Alan Borsuk:

In documents made available in advance of a School Board committee meeting Tuesday, MPS administrators said, “MPS strongly believes that parents should be given the opportunity to choose single-sex schools for their children if they believe that these schools will help their children.”
Specific schools are not spelled out in the resolution to be considered Tuesday – in fact, it doesn’t pinpoint whether the focus should be on high schools, middle schools or even elementary grades.
But the MPS administration, led by Superintendent William Andrekopoulos, recommended giving the idea a green light and allowing administrators to seek proposals for two single-sex schools, with the goal of opening them for the coming school year. That plan is expected to be recommended by the board’s Innovation and School Reform Committee on Tuesday and be approved by the full board Jan. 25.

Bruce Schneier:

However, Green MSP Patrick Harvie said the suggestion was troubling.
“We should be preparing young people for the reality of defending their privacy and civil liberties against ever-more intrusive government systems,” he argued.
“We’ve heard proposals for airport-style scanners and random drug testing in schools, fingerprinting is already in place in some schools. There’s a risk of creating environments which feel more like penal institutions than places of learning.
“These ID cards will do absolutely nothing to address the causes of bullying. Instead they will teach the next generation that an ID card culture is ‘normal’, and that they should have to prove their entitlement to services.”

Sarah Carr:

China’s schools have struck fear in the West with their relentless focus on subjects such as physics and math – areas where American students have struggled compared with other nations.
However, visits to dozens of schools in China and hundreds in the United States reveal that both countries love to hate their own schools, and live in awe of others’ strengths. While Americans revere the Chinese mastery of basic subjects such as math and geography, the Chinese extol the American emphasis on creativity and nurturing individual talent.
In the prosperous seaside region of Zhejiang, the situation’s changing, though, as entrepreneurs inject some of the country’s relatively new capitalist fervor into the schools. The result is a panoply of schools that comes close to resembling Milwaukee’s education scene in its diversity – hardly what one would expect to find in a Communist state.
Students attend fancy private schools focused on such non-academic subjects as kung fu martial arts. A fledgling school voucher program aims to give families more choices as well as strengthen alternative and private schools. Educators describe a shift toward more local control and creativity in teaching. And parents like Xu are closely examining their new options.

Amy Hetzner:

In fact, the only indication this is a multiage classroom comes more than an hour into the day’s math lesson, when the students are divided into two groups – first-graders with Weber, second-graders with gifted-specialist Kristin Stein.
Since the beginning of the school year, the Menomonee Falls school has been trying out the multiage classroom as a way to raise student achievement and forge better relationships with parents and students. Riverside Principal Kathy Myles is so encouraged thus far that she hopes to add another class – for third- and fourth-graders – next year.
“My whole thing is about creating options for learners,” said Myles, who also thinks it’s important to keep traditional grade-level classes for students who learn better that way.

Jon Hilsenrath & Rafael Gerena-Morales:

Climbing out of poverty hasn’t been as easy as getting on the bus. She says her life is now drug-free and more stable, and her children are growing up in a better environment. Yet in many ways, her struggles traveled with her.
“You really need to have a focus to get out of the ghetto,” says Ms. Grayson, a New York native.
Her experience offers clues to a question society has wrestled with for years: Can a family escape poverty by getting out of the neighborhood where it takes root? It also sheds light on the government’s shifting efforts to use housing policy as a solution to poverty.
A $16 billion federal infrastructure has built up around housing vouchers designed to give poor families more choices about where to live. About two million families currently use “Section 8” vouchers that allow them to move with subsidized rent. Since 1993, the government has been demolishing urban housing projects and forcing families to resettle in other places, sometimes with vouchers.
But results show that may only partially be true. “It would have been wonderful to have discovered the magic bullet,” says Jeffrey Liebman, a Harvard economist who has studied the program.
Findings, he says, were more complicated. Among them: boys whose families moved actually fared worse than boys who stayed in bad neighborhoods. Girls, however, fared significantly better. Adults felt better, physically and mentally, than those who stayed behind, but didn’t do better financially.

Marisue Horton:

As we head into the season for making New Year’s resolutions, here’s my wish list for resolutions relating to education in 2007:

1. Embrace our differences. Education is the ability to provide opportunity and challenges to all students. Each child is a gift and has talent. Families, schools and politicians need to avoid pitting one group of learners against another. All are valuable.
2. Build understanding and avoid condemnation. Parents, learn to advocate for children by defining the problem to be resolved. School staff, encourage family input and work together to find solutions. Community members, visit and offer to volunteer in your public schools. Before criticizing schools, look carefully at what they are doing. Know the issues.
3. Educate the public by researching the issues. Members of the media, do your homework. We are sitting on one of the best research institutions in the world. Don’t fuel the fires of divisiveness on educational issues by quoting sources without researching their assertions.
4. Appreciate school staff. There is no greater career, nor many that are open to as much public criticism, as teachers. Take time to thank a teacher, appreciate their work by attending and participating in school events. Find out what’s going on in your public schools each day.
5. Get involved in solutions to improve public education. Define waste. Rather than criticize local decision-making, share ideas for fiscal responsibility. Help boards of education and administration make districts more effective. Acknowledge that 13 years of revenue caps are stripping our public schools of their ability to effectively educate students. Referendums are NOT the answer. They are little more than panhandling for our kids. Stop asking us to beg for our future.
6. Acknowledge that leadership matters. Support the hiring of the best quality staff. Ask for local progress reports on your schools. Talk to your legislators and other policymakers about the state’s responsibility to keep their commitments on public education. If you believe in two-thirds funding from the state, demand that legislators live up to their promises!

Marisue Horton
Madison schools parent
Verona

John Taylor Gatto’s book:

I want to open up concealed aspects of modern schooling such as the deterioration it forces in the morality of parenting. You have no say at all in choosing your teachers. You know nothing about their backgrounds or families. And the state knows little more than you do. This is as radical a piece of social engineering as the human imagination can conceive. What does it mean?
One thing you do know is how unlikely it will be for any teacher to understand the personality of your particular child or anything significant about your family, culture, religion, plans, hopes, dreams. In the confusion of school affairs even teachers so disposed don’t have opportunity to know those things. How did this happen?
Before you hire a company to build a house, you would, I expect, insist on detailed plans showing what the finished structure was going to look like. Building a child’s mind and character is what public schools do, their justification for prematurely breaking family and neighborhood learning. Where is documentary evidence to prove this assumption that trained and certified professionals do it better than people who know and love them can? There isn’t any.

All Things Considered:

Karate instructor Louise Rafkin describes the way that she teaches children to hit. Childhood is a violent time, Rafkin says, and her students learn how to control their innate violence.
As Rafkin talks with two of her young students, one describes the power struggles at his school.

Matthew Henry Hall; Insider Higher Ed.

Howard Blume and Joel Rubin:

A Superior Court judge Thursday struck down legislation that gave Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa substantial authority over the Los Angeles Unified School District, a stunning setback to his plans for assuming direct control of dozens of Los Angeles schools.
Judge Dzintra Janavs said the law, which would have taken effect Jan. 1, violated multiple provisions of the state Constitution and the Los Angeles City Charter. She ordered public officials “to refrain from enforcing or implementing” any part of Assembly Bill 1381, which codified Villaraigosa’s powers.
In a late afternoon news conference, the mayor vowed to seek an expedited appeal.

WORT-FM’s new website includes archived audio. Barbara Golden’s 12/18/2006 appearance can be heard here [mp3 audio.]

When the four block schedule began at LaFollette a few years ago, the MMSD praised its succeses:

Under the new “four block” schedule, La Follette High School students are missing school less, are better behaved and are taking tougher courses, all of which is adding up to better academic performance, an analysis of first quarter data shows. Press release, December 17, 1997.
La Follette High School students flourished during the first year of the school’s four block schedule, a year-end summary reports. Press release, September 9, 1998

(more…)

Jessica Blanchard:

More parents are supplementing lessons at home by embracing public school partnerships.
Students at the tiny, nondescript public school building in North Seattle have no playground, no formal cafeteria, no sports teams, no bells signaling the end of class.
They come and go as they please, and the nearly 250 who pass through the halls don’t even consider themselves public school students.
They’re among the more than 20,000 children statewide who are thought to opt out of public schools each year. They and their parents are drawn instead to the flexibility and freedom of homeschooling.

Meanwhile, another Wisconsin virtual high school opens.

Channel3000:

On Tuesday’s meeting at the school, some parents in attendance said that there were feelings of confusion, concern and anxiety. The meeting was a listening session and allowed the new principal to introduce himself and then work to quell concerns.
Rathert told the parents about his extensive leadership experience and outlined his plans for moving forward, He also fielded questions from attendees, WISC-TV reported.
“The main thing I’ve done is just come in and tried to listen and get around to as many people and get in front of as many students as possible and learn as much as I can as quickly as I can,” Rathert said.

There’s been a bit of school climate discussion recently regarding safety as well as leadership changes, most recently at LaFollette. I’ve had the opportunity to observe a number of teachers and principals over the past few months and have to say that the level of professionalism and resiliency, in the face of significant challenges, have been impressive. I am thankful for their time and efforts.

Marc Dean Millot:

The abuses revealed in federal investigations of the Reading First program are not, as the normally levelheaded U.S. Rep. George Miller of California asserts, the product of a Republican “culture of corruption.” Nor do they spring from a vast business conspiracy, as opponents of privatization would have us believe; an autocratic bureaucrat ideology, as the Bush administration seems inclined to suggest; or an isolated set of circumstances, as all reasonable people hope. The scandal is part of a pervasive pattern in public education today, and is the predictable result of elected officials’ well-intentioned but incomplete approach to school reform legislation.
Since the early 1990s, federal and state government has rightly moved public education in the direction of standards, accountability, and competition. By any reasonable assessment, the programs that schools purchase, not just teachers and the bureaucracy, bear some responsibility for the conditions that led to legislative change. Capped by the federal No Child Left Behind Act, the legislative framework political leaders established aims at compelling public schools to purchase new, innovative programs from the private sector. But in the process, policymakers unwittingly took aim at deeply entrenched purchasing relationships involving school districts, federal and state education agencies, large multinational publishing firms, and an expert class of consultants in academia and the think tanks. Elected officials failed to change the rules of that game. Instead, they left the making of their new market to this syndicate.

WKOW-TV:

The same day principal John Broome resigned, last friday, three fights broke out, leaving many students, staff and parents wondering if they are related.
Mitch weber discovered the fights ended with two students in trouble with the law and one teacher injured.
Since the school year started, we’ve reported on rising violence at La Follette – a student pulling a knife on another student, a fight in the hallway involving girls.
Today, the district denied the principal’s resignation and the fights last week are connected.
As school got out this afternoon at La Follette High School. Many students knew why we were there. Damian Clendening found out today his new principal isn’t coming back.

I have to agree with Phil M that the Administration deserves “some level of credit” for addressing this now, rather than later. Tim had some useful comments on the challenging job that is an urban high school principal.

Michelle York:

Before Sophie Friedman, 15, went to her first high school dance last year, her friends warned her: This would not be like those in middle school with shy, awkward dance moves.
But their advice did not prepare Sophie for what she saw when she showed up. “It was a pretty big shock,” she said. “I didn’t expect it to be that crazy.”
Her classmates were bumping, grinding, shaking, arching, teasing and flaunting in a way that made the chaperons gape.

Margery Eagan:

It’s been ridiculed since Monday. Even Jay Leno weighed in with a joke about his PC home state, Massachusetts, where Needham High, in case you missed it, will stop printing the honor roll in the paper lest, as Leno put it, “it might make the kids flunking out feel bad.”
“We protect our children too much. This sends the wrong message,” said one Needham mother, whose son graduated in June. Yet she understands the principal’s good intentions.
Her boy is among those still reeling from four student suicides in three years. One was her son’s friend. She understands too the paradoxes: How the pressure on high schoolers to achieve – from parents, peers, school – is greater than ever. But teenagers have less ability to cope.
That’s because a hallmark of middle-class parenting, 2006, starting in preschool, is to stamp out any situation that teaches children how to deal with, say, getting picked last, over and over, in a schoolyard pick-up game – assuming your kids’ school even allows pick-up games anymore.

Mike Antonucci:

It was a big job, but the National Council on Teacher Quality has put together a database that will allow you to “easily search the contents of collective bargaining agreements and board policies from the nation’s 50 largest public school districts.”
NCTQ will unveil it in DC on January 4. I’m guessing that somewhere in the halls of Harlem Success Charter School, Eva Moskowitz is smiling.

National Center on Education and The Economy:

In a TIME article on How to Bring Our Schools Out of the 20th Century , Claudia Wallis and Sonja Steptoe write that the national discussion around education will change “when the New Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce, a high-powered, bipartisan assembly of Education Secretaries, business leaders and a former Governor releases a blueprint for rethinking American education from pre-K to 12 and beyond to better prepare students to thrive in the global economy.”

Executive Summary 2.1MB PDF
Andrew Rotherham comments.

Erin Richards:

In a school with more non-Catholics than Catholics, a more universal identifier is average income: More than 80% of the students receive vouchers to attend St. Joan, and almost the same number qualify for free or reduced-price lunches.
“Our girls face a huge amount of challenges,” says Teddi Kennedy, the school’s director of advancement. “For some of them, just getting here on the bus and getting a good meal is a concern.”
That meal is served in a tiny lunch line in the corner of the school’s gymnasium. On this day, nearly everything is the same color: a fried chicken patty with a slab of cheese, corn and canned fruit salad.

Shavar Jeffries:

I believe it is time, once again, to consider a new approach to using the law to facilitate meaningful educational opportunities for minority children. I suggest that civil-rights lawyers initiate a new wave of litigation premised on reshaping the governance of public schools and, in so doing, empowering minority parents to assume meaningful decision-making roles concerning the kind of education available to children of color. Litigation efforts to this point have been focused fundamentally on widescale, largely uniform government decision-making about the educational needs of minority children; the voice and needs of individual children and parents have largely been unheeded. And it is usually the case that policymaking focused on across-the-board remedies inevitably ignores the particular needs of minority children. The approach I suggest does not imply, however, an atomistic preoccupation with individual needs in opposition to the civic and social purposes motivating public subsidy of educational services; rather, I suggest a public-private form of governance fundamentally different from the almost exclusively government-centered litigation model used today.

Larry Abramson:

A new study by education researchers concludes that the best way to improve the quality of teaching is to pay teachers more. And to pay good teachers even more. Critics aren’t so sure, notably teacher’s unions. They warn that merit-pay systems are notoriously subjective and unreliable.

Audio.

Sandy Cullen:

Developed in Germany in 1919, soon after the end of World War I, Waldorf education originated as a way to develop people who could bring peace to the world, aiming to develop each child’s sense of truth, beauty, and goodness.
But two years after moving into the building that OakSong’s leaders thought would give the alternative school a permanent place in a natural setting where it could expand, financial struggles could force them to give up the property and search for a new home.
Just raising the $110,000 for the down payment on the property’s $360,000 purchase price was “a big stretch” for the school’s small community of 15 to 20 families, said Susanne Schadde, OakSong’s board president, whose children Alice, 6, and Paul, 4, attend the school.

Milwaukee schools Superintendent William Andrekopoulos says the school system must come up with a way to deal with the heavy use of cell phones when trouble breaks out at a school, an innovation that has increased the severity of incidents such as a fight Monday morning at Bradley Tech High School.
Five people were arrested and two others were given citations by police as a result of the fight, which included attacks on several Milwaukee Public Schools safety aides.
The fight, coincidentally, occurred on the same day that officials announced that Bradley Tech, at S. 4th St. and W. National Ave., would be the first MPS school to have a pair of police officers on duty full time. A second pilot project for stationing police in schools – an innovation in MPS, though it is common in suburban schools – will involve a cluster of schools on the north side, focusing on Custer High School, 5075 N. Sherman Blvd.
Andrekopoulos made his remarks about cell phones at a meeting with Bradley Tech teachers Monday afternoon.
The cell phone phenomenon has shown up in other schools in MPS, in the suburbs and nationwide: When trouble breaks out, students reach for the phones, and within moments, other youths are on their way to the scene, sometimes literally from miles around.
Bradley Tech Principal Ed Kovochich said he has had teachers change tests every hour because students take cell phone photographs of the documents and sell copies to peers who haven’t taken the exam.
Although use of cell phones is generally banned in schools, both in Milwaukee and the suburbs, it is obvious to anyone around a high school or middle school – and sometimes even elementaries – that a vast majority of students carry them and use them frequently. Sometimes when schools have tried to crack down on the phones, parents have been the ones to object the most, saying they want their children to be able to reach them during school hours.
Cell phones are banned during MPS basketball games, largely because they have been used during incidents in prior years to summon “help” when trouble breaks out among kids.
Kovochich said he doesn’t know how to stop students from using cell phones in school, a problem he said has gotten out of control.
“We keep having problems with extended members of someone’s family coming up to intervene,” he said. “I’m telling you, this whole thing with the use of cell phones is coming to a head. If we have a simple fight, everyone text-messages or calls their friends, half the school knows about it and shows up.”
On Monday, Kovochich said a staff member came to him during a routine weapons check at the door as students arrived for school and said two girls were arguing over a boy. The staff member thought trouble was about to start.
Within moments, Kovochich said, “all I could see was a ton of cell phones coming out of pockets.” A crowd gathered quickly, and the fight began. Police officers arrested one 17-year-old girl on allegations of substantial battery and issued disorderly conduct citations to another two.
Kovochich said one student must have called her extended family because a short time later, four adult males arrived at the scene, pushed aside the metal detectors, jumped the tables and attacked safety aides and others. Police eventually arrested all four men. Kovochich said he saw the butt of a gun sticking out of the pocket of one of the four.
Andrekopoulos told the Tech teachers, “We’re going to have to come up with a strategy” to minimize the negative effects of having cell phones in the hands of the vast majority of students.
He said MPS security chief Peter Pochowski began calling other districts Monday to find out what they do to hold down cell phone use during crises.
Kovochich told a reporter it’s also possible the schools could petition the Federal Communications Commission to allow for special antennas that, with a flip of a button, could block a citywide swath from cell phone service.
The pilot projects to place two pairs of police officers full time in MPS schools comes after a series of violent episodes this fall, including attacks on a principal and several teachers. Mayor Tom Barrett, Police Chief Nannette Hegerty, Andrekopoulos and leaders of MPS labor organizations have been meeting to come up with a plan.
“We’ve heard you loud and clear,” Sid Hatch, assistant executive director of the Milwaukee Teachers’ Education Association, told the Bradley Tech teachers. “It is painfully clear that the schools’ safety and security is the foremost issue in the minds of teachers.”
The effort is to be funded by up to $250,000 from the police budget and $250,000 from MPS. The “school resource officers” will begin work with the start of the second semester in late January, Andrekopoulos said.
Andrekopoulos told the high school staff that Bradley Tech was not picked for the program because it was the worst school in the city. On the contrary, he said, grade-point averages, attendance and graduation rates have risen over the last several years. But he said factors including the launch of a schoolwide academic and behavior program this fall made it a good candidate.
He said a good climate for education could be created in Milwaukee schools, but it will take “a herculean effort of all of us working together.”
http://www.jsonline.com/story/index.aspx?id=540755

Adam Liptak:

But, as an extraordinary two-hour Supreme Court argument last week demonstrated, the meaning and legacy of Brown remain up for grabs. The court was considering whether school systems in Seattle and Louisville, Ky., could take account of students’ races to ensure racial balance.
During the argument, two sets of justices managed, with equal vehemence, to invoke Brown — while understanding it to require precisely opposite things.
One side relied on the logic of the case: Brown, these justices said, forbids racial classifications by the government, period, even when the goal has changed from segregation to integration.
The other side relied on its music, saying that the real point of Brown was to achieve and maintain integrated public schools, whether through social progress or through government action that takes account of race.

The Economist:

AMERICA’S public schools are unfair. Their quality varies widely and many are lousy, so some unlucky kids get a shoddy education. Rich children live in areas with more property taxes, more education spending and better schools. They also tend to be white. So is it fair to keep some white children out of good schools, and give black children their places?
That incendiary question is among those at the heart of two cases the Supreme Court heard on December 4th. In two districts that deliberately balance each school’s racial mix (Jefferson County, Kentucky and Seattle, Washington) some white children complain that, because of their skin colour, they cannot get a fair shot at admission into the public schools they want. Both sides claim to have on their side the constitution’s 14th amendment, which was ratified after slavery ended, and grants everyone equal protection under the law.

Wide Angle:

In 2003 Wide Angle profiled seven children in seven countries-Afghanistan, Benin, Brazil, India, Japan, Kenya, and Romania-as they started their first year of school. Returning in 2006, we find that some of these children are already struggling, hanging onto their education by a thread. With over 100 million children around the globe out of school, this 90-minute special puts a human face on an issue with profound consequences for global development.

Reyhan Haranci has more.

Jessica Tonn:

“I submit to you that in a system of education that serves such a highly diverse and transitory culture, . . . shared standards aren’t simply an option, but a mandatory conversation,” the Council of Chief State School Officers’ executive director, Gene Wilhoit, said in a speech at the conference’s opening session. He took over the helm at the CCSSO Nov. 1.
Mr. Wilhoit’s appeal followed similar comments made this year by Michael Casserly, the executive director of the Council of the Great City Schools, researchers at the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, and others. Such discussion, which comes as policymakers and educators compare education systems across the states and the world and prepare for the renewal of the federal No Child Left Behind Act next year, appears to be rekindling a push for national standards.

Council of Chief State School Officers.

Shauna Grice:

In a process to ease over-crowding, facilitated by Dr. Jack Parish, Superintendent of Schools for Henry County, the proposed boundary lines for the new schools had been drawn to include a small portion of the Fairview community. Others in Fairview would remain at the older schools. Fairview is a modest neighborhood made up of children who are predominately African-American and whose parents are less affluent than those who reside in Union Grove, a fact which has sent Union Grove residents reeling.
As a resident of the Fairview community with a child in middle school, I had my concerns. Our streets aren’t made of gold, and the neighborhood certainly doesn’t boast lavishly decorated Home and Garden-type vacation cottages; but it’s not the ghetto either. Homes are modest and well-kept. Homeowners are comprised mostly of middle-aged baby-boomers, preparing for retirement and saving for their kids’ college funds all at the same time.
Most of the children I know from Fairview come from good homes with loving parents who teach them to be well-behaved. I couldn’t see much difference between families in our neighborhood and those in Union Grove. For days I had debated whether to attend a meeting where parents from both neighborhoods would come together to vent their concerns.

Jacqueline L. Salmon:

Gates grants have flowed to schools and school systems in 42 states and the District, including $126 million to New York, $65 million to Chicago and $38 million to Oakland, Calif. The grants have helped open 1,100 schools and revamp an additional 700. The foundation also has sunk millions into education think tanks and policy and academic groups (including Hechinger). Its agenda is to create high schools with rigorous college-prep curricula, to replicate successful experiments and to convert giant, mostly urban schools into effective, manageable units.
Reviews of the Gates school initiatives have been mixed.
This fall, Denver shut down a high school that had received $1 million in Gates grants; officials cited plunging enrollment after the school was divided into three smaller ones and students fled to other schools.

Bob Egelko:

More than 50 years after the U.S. Supreme Court outlawed racial segregation in public schools, the justices are about to consider whether a school district can voluntarily integrate by considering race in campus assignments.
In cases from Seattle and Louisville, Ky., to be argued Monday, the justices will address the question left unanswered by the Brown vs. Board of Education ruling in 1954: What can the government do when the last vestiges of state-sponsored segregation are erased and schools nevertheless remain racially isolated because of housing patterns, parental choice and perhaps societal discrimination?