The toolkit is geared towards both policy and practical involvement, primarily at the state and local level, in three key K-12 education reform business priorities:

• Ensuring that graduates are ready for work and college;
• Strengthening the science, technology, education and math (STEM) pipeline;
• Maximizing data-driven decisions in education.

The goal is to create a "one-stop" Web site where business can get the background information, facts, research and practical tools they need to effectively engage in education in their communities and states.

The toolkit was created and is maintained by Achieve, Inc. with generous support from the GE Foundation. Additional support was provided by the Business Roundtable. The content of the site was developed in consultation with national, state and local business organizations and companies. In particular, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the Business Roundtable and their state affiliates were instrumental in the conception and development of the website.

Wisconsin’s page & Data.
Wisconsin Data Fact Sheet.

The Economist:

The hard lessons of segregation
WAYNE CLOUGH, the president of the Georgia Institute of Technology, has just moved into a new office. The workmen are still in the corridors outside, generating noise and dust. A few years ago the site, in Atlanta, was full of drug addicts and prostitutes. The hotel across the street was boarded up and inhabited by vagrants. Now Georgia Tech is building a “sustainable, energy-efficient campus” with white roofs, recycled building materials and a system for catching and using rainwater. It is a bit more expensive, says Mr Clough, but “if you plan to be around for a while, you’ll recapture the costs eventually.”
Georgia Tech has a global reputation. Its 16,000 students will mostly go on to careers in engineering, medicine or some other tough and lucrative field. But Mr Clough does have some worries. Southern universities got into the research game later than their northern rivals, so the region is behind the curve in attracting high-tech industries, he says. From time to time, fundamentalists try to teach creationism as science in southern public schools, which “reinforces the backward image”. But his biggest worry is that not enough young southerners are mastering science and maths.
“Brother Dave” Gardner, a stand-up comic from Tennessee, greeted the 1954 Supreme Court order to end segregated schools with the quip: “Let ’em go to school, beloved. We went, and we didn’t learn nothin’.” That was harsh, but partly grounded in fact. The point of school segregation was to keep blacks down and whites separate. When it ended, many white parents moved their children from newly integrated public schools to private schools whose chief selling point was whiteness, not academic rigour.

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Debra Nussbaum:

DR. ALAN ROSS did not develop a passion for school bus safety until 10 years ago, when his son asked why there were no safety belts on the bus he rode to school in Litchfield County, Conn.
“I was your typical parent, and I just assumed we had this covered in a school bus,” said Dr. Ross, who is now the president of the National Coalition for School Bus Safety, a volunteer group. “That started my quest to improve things. The state of school bus transportation is a very sad one.”
School buses remain the safest form of transportation to and from school, according to various federal statistics, but regulation of the buses is uneven. No federal laws govern whether safety belts are required on school buses, how often the buses must be inspected or how many years they can be on the road. On a state level, there are significant differences in such laws — New York and New Jersey require seat belts on buses, for example, but Connecticut does not. Districts can have their own rules, too.

Elissa Gootman:

When a student at Seth Low Intermediate School loudly pronounced Corinne Kaufman a “fat lady” during a fire drill one recent day, Mrs. Kaufman, a 45-year-old math teacher, calmly turned around.
“Voluptuous,” she retorted, then proceeded to define the unfamiliar term, cutting off the laughter and offering a memorable vocabulary lesson in the process.
Such are the survival skills Mrs. Kaufman has acquired over 17 years at Seth Low, a large middle school in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn: How to snuff out brewing fistfights before the first punch is thrown, how to coax adolescents crippled by low self-esteem into raising their hands, how to turn every curveball, even the biting insult, into a teachable moment.
But not all middle school teachers can do it.

Ron Seely:

Forget basketball.
The real action in Madison on Saturday was on a brightly lit stage at Monona Grove High School where 47 gutsy young people stared down the vagaries of the English language and slugged it out verbally in the Badger State Spelling Bee.
The ending matched the thrill of a double-overtime NCAA tournament basketball game. Madison’s own Isabel Jacobson, of O’Keeffe Middle School, repeated as champion in a poised and confident performance. She won against a stalwart competitor, Andrew Grose, of Lake Country Academy in Sheboygan, in a nail-biting duel over the word “ineluctable.”
With just the two spellers standing on a stage amid empty chairs late in the afternoon, Andrew, who had calmly vanquished such words as “narcissistic” and “glockenspiel” during the afternoon, mistakenly put the letter “i” where the “a” belongs in “ineluctable.”
Isabel, with hardly a blink, spelled the word correctly and then awaited the final word that, if spelled correctly, would give her a memorable second straight state championship.
“Tutelary,” said pronouncer Brad Williams.

• Sheboygan School Board Approves Seven (7) Charter Schools
• DPI Charter School Grant Info Webcast on Friday, March 23, at 10:00am
• Beloit Considers Project-Based Charter School
• Environment-Focused Charter School Meetings at Stevens Point (March 30), Madison (May 2) and Oshkosh (May 10)
• Portage Charter School & Aldo Leopold
• Green Lake Charters Course for School
• Coulee Montessori Charter School in La Crosse
• D.C. Everest Exploring Charter School Options
• Learn more about public charter schools at the 2007 WISCONSIN CHARTER SCHOOLS CONFERENCE, co-sponsored by WCSA & DPI, on April 15-17 at Waukesha.

(more…)

Paula via Paul Soglin:

Federal law states that in the U.S. every child has a right to a free and appropriate education no matter if the child is gifted & talented, average, or below average. Some children will cost more to educate than others.
There is an illusion that kids come with their abilities and needs stamped on their foreheads. As you have stated, we educate students with a huge range of intellectual, emotional, physical, linguistic, and economic needs. In special education, these needs are defined by arbitrary cut-offs and definitions. The premise is that these categories can be used as predictors of education costs to be incurred by specific disability and need.

Ellen Gameran:

All over the country, schools are putting in automated phone systems that can quickly place thousands of recorded calls. Originally intended to notify parents of emergencies, more and more automated messages are about routine matters, ranging from stern warnings about talking in class to how to dress for tomorrow’s pep rally.
One automated calling company, TeleParent Educational Systems, of Fullerton, Calif., lets teachers pick from a menu of 600 canned messages — including one that says a child is a “pleasure to have in class” and another saying he or she has “been late to class five or more times.”

Terri Cullen:

My husband Gerry and I are at odds over a decision that could have a major impact on our son Gerald’s future: Should he repeat the second grade?
By repeating second grade, Gerald may greatly improve his grades — which, if it keeps up, will affect his ability to get into a good college, potentially leading one day to a higher-paying job. By going on to third grade, Gerald will keep pace with his friends and avoid the social stigma and self-doubt of having been left back — and a college education isn’t always the key to financial security and a happy life.

IREPP:

“Getting Down to Facts” is a research project of more than 20 studies designed to provide California’s citizens with comprehensive information about the status of the state’s school finance and governance systems. The overall hypothesis underlying this research project is that improvement to California’s school finance and governance structures could enable its schools to be more effective.
Over an 18 months period from September 2005 to March 2007, the Getting Down to Facts Project brought together an extraordinary array of scholars from 32 institutions with diverse expertise and policy orientations. It represents an unprecedented attempt to synthesize what we know as a basis for convening the necessary public conversations about what we should do. “Getting Down to Facts” was specifically requested by the Governor’s Committee on Education Excellence, former Secretary of Education Alan Bersin, the President pre Tem of the California Senate, the Speaker of the California Assembly, and the Superintendent of Public Instruction.

Nanette Asimov:

A yearlong, $3 million evaluation of California public schools by more than 30 education experts reveals a “deeply flawed” system that misdirects school money, emphasizes paperwork over progress, and fails to send the best teachers into the neediest schools.
“Getting Down to Facts” — a collection of 22 studies — begins with the sobering reminder that despite years of academic reform, California students of all ethnicities still score among the worst in the nation on tests of basic reading and math.
A year ago, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and a bipartisan group of state educators and lawmakers asked the researchers to find out what was wrong with the public school system. All agreed that once the report came out, they would together try to fix the problems.

Joel Rubin and Howard Blume have more.

Jonathan Weisman and Amit R. Paley:

More than 50 GOP members of the House and Senate — including the House’s second-ranking Republican — will introduce legislation today that could severely undercut President Bush’s signature domestic achievement, the No Child Left Behind Act, by allowing states to opt out of its testing mandates.

Steve Paske:

However, there was one thing I found alarming.
The column calling for school funding reforms wasn’t about MPS or inner-ring suburbs; it was about drastic service reductions in Waukesha.
If you ask me, to complain about Waukesha’s school funding while MPS and other area districts struggle to simply put a teacher in every regular classroom is akin to whining about a dripping faucet in your mansion’s eighth bathroom while your next-door neighbor is stuck going out back to a squatter’s pit.

More on Waukesha.

Several articles on open records issues in schools:

• Meg Jones: School District loses 2 suits over lack of transparency
  

  Barry Hoerz was kicked out of a meeting of the Weyauwega-Fremont School Board in July.
  What’s unusual is that Hoerz was a member of the School Board, and he was told to leave because he was writing notes during closed session.
  A Waupaca County circuit judge agreed with Hoerz after a four-hour trial in January and ordered the district to pay a $300 fine as well as attorney expenses and other fees totaling $9,133, according to court records.
  While squabbles among school board members and superintendents are not rare, it is unusual for a school board member to sue the board for violating the state’s open meetings law.

• Madison Parents School Safety Site:
  

  This week is national “Sunshine Week” (Sunshine Week web site; Sunshine Week blog), promoting open government and the public’s right to know. For last year’s Sunshine Week, the Rochester (N.Y.) Democrat and Chronicle conducted a freedom of information audit to obtain copies of its school district’s reports of violent and disruptive incidents in school buildings.

• How to Reforum your local School Board
• Is it Possible to Have a Good School District with Less Money? Presentation to the Florence School District

Maggie Rossiter Peterman:

In an abandoned insurance office, a handful of Madison engineers and scientists logged hundreds of volunteer hours to create a workshop so high school students could put their math and science lessons into practice.
It’s a drill two GE Healthcare engineers – Rob Washenko and Bob Schulz – have performed 20 hours a week for six weeks each of the last four years to assist Memorial High School science and aerospace engineering teacher Ben Senson in the development of a high school robotics program.
“We teach students how to think to solve problems,” said Washenko, 50, an engineering manager and inventor at GE Healthcare in Madison.

Appleton’s Odyssey – Magellan Charter School captures state MathCounts championship
Environment-Focused Charter School Meetings at Stevens Point (March 30), Madison (May 2) and Oshkosh (May 10)
Appleton Superintendent & WCSA President TOM SCULLEN Honored
Lake Country Academy Wants Charter School Status
Portage Charter School & Aldo Leopold
Green Lake Charters Course for School
Coulee Montessori Charter School in La Crosse
D.C. Everest Exploring Charter School Options
Learn more about public charter schools at the 2007 WISCONSIN CHARTER SCHOOLS CONFERENCE, co-sponsored by WCSA & DPI, on April 15-17 at Waukesha.
See conference program: WCSA Conference Schedule & Sessions (PDF) Speakers
Learn about planning, authorizing and operating public charter schools. Why Charter Schools?
Conference Registration Info. Join the WCSA now for member registration rate.

Jeff Opdyke:

A couple of times a year, my son comes home with an assignment that is supposed to warm our hearts: fund raising. But to be honest, it always leaves me cold.
It’s always the same old, painful drill. My son carries a clutch of papers that, for all he cares, could be written in Sanskrit. The only thing he sees is the catalog filled with pictures of the prizes he can win if he raises a ton of money for some cause he can’t even identify.
And it gets worse.
My son has no interest in peddling products door-to-door. I have no interest in letting him — in part because we don’t know every neighbor, and in part because I’m opposed to letting my son donate free labor to for-profit companies that run many of these nonprofit fund-raising efforts and keep a percentage of the money raised. Ultimately, the only thing my son cares about is winning some overpriced award. Since he hasn’t the time to sell this stuff to begin with, he wants me and his mom to find buyers or to pony up our own cash. And when we won’t, he wants to spend all of his money to buy ever more boxes of whatever the fund-raiser of the day is pitching.

Ian Shapira:

A culture of control has Washington area campuses in an ever-tightening grip, many students say, extending beyond the long-standing restrictions on provocative clothing, cellphone use and class-time bathroom visits. Akin to the omnipresent “helicopter parents,” these students say, are helicopter administrators who home in on their smallest moves, no matter how guileless or mundane.
Some administrators acknowledge that the list of rules meant to ban, limit or deter potentially inappropriate or dangerous actions is steadily growing.
“Where to start? It’s getting huge,” said Linda Wanner, a Blair assistant principal. “The word of the day is prevention. We’re on high alert all the time.” It’s a result, experts say, of the many pressures on those who lead a modern campus with anywhere from 1,000 to 3,000 teenagers and the potential for violence or a lawsuit around every hallway corner.

144K PDF File. This draft document was presented at Monday evening’s PTSO meeting prior to the school board candidate forum.

Richard Medlin:

Shyers (1992a, 1992b), in the most thorough study of home-schooled children’s social behavior to date, tested 70 children who had been entirely home-schooled and 70 children who had always attended traditional schools. The two groups were matched in age (all were 8-10 years old), race, gender, family size, socioeconomic status, and number and frequency of extracurricular activities. Shyers measured self-concept and assertiveness and found no significant differences between the two groups.
The observers used the Direct Observation Form of the Child Behavior Checklist . . . , a checklist of 97 problem behaviors such as argues, brags or boasts, doesn’t pay attention long, cries, disturbs other children, isolates self from others, shy or timimd, and shows off. The results were striking — the mean problem behavior score for children attending conventional schools was more than eight times higher than that of the home-schooled group.

via Joanne.

Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel:

Recognizing that the earlier you start teaching a child, the more and better that child will learn, Wisconsin (actually, Margarethe Schurz) brought kindergarten to America in 1856. Today, recognizing the value of that principle and the importance of collaboration, school districts in Wisconsin are starting to work with private day care centers to give 4-year-olds an even bigger boost to their education.
The Menomonee Falls School District is planning to join several other area school districts this fall in offering such a program. It’s an idea that more districts should consider.
“The goal to all of this is to provide quality 4-year-old services for each and every child who resides in the school district so when they come to 5-K, they’ve got the same kindergarten basis,” Marlene Gross-Ackeret, director of pupil services for the Menomonee Falls district, told Journal Sentinel reporter Amy Hetzner.

Online Education Database:

How would you like to study at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) for free? It has been nearly six years since MIT first announced their MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW) program. More recently, MIT announced that the OCW program, a free and open educational resource (OER) for educators, students, and self-learners around the world, is online and will be completed by 2008. The OCW provides open access to course materials for up to 1,550 MIT courses, representing 34 departments and all five MIT schools. The goal is to include materials from all MIT courses by next year.
MIT provides just one of the 10 open source educational success stories detailed below. Open source and open access resources have changed how colleges, organizations, instructors, and prospective students use software, operating systems and online documents for educational purposes. And, in most cases, each success story also has served as a springboard to create more open source projects.

WisPolitics is hosting a Madison Mayoral Forum Thursday at the Madison Club at 11:45a.m. [map]

US Chamber of Commerce:

The United States in the 21st century faces unprecedented economic and social challenges, ranging from the forces of global competition to the impending retirement of 77 million baby boomers. Succeeding in this new era will require our children to be prepared for the intellectual demands of the modern workplace and a far more complex society. Yet the evidence indicates that our country is not ready. Despite decades of reform efforts and many trillions of dollars in public investment, U.S. schools are not equipping our children with the skills and knowledge they-and the nation-so badly need.
It has been nearly a quarter century since the seminal report A Nation at Risk was issued in 1983. Since that time, a knowledge-based economy has emerged, the Internet has reshaped commerce and communication, exemplars of creative commerce like Microsoft, eBay, and Southwest Airlines have revolutionized the way we live, and the global economy has undergone wrenching change. Throughout that period, education spending has steadily increased and rafts of well-intentioned school reforms have come and gone. But student achievement has remained stagnant, and our K-12 schools have stayed remarkably unchanged-preserving, as if in amber, the routines, culture, and operations of an obsolete 1930s manufacturing plant.

Audrey Soglin & Char Gearing respond to Marc Eisen’s recent words:

I think we have learned and the research supports that kids need a balanced literacy approach. The “whole language vs. phonics” wars should really be put to rest. It is an old fight. Kids don’t learn the same way so a variety of instructional methods should be available. It is not unusual for districts to offer both direct instruction to identified students and reading recovery to others. The problems that kids have are different so the instructional interventions should be different as well. In terms of kids in heterogeneous classrooms receiving instruction – all kids need to be taught at their level. The challenge for teachers in diverse reading and math classrooms is to figure out how to meet those very different needs. It is difficult but not impossible.
The author seems to be saying that we should be segregating our classrooms and our schools. If you look at the scores of low-income students in low income schools-where the demographics are 90% low income, 90% African American or Hispanic – the scores are generally low. It is not like segregating the kids will automatically raise the scores.

http://www.madisonamps.org/

The Center for Public Education:

Few education stories get as much attention as the periodic ranking of U.S. students on international tests. The headlines are by now familiar: “U.S. Kids Mediocre in Math and Science”1; “4th and 8th Graders in U.S. Still Lag Many Peers”2. Surely, the media fascination with these stories is partly driven by our national desire to be number one. But according to many policymakers, business leaders, and analysts, more is at stake than American boasting rights. These individuals argue that the nation’s economic future depends directly on our ability to raise our present academic standing, particularly in math and science (Business Roundtable 2005; National Research Council 2005; White House 2006).
Others aren’t so sure. These observers assert that the reported failure of American students is exaggerated, claiming that the differences among countries aren’t so large. Besides, they say, our top students do just fine compared with their top-scoring peers in other countries (Bracey 1998).
Still others point to inherent difficulties in trying to make apples-to-apples comparisons across countries and argue that international rankings are not meaningful (Rotberg 1995).

Jay Matthews:

The report, “More Than a Horse Race,” was written by Jim Hull, policy analyst at the center, which is affiliated with the National School Boards Association. I sent a copy to a top U.S. expert on international educational comparisons, author and columnist Gerald W. Bracey. There were parts of the report Bracey did not like.
But I have found several points on which Hull and Bracey seem to agree. The Hull report at www.centerforpubliceducation.org, released on Jan. 17, should be read in its entirety because it is the best summary yet of the four major studies that compare our achievement rates to those abroad. (You can also get Bracey’s response if you e-mail him at gbracey1@verizon.net.)
5. Those who say our economy is doomed unless our schools get better appear to be ignoring recent history.
Hull introduced this topic in his report by noting that none of the international comparative studies include data from China or India. “Given the rapidly rising position these nations are taking in the global economy,” he said, he hoped they would be included in the future. Bracey interpreted this as a reflection of “the common, but perhaps erroneous assumption that how well 13-year-olds bubble in answer sheets has something to do with the economic health of a nation.”

Teacher Voices:

In Philadelphia last week a teacher named Frank Burd, wound up in the hospital after two students assaulted him, apparently because he had confiscated an iPod during class. After class, according to a report on NBC news, the two students were waiting for Burd. One punched him and the other pushed him. As of Friday night (February 23), he was still in intensive care with two broken bones in his neck.
Mr. Burd’s experience may seem like an aberration, but actually, it is only a slightly more extreme example of the kind of violence, crime, and general incivility that teachers and students confront in schools all over the nation. Here in NY, for example, Mayor Bloomberg’s Preliminary Management Report showed a 21-percent increase in felony crimes committed in the city’s schools between July and October 2006 compared with the same period the previous year. And according a February 23 article in The Chief, “Major crimes rose from 287 to 348, other criminal reports increased from 820 to 983, and additional safety incidents climbed from 1,614 to 1,926, according to the Mayor’s report.

is online here.