Nick Anderson:

“I just really hated school, and Roosevelt brought that out of me,” the 19-year-old said one spring afternoon next to an iron handrail that doubled as a launching slope. “Being told what to do and what to learn. Having to do homework. Grades. Grade levels. Everything that this school stands against.”
Justin will graduate in June from the highly unconventional Fairhaven School with a diploma that may require explanation to a college or future boss. He took no tests in his three years at the private school, received no grades and had no course requirements. But he played electric guitar, read and wrote poetry, made friends and got the last laugh on lunch. “No more tater tots!” he said.

Cory Doctorow discusses his own experiences with a “free school” and points to a trailer for a documentary called “Voices from the New American Schoolhouse“.

Alan Borsuk:

About 50 of 122 schools in the voucher program have no form of accreditation – no organization outside the school that is giving it a stamp of approval. Although some of the unaccredited schools should be able to get accreditation, the list includes almost all the schools that raise the most doubts among knowledgeable observers.
Some of those observers will be in positions to do something because they will be involved in accreditation, and generally, they are talking a tough game: They will be insistent that voucher schools demonstrate they meet genuine standards of quality.
The new law makes that more than idle talk. While attention focused on allowing the program to grow from less than 15,000 students to 22,500, the law also makes this clear: No accreditation, no money from the state.

Sarah Carr has more.

Wisconsin State Journal Editorial:

Madison’s attempt to reach a growing number of low-income, minority and immigrant students requires a return effort: The target families need to take responsibility for their own success.
That means the low-income, minority and immigrant communities should build more organizations to promote their own causes. The Madison School Board needs to hear from them when decisions are made about what programs to keep or cut. The Madison Area Family Advisory Advocacy Coalition, which speaks up for black students, is an example.

MAFAAC’s website.

Kevin Carey:

Normally I leave charter school issues to my colleagues Eduwonk and Sara Mead. But this morning’s front page article in the WaPo struck me as too obvious to pass up. It details how DC Public Schools is considering a novel arrangement with KIPP, one of the city’s most successful charter schools. KIPP wants to start a new middle school, but is having a hard time finding space. Meanwhile, one the regular DCPS elementary schools is losing enrollment and thus has too much space, to the point that it’s in danger of being closed. Thus, the arrrangement: co-locate in the same building, don’t overlap grades, and coordinate curricula so students from the elementary school can stay in the building and go to the KIPP middle school if that’s what they want to do.

Sounds great, right? Not to DC school board vice president Carolyn Graham, who said:

“We want to fully embrace a working relationship with KIPP, but we don’t want to do it to the detriment of our student body and financial viability,” she said, adding that the system lost about $11 million in city funding this year after more than 3,000 students departed. “We want them to come up with a way of working with our charter school partners so that all our students would benefit.”

Hmmm. You know, that’s kind of wordy, let’s tighten that up a little:

“We want to fully embrace a working relationship with KIPP, but we don’t want to do it to the detriment of our student body and financial viability,” she said, adding that the system lost about $11 million in city funding this year after more than 3,000 students departed. “We want them to come up with a way of working with our charter school partners so that all our students I would benefit.”

There we go. Much more clear.

It’s true that more students in charter schools means less students in DCPS. But if you’re going to complain about that, you’ve got to at least make an attempt to say why that would be bad, particularly wih the test scores, parental demand, and the best judgment of the DCPS superintendant providing evidence to the country. The fact that Graham offers nothing of the kind is enormously telling

Pete Thamel:

In looping printed letters, which looked like the handwriting of a young girl, Thomas wrote a one-page cry for help: “I cannot read or write. I need all you people’s help. Please do not turn your back on me.”
Thomas’s note was not that clear, however. Riddled with spelling mistakes, it had clear signs of what experts later diagnosed as dyslexia. He spelled please “peasl,” turn was “tron” and write was “witer.”
That admission by Thomas, one of the nation’s top basketball prospects, stunned faculty members at South Kent. But they soon found out that it was just the beginning of his story. He lived on the subways as a preteenager, sold drugs for a year as a teenager and could not read at age 17.

Matthew Ladner:

Oprah Winfrey recently used two days of her program to highlight the crisis in American public schools, focusing attention on our appalling dropout problem. The visuals were quite stunning.
In one segment, a group of inner-city Chicago students traded places with a group of suburban students to compare facilities and curriculums. In another, a valedictorian from a rural high school told of needing remedial classes in college. Perhaps most striking of all, CNN’s Andersen Cooper toured a high school near the White House that was in a shameful state of disrepair. Pieces of the ceiling had fallen on the ground, holes in the roof let rain pour into the school, restrooms were inoperable and unlit.
Oprah deserves a good deal of credit for putting a spotlight on these problems. Public schools face a dropout problem of stunning scale. Estimates from the Manhattan Institute put the nation’s dropout rate near 30 percent, with rates much higher among low-income and minority students. Many who do graduate do so without mastering high-school level material, as evidenced not only by the need for remediation among college students, but also in the stunningly poor literacy skills of the public.
National reading tests show that 38 percent of our fourth-graders score “below basic” in reading, meaning that they have failed to gain the basic literacy skills necessary to function academically. These students will drift into middle school, and literally be unable to make heads or tails of their textbooks.

via Andrew Rotherham:

Matthew Ladner, of steak dinner fame, weighs-in in the Philly Inquirer about what the Oprah hype all means. You can disagree with Ladner’s advocacy of vouchers but he nails the macro-problem here:

Jay Matthews:

To my astonishment, I am still receiving e-mails about an op-ed piece, “Let’s Teach to the Test,” I wrote two months ago. I argued that most good teachers consider No Child Left Behind and other test-driven assessments convenient benchmarks and don’t find them disabling, as many critics say they are. I said what people call teaching to the test is actually teaching to the state standards, which most of us parents think is good, so perhaps we should consider teaching to the test a good thing, if the test is valid and the teaching sound.
Most of the hundreds of e-mails that have come in have suggested, in mostly polite terms, that I have no business writing about schools. But a larger minority than I expected said I was right. Given that continued interest, I thought I would share reactions to the op-ed from two teachers whom I know well, and who are both stars in the classroom. Kenneth Bernstein, who teaches social studies at Eleanor Roosevelt High School in Prince George’s County, Md., and Mark Ingerson, who teaches social studies in the city of Salem, Va., look at this issue from different angles. In my view they should be read carefully because they both understand how best to communicate difficult material in the classroom and motivate students to learn.

Consortium on Chicago School Research at the University of Chicago:

Following CPS (Chicago Public Schools) graduates from 1998, 1999, 2002 and 2003, this report uses records from Chicago high schools and data from the National Student Clearinghouse to examine the college experiences of all CPS alumni who entered college in the year after they graduated high school.
The study paints a discouraging picture of college success for CPS graduates. Despite the fact that nearly 80 percent of seniors state that they expect to graduate from a four-year college, only about 30 percent enroll in a four-year college within a year of graduating high school, and only 35 percent of those who enroll received a bachelor’s degree within six years. According to this report, CPS students’ low grades and test scores are keeping them from entering four-year colleges and more selective four-year colleges.

Complete study [14.9MB PDF]

(more…)

Ben Feller:

Teachers are far more pessimistic than parents about getting every student to succeed in reading and math as boldly promised by the No Child Left Behind Act. That’s left a huge expectations gap between the two main sets of adults in children’s lives.
An AP-AOL Learning Services Poll found nearly eight in 10 parents are confident their local schools will have students up to state standards by the 2013-14 school year target. Yet only half of teachers are confident the kids in their schools will meet that deadline.
The finding underscores a theme in the poll. Parents and teachers often disagree on daily aspects of education, from the state of discipline to the quality of high schools.
A major reason is that adults see the children differently. Parents tend to focus on their own children, while teachers work with dozens of students from different backgrounds.

Ms. Cornelius has more

US Dept of Education Presidential Scholars:

WI—Madison—Brian Lee, James Madison Memorial High School
WI—Madison—Adeyinka A. Lesi, West High School
WI—Madison—Melanie R. Rawlings, James Madison Memorial High School
WI—Madison—Ilari A. Shafer, James Madison Memorial High School

Eligibility information can be found here.

Lori Aratani:

Maryland’s middle school students are more likely than their elementary or high school peers to be involved in incidents of bullying and other harassment, according to a recently released state report — the first such effort to track the problem.
Incidents most often took place on school campuses or buses, the report said, with the majority involving name calling or threatening remarks. About one-third of the incidents involved a physical attack.
The 21-page report to the General Assembly is an attempt by state officials to count incidents of bullying and other harassment in its 24 public school systems. Officials in Virginia have been collecting information on bullying and other harassment in public schools since 1999.

I was looking for more information about the combined grades at Elvejhem (my grade school was all combined grades with team teaching and it worked very well) and I found an interesting study that I don’t think has been previously noted on SIS. It is by noted Urbanist David Rusk and looks at the effects of economic segregation and integration on academic performance in Madison schools. I hope the East and West task forces were aware of this study.
TJM
The conclusion states:

“Summing Up Part V: A school’s socioeconomic context does matter far more for low-income pupils than for their middle class counterparts. The statistical analysis did show a slight decline of middle class pupils’ test scores as the percentage of low income classmates increased. The rate of decline for middle class pupils was less than half the rate of improvement for low income pupils.
However, that apparent decline in middle class pupils’ performance most probably reflected the changing composition of the “middle class” in schools with increasingly higher percentages of low income classmates. “Middle class” schools with very few low income pupils had higher percentages of children from the highest income, largely professional households. In “middle class” schools with much larger numbers of lowincome pupils, children from more modest “blue collar” households predominated.
That was most likely the primary contributing factor to the apparent slow decline in middle class test scores and not any directly adverse effect of having more low income classmates. From a larger perspective, middle class pupils’ performance levels never dropped below 70-75% achieving advanced and proficient levels under any socioeconomic circumstances in Madison-Dane County (which had no very high-poverty schools).”

Here is a link to the pdf file: Final Report

Jay Greene:

Accountability is a constructive and increasingly powerful force in the education of New York City schoolchildren. It starts with report cards and runs far deeper.
Third-graders have to pass a basic skills test to be promoted to fourth grade. High school seniors cannot earn a Regents diploma without passing a series of exams. And, of course, students hoping to attend college need to take, and perform moderately well, on the SAT or ACT.
B ut while young people have been held increasingly accountable for results, adults who work in the schools have been largely shielded from such judgments. Whether students succeed or not has little or no effect on whether teachers or administrators continue to be employed or how much they are paid. Heroic educators who transform the lives of their students are not rewarded, nor are subpar educators who deprive students of future opportunities required to improve or punished.

The Economist covers a fascinating subject:

For its exponents, this is a paternalism for the times. People are jealous of their freedoms; yet they squander them. They resent outside authorities telling them how to live their lives, but they lack self-command. They have legions of entrepreneurs dedicated to serving them better, but often they fail even to understand the embarrassment of offerings that is spread before them. Some gentle guidance would not go amiss.
But if such manipulation is sometimes a necessity, should it be made a virtue? (John Stuart) Mill, for one, would have disapproved.

He who lets the world choose…his plan of life for him, has no need of any other faculty than the ape-like one of imitation. He who chooses his plan for himself must…use observation to see, reasoning and judgment to foresee, activity to gather materials for decision, discrimination to decide, and when he has decided, firmness and self-control to hold to his deliberate decision.

Reasoning, judgment, discrimination and self-control—all of these the soft paternalists see as burdens the state can and should lighten. Mill, by contrast, saw them as opportunities for citizens to exercise their humanity. Soft paternalism may improve people’s choices, rescuing them from their own worst tendencies, but it does nothing to improve those tendencies. The nephews of the avuncular state have no reason to grow up.

Education Sector:

Los Angeles is rightly known as a cultural bellwether because of its diverse population, thriving entertainment industry, and powerful artistic community. But the city is also a harbinger of educational change, as two recent developments suggest. Democratic Mayor Anthony Villaraigosa is seeking substantial control over the Los Angeles Unified School District, while minority parents are demanding alternatives to the city’s existing public schools, putting them at odds with the teachers’ union and the school district. The result is a debate pitting Democrats against Democrats in the city.
Who gets to control schools is of course an old debate. Historically, urban school districts have vacillated between centralized and decentralized control. Villaraigosa’s bid for more leverage over the Los Angeles school system is a reflection of the frustration of urban mayors today: They are politically accountable for school performance and whether a city offers quality public schools but have little control over actual educational decision-making.
Villaraigosa has stopped short of calling for outright control of the schools, saying he would retain an elected school board. But he is still seeking to choose the next superintendent, to have control over major budget decisions, and to launch an ambitious effort to turn around low-performing schools, so it is obvious where he would like power to be vested. This was enough to prompt the National School Boards Association at its annual meeting this month to pass a resolution strongly opposing mayoral control, a measure clearly aimed at Villaraigosa. Meanwhile, with Los Angeles Superintendent Roy Romer on his way out, the power struggle complicates the search for a replacement.

Governor Doyle vetoed several school related bills, including those related to SAGE changes and virtual schools. Details here and here.

Jay Greene and Marcus Winters:

This study uses a widely respected method to calculate public high school graduation rates for the nation, for each state, and for the 100 largest school districts in the United States. We calculate graduation rates overall, by race, and by gender, using the most recent available data (the class of 2003).

Among our key findings:

• The overall national public high school graduation rate for the class of 2003 was 70 percent.
• There is a wide disparity in the public high school graduation rates of white and minority students.
• Nationally, the graduation rate for white students was 78 percent, compared with 72 percent for Asian students, 55 percent for African-American students, and 53 percent for Hispanic students.
• Female students graduate high school at a higher rate than male students. Nationally, 72 percent of female students graduated, compared with 65 percent of male students.
• The gender gap in graduation rates is particularly large for minority students. Nationally, about 5 percentage points fewer white male students and 3 percentage points fewer Asian male students graduate than their respective female students. While 59 percent of African-American females graduated, only 48 percent of African-American males earned a diploma (a difference of 11 percentage points). Further, the graduation rate was 58 percent for Hispanic females, compared with 49 percent for Hispanic males (a difference of 9 percentage points).
• The state with the highest overall graduation rate was New Jersey (88 percent), followed by Iowa, Wisconsin, and North Dakota, each with 85 percent. The state with the lowest overall graduation rate was
  South Carolina (54 percent), followed by Georgia (56 percent) and New York (58 percent).

Sarah Carr notes that some question the methods used in this analysis:

Milwaukee public high schools have one of the worst graduation rates [chart] in the country among large school districts, according to a new report that takes the unusual step of trying to make comparisons across large school districts as well as states.

Tamar Lewin also takes a look at this report:

The report, “Leaving Boys Behind: Public High School Graduation Rates,” found that 59 percent of African-American girls, but only 48 percent of African-American boys, earned their diplomas that year. Among Hispanics, the graduation rate was 58 percent for girls, but only 49 percent for boys.
“It’s a fairly large difference, particularly when you consider that unlike differences across racial and ethnic groups, boys and girls are raised in the same households, so it’s not so easy to explain the differences by their community, or their income level,” said Jay P. Greene, an author of the report.
Mr. Greene helped set off widespread national alarm with findings several years ago that almost one in three high school students, and almost half the African-American and Hispanic students, did not complete high school. His research has been widely embraced by policy makers, though some researchers argue that his method overstates the dropout problem over all and among minorities in particular.

Kristian Knutsen covers last night’s Madison City Council meeting where they approved the purchase of several allied drive properties. The City’s goal is to redevelop the purchased lots.

Tom Held:

Looking to give poorer students the technological muscle to scale the “digital divide,” the Milwaukee Public Schools district is turning to the promise of an emerging wireless service described as “Wi-Fi on steroids.”
Using WiMax, MPS would provide free broadband Internet service to the homes of all MPS students and staff.
The district would be one of the first public entities in the country to launch a WiMax system, using television channels that the Federal Communications Commission allocated for educational purposes. A pilot system covering roughly 5 square miles is scheduled to be operating by August 2007.

Via a an email from Johnny Winston, Jr.

The Madison Metropolitan School District presents its 2nd Annual Minority Student Achievement Network Conference for students of color on Saturday April 22, 2006 at 8 am to 2 pm at James C. Wright Middle School located at 1717 Fish Hatchery Road. Students and families of middle school children are invited. If you have questions, please contact Diane Crear, Special Assistant to the Superintendent at 204-1692 or Michelle Olson, Minority Services Coordinator at LaFollette High School at 204-3661.
Topic for students and parents include: Achieving in High School, Health Matters, Goal Setting, Careers in Journalism and Science; SPITE programs and “Success for your Student.” Keynote address by the performance group “Elements of Change.” Refreshments will be provided during the morning and lunch in the afternoon at no cost to the participants. There will be limited on-site registration.
Hope to see you on Saturday April 22nd at the MMSD’s 2nd Annual Minority Student Achievement Network Conference at 8 am to 2 pm at James C. Wright Middle School.
Please share this information with other interested persons or organizations. Thank you.

Frank Bass, Nicole Ziegler Dizon and Ben Feller:

States are helping public schools escape potential penalties by skirting the No Child Left Behind law’s requirement that students of all races must show annual academic progress.
With the federal government’s permission, schools aren’t counting the test scores of nearly 2 million students when they report progress by racial groups, an Associated Press computer analysis found.
Minorities – who historically haven’t fared as well as whites in testing – make up the vast majority of students whose scores are being excluded, AP found. And the numbers have been rising.
“I can’t believe that my child is going through testing just like the person sitting next to him or her and she’s not being counted,” said Angela Smith, a single mother. Her daughter, Shunta’ Winston, was among two dozen black students whose test scores weren’t broken out by race at her suburban Kansas City, Mo., high school.
To calculate a nationwide estimate, AP analyzed the 2003-04 enrollment figures the government collected – the latest on record – and applied the current racial category exemptions the states use.
Overall, AP found that about 1.9 million students – or about 1 in every 14 test scores – aren’t being counted under the law’s racial categories. Minorities are seven times as likely to have their scores excluded as whites, the analysis showed.
Less than 2 percent of white children’s scores aren’t being counted as a separate category. In contrast, Hispanics and blacks have roughly 10 percent of their scores excluded. More than one-third of Asian scores and nearly half of American Indian scores aren’t broken out, AP found.

Citizens’ Commission on Civil Rights website.
Carrie Antifinger notes that the loophole snares 33% of Wisconsin minority students.
Andrew Rotherham:

First, a reader of some of the back and forth might end up thinking that the law requires some minimum subgroup or that the feds set the subgroup size. It doesn’t, they don’t. Here are the exact AYP regulations from the Federal Register (pdf) and here is Ed Trust’s explanatory piece. It’s left up to the states although the feds approve the state plans and consequently have approved the various sizes in effect now. Now they’re trying to figure out how to clean up (pdf) some of the mess they’ve created.

Sandy Cullen:

Other school districts surrounding Madison also are seeing an increase in minority and low-income students.
In Sun Prairie and Verona, the percentage of minority students is more than five times what it was in the early 1990s, while the percentage of low-income students in Verona has more than doubled. Both districts also have seen significant growth in the number of Hispanic students who are not proficient in English.
Private schools in the Madison area also are seeing increases in their percentage of minority students. In the last seven years, minority enrollment increased 54 percent at Edgewood High School, where minorities now make up nearly 12 percent of the student body. At Madison Country Day School, in the Waunakee School District, 17 percent of its 247 students are minorities, up from 15 percent in 1997.
Between 1997 and 2004, enrollment at private schools in the Madison School District increased by 400 students, according to figures compiled by the district. Edgewood spokeswoman Kate Ripple said most Madison students who enroll in the private Catholic high school do so because of its faith component.

Two articles on Proposition 82:

• Dana Hull:
  

  It sounds like a no-brainer for advocates of early childhood education: a state ballot initiative that would offer preschool to every 4-year-old in California, free of charge to parents. What preschool wouldn’t be all for that?
  But as the June 6 election approaches, an increasingly vocal number of preschools are lining up against it.
  Some Montessori schools fear Proposition 82, dubbed the Preschool for All Act, would lead to state standards that could compromise their teaching methods and mixed-age classrooms. Faith-based preschools say they would be at a competitive disadvantage because the measure wouldn’t fund schools that offer religious instruction. Others worry a requirement that teachers earn a bachelor’s degree would drive them out of business.
  “I am going to vote no, and I am very much in favor of universal preschool,” said Bonnie Mathisen, director of Discovery Children’s House, a Montessori school in Palo Alto. “I just feel that Prop. 82 is not the right way to go about it. When you get down to the nitty-gritty, a lot of preschools will be left out.”

• Dana Hull:
  

  The children, ages 3 to 6, are part of a class of 28 at Casa di Mir Montessori School in Campbell. While many schools group children by age, Montessori believes children of different ages teach, help and learn from each other.
  Tara started the year as a kindergartner at a local elementary school, where her parents were stunned to learn there was homework. She rebelled against its structure, and her parents struggled with what to do. In January, they enrolled Tara at Casa di Mir.
  “Montessori is perfect for her,” says Haleh, Tara’s mom. “They don’t ring a bell to start class; they play a flute. She wrote a four-page journal about cats.”

• Joanne Jacobs has more

Joel Rubin:

A coalition led by the L.A. teachers group will reveal its own plan for revamping the district a day before the mayor outlines his proposal.
Intent on being a player in the ongoing scrum over the future of Los Angeles schools, the powerful teachers union and a coalition of community organizations will outline Monday their own plan to overhaul the city’s public school system.

check it out.

Greg Toppo:

Give a kid a laptop and it might not make any difference.
That’s the message from research presented here Monday, which suggests that spending millions of dollars to bring technology into kids’ homes and schools has decidedly mixed results.
Taxpayer-supported school computer and Internet giveaways are political gold, but studies have questioned whether they actually help student achievement. This research, presented at the American Educational Research Association’s annual meeting, confirms skeptics’ doubts.
In one study, researchers from Syracuse and Michigan State universities examined a program that gave laptop computers to middle-school students in Ohio in 2003. Preliminary findings are mixed.
“Overall, we don’t know if it is a worthwhile investment,” says Syracuse researcher Jing Lei.

We should not spend money on these things unless and until we get the basics right (Math, reading/writing and science).

AP:

In a move decried by some as state-sponsored segregation, the legislature voted Thursday to divide the Omaha school system into three districts — one mostly black, one predominantly white and one largely Hispanic.
tate Sen. Pat Bourne of Omaha decried the bill, saying, “We will go down in history as one of the first states in 20 years to set race relations back.”
“History will not, and should not, judge us kindly,” said state Sen. Gwen Howard of Omaha.
There is no intent to create segregation,” said state Sen. Ernie Chambers (Omaha), the legislature’s only black senator and a longtime critic of the school system.
He argued that the district is already segregated, because it no longer buses students for integration and instead requires them to attend their neighborhood school.
Chambers said the schools attended largely by minorities lack the resources and well-qualified teachers provided others in the district. He said the black students he represents in north Omaha would receive a better education if they had more control over their district.

Joel Rubin and Duke Helfand:

Villaraigosa’s advisors look at extending the academic year and selling the headquarters.
As Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa pursues control of the Los Angeles school system, his advisors are considering wide-ranging changes that could gut the central bureaucracy, sell the district’s headquarters, keep students in class until 5 p.m. and extend the academic year to 10 1/2 months.

Amy Hetzner:

The Waukesha School District already operates four charter schools. In addition to the two proposed schools discussed at Wednesday’s meeting, La Casa de Esperanza has expressed interest in opening a charter school as well.
Under Wisconsin law, however, charter schools outside Milwaukee and Racine have to get the approval of their local school boards before they can open.
South’s proposed charter school would build on Project Lead the Way, a leading pre-engineering curriculum among American high schools that is now in its second year at South.
In addition to continuing that four-year curriculum, the charter school could offer special math and science courses geared to support students’ engineering coursework. School planners also say they would like it to involve work experience for students, who would be provided mentors in the engineering field.

Becky Bartindale:

Stanford University’s Education Program for Gifted Youth is taking the next logical step: launching what is believed to be the nation’s first online high school for gifted students.
The virtual high school will offer a full standard curriculum — and more — for students in 10th through 12th grades, leading to a high school diploma.
The only restrictions? Students will have to prove their intellectual prowess — and come up with the tuition of about $12,000 a year. Applications are being accepted later this month, classes will begin in the fall.
Gifted students around the world already flock to the program at Stanford, in part because many schools are unable to offer everything that advanced students need.
“The gifted are among those left behind,” said Patrick Suppes, a philosophy professor emeritus from Stanford who directs the Stanford program. “For reasons that aren’t bad policy, No Child Left Behind worries most about students who are underperforming.

Stanford’s Educational Program for Gifted Youth website.

Terry Heaton:

He offers an extensive list of innovations in education to which he’s been exposed over the years, one of which is the internet. Each, he notes, promised to transform education.
Some of those much-heralded innovations are long forgotten. Others remain housed somewhere on the campus, but I think it is fair to say that higher education hasn’t changed all that much, that none of these ideas proved to be as transformative as their advocates predicted. Compared to their advance billing, they all turned out to be short-term enthusiasms or — more bluntly — educational fads.
So the internet is a fad that has failed to transform higher education. This, I believe, may be the most ignorant statement I’ve ever heard from an academic. The internet has already altered all education forever, because a great deal of knowledge is now accessible without memorization, contemplation, research or study. That higher education “hasn’t changed all that much” may be more a reflection of the self-serving nature of the institution than what he sees as the false promises of “fads.” Moreover, I think it’s a little early to proclaim that the internet isn’t transformative.

Aspen Institute:

Quality Teachers Equal Quality Schools: Impact of the No Child Left Behind Act on Teacher Quality, Recruitment, Retention, and Distribution.
The hearing will help inform the Commission on how to improve NCLB so that it can assist in the improvement of teacher quality, recruitment, retention, and distribution.

The LA Times has more.

Elissa Gootman:

New York City will give grades from A to F each year and principals at failing schools could be removed.

Oprah:

t’s their first interview together…Bill and Melinda Gates. What they want you to know. Then, Lisa Ling investigates America’s silent epidemic. And, what Anderson Cooper uncovered just minutes from the White House. Why Oprah is shocked, and you will be, too!

• The failing state of America’s schools
• How will this education crisis impact you?

Diane Ravitch:

But what is obvious is that once again a major decision—one might even say a revolutionary decision—affecting the most important public institution in the city and the lives of 1.1 students has been taken without any public consultation. Once again, the leaders at Tweed met behind closed doors with their management consultants and their experts in corporate governance, along with chosen staff members, and reached decisions that will have sweeping implications for the public school system.
Something is terribly wrong with this scenario. Public agencies in a democracy are not free to make major policy changes without public consultation, public feedback, public review, and other efforts to forge a consensus. That is the way democratic governance is supposed to work. What we have now seems to be the behavior and actions of a monarchy or a privately held corporation that has no stockholders; its leaders can do whatever they wish without seeking public input or public assent.

Eduwonk:

Steve Barr is winning. Also, note the LA Times descriptor of charters, long at 22 words but not too shabby though it doesn’t get at the open admissions issue. Incidentally, per the posts below and the need to change public schools, this is the equation that ought to scare the teachers’ unions into moving on the issue: Steve Barr, strong union proponent, Teamster, along with a very big coalition of almost entirely minority parents is at odds with the teachers’ union and the school district in LA. You don’t need to be an ace political consultant to see the problem there…And if Barr doesn’t succeed, these guys (Clint Bolick, Ken Starr, and company) are more than willing to help out..

Greg Toppo:

The skills tests that most public school teachers must pass to get a job are poor predictors of whether they’ll actually be good teachers — and in some cases may even keep good ones from entering the classroom, new research suggests.
A pair of long-term studies presented here at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association challenge longstanding policies in 48 states that require teachers to pass standardized exams to get jobs.
In one, Marc Claude-Charles Colitti of Michigan State University examined data going back to 1960 and found teachers’ scores had almost no correlation to principals’ evaluations of their classroom performance.
“How smart a teacher is doesn’t necessarily tell us that they’re a good teacher,” he says. Teachers’ SAT or ACT college entrance exam scores, or even their own scores on fifth-grade skills tests when they were children, would be as accurate at telling whether they’ll be good teachers, he says.

• Governor Doyle Proclaims May 1 – 6, 2006 as Charter Schools Week in Wisconsin
• Charter Schools about Social Justice, says Fuller
• What is Chartering and Where Did It Come From ?
• DPI’s NEW 2005-06 Charter Schools Directory (Under “Charter School Information” on right side of page, click “2005–06 Directory” (pdf)

(more…)

Time.com:

Shawn’s friends are not alone in their exodus. Of the 315 Shelbyville students who showed up for the first day of high school four years ago, only 215 are expected to graduate.
In today’s data-happy era of accountability, testing and No Child Left Behind, here is the most astonishing statistic in the whole field of education: an increasing number of researchers are saying that nearly one out of three public high school students won’t graduate, not just in Shelbyville but around the nation.
For Latinos and African-Americans, the rate approaches an alarming 50 percent. Virtually no community, small or large, rural or urban, has escaped the problem.
There is a small but hardy band of researchers who insist the dropout rates don’t quite approach those levels. They point to their pet surveys that suggest a rate of only 15 percent to 20 percent.

David Herszenhorn:

The New York City schools chancellor, Joel I. Klein, is once again rethinking the nation’s largest school system.
He has hired Chris Cerf, former president of Edison Schools, the commercial manager of public schools in 25 states. He has retained Alvarez & Marsal, a consulting firm that revamped the school system in St. Louis and is rebuilding the system in New Orleans. And he has enlisted Sir Michael Barber, a former adviser to Prime Minister Tony Blair of England who is now at McKinsey & Company in London.
They are evaluating everything from how textbooks and paper are bought, to how teacher training programs are chosen, to how students, teachers, principals and schools are judged. They are running focus groups of dozens of principals, and they are studying districts in England, Canada and California.
Their primary goal is to find ways to relax much of the very centralization put in place by the Bloomberg administration and give principals a far freer hand, provided the schools can meet goals for attendance, test scores, promotion rates and other criteria.

Andrew Rotherham:

A WISCONSIN court rejected a high-profile lawsuit by the state’s largest teachers’ union last month seeking to close a public charter school that offers all its courses online on the ground that it violated state law by depending on parents rather than on certified teachers to educate children. The case is part of a national trend that goes well beyond virtual schooling: teachers’ unions are turning to the courts to fight virtually any deviation from uniformity in public schools.
Unfortunately, this stance not only hinders efforts to provide more customized schooling for needy students, it is also relegating teachers to the sidelines of the national debate about expanding choice in public education.
Virtual charter schools grab headlines, but they are actually relatively minor players. The Center for Education Reform reports that there are 147 online-only charter schools in 18 states, with 65,354 students. In other words, virtual schools make up just 4 percent of the entire public charter school sector. And a third of them can be found in just one state, Ohio.
Still, they are valuable for many students. For example, a student in a rural community with few schooling options who finds the curriculum in her school too limiting might be better served through an online program that allows her to learn at her own pace. So, too, might a ninth grader who finds unbearable the jock-and-popularity culture that still largely prevails in our high schools. And some parents may want to be more involved in their child’s education than is possible in traditional public schools but don’t have the time or resources to do fully independent home schooling.

Andy Smarick has much more on this issue:

The article’s launching point is virtual schools, but there are three basic arguments here. First, the future of public education is more diversity and greater parental choice. Many of us hope this is the case and some of us actually believe it, but for it to be written so matter-of-factly and published on the pages of the old gray lady nearly gave me the vapors.

Natalie Gott:

After more than three decades at IBM, Larry Leise and Susan Luerich could be planning a leisurely retirement. Instead, the married couple are headed back to college, with plans to start new careers in retirement as high school science teachers.
“Seeing the proverbial light bulb come on (in a student), there is no better feeling,” said Luerich, 54. “It’s a way to give back.”
And their bosses at IBM Corp. are only too happy to help.
Luerich and Leise, 58, are among the first batch of IBM employees taking the company up on its offer to pay for the college classes needed to leave Big Blue behind for a math or science classroom, where a shortage of qualified teachers concerns a company that thrives on high-tech innovation.

Diana Jean Schemo:

Washington’s African-American mayor, Anthony A. Williams, joined Republicans in supporting the program, prompted in part by a concession from Congress that pumped more money into public and charter schools. In doing so, Mr. Williams ignored the ire of fellow Democrats, labor unions and advocates of public schools.
“As mayor, if I can’t get the city together, people move out,” said Mr. Williams, who attended Catholic schools as a child. “If I can’t get the schools together, why should there be a barrier programmatically to people exercising their choice and moving their children out?”
School-choice programs have fervent opponents, and here, public school officials worry that the voucher program will diminish the importance of the neighborhood school, though the program serves only a relative few of the district’s 58,000 students. National critics of school choice like Reg Weaver, president of the country’s largest teachers’ union, the National Education Association, accused voucher supporters of “exploiting the frustration of these minority parents to push for a political agenda” intended to undermine public schools.

US Education Secretary Margaret Spellings:

Few voices have been stronger in support of education reform over the years than your editorial page. Which is why it troubles me to have to respond to your March 24 editorial “Spellings Test.”

(more…)

Susanne Rust:

Indeed, special education figures that are being used to suggest an autism explosion are faulty and confounded, said Paul Shattuck, a researcher at the university’s Waisman Center and author of the study, which appears in today’s issue of the journal Pediatrics.

From 1993 to 2003, statistics compiled by the U.S. Department of Education showed a 657% increase in autism across the country – an explosive jump that signaled an epidemic to many.

But Shattuck discovered that, at least in most cases, the numbers are not only misleading, they’re likely inaccurate. On one hand, they don’t support a dramatic increase in autism prevalence, but on the other, the figures could be underestimating the absolute number of children with the condition.

The new issue of the online Teacher’s Collge Record includes two video clips of AERA President and Madison’s own Gloria Ladson-Billings on education and social justice and two essays from James B. Conant on “Public Education and the Structure of American Society.” I believe that these are all in the free content area, although you may need to register. http://www.tcrecord.org/
TJM

Ms. Cornelius:

Help me with something. What makes ed schools so special? In all seriousness are ed schools truly needed and if so, why? Why can students not have a liberal arts major and an education minor, student teach and then go into the classroom with full knowledge of the subject they are teaching. I guess a better question might be if I were to be a teacher what classes do I take as an undergrad and how many (and which) of those classes are truly meaningful and challenging? Which of the classes truly prepare me to teach?
…Just something I have wondered about — Today, it might help more people want to become teachers if they could teach something they were passionate about. Again, I do not know what classes education majors are required to take.
This is a serious question that deserves careful consideration, by people who have been in education schools and then tested out the theories taught there in the classroom. Unfortunately, serious and civil discussion is all too lacking. So let’s try. Here’s an expanded version of a comment I made:

Last Thursday, the Isthmus newspaper published an extensive article by Jason Shepard entitled “The Fate of the Schools.” While the article covered many areas of interest regarding the school district and the upcoming school board elections, we have significant concerns about the way in which the article was written. These concerns include:
CONTEXT:
• The data in the article were used inappropriately. This story compares Madison’s schools with the small, suburban, middle-class districts surrounding it. A more comparable study would have looked at other districts with similar proportions of low-income students, such as Green Bay, LaCrosse, Racine and Milwaukee. The data also was not dis-aggregated. If it had been, it would have revealed that Madison’s white, non-poor children do as well as and even surpass both Dane County and larger districts in Wisconsin. Of that group, 96% of the “non-low-income” students scored proficient or advanced.
• Additionally, MMSD has 35% of the county’s 3rd graders – and 70% of the county’s low-income 3rd graders. On the math scores quoted in the article, it wasn’t pointed out that while Madison “only matches” the state average, Madison’s overall poverty rate is 30 percent higher. Madison continues to score above state and national averages on the ACT exam each year, despite the fact that more low-income and non-white students are taking the exam each year. MMSD had 69% of all the National Merit Semifinalists in the county this year (with only about 40% of the students).
SOURCES:
• The top sources of information listed in the article when talking about diminishing public support for MMSD and data on the schools come from two sources: talk radio and the SIS blog, neither of which are primary sources. Also, no grassroots parent groups or civic groups were interviewed other than SIS. And, no educational experts from curriculum and instruction at UW-Madison were interviewed, yet it is listed as the number one Graduate School of Curriculum and Instruction in the United States (U.S. News and World Report, 2006).
• We acknowledge that many families have opted-out of the district, for a variety of reasons. However, the overall trends for enrollment in and outside of Madison also reflect the growth and availability of new housing. It is very difficult to pull out whether the bulk of the enrollment choices were based on perceived educational quality of MMSD or for a larger house with more young families in the neighborhood. Just as anecdotal evidence from SIS and other sources indicate disengagement from MMSD, we could assert, with just as much authority that, based on our own experiences with people we know, families continue to move into MMSD for its breadth of instruction, diversity, and high quality teachers and staff.
ACCURACY:
• On the issue of equity, MMSD should not be blamed for segregated housing in Madison. And in fact, many of the board members have supported increased resources to schools with high poverty rates, not just Ruth Robarts and Lawrie Kobza. The formation of a new equity task force came from Carol Carstensen. Lawrie Kobza voted against its formation.
We raise these concerns in the interest of fairness, to give our fellow SIS readers a broader understanding of the issues covered in the article.
Submitted by: Francoise Davenport, Kirsten Engel, Jerry Eykholt, Kristina Grebener, Andrew Halada, Denise Halada, Molly Immendorf, Barbara Katz, Ed Kuharski, Jane Lambert, Randy Lambert, Beth Moss, Duncan Moss, Marge Passman, Lisa Pugh, Thomas Purnell, Fred Swanson, Beth Swedeen, Terry Tuschen, Barbara Wagner, Margaret Walters, and Andrea Wipperfurth.

Arthur Levine, writing in the Chronicle of Higher Education:

Several years ago, I was part of a group that a philanthropist had assembled to review his foundation’s education agenda. In the course of a two-day meeting, the conversation turned negative only once, when education schools were discussed.
The philanthropist said he had given up on education schools, preferring to work with business schools or organizations outside of colleges and universities. A former governor who was known to be a thoughtful education-policy leader chimed in, calling the flagship education school in his state largely irrelevant. A major school-system superintendent reported having told the two education schools in his area that if they were unable to turn one of his high schools around, they should go out of business. Dismissively he said that only one of the education schools was even trying. A union leader nodded in agreement, something the superintendent had rarely experienced.
This is an age of finger-pointing. As profound demographic, economic, global, and technological changes rack the country, all of our social institutions — created to serve a disappearing world — perform less well than they once did. As they try to adjust to a society in motion, they appear to be broken and unable to fix themselves. Thus we say the government is broken. The American family is broken. So it is with the education school.
The response by the public is to withdraw. As it does, we increasingly see the institution in distorted caricature, and we develop unrealistic expectations for what it should be able to accomplish. We blame the institution for all of the problems in its field and deem its inability to change willful.

Bloomberg:

After only 50 percent of Arizona’s eighth-grade public school students passed a standardized reading test, state education officials took decisive action: They made the exam easier. Last year, 71 percent of students were rated “proficient” in reading.
As students throughout the U.S. undergo the latest round of tests this month, corporate leaders including Craig Barrett, chairman of Intel Corp., and Edward Rust, chief executive officer of State Farm Mutual Automobile Insurance Co., say they’re concerned about slipping standards among states. They’re exploring whether to renew a decade-old push for national tests.

A commenter over at Joanne Jacobs notes that “Every state must participate in the NAEP every year”.

The Economist:

“TEACHERS, teachers, teachers.” Thus the headmistress of a school near Helsinki, giving her not-exactly-rocket-science explanation for why Finland has the best education system in the world.
…….
It has achieved all this by changing its entire system, delegating
responsibility to teachers and giving them lots of support. There is no streaming and no selection; no magnet schools; no national curriculum; and few national exams. It is all, as that Finnish headmistress suggested, about getting good teachers–and then giving them freedom. If there is a lesson for EU leaders, it is: forget about multiple priority areas and action plans. European governments should go back to school. In Finland.

(more…)

Michael Winerip:

Which brings us to Connecticut. Last year, Connecticut filed suit against the federal Department of Education, contending that federal officials had failed to pay the cost of all the tests required by No Child Left Behind. While the suit got much news media play, many of the underlying testing issues were missed.
Connecticut wants to maintain its state tests, which feature many essay questions and problems that require students to explain their work. The state maintains that to administer these tests every year from third to eighth grade, as the federal law requires, will cost $8 million more than federal financing provides.
In a May 3, 2005, letter, the federal education secretary, Margaret Spellings, said that while Connecticut’s tests “are instructionally sound, they go beyond what was contemplated by N.C.L.B.” Federal officials suggested that Connecticut switch to multiple-choice tests and eliminate writing tests to cut costs.

Dean Mosiman:

Madison Mayor Dave Cieslewicz is offering a vision for troubled Allied Drive as he tries to get support for buying and redeveloping a series of worn buildings in the heart of the neighborhood.
The vision includes buying nine apartment buildings on Allied Drive and redeveloping them with condos and perhaps retail space, supporting “good landlords,” and closely monitoring the fate of a row of buildings on Carling Drive – a block off Allied Drive – with the potential of another city purchase.
Neighborhood input is important and a planning process will be completed in July, Cieslewicz stressed. But “I’d like people to be clear on what it is I’d like to accomplish.”

Madison alder Brenda Konkel has more.

David Herszenhorn:

After four days and nights camping in the Rockland County woods, Donnell Tribble, a baby-faced 15-year-old from Brooklyn with tight cornrow braids, learned to trust and depend on his classmates and his teacher.
Along with 13 other boys and girls from James Baldwin High School in Manhattan, he struggled through moments of misery. The students pitched tarps for shelter, shuddered and whined in the cold and rain, ate strange foods like muesli, griped about the lack of comforts, and worried about meeting a bear outside the safety of the Bronx Zoo.

Eduwonk:

In relation to the story in today’s Times about black men which has obvious eduimplications (including the grad rate issue the article mentions) Joe Williams notes that “this problem is so much more severe than the “World Is Flat” problem that everyone seems to be talking about.”
I couldn’t agree more. One is a long-term problem, the other is staring us in the face, right now, every day. Good Brian Friel story in National Journal ($) getting at this a few weeks ago.

Erik Eckholm’s NYT article is a must read:

Focusing more closely than ever on the life patterns of young black men, the new studies, by experts at Columbia, Princeton, Harvard and other institutions, show that the huge pool of poorly educated black men are becoming ever more disconnected from the mainstream society, and to a far greater degree than comparable white or Hispanic men.
Especially in the country’s inner cities, the studies show, finishing high school is the exception, legal work is scarcer than ever and prison is almost routine, with incarceration rates climbing for blacks even as urban crime rates have declined.

Retired University of Chicago Professor Milt Rosenberg recently hosted a discussion on the state of Americas public schools and make a case for school reform and school choice. Joseph Bast, president and CEO of the Heartland Institute, and Herbert Walberg, research professor of education and psychology at the University of Illinois Chicago along with a number of call-in teachers participated. 87 minute mp3 audio file

“Ms. Cornelius“:

I was working in my room the other day during a prep period when I overheard raised voices down the hall. One of my colleagues, Mr. Spector*, was debating with a kid from his classroom. It was obvious the kid was lipping off to Mr. Spector and basically refusing to do anything but sleep in Mr. Spector’s class. When Mr. Spector insisted he remain upright, the kid took exception.
Mr. Spector is a fifty-ish second-careerist who is caring, funny, and an ultraconservative. (I forgive him and I love him anyway.) The man can squeeze a quarter so hard that snot comes out of George Washington’s nose. He tries every day to do right by his students and expects them to learn something, and that’s what matters to me.

Crystal Lindell:

Illinois high school dropouts may soon find themselves without a driver’s license as well as lacking a diploma.
Under legislation moving through the state Senate, dropouts would lose their driving privileges until they re-enroll or turn 18 years old.
“I think we all recognize the issue and the problem of dropout that we have in secondary education,” Sen. Frank Watson, R-Greenville, said. “This is an attempt to try to address that.”
The measure, which already has won approval in the House, would target anyone younger than 18 who is either a high school dropout or has 18 or more unexcused absences. Watson said dropouts are more likely to end up in jail, so such deterrents are needed.

OnPoint:

Parents in Milwaukee want school vouchers and the governor’s signing up. Hear about one city’s big experiment with vouchers.

Madison Alder Brenda Konkel:

No, I’m not talking about the residents who live there, I’m talking about the City of Madison. So, we’re probably going to bid at the auction for the “Hauk Properties”. (It still needs council approval.) That is likely a very responsible decision given the alternatives. I feel comfortable with that decision. Problem is, what if we end up with the properties, then what?

The City and private property owners have a pretty long history of taking a low-income area, doing wholesale evictions for any infraction, enticing people to move with relatively low “incentives”, creating housing that people who previously lived there can’t afford or rehabbing the properties, moving people around until they get too frustrated to stay and then if they are persistent, making tenants re-apply to live in their old apartments and then denying them based on strict screening criteria. Essentially, destroying the sense of community that exists and the support networks of the people who live there.

School of science, math would be 17th campus
AP:

The General Assembly will be asked to approve adding a 17th campus to North Carolina’s public-university system, and this time it’s a high school.
Trustees at the N.C. School of Science and Mathematics voted unanimously Friday to integrate with the University of North Carolina system. The UNC board of governors also must approve the reorganization.
The School of Science and Mathematics, a 25-year-old residential high school in Durham, has been under the UNC system umbrella for years. But the UNC board of governors has had no direct supervision of the high school’s trustees.

Rose Fernandez:

I am the mother of 4 children who are excelling with Internet-based learning though a public school in Wisconsin. I am also the President of the Wisconsin Coalition of Virtual School Families.
Together with our fellow parents, families and friends, we strive to educate policy makers and others on why we chose a virtual public school for our children; how those schools work; about the close, working relationship we have with our teachers and administrators; and much, much more.
Our Coalition strongly support AB 1060, a bill authored by Representative Brett Davis and Senator Luther Olsen, which has passed both houses of the Legislature and is awaiting the Governor’s signature. While public schools do not require additional legislation in order to continue to operate, we appreciate the Legislature reaffirming its intent to keep virtual public education as an option before the parents of Wisconsin.

William Kates:

The program teaches students about data protection, computer network protocols and vulnerabilities, security, firewalls and forensics, data hiding, and infrastructure and wireless security.
Most importantly, officials said, teachers discuss ethical and legal considerations in cyber security.
“It’s a great course. It’s a littler harder than I expected,” said Catherine Gudaitis, a junior interested in theater. “But I know in the world I’m going to live in, this will be necessary information, even common knowledge.”

Michael Winerip:

In a recent issue, Chelsea had a front page article on the growing bureaucratic demands taking up teachers’ time. The article quoted six teachers criticizing new policies being imposed by the Blair High principal and by Montgomery County officials. All six teachers were quoted on the record, with their names, a journalistic feat many grown-up reporters would have trouble matching.
“Chelsea’s relentless,” said Maureen Freeman, a journalism teacher who is adviser to the paper. “She’s relentless in a good way. It’s a positive relentlessness. For two weeks, everywhere I went, there was Chelsea interviewing some teacher in the back of a classroom.”

RAND Corporation [pdf file]:

This “Occasional Paper” from the RAND Corporation assesses the state of charter schools in California. The results show that test scores for California’s charter school students are keeping pace with comparable students in traditional district schools. Researchers found that the state’s charter schools have achieved comparable test score results with fewer public resources and have emphasized non-core subjects more than have traditional schools. In addition, they found evidence that charter schools have not created “white enclaves” or “skimmed” high-performing students from traditional district schools as some opponents had feared. RAND’s findings, coupled with the fact that charter schools typically use less public resources, leads them to the conclusion that “charter schooling is a reform initiative worth continuing in California.”

Neal E. Boudette:

Last year, Greg DeHaan and his partner built 189 homes in the leafy, middle-class suburbs ringing this downtrodden industrial city, but not one in Kalamazoo itself. “There was no demand,” says Mr. DeHaan, whose company, Allen Edwin Homes, is one of the largest home builders in Michigan.
By early December, however, a market had suddenly materialized, prompting the developer to pay $7 million for three separate tracts of land. Out-of-state investors began scouring the area for opportunities, too.
Mr. DeHaan and others in town trace this new interest in Kalamazoo to an unusual, anonymously funded plan. Beginning this June, college tuition will be free for any student who enters the Kalamazoo school system by the ninth grade — regardless of income or need. The program, unveiled in November by the city’s superintendent of schools and underwritten by a group of local philanthropists, is to run for at least 13 years.
Called the “Kalamazoo Promise,” the tuition plan requires only that students live in Kalamazoo or neighboring Oshtemo township, graduate from public high school and attend a public university or community college in Michigan. Students who go from kindergarten through the 12th grade get a full ride. The program will cover 65% of tuition costs for those who spend at least their four high-school years in the city’s schools, with the percentage of aid rising for those who spend more years in the system.

Interesting relationship between education, economic development and a community.

Susan Troller:

Female students at East High School learned in one morning how to be happy in love, what their rights and responsibilities are as young voters, and where to find a skilled, independent job that pays $30 to $50 an hour plus benefits.
The presentations were part of a new event at East called “Week of the Young Woman,” which began Monday and continues through Friday, featuring more than 50 female community leaders who are talking about topics that range from date violence to finance and economics, nontraditional jobs and women’s health issues. It was scheduled in early March as part of the recognition of Women’s History Month; the talks are open only to East High students.