Late last week the proposal cleared a major hurdle with the announcement that the Urban League had struck a deal with MTI to employ unionized teachers, nurses and clerical staff.
AFSMCE Local 60 President Tom Coiyer asked the district to use its own unionized custodial staff rather than allow them to be contracted. And Don Severson, president of a conservative district watchdog group, withdrew his previous support because of the deal struck between the Urban League and MTI, which didn’t involve the School Board.
MTI executive director John Matthews, who attended but did not speak at the hearing, said the union would no longer oppose the proposal. However, he remains skeptical that Madison Prep would be more successful than the district’s high schools at closing the achievement gap.
The price of a free school: Of course the idea sounds grand – but free from what? Or, more importantly, free for what?
At this time of year there is always talk of education. The autumn term has started; some children are entering school for the first time; others are making the transition from primary to secondary; young adults are being driven, with bulging bags and cases, to halls of residence by parents who may be more traumatised than they are. And this year, at least in the UK, there is more talk than ever, because education is being “shaken up” by Michael Gove, a notably driven and idealistic, and ideological, education secretary; and also by a universities minister, David Willetts, of legendary intellectual firepower. A new class of “free schools” has been created; the whole system of university education has been rethought, or at least put on a different financial footing.
Of course the idea of free schools sounds grand – but free from what? Or, more importantly, free for what? Trying to get some perspective on what this idea of freedom might mean, I found myself looking back to two inspiring experiments in education, both of which were conducted in Madrid before the Spanish Civil War.
The more famous of the two was the Residencia de Estudiantes – the arty version of an Oxbridge college at which Lorca, Buñuel, Dalí, Falla and others spent time in the 1920s and 1930s, and which served as a seedbed for much of the burgeoning artistic creativity of that brilliant, short-lived time.
But the less well-known Institución Libre de Enseñanza, or Free Institute of Education, founded in 1876 by Francisco Giner de los Ríos, is possibly more relevant to my theme. In this case the word “free” meant very specifically free from the dead hand of state and religious control. The Spanish “Glorious Revolution” of 1868 had promised a more modern, secular, scientific model of education; but the Restoration of 1874 brought back not only the Bourbons but a repressive, state-controlled education system in which the minister dictated the choice of textbooks and curriculum, and forbade the teaching of non-Catholic religious doctrine or critical political ideas.
Incentives for Advanced Work Let Pupils and Teachers Cash In
Joe Nystrom, who teaches math at a low-income high school here, used to think that only a tiny group of students — the “smart kids” — were capable of advanced coursework.
But two years ago, spurred by a national program that offered cash incentives and other support for students and teachers, Mr. Nystrom’s school, South High Community School, adopted a come one, come all policy for Advanced Placement courses. Today Mr. Nystrom teaches A.P. statistics to eight times as many students as he used to, and this year 70 percent of them scored high enough to qualify for college credit, compared with 50 percent before. One in four earned the top score possible, far outpacing their counterparts worldwide.
South High students said Mr. Nystrom and his colleagues had transformed the culture of a tough urban school, making it cool for boys with low-slung jeans who idolize rappers like Lil Wayne to take the hardest classes.
City native, Teach for America see better days
It would have been easy to predict an unpromising future for Maurice Thomas when he was born. His mother was single, 17 years old, and the product of a low-income, troubled Milwaukee home.
But Thomas had some big things going for him: His mother’s dedication to education. Teachers who pushed him forward with care and skill. And his own commitment to making a difference.
“Trajectory” is a word used often by Wendy Kopp, the founder of Teach for America, the organization that over two decades has trained more than 20,000 high performing college graduates to be teachers and placed them in high-needs classrooms across the country for their first two years out of school.
Kopp is convinced that the trajectory of the lives of children – in fact, of entire communities – can be turned for the better, especially by education.
When Kopp published her book, “A Chance to Make History,” last winter, Maurice Thomas, who was with Teach for America in Atlanta, was one of the people she wrote about in detail. She described his impact as a teacher and how he had become deeply involved in getting his students to succeed.
Common-Core Math Standards Don’t Add Up
Grant Wiggins, via a kind reader
There is little question in my mind that national standards will be a blessing. The crazy quilt of district and state standards will become more rational, student mobility will stop causing needless learning hardships, and the full talents of a nation of innovators will be released to develop a vast array of products and services at a scale that permits even small vendors to compete to widen the field to all educators’ benefit.
That said, we are faced with a terrible situation in mathematics. In my view, unlike the English/language arts standards, the mathematics components of the Common Core State Standards Initiative are a bitter disappointment. In terms of their limited vision of math education, the pedestrian framework chosen to organize the standards, and the incoherent nature of the standards for mathematical practice in particular, I don’t see how these take us forward in any way. They unwittingly reinforce the very errors in math curriculum, instruction, and assessment that produced the current crisis.
One wonders what became of the Madison School Districts Math Task Force?
Should kids’ test scores be used to evaluate teachers’ colleges?
The ongoing debate over whether using student test results on standardized exams is a good way to evaluate a teacher’s effectiveness just took a new twist.
The U.S. Department of Education on Friday released a report calling for new regulations designed to link federal funding for teacher-education programs to the test scores of students.
“While there are many beacons of excellence, unfortunately some of our existing teacher preparation programs are not up to the job,” U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan says in the forward to the report. “They operate partially blindfolded, without access to data that tells them how effective their graduates are in elementary and secondary school classrooms after they leave their teacher preparation programs. Too many are not attracting top students, and too many states are not setting a high bar for entry into the profession.”
The report, which outlines the Obama administration’s proposals for teacher education reform, also calls for additional funds for teaching scholarships and expanding efforts to create more minority teachers. It’s mainly catching the eyes of higher education officials nationally, however, for proposing ways to hold colleges, universities and programs that produce teachers accountable for those they send into the classroom.
The Case for Early Parenthood Education
One hundred fifty-three thousand words per week. That’s the difference between the 215,000 words per week that the average child in a privileged home hears and the 62,000 words per week that the average child in a family on welfare hears. I’ll explain the research behind these numbers later; for now, just consider how staggering the differ- ence is. And consider the implications. Hearing language is the first step in learning to read and write and make sense of the world.
The language gap that results in the achievement gap begins at home. Schools can and should do their part to close this gap, but parents, by reading to their children and interacting with them in positive and encouraging ways, need to do their part, too.
The idea that families need to provide enriching educational activities is not new. In 1908, Edmund Burke Huey, regarded as “one of the foremost leaders” in educating children with learning disabilities,1 wrote, “The school of the future will have as one of its important duties the instruction of parents in the means of assist- ing the child’s natural learning in the home.”2 This insight was just one of many in his classic work The Psychology and Pedagogy of Reading, a 500-page book so highly regarded that it was reprinted by the MIT Press in 1968 and again by the International Reading Association in 2009.
Pittsburgh’s School/Union Partnership
It was sometime in July 2009 that then-Pittsburgh Public Schools (PPS) Superintendent Mark Roosevelt and then- Pittsburgh Federation of Teachers (PFT) President John Tarka had some things to work out. They were in yet another on a proposal to the Gates Foundation that would eventually win them $40 million and national acclaim, and they decided to leave the room where they were meeting with staff.
When they didn’t come back for much longer than expected, Rob Weil, director of field programs in the Educational Issues department of the American Federation of Teachers, who was visiting Pittsburgh and sitting in on the meetings, decided to look for them. He expected that maybe each had wandered away indi- vidually for a break. Instead, he found them both in Roosevelt’s office, huddled together looking over some documents, deep into a conversation that obviously hadn’t broken since they left 15 minutes earlier. “This is what needs to happen,” he told them.
“I wish more places would do that: have an honest discussion about the issues,” Weil says now, thinking back to that visit. “Mark and John already knew that the relationship [between the union and] the district had to change for the future of the kids in Pitts- burgh. They said that outright.”
Make the use of open standards in education mandatory
Some of you have noticed there is something buzzing among your Dutch friends. It has to do with education, Silverlight, open standards and being obese. I’ve been asked to write about it in English so you all can get on the same page as us, and sign a petition to show your support for our campaign to make the use of open standards in education mandatory.
What came first?
At first there was a problem, and the problem is called Magister. Magister is software for the school administration but it also expanding it’s reach to serve as an education learning environment and a license-tool for educational materials. When a school deploys Magister students are required to go online and use Magister via their browser. For them the tool is web-based. Till 2008 there where no issues, but in 2008 Schoolmaster, the company behind Magister, partnered with Microsoft and Siverlight was chosen as the tool of choice. Since Magister 5.x problems have been mounting for students using other browsers than Internet Explorer or another operating system than Windows. Microsoft and Schoolmaster state that Magister is truly multiplatform because Silverlight is available for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. Well, as most Linux fans and users know, there is an open source implementation for Silverlight. It’s called Moonlight and to call it a crappy implementation would be giving it too much credit. Students using Moonlight can’t get Silverlight to work.
Mukwonago High School can keep Indians nickname
A Waukesha County judge has ruled that the state’s effort to strip Mukwonago High School of its Indians nickname was unconstitutional because an administrative hearing on the case was unfair.
Circuit Judge Donald Hassin Jr. granted summary judgment Thursday in favor of two residents who challenged the 2010 state law that allowed complaints about Indian nicknames and mascots.
While he did not find the law itself unconstitutional, he said found it “an uncommonly silly law,” quoting from a famous U.S. Supreme Court case on privacy. But eliminating it, Hassin wrote, is up to the Legislature.
Hassin did agree with residents James Schoolcraft and Craig Vertz that the law, as applied against Mukwonago schools, was unconstitutional because the decision maker – a Department of Public Instruction employee named Paul Sherman – had an impermissibly high risk of bias.
Why Madison Prep deserves consideration
We have historically been uncomfortable with so-called “charter” schools, which too frequently sacrifice the principle of providing all students with a well-rounded education in favor of narrower experiments.
And we have never had any taste for separate-but-equal — or more usually separate-and-unequal — schemes that divide students along lines of race, class and gender.
As such, we approached the Madison Preparatory Academy project with trepidation.
The proposal to create a charter school with single-sex classrooms focused on raising the academic performance of minority students has been sincerely and generally well presented by Urban League President Kaleem Caire. We respect that Caire is attempting to address serious issues, including a lingering frustration with the Madison Metropolitan School District’s responses to the achievement gap that has plagued the district for many years.
How Smartphones Could Revolutionize Scientific Experiments
Cognitive psychology is, broadly, the study of mental processes almost as if the human mind was a type of computer. It is generally a highly empirical academic discipline relying on experimentation to study faculties such as language, attention and memory. It could be revolutionized by smartphones.
The current problem, according to a paper in peer-reviewed publication PLoS One, is that experiments usually rely on groups of volunteers coming to a research facility. By using smartphone technology instead, data could be collected from thousands of subjects across the world.
The paper comes from an international group of researchers who have been running a classic experiment which asks users to distinguish rapidly between words and non-words. (Its results can be used, for example, in the diagnosis of reading impairments.) Participants in the experiment downloaded a free app from iTunes to use on their iPhone or iPad.
Frustrations mount as racial achievement gap persists in Madison schools
Tim Comer says when his son moved from a mostly black magnet school in Chicago to the Madison School District in 2006, “he went from sharp to dull.”
Comer, 45, a black father and unemployed electronic engineer, said the difference was that Madison was “laid back” while the Chicago school pushed students to work extra hard to succeed.
“In Chicago he was always a frontrunner,” Comer said. “But here, he’s always on the back burner.”
Comer’s dissatisfaction is shared by many black parents in Madison where, despite decades of efforts, a significant gap persists between white and black students’ academic performance and graduation rates.
Although the gap is closing among students completing algebra by the 10th grade, it has widened on 4th grade reading tests and in high school graduation rates since 2003. Those changes have come as the number of black students in the district has increased and the number of whites has declined.
“We know that we’re not pushing the needle significantly,” Superintendent Dan Nerad said about what he considers “the most significant social justice issue in America.”
To: Professors; Re: Your Advisees
Dear faculty members: I sell Ph.D. advising services on the open market. And your Ph.D. students are buying. Why? Because you’re not doing your job.
Lest you think that by advising, I mean editing research papers and dissertations, let me disabuse you. I offer those services, but rarely am I asked for them.
A former tenured professor at a major research university, I am now running an academic-career consulting business. That’s right: I am doing graduate advising for pay. I am teaching your Ph.D. students to do things like plan a publishing trajectory, tailor their dissertations for grant agencies, strategize recommendation letters, evaluate a journal’s status, judge the relative merits of postdoctoral options, interpret a rejection, follow up on an acceptance, and–above all–get jobs. And business is so good I’m booked ahead for months.
History of education reform in Iowa
State leaders have created at least five task forces over the past three decades to provide recommendations for overhauling Iowa’s education system. The groups produced at least six reports with their ideas for changes. These are the highlights of the proposals.
“First in the Nation Education,” 1984
Implement an effective evaluation process for teachers, administrators and support services staff.
Give all educators 12-month contracts and use time for planning, developing, implementing and evaluating programs, staff development and more instruction time.
Study: No real progress in Chicago Public grade school reading in 20 years
So after waves and waves of reform, you thought Chicago public elementary schools had made tremendous progress in the last 20 years?
Think again.
Despite millions of dollars in fixes and programs, Chicago’s elementary grade reading scores have barely budged over the last two decades, a new report by the University of Chicago’s Consortium on Chicago School Research has found.
Math scores improved only “incrementally” in those grades, and racial gaps in both subjects increased, with African American students falling the most behind other groups, especially in reading — an area pushed heavily under former Mayor Richard M. Daley.
But the good news in a unique study called “Trends in Chicago’s Schools Across Three Eras of Reform: Summary of Key Findings” is that Chicago Public Schools made “dramatic improvement” in its high school graduation rate over almost two decades. Less than half of CPS freshmen graduated by age 19 in 1990, compared to about two thirds today, the study said.
In 20 years of near-constant reform efforts, Chicago’s elementary school students have made few gains, high school students have advanced, and the achievement gap between poor and rich areas has widened, a major University of Chicago study found, contradicting impressions created by years of Chicago Public Schools testing data.
The report examined performance across three eras of reform over the last two decades — a span including the Argie Johnson, Paul Vallas and Arne Duncan regimes. Researchers for the University of Chicago Consortium on School Research found that most publicly available data measuring the success of public schools in Chicago did not provide an accurate picture of progress.
One of the most striking findings is that elementary school scores in general remained mostly stagnant, contrary to visible improvement on state exams reported by the Illinois State Board of Education. The consortium study used a complex statistical analysis of data from each state-administered test over the last 20 years, controlling for changes in the test’s content and how it was scored, said Stuart Luppescu, a lead consortium researcher.
Madison Prep and Teacher’s Union Collaborate: What’s it all about?
Kaleem Caire, via email:
October 3, 2011
Dear Friends & Colleagues.
As the Wisconsin State Journal and The Capital Times newspapers reported over the weekend, the Urban League of Greater Madison, the new Board of Madison Preparatory Academy and Madison Teachers, Inc., the local teachers’ union, achieved a major milestone last Friday in agreeing to collaborate on our proposed charter schools for young men and women.
After a two-hour meeting and four months of ongoing discussions, MTI agreed to work “aggressively and proactively” with Madison Prep, through the existing collective bargaining agreement (CBA) between MTI and the Madison Metropolitan School District, to ensure the school achieves its diversity hiring goals; educational mission and staff compensation priorities; and staff and student performance objectives.
Where we started.
In March 2011, we submitted a proposal to MMSD’s Board of Education to start an all-boys public charter school that would serve 120 boys beginning in the 2012-13 school year: 60 boys in sixth grade and 60 boys in seventh grade. We proposed that the school would operate as a “non-instrumentality” charter school, which meant that Madison Prep would not employ teachers and other relevant support staff that were members of MTI’s collective bargaining unit. We also proposed a budget of $14,471 per pupil, an amount informed by budgets numbers shared with us by MMSD’s administration. MMSD’s 2010-11 budget showed the projected to spend $14,800 per student.
Where we compromised.
A. Instrumentality: As part of the final proposal that the Urban League will submit to MMSD’s Board of Education for approval next month, the Urban League will propose that Madison Prep operate as an instrumentality of MMSD, but have Madison Preparatory Academy retain the autonomy of governance and management of both the girls and boys charter schools. MTI has stated that they have no issue with this arrangement.
What this means is that Madison Prep’s teachers, guidance counselor, clerical staff and nurse will be members of the MTI bargaining unit. As is required under the current CBA, each position will be appropriately compensated for working extra hours to accommodate Madison Prep’s longer school day and year. These costs have been built into our budget. All other staff will employed by Madison Preparatory Academy, Inc. and the organization will contract out for some services, as appropriate.
B. Girls School Now: When we began this journey to establish Madison Prep, we shared that it was our vision to establish a similar girls school within 12-24 months of the boys school starting. To satisfy the concerns of the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction about how Madison Prep complies with federal Title IX regulations, we offered to start the girls school at the same time. We have since accelerated the girls school in our planning and look forward to opening the girls and boys schools in August 2012 with 60 sixth grade boys and 60 sixth grade girls. We will add one grade per year in each school until we reach a full compliment of 6th – 12th grades and 840 students total.
C. Costs: Over the past six months, we have worked closely with MMSD’s administration to identify an appropriate budget request for Madison Prep. Through an internal analysis of their spending at the secondary level, MMSD recently reported to us that they project to spend $13,207 per pupil on the actual education of children in their middle and high schools. To address school board members’ concerns about the costs of Madison Prep, we worked hard to identify areas to trim spending without compromising our educational mission, student and staffing needs, and overall school effectiveness. We’ve since reduced our request to $11,478 per pupil in Madison Prep’s first year of operation, 2012-13. By year five, our request decreases to $11,029 per pupil. Based on what we have learned about school spending in MMSD and the outstanding educational needs of students that we plan to address, we believe this is a reasonable request.
Why we compromised.
We have more information. After months of deliberation, negotiation and discussion with Board of Education members, school district administration, the teacher’s union and community stakeholders, we’ve been able to identify what we believe is a clear path to getting Madison Prep approved; a path that we hope addresses the needs and interests of all involved without compromising the mission, objectives and needs of our future students.
We believe in innovation and systemic change. We are very serious about promoting change and opportunity within our public schools, and establishing innovative approaches – including new schools – to respond to the educational needs, interests and challenges of our children, schools and community. Today’s children are tomorrow’s workforce; tomorrow’s leaders; tomorrow’s innovators; and tomorrow’s peacekeepers. We should have schools that prepare them accordingly. We are committed to doing our part to achieve this reality, including finding creative ways to break down boundaries rather than reinforce them.
The needs and desires of our children supersede all others. Children are the reward of life, and our children are our first priority. Our commitment is first and foremost to them. To this end, we will continue to seek ways to expand opportunities for them, advocate on their behalf and find ways to work with those with whom we have differences, even if it means we have to compromise to get there. It is our hope that other organizations and individuals will actively seek ways to do to the same.
We see the bigger picture. It would not serve the best interests of our community, our children, our schools or the people we serve to see parents of color and their children’s teachers at odds with each other over how best to deliver a quality education to their children. That is not the image we want to portray of our city. We sincerely hope that our recent actions will serve as a example to areas businesses, labor unions, schools and other institutions who hold the keys to opportunity for the children and families we serve.
Outstanding Issues.
Even though we have made progress, we are not out of the woods yet. We hope that over the next several weeks, the Board of Education will respond to your advocacy and work with us to provide the resources and autonomy of governance and leadership that are exceedingly important to the success of Madison Prep.
We look forward to finding common ground on these important objectives and realizing our vision that Greater Madison truly becomes the best place in the Midwest for everyone to live, learn and work.
Thank you for your courage and continued support.
Madison Prep 2012!
Onward!
Kaleem Caire
President & CEO
Urban League of Greater Madison
Phone: 608-729-1200
Fax: 608-729-1205
www.ulgm.org
Madison Prep – 1,2,3 Yellow Light (updated)
Big news over the weekend in the Madison Preparatory Academy saga. There has been significant and positive movement on four issues by the Urban League of Greater Madison (ULGM). First, they have changed their request from non-instrumentality to instrumentality, increasing control by and accountability to the district. Second, they have agreed to be staffed by teachers and other educators represented by Madison Teachers Incorporated (MTI) and follow the existing contract between MTI and the Madison Metropolitan School District (the memo on these two items and more is here). ULGM has also morphed their vision from a district-wide charter to a geographic/attendance area charter. Last, their current budget projections no longer require outrageous transfers of funds from other district schools. Many issues and questions remain but these move the proposal from an obvious red light to the “proceed with caution” yellow. It is far from being a green light.
Before identifying some of the remaining questions and issues, I think it is important to point out that this movement on the part on the Urban League came because people raised issues and asked questions. Throughout the controversies there has been a tendency to present Madison Prep as initially proposed as “THE PLAN” and dismiss any questioning of that proposal as evidence that the questioners don’t care about the academic achievement of minorities and children of poverty. This has been absurd and offensive. Remember this started at $28,000 per/pupil. Well, ULGM has moved this far because people didn’t treat their proposal as if it had been brought down from Mount Sinai by Moses; if the proposal is eventually approved, MMSD and likely Madison Prep will be better because these changes have been made. As this process enters the next phases, I hope everyone keeps that in mind.
Bringing the Common Core State Mathematics Standards to Life
Hung-Hsi Wu, via Richard Askey:
Many sets of state and national mathematics stan- dards have come and gone in the past two decades. The Common Core State Mathematics Standards (CCSMS), which were released in June of 2010,*have been adopted by almost all states and will be phased in across the nation in 2014. Will this be another forgettable stan- dards document like the overwhelming majority of the others?
Perhaps. But unlike the others, it will be a travesty if this one is forgotten. The main difference between these standards and most of the others is that the CCSMS are mathematically very sound overall. They could serve–at long last–as the foundation for creating proper school mathematics textbooks and dramatically better teacher preparation.
Before the CCSMS came along, America long resisted the idea of commonality of standards and curriculum–but it did not resist such commonality in actual classrooms. Despite some politicians’ rhetoric extolling the virtues of local control, there has been a de facto national mathematics curriculum for decades: the curriculum defined by the school mathematics textbooks. There are several widely used textbooks, but mathe- matically they are very much alike. Let’s call this de facto math- ematics curriculum Textbook School Mathematics (TSM).1
Math Curriculum: School District’s Activities Should be an Open Book
Since January 2007, I’ve attempted repeatedly and in myriad ways to persuade Spokane Public Schools‘ leadership to provide teachers with good math materials so that our children will gain sufficient basic math skills. It’s an effort you’d think would be welcome, respected, and relatively painless. Alas.
In 2008, after repeated failed efforts to get a conversation going with the district or with the daily newspaper, I decided to take that conversation public. Thus was born my blog, Betrayed. Shortly after that, I began writing my book, Betrayed: How the Education Establishment Has Betrayed America and What You Can Do about it. The book was published in January 2011, and shortly thereafter, I worked with two professionals to hold public forums in Spokane and talk directly with the people. The district leadership does not appear to appreciate my efforts to inform the people and try to get the children the mathematics they need.
A school district’s activities should be an open book to the community that pays for them. My blog, book and advocacy all required thorough and accurate information. Therefore, over these nearly five years of effort, I’ve had to file public records requests with the district in order to obtain pertinent information that wasn’t available in any other venue. For records other than internal district communications, my searches usually went like this:
AP & ACT Results Over the Years at Madison’s Edgewood High School
Last year, 120 students took 223 Advanced Placement exams from 15 different exams last year. Congratulations to all of our faculty and staff who contributed to our students’ success.
- 34% of juniors – over 40% of seniors and over a quarter of juniors took at least one AP course and exam in 2010-2011. The most recent report available shows the national figure in 2010 was 2010 was 26% for Wisconsin.
- 86.7% of EHS students who took an AP course scored a 3 or higher (passing), compared with 69.9% in the State of Wisconsin and 60.2% globally.
- 38.2% of the EHS graduating class passed (scored 3, 4 or 5) at least one AP exam. According to the 2010 AP report, the national average was 16.9% and Wisconsin average was 18.3% for any time during high school.
- EHS offers one AP course for every 13-14 seniors.
For the period 1997-2011:
- Edgewood’s average ACT score rose about 2 points to 25.0 with an average of 96% of EHS students taking the test over that period. During the same period, state and national averages remained essentially unchanged from the low 22s and about 21, respectively. In 2010-11, 71% of Wisconsin students and 49% of all US students took the test.
- The total number of students taking Edgewood’s AP courses more than tripled.
- The average number of tests taken per EHS AP student per year rose from 1.34 to 1.86.
- The percent of students receiving passing scores (3, 4 or 5) rose from 54% to 87%.
U.S. Education Secretary calls Massachusetts ‘great example’ for nation
Celebrating the one-year anniversary of Massachusetts’s successful pitch for $250 million from the Obama administration’s Race to the Top program, Gov. Deval Patrick, U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan and state Education Secretary Paul Reville on Wednesday touted the efforts the state has made to improve innovation and student performance in public schools.
The anniversary comes as state education officials indicate they plan to seek a waiver from key provisions of the federal No Child Left Behind Act that require 100 percent of students to be proficient in English and math by 2014. Obama announced the opportunity for states to apply to opt out of portions of NCLB last Friday.
Duncan credited Massachusetts with setting “a great example for the country,” despite Reville acknowledging that under No Child Left Behind over 90 percent of Massachusetts schools have been categorized in some way as “underperforming” based on the most recent MCAS scores.
How does Wisconsin compare to Massachusetts? Find out, here.
Cassidy: Education on the brink of an online revolution
I’ve been something of a pessimist when it comes to the general state of public education.
But I’m coming around. I’m coming around to the view that big, important, disruptive — and positive — changes are coming; and they’re coming faster than many might think. I’ve concluded that those who see online learning as a part of the solution to crumbling school budgets and lackluster student performance are right. I now believe that the education world is on the brink of a revolution that will come about not because of politics and policy, but despite them.
The potential is so compelling that if the education establishment does not encourage the move to smart online learning, parents, students, teachers and innovative administrators will lead the charge. They will engineer the shift. And they’ll do it in a matter of years, not decades.
The China Syndrome? Here? In Sun Prairie?
Someone PLEASE explain to us the fascination the district (or a portion thereof) has with the need for Mandarin Chinese in the curriculum!
We hear the argument, “China is the second largest country by size and most populous–and therefore the ability to speak Chinese will ultimately have value”.
Right. And property values always rise. And 100-year storms only occur once in one hundred years.
Navigating Disadvantaged Students’ Transition to College
James E. Rosenbaum and Kelly Iwanaga Becker:
In her senior year of high school, the low-income student with the C-minus average–the one who almost dropped out–is not only looking forward to graduation, but plans to attend college. Her college counselor, her teachers, her parents, and her peers have all told her that a college degree will land her a good-paying job.
No one has told her that she must pass a college placement test before she can take college classes. No one has told her that if she fails, she must pay for remedial courses for which she will receive no credit. No one has told her that she probably lacks the aca- demic preparation to do well in remedial courses, much less col- lege courses. No one has told her that most students like her never earn a college degree.
What if, instead of hoping poorly prepared students will catch up in college, we supported them in taking rigorous courses– even college-level courses–before they graduate from high school? What if, instead of lamenting the fact that many students struggle in transitioning from high school to college, our high school and college educators worked together to create a clear path from high school graduation to college graduation? What if:
Fewer students walk to school
It’s 9 a.m., and the rush is on.
Buses disgorge hundreds of students at one side of Bailey Elementary School in Woodbury. On the other side, parents line up in SUVs to drop off their kids.
“Bye-bye,” says Silva Theis of Woodbury, kissing her fourth-grade daughter.
In the hubbub, no one notices what’s missing – the dying practice of walking to school. Of 620 students at Bailey, not one walks – not even those who live one block away.
Managers of a 6-year-old federal program think they know why.
How Dangerous Are College Rankings and the Rat Race For Prestige?
You can buy a pair of jeans at Wal-Mart for $29 and one from Ralph Lauren for $98. While both cover your backside, one comes with a label of status that appeals to some and not to others. Customers — and let’s not forget that students are customers of academic services — like choices and they usually make selections based on more than one factor, price being only one.
When my son checked into his freshman dorm, there were no lights in his room – nothing on the ceiling, walls or desk. There were two outlets: if you wanted light, Yale required you to bring your own lamp. I thought this took the parable of Plato’s Cave a bit too far.
Applicants to GW look for more than overhead lights: they want living and dining choices, places to study and swim, comfortable desks and chairs, and tennis and basketball courts. Yes, they are looking for great professors but they want more than classroom life. The only way to provide more books in the library, more theaters for performances, laboratories for experiments, coffee shops for study breaks is to have the dollars to build and maintain all these things – and dollars come from tuition.
At the same time as the demand for quality services increased, so too did the cost for basic utilities: electricity, water, security, oil, insurance, personnel health and other employee benefits have all risen over the past 40 years.
The Obama Administration’s Plan for Teacher Education Reform and Improvement
Teacher preparation programs play an essential role in our elementary and secondary education system, which relies on them to recruit, select, and prepare approximately 200,000 future teachers every year.1 Strong programs recruit, select, and prepare teachers who have or learn the skills and knowledge they need to be hired into teaching positions, be retained in them, and lead their students to strong learning gains. Weak programs set minimal standards for entry and graduation. They produce inadequately trained teachers whose students do not make sufficient academic progress.
Unfortunately, while there are shining examples of strong programs throughout the country, too many of our teacher preparation programs fall short. As a whole, America is not following the lead of high-performing countries and recruiting the nation’s best and brightest into teaching. Instead, only 23% of all teachers, and
only 14% of teachers in high-poverty schools, come from the top third of college graduates.2 Our differences with other nations are not due to teacher preparation alone. We must do more to support and reward excellent teaching at various stages in the education system. However, we can do more in the area of preparation. After admission, too many programs do not provide teachers with a rigorous, clinical experience that prepares them for the schools in which they will work. Only 50 percent of current teacher candidates receive supervised clinical training. More than three in five education school alumni report that their education school did not prepare them for “classroom realities.” 3
A federal takeover of education
Many Americans, having grown accustomed to Caesarism, probably see magnanimity in that front-page headline. Others, however, read it as redundant evidence of how distorted American governance has become. A president “gives” states a “voice” in education policy concerning kindergarten through 12th grade? How did this quintessential state and local responsibility become tethered to presidential discretion? Here is how federal power expands, even in the guise of decentralization:
Ohio Sen. Robert Taft (1889-1953) was “Mr. Republican,” revered by conservatives chafing under the domination of the GOP by Eastern money that preferred moderates such as New York Gov. Tom Dewey, the GOP’s 1944 and 1948 presidential nominee. In “The Roots of Modern Conservatism: Dewey, Taft, and the Battle for the Soul of the Republican Party,” Michael Bowen, historian at Pennsylvania’s Westminster College, recounts how Taft leavened his small-government orthodoxy with deviations, including federal aid to primary and secondary education.
In the 79th Congress (1945-47), Taft sponsored legislation to provide such education more than $8 billion over 25 years. The sum was huge (the 1947 federal budget was $34.5 billion), and the 25-year horizon said that federal intervention would not be temporary. Taft drafted his bill with help from the National Education Association (NEA), the teachers union that today is an appendage of the Democratic Party, except when the relationship is the other way around.
Hillsborough school officials take new evaluation system to parents
It started with a partnership between the school district and the teachers’ union.
Next came $100 million in grant funding from Bill and Melinda Gates, then the arduous job of explaining the Empowering Effective Teachers plan to more than 11,000 teachers.
On Monday night, a small group of parents braved heavy rains for its chance.
Turnout at Chamberlain High School to hear Hillsborough County school officials explain and answer questions about the program was sparse. But Melissa Erickson, president of the county PTA council, didn’t mind.
“It’s the beginning of a conversation,” she said.
Do High Flyers Maintain Their Altitude? Performance Trends of Top Students
Yun Xiang, Michael Dahlin, John Cronin, Robert Theaker, Sarah Durant:
Fordham’s latest study, “Do High Flyers Maintain Their Altitude? Performance Trends of Top Students,” is the first to examine the performance of America’s highest-achieving children over time at the individual-student level. Produced in partnership with the Northwest Evaluation Association, it finds that many high-achieving students struggle to maintain their elite performance over the years and often fail to improve their reading ability at the same rate as their average and below-average classmates. The study raises troubling questions: Is our obsession with closing achievement gaps and “leaving no child behind” coming at the expense of our “talented tenth”–and America’s future international competitiveness? Read on to learn more.
Preschool Funding for Kids Now Pays Off Billions Later
There are few sure investments in this chaotic economic climate, but on a national level, education has proven to pay off big down the road. As tight economic times have put the squeeze on education budgets here in the U.S., a new report shows the big benefits of even small investments in early education worldwide.
For every dollar invested in boosting preschool enrollment, middle- and low-income countries would see a return of some $6.40 to $17.60, according to a new analysis published September 22 in The Lancet. “Early childhood is the most effective and cost-effective time to ensure that all children develop to their full potential,” noted the authors, led by Patrice Engle, of California Polytechnic State University. “The returns on investment in early child development are substantial.”
How Sports Can Help High Schools
Education writers rarely examine high school sports, but something is happening there that might help pull our schools out of the doldrums.
In the last school year, a new national survey found, 7,667,955 boys and girls took part in high school sports. This is 55.5 percent of all students, according to the report from the National Federation of State High School Associations, and the 22nd straight year that participation had increased.
Despite two major recessions and numerous threats to cut athletic budgets to save academics, high schools have found ways not only to keep sports alive but increase the number of students playing. We have data indicating sports and other extracurricular activities do better than academic classes in teaching leadership, teamwork, time management and other skills crucial for success in the workplace.
Coaches may be the only faculty members still allowed by our culture and educational practice to get tough with students not making the proper effort. They have the advantage of teaching what are essentially elective non-credit courses. They can insist on standards of behavior that classroom teachers often cannot enforce because the stakes of dismissing or letting students drop their courses are too high.
California Governor Brown should give ‘thumbs down’ on autism-linked education bill
Hundreds of pieces of legislation are sitting on Governor Jerry Brown’s desk awaiting his proverbial “thumbs up” or “thumbs down.” Gov. Brown has already warned that many of these bills will be vetoed, saying that there will be “plenty of veto blues.”
One bill that regretfully deserves a veto is Senate Bill 946 (Steinberg). It would impose a costly new mandate for private health insurance to pay for educational non-medical services for children with autism, while exempting the public health programs — Medi-Cal and Healthy Families — from the requirement to cover the same therapy.
The bill was jammed through the legislature at the last possible moment without sufficient time for debate or evaluation of the potential consequences of passage. While on the surface it may seem like a well-intentioned bill, it is riddled with flaws and in the end will do more harm than good.
Crunch Time for Madison Prep Charter School
Ed Hughes has a problem.
Like most of his fellow school board members and practically everyone else in Madison, he was bowled over by Urban League president Kaleem Caire’s vision for Madison Prep, a charter school that would aggressively tackle the school district’s entrenched minority achievement gap.
“The longer day, the instructional focus, and the ‘no excuses’ approach appealed to me,” Hughes says.
But as he looked into the details, Hughes became more and more concerned about the cost of the school and “whether there is a good match between the problem we are trying to address and the solution that’s being proposed.”
Expressing those doubts in his blog has turned the soft-spoken Hughes into a heretic.
Caire is a superstar who has galvanized the community to get behind his charter school. At school board hearings, only a handful of speakers express any reservations about the idea, while an overwhelming number speak passionately about the need to break the school-to-prison pipeline, and about Madison’s moral obligation to do something for the kids who are not being served.
Hughes listens respectfully. But, he says, “for Madison Prep to be the answer, we’d need to know that the students it was serving would otherwise fall through the cracks.”
…..
But Hughes’ big problem with the Urban League’s draft proposal, submitted to the district last February, is cost. The total cost to the school district of $27 million over five years is just too much, he says.
Madison School Board Member Ed Hughes:
I don’t know if the Urban League’s plans for Madison Prep will come to fruition. If they do, I predict here and now that the school will have a higher graduation rate than the Madison school district as a whole for African-American students and probably for other groups of students as well. I also predict that all or nearly all of its graduates will apply to and be admitted to college. What is impossible to predict is what difference, if any, this will make in overall educational outcomes for Madison students.
Of course charter schools like Madison Prep will have higher graduation rates than their home school districts as a whole. Students enrolled in charter schools are privileged in one clear way over students not enrolled. Each student has a parent or other caregiver sufficiently involved in the child’s education to successfully navigate the process to get the student into the charter school. Not all students in our traditional neighborhood schools have that advantage. Other things equal, students with more involved parents/caregivers will be more likely to graduate from high school. So, one would expect that charter schools will have higher graduation rates.
Proposed Madison Prep IB Charter School and Madison Teachers, Inc will work together on new charter school; to be staffed largely with Union Teachers
Several major impediments facing the proposed Madison Prep charter school appear closer to resolution after a series of meetings and communications Friday between Urban League CEO Kaleem Caire, district Superintendent Daniel Nerad and John Matthews, executive director of Madison Teachers Inc.
The changes are just in time for a public hearing on the Urban League-backed school on Monday, Oct. 3 at 6 p.m. at the Doyle Administration Building, 545 W. Dayton St.
In a major shift, the proposed charter school will now be what’s called an “instrumentality” of the Madison Metropolitan School District. That means a significant portion of the school’s staff will be covered by the contract the district has with the local teachers union, Madison Teachers Inc. The contract runs through the end of June 2013
Matthew DeFour and Gayle Worland:
On the eve of a public hearing for Madison Preparatory Academy — a proposed charter school with single-sex classrooms focused on raising the academic performance of minority students — backers of the school agreed to employ union staff, eliminating a potential hurdle to approval of the school.
A budget plan for Madison Prep, proposed by the Urban League of Greater Madison, also was released late Friday. It estimates the Madison School District would spend $19.8 million over five years on the school, or about $2,000 less per student than it spends on other secondary-school students.
In lengthy meetings Friday, Urban League officials hammered out an agreement with Madison Teachers Inc., the union that represents Madison school teachers. MTI executive director John Matthews said the union, which previously opposed creation of Madison Prep, will remain neutral on whether the school should be approved.
Fascinating. It will be interesting to see the substance of the arrangement, particularly its implications for the current MMSD schools and Madison Prep’s curriculum and operating plans.
A friend notes that the change is “stunning” and that it will likely “cost more” and perhaps “gut” some of Madison Prep’s essential components.
Academic Performance and the BCS
John V. Lombardi , Elizabeth D. Capaldi and Craig W. Abbey:
Those of us who inhabit the core of the university’s academic environment share the enthusiasm for measuring and evaluating the quality of our institutions, although we have less enthusiasm for the endless ranked lists that appear in popular publications.
While some dote on the U.S. News rankings, which like their BCS counterpart rely on hugely unreliable opinion surveys, we, however, prefer our own system for evaluating the Top American Research Universities that recognizes the importance of successful performance among highly competitive institutions without requiring a simple top to bottom ranking that often distorts more than it informs.
For over ten years, The Center for Measuring University Performance, now located at Arizona State University, has produced an annual report on the Top American Research Universities that uses objective data on nine measures to put universities into categories according to their performance.
10 Things Student Loan Companies Won’t Say
Your co-signer could do you more harm than good.
Before they will lend thousands of dollars to a college-bound 18-year-old, around 80% of private lenders require a co-signer, according to the Consumer Bankers Association. Typically, that’s a parent or another relative, but it can be anyone willing to take responsibility for paying back the loan. Private lenders often tout the benefit of an adult cosigner, saying that because students don’t have much of a credit history, the a co-signer’s good standing can help secure a lower interest rate. That’s true, but it also puts the student at the mercy of the parent’s credit history, which may not be so stable these days.
The Higher-Education Battle the White House Should Be Waging
In February 2009, in his first speech to Congress, President Obama pledged that America would regain the world lead in college attainment by 2020. It was a bold declaration, one that gave hope to those who worry that the nation’s historic commitment to higher learning is at risk.
Whether Obama really means it, however, remains to be seen. The administration has not yet developed a plan that would plausibly produce the millions of additional graduates needed to meet the 2020 goal.
To get there, the president must change the politics of higher-education reform. He should begin by using the bully pulpit to underscore how public and student interests often conflict with the priorities of traditional colleges and universities. The administration knows how to do this, because it’s already done so–twice. In 2010 it took $87-billion in unneeded student-loan subsidies away from private banks and gave the money to taxpayers and low-income students in the form of more-generous Pell Grants. In 2011 the Department of Education installed a new system for regulating the rapidly growing for-profit higher-education sector, protecting public dollars and saving students from being suckered into borrowing too much money for low-value degrees.
Race-based bake sale attracts attention at UC
A face-off on the UC Berkeley campus Tuesday pitted Democrats vs. Republicans, pro-affirmative-action students vs. those favoring race-blind policies, and, ultimately, cupcakes vs. brownies.
None other than former UC Regent and affirmative-action opponent Ward Connerly showed up on Sproul Plaza to help campus Republicans sell frosted cupcakes priced according to the race of the buyer – a stunt intended to mock legislation before the governor that would allow universities to consider race and ethnicity in admissions decisions.
K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: Bread & Circuses, or a Look at California’s Union, Pension, Budget and Political Challenges
David Crane, the former economic adviser–at that moment rapidly receding into the distance–could itemize the result: a long list of depressing government financial statistics. The pensions of state employees ate up twice as much of the budget when Schwarzenegger left office as they had when he arrived, for instance. The officially recognized gap between what the state would owe its workers and what it had on hand to pay them was roughly $105 billion, but that, thanks to accounting gimmicks, was probably only about half the real number. “This year the state will directly spend $32 billion on employee pay and benefits, up 65 percent over the past 10 years,” says Crane later. “Compare that to state spending on higher education [down 5 percent], health and human services [up just 5 percent], and parks and recreation [flat], all crowded out in large part by fast-rising employment costs.” Crane is a lifelong Democrat with no particular hostility to government. But the more he looked into the details, the more shocking he found them to be. In 2010, for instance, the state spent $6 billion on fewer than 30,000 guards and other prison-system employees. A prison guard who started his career at the age of 45 could retire after five years with a pension that very nearly equaled his former salary. The head parole psychiatrist for the California prison system was the state’s highest-paid public employee; in 2010 he’d made $838,706. The same fiscal year that the state spent $6 billion on prisons, it had invested just $4.7 billion in its higher education–that is, 33 campuses with 670,000 students. Over the past 30 years the state’s share of the budget for the University of California has fallen from 30 percent to 11 percent, and it is about to fall a lot more. In 1980 a Cal student paid $776 a year in tuition; in 2011 he pays $13,218. Everywhere you turn, the long-term future of the state is being sacrificed.
This same set of facts, and the narrative it suggested, would throw an ordinary man into depression. He might conclude that he lived in a society that was ungovernable. After seven years of trying and mostly failing to run California, Schwarzenegger is persuasively not depressed. “You have to realize the thing was so much fun!” he says. “We had a great time! There were times of frustration. There were times of disappointment. But if you want to live rather than just exist, you want the drama.” As we roll to a stop very near the place on the beach where he began his American bodybuilding career, he says, “You have to step back and say, ‘I was elected under odd circumstances. And I’m going out in odd circumstances.’ You can’t have it both ways. You can’t be a spoiled brat.”
wikipedia on bread and circuses.
Bipartisan bill would block automatic voucher school expansion in Wisconsin
Ten Wisconsin senators, from both parties, have joined forces to propose legislation that would require any further expansion of voucher schools to receive a full public debate.
The state’s voucher program provides taxpayer funds for families to send their children to private schools. It has served low-income students in Milwaukee for about 20 years, but was expanded by Gov. Scott Walker in the state budget passed in June without public debate or other legislative action.
Also included was language allowing automatic expansion of the voucher program in the future to any school district in Wisconsin that meets certain financial and demographic criteria.
That mechanism isn’t sitting well with some senators, including Senate President Mike Ellis, R-Neenah. He introduced SB 174, which ensures that any further expansion of the voucher program would include full public debate and legislative action.
“Sen. Ellis is not an enthusiastic advocate nor is he an opponent of voucher programs. But he’s long argued that policy issues should not be added into the budget process and this legislation addresses concerns about automatic expansion without proper debate,” says Michael Boerger, an aide to Ellis.
Students say: ‘Pressure? What pressure?’
We have had a lively debate in the Washington area, and other regions blessed with competitive high schools, about the demands we make on students.
Much of the talk has been about the documentary “Race to Nowhere.” The film’s creator, Vicki Abeles, told me its popularity is proof of a “silent epidemic” of “pressure-cooker education” nationally.
How much academic stress do students feel? Hart Research Associates just asked them. The answer was: not a lot. Of a representative sample of the high school Class of 2010, 69 percent said the requirements for graduating, including tests and courses, were “easy” or “very easy.” And 47 percent said they totally or mainly wish they had worked harder in high school. An additional 16 percent partially feel that way.
The Hart poll, done for the College Board, was not inspired by discussions of “Race to Nowhere,” College Board officials say, but it is relevant. It includes a question about the Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate programs; those college-level courses and extra-long final exams that are often said to be crushing our youth.
Education entrepreneurship, disruption alive and well
ImagineK12, an incubator modeled after Y Combinator to help education startups “get it right and get funded,” held its first demo day for its first cohort of 10 companies Sept. 9 in Palo Alto, Calif., and a week later the companies presented at TechCrunch Disrupt.
The companies’ pitches were crisp and intriguing, and I was struck–and encouraged–by how many of them are attempting disruptive strategies. Who knows how many in the cohort will be successful of course–they are all heading into notoriously choppy waters in a space that, as I’ve written about, feels a bit overheated at the moment–but by going this route, they do improve their odds.
Here is a rundown of just some of the things that struck me.
GoalBook: The company’s mission is to create a personal learning plan for every student. So where are they starting? Special education. Why? The law requires students to have individual learning plans (ILPs). Goalbook can create help a teacher and school create these way more affordably–not a bad thing in times of budget cuts when less expensive (think low-end disruption) could be critical to allowing districts to continue to fulfill their legal mandate.
Professors take academic road to the east
A decade ago most aspiring business professors headed west, to the US. These days they are heading in the opposite direction: Asia is becoming the hotspot for the top management thinkers.
The past year has seen some of the world’s most distinguished business professors move to Asia – China and Singapore in particular. Blair Sheppard, former dean of the Fuqua school at Duke University in the US, Arnoud de Meyer, former dean of the University of Cambridge’s Judge business school, Howard Thomas, former dean of Warwick Business School in the UK, and George Yip, former dean of the Rotterdam School of Management, are just a few.
One obvious reason is the growth in Asian economies, says John Quelch, the Harvard marketing professor and former dean at London Business School, who became dean at Ceibs in Shanghai in January. “The relative growth trajectories favour Asia rather than Europe and the US. In the US, recent political intransigence is adding to the feeling of malaise.”
Test Scores, Multiple Measures, and Circular Reasoning
Anthony Cody’s recent reflection on this year’s Education Nation program on MSNBC offers an important caution to those trying to develop “multiple measures” for student learning and effective teaching. If the decision to use a given measure is determined solely by whether or not it’s linked to higher standardized test scores (as with the Gates Foundation’s Measures of Effective Teaching study), then you don’t really have “multiple measures.”
Tracking test scores can be an important tool in helping students make progress, and it is useful to know which elements of classroom practice have a significant impact on students’ performance on end-of-the-year tests. For example, teachers in Chicago who had high ratings on Charlotte Danielson’s framework for evaluating effective teaching have also been shown to have higher value-added scores. However, when test scores are used as the sole measure of effective teaching and learning — or when valuable aspects of effective teaching and important types of student learning are discarded or ignored because they don’t align with standardized test results — our students are the ones who ultimately pay the price.
Do you notice what is bothering me? Mrs. Gates begins by acknowledging that good teaching cannot be reduced to a test score — or at least that this is often said. She then asserts that the half billion dollars they have spent on research in this area have uncovered a number of things that can be measured that allow us to predict which teachers will have the highest test scores. A great teacher is defined over and over again as one who made sure students “learned the material at the end of the year.”
Technology isn’t the fix for what ails America’s schools
If it weren’t so tragic, it might be amusing.
Last week, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan had an op-ed article in The Wall Street Journal, co-authored with Reed Hastings, CEO of Netflix, pushing “Digital Promise,” a new program to use technology to “revolutionize” K-12 education.
It was published the day after Hastings sent an email to Netflix customers informing them that, in addition to having just ticked them off by both limiting their choices and hiking rates, he also planned to split the company into two separate and unrelated entertainment services.
Career advice worth spreading
In part, that was down to a wonderfully diverse range of ideas and participants. Vidal Sassoon’s touching monologue about his journery from orphan to perhaps the most famous hairdresser in the world sat seamlessly beside Marcus du Sautoy discussing multi-dimensional symmetry. Alan McGee’s tales of launching Oasis into super-stardom and his battles with drug abuse somehow beautifully complemented Aubrey de Grey’s explanations of the complexities of regenerative therapies for ageing. Even cybernetic professor, Kevin Warwick’s description of a future where our bodies are augmented and invaded by technology managed not to feel at odds with Charles Roberts’ inspirational not-for-profit project Greeenstar, which aims to help consumers make green choices by including environmental weightings in internet searches.
Such cohesion is no mean feat, and successfully achieving it made for a relentless yet inspiring day – a sentiment echoed by the attendees I spoke to. “I just love the fact that there are talks on such a wide range of topics,” one of them told me. “I’m learning about areas I would never sit down and read about. It makes you value the overlap between topics in a whole new way.”
Blurring of boundaries was celebrated by du Sautoy, too, who took time to probe the fallacies of the science-humanities divide. “When I was at school I was frustrated by the idea of being put in an arts or science box,” said du Sautoy. “But mathematicians often talk of beauty and aesthetics. The mathematics I do, I do because it tells an interesting story.” A refreshing alternative to conventional career advice, and an important point to remember: a career in science needn’t mean you can’t dabble in the arts, and vice versa.
Seton Hall Offers Top Applicants Two-Thirds Off
For students with their sights set on a private college, the anxiety comes as a one-two punch: first from competing with thousands of others for a precious few spots, then from trying to scrape together up to $50,000 a year to foot the bill.
Starting next year, Seton Hall University will try to ease that follow-up blow for early applicants with strong academic credentials, giving them two-thirds off the regular sticker price for tuition, a discount of some $21,000. For New Jersey residents, who constitute about 70 percent of Seton Hall’s undergraduates, that would make the cost equivalent to that of Rutgers University, the state’s flagship public institution; for those from out of state, the private school would be much cheaper than the public one.
National experts on admissions and financial aid said the policy was the first of its kind. Seton Hall officials said they hoped it would provide clarity and certainty up front to the most desirable applicants, easing the weeks and months of stress that admitted students face as they wait to hear how much financial aid they might get from different campuses.
Madison Teachers union receives national recognition for organizing protests
A Madison teachers union will receive a national award for its organizational work during last spring’s protests against Gov. Scott Walker’s budget repair bill throughout Wisconsin.
The Institute for Policy Studies, located in Washington, D.C., announced Tuesday Madison Teachers Incorporated would be honored with the Letelier-Motiff Human Rights Award on Oct. 12, said ISP spokesperson Lacy MacAuleyet.
IPS annually presents two awards to honor those who the group believes to be “unsung heroes of the progressive movement.” One award is presented domestically and one internationally, she said.
MTI Executive Director John Matthews said the union has never received an award of this caliber.
“This is a first,” Matthews said. “[The national distinction represents] significant recognition for MTI’s leadership. MTI hasn’t slowed its effort in the movement.”
WEAC (Wisconsin Teacher Union): Who Benefits?
Why this area teacher chose the non-union option
Elijah Grajkowski:
If the teachers union is as wonderful as it claims, then it should have no problem attracting members, without the need to force teachers to join. How is this any different from any other professional organization that teachers, as professionals, may choose to join? It’s a question I have been pondering since I became a public school teacher in Wisconsin.
For years, I have chosen not to be a member of the union. However, this is a choice I didn’t exactly have before Gov. Scott Walker’s collective-bargaining bill became law. As a compulsory union state, where teachers are required to pay union dues as a condition of employment, the most I could hope for was a “fair share” membership, where the union refunded me a small portion of the money that was taken from my paycheck that lawyers have deemed “un-chargeable.”
Every September, after lengthy, bureaucratic and unadvertised hurdles, I would file my certified letter to try to withdraw my union membership. Then, the union would proceed to drag its feet in issuing my small refund. I often wondered why this kind of burden would be put on an individual teacher like me. Shouldn’t it be up to the organization to convince people and to sell its benefits to potential members afresh each year?
Why should I have to move mountains each fall to break ties with this group that I don’t want to be a part of in the first place? Something seemed dreadfully wrong with that picture.
Union’s efforts help all students, educators and schools
WEAC President Mary Bell:
I became a Wisconsin teacher more than 30 years ago. I entered my classroom on the first day of school with my eyes and heart wide open, dedicated to the education of children and to the promise public schools offer. I was part of our state’s longstanding education tradition.
Like many beginning teachers, I soon encountered the many challenges and opportunities educators face every day in schools. About 50% of new educators leave the profession within their first five years of teaching. New teachers need mentors, suggestions, support and encouragement to help them meet the individual needs of students (all learning at different speeds and in different ways) and teach life lessons that can’t be learned from textbooks.
That’s where the union comes in. In many ways, much of the work the Wisconsin Education Association Council does is behind the scenes: supporting new teachers through union-led mentoring programs and offering training and skill development to help teachers with their licenses and certification. Our union helps teachers achieve National Board Certification – the highest accomplishment in the profession – and provides hands-on training for support professionals to become certified in their fields. These are efforts that benefit all Wisconsin educators, not just a few, and no single educator could accomplish them all alone.
To Hover Over Schoolwork, Parents Go Online
When Debbie Sumner Mahle, an Atlanta mother, wants to know what her sons, ages 6, 7 and 10, are working on in school, she turns on her computer and logs into NetClassroom. The portal lets her see not just their school assignments but also their attendance and grades.
More public and private school systems are wiring up data-management systems, and school work is just the tip of the iceberg. Parent-accessible websites and “learning community management systems”–or LCMSs, in the age of no jargon left behind–are increasingly handling schools’ scheduling, emergency contacts, immunizations, academic assessments and even meals, with some offering a daily nutritional breakdown of lunch.
Ms. Sumner Mahle receives email reminders to place her sons’ requests at orderlunches.com, which manages the meal program at their school, the Davis Academy. If she wants to work a shift as a cafeteria monitor, or bring cupcakes to a Halloween party, she signs up at volunteerspot.com.
An Excerpt from “Getting Schooled: The re-education of an American teacher”
On the first day of school I begin my classes with John Coltrane’s “Welcome,” at the closing bars of which a palpable attentiveness comes over my chattering students, proof of what I’ve always believed about the source of Coltrane’s genius and the wellspring within even the dopiest-seeming kid. “This is nice music,” one boy remarks, and no one sneers. As I will do with the other musical introductions I play throughout the year, all chosen to fit the interval between passing bells, I key in my selection on a purse-size CD player, as quaint to the iPod generation as a Victrola is to me. I write the name of each artist and piece on the blackboard, including the date of composition when I can find it, usually a year predating that of my students’ birth (circa 1995).
I wear a jacket and tie almost every day, one of the few adults at school who do. To these I add a pair of well-oiled work boots, an offhand expression of solidarity with the parents of our community but mostly a concession to my falling arches. For the first time in many years I have what can be called a “look”–like me and like the white-collar trade of teaching itself, a strange amalgam. A girl passing in the hall remarks that I always look “spiffy.” I reply that I would have thought I looked old. “Hey, how old are you?” she counters. “Thirty?” I take this as a compliment and beam accordingly, though on reflection I wonder if she is simply trying to agree that I am old.
Scott Walker and Mitch Daniels on Public Employee Unions
The governor of Wisconsin, Scott Walker, and the governor of Indiana, Mitch Daniels, were both in New York City earlier this week for a Manhattan Institute conference about a “new social contract” with public employees.
Mr. Walker spoke first. He said the changes enacted in Wisconsin that had opponents sitting in and sleeping over in the state capital in protest earlier this year had saved $1.44 billion for state and local governments combined. He said school districts had used the savings to hire more teachers to reduce class sizes and to offer merit pay.
Mr. Walker said voters are looking for “not Republican leadership, not Democrat leadership, they just want leadership.”
Mr. Walker contrasted his approach with that of Governor Patrick Quinn, a Democrat, of Wisconsin’s neighbor Illinois, who “laid off thousands” of state workers after “massive tax increases.”
Study finds low graduation rates among part-time college students
Growing numbers of college students are in school part time, and they face increasingly long odds of ever graduating, according to a report released Tuesday.
The report, Time is the Enemy, by the nonprofit group Complete College America, includes data on full- and part-time students at public colleges and universities in 33 states, including California. It was funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Lumina Foundation and others.
“There is a new generation of students who are poorer, more likely to be a minority, working and with families,” said Stan Jones, the organization’s president. “The graduation rates are very low, so that even though more people are going to college looking to better themselves and better their economic circumstances, those goals are not being realized because the system is failing them.”
Among the report’s key findings:
Further Commentary on the Proposed Madison Preparatory Academy IB Charter School: Gender discrimination likely a red herring in charter school discussion
The Madison School District now has another justification for killing a charter school aimed at doing what the district hasn’t: consistently educate minority students.
Last week, the state Department of Public Instruction said the first half of a planning grant for Madison Preparatory Academy would be released. Madison Prep would focus on low-income minority students and was originally just for boys but has since been revamped to include girls in separate classrooms.
But DPI had a catch: In order to get the rest of the grant, the school must provide scientific research that single-gender education is effective. If you’re going to discriminate by gender, DPI is saying, at least have a good reason for it.
I can’t help but wonder: Is this the best DPI can do?
I don’t know much more than what I’ve read in this newspaper about how Madison Prep would organize itself, what kinds of educational approaches it would use or how capable its sponsor, the Urban League of Greater Madison, would be.
ewsletter (as of this writing PD has not taken a position on the Madison Prep proposal). I’ve only changed minimally for posting here; one thing I have added is some hyperlinks (but I did not link as thoroughly as I usually do), another is a small “For Further Reading” set of links at the end,” and of course the song. This is intended to be a broad overview and introduction to what I think are some of the most important issues concerning the decision on the Madison Preparatory Academy presented in the context of related national issues. Issues raised in this post have been and will be treated in more depth — and with hyperlinks — in other posts]
For decades free market advocates such as the Bradley Foundation, the Walton Foundation and the Koch brothers have a waged a multi-front campaign against the public sector and the idea of the common good. Public education has been one of the key battlegrounds. In the coming weeks the Madison Metropolitan School District Board of Education will decide whether to approve a proposal for the Madison Prep Charter School. This proposal and the chief advocate for it – Kaleem Caire of the Urban League of Greater Madison – have their roots in the Bradley/Walton/Koch movement, and like much of that movement they offer false promises of educational progress in order to obscure the damage being done to every child in our public schools.
A Public Hearing on the Madison Prep proposal has been scheduled for Monday October 3, at 6:00 PM in the Doyle Building Auditorium; The Madison Prep proposal is on the agenda of the PD General Membership Meeting (Wed , 9/28 , 6:00 p.m, Hawthorne Branch Library, guests welcome).
Much more on the proposed Madison Preparatory Academy IB Charter School, here.
Parents Losing Faith in Hong Kong Schools
It is no secret that top Hong Kong officials have long said “no” to the education system they govern by sending their own children to schools abroad.
But now more than half of all Hongkongers say they will follow suit, according to a recent survey.
Fifty-two per cent of parents polled said they planned to send their children abroad, according to the survey conducted by credit card company MasterCard. That contrasts with 13 per cent on the mainland and 34 per cent in Taiwan.
Educating the Gifted
Norman Augustine, via a kind reader’s email:
The very subject of giftedness is fraught with contradiction and controversy. On the one hand, we often encounter misunderstanding, envy, and perceived elitism–and on the other, admiration, dependency, and respect. Little wonder that our K-12 education system has not yet determined how best to nurture extraordinary individuals so that they can become extraordinary contributors to society–and feel rewarded in doing so. Unfortunately, it is not simply the gifted who are underserved by most of our nation’s 14,000 public school systems; that group is just more acutely neglected, along with the economically less fortunate, than the nation’s student population as a whole.
RBC to Pay $30.4 Million Over Wisconsin Investment Sales
Andrew Ackerman & Joan Solsman:
The Securities and Exchange Commission said the corporate and investment-banking arm of Royal Bank of Canada agreed to pay $30.4 million to settle charges it inappropriately sold unsuitable investments to five Wisconsin school districts.
The settlement, disclosed Tuesday, with the SEC comes as the agency is stepping up its probe into complex derivatives transactions at the heart of the financial crisis. The school district case is the latest to arise out of those efforts, SEC officials said.
“This unit has brought several cases and there will still be some more to come,” said Kenneth Lench, chief of the SEC enforcement division’s structured- and new-products unit, which jointly investigated the matter with a separate municipal securities-enforcement team.
K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: Poverty pervades the suburbs
Guess where most people in poverty live? Hint: It’s not in the inner cities or rural America.
It’s in the idyllic suburbs.
A record 15.4 million suburban residents lived below the poverty line last year, up 11.5% from the year before, according to a Brookings Institution analysis of Census data released Thursday. That’s one-third of the nation’s poor.
And their ranks are swelling fast, as jobs disappear and incomes decline amid the continued weak economy.
Since 2000, the number of suburban poor has skyrocketed by 53%, battered by the two recessions that wiped out many manufacturing jobs early on, and low-wage construction and retail positions more recently.
America’s cities, meanwhile, had 12.7 million people in poverty last year, up about 5% from the year before and 23% since 2000. The remaining 18 million poor folks in the U.S. are roughly split between smaller metro areas and rural communities.
Madison School Board OKs use of police dogs for drug searches
In the coming weeks, Madison police dogs will be able to sniff through the halls, bathrooms and parking lots of the city’s middle and high schools if school principals suspect there may be illegal drugs there.
The School Board voted 5-1 Monday to allow the sweeps, which school officials say will help eliminate drug use and trafficking in schools and decrease violence. Annual evaluations will be conducted to assess the program’s effectiveness.
Supporters, including Madison Police Chief Noble Wray, said it could be an effective and color-blind tool as part of a strategy to keep schools safe. The dogs would search for marijuana, heroin and cocaine.
Luis Yudice, coordinator of safety and security for the school district, said one statistic that led officials to consider these searches was the 60 percent increase in student code-of-conduct violations since 2007 occurring because of drugs.
The Global Report: Compare US School Districts to the World
The Global Report Card, via a kind Chan Stroman-Roll email:
The Global Report Card was developed by Jay P. Greene and Josh B. McGee as part of the George W. Bush Institute’s Education Reform Initiative. The Bush Institute works to increase dramatically the number of American students who graduate high school ready for college or prepared for a good career by:
- cultivating a new generation of principals
- implementing cutting edge research
- advancing accountability
Driven by accountability and data, these initiatives challenge the status quo and lead a wide range of partners to share goals and use clear metrics tied to student achievement.
Summary of Methodology
The calculations begin by evaluating the distributions of student achievement at the state, national, and international level. To allow for direct comparisons across state and national borders, and thus testing instruments, we map all testing data to the standard normal curve using the appropriate student level mean and standard deviation. We then calculate at the lowest level of aggregation by estimating average district quality within each state. Each state’s average quality is evaluated then using national testing data. And finally, the average national quality is determined using international testing data. Essentially, this re-centers our distribution of district quality based upon the relative performance of the individual state when compared to the nation as a whole as well as the relative performance of the nation when compared to our economic competitors.
For example, the average student in Scarsdale School District in Westchester County, New York scored nearly one standard deviation above the mean for New York on the state’s math exam. The average student in New York scored six hundredths of a standard deviation above the national average of the NAEP exam given in the same year, and the average student in the United States scored about as far in the negative direction (-.055) from the international average on PISA. Our final index score for Scarsdale in 2007 is equal to the sum of the district, state, and national estimates (1+.06+ -.055 = 1.055). Since the final index score is expired in standard deviation units, it can easily be converted to a percentile for easy interpretation. In our example, Scarsdale would rank at the seventy seventh percentile internationally in math.
The Best United States School Districts (2007 Math data) [PDF].
Related: www.wisconsin2.org and 1990-2010 US High School & College Graduation Comparison.
What Do Test Scores Tell Us?
Tests used to be just for evaluating students, but now the testing of students is used to evaluate teachers and, in fact, the entire educational system. On an individual level, some students and parents have noticed a change — more standardized tests and more classroom and homework time devoted to preparation for them.
So what exactly do test scores tell us?
Poor test scores are the initial premises in most current arguments for educational reform. At the end of last year, reading scores that showed American 15-year-olds in the middle of an international pack, led by Asian countries, prompted calls from researchers and educators for immediate action. This year two sociologists, Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa, showed that 45 percent of students, after two years of college, have made no significant gains on a test of critical thinking. Last week’s report of falling SAT scores is the latest example.
Classroom Seating Habits
In college, I was one of those guys who sat in the back and doodled in my notebook. Sometimes I fell asleep. One time I fell asleep and woke up in the middle of a different class. I blame the professor. Why would you turn off the lights for a two-hour session in a big lecture hall, while reading verbatim from world’s most boring powerpoint presentation?
Anyways, we all have our seating pockets that we like to settle in. Skyrill, a two-brother design team, took it upon themselves to visualize the seating habits of their graduate student classmates in class 15.514 at MIT.
Martin Institute Looks at Inclusion Teaching
Public and private school teachers will explore the shifting line between “mainstream” students and special education students during a two-day special education summit at The Martin Institute that begins Tuesday, Sept. 27.
The session is for special education teachers. The Wednesday session is for teachers outside the specific special education area. Both are on the Presbyterian Day School campus in East Memphis.
The summit and an 18-month focus on special education that follows arose from a series of luncheons and discussions Institute director Clif Mims had last spring with special education teachers.
The teachers and school system administrators cited “inclusion teaching” as both a trend and a challenge for all teachers.
In Public School Reform, What Can Private Money Buy?
Bill Gates has donated more than $5 billion to improve U.S. schools. But he sees little bang for all those bucks. What do other philanthropists–and the school systems who’ve benefited from them–think they have to show for what’s been spent?
Two months ago, Bill Gates told the Wall Street Journal that private money–including upwards of $5 billion in Gates foundation funding–“didn’t move the needle much,” in terms of substantial, measurable improvements in student achievement and graduation outcomes.
“It’s hard to improve public education–that’s clear,” Gates said. “If you’re picking stocks, you wouldn’t pick this one.”
6 wild ideas for ideal schools
A month ago, I suggested that readers stop asking me what’s a good school and come up with their own ideas. I wanted fresh concepts, including some that were already operating and producing better achievement without putting too much strain on staffs and students.
I gave two thriving models as examples, the New York Performance Standards Consortium and the KIPP schools. Reader suggestions poured in. Some were crazy, but so what? Look for details on my blog on Friday. Here are the ones I thought most interesting. What do you think of them?
Quest Early College High School, Houston (submitted by Katie Test of the ASCD educational leadership organization). This 16-year-old public high school focuses on both academic and emotional needs with an advisory program that keeps students in regular contact with educators and emphasis on health, including a personal wellness plan. They start college courses freshman year and do community service every Friday.
Commentary on Wisconsin School Choice Battles
A 3,000 plus word article by Bill Lueders in the Capital Times today questions the motives behind legislators that support the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program (MPCP). Specifically targeted is Rep. Howard Marklein, a freshman legislator from Spring Green who had the gall to not only support school choice in Milwaukee but also to introduce legislation to improve the program.
Lueders quotes Rep. Sandy Pope-Roberts as asking: “What’s in this for Howard Marklein?…If it isn’t for the campaign funds, why is he doing this?”
Perhaps he is doing it because it benefits taxpayers in the 51st Assembly district. As Marklein points out to Lueders, an analysis by the Legislative Fiscal Bureau shows the MPCP is a benefit to his constituents. Without the MPCP, the 15 school districts represented by Rep. Marklein would lose $1.3 million in state aid. The estimate assumes that 90% of students in the MPCP would have no choice but to return to the more expensive Milwaukee Public School (MPS) system if the MPCP was ended. The 90% figure is the number used by the official state evaluators of the MPCP and is based on evidence from choice programs around the country.
David Blaska has more.
TJ Mertz:
This is Take Two in a series. Take One, with a fuller introduction, can be found here. Briefly, the idea of the series is to counter anti-teacher and anti-teachers’ union individuals and “reform” groups appropriation of the phrase “it is all about the kids” as a means to heap scorn and ridicule on public education and public education employees by investigating some of the actions of these individuals and groups in light of the question “is it all about the kids?” In each take, national developments are linked to local matters in relation to the Madison Prep charter school proposal.
Take Two: A Picture is Worth A Thousand Words: Public Lotteries and the Exploitation of Families and Children
Schools need more than money to improve
Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker:
Education is a key part of job creation and long-term economic growth. That’s one of the reasons why the issue is so important to me and governors across the country. It’s also why I’m excited to be participating in an extended national discussion about the future of education, how it will be the backbone of future innovation, and help grow our economy.
As part of an “Education Nation Summit” hosted by NBC on Monday, I will be talking with a bipartisan group of governors about education in America and its importance to economic competitiveness.
Although Democratic and Republican governors don’t always agree on every issue, there is broad consensus about the need to improve education in our country to keep our workforce the best in a global economy. Almost every governor has dealt with declining revenues and difficult budget decisions, but almost every governor has ideas on how to reform and improve education that go beyond spending more money.
K-12 America Since 1981
edweek, via a kind Richard Askey email:
This interactive timeline digs deep into the Education Week archives to tell the story of U.S. education and the changing policies, theories, and perspectives that have influenced it since 1981, the year the publication began.
Abolish the U.S. Department of Education? Seriously?
We all owe Stella Lohmann of Atlanta, Georgia thanks. Ms. Lohmann is the substitute teacher who via video asked GOP candidates in last night’s debate:
What as president would you seriously do about what I consider a massive overreach of big government into the classroom?
Prior to asking the question, Ms. Lohmann offered some important context to show her credibility:
I’ve taught in both public and private schools, and now as a substitute teacher I see administrators more focused on satisfying federal mandates, retaining funding, trying not to get sued, while the teachers are jumping through hoops trying to serve up a one-size-fits-all education for their students.
Next time I visit Georgia, I would not mind shaking Ms. Lohmann’s hand for posing such an interesting and illuminating, albeit extremely loaded, question.
Then I would ask whether she happens to be the same blogger and communications consultant found at stellalohmann.com wearing a “Freedom Czar” baseball hat. And how Fox happened to find her?
Book Review: School Blues
THOMAS NAGEL, an American philosopher, wants to know what it is like for a bat to be a bat. Ian Anderson, a Scot who performs with the band Jethro Tull, sang of a slightly less intractable difficulty: “wise men don’t know how it feels to be thick as a brick.” In “School Blues” Daniel Pennac, a prize-winning French writer, describes what faces a school dunce when the teacher before him cannot recall what it felt like to be ignorant.
Mr Pennac was once such a child (he uses the French cancre, as in Cancer, the crab: a creature that scuttles sideways instead of advancing forwards). But despite becoming a teacher, he can remember what it was like not to understand lessons. The voices in his head remind him of it. They taunt him throughout his semi-autobiographical novel, which partially traces his sorry academic career as the child of high-achieving parents whose three older brothers excelled at school. Luckily for him, his parents did not let him flee the system but instead persisted in finding a teacher who would help him to succeed. The breakthrough came aged 14 when his latest tutor–“no doubt amazed by my increasingly inventive excuses as to why I hadn’t done my homework”–commissioned him to write essays and then a novel.
Common Core unconstitutional, will “nationalize mediocrity, stifle innovation”
With the help of some Republican governors and school board members, the Obama Administration is on the verge of taking over education.
Common Core is the latest attempt to expand the reach of federal government even more broadly into our daily lives. Common Core, which was reportedly conceived by the National Association of Governors, was originally presented to the states as an effort to develop consistency in state curriculums for college and workforce readiness. Theoretically, the Common Core standards will improve education outcomes and increase transparency and accountability.
One problem with the new Common Core standards is that they are almost indistinguishable from the old state standards they are supposed to replace. According to an Education Week blog by Catherine Gewertz, many teachers and administrators don’t see any difference between their old state standards and the Common Core standards. The fact is, state boards of education have bought into something that most of them had little or no input in and that many of them really do not fully understand and that will inevitably lead to having federal government bureaucrats setting education standards for Alabama’s children.
A Look at Madison Badger Rock Middle School
On a recent school day, sixth-grader Cassidy Wimmer places surveyors’ flags in spots where runoff water from the Beltline, other roads and parking lots flows toward the wetlands of Indian Springs south of Madison.
She and her classmates are part of a field biology class at Badger Rock Middle School and they’re learning a hands-on lesson about water quality and the environment in the neighborhood that surrounds their school.
“It’s interesting to see where the water travels,” she says. “It probably has a lot of pollution in it.”
Meanwhile, other students from Badger Rock are studying an enormous burr oak tree, and estimating its age. Still other sixth-graders are helping move a giant compost pile toward a community garden at their school that they help tend. Their lesson today is on improving soil to nourish growing plants, and learning the ideal ratio of carbon to nitrogen to create the best compost.
Pro-Charter Group Seeks to Bolster Support
Dan Mihalopoulous & Rebecca Vevea:
Chicago’s charter school advocates could have reason for unprecedented optimism, given that new Mayor Rahm Emanuel frequently praises their efforts – and that a prominent charter-school executive was Emanuel’s election campaign co-chairman.
Yet, rather than assume that they will reap the benefits of firm political backing, charter advocates say they are organizing a show of support from parents to help convince the new mayor and other leaders that they deserve more funding.
A rally on Saturday, billed as the “Charter schools Day of Action,” is among the first public displays of a new public-relations push. The New Schools for Chicago group, which is devoting tens of millions of dollars to scores of new charters, has entered into a $250,000 contract with the United Neighborhood Organization to organize public support, said Juan Rangel, UNO’s chief executive officer.
The destructive nature of power without status
Nathanael J. Fast, Nir Halevy, Adam D. Galinsky:
The current research explores how roles that possess power but lack status influence behavior toward others. Past research has primarily examined the isolated effects of having either power or status, but we propose that power and status interact to affect interpersonal behavior. Based on the notions that a) low-status is threatening and aversive and b) power frees people to act on their internal states and feelings, we hypothesized that power without status fosters demeaning behaviors toward others. To test this idea, we orthogonally manipulated both power and status and gave participants the chance to select activities for their partners to perform. As predicted, individuals in high-power/low-status roles chose more demeaning activities for their partners (e.g., bark like a dog, say “I am filthy”) than did those in any other combination of power and status roles. We discuss how these results clarify, challenge, and advance the existing power and status literatures.
A New Law on School Fitness Data Faces Obstacles
Texas children are fat — and getting fatter.
It is something state policy makers have known and have struggled to address for years. In the last decade, the Legislature has passed laws that set nutritional standards for school meals, required body mass index screenings for children and adolescents, and instituted physical activity requirements.
The latest effort came during this year’s legislative session with a bill passed by Senator Jane Nelson, Republican of Flower Mound, that allows a deeper study of schools’ fitness data.
Under the new law, researchers can access unidentified individual student data, which they say will help bolster aggregate analyses that already show correlations between physical fitness and academic performance, gang activity and absenteeism.
Think Different? Not in Higher Ed
When Steve Jobs introduced the “Think Different” advertising campaign on his return to the helm of Apple, in 1997, the slogan was not just aimed at consumers. It was also meant to inspire those inside the struggling company to innovate for the future.
Of course, what followed is now the story of one of the most successful companies in American history: a decade when Apple transformed the music industry with the iPod, the mobile-phone industry with the iPhone, and now the publishing industry with the iPad.
Apple succeed partly because it decided to take a different path than its competitors in the tech industry, and consumers followed. The history of business is filled with similar tales. Just look at what happened to Detroit’s Big Three after the arrival of Japanese automakers in the United States.
Clashes of Money and Values: A Survey of Admissions Directors
Admissions counselors like to talk about finding the right “fit” for applicants — a great match between a student’s educational and other goals and an institution’s programs. But a new survey of the senior admissions officials at colleges nationwide finds that this “fit” is, from many colleges’ point of view, increasingly about money. As evidence of that pressure, the survey found that:
For many colleges, a top goal of admissions directors is recruiting more students who can pay more. Among all four-year institutions, the admissions strategy judged most important over the next two or three years — driven by high figures in the public sector — was the recruitment of more out-of-state students (who at public institutions pay significantly more). The runner-up was the strategy of providing more aid for low- and middle-income students.
Among all sectors of higher education, there is a push to recruit more out-of-state students and international students.
School district tackles its changing demographics
WORTHINGTON, Minn. (AP) — Perla Banegas arrived in Worthington a decade ago, on a Greyhound bus from Los Angeles. Her single mom had heard about a safe, quiet town in the upper Midwest and steady jobs at its meatpacking plant.
In sixth grade that year, Banegas quickly got a reputation as a painfully shy kid — and a talking-to for taking too many bathroom breaks. She wasn’t shy: She just didn’t understand a word of English in class. In bathroom stalls, she’d have a good cry and then give herself a pep talk: “You have to go back and try.”
She did. And she graduated.
Building an Education Nation
Think of American education as a house of many rooms, each with a distinct function but taken as a whole, this house is shelter against the winds of change buffeting the world and threatening our future.
Any objective analysis of that shelter comes to the same conclusion: we have work to do to be sure we’re secure and able to hold our own against whatever this new global climate sends our way.
That’s the unsettling news. The good news? Work is under way, from the most remote school districts in rural America, to the inner city of our largest urban areas.
StoryCorps Launches National Teacher Initiative
StoryCorps — a national oral history project whose interviews you’ve probably heard on public radio — kicked off its National Teacher Initiative earlier this week with AFT president Randi Weingarten participating at the White House event.
The project, which launched Sept. 19, celebrates and honors the courageous work of public school educators nationwide. “This is a fantastic opportunity to hear from teachers — the people who are closest to the kids,” said Weingarten. “Their stories will be a window to the world on today’s public education — what’s working, what’s not, and what we can do better to prepare our children for the 21st-century knowledge economy.”
StoryCorps is looking to partner with schools, districts, teachers unions, community groups, and others to conduct an on-site recording day, and will send their staff and equipment to schools or events if the local or state federation can guarantee that at least eight interview pairs that include at least one teacher are available to participate. Each interview takes 40 minutes, and the participants will receive a CD of their interview.
Milwaukee Public Schools: Educator & Social Agency
Imagine what would happen to Milwaukee’s most vulnerable children if it weren’t for the services provided by their school district: Milwaukee Public Schools.
I know what some of you are thinking: Their parents should be providing for them. Or: MPS might get better results if the district focused more on education and less on being a social service agency.
I agree. Parents are responsible for their kids, and the district is responsible for education. I’m not here to defend the district against justifiable criticism.
But understand: Many of the kids who attend MPS come from homes so impoverished that even the most basic things – breakfast or a place to sleep – are missing. How can the district educate kids living in such circumstances?
The U.S. Census Bureau reported last week that nearly half of Milwaukee’s kids live in poverty. More than 80% of MPS students receive free or reduced-price lunch.
Let’s Not Focus on the Achievement Gap
Parental participation in Milwaukee Public Schools appears weak
Twenty-three percent?
Does it surprise you to hear that is the percentage of Milwaukee Public Schools children who had adults in their lives attend parent-teacher conferences last spring?
Or that the figure for a year earlier was 47%, meaning the percentage dropped by half in one year?
I’ve often heard anecdotes from teachers or principals about how low involvement is in parent-teacher conferences. Five parents show up for conferences involving a class of 27 kids. Numbers like that. There are individual MPS schools where participation is high, but that underscores how low the figure is at many other schools.
Parent-teacher conference attendance is sometimes overemphasized. There are other things parents can and should do that are much more important. But conferences can be seen as a measure of parent involvement. I had never seen specific numbers for MPS as a whole until now. The School Board was given a report on parent involvement this month, including numbers produced by stepped-up efforts in MPS to monitor this.
Are Today’s Youth Really a Lost Generation?
They’re calling us the “Lost Generation.” Young people are struggling in record numbers to find work, leave home, and start a family, according to 2010 Census figures released today.
The proximate cause is the Great Recession. The number of young Americans living with their parents, nearly 6 million, has increased by 25 percent in the last three years. But the greatest cause for concern is that even when the recession has finally let go of the economy, young Americans — Generation Y or Millennials — will face a longer road back to normalcy than their older peers and parents.
Last week, I compared the impact of the recession on three generations: Gen-Y, Gen-X, and Boomers. Each face a particular challenge. For Boomers, it’s a wealth crisis. They invested in homes whose value has fallen by as much as 30 percent. For Gen-X, it’s an income crisis. They should be in the highest-earnings years of their life, but the recession has depressed their salaries and threatened their pensions. For Gen-Y, it’s about the future. The money they’re not making today is a problem. But the money they might not make tomorrow is a greater concern. Two decades after graduating into a recession, an unlucky generation can continue earning 10 percent less than somebody who left school a few years before or after the downturn. When Don Peck added it all up, he found “it’s as if the lucky graduates had been given a gift of about $100,000, adjusted for inflation, immediately upon graduation.”
Teenage Brains
To see past the distracting, dopey teenager and glimpse the adaptive adolescent within, we should look not at specific, sometimes startling, behaviors, such as skateboarding down stairways or dating fast company, but at the broader traits that underlie those acts.
Let’s start with the teen’s love of the thrill. We all like new and exciting things, but we never value them more highly than we do during adolescence. Here we hit a high in what behavioral scientists call sensation seeking: the hunt for the neural buzz, the jolt of the unusual or unexpected.
Seeking sensation isn’t necessarily impulsive. You might plan a sensation-seeking experience–a skydive or a fast drive–quite deliberately, as my son did. Impulsivity generally drops throughout life, starting at about age 10, but this love of the thrill peaks at around age 15. And although sensation seeking can lead to dangerous behaviors, it can also generate positive ones: The urge to meet more people, for instance, can create a wider circle of friends, which generally makes us healthier, happier, safer, and more successful.
Great Recession yields a lost generation of workers
Call it the recession’s lost generation.
In record-setting numbers, young adults struggling to find work are shunning long-distance moves to live with Mom and Dad, delaying marriage and buying fewer homes, often raising kids out of wedlock. They suffer from the highest unemployment since World War II and risk living in poverty more than others — nearly 1 in 5.
New 2010 census data released Thursday show the wrenching impact of a recession that officially ended in mid-2009. It highlights the missed opportunities and dim prospects for a generation of mostly 20-somethings and 30-somethings coming of age in a prolonged slump with high unemployment.
“We have a monster jobs problem, and young people are the biggest losers,” said Andrew Sum, an economist and director of the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University. He noted that for recent college grads now getting by with waitressing, bartending and odd jobs, they will have to compete with new graduates for entry-level career positions when the job market eventually does improve.
Our Achievement-Gap Mania
A decade ago, the No Child Left Behind Act ushered in an era of federally driven educational accountability focused on narrowing the chasms between the test scores and graduation rates of students of different incomes and races. The result was a whole new way of speaking and thinking about the issue: “Achievement gaps” became reformers’ catch phrase, and closing those gaps became the goal of American education policy.
Today, the notion of “closing achievement gaps” has become synonymous with education reform. The Education Trust, perhaps the nation’s most influential K-12 advocacy group, explains: “Our goal is to close the gaps in opportunity and achievement.” The National Education Foundation has launched its own “Closing the Achievement Gaps Initiative.” The California Achievement Gap Educational Foundation was launched in 2008 to “eliminate the systemic achievement gap in California K-12 public education.” Elite charter-school operator Uncommon Schools says its mission is running “outstanding urban charter public schools that close the achievement gap and prepare low-income students to graduate from college.” Education Week, the newspaper of record for American education, ran 63 stories mentioning “achievement gaps” in the first six months of this year.
The No Child Left Behind Act’s signal contribution has been this sustained fixation on achievement gaps — a fixation that has been almost universally hailed as an unmitigated good. Near the end of his presidency, George W. Bush bragged that NCLB “focused the country’s attention on the fact that we had an achievement gap that — you know, white kids were reading better in the 4th grade than Latinos or African-American kids. And that’s unacceptable for America.” Margaret Spellings, Bush’s secretary of education, said last year, “The raging fire in American education is the achievement gap between poor and minority students and their peers.”
Wisconsin School chief Evers says state will seek No Child Left Behind waivers
State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Evers said Friday that Wisconsin will seek waivers to avoid having to meet basic elements of the federal No Child Left Behind education law at the “first possible moment.”
Evers spoke during a conference call with U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan shortly after President Barack Obama announced that he was allowing states to seek the waivers.
“This is absolutely outstanding news,” said Evers, who has long advocated for states to be given the ability to get out of meeting some parts of the law.
Obama is allowing states to scrap the hugely unpopular requirement that all children must show they are proficient in reading and math by 2014 if states can meet conditions designed to better prepare and test students.
Education chiefs from more than 20 states gathered at the White House on Friday morning to hear President Barack Obama formally propose relaxing certain tenets of the No Child Left Behind act for states that agree to meet a new set of standards he called more flexible.
In characterizing the nearly 10-year-old act as too rigid, the president appeared to strike a chord with school administrators across the country. How much enthusiasm his solution will generate remains to be seen. It calls for evaluating teachers in a way that wouldn’t be legal in California, for example, a state that very much supports amending the No Child Left Behind Act.
“It’s problematic,” Michael Kirst, president of the California State Board of Education, said of a condition that would require states to set specific policy on teacher evaluation, something that in California currently can be done only at the local level. To comply, he said, “we would need legislation passed.”
Much more on No Child Left Behind, here
I spoke with a local mother recently who mentioned that her child was doing great, based on the WKCE math report.
Is it “all about the kids” (and what that might mean)? — Take One (in relation to ULGM and Madison Prep)
My training as a historian has taught me that all knowledge is tentative and that this is especially true when it comes to assigning motives to people’s actions. It has also taught me to not accept self-proclaimed motives at face value , to only state an opinion about the motives of others when there is a preponderance of evidence, and to look at actions and consequences as well as rhetoric when trying to make sense of things.
With those caveats, I think it is worthwhile to investigate the motives, actions and the consequences of the actions of Kaleem Caire and some of others associated with the Madison Prep proposal and the Urban League of Greater Madison in relation to public education.
Enemies of teachers and teacher unions have seized upon the phrase “it is all about the kids” to ridicule and attack teachers and their representatives. With union and (almost all) others, of course it isn’t “all about the kids.” Interestingly, those who blame unions for some or all of the ills of public education — like many of the proponents of Madison Prep — often offer their own versions of “it is all about the kids.” Examples include Michelle Rhee who named her group Students First (Valarie Strauss pointedly offered a column on Rhee’s organization titled “Rhee’s campaign is not about the kids.”) and the anti-Union political bribery has been done in Illinois (and elsewhere) under the banner of Stand for Children ( a must-see video here).
Much more on the proposed Madison Preparatory Academy IB charter school, here.
Texas Students of all backgrounds outperform Wisconsin Students
Allison Sherry, via a kind reader’s email
While Perry has been outspoken against the Common Core, he and his education commissioner have pulled the quality of Texas tests up to a level respected among education reformers. Test scores among kids of all racial and ethnic backgrounds are higher in Texas than in Wisconsin, for example, which has fewer students qualifying for free- and reduced-price lunch.
Though Perry will probably make this point on the campaign trail, he’s not likely to promise to take over the nation’s schools. On the contrary, he’ll likely pick up on his recent call to repeal No Child Left Behind and let states take charge of their education systems. In his book released last year, Fed Up! Our Fight to Save America from Washington, Perry argues that Washington has taken power away from states. At a speech in November in Washington, Perry took aim at two of former President Bush’s signature accomplishments, No Child Left Behind and the Medicare drug benefit program, saying they were examples of areas in which Washington need not be.
“Those are both big government but more importantly, they were Washington-centric,” he told the Dallas Morning News. “One size does not fit all, unless you’re talking tube socks.”
National Center for Education Statistics State Education Data Profiles.
much more at www.wisconsin2.org
1990-2010 US High School & College Graduation Comparison, by State
Download a 55K PDF version.
Conor Dougherty & Rob Barry
Despite a decade of technological advances that make it possible to work almost anywhere, many of the nation’s most educated people continue to cluster in a handful of dominant metropolitan areas such as Boston, New York and California’s Silicon Valley, according to census data released Thursday.
The upshot is that regions with the most skilled and highly paid workers continue to widen their advantages over less well-endowed locales.
“In a knowledge economy, success breeds success,” said Alan Berube, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C.
Of the largest 100 metropolitan areas, those with the highest percentage of college graduates in 2000 outpaced in education gains areas with lower percentages of college grads. For instance, the 10 cities with the highest share of their population holding a bachelor’s degree or higher saw that share jump by an average of 4.6 percentage points over the decade, while the bottom 10 saw their share grow 3.1 percentage points.
Data Source: American Community Survey.
Related: www.wisconsin2.org
The worth of education cannot be determined solely by marketplace logic. Hong Kong needs to reflect on the true mission of a university to avoid failing its future generations
While money does not work miracles (as the saying goes, any problem that money can solve is not a problem), it is a necessary ingredient of many solutions to our problems. Without money, many poor countries and rural communities simply cannot provide basic education to improve literacy and promote life skills, never mind consider the quality of education. Unesco, the UN cultural organisation, calls on all governments to invest in education, to provide “education for all”.
Having said that, education should not be seen as just an investment business in the sense that we look for money indicators to measure performance – for example, if we invest so much in a law degree student, how much will he or she earn upon graduation – as if justice can be measured by earnings.
20-Somethings Rack Up Frequent-Flier Miles to Take Far-Flung Journeys; Flying to Fiji for Lunch
The 18-year-old Drexel University student in Philadelphia buys cheap tickets and takes “mileage runs” solely to build up frequent-flier account balances. Then, he cashes in the miles for expensive, far-flung journeys. Once there, he buys rail passes and catches the first train that comes along–doesn’t matter where it’s going–just to see some of the city. “It’s hard for me to stay home. I just want to go,” said Mr. Nguyen, who is from Seattle.
Mr. Nguyen is among a growing number of 20-somethings mastering the calculus of frequent-flier miles, making globe-trotting their hobby. It’s a generation that has grown up with airline deregulation, discount airlines, global airline alliances and “open skies” treaties that make flying between countries easier. They’re also at an age when they have time and flexible schedules. As a result, many have become ferocious travelers.
Restructuring, Reform and Reality
In a recent eduwonk post regarding NCLB’s complex and controversial school restructuring options, Andrew Rotherham wrote, “When it comes to tackling these problems, we have a serious failure of creativity, imagination, and, of course, political will. That’s not this law’s fault, and it’s not going to be solved by any future law. Rather, it’s cultural, deep rooted and demands real leadership…”
He has a point. However, the restructuring project is pretty daunting and beset with real practical constraints. Take the staffing issue. Which staff would you replace if the achievement failure is limited to the Hispanic subgroup within the school, but two-thirds of the students are Hispanic? What do you do if you are having difficulties with second-language learners, but your school has kids who speak fifteen different languages? Would you really fire all of the special education staff, even if there is no hope of hiring more?
The Myth About Traditional Math Education
The education establishment commits to fads like group and collaborative learning, but Garelick says they shouldn’t ignore and misinterpret traditional math.
Most discussions about mathematics and how best to teach it in the K-12 arena break down to the inevitable bromides about how math was traditionally taught and that such methods were ineffective. The conventional wisdom on the “traditional method” of teaching math is often heard as an opening statement at school board meetings during which parents are protesting the adoption of a questionable math program: “The traditional method of teaching math has failed thousands of students.” A recent criticism I read expanded on this notion and said that it wasn’t so much the content or the textbooks (though he states that they were indeed limited) but the teaching was “too rigid, too inflexible, too limited, and thus failed to adequately address the realities of educating a large, diverse, and rapidly changing population during decades of technological innovation and social upheaval.”
There is some confusion when talking about “traditional methods” since traditional methods vary over time. Textbooks considered traditional for the last ten years, for example, are quite different than textbooks in earlier eras. For purposes of this discussion, I would like to confine “traditional” to methods and textbooks in use in the 40′s, 50′s and 60′s. And before we get to the question about teaching methods, I want to first talk about the textbooks in use during this time period. A glance at the textbooks that were in use over these years shows that mathematical algorithms and procedures were not taught in isolation in a rote manner as is frequently alleged. In fact, concepts and understanding were an important part of the texts. Below is an excerpt from a fifth grade text of the “Study Arithmetic” series (Knight, et. al. 1940):
IXL Learning
Practice makes perfect, and IXL makes math practice fun! IXL allows teachers and parents to monitor the progress of their students and motivate them through interactive games and practice questions. Widely recognized as the Web’s most comprehensive math site, IXL offers a dynamic and enjoyable environment for children to practice math. Students who use IXL are succeeding like never before.
The View from Fifth Grade
“I have a locker!”
You forget what’s important when you’re ten.
TW and I went to the parents’ open house at The Boy’s school. Now that he’s in fifth grade, he’s in a new building that unites the kids from the various elementary schools in the district. And yes, he gets a locker.
The principal greeted the parents, if you want to call his mumble a greeting. Honestly, one of the first principles of public speaking is “try to at least pretend to care.” His entire affect conveyed that he’d rather be almost anywhere else. This did not inspire confidence. The only time he seemed to engage was when he mentioned where parents should park.
The library made me sad. TB later reported that his class took a trip there, and he was disappointed in its selection. Luckily we have a good public library in town, and I’ve lent TB my kindle before. At the rate he blasts through books, electronic delivery may be our only hope of keeping up.
How I Found the Report Cards, and How They Changed My Life
Meet Marie Garaventa.
What you see above is the front of her report card from the Manhattan Trade School for Girls, a vocational school she attended in the late 1920s, after she had finished the eighth grade. As you can see, she had a perfect attendance record–this despite moving several times, having a deceased father, and being hard of hearing.
If you click through the rest of Marie’s student record, you’ll see that the school’s staff initially described her as “slow” and “irritable” (perhaps due to her hearing problems) but that she eventually gained confidence and made the honor roll. You’ll also see that the school helped to place her in more than a dozen sewing and dress-finishing jobs after she graduated, and that at one point she was scolded for not returning to a job after her lunch break.
