Search Results for: Mississippi
String quartet brings classical music to area elementary schools
Scott Girard: “So for some kids here this is their first experience with orchestral string instruments,” Moran said. “Getting to see them live is a really exciting and big deal for them. “I feel really lucky to have it at our school.” That excitement was clear as the students listened to the four members of […]
Teacher Mulligans, continued: The latest report on reading was really bad. Here are some possible solutions
Alan Borsuk: Mississippi got a lot of attention when the NAEP scores were released. It was the only state where fourth grade reading scores improved. Mississippi is implementing a strong requirement that teachers be well-trained in reading instruction. Massachusetts did that in the 1990s and it paid off in the following decade. Wisconsin passed a […]
“STATES ARE MOVING AWAY FROM BAD NEWS TESTS”
Joanne Jacobs: States are moving away from requiring students to show they’ve mastered the content in core courses, writes Fordham’s Adam Tyner, who co-authored a new Fordham study on end-of-course exams (EOCs). Mississippi, which requires students to pass a U.S. history exam to earn a diploma, is considering dropping the requirement. “Even New York, where […]
ANother Lost Decade: Madison’s Reading Crisis Continues
Simpson Street Free Press: On the wall at Simpson Street is a feature editorial from the Wisconsin State Journal. The headline reads “Support State Reading Initiatives” and announces the launch of a bipartisan effort co-chaired by Tony Evers and Scott Walker. The editorial is dated September 12, 2012. Local News and Numbers Recent reports by […]
Campus police said he should’ve been ‘smarter’ than to exercise his First Amendment rights. Now he’s suing.
Foundation for Individual Rights in Education: Late yesterday, with the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, Brown sued Jones County Junior College over policies that deny students their First Amendment rights on campus. The public Mississippi institution twice stopped Brown from exercising his free speech rights when he tried to recruit fellow students for a […]
How the assault on American excellence at Yale–and all universities–threatens our democracy
Anthony Kronman: The Pierson master who gave up his title could not possibly have thought that he might be confused with the owner of a Mississippi plantation. What really disturbed him, and his students, was not race but rank. It was the aristocratic implication, however slight, that men and women can be distinguished according to […]
Back Row America
David Azerrad: The Back Row is Arnade’s name for the parts of the country that are poor and “rarely considered or talked about beyond being a place of problems.” Some are black, some are white; some rural, some urban. All are populated by those who could not or would not leave their dying neighborhoods in […]
California Has the Highest Poverty Rate in America. Why?
Jon Miltimore: Can you guess which state has the highest poverty rate in the U.S.? Many people would say Mississippi. That’s how I would have responded if you had asked me this morning, and I would have been right in a sense. There are two different ways to measure poverty, you see. One accounts for […]
Where in The U.S. Are You Most Likely to Be Audited by the IRS?
Paul Kiel and Hannah Fresques: Humphreys County, Mississippi, seems like an odd place for the IRS to go hunting for tax cheats. It’s a rural county in the Mississippi Delta known for its catfish farms, and more than a third of its mostly African American residents are below the poverty line. But according to a […]
State lawmakers pushing for laxer vaccine rules despite measles outbreaks
Victoria Colliver: We still get messages that say these diseases are good for you. And that old ‘What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger,’” said Oregon state Rep. Mitch Greenlick, who is pushing for stricter vaccination requirements. He has introduced a bill, OR HB3063, to eliminate all vaccine exemptions except for those based on medical […]
Why aren’t kids being taught to read?
Emily Hanford, via a kind reader: But this research hasn’t made its way into many elementary school classrooms. The prevailing approaches to reading instruction in American schools are inconsistent with basic things scientists have discovered about how children learn to read. Many educators don’t know the science, and in some cases actively resist it. The […]
Civics: This Iowa city forged an unusual friendship with China and its president. Then came the soybean tariffs.
Jeanne Whalen: This spring, residents of this Mississippi River city published a book celebrating three decades of friendship with Chinese President Xi Jinping, who first visited as a regional official in 1985 to learn about modern farming practices. That visit, and one Xi made in 2012, helped forge a relationship that turned China into a […]
“We know best”, Disastrous Reading Results and a bit of history with Jared Diamond
Jared Diamond: these stories of isolated societies illustrate two general principles about relations between human group size and innovation or creativity. First, in any society except a totally isolated society, most innovations come in from the outside, rather than being conceived within that society. And secondly, any society undergoes local fads. By fads I mean […]
Welcome Students, Let’s Talk About Confederate Statues
Cameron McWhirter and Melissa Korn: Shadé Shepard recently attended an orientation session addressing the slave-owner connections of her new college, Sewanee. Also known as the University of the South, the liberal-arts school in the Tennessee mountains was conceived by slave owners who didn’t want their sons going North for an education, and many ex-Confederates taught […]
California, Poverty Capital Why are so many people poor in the Golden State?
Kerry Jackson: California—not Mississippi, New Mexico, or West Virginia—has the highest poverty rate in the United States. According to the Census Bureau’s Supplemental Poverty Measure—which accounts for the cost of housing, food, utilities, and clothing, and which includes noncash government assistance as a form of income—nearly one out of four Californians is poor. Given robust […]
Service Meant to Monitor Inmates’ Calls Could Track You, Too
Jennifer Valentino-DeVries: Thousands of jails and prisons across the United States use a company called Securus Technologies to provide and monitor calls to inmates. But the former sheriff of Mississippi County, Mo., used a lesser-known Securus service to track people’s cellphones, including those of other officers, without court orders, according to charges filed against him […]
Wisconsin 4th Grade Reading Results on the 2017 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP)
Wisconsin Reading Coalition: Main takeaways from the 2017 NAEP 4th grade reading exam: Wisconsin’s score was 220, below the national average of 222 Wisconsin score statistically declined from 2015 Wisconsin scores have been statistically flat since 1992 Wisconsin ranked 34th nationally, compared to 25th in 2015 All Wisconsin racial, economic status, and disability status sub-groups […]
Wisconsin Posts Lowest Ranking Ever on 2017 NAEP Reading
Wisconsin Reading Coalition, via a kind email: The 2017 scores from the National Assessment of Educational Progress have been released, and the news is not good for Wisconsin. All the data is available in the NAEP Data Explorer at https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/ndecore/landing. We will do a detailed analysis soon, but here are some important takeaways from the […]
‘A Nation at Risk’ Turns 35: Schools Leaders, Including Five Former Education Secretaries, to Headline Summit on Report that Launched a Movement
Laura Fay: “A Nation at Risk”, the damning report that sparked the modern education reform movement, turns 35 this year. The Ronald Reagan Foundation and Institute is marking the anniversary with a daylong summit to discuss progress since the report’s release and the future of American education. The report, released during Ronald Reagan’s presidency, warned […]
Poverty and the States
: On an individual state basis, the biggest changes in a state’s poverty rate between the two measures in each direction are: a) California’s official poverty rate of 14.5% ranked it No. 16 but the state moved up to No. 1 at 20.4% (highest state poverty rate in the US) using the SPM ( a […]
School district pulls ‘To Kill A Mockingbird’ from reading list; ‘makes people uncomfortable’
associated press: “To Kill a Mockingbird” is being removed from a junior-high reading list in a Mississippi school district. The Sun Herald reports that Biloxi administrators pulled the novel from the 8th-grade curriculum this week. School board vice president Kenny Holloway says the district received complaints that some of the book’s language “makes people uncomfortable.” […]
U.S. Defense Budget May Help Fund “Hacking for Defense” Classes at Universities
Tekla Perry: In 2016, Stanford students started hacking for defense—that is, they took on real projects from National Security Agency, the Army, the Navy, the Air Force, the Army Cyber Command, the Veterans Administration, and other agencies with defense-related problems. The students actually came up with prototype solutions. The innovative Hacking For Defense (H4D) class, […]
William Faulkner Draws Maps of Yoknapatawpha County, the Fictional Home of His Great Novels
open culture: If you’ve ever had difficulty pronouncing the word Yoknapatawpha—the fictional Mississippi county where William Faulkner set his best-known fiction—you can take instruction from the author himself. During his time as writer-in-residence at the University of Virginia, Faulkner gave students a brief lesson on his pronunciation of the Chickasaw-derived word, which, as he says, […]
Relaxing Wisconsin’s Weak K-12 Teacher Licensing Requirements; MTEL?
Molly Beck: A group of school officials, including state Superintendent Tony Evers, is asking lawmakers to address potential staffing shortages in Wisconsin schools by making the way teachers get licensed less complicated. The Leadership Group on School Staffing Challenges, created by Evers and Wisconsin Association of School District Administrators executive director Jon Bales, released last […]
A Lawsuit over Google’s Student Data Mining Practices
Joe Mullin: “Through this lawsuit, we want to know the extent of Google’s data mining and marketing of student information to third parties,” Hood said. “I don’t think there could be any motivation other than greed for a company to deliberately keep secret how it collects and uses student information.” The complaint claims that through […]
Seeking students, public colleges reduce out-of-state prices
Jeff Amy: Graduating high school seniors: does the University of Southern Mississippi have a deal for you! The 14,500-student school has cut annual out-of-state tuition and fees from $16,529 this year to $9,964 next fall, even as it increases the cost for Mississippi residents by 4 percent, to $7,963. The idea is to reverse a […]
A School District That Was Never Desegregated
Sharon Lerner: The wheels of justice have been said to turn slowly. And few things move quickly here in Cleveland, Mississippi, a town of 12,000 people with no movie theater and a quaint commercial district that’s shuttered on Sunday. But when a deadline on a school desegregation suit—originally filed in 1965—came and went last month […]
Elite scribes find the source of America’s weakness
Chris Lehman: First up was crusading lady-savior Nick Kristof, who weighed in this past Sunday with an anguished thumbsucker on the alleged plague of “liberal intolerance” in the American university. Kristof here joins the great trolling chorus of liberal critics of alleged PC trespasses against the spirit of free inquiry. And like those heroes of […]
Camille Paglia: The Modern Campus Has Declared War on Free Speech
Camille Puglia: Our current controversies over free speech on campus actually represent the second set of battles in a culture war that erupted in the U.S. during the late 1980s and that subsided by the mid-1990s — its cessation probably due to the emergence of the World Wide Web as a vast, new forum for […]
Remembering war: A few thoughts after walking the Vicksburg battlefield at night, and before drinking with Charlie Rich
Thomas E Ricks: One day last week I drove 500 miles and as the sun set I really needed to stretch my legs. So when me and my little dog got to the Vicksburg battlefield, and the sign said the battlefield road was closed, we just parked across the street and headed out overland. We […]
“Plenty of Resources”: Madison’s school budget ($17K+/student) isn’t so bad
Wisconsin State Journal Editorial: Cheatham has the right attitude on “repurposing” school resources within existing spending levels. She wants to add three more employees to focus on student academic and career planning, for example. That should help more struggling students graduate. She also wants to advance the district’s technology plan. Cheatham is proposing $2.1 million […]
Reading Huck Finn
Mark Tapson: Published in 1885 with the Civil War still in living memory, Mark Twain’s classic novel about a white boy traveling down the Mississippi River with an escaped slave remains one of our nation’s most controversial books even 130 years later. It was the 14th most “challenged” book in the country during the 2000s, […]
Push for Private Options in Education Gains Momentum
Caroline Porter: A growing number of statehouses are considering measures that would allow school districts, parents and students increasingly to use taxpayer funds to explore alternatives to traditional state-backed public education. The flurry of new bills—which range from supporting private-school options to putting education dollars directly into parents’ hands—comes amid concerns of federal overreach in […]
“Just a Little Easier”: The Middle-Class Economics of Higher Education
Jeffrey Alan Johnson: There is also a more ominous challenge to making community college “as free and universal as high school”: high school is, in most of America, neither free nor universal. Students must provide their own supplies nearly everywhere, and the penalty for a student without paper or pen (let alone iPad and home […]
Jobs for young Southerners: Thanks for nothing
The Economist: BAKING everyday might sound fun, particularly at this time of year. But for one recent graduate of the University of Georgia, working in a cake shop for six months quickly turned from sweet to sickly. At her birthday party recently she warned sweet-toothed friends that she just couldn’t face another black forest gateau. […]
Fight Is On for Common Core Contracts
Caroline Porter: As states race to implement the Common Core academic standards, companies are fighting for a slice of the accompanying testing market, expected to be worth billions of dollars in coming years. That jockeying has brought allegations of bid-rigging in one large pricing agreement involving 11 states—the latest hiccup as the math and reading […]
Wisconsin 6th Best State for Teachers
Todd Milewski: A data analysis has put Wisconsin as the sixth-best state for teachers. The analysis by personal finance website WalletHub scored states and the District of Columbia based on 18 factors, including salary, job openings and school safety. Wisconsin ranked no higher than seventh in any category, but it scored among the top 15 […]
Wisconsin is a great place for kids to grow up — unless they’re black
Steven Elbow, via a kind reader: Last year’s “Race to Equity” report set off an impassioned discussion about the vast disparities in the quality of life for African-Americans and whites. But that discussion was restricted to Dane County. Now the authors have issued a new report that they hope will take the discussion to the […]
Job security for teachers helps everyone
Liza Featherstone: A New York City parents group is joining a nationwide trend — recently filing a lawsuit that challenges teacher tenure laws. Mona Davids of the New York City Parents Union sued in State Supreme Court in Staten Island on behalf of 11 plaintiffs who suffered in classrooms with bad teachers. A similar suit is […]
When Teachers Romanticize Their Students’ Poverty
April Bo Wang: It’s one of those summer afternoons in Helena, Arkansas, where the sun is bright enough to wipe everything out in a glare of white. Even the breeze feels like a hairdryer on my neck. I am sweating on top of Battery C. The last time I was here, I’d picked my way […]
All Children Should Be Delinquents
John Beckman: IN the late 1970s, in the Mississippi River town of Dubuque, Iowa, the threat of summer boredom was real. The nearest theme parks were hours away, and the best video games (Space Invaders, Asteroids) were coin guzzlers, fueled by hard-earned lawn-mowing or paper-route funds. While we had the requisite tennis courts and public […]
A new front has opened in the Common Core wars — over testing contracts.
Stephanie Simon & Caitlin Emma: The high-stakes battle is undermining one of the Obama administration’s most prized initiatives: its vision, backed by more than $370 million in federal funds, of testing students across the country on a common set of exams in math, reading and writing. The administration wants children in Mississippi to be measured […]
Annie E. Casey study highlights problems; Pilot projects in Milwaukee work on answers
Wisconsin Reading Coalition, via a kind email: The Annie E. Casey Foundation published “Race for Results: Building a Path to Opportunity for All Children” earlier this month. This is another chance for Wisconsin to see how its children are faring in comparison to the rest of the country. Taking into account 12 separate factors, only […]
Income Inequality by State, 1917 to 2011
Estelle Sommeiller & Mark Price: According to state-level data, available only through 2011, the largest gaps between the top 1 percent and the bottom 99 percent are in Connecticut and New York. In both states the top 1 percent in 2011 earned on average over 40 times the income of the bottom 99 percent of […]
K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: Managing Corrections Costs
National Conference of State Legislators: States will spend $40 billion to incarcerate and supervise offenders in fiscal year (FY) 2014, according to the National Confer- ence of State Legislatures’ (NCSL) State Budget Actions: FY 2013 & 2014. This is a modest 2.5 percent increase over FY 2013 costs, with cor- rections a shrinking portion of […]
Ten map meditations on economic mobility
Andy Smarick, via a kind reader: The map shows, by small geographic areas, the likelihood that a child born into the lowest-income quintile ended up (as an adult) in the highest-income quintile. This isn’t the necessarily the best indicator of economic mobility, but it is still edifying. (The fantastic interactive map from the Times allows […]
Parents push for Miss. special education vouchers
Parents who want Mississippi lawmakers to approve special education vouchers are adding their voices in support.
House and Senate lawmakers held a hearing Tuesday to showcase the proposals. Natalie Gunnels of Tupelo told lawmakers that public school administrators can’t or won’t take care of students like her son Patrick, who has trouble walking, is sensitive to noises, and has trouble reading and writing.
“It’s obvious to me and my husband that the public school system is not equipped to educate the Patricks of our state,” Gunnels said.
The plan would give debit cards with more than $6,000 on them to parents who withdraw their special education students from public schools. The money could be spent on private school tuition or private tutoring services.
Mandy Rogers, a disability advocate, said that the state has been promising improvements but not delivering since the federal law was passed.
Who is really ‘worst’ in education?
A child who grows up in Nevada has less chance for adult success than a child growing up anywhere else in the United States.
Let that sink in for a moment. Of all 50 states and the District of Columbia, the average (actually median) child whose family has chosen to live in Nevada has less chance of future success than the child of a family living anywhere else in the country — less chance than a child in Mississippi or Alabama or inner city Washington, D.C.
Of 51 places in the country to raise a child, Nevada comes in at 51st. This is the conclusion of “Quality Counts,” a national study conducted by Education Week and released recently. Just after the Sun printed its piece on the report, headlined “Report says Nevada schools again worst in nation for giving children a chance for success” (Jan. 9), I began receiving questions from disturbed educators, policymakers, parents, journalists and others about the study. How bad must the quality of education in Nevada really be? What should CCSD do to improve these horrible results? What could the College of Education do to address the poor chances of success for Nevada’s children? Most cogently: What does the report really tell us and what needs to be done?
NAEP Wisconsin Results & Commentary with a Remarkable Reading Recovery Booster
Wisconsin Reading Coalition, via a kind email:
The results of the 2013 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) were released today. For Wisconsin, the news on reading is much the same as it was two years ago at the last NAEP administration. 33.6% of our 4th graders reached the proficient level. Massachusetts again scored at the top, with 50.4% of its 4th graders proficient.
Wisconsin students who are Asian, black, and white, as well as students who are not eligible for a free and reduced lunch, all posted scores that are significantly lower than the national averages for those groups of students. We had no 4th grade sub-groups that scored significantly above the national average for their group.
Wisconsin’s black 8th graders had the lowest scores in the nation, falling below Mississippi and Alabama. Wisconsin’s black 4th graders had the second lowest scores in the nation, and at both 4th and 8th grade, Wisconsin had the largest gap between white and black students.
As we examine the data more fully, we will have more specifics.Fourth- and eighth-graders across the country made modest advances in national math and reading exams this year, according to data released Thursday, but proficiency rates remained stubbornly below 50% on every test.
Amid the sluggish progress nationwide, a few areas notched drastic improvements on the 2013 National Assessment of Educational Progress exams, with Tennessee and Washington, D.C., –as well as schools on military bases–the only ones achieving statistically significant gains on all tests.
Washington gained a cumulative 23 points since 2011, while Tennessee posted a 22-point jump–both compared with a 4-point national gain. The exams are scored on a 0-500 scale.
Officials in Tennessee and Washington attributed the gains to tougher classroom math and reading standards, improved teacher development and overhauling teacher evaluations.State posts widest achievement gap in ‘the nation’s report card’ by Lydia Mulvany:
Steven Dykstra, a founding member of the Wisconsin Reading Coalition, a grassroots group devoted to reforming reading instruction, said the state needs to start imitating reforms in other states by training teachers more effectively. In the past, Wisconsin students ranked as high as third in the nation in reading.
“This isn’t a surprise. The last time we did well in reading was when everyone sucked at reading,” Dykstra said. “When some states started doing better, they very quickly left us behind.”
“Left behind” is precisely what the data shows is happening to Wisconsin’s black students:
Eighth graders, reading: 9% were judged proficient; 55% rated below basic, the most of any state.
Fourth graders, reading: 11% were proficient; 65% scored below basic, again the most of any state.
Eighth graders, math: 8% were proficient; 62% rated below basic, better than only three states.
Fourth graders, math: 25% were proficient; 30% scored below basic, again with only three states performing worse.
Henry Krankendonk, a retired Milwaukee Public Schools math curriculum planner and NAEP board member, said Wisconsin’s failure to narrow the disparity — which has existed for decades — is a challenge for Milwaukee in particular, because it has the highest concentration of minority students. Krankendonk said the problem has long been weak standards for what students should know, and he was hopeful that the recent adoption of new standards more in line with NAEP, called Common Core State Standards, would help.Meanwhile, St. Norbert College Education Professor Steve Correia emphasized how well (!) Reading Recovery is working while discussing Wisconsin’s NAEP results on WPR. [5.6mb mp3 audio]
Related: Madison’s long term disastrous reading results.
Much more on NAEP over time, here.
Missing out on timeless literature
He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice,” Mississippi’s William Faulkner said of man upon receiving the 1949 Nobel Prize in Literature, “but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet’s, the writer’s, duty is to write about these things.”
New Englanders can rightfully claim to have been America’s 19th-century literary hub, but no other regional landscape dominated 20th-century literature like the South and its genius for storytelling. Famously, Faulkner’s imaginary Yoknapatawpha County, Chickasaw for “split land,” provided the setting for his most inspired novels.
American high school students should read Southern writers like Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Flannery O’Connor and Walker Percy, author of the 1962 National Book Award-winning “The Moviegoer.” Percy crafted stories about “the dislocation of man in the modern age,” while contributing to a “community of discourse” around fiction writing. His Greenville, Miss., was a wellspring of outstanding writers.
Greenville’s patriarch, William Alexander Percy, was a lawyer, planter and poet from a suicide-plagued family. He authored the best-selling 1941 memoir “Lanterns on the Levee.” His second cousin, Walker Percy, and Walker’s lifelong best friend, Shelby Foote, were both young when they lost their fathers. Will Percy’s book-filled house became a sanctuary for writers, journalists and musicians, as the man himself mentored a region.
States continue increasing or eliminating caps on charter schools
In the past three years, 18 states have lifted caps on the number of charters schools allowed, another sign that lawmakers are embracing charters as valuable options in public education.
“I think there’s a growing recognition from state policymakers that charter schools are one of the pieces of the puzzle of education reform,” said Todd Ziebarth of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools. “They’re not the silver bullet. They’re not a panacea.”
But when charter schools are allowed to push the traditional system, they can become the labs of innovation they were designed to be, he said.
The information on caps comes in a new report from the alliance, which also looked at other changes states have made to charter school laws. Forty-two states and the District of Columbia now have charter schools, and the alliance concluded 35 of them strengthened their laws. In the alliance’s view, that could mean anything from increasing transparency of the approval process to ensuring local charter school authorizers are adequately funded.
Most of the progress was on lifting the caps, said Ziebarth, who co-authored the report and is the alliance’s senior vice president for state advocacy and support. Between 2010 and the beginning of 2013, 16 states lifted caps. Since January, Mississippi and Texas have joined the list.
Efforts to Recruit Poor Students Lag at Some Elite Colleges
With affirmative action under attack and economic mobility feared to be stagnating, top colleges profess a growing commitment to recruiting poor students. But a comparison of low-income enrollment shows wide disparities among the most competitive private colleges. A student at Vassar, for example, is three times as likely to receive a need-based Pell Grant as one at Washington University in St. Louis.
“It’s a question of how serious you are about it,” said Catharine Bond Hill, the president of Vassar. She said of colleges with multibillion-dollar endowments and numerous tax exemptions that recruit few poor students, “Shame on you.”
At Vassar, Amherst College and Emory University, 22 percent of undergraduates in 2010-11 received federal Pell Grants, which go mostly to students whose families earn less than $30,000 a year. The same year, the most recent in the federal Department of Education database, only 7 percent of undergraduates at Washington University were Pell recipients, and 8 percent at Washington and Lee University were, according to research by The New York Times.
Researchers at Georgetown University have found that at the most competitive colleges, only 14 percent of students come from the lower 50 percent of families by income. That figure has not increased over more than two decades, an indication that a generation of pledges to diversify has not amounted to much. Top colleges differ markedly in how aggressively they hunt for qualified teenagers from poorer families, how they assess applicants who need aid, and how they distribute the available aid dollars.
Some institutions argue that they do not have the resources to be as generous as the top colleges, and for most colleges, with meager endowments, that is no doubt true. But among the elites, nearly all of them with large endowments, there is little correlation between a university’s wealth and the number of students who receive Pell Grants, which did not exceed $5,550 per student last year.
Related:Travis Reginal and Justin Porter were friends back in Jackson, Miss. They attended William B. Murrah High School, which is 97 percent African-American and 67 percent low income. Murrah is no Ivy feeder. Low-income students rarely apply to the nation’s best colleges. But Mr. Reginal just completed a first year at Yale, Mr. Porter at Harvard. Below, they write about their respective journeys.
Reflections on the Road to Yale: A First-Generation Student Striving to Inspire Black Youth by Travis Reginal:For low-income African-American youth, the issue is rooted in low expectations. There appear to be two extremes: just getting by or being the rare gifted student. Most don’t know what success looks like. Being at Yale has raised my awareness of the soft bigotry of elementary and high school teachers and administrators who expect no progress in their students. At Yale, the quality of your work must increase over the course of the term or your grade will decrease. It propelled me to work harder.
Reflections on the Road to Harvard: A Classic High Achiever, Minus the Money for a College Consultant by Justin Porter
I do not believe that increasing financial aid packages and creating glossy brochures alone will reverse this trend. The true forces that are keeping us away from elite colleges are cultural: the fear of entering an alien environment, the guilt of leaving loved ones alone to deal with increasing economic pressure, the impulse to work to support oneself and one’s family. I found myself distracted even while doing problem sets, questioning my role at this weird place. I began to think, “Who am I, anyway, to think I belong at Harvard, the alma mater of the Bushes, the Kennedys and the Romneys? Maybe I should have stayed in Mississippi where I belonged.”
First public school seized by parents set to open
A grand experiment in letting parents seize control of their neighborhood schools is unfolding in an impoverished Mojave Desert town — and lawmakers as far away as Pennsylvania, Florida and Michigan are watching, and pondering the implications for troubled schools in their own states.
Desert Trails Preparatory Academy in Adelanto, Calif., will open for the academic year on Monday as the first school in the nation to have been remade under a law that gives parents the power to take over a low-performing public school and fire the principal, dismiss teachers or bring in private management.
The law, known as “parent trigger“, passed in California in 2010 and has since been adopted by six other states — Connecticut, Indiana, Louisiana, Mississippi, Ohio and Texas — though parents have not yet taken over schools in any of them.
Parent Revolution, a nonprofit dedicated to organizing trigger campaigns, anticipates a surge of interest in other state legislatures as Desert Trails and three other California schools transformed by parent activism reopen over the next month. Parent empowerment has strong bipartisan support in many states — a sign of the diminished clout of teachers unions, which oppose trigger laws but have not been able to stop their traditional allies in the Democratic Party from endorsing the concept.
Teach for America isn’t perfect, but it has been a boost to education
As an African-American male born to a teenage mother, my future was bleak, but I had an extended family of teachers, mentors and coaches whose high expectations and support helped me grow from a young boy with an uncertain future to a young man with a college degree.
Although, I found a viable pathway, I remained agitated that we can predict a child’s life trajectory based primarily on their zip code. Teach For America (TFA), an organization on a mission to ensure an excellent education for all children by putting talented college graduates into teachingroles, seemed like the perfect fit, so I headed south to teach 8th Grade science in the Mississippi Delta just three days after graduating from Harvard University.
Sesame Street Creates a Muppet Whose Dad Is in Jail. Way Too Many Kids Relate.
Grab your hankies: To help kids coping with a parent in prison, Sesame Street created a Muppet whose father can’t play with him because he’s in jail.
Sesame Street has always made it part of its larger mission to address all children, not just the ones with traditional families or easily digestible experiences. In the latest move toward that goal, the popular children’s program created an online toolkit, titled “Little Children, Big Challenges: Incarceration,” for those struggling to raise a child who has an incarcerated parent. Released just in time to help kids in need get through Father’s Day, the toolkit has its detractors. Alex Jones naturally went into full-blown conspiracy theory mode, calling it a “propaganda program designed to help children accept the fact that daddy is in jail” by dangerously telling kids that “all you have to do is talk about your feelings, draw a few pictures, write letters to your dad, and toddle off to visit him in jail every now and then and everything will be all rainbows and lollipops.” (Better to tell them … what?) Mike Riggs at Reason was also angry, though not at Sesame Street but at the U.S. government for incarcerating so many people that these kinds of materials are necessary. He points out that nearly 7 million people are under correctional supervision in this country, writing, “congratulations, America, on making it almost normal to have a parent in prison or jail.”
Obviously, Sesame Street can’t do anything about the growth of the police state or the war on drugs that has resulted in the massive incarceration numbers in this country. The show is just trying to help innocent children deal with the repercussions. But Riggs is absolutely right: That this even has to exist in the first place shows how much pointless damage our prison system does not just to people who are caught up in the overly punitive, often racially biased justice system, but also to their families. As Jill Filipovic writes in the Guardian:
Crucible of Change in Memphis as State Takes On Failing Schools
Not far off a scruffy boulevard lined with dollar stores and payday loan shops in a neighborhood of run-down brick bungalows, Corning Achievement Elementary School here is a pristine refuge, with gleaming tile floors and signs in classrooms proclaiming “Whatever it takes.”
In this Mississippi River town marked by pockets of entrenched poverty, some of the worst schools in the state are in the midst of a radical experiment in reinventing public education.
Last fall, Tennessee began removing schools with the lowest student test scores and graduation rates from the oversight of local school boards and pooling them in a special state-run district. Memphis, where the vast majority of public school students are black and from poor families, is ground zero: 80 percent of the bottom-ranked schools in the state are here.
Tennessee’s Achievement School District, founded as part of the state’s effort to qualify for the Obama administration’s Race to the Top grant, is one of a small handful of state-run districts intended to rejuvenate chronically struggling schools. Louisiana’s Recovery School District, created in 2003, is the best-known forerunner, and this year Michigan also set up a state district for failing schools. In February, Virginia legislators passed a measure to set up a similar statewide district.
The achievement district is a veritable petri dish of practices favored by data-driven reformers across the country and fiercely criticized by teachers’ unions and some parent groups.
Most of the schools will be run by charter operators. All will emphasize frequent testing and data analysis. Many are instituting performance pay for teachers and longer school days, and about a fifth of the new district’s recruits come from Teach for America, a program in which high-achieving college graduates work in low-income neighborhood schools. And the achievement district will not offer teachers tenure.
The Freedom To Teach
WITH Republican control of state government now firmly consolidated, Mississippi is poised for wholesale education reform. In his state-of-the-state address in January, Governor Phil Bryant proposed a robust, if rather familiar, basket of reforms: expansion of the state’s current (and highly restrictive) charter-school laws, merit pay for teachers, and higher standards for teacher training. More controversially, Mr Bryant proposed allowing students to enroll in schools outside of the district in which they live (so-called open enrollment), as well as privately-funded scholarships for students to attend private schools. With the exception of these last, the proposals have been enthusiastically embraced by the state legislature.
The question is whether they will work. Some charter schools have proven successful and the much-touted KIPP programme has produced marked improvement in test scores for low-income children. The worst fears of sceptics (that charter schools would siphon better teachers and better prepared students away from traditional public schools; that the result would intensify economic and ethnic segregation) have not been realised. But taken as a whole, school choice has failed to produce across-the-board improvements in student learning.
Louisiana has second-lowest graduation rate for public special education students
Louisiana has the second-lowest public high school graduation rate in the nation for special education students, according to federal figures.
The rate in Louisiana, 29 percent, is only lower than Mississippi and Nevada, statistics compiled by the U.S. Department of Education show. The graduation rate in both those states is 23 percent.
South Dakota is tops in the nation at 84 percent, federal figures show. The national average is 58 percent.
Louisiana’s dismal rate is one of the key drivers behind state Superintendent of Education John White’s push to revamp the way the state finances special education.
A Long Struggle for Equality in Schools
Looking back at the school desegregation case he took as a young lawyer, Rubin Salter Jr. sees a pile of wasted money and squandered opportunities. After almost four decades in court and nearly $1 billion in public spending, little has changed for the black children whose right to a good education he had labored to defend.
They are still among the lowest-performing students in the Tucson Unified School District, still among the most likely to be suspended or to be assigned to special-education programs and still among the least likely to join groups for gifted students. They are, as Mr. Salter put it, “still getting the short end of the stick.”
A federal judge approved a plan on Wednesday intended to lift a longstanding desegregation order that has served as a reason and an excuse for a lot that has gone wrong in the district over the past decades: shrinking enrollment, sliding graduation rates and insistent dropout rates.
After all these years, Mr. Salter, whose family left Mississippi in the 1950s to escape segregation, said he no longer harbors hope for integration. One reason is that the district, overwhelmingly white when he began working on the case in 1974, is now largely made up of Latino students, who are also a party in the litigation and perform just as poorly as their black counterparts. Another is that parameters set long ago by the Supreme Court prevent the busing of students beyond a school district’s boundaries as a remedy for segregation.
In a Memphis Cheating Ring, the Teachers Are the Accused
MEMPHIS — In the end, it was a pink baseball cap that revealed an audacious test-cheating scheme in three Southern states that spanned at least 15 years.
Test proctors at Arkansas State University spotted a woman wearing the cap while taking a national teacher certification exam under one name on a morning in June 2009 and then under another name that afternoon. A supervisor soon discovered that at least two other impersonators had registered for tests that day.
Ensuing investigations ultimately led to Clarence D. Mumford Sr., 59, who pleaded guilty on Friday to charges that accused him of being the cheating ring’s mastermind during a 23-year career in Memphis as a teacher, assistant principal and guidance counselor.
Federal prosecutors had indicted him on 63 counts, including mail and wire fraud and identify theft. They said he doctored driver’s licenses, pressured teachers to lie to the authorities and collected at least $125,000 from teachers and prospective teachers in Arkansas, Mississippi and Tennessee who feared that they could not pass the certification exams on their own.
American Calendar: Birthday of Martin Luther King Jr.
What So Proudly We Hail, via a kind reader’s email
Introduction
Are we at last one nation, with liberty and justice for all? In this ebook, we reflect on the life and legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. and the Civil Rights Movement, and assess their efforts to overcome racial discrimination and to promote racial equality and integration. The first chapter explores the origins and traditions of the Martin Luther King Jr. birthday celebration, with particular attention to the American character of the holiday. The second chapter presents powerful accounts of the black American experience during the era of racial segregation–from Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Zora Neale Hurston, to Langston Hughes, Ralph Ellison, and James Baldwin–with a focus on showing the need for civil rights. The third chapter brings us to the Civil Rights Movement itself, evaluating the goals, strategies, and tactics of the Movement’s various leaders. The final chapter raises questions about the challenging and vexed issues left open in the wake of the successes of the Civil Rights Movement: equality; family, religion, and culture; and identity.
Each selection includes a brief introduction by the editors with guiding questions for discussion. Also unique to this collection is a never-before published letter by coeditor Leon R. Kass about his and his wife Amy’s experience working with civil rights activists in Mississippi during the summer of 1965.“A civics and history curriculum done right”.
The Best Speech About Education — Ever
Every now and then a speech comes along that reminds me why public speaking is still essential and why I said back in 2003 that the only reason to give a speech is to change the world.
Today, Mike Johnston is a state senator from Colorado, but his passion is education, and it was ignited as a Teach for America teacher in the Mississippi delta in 1997. From that came a searing book, In the Deep Heart’s Core, about the terrible challenges facing teachers and learning in that state. Johnston moved on to become the principal of a school for challenged kids in Colorado.
Jeb Bush, with cash and clout, pushes contentious school reforms
Former Florida Governor Jeb Bush soared to rock star status in the education world on the strength of a chart.
A simple graph, it tracked fourth-grade reading scores. In 1998, when Bush was elected governor, Florida kids scored far below the national average. By the end of his second term, in 2007, they were far ahead, with especially impressive gains for low-income and minority students.
Those results earned Bush bipartisan acclaim. As he convenes a star-studded policy summit this week in Washington, he is widely regarded as one of the most influential education reformers in the U.S. Elements of his agenda have been adopted in 36 states, from Maine to Mississippi, North Carolina to New Mexico.
Many of his admirers cite Bush’s success in Florida as reason enough to get behind him.
But a close examination raises questions about the depth and durability of the gains in Florida. After the dramatic jump of the Bush years, Florida test scores edged up in 2009 and then dropped, with low-income students falling further behind. State data shows huge numbers of high school graduates still needing remedial help in math and reading.
Ole Miss sets early ed focus
The University of Mississippi’s School of Education is developing a curriculum that could impact early education across the state.
Starting next fall, undergraduates who complete the required classes can earn an emphasis in early education along with their bachelor’s degree in education. The school also will offer a graduate degree in early childhood education. That endorsement or degree would qualify them to work with elementary school-aged children, as well as children ages 3, 4 and 5, said David Rock, dean of the Ole Miss School of Education.
That effort is being funded with a $1.1 million grant from the Jackson-based Robert M. Hearin Support Foundation. In all, the foundation has awarded the university five different grants totalling $5.7 million to support different programs that aim to improve education in Mississippi.
A Right to Choose Single-Sex Education
Kay Bailey Hutchison & Barbara Mikulski:
For some children, learning in girls-only or boys-only classes pays off. Opponents of the idea are irresponsible.
Education proponents across the political spectrum were dismayed by recent attempts to eradicate the single-gender options in public schools in Virginia, West Virginia, Alabama, Mississippi, Maine and Florida. We were particularly troubled at efforts to thwart education choice for American students and their families because it is a cause we have worked hard to advance.
Studies have shown that some students learn better in a single-gender environment, particularly in math and science. But federal regulations used to prevent public schools from offering that option. So in 2001 we joined with then-Sen. Hillary Clinton and Sen. Susan Collins to author legislation that allowed public schools to offer single-sex education. It was an epic bipartisan battle against entrenched bureaucracy, but well worth the fight.
Since our amendment passed, thousands of American children have benefited. Now, though, some civil libertarians are claiming that single-sex public-school programs are discriminatory and thus illegal.
A different Kind of College Ranking
Washington Monthly: Our ranking of liberal arts colleges also reveals institutions that stand out in unconventional ways. Bryn Mawr is ranked first this year, continuing a long tradition of women’s colleges serving their country. Berea College in Kentucky is ranked third, far above its U.S. News position, because it enrolls a predominantly low-income student population […]
‘Won’t Back Down’ highlights parent trigger law for schools
Set in a gritty Pittsburgh neighborhood, the upcoming Maggie Gyllenhaal/Viola Davis film tells the story of two parents, one of them a teacher, who use a little-known state law to take over their kids’ struggling public school. Turns out that such laws actually exist in four states — California, Texas, Mississippi and Louisiana — with lawmakers in about a dozen more, including Pennsylvania, expected to consider them over the next year.
First dreamed up by Democratic activist and former Clinton White House staffer Ben Austin, so-called parent trigger laws allow dissatisfied parents to demand changes at their kids’ schools — including a total takeover — if a majority sign on.
Upper Education Myopia
Not long ago, an associate professor of Creative Writing (the most popular subject in which is now not Ozymandias or Dover Beach or Westminster Bridge, but “ME”)…at an Upper Education institution west of the Mississippi wrote an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education, bemoaning the incompetence and/or indifference of her Upper peers in evaluating, correcting or coaching the academic writing of their students:
“…And since there’s little room in most graduate curricula to focus on writing, many future faculty members simply never learn. The truth is, everyone thinks whoever went before him or her was responsible for the job of teaching writing: College instructors believe students learned the mechanics in high school; graduate advisers assume their students learned as undergraduates what they needed to know about style and argumentation.
By the time people become professors, they have no one to turn to for help with their writing. Some hope or pray that editors will save them; sometimes that happens. But most acquisitions editors don’t have the time or energy to do line-editing, and they assume that the copy editors will clean up the prose…And so, bad prose gets published and bad models proliferate….
…What, then, to make of the political scientist who didn’t think he had the expertise to comment on his students’ writing? I believe he’s shirking an important aspect of his job…If professors don’t tell students that the writing matters, who will? If professors don’t know what good writing looks like, who does?”
I followed up this welcome interest in academic writing at the Upper Education level by sending her information about The Concord Review, which, for 25 years has been working to encourage, distribute and, with the National Writing Board, to assess, serious academic expository writing by high school students around the world (Lower Education Level).
The replies I got from the Upper Education personage were:
“I got a whole bunch of messages that I don’t think were meant for me. You might check your computer for viruses.”
When I sent more information, she replied that she had seen material about these efforts when she was in Admissions at an Upper Education place in the Southeast but:
“What made a big impression on me is that there was (as I recall) a submissions fee. At Duke, I saw a lot of ‘honors’ that came with a price tag. That troubles me.”
So, of course, she never inquired further. (And yes, Duke takes an admissions fee…)
Now, so as not to charge all Upper Education people with having the same dim or poor vision about writing at the Lower Education Level, here is a letter I got from a physicist at the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study…
INSTITUTE FOR ADVANCED STUDY
Einstein Drive, Princeton, New Jersey 08540
22 June 2000
Mr. Will Fitzhugh, President
National Writing Board
The Concord Review
730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24
Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776
Dear Mr. Fitzhugh,
I recently came across The Concord Review, and I would like to express my appreciation for your leadership role and your continuous dedication to this endeavor. Not only am I impressed with the high quality of the history articles that appear in the Review, but I am also impressed with the very idea of a publication which provides a forum for the academic work of high school students in history.
As a physicist, I am accustomed to the many initiatives, such as math competitions and physics olympiads, instituted to recognize and promote interest and talent in the sciences among high school students. However, I have always felt that there was no equivalent mechanism to encourage and nurture students in the humanities, and to recognize their accomplishments. The Concord Review strikes me as a simple yet brilliant idea to help fill that gap, and as a very effective way to promote high standards and excellence in the humanities.
Sincerely,
Chiara R. Nappi
Theoretical Physicist
Will Fitzhugh
The Concord Review
12 July 2012
New voucher program for dyslexic students deserves a look
Mississippi recently became the first state in the nation to adopt a public and private school choice program in which state and federal monies are provided directly to schools which parents choose. Aimed at students with dyslexia, it’s also the second special needs school choice program in the country designed for children with a single type of disability. (Ohio’s Autism Scholarship Program enacted in 2003 was the first.)
What makes this new program interesting is that it may be a starting point for other state legislatures where special needs voucher bills have failed due to concerns about parent accountability – Wisconsin comes to mind – or where special needs voucher laws have come under increased scrutiny due to reports of private school abuse of public money – Florida comes to mind.
Mississippi’s program morphed from a dyslexia screening and treatment bill (supported by a governor who struggled with the learning disorder) into a school choice measure during the proverbial sausage-making legislative process. It’s not as carefully or as broadly designed as it could have been. It also appears there’s currently only one school in the state which is specialized enough to meet the exceedingly specific criteria to participate. But nonetheless, it succeeds in incentivizing the growth of more highly-accountable school options for parents.
Level of Expectations
It has become an educational cliché to say that “students will rise to the level of expectations.” But how do we explain the students whose work rises well above our level of expectations? Mostly, we just ignore them. In the local media, coverage of high school sports “blanks” any and all accounts of exemplary academic work by high school students.
In the mid-1980s, when I was teaching (as I thought) United States History to Sophomores at the high school in Concord, Massachusetts, I assigned, following the advice of my colleagues, history papers of just 5-7 pages, but I did tell the students that the title page did not count as one of the pages.
One quiet student, who I did not know at all, turned in a 28-page paper on the current balance of nuclear/thermonuclear weapons between the United States and the USSR. He later graduated summa cum laude from Tufts in economics. Why did he do that paper? He didn’t need to, and he didn’t do it for me. He was “rising” to the level of his own expectations. As Laurence Steinberg wrote in Beyond the Classroom: “Within a system that fails (flunks) very few students, then, only those students who have high standards of their own–who have more stringent criteria for success and failure–will strive to do better than merely to pass and graduate.”
In the last 25 years I have published more than 1,000 history research papers by crazy motivated secondary students like that from 46 states and 38 other countries. (I am happy to provide pdfs of some of these exemplary history research papers on request to fitzhugh@tcr.org).
Since the 1960s, the International Baccalaureate has been expecting students to complete a 4,000-word Extended Essay to qualify for the Diploma. In 2011, I published an 11,000-word (Emerson Prize) paper on the stagnation in science and technology in China for five centuries after 1500, and the student had to cut it down to 4,000 words to meet the expectations for the Extended Essay and the IB Diploma. ACT and the College Board have not yet included an expectation for that sort of academic expository writing.
Often we work to limit what students do academically. Several years ago, when The Concord Review was receiving submissions of high school history research papers of 6,000, 8,000, and 10,000 words, I asked the Executive Director of National History Day, which has as one option for competitors a 2,500-word history paper, if they had considered accepting essays that were longer. She said that no, they didn’t want any paper that took more than 10 minutes to read.
Recently when I published a 108-page (Emerson Prize) paper on the War of Regulation in North Carolina in the 18th century by a student from an independent school west of the Mississippi, I found out that she had to reduce it to 9 pages, without endnotes, to enable her to win first place nationally in the National History Day competition.
One student whose (Emerson Prize) work I published went to her teacher and said: “My paper is going to be 57 pages, is that all right?” And the teacher (may his tribe increase) said, “Yes.”
Five or six years ago I received a paper (Emerson Prize) on the history of economic reform in China in recent years from a student at a public high school in Ohio. Like high schools generally, hers expected her to complete their requirements in four years. Instead she did it in two and spent the next two years as a full-time student at The Ohio State University before applying to Harvard as a freshman. She recently graduated from there with high honors in mathematics, with an economics minor.
I should say that, even though Asian students have the highest academic achievement of any group in the United States, not all of the students I have published have been Asian, nor did the high level of expectations for their own academic work all come from the Confucian influence of their parents.
When it comes to academics, we seem to give the vast majority of our attention to, and spend the bulk of our efforts on, students whose efforts fall far below our expectations, those who, if not among the 25-30% who fail to finish high school, may enter community college reading at the fifth-grade level, and more than half of whom will drop out from there. Naturally we want to help those who are doing poorly in school. Still, we do want our most brilliant students to start companies, become scientists, be our judges, diplomats, and elected officials, teach history, write good books, and otherwise work to sustain and advance our civilization. But our basic attitude is–let them manage on their own.
How different it is for our promising young athletes, for whom we have the highest expectations, on whom we keep the most elaborate statistics, and to whom we dedicate the most voluminous local media coverage, as well as nationally-televised high school football and basketball games.
If we matched for them the expectations we have for our students’ academic work, we might be asking them to run just one lap, do two pushups, and spend most of their time helping out in gym classes, or playing video games, instead of practicing their sport. But our young people, being the way they are, would no doubt “cheat,” as some do in academics, by deriving higher standards from their own ambition and from seeing the achievements of their peers, and the athletes for whom we might try to set such low expectations, like the young scholars for whom we do, would continue to rise above them, and to astonish us with their accomplishments. Dumb Lucky us.
Will Fitzhugh
The Concord Review
25 June 2012
Try parent visits, not parent takeovers of schools
A modest program in Missouri — similar to one in the District — has found a way to help parents improve their children’s education. But nobody is paying much attention.
Instead, something called the parent trigger, the hottest parent program going, has gotten laws passed in four states even though it has had zero effect on achievement.
The Missouri program, the Teacher Home Visit Program or HOME WORKS!, trains and organizes teachers to visit parents in their homes. It is quiet, steady, small and non-political.
The parent trigger, begun in California by a well-meaning group called Parent Revolution, is also authorized in Mississippi, Texas and Louisiana and is deep into electoral politics. Both the Obama and Romney presidential campaigns have embraced it.
Faces of the achievement gap in Madison: The stories behind the statistics
In 2010, just five black and 13 Hispanic graduating seniors in the Madison Metropolitan School District were ready for college, according to data from the district and Urban League of Greater Madison. These statistics should make your heart race. If they don’t, and you’re white, you may be suffering from what anti-racism educator Tim Wise calls “the pathology of white privilege.” If you do get it and don’t take action, that is almost worse.
The issue affects all of us and fell a little harder into my lap than it does in most white middle-class families when my daughter told me last summer that I was going to have a biracial grandson. My response? “Not in this school district.”
The dismal academic record of minorities has long been apparent to me, through my own experiences and the stories of others. But many people only hear about the statistics. To help humanize these numbers I asked students and parents who are most affected to share their stories so I could tell them along with mine. The experiences are anecdotal, but the facts speak for themselves.Related:
- Student test scores show Madison lags state in cutting achievement gap
- Wisconsin, Mississippi Have “Easy State K-12 Exams” – NY Times
- The Death of WKCE? Task Force to Develop “Comprehensive Assessment System for Wisconsin”
- Schools should not rely on only WKCE data to gauge progress of individual students or to determine effectiveness of programs or curriculum”
- Superintendent Dan Nerad’s achievement gap plan.
- 60% to 42%: Madison School District’s Reading Recovery Effectiveness Lags “National Average”: Administration seeks to continue its use
In my view, the status quo approach to Madison’s long lived reading challenges refutes Mr. Hughes assertion that the District is on the right track. Matt DeFour’s article:
Overall student performance improved in math and dipped slightly in reading across Wisconsin compared with last year, while in Madison scores declined in all tested subjects.
Perhaps change is indeed coming, from a state level initiative on reading.
Reflections and questions on Wisconsin school test results
So what was new in all the data released last week summarizing results of the standardized tests, known as the WKCEs, that were taken last fall by more than 400,000 students from Kenosha to Superior?
Not much.
Some things a little better, most things the same, the state of meeting our educational needs pretty much unchanged.
But for every answer like that, I have a dozen questions (and lots of sub-questions).
Here they are:
1. Do we have the patience to pursue solid, significant improvement in how our students are doing?
The highflying schools I know of all took years to reach the heights.
Are we willing to do the steady, thoughtful work of building quality and resist the rapidly revolving carousel of education fads?
2. Do we have the impatience to pursue solid, significant improvement in how our students are doing?
At the same time we’ve got to be steady, we’ve got to be propelled by the urgency of improving.
Especially outside of Milwaukee, an awful lot of people are complacent about how Wisconsin’s kids are doing, and that complacency is often not well justified.Related:
- How does Wisconsin compare to the world? wisconsin2.org
- Student test scores show Madison lags state in cutting achievement gap
- Wisconsin, Mississippi Have “Easy State K-12 Exams” – NY Times
- The Death of WKCE? Task Force to Develop “Comprehensive Assessment System for Wisconsin”
- Schools should not rely on only WKCE data to gauge progress of individual students or to determine effectiveness of programs or curriculum”
- Superintendent Dan Nerad’s achievement gap plan.
- 60% to 42%: Madison School District’s Reading Recovery Effectiveness Lags “National Average”: Administration seeks to continue its use
- The WKCE has long been criticized for its lack of rigor.
- Notes and links on Wisconsin’s new reading standards – and teacher requirements, here.
4.1.2012 from Omaha: Madison Superintendent Dan Nerad: Narrowing gap a work in progress in Madison
The push to raise achievement for minority and low-income students in Madison Metropolitan School District remains “a work in progress,” said Superintendent Daniel Nerad.
Work has been done on Nerad’s watch, such as drafting a new strategic plan and a multifaceted, $106 million proposal for programs aimed at shrinking test score gaps between students of different races and income levels.
As for results, Nerad and Madison school board member Ed Hughes say there hasn’t been enough progress.
“We certainly haven’t seen, overall, the kind of improvement that we would like to see in reducing the achievement gap,” Hughes said. “But we need to look at whether the steps are being put in place that would give us some hope or confidence that we will see those gaps narrowing in the future.”
Hughes thinks Madison is on the right track.Related:
- Student test scores show Madison lags state in cutting achievement gap
- Wisconsin, Mississippi Have “Easy State K-12 Exams” – NY Times
- The Death of WKCE? Task Force to Develop “Comprehensive Assessment System for Wisconsin”
- Schools should not rely on only WKCE data to gauge progress of individual students or to determine effectiveness of programs or curriculum”
- Superintendent Dan Nerad’s achievement gap plan.
- 60% to 42%: Madison School District’s Reading Recovery Effectiveness Lags “National Average”: Administration seeks to continue its use
In my view, the status quo approach to Madison’s long lived reading challenges refutes Mr. Hughes assertion that the District is on the right track. Matt DeFour’s article:
Overall student performance improved in math and dipped slightly in reading across Wisconsin compared with last year, while in Madison scores declined in all tested subjects.
Perhaps change is indeed coming, from a state level initiative on reading.
A look at the numbers:
Omaha spends substantially less per student than Madison. The Omaha 2011-2012 adopted budget will spend 468,946,264 for 46,000 students: $10,194.48/student. Madison’s 2011-2012 budget spends $369,394,753 for 24,861 = $14,858.40/student, 31.4% more than Omaha…. Green Bay (Superintendent Nerad’s former position) spent about 10% less than Madison, per student.
Student test scores show Madison lags state in cutting achievement gap
Madison and Wisconsin are moving in opposite directions in raising achievement levels of black students, according to state test scores released Tuesday by the Department of Public Instruction.
The percentage of black Madison students scoring proficient or better on the state reading test dropped to the lowest level in six years, while statewide black student reading scores continued to improve.
“The results affirm the work that we need to be doing and are doing to close our unacceptable gaps in achievement,” Madison Superintendent Dan Nerad said.
Overall student performance improved in math and dipped slightly in reading across Wisconsin compared with last year, while in Madison scores declined in all tested subjects.
Madison’s strongest gains were among eighth grade math scores, with the percentage of black students scoring proficient gaining 8 percentage points, Hispanic students gaining 16 percentage points and low-income students gaining 6.5 percentage points over last year.
Overall 77 percent of eighth-graders scored advanced or proficient on math, up from 76 percent last year. In all other grade levels the math scores were down in Madison from last year, whereas statewide the scores were up or the same in each grade level.Related:
- Wisconsin, Mississippi Have “Easy State K-12 Exams” – NY Times
- The Death of WKCE? Task Force to Develop “Comprehensive Assessment System for Wisconsin”
- Schools should not rely on only WKCE data to gauge progress of individual students or to determine effectiveness of programs or curriculum”
- Superintendent Dan Nerad’s achievement gap plan.
- 60% to 42%: Madison School District’s Reading Recovery Effectiveness Lags “National Average”: Administration seeks to continue its use
Hopes and Fears for Parent Trigger Laws
As many as 20 states have considered enacting parent trigger laws, which would let parents who are dissatisfied with the way a school is being run, turn it into a charter, replace the staff, or even shut it down, if 51 percent of the school’s families agree. The laws — which have been passed in various forms in California, Connecticut, Mississippi and Texas — have generated controversy and even inspired a movie to be released this fall. Do these laws give parents the first real power over their children’s education? Or do they put public schools in private hands and impede real improvements?
Wisconsin Education K-12 Jobs Fund Spending Increased 10.6% from 2006-2011; Higher Ed: 14.1%
Jennifer Cohen, via a kind reader’s email
Despite the revenue drops these state reported, their MOE submissions show that they increased education spending significantly from 2006 to 2011, particularly for K-12 education. For example, Utah’s submission shows a 28.4 percent increase in funding for K-12 education from $1.8 billion to $2.3 billion. Oregon shows an increase of 19.2 percent and Illinois shows an increase of 19.8 percent. Increases in Indiana and Nevada are both over 65 percent. Only three states – Arizona, Minnesota, and Mississippi – showed increases below 3.0 percent.
Of course, it wouldn’t be unusual for states to increase K-12 education spending over a 5-year period under more normal budget circumstances due to increasing enrollment and costs. What the MOE data could be telling us is that many states protected K-12 spending during the economic downturn that began in 2007.
But these numbers are also curious, if not dubious. Large contractions in state tax revenues and repeated media reports of states cutting education spending make some of these data difficult to believe.
The MOE data for the 31 states also show growth in higher education spending, though not at as high of rates as K-12 spending. New York State showed an increase of 22.3 percent from $3.3 billion to $4.0 billion from 2006 to 2011 and Connecticut showed an increase of 17.6 percent. But many states showed increases below 3.0 percent – 13, including Arizona, Colorado, Illinois, Pennsylvania, and Virginia. Low growth for higher education in many states is not surprising. States often make cuts (or delay increases) to higher education before K-12 education because it has a smaller constituency and they can rely on tuition increases to make up the difference. However, many public higher education systems have faced dramatic increases in enrollment as a result of the economic downturn, placing greater pressure on their strapped systems.Fascinating rhetoric: the numbers tell us spending is up, but the writer mentions “data difficult to believe”. In my brief 8+ years observing the K-12 world, spending always goes up. Some want it to increase more than others, which is where the “schwerpunkt” can be found.
View a chart of US State tax collections and Education (K-12 and Higher Ed) spending from 2006 to 2011.
Related: Wisconsin State Tax Based K-12 Spending Growth Far Exceeds University Funding
Sex education in schools? Auburn Report finds most parents favor it.
Among the nation’s young people, those in the South suffer the worst rates of sexually transmitted infections such as HIV, according to a new study that finds little resistance among parents in the region for age-appropriate sex education in schools.
The report “Sexual Health of Young People in the U.S. South: Challenges and Opportunities” was released by Auburn University at Montgomery’s Center for Demographic Research. It focused on 10 Southern states including Alabama and Mississippi.
Issues such as high teen pregnancy rates can place heavy burdens on government and taxpayers. According to the study, for example, teen-childbearing expenses in the South cost local, state and federal governments an estimated $2.3 billion in 2008.
Anatomy of a Troubled School District: Picturesque Bayfield has it all: dreadful student performance, community infighting, a powerful teachers union, outlandish spending. What can be done?
Over 300 miles from the never-ending debates in Madison over how to help struggling schools, in a small, largely impoverished district along the edge of Lake Superior, Liz Woodworth ran unopposed for a spot on the Bayfield School Board this spring.
Woodworth isn’t just another parent. She and her husband, Jeff Kriner, are both teachers; she in nearby Ashland and he in the same district that Woodworth will help run. Kriner, in fact, has served as everything from a co-president of the local Bayfield Education Association to a teachers union negotiator and spokesman who appears before the School Board.
In states such as Arizona and Mississippi, conflict-of-interest laws would bar Woodworth from serving. Not here, where the state has long left local schools to sort out their own problems and conflicts. With Woodworth slated to begin a three-year term in late April, critics fear she will help preserve the status quo in schools that desperately need outside intervention.
Should Home-Schoolers Play for High School Teams?
Legislation to allow home-schooled students to play varsity sports at public schools passed the Republican-controlled Virginia Assembly on Wednesday. It will now go before the State Senate. Robert McDonnell, Virginia’s Republican governor, has said he supports the bill.
Alabama and Mississippi are considering similar legislation, and 25 states now allow home-schooled students to play sports at public schools with varying restrictions. Is this a move in the right direction?
Nothing Ever Happens
One of the saddest things is that the only thing that a man can do for eight hours a day, day after day, is work. You can’t eat eight hours a day nor drink for eight hours a day nor make love for eight hours — all you can do for eight hours is work. Which is the reason why man makes himself and everybody else so miserable and unhappy.
In spring of 1947, the English department of the University of Mississippi had William Faulkner address one class a day for a week. The teacher of each class was barred from attending the sessions. Faulkner spent the entire time answering questions from students.
Parents Rebel Against School
Fed-up parents of students attending a low-performing school in Southern California aim to use the power given to them by the state to take an unusual step: fire the school.
This power, called a Parent Trigger, was passed into law in California in 2010, but parents are attempting for only the second time to use it at Desert Trails Elementary outside Los Angeles. Their effort to force Adelanto Elementary School District to overhaul the school, or turn it into a charter school run by the parents themselves, is expected to be closely watched across the nation.
Similar legislation passed in Texas and Mississippi last year and is under consideration in Florida, Pennsylvania and Indiana this year.
K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: A Look at California
Here’s a depressing but documented comparison of California taxes and economic climate with the rest of the states. The news is breaking bad, and getting worse (twice a month, I update crucial data on this fact sheet):
REVISED: California has the 3rd worst state income tax in the nation. 9.3% tax bracket starts at $46,766 for people filing as individuals. 10.3% tax starts at $1,000,000. Governor Brown is putting on the ballot a prop to change the “millionaires’ tax” to 12.3%, starting at $500,000. If approved, CA will be #1 in income tax rates. http://www.taxfoundation.org/files/bp59_es.pdf
Highest state sales tax rate in the nation. 7.25% (as of 1 July, 2011 – does not include local sales taxes).
http://www.taxfoundation.org/files/bp60.pdf Table #15
California corporate income tax rate (8.84%) is the highest west of the Mississippi (our economic competitors) except for Alaska. http://www.taxfoundation.org/files/bp59.pdf Table #8 – we are 8th highest nationwide.
Louisiana to Push AP Courses for All
Louisiana education leaders have launched a five-year plan to reach the national average for high school students who earn college credit.
The courses, called Advanced Placement, can enhance college success and even make students more likely to attend college, officials said.
But only 4 percent of Louisiana students passed at least one AP exam in 2009, which is 49th in the nation and ahead of only Mississippi.
The national average is 16.9 percent, which state officials said is reachable by 2017.
After Madison Prep vote, it’s time to shake things up
There’s nothing like standing in the schoolhouse door.
For me, the Madison School Board’s 5-2 vote to shoot down Madison Preparatory Academy, a proposed charter school specifically designed for low-income minority students, brings to mind images of George Wallace standing in the schoolhouse door to block the integration of the University of Alabama, or state officials blocking James Meredith’s enrollment at the University of Mississippi.
If you think that’s harsh, remember that those pieces of history were not only about Civil Rights and desegregation, they were about every person’s right to pursue a quality education.
In the Madison Metropolitan School District, a 48% graduation rate among African American students indicates that quality has not been achieved. Not even close.
Fortunately, this is one dream that’s not going to be allowed to die. Kaleem Caire, president of the Urban League of Greater Madison, is the driving force behind Madison Prep, and he isn’t ready to wave the surrender flag.
Following the school board vote, Caire vowed to file a racial discrimination lawsuit with the U.S. Department of Justice, and he also urged supporters of Madison Prep to run for school board.
Love it, love it, love it.
At one point in the development of Madison Prep, Caire sounded optimistic that the school district was a real partner, but the majority of board members had other ideas. Caire and the Urban League did their best to address every objection critics put in their way, and now it’s clear that the intent all along was to scuttle the project with a gauntlet of hurdles.Much more on the proposed Madison Preparatory IB charter school, here.
K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: California vs. the Other States Rev. 11/18/11
Here’s a depressing but documented comparison of California taxes and economic climate with the rest of the states. The news is breaking bad, and getting worse (twice a month, I update crucial data on this fact sheet):
California has the 3rd worst state income tax in the nation. 9.3% tax bracket starts at $46,766 for people filing as individuals. 10.3% tax starts at $1,000,000. http://www.taxfoundation.org/files/bp59_es.pdf
Highest state sales tax rate in the nation. 7.25% (as of 1 July – does not include local sales taxes)
http://www.taxfoundation.org/files/bp60.pdf Table #15
California corporate income tax rate (8.84%) is the highest west of the Mississippi (our economic competitors) except for Alaska. http://www.taxfoundation.org/files/bp59.pdf Table #8 – we are 8th highest nationwide.
Madison School Board’s DIFI (District Identified for Improvement) Plan Discussion
The Madison School Board (the discussion begins at about 58 minutes) video archives (11.7.2011) is worth a watch.
Related: Madison School District Identified for Improvement (DIFI); Documentation for the Wisconsin DPI1. Develop or Revise a District Improvement Plan
Address the fundamental teaching and learning needs of schools in the Local Education Agency (LEA), especially the academic problems o f low-achieving students.
MMSD has been identified by the State of Wisconsin as a District Identified for Improvement, or DIFI. We entered into this status based on District WKCE assessment scores. The data indicates that sub-groups of students-African American students, English Language Learner Students with Disabilities or Economically Disadvantaged -did not score high enough on the WKCE in one or more areas of reading, math or test participation to meet state criteria.
Under No Child Left Behind, 100% of students are expected to achieve proficient or advanced on the WKCE in four areas by 2014. Student performance goals have been raised every year on a regular schedule since 2001, making targets more and more difficult to reach each year. In addition to the curriculum changes being implemented, the following assessments are also new or being implemented during the 2011-12 school year (see Attachment 1):Perhaps the No Child Left Behind requirement waivers that Education Secretary Duncan has discussed remove the urgency to address these issues. Of course, the benchmark used to measure student progress is the oft-criticized WKCE “Wisconsin, Mississippi Have “Easy State K-12 Exams” – NY Times”.
Related: Comparing Wisconsin & Texas: Updating the 2009 Scholastic Bowl Longhorns 17 – Badgers 1; Thrive’s “Advance Now Competitive Assessment Report”.
Wisconsin Framework for Educator (Teacher) Effectiveness
Design Team Report & Recommendation:1. Guiding Principles
The Design Team believes that the successful development and implementation of the new performance-based evaluation system is dependent upon the following guiding principles,
which define the central focus of the entire evaluation system. The guiding principles of the educator evaluation system are:
The ultimate goal of education is student learning. Effective educators are essential to achieving that goal for all students. We believe it is imperative that students have highly effective teams of educators to support them throughout their public education. We further believe that effective practice leading to better educational achievement requires continuous improvement and monitoring.
A strong evaluation system for educators is designed to provide information that supports decisions intended to ensure continuous individual and system effectiveness. The system must be well-articulated, manageableRelated: Wisconsin 25th in 2011 NAEP Reading, Comparing Rhetoric Regarding Texas (10th) & Wisconsin NAEP Scores: Texas Hispanic and African-American students rank second on eighth-grade NAEP math test, Wisconsin, Mississippi Have “Easy State K-12 Exams” – NY Times and Seidenberg endorses using the Massachusetts model exam for teachers of reading (MTEL 90), which was developed with input from reading scientists. He also supports universal assessment to identify students who are at risk, and he mentioned the Minnesota Reading Corps as a model of reading tutoring that would be good to bring to Wisconsin.
The myth of the rational education market
The idea that school choice is automatically better than no choice has recently been reinforced again, with the “Parent Trigger” in California. Under a law passed there last year, parents whose children attend underperforming public schools can get together, and if 51% of them sign a petition, they can demand their district change the school administrators or convert the school to a charter. So far, a parent group from Compton “pulled the trigger,” but parents from poor urban schools and well-funded suburban schools have been seeking information on how to use the Parent Trigger law to improve their schools.
Similar bills, which are supported by education reformers on both sides of the political aisle, have been passed in Connecticut, Ohio and Mississippi. About a half dozen state legislatures–including New York — are expected to consider Parent Trigger type bills this year.
Long live the fat American Obesity may threaten life expectancy. Or maybe not
AMERICA’S obesity epidemic is so called for a reason. Roughly one in three adults is obese. In 2008 close to 25m Americans were diabetic, according to a study published on June 25th. Nevertheless, Americans are living longer than ever. In 2007 the average life expectancy at birth was 78 years. This follows decades of progress. The question is whether obesity might change that.
National progress in life expectancy masks wide local disparities, according to a study published on June 15th and written by researchers at the University of Washington and Imperial College London. Men in Holmes County, Mississippi, for example, have a life expectancy of 65.9 years, the same as men in Pakistan and 15.2 years behind men in Fairfax, Virginia. Gaps between America’s counties have widened since the early 1980s. Most alarming, 702 counties, or 30% of those studied, saw a statistically significant decline in life expectancy for women from 2000 to 2007; 251 counties saw a statistically significant decline for men.
DOJ: Miss. schools still segregated despite order
A public school district in Mississippi and the federal government are divided over whether the schools are complying with a desegregation order that dates back to the civil rights era.
The Justice Department has asked a judge to order the Cleveland Public School District “to devise and implement a desegregation plan that will immediately dismantle its one-race schools,” but an attorney for the district said it has been following the latest order and sends the federal government updates on its integration attempts.
The Army should fix the geographical narrowness of its ROTC programs
I don’t know your Year Group cohort, but I think you may not realize how narrow the ROTC’s geographic/outreach footprint has become since 1989 (e.g. closure of 4 of New Jersey’s 7 Army ROTC programs). Sadly, I have been taking on the “if they want it bad enough they will low crawl to ROTC” argument for almost two decades. I didn’t buy that argument as a first year ROTC cadet in 1994 and I buy it even less now.
The Army has allocated only a single Army ROTC instructor battalion to the entire state of Connecticut–which has one of the highest educational attainment levels in the United States and an enormous per capita student population. It is also noteworthy that Connecticut’s population is LARGER than Mississippi’s, over half the size of Alabama’s and FOUR TIMES LARGER than South Dakota’s. Despite its size and student population, Connecticut has just one Army ROTC battalion, while Mississippi has 5, Alabama has 10 and South Dakota has 3. It is misplaced to blame the Yale students for not seeking out Army ROTC — particularly when the program HQ and the Professor of Military Science (PMS) sit 70 miles away in Storrs. Sure, there is some instruction available in New Haven, but the core of the ROTC’s administrative, logistical and outreach capabilities in the state are 70 miles away from New Haven. This reality can not be discounted.
I challenge anyone to find a university comparable to Yale’s size south of the Mason-Dixon line that is 70 miles away from an Army ROTC host institution.
Cheaters Find an Adversary in Technology
Mississippi had a problem born of the age of soaring student testing and digital technology. High school students taking the state’s end-of-year exams were using cellphones to text one another the answers.
With more than 100,000 students tested, proctors could not watch everyone — not when some teenagers can text with their phones in their pockets.
So the state called in a company that turns technology against the cheats: it analyzes answer sheets by computer and flags those with so many of the same questions wrong or right that the chances of random agreement are astronomical. Copying is the almost certain explanation.
Since the company, Caveon Test Security, began working for Mississippi in 2006, cheating has declined about 70 percent, said James Mason, director of the State Department of Education’s Office of Student Assessment. “People know that if you cheat there is an extremely high chance you’re going to get caught,” Mr. Mason said.
Save the Children Breaks With Soda Tax Effort
Over the last year, Save the Children emerged as a leader in the push to tax sweetened soft drinks as a way to combat childhood obesity. The nonprofit group supported soda tax campaigns in Mississippi, New Mexico, Washington State, Philadelphia and the District of Columbia.
At the same time, executives at Save the Children were seeking a major grant from Coca-Cola to help finance the health and education programs that the charity conducts here and abroad, including its work on childhood obesity.
The talks with Coke are still going on. But the soda tax work has been stopped. In October, Save the Children surprised activists around the country with an e-mail message announcing that it would no longer support efforts to tax soft drinks.
In interviews this month, Carolyn Miles, chief operating officer of Save the Children, said there was no connection between the group’s about-face on soda taxes and the discussions with Coke. A $5 million grant from PepsiCo also had no influence on the decision, she said. Both companies fiercely oppose soda taxes.
Your Child Left Behind
Amanda Ripley, via two kind readers:
FOR YEARS, POOR PERFORMANCE BY STUDENTS IN AMERICA RELATIVE TO THOSE IN OTHER COUNTRIES HAS BEEN EXPLAINED AWAY AS A CONSEQUENCE OF OUR NATIONWIDE DIVERSITY. BUT WHAT IF YOU LOOKED MORE CLOSELY, BREAKING DOWN OUR RESULTS BY STATE AND SEARCHING NOT FOR AN AVERAGE, BUT FOR EXCELLENCE?
Stanford economist Eric Hanushek and two colleagues recently conducted an experiment to answer just such questions, ranking American states and foreign countries side by side. Like our recruiter, they looked specifically at the best and brightest in each place–the kids most likely to get good jobs in the future–using scores on standardized math tests as a proxy for educational achievement.
We’ve known for some time how this story ends nationwide: only 6 percent of U.S. students perform at the advanced-proficiency level in math, a share that lags behind kids in some 30 other countries, from the United Kingdom to Taiwan. But what happens when we break down the results? Do any individual U.S. states wind up near the top?
Incredibly, no. Even if we treat each state as its own country, not a single one makes it into the top dozen contenders on the list. The best performer is Massachusetts, ringing in at No. 17. Minnesota also makes it into the upper-middle tier, followed by Vermont, New Jersey, and Washington. And down it goes from there, all the way to Mississippi, whose students–by this measure at least–might as well be attending school in Thailand or Serbia.
ANUSHEK, WHO GREW UP outside Cleveland and graduated from the Air Force Academy in 1965, has the gentle voice and manner of Mr. Rogers, but he has spent the past 40 years calmly butchering conventional wisdom on education. In study after study, he has demonstrated that our assumptions about what works are almost always wrong. More money does not tend to lead to better results; smaller class sizes do not tend to improve learning. “Historically,” he says, “reporters call me [when] the editor asks, ‘What is the other side of this story?'”Emphasis added.
Education, local control and taxes
Anytime the Maine media rains terms such as “taxes,” “economy,” “business climate” and “jobs,” among others, upon the voters and taxpayers of Maine, Libby Mitchell runs for cover under her education umbrella. The fact, and it is fact, is that Maine is already among the nation’s leaders in education spending.
Maine’s population of approximately 1.5 million residents, like that of neighboring New Hampshire, is among the smallest in the nation, yet Maine’s education spending ranks among the highest, ahead of many much larger states, and in the vicinity of the top 20 to 25 percent. Exact position may change incrementally from year to year; nevertheless, Maine is right up there. Do not take my word; go online, visit the Web and check it out yourself.
Maine’s economy is just about non-existent. Five years ago, after Hurricane Katrina ravaged the states of Louisiana and Mississippi, it was Maine that had the worst economy in the U.S. During the 2010 primary season, the figure that was popular and which met no argument from any other politician was that Maine had gained just 65 jobs in the past decade.
Yes, the Maine economy is shedding jobs as fast as it is creating them. While the Maine economy may be somewhat better off at this time, it is in no position to foot Libby’s brand of education spending.
New Superintendent: Taking on Milwaukee Public Schools
He’s got their attention, but only for a few minutes. A few precious minutes to teach in a position that is otherwise layers removed from teaching. Right now, these are his students.
The adults in the room are also intrigued. The new superintendent is an outsider leading a district where staff morale and student achievement are at an all-time low. He arrived on the heels of a fierce debate about mayoral control that polarized the city. His predecessors – including the last superintendent of eight years – have found little success. He’s inherited reports that show the district’s financial operations and human resource practices need serious improvement.
In addition, there’s a $55 million hole in the budget, hundreds of teachers on layoff, 40,000 empty seats in mothballed buildings and a union committed to health care benefits the district can’t afford. Teachers are working under a contract that expired in 2009.
And then there are the children. At Starms, all of them on the floor are black, like Thornton, and they are facing tremendous odds. The achievement gap in Wisconsin between white and black students is one of the highest in the nation. African-American fourth-graders in MPS have lower reading scores than their peers anywhere else in the country, even lower than kids in rural Mississippi or Alabama.
K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: Property Taxes Emerge as Latest Front in Housing Crisis
Foreclosures make headlines. They are a big focus of the media’s attention as the troubled economy continues to dominate the news. But even where banks aren’t taking over properties, the collapse of the real estate market is having profound effects on local politics and county and city policymaking.
Here in Northwestern Montana, one needs only look at the situation happening on the shores of stunning Flathead Lake to see the housing crisis will continue to haunt communities for years to come. Residents along the largest natural freshwater lake west of the Mississippi had watched as property values climb throughout the 1990s and early 2000s.
Fueled by many out-of-staters looking for a second home with views of the glacier-carved Mission Mountains and only miles from Glacier National Park, property reappraisals including land and home soared to as much as $10,000 per foot of shoreline along the lake.
A State Transformed: Immigration and the New California
Steven Camarota & Karen Jensen:
etween 1970 and 2008 the share of California’s population comprised of immigrants (legal and illegal) tripled, growing from 9 percent to 27 percent.1 This Memorandum examines some of the ways California has changed over the last four decades. Historically, California has not been a state with a disproportionately large unskilled population, like Appalachia or parts of the South. As a result of immigration, however, by 2008 California had the least-educated labor force in the nation in terms of the share its workers without a high school education. This change has important implications for the state.
Among the changes in California:
- In 1970, California had the 7th most educated work force of the 50 states in terms of the share of its workers who had completed high school. By 2008 it ranked 50th, making it the least educated state. (Table 1a)
- Education in California has declined relative to other states. The percentage of Californians who have completed high school has increased since 1970; however, all other states made much more progress in improving their education levels; as a result, California has fallen behind the rest of the country. (Table 1b)
- The large relative decline in education in California is a direct result of immigration. Without immigrants, the share of California’s labor force that has completed high school would be above the national average.
- There is no indication that California will soon close the educational gap. California ranks 35th in terms of the share of its 19-year-olds who have completed high school. Moreover, one-third (91,000) of the adult immigrants who arrived in the state in 2007 and 2008 had not completed high school.
- In 1970 California was right at the national average in terms of income inequality, ranking 25th in the nation. By 2008, it was the 6th most unequal state in the country based on the commonly used Gini coefficient, which measures how evenly income is distributed. (Tables 2a and 2b)
- California’s income distribution in 2008 was more unequal than was Mississippi’s in 1970. (Tables 2a and 2b)
- While historical data are not available, we can say that in 2008 California ranked 11th highest in terms of the share of its households accessing at least one major welfare program and 8th highest in terms of the share of the state’s population without health insurance. (Tables 3 and 4)
- The large share of California adults who have very little education is likely to strain social services and make it challenging for the state to generate sufficient tax revenue to cover the demands for services made by its large unskilled population.
NCAA cracks down on correspondence courses
The NCAA has a message for would-be college athletes hoping to use online courses to bolster their high school transcripts: proceed with caution.
The organization announced Tuesday that it will stop accepting course credit from two virtual schools based in Utah and Illinois as part of a move to strengthen high school eligibility standards in Division I.
That means no more high school credit from Brigham Young University’s independent study program. The school in Provo, Utah, has previously been targeted by NCAA investigators and federal prosecutors pursuing claims of academic fraud at Missouri, Kansas, Mississippi, Nicholls State and Barton County Community College in Kansas.
Also on the prohibited list is the American School, a correspondence program based in Lansing, Ill.
New NCAA rules approved last month require “regular access and interaction” between teachers and students in the 16 core courses required to establish initial eligibility for new college athletes.
