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Muscular Mediocrity
It is excusable for people to think of Mediocrity as too little of something, or a weak approximation of what would be best, and this is not entirely wrong. However, in education circles, it is important to remember, Mediocrity is the Strong Force, as the physicists would say, not the Weak Force.
For most of the 20th century, as Diane Ravitch reports in her excellent history, Left Back, Americans achieved remarkably high levels of Mediocrity in education, making sure that our students do not know too much and cannot read and write very well, so that even of those who have gone on to college, between 50% and 75% never received any sort of degree.
In the 21st century, there is a new push to offer global awareness, critical thinking, and collaborative problem solving to our students, as a way of getting them away from reading nonfiction books and writing any sort of serious research paper, and that effort, so similar to several of the recurring anti-academic and anti-intellectual programs of the prior century, will also help to preserve the Mediocrity we have so painstakingly forged in our schools.
Research generally has discovered that while Americans acknowledge there may be Mediocrity in our education generally, they feel that their own children’s schools are good. It should be understood that this is in part the result of a very systematic and deliberate campaign of disinformation by educrats. When I was teaching in the high school in Concord, Massachusetts, the superintendent at the time met with the teachers at the start of the year and told us that we were the best high school faculty in the country. That sounds nice, but what evidence did he have? Was there a study of the quality of high school faculties around the country? No, it was just public relations.
The “Lake Woebegone” effect, so widely found in our education system, is the result of parents continually being “informed” that their schools are the best in the country. I remember meeting with an old friend in Tucson once, who informed that “Tucson High School is one of the ten best in the country.” How did she know that? What was the evidence for that claim at the time? None.
Mediocrity and its adherents have really done a first-class job of leading people to believe that all is well with our high schools. After all, when parents ask their own children about their high school, the students usually say they like it, meaning, in most cases, that they enjoy being with their friends there, and are not too bothered by a demanding academic curriculum.
With No Child Left Behind, there has been a large effort to discover and report information about the actual academic performance of students in our schools, but the defenders of Mediocrity have been as active, and almost as successful, as they have ever been in preserving a false image of the academic quality of our schools. They have established state standards that, except in Massachusetts and a couple of other states, are designed to show that all the students are “above the national average” in reading and math, even though they are not.
It is important for anyone serious about raising academic standards in our schools to remember that Mediocrity is the Hundred-Eyed Argus who never sleeps, and never relaxes its relentless diligence in opposition to academic quality for our schools and educational achievement for our students.
There is a long list of outside helpers, from Walter Annenberg to the Gates Foundation, who have ventured into American education with the idea that it makes sense that educators would support higher standards and better education for our students. Certainly that is what they hear from educators. But when the money is allocated and the “reform” is begun, the Mediocrity Special Forces move into action, making sure that very little happens, and that the money, even billions of dollars, disappears into the Great Lake of Mediocrity with barely a ripple, so that no good effect is ever seen.
If this seems unduly pessimistic, notice that a recent survey of college professors conducted by the Chronicle of Higher Education found that 90% of them reported that the students who came to them were not very well prepared, for example, in reading, doing research, and writing, and that the Diploma to Nowhere report from the Strong American Schools program last summer said that more than 1,000,000 of our high school graduates are now placed in remedial courses when they arrive at the colleges to which they have been “admitted.” It seems clear that without Muscular Mediocrity in our schools, we could never have hoped to achieve such a shameful set of academic results.
“Teach by Example”
Will Fitzhugh [founder]
Consortium for Varsity Academics® [2007]
The Concord Review [1987]
Ralph Waldo Emerson Prizes [1995]
National Writing Board [1998]
TCR Institute [2002]
730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24
Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776 USA
978-443-0022; 800-331-5007
www.tcr.org; fitzhugh@tcr.org
Varsity Academics®
All-Athletics
The Boston Globe has been publishing for 137 years, and the news that it may have to fold has distressed its many readers. Each Fall, Winter and Spring the paper publishes a special section, of 14 pages or so, on notable local public high school athletes and their coaches. There is a mention of athletes and coaches at local prep schools as well.
The latest Boston Globe’s Winter “ALL-SCHOLASTICS” section arrived, with the “ten moments that stood out among the countless athletic stories in Massachusetts.” There are reports on the best athletes and coaches in Skiing, Boys’ Basketball, Girls’ Basketball, Boys’ Hockey, Girls’ Hockey, Boys’ Track, Girls’ Track, Boys’ Swimming, Girls’ Swimming, Preps, Wrestling, and Gymnastics. The Preps and Gymnastics parts consolidate boys’ and girls’ accomplishments, perhaps to save space (and cost).
Each full-page section also features photographs of 9-16 athletes, with perhaps a twitter-sized paragraph on their achievements. In addition, there are 30 photos and tweets about some coaches, spread among the various sports. There are 26 “Prep” athletes mentioned, from various sports, but I didn’t see any “Prep” coaches profiled. For each high school sport there are two “athletes of the year” identified, and all the coaches are “coaches of the year” in their sport.
There may be, at this time, some high school “students of the year” in English, math, Chinese, physics, Latin, chemistry, European history, U.S. history, biology, and the like. There may also be high school “teachers of the year” in these and other academic subjects, but their names and descriptions are not to be found in The Boston Globe, perhaps the most well-known paper in the “Athens of America” (Boston).
It may be the case, indeed it probably is the case, that some of the athletes featured in the Winter “All-Scholastics” section today are also high school students of math, history, English, science, and languages, but you would not know that from the coverage of The Boston Globe. The coaches of the year may in many, if not all, cases, also be teachers of academic subjects in the Massachusetts public and private schools, but that remains only a guess as well.
When the British architect Christopher Wren was buried in 1723, part of his epitaph, written by his eldest son, Christopher Wren, Jr., read: “Lector, si monumentum requiris, Circumspice.” If you wanted to judge his interest, efforts and accomplishments, all you had to do was look around you. His work was there for all to see.
The work of Massachusetts high school athletes and coaches is all around us in The Boston Globe on a regular basis, but the work of our high school scholars and teachers is nowhere to be seen in that public record.
If one seeks a monument to anti-academic and anti-intellectual views and practices in Boston today, one need look no further than The Boston Globe. I read it every day, and I will be sorry to see it fold, if it does, but I will not miss its attention to and recognition of the academic efforts and accomplishments of Massachusetts secondary students and their teachers, because there is none now, and never has been any, no matter how many reports on education reform and academic standards it may have published over the years. If you ask how much The Boston Globe editors (and I am sure The Globe is not alone in this) cares about the good academic work now actually being done by high school teachers and their students in Massachusetts, the answer is, from the evidence, that they do not.
No long-term plan, no research – fine-tuning of language policy reflects a lack of values
Jonathan Lai, principal, Lee Kau Yan Memorial School in San Po Kong:
This is an era of “NO Values” – that is confirmed! Ten years have passed since 1998 and the medium-of-instruction pendulum is swinging again. From one side to the other, or rather, back to square one, although the government refuses to admit the fact and gives the latest policy move a beautiful name: “fine-tuning”. Yet, who will feel fine? The Education Bureau? Parents? Teachers? Students?
While the community is deeply involved in the discussion about the so-called labelling effect that could be caused by the fine-tuning policy, what has made the pendulum swing back remains a complete mystery. No one will be interested in the mystery, they will be too busy getting their surfboards ready for the tide to turn again.
However, this mysterious force is pushing our community into an era without beliefs and values. The issue of teaching language should not be considered as something solely related to education, it should be viewed and discussed from a wider angle. It is, in fact, demonstrating how our government formulates and adjusts its public policies.
Let us have a look at the Education Bureau’s proposal. The officials are now suggesting that teachers hold a grade six in the International English Language Testing System (IELTS), considered appropriate to be able to conduct a lesson in English in the future.
What is IELTS? According to the official webpage www.ielts.org) , it is an internationally recognised English test measuring the ability of a student to communicate in English across all four language skills – listening, reading, writing and speaking – for people who intend to study or work where English is the language of communication.
Just like TOEFL, this is an English benchmarking test for students who wish to further their studies overseas and for people who are applying for migration to an English-speaking country.
Angling for attention: Teacher devised board game to make geometry fun
Chris Dyer’s students want to know if, when he becomes rich and famous, he’ll let them swim in his pool.
Dyer, an eighth-grade math teacher at Cherokee Middle School on Madison’s west side, developed a board game while student teaching at the school that was picked up by an international educational products manufacturer and has now sold more than 2,000 copies.
The game, Angleside School Adventure, teaches kids how to measure angles. While learning to play the game in class one recent afternoon, student Oscar Hernandez, 14, wondered aloud whether Dyer is a millionaire yet. Dyer laughed and assured his students that, if he becomes a millionaire, he’ll still be teaching them.
Many of Dyer’s students say he is the best math teacher they’ve had.
“He’s pretty good at explaining things to people who don’t know,” said 13-year-old Allison Ballard. “And for the people who do know, he just lets them go ahead.”
A Visit to KIPP Schools in New York City
I AM in Newark, New Jersey’s largest town and long a byword for urban decay. I’ve been invited by KIPP (the “Knowledge is Power Programme”), the biggest and best known of America’s charter-school chains, which has three schools in Newark, with a fourth to open this autumn. Founded by two Teach for America alumni (how familiar that story is getting) in 1994, there are now 66 KIPP schools nationwide, mostly middle schools (ie, with students between 10 and 14 years old). Oddly, none of Newark’s KIPP schools are called that: under the state’s charter law “brand” names are banned, which reflects early fears that big chains would come in and take over. Those fears have dissipated, and Cory Booker, Newark’s mayor since 2006, is a good friend of charters, and wants to see more of them.
I’m actually a bit nervous. KIPP has a fearsome and to my mind not entirely attractive reputation in England for a zero-tolerance approach to discipline–insisting that children keep their gaze on teachers who are speaking, and nod and say “yes” in response to teachers’ requests; giving detentions for minor transgressions; and “benching”–that is, seating naughty children separately in class and forbidding other pupils to speak to them during breaks. A certain type of English politician practically drools when talking about KIPP–the ones who, like many of their compatriots, dislike and fear children, and love all talk of treating them harshly. I’m half-expecting to find dead-eyed Marine-sergeant types with crewcuts barking orders at children one-third their size. If it turns out that the only way to maintain order and calm in a tough urban school is to run it like a boot camp, it will make me very sad.
Madison School Board Rejects Teaching & Learning Expansion; an Interesting Discussion
One of the most interesting things I’ve observed in my years of local school interaction is the extensive amount of pedagogical and content development that taxpayers fund within the Madison School District. I’ve always found this unusual, given the proximity of the University of Wisconsin, MATC and Edgewood College, among other, nearby Institutions of Higher Education.
The recent Math Task Force, a process set in motion by several school board elections, has succeeded in bringing more attention to the District’s math curriculum. Math rigor has long been a simmering issue, as evidenced by this April, 2004 letter from West High School Math Teachers to Isthmus:
Moreover, parents of future West High students should take notice: As you read this, our department is under pressure from the administration and the math coordinator’s office to phase out our “accelerated” course offerings beginning next year. Rather than addressing the problems of equity and closing the gap by identifying minority math talent earlier, and fostering minority participation in the accelerated programs, our administration wants to take the cheaper way out by forcing all kids into a one-size-fits-all curriculum.
It seems the administration and our school board have re-defined “success” as merely producing “fewer failures.” Astonishingly, excellence in student achievement is visited by some school district administrators with apathy at best, and with contempt at worst. But, while raising low achievers is a laudable goal, it is woefully short-sighted and, ironically, racist in the most insidious way. Somehow, limiting opportunities for excellence has become the definition of providing equity! Could there be a greater insult to the minority community?
The fact the Madison’s Teaching & Learning Department did not get what they want tonight is significant, perhaps the first time this has ever happened with respect to Math. I appreciate and am proud of the Madison School Board’s willingness to consider and discuss these important issues. Each Board member offered comments on this matter including: Lucy Mathiak, who pointed out that it would be far less expensive to simply take courses at the UW-Madison (about 1000 for three credits plus books) than spend $150K annually in Teaching & Learning. Marj Passman noted that the Math Task Force report emphasized content knowledge improvement and that is where the focus should be while Maya Cole noted that teacher participation is voluntary. Voluntary participation is a problem, as we’ve seen with the deployment of an online grading and scheduling system for teachers, students and parents.
Much more on math here, including a 2006 Forum (audio / video).
Several years ago, the late Ted Widerski introduced himself at an event. He mentioned that he learned something every week from this site and the weekly eNewsletter. I was (and am) surprised at Ted’s comments. I asked if the MMSD had an internal “Knowledge Network”, like www.schoolinfosystem.org, but oriented around curriculum for teachers? “No”.
It would seem that, given the tremendous local and online resources available today, Teaching & Learning’s sole reason for existence should be to organize and communicate information and opportunities for our teaching staff via the web, email, sms, videoconference, blogs, newsletters and the like. There is certainly no need to spend money on curriculum creation.
“Men more frequently require to be reminded than informed.”
Listen to tonight’s nearly 50 minute Madison School Board math discussion via this 22MB mp3 audio file.
More on the Obama Administration’s Opposition to Washington, DC Vouchers
The Institute of Education Sciences (IES) within U.S. Department of Education released a study on April 3 of the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program, which provides up to a $7,500 annual voucher for students from low-income families in the District of Columbia to attend private schools. Notably, the study found that students who won the lottery to receive the limited number of available vouchers had significantly higher reading achievement after three years than students who lost the lottery.
Yet last month Congress voted to eliminate funding for the program. Columnists for the Wall Street Journal and the Denver Post, accompanied by the blogosphere, have alleged that Secretary of Education Arne Duncan sat on the evidence of the program’s success. The WSJ writes that, “… in November preliminary results were presented to a team of advisers who work with the Education Department to produce the annual evaluation. Since Education officials are intimately involved in this process, they had to know what was in this evaluation even as Democrats passed (and Mr. Obama signed) language that ends the program after next year.” The Denver Post questions the Secretary’s denial of having known the results of the study prior to congressional action, asserting that he was, “at best … willfully ignorant.”
As director of IES through November 2008, I was responsible for the evaluation that is at the center of the controversy. Given the established procedures of IES it is extremely unlikely that Secretary Duncan would have known the results of the study until recently.
Secretary of Education Arne Duncan argues that we have an obligation to disregard politics to do whatever is “good for the kids.”
Well then, one wonders, why did his Department of Education bury a politically inconvenient study regarding education reform? And why, now that the evidence is public, does the administration continue to ignore it and allow reform to be killed?
When Congress effectively shut down the Washington, D.C., voucher program last month, snatching $7,500 Opportunity Scholarship vouchers from disadvantaged kids, it failed to conduct substantive debate (as is rapidly becoming tradition).
Then The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board reported that the Department of Education had buried a study that illustrated unquestionable and pervasive improvement among kids who won vouchers, compared with the kids who didn’t. The Department of Education not only disregarded the report but also issued a gag order on any discussion about it.
Adolescent Literacy Flim-Flam
The Concord Review
3 April 2009
There is no question that lots of people around the nation are concerned about the literacy of American adolescents. They must be worried about the ability of our students to read and write, one would assume. It might also seem reasonable to take for granted that professionals interested in teen skills in reading books and writing papers would give close attention to those students who are now reading a fair amount of nonfiction and writing really exemplary research papers at the high school level.
At this point, expectations need to be altered a bit. Surely coaches of Adolescent Sports have a tremendous fascination with the best teen athletes in the country. There are lots of prizes and even scholarships for high school students who perform very well in football, soccer, basketball, baseball, etc., and there are even college scholarships for good teen cheerleaders. We might think it odd if all high school coaches cared about was physical education classes and even in those, only those student/athletes who were most un-coordinated and incompetent. Not that it is unimportant to worry about teens who are overweight and cannot take part in sports, but nevertheless, coaches tend to focus on the best athletes, and colleges and the society at large seem to think that is fine for them to do, and is even their job, some would say.
But when it comes to students who read well and write good term papers, the Literacy Community has no interest in them. It is only able to focus on the illiterate and incompetent among Adolescents, and their professional peers seem to think that is fine for them to do, and is even their real job. And it surely is important for them to help those who need help. They should do research and develop curricula and programs to help teens become more literate. They have been doing this for many decades, and yet more than a million of our high school graduates each and every year are in remedial (non-credit) courses when they are “admitted” (conditionally) to colleges around the country.
Perhaps the current approach to literacy training for young people might deserve a second look. The Chronicle of Higher Education surveyed college professors, 90% of whom reported that they thought the freshmen in their classes were not well prepared in reading, doing research, or writing term papers. Their high school teachers had thought they were well prepared, but college professors didn’t see it that way.
No doubt many of those students had the benefit of the Adolescent Literacy Initiatives of AdLit.org, National Council of Teachers of English, National Writing Project, Young Adult Library Services Association (YALSA), Alliance for Excellent Education, Partnership for Reading, National Adolescent Literacy Coalition, Learning Point Associates, Education Development Center, Council of Chief State School Officers, Scholastic, Adolescent Literacy Coaching Project (ALCP), National Governors’ Association, Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, Adolescent Literacy Research Network, Adolescent Literacy Support Project, WGBH Adolescent Literacy website, and the International Reading Association, not to mention the many state and local literacy programs, and yet our students’ literacy still leaves a lot to be desired, even if they can graduate from high school.
To me it seems that, unlike coaches, the literacy pros are almost allergic to good academic work in reading and writing by our teens. I am not really sure why that would be the case, but in the last 20 years of working with exemplary secondary students of history from 44 states and 35 other countries, I have not found one single Literacy Organization or Literacy Program which had the slightest interest in their first-rate work, which I have been privileged to publish in 77 issues of The Concord Review so far. They have heard about it, but they don’t want to know about it, as far as I can tell.
It does seem foolish to me, that if they truly want to improve the reading and writing of adolescents, they don’t take a tiny bit of interest in exemplary reading and writing at the high school level, not only in the students’ work, but even perhaps in the work of the teachers who guided them to that level of excellence, just as high school coaches are interested in the best athletes and perhaps their coaches as well.
They could still spend the bulk of their time on grants given them to do “meta-analyses” of Literacy Strategies and the like, but it seems really stupid not to glance once or twice at very good written work by our most diligent teens (the Literate Adolescents).
Of course, I am biased. I believe that showing teachers and students the best term papers I can find will inspire them to try to reach for more success in literacy, and some of my authors agree with me: e.g. “When a former history teacher first lent me a copy of The Concord Review, I was inspired by the careful scholarship crafted by other young people. Although I have always loved history passionately, I was used to writing history papers that were essentially glorified book reports…As I began to research the Ladies’ Land League, I looked to The Concord Review for guidance on how to approach my task…In short, I would like to thank you not only for publishing my essay, but for motivating me to develop a deeper understanding of history. I hope that The Concord Review will continue to fascinate, challenge and inspire young historians for years to come.” Emma Curran Donnelly Hulse, Columbia Class of 2009; North Central High School (IN) Class of 2005……”The opportunity that The Concord Review presented drove me to rewrite and revise my paper to emulate its high standards. Your journal truly provides an extraordinary opportunity and positive motivation for high school students to undertake extensive research and academic writing, experiences that ease the transition from high school to college.” Pamela Ban, Harvard Class of 2012; Thomas Worthington High School (OH) Class of 2008…
But what do they know? They are just some of those literate adolescents in whom the professional adolescent literacy community seems to have no interest.
“Teach by Example”
Will Fitzhugh [founder]
Consortium for Varsity Academics® [2007]
The Concord Review [1987]
Ralph Waldo Emerson Prizes [1995]
National Writing Board [1998]
TCR Institute [2002]
730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24
Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776 USA
978-443-0022; 800-331-5007
www.tcr.org; fitzhugh@tcr.org
Varsity Academics®
Michigan State Test Scores Released
Michigan Department of Education:
Scores on the statewide math tests have risen for the fourth consecutive year, the Michigan Department of Education announced today. Students’ scores in social studies and writing rose overall, as well.
Over 75 percent of students in grades 3-8 tested as “proficient or above” on the Michigan Educational Assessment Program (MEAP) math tests given in the Fall of 2008, including 91 percent of third graders. The greatest improvement was among seventh graders, where 83 percent scored proficient or above, compared to 73 percent the year before.
“There is a direct connection between our kids learning more in the classroom and getting the jobs we need in Michigan’s economy,” said Governor Jennifer M. Granholm. “We are glad to see these signs of success but we know we have a lot of work to do to give Michigan the best educated workforce in the nation and that must be our goal.”
Michigan students were tested in October 2008 on skills learned through the end of the previous year. Students’ MEAP scores are divided into four performance levels: Not Proficient, Partially Proficient, Proficient, and Advanced. Students who place in either the Proficient or Advanced levels are considered to be “proficient or above” in that subject.
Advocating Rose Fernandez for Wisconsin DPI Superintendent
Wisconsin State Journal Editorial:
Wisconsin voters have a clear choice in the April 7 race for state superintendent of the Department of Public Instruction.
The race features a consummate and careful insider, Tony Evers, versus a spirited and straightforward outsider, Rose Fernandez.
The State Journal endorses Fernandez.
The pediatric nurse and mother of five will be a strong advocate for change — someone who will use the mostly symbolic post of state schools superintendent as a bully pulpit to press for reforms, many of which President Barack Obama favors.
With so many high school students failing to graduate in Milwaukee, with so much at stake for Wisconsin in the changing, knowledge-based economy, Fernandez is the best candidate to invigorate DPI.
Fernandez, of Mukwonogo, drew public attention last year for her advocacy of public online charter schools. She helped push for a bipartisan legislative compromise that allowed virtual schools to continue serving thousands of students online with more accountability.
Students See Value in History-Writing Venue
Education Week “Curriculum Matters”
Kathleen Kennedy Manzo 17 March 2009:
It is difficult to figure why some education ventures attract impressive financial and political support, while others flounder despite their value to the field. For years, I’ve written about The Concord Review and the really amazing history research papers it publishes from high school authors/scholars.
The Review has won praise from renowned historians, lawmakers, and educators, yet has failed to ever draw sufficient funding. The range of topics is as impressive as the volume of work by high school students: In 77 issues, the 846 published papers have covered topics from Joan of Arc to women’s suffrage, from surgery during the Civil War to the history of laser technology. (The papers average more than 7,000 words, and all have been vetted for accuracy and quality. Many of the students do these research papers for the experience and knowledge they gain, not for school credit.)
But here’s the kicker: It operates on a shoestring, as Founder and Publisher Will Fitzhugh reminds me often. Fitzhugh, who has struggled for years to keep the operation afloat, challenges students to do rigorous scholarly work and to delve deeply into history. His success at inspiring great academic work is juxtaposed against his failure to get anyone with money to take notice.
Well, if the grown-ups in the world have failed to recognize and reward the Review for its 22 years of contributions, the students themselves have not.
Fitzhugh has shared many of the letters he receives from students whose work has been published in The Concord Review over the years. Yesterday, he shared with me one of the most memorable of those letters, which arrived recently at his Sudbury, Massachusetts, office.
Nicole Heise won one of the Review’s Emerson Prize awards for excellence this year. The senior at Ithaca High School in Upstate New York sent the check back, with this note:
“As you well know, for high school-aged scholars, a forum of this caliber and the incentives it creates for academic excellence are rare. I also know that keeping The Concord Review active requires resources. So, please allow me to put my Emerson award money to the best possible use I can imagine by donating it to The Concord Review so that another young scholar can experience the thrill of seeing his or her work published.”
Five Ways to Survive the April College Crunch
I was born in April. I used to have positive feelings about the month, notwithstanding T. S. Eliot’s observation about its cruelty, although lately my birthday has become just another reminder of my rapid decline into irrelevancy and ruin. The other problem with April is that it is, by far, the worst month for college-bound high school seniors. Twelfth-graders are among my best sources, so I sense their pain and want to help ease it.
Everything piles up in April. The month starts with often frightful news about which colleges accepted you and your friends, and which didn’t. By the end of the month you have to decide which school should get your unrefundable deposit to reserve a place in its freshman class. Your favorite school may have wait-listed you, and you have to figure out what to do about that. Your Advanced Placement or International Baccalaureate final exams are just a month away, and you don’t want to embarrass yourself. It’s spring, so your social life may be heating up, maybe for the first time in your adolescence if you were a bookworm like me. You have to worry about your parents interfering in all these important personal decisions. They will be concerned about how college is going to fit into the family finances, which don’t look so good this year.
Here is my helpful guide to surviving April. Since it is still March, you have time to think and prepare. Let me know how it works for you.
UK Children ‘forced to accept unwanted comprehensives’
One-in-10 pupils in some areas were given places parents refused to name on application forms amid unprecedented competition this year.
In at least 32 areas, more children were forced to accept unwanted secondary schools for this September compared to 2008.
Across London, almost 4,700 pupils failed to get into any favoured school.
Critics said the disclosure made a mockery of Government claims of school choice in the state education system.
Samantha Jellett, 34, a freelance music teacher from Knebworth, Hertfordshire, failed to win any of her preferred choices for daughter Lydia, 10.
The child was rejected from the sought-after Barnwell School and has been told to attend the Thomas Alleyne Comprehensive in Stevenage, four miles away.
She described the admissions process as “haphazard and unjust”.
“They have removed every element of choice we had and placed our children at a school we know little about and have never seen,” she said. “Parents should not be put in this situation.”
It came as research showed the lengths parents are prepared to go to ensure pupils get into best schools.
The Good Schools Guide used census data to map schools and the postcodes of pupils admitted over the last few years.
On Education Spending Facts, not faith Obama pours money into discredited programs
President Obama’s massive education initiative detailed in his proposed budget aims at the right challenge – lifting our schools and narrowing achievement gaps. But huge chunks of his eye-popping $131 billion package, now before Congress, would go for stale federal programs that have long failed to elevate students’ learning curves.
Mr. Obama promised a sharp break from President Bush, who often bent scientific findings to advance his favored dogma. Instead, “it’s about ensuring that facts and evidence are never twisted or obscured by politics or ideology,” Obama promised at his inauguration.
Few question the president’s plea to improve the quality of our schools and colleges, racheting-up our economy’s competitiveness. This requires not just retooling auto factories or investing in solar power, but enriching the nation’s human capital as well.
To boost school quality Obama declared that he would only fund programs that lift pupil performance. “In this budget,” he declared before the Congress, “we will end education programs that don’t work.” Music to the ears of the empirically minded.
But hard-headed scholars are scratching those craniums over Obama’s desire to spend billions more on disparate federal programs that have delivered little for children or teachers over the past decade.
Take Washington’s biggest schools effort: the $14 billion compensatory education program, known as Title I, supporting classroom aides and reading tutors for children falling behind. A 1999 federal evaluation showed tepid results at best, largely because local programs fail to alter core classroom practices or sprout innovative ways of engaging weaker students.
Bruce Fuller, professor of education and public policy at the UC Berkeley, is author of “Standardized Childhood.”
20 Ways AP is Bad — Not!
Bruce G. Hammond, a well-regarded educator and former Advanced Placement teacher, is at it again. His organization, Excellence Without AP, has changed its name to the Independent Curriculum Group (ICG). Hammond, based in Charlottesville, is the executive director. The group’s new Web site is www.independentcurriculum.org.
I have written before about what I consider his short-sighted opposition to AP, the nation’s largest program of college-level courses and tests for high school students. I thought the group’s name change was a good sign. I hoped that Hammond had revised a point of view that alienated many AP teachers. I thought he was going to emphasize henceforth his best and most positive point, that good teachers should be able to challenge their students in any way that works best for them, AP or not.
But the announcement of the name change did not go in that direction. Instead, Hammond unveiled a document titled “Twenty of the most fundamental reasons to rethink AP.”
I have shared the document with AP teachers I know. They had the same reaction I did: The list betrays an insufferably elitist view of American education. This is not entirely surprising since almost all of the 70-or-so institutions listed on the ICG Web site are small, private schools that cater to affluent families, such as Beaver Country Day in Massachusetts, Putney in Vermont, Fieldston in New York and Crossroads in California. The public schools that I write about most frequently, those that use AP and International Baccalaureate courses and tests to challenge average and below-average students, many of them from low-income minority families, appear to be unfamiliar to the Independent Curriculum Group.
Dane County High School AP Course Offering Comparison.
Straddling the Democratic Divide
Rift in Democratic Party over the nation’s education reform agenda is growing. One side backs strong accountability through reforms, the other looks to augment the current system with social support programs.
Secretary of Education Arne Duncan’s Senate confirmation hearing in January was thick with encomiums. He was praised by Democrat Tom Harkin of Iowa for the “fresh thinking” he brought to his post as Chicago schools chief for seven years. Republican Lamar Alexander, education secretary under George H. W. Bush, told Duncan he was the best of President Barack Obama’s cabinet appointments. Ailing Massachusetts senator Ted Kennedy, in written comments entered into the record, praised Duncan for having “championed pragmatic solutions to persistent problems” and for lasting longer in Chicago than most urban superintendents.
The warm greetings given by both Republicans and Democrats on the committee reflect Duncan’s reputation as a centrist in the ideologically fraught battles over education reform. He has received national attention for moves favored by reformers, such as opening 75 new schools operated by outside groups and staffed by non-union teachers; introducing a pay-for-performance plan that will eventually be in 40 Chicago schools; and working with organizations, including The New Teacher Project, Teach For America, and New Leaders for New Schools, that recruit talented educators through alternatives to the traditional education-school route.
At the same time, Duncan maintained at least a cordial working relationship with the Chicago Teachers Union, and both the National Education Association (NEA) and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) backed his nomination. He supported the No Child Left Behind law (NCLB), but also called for dramatic increases in spending to help schools meet the law’s targets, and additional flexibility for districts like his own. In nominating Duncan, Obama said, “We share a deep pragmatism about how to go about this. If pay-for-performance works and we can work with teachers so it doesn’t feel like it’s being imposed upon them…then that’s something that we should explore. If charter schools work, try that. You know, let’s not be clouded by ideology when it comes to figuring out what helps our kids.”
The Spiral of Ignorance
Lack of understanding of the credit crunch is magnifying its damage
THE BBC’s “Today” programme is the main current-affairs show on British radio. Last year it recruited a new presenter, Evan Davis, who is also an economist. An amusing pattern has since developed. Quizzed about the credit crunch, a politician delivers some carefully memorised remark about, say, quantitative easing. Then the guest experiences an audible moment of existential horror, as Mr Davis ungallantly presses him for details.
The tide has gone out and, with a very few exceptions, Britain is swimming naked: almost nobody appears to know what he is talking about. The havoc of the financial crisis has stretched and outstripped even most economists. The British political class is befogged. Ordinary people are overwhelmed. And just as the interaction between banking and economic woes is proving poisonous, so the interplay of public and political ignorance is damaging the country’s prospects.
Start with the government, whose ministers are still oscillating between prophesying economic Armageddon and gamely predicting the best of all possible recoveries. Gordon Brown is learned in economic history–indeed, he is at his most animated and endearing when discussing it. But the prime minister’s grip on the history he is living through is less masterful. The government’s implicit strategy is to try something and, when that does not work, try something else: the approach modestly outlined by Barack Obama, but rather less honest.
Two Teachers, 16,000 Students, One Simple Rule
Jay Mathews is a bit of a journalistic oddball. Most reporters see the education beat as a stepping stone to bigger things, but much to his credit Mathews, who writes for The Washington Post, returned to covering schools after an international reporting career. He is best known for his book on Jaime Escalante, who taught low-income children in East Los Angeles to excel in AP calculus and was featured in the film “Stand and Deliver.” Now Mathews is back to profile two young teachers — Mike Feinberg and Dave Levin — who founded the wildly successful Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP), a chain of 66 charter schools now educating 16,000 low-income students in 19 states and the District of Columbia.
While I have some quarrels with the book’s implicit and explicit public-policy conclusions, “Work Hard. Be Nice” provides a fast-paced, engrossing and heartening story of two phenomenally dedicated teachers who demonstrate that low-income students, if given the right environment, can thrive academically. In 52 short and easily digestible chapters, Mathews traces the story of two Ivy League graduates who began teaching in Houston in 1992 as part of the Teach for America program. Both struggle at first but come under the tutelage of an experienced educator, Harriett Ball, who employs chants and songs and tough love to reach students whom lesser teachers might give up on. Levin and Feinberg care deeply: They encourage students to call them in the evening for help with homework, visit student homes to get parents on their side and dig into their own pockets to buy alarm clocks to help students get to school on time. In Mathews’s telling, it’s hard not to love these guys.
A More Joyous Approach: “The War of the Roses”
Queenly Cate Blanchet turns her attention to Richard II
Cate Blanchett is known for the pale beauty of her face and her vivid film performances. Her latest work marks a significant change of pace. As the curtain rises at the Sydney Theatre, she sits centre-stage, a still figure in a white blouse and trousers, blond hair, high cheekbones. A storm of golden petals drifts down from the ceiling, and she wears a crown.
It has become fairly commonplace for film actors to star in London’s West End and on Broadway, but this transposition is different. Miss Blanchett is playing the king in Shakespeare’s Richard II, the first part of a rigorously condensed version of the eight history plays. Miss Blanchett and her husband, Andrew Upton, have become artistic directors of the Sydney Theatre Company, an organisation which already has a fine opinion of itself. “In so far as there is a National Theatre in Australia, the Sydney Theatre Company is it,” says Bob Brookman, the general manager.
Sydney’s “The War of the Roses” ruthlessly cuts the histories down to two evening performances, each lasting a little under four hours, focusing on the death of kings and the hollowness of their crown. If this production, performed as part of the Sydney Festival and now on tour, is a clue to the nature of Miss Blanchetts’ regime, it will be energetic, controversial, ambitious, and, to use one of Miss Blanchett’s favorite adjectives, “noisy.” Casting her as Richard II was the bold idea of the director, the fearless 36-year-old Benedict Andrews. Having an actress play Richard II is not original: Fiona Shaw did it in London in 1995. But casting a woman as Richard III most certainly is. He is played by Pamela Rabe, one of Australia’s most accomplished actors, without a hump and with a heavy sense of irony, which provokes tense laughter in unlikely places.
Miss Rabe is not as self-consciously feminine as Miss Blanchett, who deploys laughter–her own–to dramatise the alienation of the king from his court, and fondly adopts girlish poses during the deposition scene in which Richard passes the crown to Bolingbroke. Shakespearean actors need to drill their vocal cords and Miss Blanchett seemed a little short of training, but she made a likeable, vulnerable, androgynous monarch. Given the extent of the cuts and transpositions, there could be no lingering over the development of character. The playful relationship between Prince Hal (Ewen Leslie) and Falstaff (John Gaden), for example, was speedily established by Hal fellating Falstaff. Sydney was not fazed.
Many of Australia’s best actors have emigrated in search of larger audiences and new writers. Miss Blanchett want to bring in a younger audience to the Sydney Theatre Company’s performances. “We’re hoping to take a more joyous approach,” Mr. Upton said recently. Miss Blanchett and Mr. Upton also want to develop the company’s reputation abroad as well as at home. Later this year their production of A Streetcar Named Desire, directed by Liv Ullman with Miss Blanchett as Blanche Dubois, travels to the Kennedy Centre in Washington, DC, and the Brooklyn Academy of Music. In this case of celebrity culture, the emphasis will be on the culture.
February 1994: Now They Call it 21st Century Skills
Charles J. Sykes:
“Dumbing Down Our Kids–What’s Really Wrong With Outcome Based Education”
Charles J. Sykes, Wisconsin Interest, reprinted in Network News & Views 2/94, pp. 9-18
Joan Wittig is not an expert, nor is she an activist. She just didn’t understand why her children weren’t learning to write, spell, or read very well. She didn’t understand why they kept coming home with sloppy papers filled with spelling mistakes and bad grammar and why teachers never corrected them or demanded better work. Nor could she fathom why her child’s fourth-grade teacher would write, “I love your story, especially the spelling,” on a story jammed with misspelled words. (It began: “Once a pona time I visited a tropical rian forist.”)
While Wittig did not have a degree in education, she did have some college-level credits in education and a “background of training others to perform accurately and competently in my numerous job positions, beginning in my high school years.” That experience was enough for her to sense something was wrong. She was not easily brushed off by assurances that her children were being taught “whole language skills.” For two years, she agonized before transferring her children from New Berlin’s public schools to private schools.
After only a semester at the private schools, her children were writing and reading at a markedly higher level. Their papers were neatly written, grammatical, and their spelling was systematically corrected.
Earlier this year, she decided to take her story to her local school board.
Houston School Board Retreat Summary: “Differentiated Compensation Strategy”
*The administration has been developing a differentiated compensation strategy. Saavedra has hinted at this before, but the bottom line is he wants to pay the highest-performing teachers significantly more money. Some proposed details: The district would identify the teachers who rank among the top 10 percent of value-added student test data for at least two consecutive years. Those top performers would get a 10 percent salary increase, and they would have the option — Saavedra emphasized this would be a choice — to transfer to a low-performing school and get another 15 percent salary increase. These top teachers also could get even more money if they agree to teach summer school; rather than the usual $25-an-hour rate, they would get 125 percent of their full daily rate of pay. And there’s more: These teachers could choose to serve as master teachers and share their best practices across the district for 15 days, at a rate of $500 per day.
*Mission and vision for human capital, from Best’s PowerPoint (I’ll try to get an electronic copy and post later):
Mission: HISD’s most important resource in helping our students become college- and career-ready is our employees. Our success to move our organization to its next level of achievement depends on our ability to attract and cultivate human capital and provide the support for our employees to excel in their work.
Vision: HISD seeks to create a culture that values employees who are talented, innovative thinkers who are reuslts-oriented; individuals who strive to increase student achievement and revolutionize the field of education. We know that a wise investment in human capital in each individual at every level will yield success for our students.
*On the recruiting strategy, it sounds like Best wants the central HR department to have a bigger central office role in the recruiting process. Basically, the department would take the lead in identifying talent, wherever it is. Best is proposing a pilot where principals would agree to hire some of the centrally recruited teachers.
Marquette sorority sisters pledge to log off Facebook
Marquette sorority members have to deactivate their Facebook pages until Bid Day this Sunday, part of a growing number of sororities hoping to avoid decisions – about where to pledge and who to allow in – being made based on preconceptions and stereotypes.
Instead, they’re reverting to old-fashioned, face-to-face contact.
“It’s not about the purse you carry, the shoes you wear or what your parents do . . . it’s about being yourself,” Profita said. “We want to know you for you.”
These days, for most college students, getting-to-know-you is incomplete without requisite Facebook research. Who are your friends? How many do you have? What do your photos say about you?
But despite their reliance on the social networking site, sorority members say they still think real contact is the best way to decide who your true friends are.
What’s It All About, Alfie?
In many books, more articles, and perhaps 200 appearances a year, Alfie Kohn does what he can to spare United States students the evils of competition. While he can’t do much about athletic competition, or economic competition or the unfairness of love and war, he tries hard and successfully to persuade educators that making academic distinctions among students hurts them.
A story is told of an unpopular officer at the U.S Naval Academy who knew he was disliked (his nickname was “The Wedge” as “the simplest tool known to man”) and he was always on the lookout for ways to assert his dominance. Once he berated a formation of midshipman for being unsatisfactory by pointing out that while their toes were all lined up, their heels were as much as two or three inches out of line! The officer candidate in charge of the formation replied that he recognized the problem, and would try to see that all midshipmen in future could be issued the same size shoes!
Of course, Mr. Kohn would not, I believe, argue that having different size feet should be corrected to prevent some students from feeling inferior, but he does object to anything in school which might reveal that some are brighter and some more diligent than others. It is not clear how he thinks students can be prevented from noticing this for themselves, but he is insistent that testing and other forms of academic competition should not be allowed to reveal such differences.
Some people feel that in law, for instance, competition among arguments makes arriving at the facts of a case more likely. Competition among the producers of goods and services are thought by some to make improvements in quality and reduction in price more likely. It is even claimed that some works of art and literature are better than others, although serious efforts have of course been made to make such judgments less common.
Sorting Children Into ‘Cannots’ and ‘Cans’ Is Just Racism in Disguise
Tomorrow marks a turning point in the history of our schools as well as our country. Note how the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., whom we honor today, had to confront the cold, hard, in-your-face prejudice of a legally segregated system, while the next president, Barack Obama, speaks of a softer negligence, illuminated by the frequently heard phrase, “These kids can’t learn.”
These days, those of us interested in schools — parents, students, educators, researchers, journalists — are not sure if we believe in teaching or sorting. Is it best to strain ourselves and our children trying to raise everyone to a higher academic level, or does it make more sense to prepare each child for a life in which he or she will be comfortable? The people I admire in our schools want to be teachers. Sorting, they say, is a new form of the old racism but subtler and in some ways harder to resist.
It took me a long time to understand this. My parents were socially conservative but politically and religiously liberal, and they raised me in the United Church of Christ, the same denomination that Obama and his family joined in Chicago. There were few black people in our pews in San Mateo, Calif., however. My public high school had only two black students, my private college not many more. The first African Americans I got to know well were in my Army basic training company. They teased me, the only college graduate in the barracks, about my utter lack of street smarts. They had not done well in school, but they were shrewd, energetic and learned quickly, once subjected to the Army’s refusal to tolerate inattention. Many went to college when they finished their service.
Making Room for Miss Manners Is a Parenting Basic
For years, I took care of a very rude child. When he was 3, I called him rambunctious — and I talked to his mother about “setting limits.” At 4, I called him “demanding.” At 5, he was still screaming at his mother if she didn’t do what he wanted, he still swatted me whenever I tried to examine him, and his mother asked me worriedly if I thought he was ready for kindergarten.
I could go on (he didn’t have an easy time in school), but it would sound like a Victorian tale: The Rude Boy. I never used the word “rude” or even “manners” when I spoke to his mother. I don’t describe my patients as rude or polite in the medical record. But I do pass judgment, and so does every pediatrician I know.
It’s always popular — and easy — to bewail the deterioration of manners; there is an often quoted (and often disputed) story about Socrates’ complaining that the young Athenians have “bad manners, contempt for authority.” Sure, certain social rubrics have broken down or blurred, and sure, electronic communication seems to have given adults as well as children new ways to be rude. But the age-old parental job remains.
And that job is to start with a being who has no thought for the feelings of others, no code of behavior beyond its own needs and comforts — and, guided by love and duty, to do your best to transform that being into what your grandmother (or Socrates) might call a mensch. To use a term that has fallen out of favor, your assignment is to “civilize” the object of your affections.
Should Students Be Paid for Good Grades?
According to a study released today by the social-policy research group MDRC, a nonpartisan organization perhaps best known for evaluating state welfare-to-work programs, cash incentives combined with counseling offered “real hope” to low-income and nontraditional students at two Louisiana community colleges. The program for low-income parents, funded by the Louisiana Department of Social Services and the Louisiana Workforce Commission, was simple: enroll in college at least half-time, maintain at least a C average and earn $1,000 a semester for up to two terms. Participants, who were randomly selected, were 30% more likely to register for a second semester than were students who were not offered the supplemental financial aid. And the participants who were first offered cash incentives in spring 2004 — and thus whose progress was tracked for longer than that of subsequent groups before Hurricane Katrina abruptly forced researchers to suspend the survey for several months in August 2005 — were also more likely than their peers to be enrolled in college a year after they had finished the two-term program. (Read “Putting College Tuition on Plastic.”)
Students offered cash incentives in the Louisiana program didn’t just enroll in more classes; they earned more credits and were more likely to attain a C average than were nonparticipants. And they showed psychological benefits too, reporting more positive feelings about themselves and their abilities to accomplish their goals for the future. “It’s not very often that you see effects of this magnitude for anything that we test,” notes Thomas Brock, MDRC’s director for young adults and postsecondary-education policy.
Educators Resist Even Good Ideas From Outsiders
With two massive parental revolts nearing victory in Fairfax County, and mothers and fathers elsewhere in the area plotting similar insurgencies, it is time to disclose a great truth about even the best educators I know: As much as they deny it, they really don’t like outsiders messing with the way they do their jobs.
I don’t like that either. Do you? We know what we are doing. Most other folks don’t. We are polite to outsiders, but only to mollify them so we can hang up and get back to work.
The problem is that schools, unlike most institutions, are handling parents’ most precious possessions, their children. That aggravates the emotional side of the discussion. It makes it more likely that smart educators are going to write off parents as interfering idiots, even if they actually have a good idea and data to prove it.
I was a school parent for 30 years. The last kid graduated from college in 2007, but a grandchild has just appeared. That sound you hear is California teachers muttering at the thought of me at their door, brimming with helpful suggestions. I know how this works. The school people smile and nod, but nothing happens. Sure, some parent ideas are daft. But important queries are also shrugged off.
Vermont Attempts to Slow School Spending Growth as Enrollments Decline
Pelham said Vermont schools are among the best-funded in the nation and have been getting more money and more staff while the number of students continues to decline.
“Vermont’s best-in-the-nation spending on K-12 education provides a very reasonable basis to ask the education lobby to temper their exuberant self-interest and to work with others to find a more balanced response to Vermont’s current economic and fiscal concerns,” Pelham said in a Dec. 29 letter to legislative leaders.
John Nelson of the Vermont School Boards’ Association said he took exception to Pelham’s letter.
“What I know from talking with board members around the state is that there are truly agonizing discussions going on about this year’s budget,” Nelson said. “We’re aware of the economic climate, but we’re also aware of the continuing demand on schools.”
State Sen. Peter Shumlin, a Putney Democrat, the senate president pro tem and one of the lawmakers to whom Pelham’s letter was addressed, said it was “disrespectful and destructive” to blame school boards for rising costs.
“Clearly, the tone of the letter suggests there is real animosity between the governor, the tax commissioner and hard working school board members. When that spills over into the public dialogue it is a disservice to all Vermonters,” Shumlin said.
Links:
10 Lessons of an MIT Education
Lesson One: You can and will work at a desk for seven hours straight, routinely. For several years, I have been teaching 18.30, differential equation, the largest mathematics course at MIT, with more than 300 students. The lectures have been good training in dealing with mass behavior. Every sentence must be perfectly enunciated, preferably twice. Examples on the board must be relevant, if not downright fascinating. Every 15 minutes or so, the lecturer is expected to come up with an interesting aside, joke, historical anecdote, or unusual application of the concept at hand. When a lecturer fails to conform to these inexorable requirements, the students will signify their displeasure by picking by their books and leaving the classroom.
Despite the lecturer’s best efforts, however, it becomes more difficult to hold the attention of the students as the term wears on, and they start falling asleep in class under those circumstances should be a source of satisfaction for a teacher, since it confirms that they have been doing their jobs. There students have been up half the night-maybe all night-finishing problem sets and preparing for their midterm exams.
Four courses in science and engineering each term is a heavy workload for anyone; very few students fail to learn, first and foremost, the discipline of intensive and constant work.
Lesson Two: You learn what you don’t know you are learning. The second lesson is demonstrated, among other places, in 18.313, a course I teach in advanced probability theory. It is a difficult course, one that compresses the material typically taught in a year into one term, and it includes weekly problem sets that are hard, even by the standards of professional mathematicians. (How hard is that? Well, every few years a student taking the course discovers a new solution to a probability problem that merits publication as a research paper in a refereed journal.)
Students join forces on the problem sets, and some students benefit more than others from these weekly collective efforts. The most brilliant students will invariably work out all the problems and let other students copy, and I pretend to be annoyed when I learn that this has happened. But I know that by making the effort to understand the solution of a truly difficult problem discovered by one of their peers, students learn more than they would by working out some less demanding exercise.
Is Recess Necessary?
I often spout opinions on matters about which I know nothing, so I understand when my favorite peer group — the American people — does the same. The latest example is a survey of 1,000 U.S. adults [931K PDF] by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, which specializes in public health projects, and Sports4Kids, a national nonprofit organization that supports safe and healthy playtime in low-income elementary schools.
According to the survey’s press release, “seven out of 10 Americans disagree with schools’ policies of eliminating or reducing recess time for budgetary, safety or academic reasons.” I realize most people don’t know how poisonous recess can be for urban schools with severe academic needs, but I was surprised to see the news release fail to acknowledge this. It even suggests, without qualification, that “in low-income communities” recess time “offers one of our best chances to help children develop into healthy, active adults who know how to work together and resolve conflicts.”
Few Americans have an opportunity to experience what teaching in urban schools is like. The people I know who have done so have developed a well-reasoned antipathy for the typical half-hour, go-out-and-play-but-don’t-kill-anybody recess. In my forthcoming book, “Work Hard. Be Nice,” about the Knowledge Is Power Program, I describe the classroom and playground chaos KIPP co-founders Mike Feinberg and Dave Levin encountered before starting their first KIPP fifth grade in a Houston public elementary school, the beginning of their successful program:
Geoffrey Canada and Education’s Future
I have devoted many years to writing about schools, but much of the time I am really writing about poverty. Paul Tough has devoted several years to writing about poverty, but much of the time he is really writing about schools.
This is apparent in his insightful book “Whatever It Takes: Geoffrey Canada’s Quest to Change Harlem and America.” You don’t see the words “schools” or “education” in the title, but be assured this is one of the best books ever written about how poverty influences learning, and vice versa.
As usual, I am late reviewing the book because I took my time reading it. I got a copy in September, when it came out. Books like this I like to absorb slowly and carefully. I keep them in a small room in my house where I know I will be alone, at least for short periods of time. It makes for great concentration, even if my reviews always miss their deadlines.
I have institutionalized this personal failing by creating the Better Late Than Never Book Club, of which Tough’s book is the latest featured selection. The club — which sells no books and offers no discounts, sorry — celebrates volumes I consider so important that I review them even if they are months, and in some cases years, past their publication dates.
Gangs in Dane County? Yes, they’re everywhere, detective says
Gangs are everywhere in Dane County, from the largest Madison high schools to the smallest rural hamlets.
In the latest of a series of informational meetings led by a Dane County detective who monitors local gang activity, Sun Prairie parents were told their help is needed.
Detective Joel Wagner estimated that 3 to 4 percent of Dane County youths are involved in a gang. Recruiting begins in the fourth grade, he said; gang members can be of any race and socioeconomic status, but are primarily kids who have fallen away from school and family and are looking for a group to belong to.
“The best thing is prevention,” Wagner said. “We need to get back to eyes and ears.”
“Know your children’s friends. Know them well,” he said. “Know your children’s friends’ parents. Know them better.”
Wednesday night’s meeting at Sun Prairie High School stretched more than two hours and included disturbing video of gang fights and other violence from Dane County and across the nation as well as online photos of gang members who identify themselves as being from Sun Prairie and other Dane County communities.
Particularly disturbing was video — not from Dane County — of a gang initiation in which a teen’s head was smashed into a cement curb and into a florescent light tube. In another video, a teen was beaten in a bathroom as part of an initiation.
Related:
- Gangs & School Violence Forum Audio & Video.
- Educating the Community on Gangs in Madison
- Art Rainwater’s Memo on School Violence
- Madison police calls near local high schools: 1996-2006
Los Angeles Superintendent Takes a Buyout
Howard Blume, Jason Song and Mitchell Landsberg:
Under pressure by civic leaders and members of his own school board, Los Angeles Schools Supt. David L. Brewer announced Monday that he would leave his post rather than drag the district through a racially divisive fight.
The Los Angeles Unified School District Board of Education is expected to hash out the final details of an exit package today for Brewer, the retired Navy vice admiral who was supposed to bring military know-how and a deep passion for education to the job of running the nation’s second-largest school district.
“As an African American, I’ve experienced my share of discrimination,” he told reporters, school board members and district employees Monday. “I know what it looks like, smells like, and the consequences.”
“Although this debate is disconcerting and troubling, it must not become an ethnic issue. When adults fight, it can manifest itself in our children,” said Brewer, the district’s second African American superintendent. “This must not become an ethnic or racial battle that infests our schools, our campuses, our playgrounds. This is not about settling an old score; this must be about what is best for every LAUSD student.”
Obama’s Big Test on Education
Interestingly, though Rhee is a Democrat, she almost voted for Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz.
“It was a very hard decision,” Rhee says. “I’m somewhat terrified of what the Democrats are going to do on education.”
What does President-elect Obama think? Tough to say. He has supported merit pay for teachers, which teachers’ unions oppose, and heralded Rhee. He has been a strong advocate of charter schools and in 2002 said he was “not closed minded” on the subject of vouchers, though since then he has come out against vouchers. Over the Summer, I asked him why.
“The problem is, is that, you know, although it might benefit some kids at the top, what you’re going to do is leave a lot of kids at the bottom,” he said. “We don’t have enough slots for every child to go into a parochial school or a private school. And what you would see is a huge drain of resources out of the public schools. So what I’ve said is let’s foster competition within the public school system. Let’s make sure that charter schools are up and running. Let’s make sure that kids who are in failing schools, in local school districts, have an option to go to schools that are doing well.
“But what I don’t want to do is to see a diminished commitment to the public schools to the point where all we have are the hardest-to-teach kids with the least involved parents with the most disabilities in the public schools,” Obama continued. “That’s going to make things worse, and we’re going to lose the commitment to public schools that I think have been so important to building this country.”
In March, Josh Patashnik of The New Republic took a closer look at PEBO and education, writing that Obama “has long advocated a reformist agenda that looks favorably upon things like competition between schools, test-based accountability, and performance pay for teachers. But the Obama campaign has hesitated to trumpet its candidate’s maverick credentials. As an increasingly influential chorus of donors and policy wonks pushes an agenda within the Democratic Party that frightens teachers’ unions and their traditional liberal allies, Obama seems unsure how far he can go in reassuring the former group that he’s one of them without alienating the latter. And this is a shame, because Obama may represent the best hope for real reform in decades.”
An Interview with Will Fitzhugh: About Academic Excellence and Writing
Michael F. Shaughnessy:
1) Will, you recently gave a talk in Madison, Wisconsin. What exactly did you speak about?
WF: A group of professors, teachers, business people, lawyers and community people invited me to speak at the University of Wisconsin in Madison about the work of The Concord Review since 1987, and about the problems of college readiness and academic writing for high school students.
The Boston Public Schools just reported that 67% of the graduating class of 2000 who had gone on to higher education had failed to earn a certificate, an associate’s degree or a bachelor’s degree by 2008. Also, the Strong American Schools program just reported that more than a million of our high school graduates are in remedial education in college each year.
I recommend their report: Diploma to Nowhere, which came out last summer. While many foundations, such as Gates, and others, have focused on getting our students into college, too little attention has been paid to how few are ready for college work and how many drop out without any degree.
2) “We believe that the pursuit of academic excellence in secondary schools should be given the same attention as the pursuit of excellence in sports and other extracurricular activities.” This is a quote from The Concord Review. Now, I am asking you to hypothesize here–why do you think high schools across America seem to be preoccupied with sports and not academics?
WF: In Madison I also had a chance to speak about the huge imbalance in our attention to scholars and athletes at the high school level. I had recently seen a nationally televised high school football game in which, at breaks in the action, an athlete would come to the sidelines, and announce, to the national audience, which college he had decided to “sign” with. This is a far cry from what happens for high school scholars. High school coaches get a lot of attention for their best athletes, but if the coach also happens to be a history teacher, he or she will hear nothing from a college in the way of interest in his or her most outstanding history student.
When Kareem Abdul Jabbar was a very tall high school senior at Power Memorial Academy in New York, he not only heard from the head coaches at 60 college basketball programs, he also got a personal letter from Jackie Robinson of baseball fame and from Ralph Bunche at the United Nations, urging him to go to UCLA, which he did. That same year, in the U.S., the top ten high school history students heard from no one, and it has been that way every year since.
The lobby of every public high school is full of trophies for sports, and there is usually nothing about academic achievement. For some odd reason, attention to exemplary work in academics is seen as elitist, while heaps of attention to athletic achievement is not seen in the same way. Strange…The Boston Globe has 150 pages on year on high school athletes and no pages on high school academic achievement. Do we somehow believe that our society needs good athletes far more than it needs good students, and that is why we are so reluctant to celebrate fine academic work?
Change Our Public Schools Need
Can Barack Obama bring change to American education? The answer is: Yes he can. The question, however, is whether he actually will. Our president-elect has the potential to be an extraordinary leader, and that’s why I’ve supported him since the beginning of his campaign. But on public education, he and the Democrats are faced with a dilemma that has boxed in the party for decades.
Democrats are fervent supporters of public education, and the party genuinely wants to help disadvantaged kids stuck in bad schools. But it resists bold action. It is immobilized. Impotent. The explanation lies in its longstanding alliance with the teachers’ unions — which, with more than three million members, tons of money and legions of activists, are among the most powerful groups in American politics. The Democrats benefit enormously from all this firepower, and they know what they need to do to keep it. They need to stay inside the box.
And they have done just that. Democrats favor educational “change” — as long as it doesn’t affect anyone’s job, reallocate resources, or otherwise threaten the occupational interests of the adults running the system. Most changes of real consequence are therefore off the table. The party specializes instead in proposals that involve spending more money and hiring more teachers — such as reductions in class size, across-the-board raises and huge new programs like universal preschool. These efforts probably have some benefits for kids. But they come at an exorbitant price, both in dollars and opportunities foregone, and purposely ignore the fundamentals that need to be addressed.
What should the Democrats be doing? Above all, they should be guided by a single overarching principle: Do what is best for children. As for specifics, here are a few that deserve priority.
Education remains the elephant in the room
You know that line about “the best-laid plans”? It came to mind earlier this month as I sat in on a west-metro League of Women Voters briefing on big plans to tidy up the mess that’s been made of Minnesota’s school-funding system.
A “New Minnesota Miracle.” That idea was supposed to be the big issue in state House races this summer and fall. It was supposed to be top-tier policy stuff at the 2009 Legislature. The studies have been done; the proposal drafted; the stakeholders’ coalition built, and the hearings held around the state.
And the state senator who led the briefing, Minnetonka DFLer Terri Bonoff — well, according to her plan last winter, she wasn’t even going to be in the Legislature in 2009. She aimed to be off to Congress as the newly elected successor to Third District Rep. Jim Ramstad.
Plans go awry. Bonoff is still in the state Senate. The education issue is being eclipsed by economic distress and — temporarily, let us pray — by the Coleman-Franken recount.
A Surprisingly Sensible 21st-Century Report
Only six weeks have passed since my last cranky diatribe about teaching what are called “21st-century skills” in our schools. I think the 21st-century skills movement is mostly a pipe dream, promoted by well-meaning people who embrace the idea of modernity but fail to consider how these allegedly new and important lessons can be taught by the usual victims of such schemes, classroom teachers.
Now I am forced to calm down, take a breath and consider the possibility that I was wrong about this, because a scholar whose work I admire has produced the first sensible report on 21st-century skills I have read. “Measuring Skills for the 21st Century” was written by Elena Silva, senior policy analyst at the Education Sector think tank in Washington. It is available at http://www.educationsector.org/research/research_show.htm?doc_id=716323. It suggests that this idea is vital, important and ought to be pursued, no matter what I say.
I telephoned Silva to express my concern that we differ on this issue, since she always knows what she is talking about and I sometimes don’t. Our conversation reassured me. She has the same doubts I do about the loose and overheated way the 21st-century skills concept has been marketed, and the failure to give teachers useful guidance on what to do with it. She agrees with me that much of what is labeled 21st-century learning is not new, but represents what our best educators have been teaching for several centuries.
On College Choice
Stephen Kreider Yorder & Isaac Yoder:
When we get lots of reader email, we know we’ve struck a chord. College choice is clearly a chord.
After our column discussing how much college is worth — and my plan to narrow my search to small liberal-arts schools — many readers agreed with us that getting the best-fitting education is the top priority.
Marina E. Marra from Tucson, Ariz., writes that her son, like me, “was very concerned about spending his parents’ money for a degree that can be purchased for less elsewhere. I, too, advised him that it is his job to be accepted at the best school possible with the best education and it is my job to figure out how to pay for it.” She adds: “There is an intangible element that isn’t apparent in a cost/benefit comparison among colleges, something that can be found only at smaller liberal-arts colleges.”
Others held that price should be a top consideration. “YES — Price DOES Matter!,” writes Pat Diamond, also of Tucson. “I can’t understand why either of you would consider going into debt for a college education when there’s the option of a perfectly good state university system that would provide an education equal to that of a small expensive elite liberal-arts college.”
An expensive education is fine if I know what I plan to do with it, writes Robert Lowrie of Georgetown, Texas. “To spend $48,000/year, and then not know what he’s going to do with the B.A. degree after four years, is insanity,” he says, suggesting that I “look into getting [my] bachelor’s degree at a less expensive state university, and then enter a small, probably more prestigious and expensive school for [my] graduate studies.”
Another Look at the Madison School District’s Use of “Value Added Assessment”
The analysis of data from 27 elementary schools and 11 middle schools is based on scores from the Wisconsin Knowledge and Concepts Examination (WKCE), a state test required by the federal No Child Left Behind law.
Madison is the second Wisconsin district, after Milwaukee, to make a major push toward value-added systems, which are gaining support nationally as an improved way of measuring school performance.
Advocates say it’s better to track specific students’ gains over time than the current system, which holds schools accountable for how many students at a single point in time are rated proficient on state tests.
“This is very important,” Madison schools Superintendent Daniel Nerad said. “We think it’s a particularly fair way … because it’s looking at the growth in that school and ascertaining the influence that the school is having on that outcome.”
The findings will be used to pinpoint effective teaching methods and classroom design strategies, officials said. But they won’t be used to evaluate teachers: That’s forbidden by state law.
The district paid about $60,000 for the study.
Much more on “Value Added Assessment” here.
Ironically, the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction stated the following:
“… The WKCE is a large-scale assessment designed to provide a snapshot of how well a district or school is doing at helping all students reach proficiency on state standards, with a focus on school and district-level accountability. A large-scale, summative assessment such as the WKCE is not designed to provide diagnostic information about individual students. Those assessments are best done at the local level, where immediate results can be obtained. Schools should not rely on only WKCE data to gauge progress of individual students or to determine effectiveness of programs or curriculum.”
Related:
- Wisconsin, Mississippi have “easy state K-12 exams” – NY Times
- Much more on Wisconsin’s state exam; the WKCE, here.
- The Fordham Foundation gave Wisconsin’s standards a “D”.
- The Death of WKCE? Task Force to Develop “Comprehensive Assessment System for Wisconsin”
- Alan Borsuk has more
The Most Promising Schools in America
My publisher and I had a fight over the subtitle of my upcoming book, “Work Hard. Be Nice,” about the Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP). Okay, it wasn’t a fight exactly. My editor at Algonquin Books, Amy Gash, is too polite and professional for that. It was a spirited discussion. Gash said the Algonquin view was that my subtitle, “How Two Inspired Teachers Created America’s Best Schools” was off-putting and hyperbolic. Who was I to say what was best and what wasn’t?
I defended the loaded adjective because I thought it was accurate and would inspire useful arguments about how to make schools better. Nonetheless, Algonquin seemed more interested in selling books than encouraging my pugnacious tendencies, and I saw their point. We considered more than 100 alternatives before settling on “How Two Inspired Teachers Created the Most Promising Schools in America.” That seems like a trivial change, but it’s not. A new research assessment by Columbia University scholar Jeffrey R. Henig suggests it is the right way to think about these intriguing but still developing schools, and about other new approaches to schooling that may bloom in the future.
The 66 KIPP schools in 19 states and the District feed off the work of KIPP co-founders Dave Levin and Mike Feinberg, who started teaching impoverished children in Houston when they were just out of college in 1992. The first KIPP class began in 1994. It had a longer school day, required summer school, required homework, frequent contact with parents, consistent methods of discipline, imaginative and energetic teaching and lots of singing and fun. It has become the best known and most researched network of independent public charter schools in the country.
Singing Our Song
6 November 2008
Dear Mr. Fitzhugh,
My name is Lindsay Brown, and I am the chair of the history department at St. Andrew’s School in Delaware. I have been thinking about the role of academics and athletics in college placement for some time, and being at a boarding school I wear many hats and so see multiple sides of this issue. I do a great deal of work with athletes that I coach in the sport of rowing, helping them to be recruits for college coaches. I began talking to people and commenting about how I had never done any recruiting for our top history students, and that there was a significant contrast between athletic and academic interest in the admission process for colleges.
With these vague thoughts, I decided to write something, possibly to send to some publication(?) or maybe just to do some therapeutic venting on my keyboard. I sent a draft of my thoughts to several of my colleagues, including our librarian who is a relentless researcher. In response to my short essay, she sent me your article on the “History Scholar” on very similar ideas–I guess I wasn’t as original as I thought! But I wanted to send you my thoughts, ask if you had a moment to give me any feedback, and then also ask if you think it was acceptable for me to potentially send my essay out–where exactly I’m not sure.
In any case, I was impressed with your work and your information on this topic.
Many thanks,
Lindsay Brown
History
St. Andrew’s School
My essay is copied below and attached:
The headlines are meant to grab our attention and alert us to a crisis in education: “High school graduates are not ready for college” or some variation on this idea that college freshmen can’t do the work their professors demand of them. Colleges and professors lament this situation, and, in a related vein, often complain that athletics and athletic recruiting are running out of control to the detriment of the academic mission of their institutions. And not just the big schools that compete for national championships in football or basketball are sounding this alarm; even top tier, highly selective colleges and universities sing a similar melody. What should happen to correct this situation?
Ironically, I would like to suggest that colleges look to their athletic departments for inspiration and a possible way to improve the academic strength of their student body.
Madison School District’s November 2008 Referendum Passes, 68% in favor
Preliminary voter results. Tamira Madsen:
The tumultuous state of the economy was a nagging concern for supporters of the $13 million Madison Metropolitan School District referendum, but it passed Tuesday night with a surprisingly large 68 percent of the vote.
A handful of wards were still uncounted after midnight, but the totals then were 84,084 in favor and 39,116 opposed to the measure that will allow the school district to raise its taxing limits.
Voters approved an operating referendum to maintain current services, which district officials say shows that the community places a high value on quality education.
“We also knew this was not an easy time for people and that was not lost on us,” Superintendent Dan Nerad said late Tuesday night. “We are heartened by this response, and what this will allow us to do is to maintain our existing programs as we move into a new discussion about what should our priorities be going forward, and involving the community in that discussion in regard to the strategic planning.”
The referendum allows the district to exceed its tax limits by $5 million during the 2009-10 school year, then by an additional $4 million in each of the following two years. The referendum will add $27.50 onto the taxes of a $250,000 home in the first year, district officials say, and add an extra $43 to that tax bill in 2010-11 and an additional $21 to the bill in 2011-12.
The recurring referendum will increase the current tax limit by $13 million in 2011-12 and in every year after that.
The measure, a “recurring referendum,” gives the district permission to build on the previous year’s revenue limit increase by additional amounts of $4 million in 2010-11 and another $4 million in 2011-12. The measure permits a total increase of $13 million — a change that will be permanent, unlike the impact of some other referendums that end after a specified period.
By comparison, the district’s total budget for the current school year is $368 million.
Referendum backers hoped voters would set aside concerns about the economy to help the district avert multimillion-dollar budget cuts that would lead to larger class sizes and other changes in school operations.
The measure faced no organized opposition.
A big thanks to those who voted in support of the school referendum. Your support is appreciated.
To those who chose not to support the referendum, please let us know why. This feedback is very important to us.
So…what are the next steps? As we have been saying throughout the referendum campaign, the referendum is really only one piece of a bigger picture. A couple of things about the bigger picture. On November 10 we continue our discussions on board-superintendent governance models. How can we best work together to strengthen our focus on student achievement?
My sense of these local questions after observing them for a number of years is that:
- 33 to 40% of the voters will always vote yes on school related issues, and
- 30 to 35% will always vote no, or anti-incumbent and,
- elections are won or lost based on the remaining 25 to 35% who will vote “independently”.
Just What Exactly is a Charter School?
One of the more consistent, ongoing suggestions for improving America’s educational system centers upon the creation of greater competition amongst public schools. The reason for the steady drumbeat centers upon a belief that a change to the free market system would be one of the best methods for creating better educational opportunities for children.
In direct response to the push for greater competition, forty states across America have now initiated legislation to allow the construction of new public schools called charter schools. Minnesota was the first state to pass laws regarding charter schools, doing so in 1991.
The concept is definitely catching on. Today, according to USCharterSchools.org, there are nearly 4,000 charter schools across our country educating more than 1.1 million children. The state of California, the second to enact such legislation, has more than 600 such schools educating about one-fifth of all charter school students.
While the number of schools continues to grow, large numbers of Americans, many even within the field of education, simply do not know what a charter school really consists of or how this new school concept differs from traditional public schools. Today at OpenEducation.net, we provide our readers the fundamentals of the charter school concept.
Counting on the Future: International Benchmarks in Mathematics for American School Districts
Dr. Gary W. Phillips & John A. Dossey [2.5MB PDF Report]:
Students in six major U.S. cities are performing on par or better in mathematics than their peers in other countries in grades 4 and 8, according to a new study by the American Institutes for Research (AIR). However, students from five other major cities are not faring as well, and overall, U.S. student performance in mathematics falls off from elementary to middle school grades — and remains behind many industrialized nations, particularly Asian nations.
The AIR study offers the first comparison between students from large U.S. cities and their international peers. The study compares U.S. 4th grade students with their counterparts in 24 countries and 8th grade students with peers in 45 countries.
“Globalization is not something we can hold off or turn off…it is the economic equivalent of a force of nature… like the wind and water” (Bill Clinton)
If you are a student today competing for jobs in a global economy, the good jobs will not go to the best in your graduating class–the jobs will go to the best students in the world. Large urban cities are intimately connected to the nations of the world. Large corporations locate their businesses in U.S. cities; foreign students attend U.S. schools; and U.S. businesses export goods and services to foreign nations. Large urban cities need to know how their students stack up against peers in the nations with which the U.S. does business. This is especially important for students in the fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. The students in these fields will allow our future generation to remain technologically innovative and economically competitive.
This report provides a comparison of the number of mathematically Proficient students in Grades 4 and 8 in 11 large cities in the United States with their international peers.
This comparison is made possible by statistically linking the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) in 2003 and the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) in 2003 when both assessments were conducted in the United States in the same year and in the same grades.
After the statistical linking was completed, it was possible to compare the most recent NAEP results (from 2007) to the most recent TIMSS results (from 2003). How the United States compares to the overall international average.
At Grade 4, five countries (Singapore, Hong Kong SAR, Chinese Taipei, Japan, and the Flemish portion of Belgium) performed significantly better than the United States (Figure 1). However, the United States (at 39% proficiency) performed better than the international average (27% proficiency) of all 24 countries (Figure 13).
At Grade 8, eight countries (Singapore, Hong Kong SAR, Republic of Korea, Chinese Taipei, Japan, Belgium (Flemish), Netherlands, and Hungary) performed significantly better than the United States (Figure 1). However, the United States (at 31% proficiency) performed better than the international average (21% proficiency) of all 44 countries (Figure 14).
….
Because of the persistent requests of urban school districts, the U .S . Congress authorized NAEP to assess, on a trial basis, six large urban school districts beginning in 2002 . Since then, more districts have been added, resulting in 11 school districts in 2007 (and plans are underway to include even more districts in the future) . The urban school chiefs in these 11 large school districts, which voluntarily participated in the 2007 NAEP, recognized the global nature of educational expectations and the importance of having reliable external data against which to judge the performance of their students and to hold themselves accountable . They should be commended for their visionary goal of trying to benchmark their local performance against tough national standards. National standards provide a broad context and an external compass with which to steer educational policy to benefit local systems . The purpose of this report is to further help those systems navigate by providing international benchmarks.
Clusty Search: Gary W. Phillips and John A. Dossey.
Greg Toppo has more:
Even if the findings are less-than-stellar, he says, they should help local officials focus on improving results.
“In that sense, I think it could be a very positive thing to use in-house, in the district, to keep their nose to the grindstone,” says Kepner, a former middle- and high-school math teacher in Iowa and Wisconsin.”If they can show they’re improving, they might be able to attract more companies to a system that’s on the move.”
Phillips says the findings prove that in other countries “it is possible to do well and learn considerably under a lot of varied circumstances — in other words, being low-income is not really an excuse when you look around the rest of the world.”
NAEP Writing Assessment 2011
An Interview with Will Fitzhugh: About Assessing Writing EdNews.org Houston, Texas, 24 January 2007
Michael F. Shaughnessy Senior Columnist EdNews.org:
1) I understand that you have just finished a stint on the ACT/NAGB Steering Committee for the 2011 NAEP (National Assessment of Educational Progress) Writing Assessment. What was that like? (And what does NAGB stand for?)
WF: NAGB is the National Assessment Governing Board, which runs the NAEP, “America’s Report Card,” as they say. I was glad that Diane Ravitch recommended me for the Steering Committee for the new national writing assessment scheduled for 2011. I was very impressed with the intelligence and competence of Mary Crovo, representing NAEP, and Rosanne Cook, who is running the project for American College Testing. Many people on the Committee were from the National Council of Teachers of English and the College Composition world, which have little interest in having students read history books or write history research papers. In fact that world favors, or has favored in the past, personal and creative writing and the five-paragraph essay, which do a terrible job of preparing high school students for the nonfiction books and the academic term papers most will be asked to cope with in college.
2) Given the paucity of writing that goes on in the high schools of America, is it really fair to ask high school students to engage in a robust writing assessment?
WF: It would not be fair to ask high school students to play in a football game if they hadn’t had an opportunity for lots of practice, and it is very hard to ask high school students to do the sort of academic expository writing they should be doing if they have never done it in all their years in school. But we need to start somewhere. Every high school student does not need to be able to play football, but they all need to be able to read nonfiction books and write serious term papers.
3) On the other hand, since so much of the college experience is writing, are high school teachers doing students a disservice by NOT requiring more writing?
WF: High school teachers would make terrible football coaches and their teams would lose most if not all of their games, if the teacher/coaches did not have time to practice their teams. We take football seriously, and we take band seriously, so ample time and money are made available to produce the best teams and the best bands the high school can manage. We allow really no time for a public high school teacher to work with students on heavy-duty term papers. We don’t make time for them, because we don’t think they are that important. Not as important as drama practice, yearbook, chorus, debate or a host of other activities. As a result our high school students are, once again, ill-prepared for college reading and writing. AP courses in history do not require, in most cases, that students read a complete nonfiction book, and most of the AP teachers say they don’t have time to ask the student to write a research paper, because they “have to get students ready for the AP Exam.”
Obama & McCain on Education
When it comes to sports, whether it’s on the basketball court or on the ice, high school seniors Brit Schneiders and Raven Gary know what it’s like to be the best.
Both girls star on Illinois state championship teams, but when it comes to the public schools they each attend, these two aren’t even in the same league.
Raven’s high school, John Marshall, is on Chicago’s tough West Side. It’s part of the third largest school district in the country, Chicago Public Schools, where students average a meager 17 out of 36 on the ACT – the all important college entrance exam.
But the average at Marshall is only 14. The graduation rate hovers around 50 percent. Less than 8 percent of Marshall students read at grade level and fewer than 3 percent are at grade level in math.
“I’m goin’ to college,” said Raven, who is an A-student. But she and her mom Sharon Williams say it’s been a real struggle at a school that doesn’t even have enough textbooks to send home with students.
“When look at other schools … do you feel ripped off, and why do you think the country is letting that happen?” Bowers asked Raven.
“Maybe they don’t see the big picture,” she said. “We need the tools to learn.”
A Public Hearing on Madison’s November, 2008 Referendum
Taxpayers got a chance to ask the questions Tuesday night about the upcoming multimillion dollar Madison school referendum.
More than a dozen people turned out to Sherman Middle School for the first of four public hearings across the city.
Superintendent Dan Nerad gave a brief presentation before opening the forum up for questions.
Voters questioned everything from Fund 80 to the Capital Expansion Fund and student achievement.
Active Citizens for Education said they would like to have seen the referendum scheduled for the spring in order to give the district time to re-evaluate programs that they say are not working – programs that could be cut or changed.
“Where they’re talking about maintaining current programs and services it’s not getting good results,” said ACE’s Don Severson. “You look at the achievement gap, look at increased truancy, look an an increased drop-out rate, decreased attendance rates, more money isn’t going to get different results.”
Referendum supporters, Communities And Schools Together, know the $13 million referendum will be a tough sell, but worth it.
“I think it is going to be a hard sell,” said CAST member and first-grade teacher Troy Dassler. “We really need to get people out there who are interested still in investing in infrastructure. I can think of no greater an investment — even in the most difficult tough times that we’re facing that we wouldn’t invest in the future of Madison.”
School Board President Arlene Silveira was pleased with the dialogue and questions asked at the forum and said she hasn’t been overwhelmed with questions from constituents about the referendum.
“It’s been fairly quiet, and I think it’s been overshadowed by the presidential election and (downturn with) the economy,” Silveira said. “People are very interested, but it does take an explanation.
“People ask a lot of questions just because it’s different (with the tax components). Their initial reaction is: Tell me what this is again and what this means? They realize a lot of thought and work has gone into this and certainly this is something they will support or consider supporting after they go back and look at their own personal needs.”
Superintendent Dan Nerad has already formulated a plan for program and service cuts in the 2009-2010 budget if voters do not pass the referendum. Those include increasing class sizes at elementary and high schools, trimming services for at-risk students, reducing high school support staff, decreasing special education staffing, and eliminating some maintenance projects.
Nerad said outlining potential budget cuts by general categories as opposed to specific programs was the best route for the district at this juncture.
Academic Fitness
The NACAC Testing Commission has just released its report [PDF]on the benefits of, and problems with, current standardized admission tests. The Commission says that “a ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach for the use of standardized tests in undergraduate admission does not reflect the realities facing our nation’s many and varied colleges and universities.”
It might be pointed out, by an outside observer, that standardized tests not only do not reflect the realities of acceptance for high school students receiving athletic scholarships, but such tests have nothing whatever to do with whether high school athletes are recruited or not and nothing to do with whether they receive college athletic scholarships or not.
Athletic scholarships are based on athletic performance in particular athletic activities, not on tests of the athletic or physical fitness of high school athletes. The cost of failure for college coaches is too high for them to think of relying on any standardized test of sports knowledge or of anything else in their efforts to recruit the best high school athletes they can.
The NACAC Testing Commission also says that standardized tests may not do a good enough job of telling whether applicants to college are academically fit. They recommend the development and use of good subject matter tests which are “more closely linked to the high school curriculum” than the SAT and ACT exams.
This suggestion begins to approach the rigor of assessment in the recruiting and selection of high school athletes, but there are still important differences. The high school athletic curriculum includes such subjects as football, basketball, soccer, baseball, etc., but college coaches do not rely on tests of athletes’ knowledge of these sports as determined by sport-specific tests. They need to know a lot about the actual performance of candidates in those sports in which they have competed.
The parallel is not perfect, because of course students who can demonstrate knowledge of history, biology, literature, math, chemistry, and so on, are clearly more likely to manage the demands of college history, biology, literature, math and chemistry courses when they get there, while athletes who know a lot about their sport may still perform poorly in it.
But college academic work does not just consist of taking courses and passing tests. In math there are problem sets. In biology, chemistry, etc., there is lab work to do. And in history courses there are history books to read and research papers to write. Such performance tasks are not yet part of the recommended tests for college admission.
It is now possible, for example, for a student who can do well on a subject matter test in history to graduate from high school without ever having read a complete history book or written a real history research paper in high school. That student may indeed do well in history courses in college, but it seems likely that they will have a steep learning curve in their mastery of the reading lists and paper requirements they will face in those courses.
New standard college admissions tests in specific academic subjects will no doubt bring more emphasis on academic knowledge for the high school students who are preparing for them, but a standard independent assessment of their research papers would surely make it more likely that they would not plan to enter college without ever having done one in high school.
The reading of complete nonfiction books is still an unknown for college admissions officers. Interviewers may ask what books students have read, but there is no actual standard expectation for the content, difficulty and number of nonfiction books high school students are expected to have read before college.
The increased emphasis on subject matter tests is surely a good step closer to the seriousness routinely seen in the assessments for college athletic scholarships, but it seems to me that some regular examination of the reading of nonfiction books and an external assessment of at least one serious research paper by high school students would help in their preparation for college, as well as in the assessment of their actual demonstrated academic fitness which, as the Commission points out, is not now provided by the SAT and ACT tests.
Will Fitzhugh [founder]
Consortium for Varsity Academics® [2007]
The Concord Review [1987]
Ralph Waldo Emerson Prizes [1995]
National Writing Board [1998]
TCR Institute [2002]
730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24
Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776 USA
978-443-0022; 800-331-5007
www.tcr.org; fitzhugh@tcr.org
Varsity Academics®
Effective education, kindergarten to retirement
Last week I wrote that building the best possible business environment in America was the key to attracting jobs and investment to Indiana. Our state has recently achieved top-tier rankings as a place to do business, with low taxes and utility costs, reduced regulation, new infrastructure investments, and the highest credit rating in history. But we will not maximize these advantages if we do not also have enough well-educated workers. Jobs and investment that would otherwise come to Indiana will wind up somewhere else if we can’t provide a large enough pool of skilled labor.
As our economy diversifies, jobs in all sectors, including manufacturing, increasingly require skills and knowledge beyond high school. Right now, too many of our workers lack the education and training they need to perform — or even qualify for — the kinds of skilled jobs that we want to bring to or grow here in Indiana. Thousands of jobs are open and waiting in fields such as information technology, health and logistics, but are not being filled because of this skills mismatch.
[For] Crying Out Loud
September 24, 2008 By Glenn Ricketts:
Yes, yes, we know that you’ve been an outstanding high school history student and that you’d like to major in that subject in college, but we’re not sure why you’re inquiring about scholarships here. Wait, not so fast: it’s certainly impressive that you’ve had some original research published, and your grades are indeed outstanding. But if, as you say, you’re looking for a scholarship, we’d like to hear about your curve ball. Oh, you didn’t play baseball in high school? Well, then how about football or basketball? No? Lacrosse, soccer, swimming, maybe? Golf, bowling, tennis? In that case, do you sing or dance? You don’t appear to have any disabilities, not that we’d ask.
No, sorry, speaking fluent French is not really what we had in mind by “diversity.” Do you by chance play the xylophone? What’s that? History scholarships? You mean something geared specifically towards outstanding high school history students? Ho! Ho! Good one.
No, not here. Haven’t heard of ’em anywhere else, either. Where’d you come up with that idea anyway? Look, we’re not sure we can do anything for you at this point unless…wait a minute, did you say you were a cheerleader? Sit down. I think we’re finally on to something. Yes, that’s right, we have several scholarships for cheerleaders. Can you send us all of the relevant information about your high school cheerleading experience? We may also be able to direct you to other sources of support for promising college cheerleading prospects. Why didn’t you tell us this at the outset, instead of getting sidetracked with all of that stuff about history? We’re very busy in this office, you know. No doubt you’re an outstanding history student, and by all means major in it if you like, but that’s not going to get you anywhere if you’re looking for a scholarship. Good thing you mentioned the cheerleading angle, especially since we have to be careful to choose only the most outstanding applicants.
I made up this little drama, but it is based on the “true facts.” History scholarships are rare. Cheerleading scholarships are pretty common–even at colleges and universities that one might think value intellectual achievement over human pyramids.
Will Fitzhugh is a former high school history teacher who, frustrated with the lack of opportunities to showcase academic achievement among young students, in 1987 founded The Concord Review, (www.tcr.org) a quarterly journal devoted entirely to outstanding research essays by high school students. Anyone who doubts the possibility of impressive research skills and consummate writing ability among some of today’s secondary school students should read at least one issue of the Review, where future historians and teachers might well be making their first appearances. These students don’t need remedial English, and could probably be bumped up beyond the usual introductory survey courses in history to begin work as history majors on the fast track.
Trouble is, as Will has pointed out to us, the students who write in The Concord Review don’t get much recognition beyond that, to say nothing of scholarship assistance. A few colleges–most notably Reed College–have recently started supporting The Concord Review financially–which is bound to encourage some bright, highly capable students to consider attending college out in Portland, Oregon. But by and large, the prospect for students winning scholarships on the basis of outstanding ability to engage in historical scholarship isn’t very bright.
Education Awareness Building in Hawaii
Everyone seems to have an opinion about education and they seem more than happy to share it. Nelson Mandela called education the most powerful tool you can use to change the world, while Mark Twain joked that he never let his schooling interfere with his education.
One thing we can agree on: We all want our children to have the best education possible — one that will help them to achieve their potential in life, no matter which path they choose.
Our kids in Hawaii deserve our best efforts to give them a good start on life, and we have a unique opportunity to do just that. With a culturally rich and ethnically diverse student population, Hawaii represents a microcosm of the world’s future. We have teachers, principals and administrators deeply committed to equipping our children with the knowledge and skills they’ll need, and parents ready to support them in their efforts. We have a Board of Education responsible for setting policies and standards to ensure all children a quality education, regardless of their economic background or ZIP code. By working together and coordinating our efforts, we have the potential to transform our island state into an educational model for others to emulate.
Wisconsin Governor Doyle Wants a Study of the Milwaukee Public Schools
Gov. Jim Doyle called Friday for “a complete evaluation of exactly where MPS is” as a first step toward any action by state government to do more for Milwaukee schools or change the way the school system is run.
“The School Board has really opened this up now,” Doyle said, referring to a surprising 6-3 vote by Milwaukee School Board members Thursday night in favor of exploring the dissolving of Milwaukee Public Schools, which is under financial pressure. Such a step might leave responsibility for Milwaukee schools in the state’s lap.
“I take this vote very seriously by the board and, if they are moving in this direction at all, it can only be done through state law,” Doyle said in an interview. “I think we need — everybody needs — to have a good clear understanding of where exactly the Milwaukee schools are.”
He said he wants to know whether MPS is making the best use of the money it has. He expects to announce plans for conducting such an evaluation next week.
“You can’t just sort of speculate that maybe we’re going to dissolve and have the state just sort of stand there,” Doyle said. “We have to be prepared.”
Inside Bay Area KIPP Schools
One of the benefits of finding public schools that work is the chance to study them and discover exactly what they are doing that other schools are not doing. Sadly, this rarely seems a blessing to the educators at those schools, who have to fill out surveys, sit for long interviews and have strangers recording their every move. Often they feel like Michael Phelps might have felt, told to take a drug test every time he won an Olympic gold medal.
I sense these often intrusive assessments have been particularly galling for many teachers at KIPP (Knowledge Is Power Program). It has become the most studied school network in the country, one more indication that it is probably also the best. KIPP serves children from mostly low-income minority families at 66 schools in 19 states and the District, a network way too big for most researchers to handle. But since KIPP began to expand in 2001 from the two successful charter middle schools created by co-founders Dave Levin and Mike Feinberg, scholars have been examining pieces of the growing enterprise.
KIPP has cooperated with the research; one of its “Five Pillars” — its philosophy of success — is “Focus on Results.” Five independent studies of KIPP have been done so far. A sixth has just been released, available at http://policyweb.sri.com/cep/publications/SRI_ReportBayAreaKIPPSchools_Final.pdf.
Want Schools to Work? Meet the Parents
Sandra Tsing Loh, making sense, continues her whirlwind media tour, this time at the Washington Post (thanks to a kind reader’s email for this link):
Yea, public school parents’ priorities are routinely placed below those of building inspectors, plant managers, even, given an errant bell schedule, cafeteria workers. Although, teachers are down in the bunkers with us, too. You’d be amazed how many extraordinary schoolteachers, who’ve served faithfully, conscientiously, daily for 40 years, just keep their heads down at this point.
Since most politicians have never dealt with U.S. public schools as customers themselves (in the same way that precious few of them put their own children in the Army), it might shock you, Mr. Future President, how poorly parents are treated out here in Public-School-Landia. You know how when you walk into a Wal-Mart or a McDonald’s, someone greets you with, “Hello! May I help you?” It’s startling how seldom you can expect this basic courtesy in public schools, how often we parents approaching the counter are treated as felons, or more often simply ignored by the frantically typing office-administrator-type-person. It’s a peculiar thing, in this 21st century. Forget best-practice research and technology-driven classrooms. I really believe if anyone in the multibillion-dollar industry called U.S. public education were ever listening to us, improved schools would start, simply, with this: “Hello! May I help you?”
Where does this culture of committee-oriented time wastage — even for parents who work — spring from? Here’s a clue. L.A. Unified recently faced such a budget shortfall that the district was actively recruiting potential save-our-schools spokesparents to submit their resumes and come to the central offices for “media training” if selected. Cut to the bone as it is, though, next year’s budget still slates a hefty $78.8 million for consultants (last year a consultant was paid $35,000 to teach our superintendent how to use a computer). And yes, I realize that I’m getting off-message by noting that our school district wastes money.. . . That’s like waving red meat in front of America’s seniors, who’ll probably vote to cut taxes again! Even though it’s not the bureaucracy, but the children who get squeezed. That’s all budget cuts mean, in the end. My kids have their assemblies on cracked asphalt. Now the cracked asphalt will have weeds.
But here’s the good news, Mr. Future President. In a testament to the incredible can-do American spirit (and I mean that in the most drop-dead-serious way), activist public school parents are fighting back against U.S. public education’s wasteful and unresponsive corporate “professionalism.” (Remember George Bernard Shaw’s quip about the professions being “conspiracies against the laity”?) City by city, homegrown “parents for public schools”-style Web sites are springing up daily, little rebel force fires on the horizon. From New York to Chicago, Seattle to San Francisco and beyond, activist parents are starting to blog their outrage over millions of education dollars wasted on non-working computer technology, non-child-centered programs and, of course, those entities whose education dollars are never, ever cut — the standardized-testing companies.
Some years ago, I sketched a chart illustrating the influence of various factions on our nearly $400M local school system. Topping the list were Administrators of both the school system and local teachers union. Far down were teachers (think of the “downtown math police”) and parents. Further still were students themselves. Taxpayers were not represented.
Observing public education rather closely for a number of years, it seems to me that all players, especially teachers, parents and students, would be better off with a far more diffused governance model (charters, smaller districts/schools, choice?).
School District Steps Back from Controversial Math Curriculum
Janese Heavin via a kind reader’s email:
Columbia Public Schools’ chief academic officer said the district is ready to compromise with the community when it comes to elementary math. But Sally Beth Lyon, who oversees district curricula, stopped short of saying concepts-based math would be replaced by a more traditional program.
“We’re going to figure out how to get something done so we can all move forward,” she told the Tribune. “We’re still at the table and will discuss the best way to move forward and include and acknowledge the community concerns we’re hearing.”
Lyon’s comments followed last night’s Board of Education meeting, where board member Ines Segert accused the district of appointing people to district math committees who are biased toward investigative math programs and not appointing mathematicians who favor more traditional math instruction.
Segert cited three University of Missouri math education professors who serve on district committees and have received grant funds to train Columbia teachers how to use concepts-based math materials. “They instruct teachers in a certain ideology that happens to be used in these textbooks we have in class,” said Segert, a vocal advocate of returning traditional math to classrooms.
Lyon’s comments followed what was almost a scolding from board member Ines Segert during last night’s board meeting. Segert criticized the district for appointing math education professors on math committees who seem to benefit from investigative math curriculum. She also accused the district of giving people incomplete data and summaries that skew results to justify current practices.
Lyon denied that anyone making curricula decisions receive district dollars. Any grant money they get comes from federal and state sources, she said.
Related: Madison School District Math Task Force Discussion.
In Memory of Randy Pausch …
“Last Lecture” Professor Randy Pausch, 47, Dies
Tara Parker-Pope
The New York Times
Randy Pausch, the Carnegie Mellon computer science professor whose last lecture became an Internet sensation and bestselling book, has died of pancreatic cancer. He was 47.
A School Where One Size Doesn’t Fit All
“The model is inspired by the success of home-schoolers,” he said. Students will set their class schedules, enabling them to learn at their pace and in their styles. Teachers will act as advisers, not taskmasters.
As for homework, “the one-size-fits-all [model] mandated in today’s schools is largely counterproductive,” Shusterman says in a slide presentation he uses to sell his idea. School for Tomorrow will have a home reading requirement and “encourage and support individualized, student-initiated homework.”
Much of Shusterman’s plan is inspired by John Dewey, a 20th-century educational philosopher whose devotees have called for teachers to be “guides on the side, not sages on the stage.” Dewey led a movement called progressive education in which, he said, children learn best when pursuing individual projects that allow them to explore their world.
Many teachers, in both private and public schools, use project-based learning to a degree. But at School for Tomorrow, Shusterman said, every course and project will be linked to this question: What does a high school graduate need to know and need to be able to do to thrive in college, the workplace and life in the 21st century?
Wisconsin’s improved performance on a noted ranking of science and technology is a plus. But the state still must work harder to turn good ideas into jobs.
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel Editorial:
Wisconsin is far better positioned in the knowledge economy than it was four years ago, with larger pools of risk capital and better coordination of the state’s best research.
That’s one way to read a new report from the well-respected Milken Institute. The state finished five spots higher at No. 22 in Milken’s State Technology and Science Index (www.jsonline.com/765102).
But the state’s policy-makers and business leaders must figure out how to turn more of the state’s best ideas into jobs across the state, not just in Madison. And perhaps how better to tap the wealth of intellectual property in southeastern Wisconsin.
While Wisconsin moved up five notches, it still ranks only middling overall and still lags far behind on some of the measures. Furthermore, it’s arguable how much such state-by-state rankings tell us in a world where the competitor as easily could be in Bangalore as in Buffalo.
When Mom & Dad Share it All
On her first day back to work after a four-month maternity leave, Amy Vachon woke at dawn to nurse her daughter, Maia. Then she fixed herself a healthful breakfast, pumped a bottle of breast milk for the baby to drink later in the day, kissed the little girl goodbye and headed for the door.
But before she left, there was one more thing. She reached over to her husband, Marc, who would not be going to work that day in order to be home with Maia, and handed him the List. That’s what they call it now, when they revisit this moment, which they do fairly often. The List. It was nothing extraordinary — in fact it would be familiar to many new moms. A large yellow Post-it on which she had scribbled the “how much,” “how long” and “when” of Maia’s napping and eating.
“I knew her routines and was sharing that with Marc,” Amy recalls.
She also remembers what he did next. Gently but deliberately, he ripped the paper square in half and crumbled the pieces into a ball.
“I got the message,” Amy says.
That message was one the Vachons had agreed on from the evening they met, though they were clearly still tinkering with the details. They would not be the kind of parents their parents had been — the mother-knows-best mold. Nor the kind their friends were — the “involved” dad married to the stressed-out working mom. Nor even, as Marc put it, “the stay-at-home dad, who is cooed at for his sensitivity but who is as isolated and financially vulnerable as the stay-at-home-mom.”
Back to school for cities: Solutions to urban problems begin with improving schools
Big city school boards and superintendents have generally failed to provide the accountability and leadership needed to educate the many disadvantaged children they serve. Mayors and the federal government must take stronger roles in improving urban schools.
In an increasingly global and knowledge-based economy, nothing is more important to the future of cities and to the nation as a whole than education.
America’s beleaguered cities cannot rebound without good public schools, now plagued by lack of money, unresponsive bureaucracies, declining enrollments, high dropout and poverty rates, and low academic standards. State and federal contributions to school budgets have not made up for huge inequities in local support.
At their best, public schools give the most disadvantaged children a chance to succeed, but rarely the clear path that children find in affluent districts. More than 50 years after the landmark Brown v. Board of Education case declared segregation unconstitutional, the nation’s schools remain practically as unequal as ever — and in places such as metro Detroit, nearly as segregated as they were in 1950.
It’s time to open the doors to out-of-state school models
Former Providence School Board Member Julie Steiny:
Across the nation, charter laws have spawned certain schools that are so successful they’re being replicated in other towns and states.
Nonprofit providers of these nationally acclaimed schools have been wooed and welcomed into communities hungry for better, more-effective options. The best of these models can prove their strategies’ merits with lots of encouraging data, testimonies from happy parents and impressive stories about their successful students.
These networks include the Knowledge is Power Program (KIPP), Achievement First and the Green Dot Schools, among others. Pop down to New Haven, Conn., to see the thing of beauty that is the Amistad Academy run by Achievement First. Or drive up to Lynn, Mass., to take in a KIPP.
Can Rhode Island benefit from these proven successes? In a word, no.
Our laws fiercely protect Rhode Island’s educational status quo, as though it were a real treasure like Narragansett Bay or our historical architecture. The protectionist laws make it impossible for outside providers to do business in the state. (One could argue that the state laws make it impossible even for local schools to do business effectively. Certain Rhode Island charter schools are now being crushed by our protectionist culture.)
Take as only one example Rhode Island’s General Law 16-13-6 which cements teacher tenure, seniority and “bumping” into place, leaving Rhode Island administrators little if any control over the quality of their staff. No school providers from saner states can possibly assure us that they can be successful here if they can’t retain the stability of their staff and let ineffective teachers go, when necessary. Longtime Rhode Island residents have been drinking the protectionist Kool-Aid for so long they forget what effective school governance might look like.
Fascinating.
Wisconsin Host schools and families needed for Japanese teachers
A father from Thailand recently observed the power of international exchange programs in an e-mail to Wisconsin staff about his daughter’s visit to the state: “She has learned many things and felt very connected to her host, friends and you. I think this is the best part of this program: to get people to know each other, understand each other and feel that they belong to the same family. It is very amazing that only few weeks can make this strong relationship.”
Another opportunity to build international relationships is now here. Schools and districts have until June 6 to apply to host visiting teachers from Japan this fall.
The Japan-Wisconsin Education Connection, now in its 12th year, gives a select number of K-12 Wisconsin school districts the opportunity to host a talented elementary, junior or senior high school teacher from Japan.
Reports on Schools Cite Student Discontent
The question to a focus group of Dunbar High students was: What did they like best about going to school there?
“Freedom,” said one who takes Advanced Placement classes at the school in Northwest Washington. “We can do whatever we want at this school. That’s the only good thing about this place.”
At Green Elementary School in Southeast, one child urged: “Give us harder work, not the busywork that we already know.”
“They let us struggle,” a student at Lincoln Middle School in Northwest said of the teachers. “They let you know you are failing, but then let you go on struggling and then send you to summer school.”
‘Hands-on’ science teaching gains momentum in Wisconsin
In an approach based in Green Bay that has spread down the Lake Michigan shoreline, about 40 Wisconsin districts (though not Madison) belong to a consortium called the Einstein Project, a nonprofit group that buys the kits from publishers, leases them for a nominal fee to schools and arranges teacher training on their use.
Hailed as a national model by the National Science Teachers Association, the Einstein Project began on a shoestring and now has 10 employees, two kit warehouses and a $1 million annual budget supported by the rental fees, year-round fundraising and private and corporate backing.
But critics of the hands-on movement charge that without textbooks and the structured reading, teacher-driven learning and broad memorization of facts that traditionally define classroom science, kids are being short-changed on core knowledge.
A major fight over science curriculum in California got national attention in 2004, as the state weighed a proposal to allow no more than 25 percent of science classroom time for hands-on activities. But in an abrupt reversal after intense debate, the adopted standard reads that at least 25 percent of science classroom time has to be hands-on.
Stanley Metzenberg, an assistant biology professor from California State University-Northridge, said in congressional testimony that reading is critical for scientists and that children are best served through traditional textbooks and teacher-directed instruction.
Some of California’s most gifted students are being ignored, advocates say
If you reviewed Dalton Sargent’s report cards, you’d know only half his story. The 15-year-old Altadena junior has lousy grades in many subjects. He has blown off assignments and been dissatisfied with many of his teachers. It would be accurate to call him a problematic student. But he is also gifted.
Dalton is among the sizable number of highly intelligent or talented children in the nation’s classrooms who find little in the standard curriculum to rouse their interest and who often fall by the wayside.
With schools under intense pressure from state and federal mandates such as No Child Left Behind to raise test scores of low-achieving pupils, the educational needs of gifted students — who usually perform well on standardized tests — too often are ignored, advocates say.
Nationally, about 3 million kindergarten through 12th-grade students are identified as gifted, but 80% of them do not receive specialized instruction, experts say. Studies have found that 5% to 20% of students who drop out are gifted.
There is no federal law mandating special programs for gifted children, though many educators argue that these students — whose curiosity and creativity often coexist with emotional and social problems — deserve the same status as those with special needs. Services for gifted students vary from state to state. In California, about 512,000 students are enrolled in the Gifted and Talented Education program, which aims to provide specialized and accelerated instruction.
Linda Scholl @ Wisconsin Center for Education Research: SCALE Case Study: Evolution of K-8 Science Instructional Guidance in Madison Metropolitan School District [PDF report]
In addition, by instituting a standards-based report card system K-8, the department has increased accountability for teaching to the standards.
The Department is struggling, however, to sharpen its efforts to reduce the achievement gap. While progress has been made in third grade reading, significant gaps are still evident in other subject areas, including math and science. Educational equity issues within the school district are the source of much public controversy, with a relatively small but vocal parent community that is advocating for directing greater resources toward meeting the needs of high achieving students. This has slowed efforts to implement strong academic equity initiatives, particularly at the middle and early high school levels. Nonetheless, T&L content areas specialists continue working with teachers to provide a rigorous curriculum and to differentiate instruction for all students. In that context, the new high school biology initiative represents a significant effort to raise the achievement of students of color and economic disadvantage.
WCER’s tight relationship with the Madison School District has been the source of some controversy.
Related:
- Value Added Assessment (Report Cards)
- Wisconsin DPI Academic Standards (DPI Website).
- Bruce King’s evaluation of West High School’s Small Learning Community initiative and pushback at East High over planned curriculum changes.
- Lucy Mathiak’s 2006 post on Madison dropouts who tested at the high end of the scale.
Scholl’s error, in my view, is viewing the controversy as an issue of “advocating for directing greater resources toward meeting the needs of high achieving students”. The real issue is raising standards for all, rathing than reducing the curriculum quality (see West High School Math teachers letter to the Isthmus:
Moreover, parents of future West High students should take notice: As you read this, our department is under pressure from the administration and the math coordinator’s office to phase out our “accelerated” course offerings beginning next year. Rather than addressing the problems of equity and closing the gap by identifying minority math talent earlier, and fostering minority participation in the accelerated programs, our administration wants to take the cheaper way out by forcing all kids into a one-size-fits-all curriculum.
It seems the administration and our school board have re-defined “success” as merely producing “fewer failures.” Astonishingly, excellence in student achievement is visited by some school district administrators with apathy at best, and with contempt at worst. But, while raising low achievers is a laudable goal, it is woefully short-sighted and, ironically, racist in the most insidious way. Somehow, limiting opportunities for excellence has become the definition of providing equity! Could there be a greater insult to the minority community?
)
A friend mentioned a few years ago that the problems are in elementary and middle school. Rather than addressing those, the administration is trying to make high school changes.
Thanks to a reader for sending along these links.
Art Without Craft
On the website www.michelangelo.com/buon/bio, I learn that:
“When Michelangelo turned 13-years-old he shocked and enraged his father when told that he had agreed to apprentice in the workshop of the painter Domenico Ghirlandaio. After about one year of learning the art of fresco, Michelangelo went on to study at the sculpture school in the Medici gardens and shortly thereafter was invited into the household of Lorenzo de’ Medici, the Magnificent…During the years he spent in the Garden of San Marco, Michelangelo began to study human anatomy. In exchange for permission to study corpses (which was strictly forbidden by The Church), the prior of the church of Santo Spirito, Niccolò Bichiellini, received a wooden Crucifix from Michelangelo (detail of Christ’s face). But his contact with the dead bodies caused problems with his health, obliging him to interrupt his activities periodically.
“Michelangelo produced at least two relief sculptures by the time he was 16 years old, the Battle of the Centaurs and the Madonna of the Stairs (both 1489-1492), which show that he had achieved a personal style at a precocious age…”…(and later) “Michelangelo also did the marble Pietà (1498-1500), still in its original place in Saint Peter’s Basilica. One of the most famous works of art, the Pietà was probably finished before Michelangelo was 25 years old.”
My apologies for quoting at such length from a biography, but I have seen his Pietà in Rome on several occasions, and it seems clear to me that it took a gifted young man, with great acquired skill in the craft of shaping marble with hammer and chisel, perhaps two years to achieve this masterwork.
Financial Literacy
“EVERYBODY wants it. Nobody understands it. Money is the great taboo. People just won’t talk about it. And that is what leads you to subprime. Take the greed and the financial misrepresentation out of it, and the root of this crisis is massive levels of financial illiteracy.”
For years John Bryant has been telling anyone who will listen about the problems caused by widespread ignorance of finance. In 1992, in the aftermath of the Los Angeles riots, he founded Operation HOPE, a non-profit organisation, to give poor people in the worst-hit parts of the city “a hand-up, not a handout” through a mixture of financial education, advice and basic banking. Among other things, Operation HOPE offers mortgage advice to homebuyers and runs “Banking on Our Future”, a national personal-finance course of five hour-long sessions that has already been taken by hundreds of thousands of young people, most of them high-school students.
The council is not short of expertise. It is chaired by Charles Schwab, eponymous boss of a broking firm. Its other members include the head of Junior Achievement, which has been teaching children about money since 1919, and a co-author of “Rich Dad, Poor Dad”, a self-help bestseller. Already, it has approved a new curriculum for middle-school students, “MoneyMath: Lessons for Life“. (Lesson one: the secret to becoming a millionaire. Answer: save, save, save.) It is starting a pilot programme to work out how to connect the “unbanked” to financial institutions. And it is supporting what, echoing the Peace Corps, is called the Financial Literacy Corps: a group of people with knowledge of finance who will volunteer to advise those in financial difficulties.
Yet another math curriculum. One of the things I noticed when paging through the large Connected Math (CMP) textbooks a few years ago was the consumer oriented nature of the content (as opposed to a creative approach).
“Children Should be Treated Like Refugees”
A child protection expert says the children — and the children of those children — who are now in state custody should be cared for in the same way as refugees from Southeast Asia who migrated to the United States after the fall of Saigon.
Families from South Vietnam and Cambodia were kept intact, a social safety net was set up around them and they gradually assimilated into mainstream culture, said Richard Wexler, who leads the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform.
“One thing that we as a society know how to do is provide for refugees, and that’s exactly what we are dealing with here,” Wexler said Wednesday from his office in Alexandria, Va. “These children live in a very isolated world of their own and they have no idea of the world they suddenly find themselves in.”
Wexler, who has criticized Texas’ policies regarding the placement of children in foster homes in recent years, urged state officials to do their best to keep families together as long as they are out of reach of anyone who might abuse them.
Detroit Schools Coping with a Surge of Homeless Children
Cherish Brisbane loved Gompers Elementary School, where she was friends with girls named Tyler, Casey and Amanda. Now she’s trying to find friends at Owen Academy, her new school near the homeless shelter in Highland Park that she now calls home.
“I miss my school, and that was a good house. Plus I miss my dog, Precious. We had to give her away to somebody,” said Cherish, a pretty girl with her hair pulled into a puff on top of her head. “The hardest part was I lost all my best friends.”
The 8-year-old is one of a growing number of homeless children attending schools throughout Metro Detroit, where the number of children known to have no fixed address has shot up by more than 70 percent in the last three years. Cherish has lived in two shelters since her family was evicted from their Detroit home in November.
Private Education: Is it Worth It?
FEE-PAYING schools have long played a giant part in public life in Britain, though they teach only 7% of its children. The few state-educated prime ministers (such as the current one) went to academically selective schools, now rare; a third of all MPs, more than half the appointed peers in the House of Lords, a similar proportion of the country’s best-known journalists and 70% of its leading barristers were educated privately. There is no sign that the elevator from independent schools to professional prominence is slowing: nearly half of the undergraduates at Oxford and Cambridge were privately schooled too.
Many ambitious parents would like to set their children off on this gilded path. But there is a problem: the soaring cost. Fees at private day schools have more than doubled in the past 20 years, in real terms; those at boarding schools have risen even faster (see chart). Since 2000 fees have risen by at least 6% every year, according to Horwath Clark Whitehill, a consultancy—double retail-price inflation and half as much again as the growth in wages. If this continues, a four-year-old embarking on a career in private day schools this autumn will have cost his parents around £170,000 ($335,000) in today’s money by the time he completes secondary school. So even though more Britons than ever before describe themselves as comfortably off, the share of children being educated privately is barely higher than it was two decades ago.
Creative Nonfiction
There is a new genre of teenage writing in town: Creative Nonfiction. It allows high school students (mostly girls) to complete writing assignments and participate in “essay contests” by writing about their hopes, experiences, doubts, relationships, worries, victimization (if any), and parents, as well as more existential questions such as “How do I look?” and “What should I wear to school?”
This kind of writing is celebrated by Teen Voices, where teen girls can publish their thoughts about their hopes, experiences, doubts, relationships, worries, victimization (if any), and parents, etc. and by contests such as the one sponsored by Imagine, the magazine of the Johns Hopkins Center for Talented Youth.
College admissions officers also ask applicants to write about themselves, rather than, for example, asking to see their best extended research paper from high school. The outcome is that many of our public high school graduates encounter college term paper assignments which ask them to learn and write about something other than themselves, and thanks to the kudzu of Creative Nonfiction, this they are unprepared to do.
How teen autobiography came to be a substitute for nonfiction reading and academic writing is a long story, but clearly many now feel that a pumped-up diary entry is worthy of prizes in high school “essay contests,” and may be required in college application materials.
Of course teen girls should write about anything they want in their diaries, that is what diaries are for, after all, but it is a crime and a shame to try to confine their academic writing experiences in such a small, and poorly-gilded, cage of expectations.
Plugging the Hole in State Standards
E.D. Hirsch, Jr. [300K pdf]:
Like other forward-looking organizations, the American Federation of Teachers believes that we need to have better state standards if we are truly going to improve K-12 education. I’ve earnestly stated that same view. That’s no doubt why I’ve been invited to write on this subject.
I’m genuinely flattered. But after living with this question for more than two decades, my views have become so definite (some might say extreme) that I decided to conceive of this piece as a guest editorial where no one should think I am speaking for anyone but myself. That will allow me to speak my mind, which will I hope be more useful to readers than an attempt to find and express a consensus view on behalf of American Educator and the AFT on this controversial subject.
E. D. Hirsch, Jr., is professor emeritus at the University of Virginia and author of many articles and books, including the bestselling Cultural Literacy and The Schools We Need. He is a fellow of the Academy of Arts and Sciences and founder of the Core Knowledge Foundation. His most recent book is The Knowledge Deficit: Closing the Shocking Education Gap for American Children.
The subject is controversial in part because some teachers do not like explicit subject-matter standards. In my own state of Virginia, some teachers are quite annoyed with me personally because many years back my writings influenced the Virginia Board of Education when they introduced the “Virginia Standards of Learning”—the much debated, often dreaded SoLs. But let me say to those teachers, and to other teachers, that the state did not pay attention to what my colleagues and I said back in 1988. We said that subject-matter standards and tests of them should be just two prongs of a four-pronged policy. Standards and tests needed to be accompanied by good teacher training in the subject matter specified in the standards and by good classroom materials that clearly indicate what to teach, but not how to teach it. The last two prongs have never come properly into existence in Virginia, nor to my knowledge in any other state. Moreover, the Virginia standards (not to mention the tests) are not nearly as good as they should be. other state standards are even worse. No wonder there is such dissatisfaction!
But many teachers I have talked to have agreed that they would very much prefer to work in a more coherent system, one that ensured that students who entered their classrooms were adequately prepared.
Thanks to a reader for mentioning this article.
A Decade of the Challenge Index: Send Me Your School and Your Opinion
The Challenge Index, my device for assessing high schools on college-level course participation, was born 10 years ago this month in The Post and Newsweek. At the beginning it was mostly a way to draw attention to a book I had written, “Class Struggle: What’s Wrong (and Right) with America’s Best Public High Schools.” I feared that my prose was far too stuck in the minutiae of classroom life to win much of an audience but hoped that a list of schools ranked in a new way might tweak some curiosity.
In May, Newsweek will again publish its annual Top High Schools list, using the Challenge Index rating method, just as The Post published its annual Challenge Index list of D.C. area schools in December. These lists have taken on a life of their own. Newsweek’s Top High Schools was the most visited feature on the Newsweek.com Web site last year. The Post’s local list is also popular, and both are targets of controversy, producing by far the most questions and comments coming to my e-mail boxes.
Is this good? I would like you to tell me. These past 10 years I have been quoting regularly from the lists’ most acidic critics, as well as their warmest friends. But the arguments on both sides have grown stale and predictable. I have a new idea for advancing the debate.
First, I would like to ask all high schools that have strong Advanced Placement, International Baccalaureate or Cambridge programs and have NOT gotten the Newsweek list entry form to e-mail highschools@newsweek.com right away and request one. If you gave at least as many AP, IB or Cambridge exams last May as you had graduating seniors last year, you should qualify for the Newsweek list. We gather all of our information for the list directly from the qualifying high schools. We have sent out thousands of forms, but we don’t want to miss anybody. If you know of a high school that you think has been overlooked, please forward this column to the principal. I figure the more schools on the list, the more varied and interesting the opinions of the list.
Moore’s Law, Culture & School Change
Here, buried in my sixth paragraph, is the most important nugget: we’ve reached the point in our (disparate) cultural adaptation to computing and communication technology that the younger technical generations are so empowered they are impatient and ready to jettison institutions most of the rest of us tend to think of as essential, central, even immortal. They are ready to dump our schools.
I came to this conclusion recently while attending Brainstorm 2008, a delightful conference for computer people in K-12 schools throughout Wisconsin. They didn’t hold breakout sessions on technology battles or tactics, but the idea was in the air. These people were under siege.
I started writing educational software in 1978. The role of instructional technology has changed since then from a gimmick to a novelty to an effort to an essential component of any curriculum. Kids can’t go to school today without working on computers. But having said that, in the last five years more and more technical resources have been turned to how to keep technology OUT of our schools. Keeping kids from instant messaging, then text messaging or using their phones in class is a big issue as is how to minimize plagiarism from the Internet. These defensive measures are based on the idea that unbound use of these communication and information technologies is bad, that it keeps students from learning what they must, and hurts their ability to later succeed as adults.
But does it?
These are kids who have never known life without personal computers and cell phones. But far more important, there is emerging a class of students whose PARENTS have never known life without personal computers and cell phones. The Big Kahuna in educational discipline isn’t the school, it is the parent. Ward Cleaver rules. But what if Ward puts down his pipe and starts texting? Well he has.
Andy Hertzfeld said Google is the best tool for an aging programmer because it remembers when we cannot. Dave Winer, back in 1996, came to the conclusion that it was better to bookmark information than to cut and paste it. I’m sure today Dave wouldn’t bother with the bookmark and would simply search from scratch to get the most relevant result. Both men point to the idea that we’re moving from a knowledge economy to a search economy, from a kingdom of static values to those that are dynamic. Education still seems to define knowing as more important than being able to find, yet which do you do more of in your work? And what’s wrong with crimping a paragraph here or there from Cringely if it shows you understand the topic?
This is, of course, a huge threat to the education establishment, which tends to have a very deterministic view of how knowledge and accomplishment are obtained – a view that doesn’t work well in the search economy. At the same time K-12 educators are being pulled back by No Child Left Behind, they are being pulled forward (they probably see it as pulled askew) by kids abetted by their high-tech Generation Y (yes, we’re getting well into Y) parents who are using their Ward Cleaver power not to maintain the status quo but to challenge it.
There’s no question that revolution is in the air. The education process is ripe for change for a number of reasons, including those mentioned by Cringely. We’ve seen substantial education spending increases over the past decade, which are unlikely to continue growing at the same pace, given other spending priorities such as health care and infrastructure. The ongoing flap over the proposed Madison report card changes is another example of change in the air. Links:
Cringely has posted a followup article here.
Living in a Post-National Math Panel World
The British mathematician J. E. Littlewood once began a math class for freshmen with the following statement: “I’ve been giving this lecture to first-year classes for over twenty-five years. You’d think they would begin to understand it by now.”
People involved in the debate about how math is best taught in grades K-12, must feel a bit like Littlewood in front of yet another first year class. Every year as objectionable math programs are introduced into schools, parents are alarmed at what isn’t being taught. The new “first-year class” of parents is then indoctrinated into what has come to be known as the math wars as the veterans – mathematicians, frustrated teachers, experienced parents, and pundits – start the laborious process of explanation once more.
It was therefore a watershed event when the President’s National Mathematics Advisory Panel (NMP) held its final meeting on March 13, 2008 and voted unanimously to approve its report: Foundations for Success: The Final Report of the National Mathematics Advisory Panel.
Driving Miss Chloe
YOU know her — that nice teenager across the street? Chloe. There she is, sitting in one of the two captain’s seats in the midsection of her mom’s Toyota Sienna, bopping along to the music on her iPod. Now and then she pulls out one of the ear buds so that she can tell her mom some forgotten bit of news or gossip; Chloe’s mom is up to speed on the dramas that are always unfolding in her daughter’s circle of friends, just as she can tell you the date of her next French test, the topic of her coming history paper and the location and scope of her next community service project. They have a great night planned out: they’re going to pick up Chloe’s best friend and then drive back home for a night of DVDs and popcorn in the family room. Her mom will putter around close by, and her dad will probably sit down and watch one of the movies with the girls.
When I was in high school in the 1970s, we had a name for teenagers like Chloe: losers. If an otherwise normal girl thought that the best way to spend a Saturday night was home with her parents — not just co-existing with them, but actually hanging out with them — we would have been looking for a bucket of pig’s blood.
PSYCHOLOGYZATION
At Harvard University, the Harvard Graduate School of Law is called Harvard Law School, the Harvard Graduate School of Medicine is called Harvard Medical School, but Harvard Education School is called the Harvard Graduate School of Education—surely that indicates something…
In any case, Harvard Education School is kind enough to offer, on its website, an insight into the research interests of its faculty. Their centers for research include: “The Center on the Developing Child; Change Leadership Group; Chartering Practice Project; Civil Rights Project; Collaborative on Academic Careers in Higher Education; Dynamic Development Laboratory; Everyday Antiracism Working Group; GoodWork Project; Harvard Family Research Project; Language Diversity & Literacy Development Research Group; National Center for the Study of Adult Learning and Literacy (NCSALL); NICHD Study of Early Child Care & Youth Development; Project IF; Project on the Next Generation of Teachers; Project Zero; Projects in Language Development; Project for Policy Innovation in Education; Public Education Leadership Project (PELP); and Understanding the Roots of Tolerance and Prejudice.”
The mission of some may be less clear. The “GoodWork®” Project explains that: “The GoodWork® Project is a large scale effort to identify individuals and institutions that exemplify good work—work that is excellent in quality, socially responsible, and meaningful to its practitioners—and to determine how best to increase the incidence of good work in our society.” There is no indication that they are interested in good academic homework. Project IF is about “Inventing the Future.” Project Zero is home to work on multiple intelligences, among other things.
If you dig down further into the research interests of individual faculty, also kindly provided on the site, you may have the same difficulty I do in finding anyone interested in the work of the schools in teaching math, science, history, literature and foreign languages. There may be exceptions, but the overall impression is that academic work, of the sort we are asking students to do in our schools, gets little attention.
There is concern for finding and retaining teachers, but not too much for seeing that they have the academic preparation to be successful in promoting the study of math, science, history, literature, and foreign languages among their students.
Growing Cheers for the Home-Schooled Team
Taber Spani, one of the best high school girls basketball players in the nation, holds hands with two opponents as a coach reads a Bible verse. It is the way each game in the National Christian Homeschool Basketball Championships begins.
This is more than a postseason tournament for the 300 boys and girls teams from 19 states that have competed here over the past six days. As the stands packed with parents and the baselines overrun by small children attest, this is also a jamboree to celebrate faith and family.
“You build friendships here with other girls who know what it’s like to be self-motivated and disciplined and share your values,” said Spani, a junior who plays for the Metro Academy Mavericks of Olathe, Kan. “I wouldn’t trade this tournament for anything.”
Only a decade ago, home-school athletics was considered little more than organized recess for children without traditional classrooms. Now, home-school players are tracked by scouts, and dozens of them have accepted scholarships to colleges as small as Blue Mountain in Mississippi and as well known as Iowa State.
The Whole Child
Here in Massachusetts these days, we are hearing more and more from the Governor and educators about “The Whole Child.” They say we should be sure, in our schools, not to get distracted from a focus, in a holistic way, on the whole child.
I have heard about this “whole child,” but I have yet to have anyone explain what that could mean. I know that it has been said, of boys, for instance, that they are made of “snakes and snails and puppy dogs’ tails,” and of girls, that they are mostly “sugar and spice and everything nice,” but I can’t believe that completes the inventory.
Each student may be considered from a neuro-psychological, socio-economic, philosophical, dental, muscular-skeletal, ethnic, spiritual, academic, motivational, personality configuration, family, allergic, drug-resistant, blood-type, intellectual, gastrointestinal and athletic point of view, among a large group of other perspectives.
This raises the question of what parts of the whole child the school might be best qualified and equipped to work with? Surely no imaginable set of teachers, nurses, hall monitors, principals, bus drivers, coaches, and so on can deal with all the various characteristics of each human being who comes as a student to their school.
It would appear that a school and its staff might have to choose which aspects of the whole child should be their focus. In recent decades, self-esteem, tolerance, social consciousness, respect for differences, and environmental awareness have taken up a good deal of time in the schools. Perhaps as a consequence, our students tend to be in-numerate and a-literate. The Boston Globe reports today that: “37 percent of public high school graduates who enter public higher education may not be ready.”
Ten Tips for Picking a Good School
This is the time of year many parents seek advice on how to find a good elementary, middle or high school, public or private, for their children. Usually I send them a Washington Post article I wrote on this subject three years ago. But this is such an important topic to so many families, I decided to update my thoughts. Here are 10 suggestions, in no particular order. As you’ll see in recommendation number 10, your own thoughts and feelings should always be the deciding factor.
1. Buy an expensive house and you can be almost sure that the local school will be good.
This is an admittedly cynical notion, but there is truth in it. Newcomers often say to themselves, “Let’s find a school or school district we like and then find the house.” Yet most school systems in this area are so good, and parental affluence is so closely tied to educational quality, that if you buy a pricey house, the nearest school is almost guaranteed to be what you are looking for.
2. Look at the data.
In my opinion, based on 22 years of visiting schools and looking at data, the two largest school districts in the Washington area, Fairfax and Montgomery counties, are so well run that even their low-income neighborhoods have schools and teachers that compare with the best in the country. I think the same is true for public schools in Arlington, Clarke, Loudoun and Prince William counties, and the cities of Falls Church and Alexandria. (I’m based in Northern Virginia, so I have closer first-hand knowledge of school systems on that side of the Potomac River.) I also think all the D.C. public schools west of Rock Creek Park are as good as those in the suburbs.
My beliefs are influenced by data on how much schools challenge all of their students, even those with average records of achievement, to take college-level courses and tests before they finish high school. I call this the Challenge Index. (For more on the index, see recommendation No. 9 below.) I want to stress that other systems in the area have some fine public schools. Case in point: All four public high schools in Calvert County appear to be pushing students solidly toward college-level work. There are also some good charter schools. But in some places, you have to look more carefully to find them.
Maya Cole’s Schoolcast Update
Maya Cole:
Dear friends,
First, I would like to let you know that I have new podcasts and blog posts up on my website! You can get information on how our superintendent search evolved and learn how school districts lobby the legislature at a state level through the Wisconsin Association of School Boards.
I am also happy to report that several of us on the Board have begun to meet (after a long hiatus) as members of the Dane County School Board Consortium. The Madison School Board will be hosting other districts next month at LaFollette High School. We will be discussing how we can engage and listen to the public on boundary changes. We hope to come together in the future and combine our lobbying efforts as representatives of Dane County schools. If you know of any state or local officials who would be interested in joining us to learn more about issues facing school districts, please feel free to send them my e-mail address.
I also have two new podcasts, five minutes in length, that explain all you need to know about No Child Left Behind and its re-authorization this year. I met with Sennett school teacher David Wasserman and promised him I would work on engaging the public on this important issue. Please take a listen and pass it on to your friends.
These past few months I have been working hard on many issues on behalf of the school district. I met many fascinating educators and members of the community that are interested in our schools. Some of the Board highlights include, but are not limited to:
The Most Irritating Education Expert in America
I am breaking the rules of book-reviewing by admitting right away that I like Chester E. “Checker” Finn Jr., whose memoir, “Troublemaker: A Personal History of School Reform Since Sputnik,” just came out. For an education reporter, Finn is a godsend — the most quotable man in his field. But that also means he is funny, irreverent and often as irritating as he can be.
I think that’s good. I don’t know him well personally, other than seeing him in the supermarket occasionally. (A very picky shopper, he is murder on the produce.) We don’t always agree, particularly over a recent column of mine that criticized a report by his Thomas B. Fordham Institute.
But I love the fact that no one is spared his acidic sense of humor. That makes him a first-class writer, and “Troublemaker” may be the best of his many books. It’s $26.95, from Princeton University Press, though you can buy it for less online. The book offers one of the most enjoyable, astute and fair-minded reviews of the topsy-turvy course of our national effort to improve schools. It flavors that complex tale with the story of Checker Finn, a smart kid from Dayton, Ohio, who wisely attached himself to some of the most thoughtful political figures of his era and brought their practical approach to fixing schools to a new generation. Among them were Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who served as a Democratic senator from New York from 1977 to 2001; William J. Bennett, a Reagan administration education secretary; and Lamar Alexander, an education secretary in administration of President George H. W. Bush and now a Republican senator from Tennessee.
On Madison Boundary Changes
Dear Board,
As the opening of a new school is coming close, I was surprised to some extent that the plans were changed with such a short amount of time left before the new year.
So………..I dug up my West Side Long Term Planning Binder and reviewed all the data presented to us, as a member of that committee, and remembered the HOURS we spent debating and reviewing the pros and cons of each plan. I believe this is a very hard process and I am sad it is being altered at this late date.
I think one thing many of us felt on the Long Range Planning Committee was even with the new school and addition to Leopold we did not devise a Long Term Plan. My #1 suggestion to the board would be to revisit the plan of “making the map look better” and balancing the income levels but TO MAKE IT A LONG TERM plan and say in 6 years this is what we are going to do. (and stick to it) I think when you spring it on families that in a few months Johnny has to switch schools, we parents are too invested and comfortable with the school and protest the change. But if a 6 Year Plan was in place with some options to start at the new school, grandfather for a couple of years the protest would be great but families would have lots of time to accept the change and deal with it. It would also be a LONG TERM PLAN.
Madison Superintendent Candidate Steve Gallon’s Public Appearance
Watch a 28 minute question and answer session at Monona Terrace yesterday, download the .mp4 video file (175mb, CTRL-Click this link) or listen to this 11.3MB mp3 audio file. Learn more about the other candidates: Jim McIntyre and Dan Nerad.
Related Links:
- Dr. Steve Gallon, District Administrative Director – Miami/Dade Public Schools, Miami, Florida [Clusty Search / Google Search / Live Search / Yahoo Search]
- Desired Superintendent Characteristics
- Five Candidates Named
- Learn more about the three candidates
- WKOW-TV
- NBC15
- Hire the best
- Susan Troller:
As a life-long resident of southern Florida, school superintendent candidate Steve Gallon III grimaced, then grinned, when asked about how he liked Wisconsin weather.
Known as a motivational speaker as well as a top teacher, principal and administrator in the Miami/Dade County public school system, Gallon quickly got back on message: He sees his experiences as an educator and a leader as a good match for the school district here, especially given its rapidly changing demographics and challenges in funding.
He said the issue of underperforming students is not so much one of ethnicity but of economics.
“What we have to do is embrace the reality that gaps in achievement exist,” Gallon said. Much of it, he said, has to do with economic disadvantage.
“It’s the 800-pound gorilla in the room. You must acknowledge that work needs to be done before you’re going to be successful in dealing with it,” he said.
Gallon, 39, is one of three finalists for the position of school superintendent here. He talked with community members and the media in a meet and greet session late Monday afternoon at Monona Terrace. There will be similar sessions today and Wednesday for candidates James McIntyre, chief operating officer for the Boston public schools and Daniel Nerad, superintendent of the Green Bay district.
In responses to questions from the audience, Gallon applauded the notion of working closely with the resources of the University of Wisconsin, said he believed in the least restrictive environment for special education students and cautioned that problems facing schools in terms of funding weren’t likely to be solved easily.
In Praise of Nerds
“AND then, just to show them, I’ll sail to Ka-Troo, and bring back an It-Kutch, a Preep, and a Proo, a Nerkle, a Nerd, and a Seersucker, too!” That typically nifty passage comes from Dr Seuss’s “If I Ran the Zoo”. The book was published in 1950 and contains the first use of the word “nerd”. How very unfortunate that Dr Seuss, whose verbal pyrotechnics have given so much pleasure to so many children, should also have given them, however innocently, the ghastly label “nerd”.
The precise meaning of the word (in its post-Seuss sense) is hard to pin down, as David Anderegg, a child psychologist and academic, argues in this thoughtful and warmly sympathetic book. It denotes a bundle of different qualities: “some combination of school success, interest in precision, unselfconsciousness, closeness to adults and interest in fantasy.”
But the word is no less powerful for its vagueness. Children intuitively understand what a nerd is, with terrible clarity. The bottom line, Mr Anderegg reckons, is that American kids grow up knowing that “nerds are bad and jocks are good”. (His focus is exclusively American: in many other countries academically high-achieving children are revered by their peers.) And this matters because these stereotypes become the basis for choices that children make about their identity and future.
Striving to do badly
Mr Anderegg draws on scores of interviews with his young patients to show what being called a nerd can do to a child. Some are driven to despair or suicide. But most cope by bending to peer pressure. “The kids who will really be hurt by the nerd/geek stereotypes are the kids who will shut down parts of themselves in order to fit in.” When these bright children start switching off their own lights to avoid being branded nerds, it is bad news for everyone—and for the economy. Mr Anderegg points to declining school performance and college enrolment in science subjects in America, and to the fact that employers in certain fields are now having to look abroad to find the best graduates.
Nerds: Who They Are and Why We Need More of Them @ Amazon. Clusty.
DOUBLE VISION
When was the last time a college history professor made it her business to find out the names and schools of the best high school history students in the United States?
When was the last time a college basketball coach sat in his office and waited for the admissions office to deliver a good crop of recruits for the team?
When was the last time a high school history teacher got scores of phone calls and dozens of visits from college professors when he had an unusually promising history student?
When was the last time a high school athlete who was unusually productive in a major sport heard from no one at the college level?
Not one of these things happens, for some good reasons and some not-so-good reasons.
Before you think of the reasons however, we should be aware that sometimes the high school coach who is besieged with interest from the colleges is the same person who is ignored by colleges as a teacher. And sometimes the athlete who gets a number of offers from college coaches is the same person who, as an outstanding student, draws no interest at all. Not only do they observe this demonstration of our placing a higher value on athletics than on academics at the high school level, but their peers, both faculty and student, see it as well, and it teaches them a lesson.
Now it is obvious that if college coaches don’t scramble for the best high school athletes they can find, they may start to lose games, and, before long, perhaps their jobs as well.
To the Superintendent Selection Committee of Madison Metropolitan Schools
via email (with an opportunity to sign on below):
As you make your selection for the next Superintendent of MMSD, we ask you to choose a candidate that will be able to address the needs of all students, including those of gifted and talented (GT) students. We strongly urge you to hire a candidate that is knowledgeable of and open to the special needs of gifted learners.
The following are reasons this is necessary. References for these points are attached.
Approximately 1 out of every 5 drop-outs is gifted.
Giftedness occurs in all racial and socioeconomic groups. It is short-sighted to ignore the needs of the gifted as we increase in low-income enrollment, and creates even more disparity as those who have resources have other choices.
The statistics for Madison’s gifted low-income and minority student drop-outs may be significantly higher than 1 out of 5.
GT students may learn poorly when taught at standard grade level and rate.
It may be thought that the experience of gifted in heterogeneous classrooms is that of the pleasure of excelling above everyone. However, as one GT teacher at Appleton’s gifted school observed, it is the experience of a 5th grader whose teacher inexplicably teaches 1st grade curriculum.
Vietnamese Professor Advocates for an Updated Curriculum
A conversation with Professor Nguyen Lan Dung:
Prof Nguyen Lan Dung, a National Assembly Deputy who has devoted himself to Vietnam’s education system for the last 51 years, while chatting with a VTC News reporter on the New Year, said that he is unhappy with poor curriculums and outdated and unremarkable textbooks
I failed to persuade the National Assembly and the Ministry of Education and Training that the currently applied curriculum and textbooks are greatly different from all others in the world. I do not intend to stop addressing this issue and will still try my best to persuade relevant ministries that it is necessary to make changes.
You have a strong attachment to and interest in the national education system. You may well know that Minister of Education and Training Nguyen Thien Nhan has been taking drastic measures to solve various problems. Do you think he will bring about change?
I well understand that Mr. Nhan is also adamant about addressing education and training shortcomings. That explains why he has started the “say ‘no’ to exam fraud and wrongdoing. Resultantly, 400,000 pupils failed the high school final exam. If you drive too fast, and then you put on the emergency brake, you will crash your motorbike. The consequence of drastic action was that 400,000 students have no degree, and a bleak future ahead.
As a journalist, you may well know that a lot of students dropped out after this movement was implemented I’ve never in my life seen so many give up school; its downright dangerous.
How to Fix Coolidge High
I asked readers how to fix Coolidge High. They quickly filled my e-mail basket with suggestions. Interestingly, this varied group of people agreed on so many points I can summarize their recipe for turning around Coolidge — and schools like it — in just seven steps:
1. Train teachers better. Greg Prudich, president of the Mercer County (W.Va.) Board of Education, said training must be “intense, disciplined, research-based, and result-directed. Require it, and a lot of it. We do a lot of teacher training, and it does benefit everyone.” But it has to fit with whatever the individual school is doing, and include follow-up sessions by the trainer and the principal. Too many school districts schedule big training sessions that are little more than the fad of the month, delivered by a high-priced speaker. Susan Sandler, president of the Justice Matters Institute in San Francisco, notes her group and others have just produced a study, “High Schools for Equity,” focusing on five urban public high schools that are having success. The study was conducted by Linda Darling-Hammond at Stanford University and recommends more investment in teacher preparation and development.
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2. Let principals hire and fire staff. One math teacher at another D.C. high school said, “Principals need the ability to clean house and hire teachers that will continually strive for progress and not give up hope on our children.” Barry Fitzpatrick, principal of Mount Saint Joseph High School in Baltimore, said, “It seems to me this would allow for the creation of a motivated core of teachers.” I have examined closely some charter high schools that are raising student achievement in low-income neighborhoods. Their ability to recruit the best teachers they can find, and dismiss those who are not productive, is among their greatest advantages over schools like Coolidge.
3. Remove disruptive students. This seems obvious to many readers. One reader who favors giving good, serious students their own classes acknowledged the idea has a significant flaw. This reader, with 34 years of experience in urban public education, said: “The most common argument against my proposal was always, ‘Would YOU want to work in the place where the OTHER students were grouped?’ ” The reader said: “I would be willing to work in both. Both groups of students are important and valuable, but they cannot be approached in the same manner.” A Montgomery County teacher who specializes in helping disruptive and at-risk youth had three practical solutions for dealing with such students: Get them into more extracurricular activities, upgrade cafeteria food and require school uniforms. Several readers said that was fine, but if troubled students interfered with the learning of conscientious kids, they had to be put somewhere else.
A Few Words on Sports
Sports provide many opportunities for students, often well beyond the physical effort, competition and team building skills. These two articles provide different perspectives on sports, particularly the climate around such activities and the people who give so much time to our next generation.
Matthew Defour:
The Dane County Sheriff ‘s Office has fired Lt. Shawn Haney because he released to the Waunakee School District a report on a September underage drinking party allegedly involving Waunakee High School students.
Lester Pines, attorney for the 21-year veteran of the department who has no previous disciplinary record, said the termination was based on an ethics violation resulting from a “conflict of interest. ”
The sheriff ‘s report described a Sept. 30 incident that led to five people, including a member of the Waunakee High School football team, being charged with various misdemeanors. According to a criminal complaint filed Nov. 13, a witness told sheriff ‘s deputies investigating the party that “the majority of the Waunakee High School football team ” was at the party.
Waunakee School District Superintendent Charles Pursell did not return messages left Tuesday. He previously said several students, including football players, were disciplined in connection with the party and an elementary school teacher ‘s aide accused of hosting the party resigned. He also has said players weren ‘t disciplined before an important playoff game because the district ‘s investigation had not yet determined that any of them attended the party.
The coaching lifer, much like the three-sport varsity athlete, is on its way to extinction.
But walk into a Wisconsin Lutheran boys basketball practice, and it’s obvious there is plenty of life left in that team’s 62-year-old coach.
It has been quite a season for Dale Walz and the Vikings (4-1). Walz picked up his 500th career victory Dec. 7 when the Vikings topped Hartford, 58-47. More good news came Sunday when he learned he will be enshrined in the Wisconsin Basketball Coaches Association Hall of Fame next October.
Walz, in his 35th year as a coach at the prep level, enjoys the game as much as ever. The Vikings play host to Slinger in a big Wisconsin Little Ten Conference game tonight at 7:30.
“I’ve known since college I wanted to be a high school basketball coach,” Walz said. “The challenge is always there. There’s not a day that goes by at any time of the year when I don’t think about basketball.”
Walz, an assistant principal at Wisconsin Lutheran, has remained true to himself while making subtle adjustments to how the game and kids have changed since he ran his first practice at Lakeside Lutheran in 1973.
“He’s still intense, but everybody mellows a little,” said Ryan Walz, Walz’s second-oldest son and the Vikings’ junior varsity coach. “He’s changed with the kids, which is part of the reason he’s coached as long as he has.”
I learned a number of things from my coaches many (!) years ago – including Walz. Those include:
- the benefit of persistence and a willingness to keep on when most others give up, (I consider this an invaluable lesson),
- Drive, sometimes bordering on fanaticism 🙂
- The ability to push your body far beyond what was previously possible – and why that is important for one’s self confidence,
- Competing against the best is the fastest route to improvement,
- Duplicity, that is; things are not always black and white. The Waunakee story above reminded me of the fog that is athletic conduct rules (or, cheating – more), something important to understand as one travels through life,
- Growing up: the minute I realized that the NFL or NBA was not in my future, I became more interested in lifelong pursuits, including academics.
Looking back to the 1970’s, I am astonished at the level of time and effort my coaches put into a ragtag group of kids. Creating winners out of such raw material is an art.
Update: Susan Lampert Smith:
Boy, that Homecoming drinking party in Waunakee has a hangover that won’t go away.
So far, it’s cost the jobs of a Waunakee teacher’s aide, at whose home the party was allegedly held, and that of a 22-year veteran of the Dane County Sheriff’s Office, who was apparently fired ratting out the miscreants to the WIAA. Of course, that might have been because his son played for the football team of Waunakee’s arch rival, DeForest.
There are some lessons to be drawn from this fiasco: First, it seems that high school sports are just a little too important to people who are old enough to know better.
DeForest wasn’t the only Badger Conference town where people were rubbing their hands together in glee over rumors that, as one witness told the cops, “the majority of the Waunakee High School football team” was at the party. The celebrants hoped the players would get punished and miss some games. But really, why celebrate an event that could have cost lives in drunken-driving crashes?
Top 10 Education Concerns
Michael Shaughnessy interviews the Washington Post’s Jay Matthews:
7) What do you see as the top ten concerns in education? What are the biggest concerns in the Washington Circle?
My concerns or Washington’s? I will go with mine:
- Low standards and expectations in low-income schools.
- Very inadequate teacher training in our education schools.
- Failure to challenge average students in nearly all high schools with AP and IB courses.
- Corrupt and change-adverse bureaucracies in big city districts.
- A tendency to judge schools by how many low income kids they have, the more there are the worse the school in the public mind.
- A widespread feeling on the part of teachers, because of their
inherent humanity, that it is wrong to put a child in a challenging situation where they may fail, when that risk of failure is just what they need to learn and grow.- The widespread belief among middle class parents that their child must get into a well known college or they won’t be as successful in life.
- A failure to realize that inner city and rural schools need to give students more time to learn, and should have longer school days and school years.
- A failure to realize that the best schools–like the KIPP charter schools in the inner cities—are small and run by well-recruited and trained principals who have the power to hire all their teachers, and quickly fire the ones that do not work out.
- The resistance to the expansion of charter schools in most school district offices.
Matthews list is comprehensive and on target.
Prufrock’s Gifted Child Information Blog
When I took my first serious history course in college, the president of the university (a history buff himself) spoke to our class and encouraged us to submit our papers to various journals for publication. Being rather inexperienced, it had never occurred to me to submit anything I had ever written to anyone for publication. In my mind, I was “just” a student and couldn’t imagine anyone being interested in what I wrote.
Now it is possible not only for serious college students to publish their work, but it is also possible for serious high school history students to publish the papers that they have researched. The Concord Review gives young people this opportunity. The Review is the only quarterly journal in the world to publish the academic expository research papers of secondary history students. Papers may be on any historical topic, ancient or modern, foreign or domestic.
Many of these young authors have sent reprints of their papers along with their college application materials. Their research has helped them to gain admission to some of the nation’s (and world’’s) best universities.
California schools move to the head of the class
California public schools dominated a national ranking of high schools released Friday, countering the usual depiction of the state’s schools as lagging behind their counterparts elsewhere in the country.
In a first-ever ranking of high schools by U.S. News & World Report magazine — best-known for its influential and controversial ranking of colleges and universities — 23 of the top 100 schools in the nation were from California, including 10 from the Los Angeles area.
No other state has as many schools on the list, although New York City and its suburbs, with 20 schools, have by far the most of any metropolitan area, and Massachusetts has the highest percentage of its schools ranked among the top 505 profiled.
The top-ranked school in California was Pacific Collegiate School, a charter campus in Santa Cruz, which was ranked No. 2 in the country behind Thomas Jefferson High in Virginia, just outside Washington, D.C.
Also in the top 10 were the Oxford Academy at No. 4, a college preparatory school in the Anaheim Union High School District that accepts students by examination, and the Preuss School at No. 10, a charter school under the joint oversight of the San Diego Unified School District and UC San Diego. The Preuss School is currently under a cloud because of allegations of grade-tampering, but that would apparently not have affected its ranking, since U.S. News relied on standardized test scores, not grades.
In the Los Angeles area, the top-rated school was Gretchen Whitney High in Cerritos, at No. 12. The ranking was the latest in a long list of honors for the school, and Principal Patricia Hager was both proud and circumspect.
“Well, I’d like to be No. 1,” she joked in an interview. “I’m very proud because this is a very special place, and I appreciate any opportunity I get to have that recognized.”
At the same time, she said, “It’s interesting how we define things like ‘successful’ and ‘top performer’ — what does it mean? As a public educator, it concerns me how we use those terms. Every school has something going for it, so in a way it’s unfair to other schools that don’t score highly on tests. Philosophically it’s a dilemma, but I won’t refuse the attention.”
Certain high schools have a remarkable record of sending their students to elite colleges
As college-application season enters its most stressful final stretch, parents want to know if their children’s schools are delivering the goods — consistently getting students into top universities.
It’s a tricky question to answer, but for a snapshot, The Wall Street Journal examined this year’s freshman classes at eight highly selective colleges to find out where they went to high school. New York City private schools and New England prep schools continue to hold sway — Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass., is a virtual factory, sending 19 kids to Harvard this fall — but these institutions are seeing some new competition from schools overseas and public schools that focus on math and science.
The 10 schools that performed best in our survey are all private schools. Two top performers overall are located in South Korea. Daewon Foreign Language High School in Seoul sent 14% of its graduating class to the eight colleges we examined — that’s more than four times the acceptance rate of the prestigious Horace Greeley High School in Chappaqua, N.Y.
No ranking of high schools is perfect, and this one offers a cross-section, rather than an exhaustive appraisal, of college admissions. For our survey, we chose eight colleges with an average admissions selectivity of 18% and whose accepted applicants had reading and math SAT scores in the 1350-1450 range, according to the College Board: Harvard, Princeton, MIT, Williams, Pomona, Swarthmore, the University of Chicago and Johns Hopkins. Some colleges that would otherwise have met our criteria were excluded from our study because information on their students’ high-school alma maters was unavailable. All the colleges in our survey received a record number of applications last year.
How to Fix Struggling High Schools
I think the people running our high schools, as well we parents, need to stop making compromises that sustain the cycle of failure. Kind and thoughtful educators and parents, such as the ones in Parker’s articles, are trying to get through each day without hurting too many feelings or forcing too many confrontations. When the choice is between letting standards continue to slip or making a scene, few people want to be drama queens, which is too bad.
The best inner-city educators begin each day knowing they are going to have to confront apathy again and again. They shove it away as if it were a kidnapper trying to steal their children. To succeed, a high school like Coolidge needs a unified team of such people, who follow the same standards of regular attendance, daily preparation for school, high achievement and attention and decorum in the classroom.
It sounds impossible, but it’s not. There are inner-city schools right now, including some charter, religious and private schools that operate that way. It takes strength and intelligence and humor and love for young people, and an abhorrence for the limp compromises that have created such sickly schools as Coolidge.
I asked several expert educators how they would fix schools like that. Michael A. Durso, principal of Springbrook High School in Silver Spring, said: “These problems did not occur overnight and will not be resolved easily or in a short time.” Michael Riley, superintendent of the Bellevue, Wash., schools, said: “Anyone who thinks there is a quick fix, that taking a couple of dramatic steps will make this situation better overnight, is kidding himself.”
Different Notions of Honesty?
Friends from Hanover came into town this weekend and mentioned this story: “A small town in New Hampshire is coming to grips with a scandal at the public high school where nine students face criminal charges for allegedly breaking into a classroom and stealing advance copies of final exams.
The incident at Hanover High School in Hanover, N.H., is sparking debate between those who believe the students are being treated fairly and those who think the charges go too far.”
But what I found most interesting about this story was this:”Teachers also may be sending kids the wrong message about cheating.
Students say they know they won’t get in trouble for things like sharing homework or finding out what’s on a test from kids who’ve already taken it. “That is cheating, and some teachers don’t classify it as cheating,” said Junior Cory Burns. “Or some don’t see it as such a serious issue, ” added Dillon Gregory.
The millennial generation (born between 1980 and 2000) seems to have a different notion about honesty than previous generations.
Aine Donovan, executive director of the Dartmouth College Ethics Institute, said kids today are more apt to rationalize their behavior as a means to an end; and they seem to have invented their own particular code of right and wrong.
“When I ask my students: ‘Is there anything unethical about downloading music?'” Donovan said. “(They answer) ‘Absolutely not.’ They don’t have a problem with it. And yet, those same kids would never in a million years, walk into a K-mart and steal a CD. They just have a different kind of orientation of morality.”
African-American dads and others here size up Bill Cosby’s tough love talk
There’s a crisis among young African-American males in Madison, says Kenneth Black, president of 100 Black Men of Madison.
High school drop-out rates, low employment, a high incidence of jail and prison time — and beneath it all, a growing number of black children growing up without a father.
“It definitely needs to be dealt with,” said Black, a division administrator in the state Department of Veteran Affairs. “There’s a huge void in most of these kids’ lives. They need to see positive African-American role models who are successful in the community. They need to see us,” he said.
100 Black Men of Madison may be best known for its back-to-school backpack giveaway that draws hundreds of children each year, but its bedrock program is mentoring. “Our intent is to get these young men and expose them to the more positive things in life: the Overture, sporting events, UW and places outside our community,” Black said.
Black was among several local African-Americans interviewed for this article who had praise, and some criticism, for the rallying cry to social responsibility raised by comedian Bill Cosby.
“Some people are not happy with Bill Cosby for airing dirty laundry,” said Johnny Winston Jr., a member of the Madison School Board. “But it’s not like he’s saying something we don’t know.”
Barbara Golden, an advocate for children and families in Dane County, said it was good that the discussion opened by Cosby was taking place outside just African-American circles. “We are very much a part of America. What happens to us should be the concern of everybody,” Golden said.
The African-American culture also has a strong influence on mainstream U.S. culture, she noted, noting how white kids’ performances at a recent Madison middle-school talent show borrowed heavily from hip-hop.
“No one can sit and say, ‘This doesn’t affect me,'” she said.
Cosby’s book published last month, “Come On People: On the Path from Victims to Victors” is just the latest round in a years-long confrontation with his fellow African-Americans.
Additional links and notes on Bill Cosby [RSS]
Seven Warnings and One Mistake in High School Reform
I receive many reports on how to improve our schools. This is an occupational hazard. Reading them is often confusing, depressing, disorienting and maddening. But there is no help for it. The academic papers, commission recommendations and task force action plans are usually written by some of the smartest experts in the country. They have stuff I need to know, so I plow through them.
It is best that I be vague, however, about what the margins of these reports look like after I have finished with them. I have just gone through, for instance, a paper by two leading experts, W. Norton Grubb of the University of California, Berkeley, and Jeannie Oakes of the University of California, Los Angeles. I looked forward to reading their report, “‘Restoring Value’ to the High School Diploma: The Rhetoric and Practice of Higher Standards. 432K PDF” It was published by the Education and the Public Interest Center at the University of Colorado at Boulder and the Education Policy Research Unit at Arizona State University. They focus on the push for rigor in high schools and argue that the discussion spends too much time on narrow definitions of rigor, based on test scores and demanding courses, and ignores other conceptions, such as more sophisticated levels of understanding and the ability to apply learning in unfamiliar settings.
The authors write well and know their stuff. Nonetheless, here are some of the words I wrote on the margins: “stupid,” “so what?” “no! no!” “recipe for disaster,” “booo!” “who cares?” and a few others I may not quote on a family Web site.
Ordinarily, I would use this column to flay Grubb and Oakes for disagreeing with me on how to fix high schools, my favorite topic. But I am writing this on a lovely Saturday, with the leaves turning and the birds happily washing themselves in the little puddles left by my garden-watering wife. Why don’t I, just this once, write about this report’s good points? They include at least seven astute warnings about sloppy thinking in the high school reform debate. Here they are, plus one mistake in their thinking that I could not resist trashing.
Related:
- High School Redesign Links & Notes [RSS]
- Small Learning Communities (SLC) [RSS]
- Bruce King’s evaluation of the Madison West High School SLC implementation.
Fixing the Milwaukee Public Schools: The Limits of Parent-Driven Reform
The Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS) district, like many of its big-city counterparts in other states, continues to suffer from poor student performance. Student test scores and dropout rates are at deplorable levels, both in absolute terms and in comparison with the rest of Wisconsin. This fact has led to a veritable cottage industry dedicated to improving educational outcomes in Milwaukee. The district itself has embraced two reforms in particular: public school choice and parental involvement.
Advocates of public school choice claim that by permitting parents to choose among a variety of public school options within the district, competition for students will ensue. This should improve school effectiveness and efficiency, and ultimately lead to better student outcomes.
Proponents of parental involvement argue that even first-rate schools are limited in their effectiveness unless parents are also committed to their children’s education. Thus, the parental involvement movement seeks to engage parents as partners in learning activities, both on-site and at home. Research has shown that such engagement can produce higher levels of student performance, other things being equal.
Research has also shown, however, that both reforms can be stifled in districts like MPS, with relatively large percentages of poor, minority, single-parent families, and families of otherwise low socioeconomic status. With regard to public school choice, many of these families:
- may fail to exercise choice altogether;
- or
may exercise choice, but do so with inadequate or inaccurate information;- and/or
may choose schools largely on the basis of non-academic criteria.As for parental involvement, disadvantaged parents may withdraw from participation in their child’s education because of lack of time, energy, understanding, or confidence.
This study offers estimates of the extent and nature of public school choice and parental involvement within the MPS district. The basic approach is to identify the frequency and determinants of parental choice and parental involvement using a national data set, and extrapolate those results to Milwaukee, relying on the particular demographics of the MPS district.
Alan Borsuk has more along with John McAdams:
Rick Esenberg has beat us to the punch in critiquing the methodology of this particular study. As he points out, it’s not a study of private school choice, only a study of choice within the public sector.
ecently, the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute (WPRI) released a report entitled, Fixing Milwaukee Public Schools: The Limits of Parent-Driven Reform. Unfortunately, the headline in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel read, “Choice May Not Improve Schools.” That headline not only misrepresented the study, it energized those who are dying to go back to the days when parents were forced to send their children to whichever MPS school the educrats thought best.
So that there is no misunderstanding, WPRI is unhesitant in supporting school choice. School choice is working and should be improved and expanded. School choice is good for Milwaukee’s children.
Here are the simple facts about the WPRI study:
1. The study addressed only public school choice; the ability of parents to choose from among schools within MPS. The author did not address private school choice.
Credit is due the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute for releasing a study that confirms what the rest of us have known for some time: So-called “school choice” programs have failed to improve education in Milwaukee.
The conservative think tank funded by the Bradley Foundation has long been a proponent of the school choice fantasy, which encourages parents to “shop” for schools rather than to demand that neighborhood schools be improved — and which, ultimately, encourages parents to take publicly funded vouchers and to use the money to pay for places in private institutions that operate with inadequate oversight and low standards for progress and achievement.
