schoolinfosystem.org
Glenn Greenwald: Whether one agrees or disagrees with his work, there is no denying that the writer, documentarian, and activist Chris Rufo has had an extremely significant impact on our political discourse, debates and even our laws. Even large liberal outlets which seek to demonize him — such as the New Yorker and New York […]
Christopher Moses: When I started a commercial cleaning business with my wife in 2011, I didn’t imagine that I would be a plaintiff in a race-discrimination lawsuit against a massive corporation.
Jill Tucker & Anni Vainshtein: San Francisco voters overwhelmingly supported the ouster of three school board members Tuesday in the city’s first recall election in nearly 40 years. The landslide decision means board President Gabriela López and members Alison Collins and Faauuga Moliga will officially be removed from office and replaced by mayoral appointments 10 days after […]
Alexander Shur: In vetoing the critical race theory bill, Evers said he is objecting to creating new censorship rules that would prohibit educators from teaching “honest, complete facts about important historical topics.” “Our kids deserve to learn in an atmosphere conducive to learning without being subjected to state legislative encroachment that is neither needed nor […]
Molly Beck: Two Republicans running for governor said this week they would sign legislation that dissolves the state’s largest school district while the Democratic incumbent who spent a career in education said the idea would throw Milwaukee’s children into “chaos.” Gov. Tony Evers, a former state superintendent and public school educator, signaled Tuesday he would […]
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Tyler Kingkade and Mike Hixenbaugh: “Some of these kids, they’re just trying to get through the day, get through compacted math, get through algebra, go to cotillion on Sunday,” Eddins said. “They are not thinking about these issues.” Two days after Eddins made the remarks, Southlake Families PAC — a group that has fought to […]
John Hindraker: Critical Race Theory has become the number one political issue in the U.S. So, needless to say, it is the top issue in school board elections that are taking place across the country. Thus, in one of Minnesota’s largest school districts, the administration emailed talking points to school board members, telling them how […]
October 21 WisPolitics Event (about 41 minutes into the video clip). A followup questioner, at 47:10, mentioned that the response to my question was money and in fact the school districts that spend the most money (Milwaukee and Madison) have among the worst results. mp3 audio Transcript (Machine generated). Related: AB446. Ben Wikler and a […]
Gerard Baker: Merrick Garland’s got a little list. The attorney general is compiling a steadily lengthening register of “society offenders who might well be underground and who never would be missed,” as Ko-Ko, the hypervigilant lord high executioner, sings in Gilbert and Sullivan’s “The Mikado.” Mr. Garland’s list of society offenders is compendious. At the […]
Bob Woodson and Ian Rowe: With a new school year underway, parents, teachers, and children anxiously return to classrooms amidst an ongoing coronavirus pandemic. But this year, school board members, teachers, academics, politicians, and parents continue to argue over critical race theory and how to enact its version of equity. Last week, the U.S. Conference of […]
Bob Woodson and Ian Rowe: With a new school year underway, parents, teachers, and children anxiously return to classrooms amidst an ongoing coronavirus pandemic. But this year, school board members, teachers, academics, politicians, and parents continue to argue over critical race theory and how to enact its version of equity. Last week, the U.S. Conference of […]
Antonio García Martínez: Christopher Rufo is a political activist who has been leading a very prominent media war against ‘Critical Race Theory’ (CRT), a concept I won’t even dare to define but which Pull Request readers have surely seen in various guises all over their feeds.This post is for paying subscribers
Michael Hendrix: Six out of ten say that crime is increasing in their area—including a majority of all racial and ethnic groups. Among those who live in urban cores but who express an interest in moving to a less dense area, crime rates are a top-three motivator. More than two in five respondents also see […]
This is a lie. Almost 20 years ago, the founder of critical race theory, Kimberlé Crenshaw, boasted that “critical race theory” has been “used as interchangeably for race scholarship as Kleenex is used for tissue.” It’s their own definition; now they are being exposed. https://t.co/7kdFD0rSno — Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) July 27, 2021
Christopher F. Rufo: Critical race theory is the latest battleground in the culture war. Since the murder of George Floyd last year, critical race theory’s key concepts, including “systemic racism,” “white privilege,” and “white fragility,” have become ubiquitous in America’s elite institutions. Progressive politicians have sought to implement “antiracist” policies to reduce racial disparities, such […]
Peter Wood: Is the popular outrage against CRT truly a pro-censorship movement? Is it disrespectful of education? The way to tell is to look at what vexes the anti-CRTers — and what they favor instead. Among the more widely watched videos is one of a citizen opposing his school board’s pro-CRT stance: the T-shirted, tattooed […]
Maciver: The Superintendent of Germantown Schools, Brett Stousland, has been adamant that Critical Race Theory is not present in the school district, save for two elective courses offered at the high school. In a letter to parents dated April 29, 2021, Stousland said “Currently, CRT is presented as a theory in just two high school elective courses; […]
Virginia Allen: As a lawyer defending religious liberty, a wife, and a mother of four school-age children, Smith says, she was enjoying life and had plenty to keep her busy. But she felt compelled to run for school board to try to stop the agenda of critical race theory, which she says would “radically change […]
Christopher Rufo: Critical race theory is fast becoming America’s new institutional orthodoxy. Yet most Americans have never heard of it—and of those who have, many don’t understand it. This must change. We need to know what it is so we can know how to fight it. To explain critical race theory, it helps to begin […]
Christopher Rufo: Critical race theory is fast becoming America’s new institutional orthodoxy. Yet most Americans have never heard of it—and of those who have, many don’t understand it. This must change. We need to know what it is so we can know how to fight it. To explain critical race theory, it helps to begin […]
Bion Bartning: We started to ask questions. I have always felt a strong connection with Martin Luther King Jr. ’s dream of an America where people “will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” I advocate genuine antiracism, rooted in dignity and humanity. But the ideology […]
Evita Duffy: If you think state and federal government COVID-19 policies are too restrictive, you haven’t been to a college campus lately. Schools across the country have imposed extreme, micromanaging rules on 19-22 year olds—a demographic more likely to die from the seasonal flu and pneumonia than COVID. Paying top dollar at already overpriced institutions for vastly inferior remote […]
Sonia Sodha: Is it deeply offensive to lambast a black or an Asian person for not being “black” or “Asian” enough? Yes. Is it offensive to assume that someone black or Asian criticising the politics of another black or Asian person is motivated by such sentiment? Yes. Last week, the Conservative MP Neil O’Brien blundered […]
Bocar A. Ba, Dean Knox, Jonathan Mummolo and Roman Rivera: Diversity in policing In the wake of high-profile police shootings of Black Americans, it is important to know whether the race and gender of officers and civilians affect their interactions. Ba et al. overcame previous data constraints and found that Hispanic and Black officers make […]
Dave Huber: A state representative in New Hampshire is picking up where the former Trump administration left off — he’s introduced legislation which would ban trainings based on critical race theory. Keith Ammon’s bill (via Christopher Rufo) would prohibit — in state contracts, grants and training programs — the teaching of “divisive concepts” such as […]
Wisconsin Democracy Campaign: Seven candidates who want to be the state’s next top school chief in the upcoming spring elections collectively raised more than $200,000 last year. The seven candidates will face off in the Feb. 16 primary. The top two finishers will vie for a four-year term as state school superintendent in the April […]
Jarrett Stepman: “Critical race theory and its parent, critical theory, are rooted in a worldview that wants to dismantle social and governmental norms,” Butcher said. While racism and other prejudices still and will continue to exist, Butcher said this does not mean that we don’t have to ignore the intolerance and “dogmas” of critical theory. […]
ARMAND A. FUSCO, ED.D.: As the newly appointed Literacy Task Force begins its quest to unravel why 20 years of efforts to improve reading were mired in a whirlpool of disastrous reading results to determine what went wrong (so that past mistakes are not repeated) there are critical lessons for learning from the Reading Champion. […]
CDC.gov: What is already known about this topic? As of October 15, 216,025 deaths from COVID-19 have been reported in the United States; however, this might underestimate the total impact of the pandemic on mortality. What is added by this report? Overall, an estimated 299,028 excess deaths occurred from late January through October 3, 2020, […]
Jessica Custodio: The University of Colorado announced to its communications staff through a memo that, in order to prevent biased language, any speech surrounding what it deems as delicate language must be approved by the office of the president first. Such topics include COVID-19, race, and the First Amendment. “…clear effort to regulate speech on […]
Christopher Rufo: My reporting on critical race theory in the federal government was the impetus for the president’s executive order, so I can say with confidence that these training sessions had nothing to do with developing “racial sensitivity.” As I document in detailed reports for City Journal and the New York Post, critical race theory […]
SG Cheah: 10 years ago, if you told someone they’d be watching children depicted pornographically on a mainstream media service, they’d tell you to get lost and stop your fear-mongering. Fast forward today, and we have “Cuties” on Netflix. What happened? The Frankfurt School of Critical Theory is what happened. Recently, the White House issued […]
Chris Stewart: Are they a saving grace for families displaced from traditional schooling or yet another mirage hiding serious educational inequities. Like most things it matters who you ask. Much of the media coverage of pods has shown a deceptively white face which predictably has drawn significant warnings of widening gaps in educational outcomes. I understand the concerns, but […]
Davide Castelvecchi: The tide of reckoning on systemic racism and police brutality that has been sweeping through institutions — including scientific ones — has reached universities’ normally reclusive mathematics departments. A group of mathematicians in the United States has written a letter calling for their colleagues to stop collaborating with police because of the widely […]
William Turvill: Will Lewis, the former boss of Dow Jones and the Wall Street Journal, and ex-Financial Times editor Lionel Barber have also spoken of their uneasiness about the “blurring” of opinions and facts in journalism. Lewis – who recently left his role and missed out in the race to become the BBC’s next director general – said that […]
Boundless: Millenarianism is is defined as “the belief by a religious, social, or political group or movement in a coming fundamental transformation of society, after which “all things will be changed”. I ran across this concept in a fascinating book by John Gray called “Black Mass” where he explored how humans have consistently been drawn toward […]
Tony Room: More than 2,100 U.S. cities are anticipating major budget shortfalls this year and many are planning to slash programs and cut staff in response, according to a survey of local officials released Tuesday, illustrating the widespread financial havoc threatened by the coronavirus pandemic. The bleak outlook — shared by local governments representing roughly […]
Scott Girard: For the past seven months, Strong has been a program associate with the National Council on Crime and Delinquency. Strong said in an interview Thursday he considers school safety and racial disparities in discipline and achievement to be the top issues facing MMSD. “We have to make sure that our schools are safe […]
Lionel Shriver: Riddle: when is discrimination against a historically disadvantaged racial minority perfectly legal? Answer: when they do too well. The first ruling on the Students for Fair Admissions suit against Harvard University is in. A federal judge in Massachusetts concluded last month that for America’s be-all-and-end-all university to discriminate against Asian applicants in order to serve […]
Nat Malkus and Hannah Warren: School discipline has long been at or near the top of the list of public concerns about education. Indeed, polls show that student discipline was the public’s top concern 50 years ago, in 1969, and for 15 of the next 16 years. More recently, education reformers’ concerns have focused more […]
Dave Zirin: Then there is the palpable fear in the offices of the National Football League about what the retirement of Luck represents and the attendant public relations hit. Behind the pageantry, the war planes flying overhead, and the tailgating keg stands, this is a game largely played by black people from poor backgrounds for […]
Mark Pulliam: Utopian social movements often degenerate into unruly—and sometimes vicious—mobs. During the French Revolution, the slogan “liberty, equality, fraternity” quickly led to the guillotine as the Jacobins unleashed the Reign of Terror. We are witnessing a softer version of this at Harvard, America’s most elite university, where Ronald Sullivan, an African-American law professor, faces […]
Liel Leibovitz: As soon as I woke up that first morning, I took the train to 116th and Broadway, got off, strolled through the gates of Columbia University, and stood there gazing at the bronze Alma Mater sculpture guarding the steps to Low Library. Her face was serene, her lap adorned by a thick book, […]
Liel Leibovitz: When I immigrated to America, 20 years ago this fall, I had just over $2,000 in my pocket that I’d saved working as a night watchman at a factory back home in Israel. I also had an inflatable mattress on the floor of a friend’s one-bedroom in White Plains, New York, and a […]
Nikki Graf: hen asked about eight admissions criteria that colleges may consider, high school grades top the list. About two-thirds of Americans (67%) say this should be a major factor; 26% say it should be a minor factor. And while many colleges have stopped requiring standardized test scores as part of the application process, 47% […]
Tom Hancock & Nicolle Liu: Several senior Chinese officials have apparently copied portions of their university thesis from other authors without citation, an FT analysis has found, highlighting how an “academic arms race” among the political elite may be fuelling plagiarism. China’s politicians are on paper among the world’s best educated: the elite politburo, composed […]
Avi Wolfman-Arent: The small parent rebellion forming in one of Pennsylvania’s wealthiest school districts began at a Starbucks in suburban Chester County. Over coffee, three moms — Kate Mayer, Jamie Lynch, and Wendy Brooks — swapped stories about how their kids struggled to read as they moved through the Tredyffrin/Easttown school district, located about 30 […]
Sophia Bollag: When former charter school executive Marshall Tuck called Assemblyman Tony Thurmond to concede over the weekend, it marked another defeat for charter-school advocates in California. Thurmond was elected California’s top education official in the wave that led more liberal-leaning voters to cast ballots. Although both are Democrats, Thurmond had the party’s endorsement. He […]
Janie Har: Time and again, Chinese-American students consistently delivered top academic scores, only to be denied admission to their dream school. Parents bemoaned what they saw as an unfair racial advantage given to black and Latino children while their own children were overlooked. “Every year hundreds of Chinese-American parents would be in anguish,” said Lee […]
David Blaska: Bad Language + Bad Manners = Bad Policyat the Madison school board’s ad hoc committee on educational resource officers Monday afternoon Who, exactly, is demanding cops out of schools? I noted that the crowd seated in Room 103 were pretty much the same mob who shouted down the Dane County Board of Supervisors […]
Hilde Kahn, via Will Fitzhugh: One of few bright spots in the just-released National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) results was an increase in the number of students reaching “advanced” level in both math and reading at the 4th- and 8th-grades. But the results masked large racial and economic disparities. While 30 percent of Asian […]
LA Times: There are few sights in the world like nighttime in skid row, the teeming Dickensian dystopia in downtown Los Angeles where homeless and destitute people have been concentrated for more than a century. Here, men and women sleep in rows, lined up one after another for block after block in makeshift tents or […]
Joe Kotkin: The tech oligarchs who already dominate our culture and commerce, manipulate our moods, and shape the behaviors of our children while accumulating capital at a rate unprecedented in at least a century want to fashion our urban future in a way that dramatically extends the reach of the surveillance state already evident in […]
David Cyranoski: Getting time with Qiao Jie is not easy. At 7:30 a.m., the line coming out of the fertility centre that she runs blocks the doorway and extends some 80 metres down the street. Inside, about 50 physicians on her team are discussing recent findings, but Qiao, a fertility specialist and president of Peking […]
Economist: To have an equal chance of admission as a black applicant, an Asian applicant to a top college needs as much as 450 additional points out of 1600 on the SAT (a whopping amount to those unaccustomed to American psychometrics). Encouragingly, research by David Card and Alan Krueger, two economists, shows that talented minority […]
Elizabeth Berhman:: In particular, friction is growing between workers who build combustion vehicles — still the mainstay of most carmakers’ profits — and managers seeking to position their companies for a battery-powered future. Sedan Shifts The latest sign of the tough road ahead came on Thursday. To protest conditions offered by Mercedes parent Daimler as it negotiates […]
Alex Arriaga: Students at Northwestern University disrupted a sociology class on Tuesday to protest the visit of an officer from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The Daily Northwestern reports that members of student groups gathered outside the campus building where the ICE representative was beginning a guest presentation. The sociology course focuses on “inequality in […]
Judy Newman: The fourth time proved to be the charm for Madison seventh-grader Martius Bautista. Bautista, 12, a student at Edgewood Campus School, outspelled 45 competitors from around Wisconsin to win the first-place prize at the Badger State Spelling Bee on Saturday after correctly spelling “rhizograph,” a device that traces the movement of roots in […]
Molly Beck: “I think our track record is pretty good,” Evers said, citing decreased suspensions and expulsions, increased number of students taking college-level courses while still in high school and modest increases in reading proficiency. “Is it where we want? Absolutely not,” he said. Reading a key issuefor Humphries The state’s reading proficiency levels have […]
Kate Bellows: Several groups on Grounds collaborated to write a letter to University President Teresa Sullivan against the inclusion of a Thomas Jefferson quote in her post-election email Nov. 9. In the email, Sullivan encouraged students to unite in the wake of contentious results, arguing that University students have the responsibility of creating the future […]
Lauren Kirchner The five teenage boys were sitting in a parked car in a gated community in Melbourne, Florida, when a police officer pulled up behind them. Officer Justin Valutsky closed one of the rear doors, which had been ajar, and told them to stay in the car. He peered into the drivers’ side window […]
The Economist: The story of the Melungeons is at once a footnote to the history of race in America and a timely parable of it. They bear witness to the horrors and legacy of segregation, but also to the overlooked complexity of the early colonial era. They suggest a once-and-future alternative to the country’s brutally […]
Trevor Griffey: Popular discussions of higher education in the United States today are primarily organized around narratives of decline—from “The Fall of the Faculty” to “The Last Professors”, from “University Inc.” to “The University in Ruins.” Writing about the more than 70 percent of all college instructors who are off the tenure track—with poor pay […]
Christine Campbell, via a kind Robin Lake email: Teachers have been at the center of most states’ talent discussions to date. Although principals play a critical role in virtually all school-improvement reform efforts, most states lack a coherent school leadership strategy. This is a major oversight. But a few forces are afoot that may help […]
Carimah Townes: After eight years as the Cook County State’s Attorney, Anita Alvarez may be voted out of the office on Tuesday for her role in Chicago’s scandalous police culture. In the past few months, she’s been the subject of public outrage for her handling of Laquan McDonald’s shooting, which inspired calls for her resignation. […]
Xiani Zhong: University of Wisconsin is looking at increasing its non-need-based financial aid for students earlier in their academic career, but some say it is just another move in the “arms race” among schools competing for top students in the nation. Historically, UW’s non-need-based aid, or merit aid, has sat at the lower end among […]
Asma Khalid: Amanda Durio, 31, is a union carpenter. She plans to caucus for Bernie Sanders because she likes his message on “race” and “social classes.” Amanda Durio, 31, is a union carpenter. She plans to caucus for Bernie Sanders because she likes his message on “race” and “social classes.” Asma Khalid/NPR So far this […]
Stephanie Saul: free? That is the provocative question posed by a slate of candidates running for the Board of Overseers at Harvard, which helps set strategy for the university. They say Harvard makes so much money from its $37.6 billion endowment that it should stop charging tuition to undergraduates. But they have tied the notion […]
Daniel Hannan: Ah, well, you might say, after the monstrosities of apartheid, race is an understandably charged issue in South Africa. Perhaps a little bit of overshoot is only to be expected: a guilty conscience, allied to fear of a self-righteous mob, can be a powerful thing. Except that this isn’t just happening in South […]
Matthew Hennessey: For Wade and her husband, and for city dwellers with concerns ranging from classroom environment to the Common Core, public school is out of the question. And for them, as for many urban middle-class families, paying hefty private school tuition is not a realistic option, either. “It wasn’t so much a decision of […]
Zheping Huang: While many of his peers get their sense of achievement from online video games, Li Shengyao, a 21-year-old sophomore at the Shanghai University of Finance and Economics, gets it from playing the stock market. He describes himself as a short-term trader who “can’t stop my fingers from making orders.” Li spends at least […]
Stephanie Simon: Democratic mayors and governors across the nation are increasingly standing up to their traditional allies in the teachers unions to demand huge changes in urban school districts — and labor is frantically, furiously fighting back. Local and national unions have made Emanuel a top target, pouring resources into the effort to oust him. […]
Molly Hensley-Clancy Not long ago, Amber Brown, a student at Everest University, saw an article on Facebook about one of the many lawsuits against her school. The story, she wrote to BuzzFeed News, “dumbfounded” her: It mentioned former students facing mountains of debt for their degrees, but that didn’t seem to apply to her. Brown […]
Caroline Porter: The campaign for California’s top education post, typically a low-wattage contest, has become this state’s hottest race because of a division among Democrats over tenure rules and other policies that diminish teachers’ union power. One sign of the high attention: Nearly $30 million has been spent on campaigns for the postof state superintendent […]
Steve Denning: I have been asked for my “single best idea for reforming K-12 education”. When you only have one shot, you want to make it count. So I thought I would share my idea here, in case anyone has a brighter insight. Root cause: factory model of management To decide what is the single […]
Michael Kozlowski: American students have yet to embrace digital textbooks in considerable numbers. Many of the top universities and colleges have a very slim minority that either use them exclusively or in parallel with print. A recent survey by Hewlett Packard illiminates the role digital is playing in the classroom. HP conducted a survey last winter, […]
Stephanie Simon: GOOD MORNING! Welcome to the first installment of our monthly edu-lection newsletter, a new feature of our POLITICO series “All Policy is Local: Education.” Over the next five months, we’ll keep you in the know on all the ways education plays out in key races at the local, state and federal levels. We’ve […]
It was just a primary — and the results aren’t even final yet, with mail-in ballots still being counted to determine if there will be a runoff.
But advocates for traditional public education are jubilant that Bill de Blasio came out on top Tuesday in the Democratic mayoral race in New York City after a campaign in which he promised to yank support from charter schools, scale back high-stakes standardized testing and tax the wealthy to pay for universal preschool and more arts education.
De Blasio’s education platform boiled down, in effect, to a pledge to dismantle the policies that Mayor Michael Bloomberg enacted over the past decade in the nation’s largest school district.
Those policies, emphasizing the need to inject more free-market competition into public education and weaken the power of teachers unions, are not unique to New York City; they’re the backbone of a national education reform movement that has won broad bipartisan support. Yet the reform movement has also triggered a backlash from parents and teachers who see it as a threat to their schools, their jobs and the traditional concept of public education as a public trust.
There’s a widely shared image on the Internet of a teacher’s note that says: “Dear students, I know when you’re texting in class. Seriously, no one just looks down at their crotch and smiles.”
College students returning to class this month would be wise to heed such warnings. You’re not as clever as you think–your professors are on to you. The best way to stay in their good graces is to learn what behavior they expect with technology in and around the classroom.
Let’s start with the million-dollar question: May computers (laptops, tablets, smartphones) be used in class? Some instructors are as permissive as parents who let you set your own curfew. Others are more controlling and believe that having your phone on means your brain is off and that relying on Google for answers results in a digital lobotomy.
Neal McCluskey, Williamson Evers and Sandra Stotsky:
The Common Core — effectively national math and English curriculum standards coming soon to a school near you — is supposed to be a new, higher bar that will take the United States from the academic doldrums to international dominance.
So why is there so much unhappiness about it? There didn’t seem to be much just three years ago. Back then, state school boards and governors were sprinting to adopt the Core. In practically the blink of an eye, 45 states had signed on.
But states weren’t leaping because they couldn’t resist the Core’s academic magnetism. They were leaping because it was the Great Recession — and the Obama administration was dangling a $4.35 billion Race to the Top carrot in front of them. Big points in that federal program were awarded for adopting the Core, so, with little public debate, most did.
Major displeasure has come only recently, because only recently has implementation hit the district level. And that means moms, dads and other citizens have recently gotten a crash course in the Core.
Their opposition has been sudden and potent — with several states now considering legislation to either slow or end implementation, and Indiana, Pennsylvania and Michigan having officially paused it.
Wisconsin Center for the Advancement of Post-Secondary Education (2.6MB PDF):
To answer the guiding research questions, we developed a comparison group of academically and demographically similar non-participants to compare outcomes with AVID/TOPS students based on 8th grade pre-participation data. Using a statistical matching method called propensity score matching, we matched every AVID/TOPS student with a similar non-AVID/TOPS student at the same high school to create the comparison group.
Using these groups, we test for statistically and practically significant differences on key measures of academic preparation (cumulative GPA, enrollment and GPA in core courses, enrollment and GPA in AP/Honors courses, and credit attainment), college knowledge (test-taking rates and performance on the EXPLORE, PLAN, and ACT tests), and student engagement (attendance rates and behavioral referrals).
Statistically significant differences are differences that are unlikely to have occurred through random chance and are large enough to reflect meaningful differences in practice. In this report, we highlight statistically significant differences with a red symbol: .To focus attention on underrepresented students’ achievement, we disaggregated the measures by income and race. Though we report disaggregated findings, many of these groups are not mutually exclusive; for example, low-income students may also be African-American and therefore also represented in that data disaggregation. We do not report data from disaggregated groups that have fewer than five students in them. We then analyze this data at the program, grade cohort, and high school levels.
This assessment does not make causal claims about AVID/TOPS, nor does it present a longitudinal analysis of AVID/TOPS student achievement. Rather, the findings represent a single snapshot for achievement during the 2011-12 school year of the program’s 9th, 10th, and 11th graders.
First up is Dr. Dana Rickman, policy and research director for the partnership, on the Top Ten Education Issues to Watch in 2013.
Please note that all these comments are from the speakers today, not from me. (I did add a few comments, but I clearly designate them as mine.) I am writing as folks speak and may miss a typo but will go back during the breaks and clean this up.
Top 10 issues, says Rickman:
Race to the Top: Halfway through implementing grant. Where do we stand?
As part of Virginia’s waiver to opt out of mandates set out in the No Child Left Behind law, the state has created a controversial new set of education goals that are higher for white and Asian kids than for blacks, Latinos and students with disabilities.
Virginia Democratic state Sen. Donald McEachin first read about the state’s new performance goals for schoolchildren in a newspaper editorial.
“And I was shocked to find that the state board of education [was] putting in place permanent disparities between different subgroups — Asians at the top, African-Americans at the bottom,” says McEachin.
Here’s what the Virginia state board of education actually did. It looked at students’ test scores in reading and math and then proposed new passing rates. In math it set an acceptable passing rate at 82 percent for Asian students, 68 percent for whites, 52 percent for Latinos, 45 percent for blacks and 33 percent for kids with disabilities.
One claim that gets tossed around a lot in education circles is that “the most effective teachers produce a year and a half of learning per year, while the least effective produce a half of a year of learning.”
This talking point is used all the time in advocacy materials and news articles. Its implications are pretty clear: Effective teachers can make all the difference, while ineffective teachers can do permanent damage.
As with most prepackaged talking points circulated in education debates, the “year and a half of learning” argument, when used without qualification, is both somewhat valid and somewhat misleading. So, seeing as it comes up so often, let’s very quickly identify its origins and what it means.
This particular finding is traceable to a 1992 paper by economist Eric Hanushek, one which focused primarily on the relationship between achievement and family composition in Gary, Indiana (the data are from the early- to mid-1970s, and include only low-income students). After reviewing his (very interesting) main results on the relationship between student achievement and family size, birth order and the interval between births, Hanushek presents an analysis of test-based teacher effects.
Asians are the fastest-growing, most educated and highest-earning population in the U.S., according to a new report that paints the majority-immigrant group as a boon to an economy that has come to rely increasingly on skilled workers.
The number of Asians in the U.S. quadrupled between 1980 and 2010 to about 18 million, or 6% of the total population, according to “The Rise of Asian Americans,” a study released Tuesday by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center. The bulk of Asians in the U.S. trace their roots to six countries: China, India, Japan, Korea, the Philippines and Vietnam.
As a group, Asians place more value than Americans overall on marriage, parenting, hard work and careers, according to the report. Irrespective of their country of origin, Asians overall believe that American parents are too soft on their children.
In the mid-1990s I set out to adopt a baby. I made phone calls to adoption agencies, and staff members asked warily if I’d consider a transracial adoption. I said yes. At one agency, the receptionist snapped: “Do you understand what transracial means?” Her tone startled me. “I think so,” I said, parsing syllables, “adoption across races.” Impatient, she said, “You’ll get a black baby!”
I lived in a small town without internet access and had done my research–on adoption laws, policy, advice–at a library twenty miles away. I’d found references to a 1972 position paper issued by the National Association of Black Social Workers that objected to transracial adoption as “cultural genocide,” an understandable position, given the state of race relations in 1972. The few agencies that had been doing black-white adoptions stopped because of the position paper. I didn’t find references to a time when agencies started doing transracial adoptions again because the Metzenbaum Act–passed in 1994 to address the fact that children of color were overrepresented in the child welfare system–had been amended, making “race-matching” as the sole determinant for the placement of a child unambiguously illegal.
Some staff members welcomed the change but weren’t sure if adoptive parents would. Other staff members objected to the change–take the receptionist who’d thought I must not know what transracial meant based on my answer. In the end, I used an agency whose staff members were able to discuss race without anger or recoil.
Matthew DeFour, a local education reporter:
Nichols said declining test scores and low graduation rates for minority students over the past six years have been a reflection of the board and superintendent not having shared priorities. She said a change in board leadership is necessary “because we can’t afford to lose more precious time.”
Silveira did not respond Wednesday to a request to discuss Nerad’s departure.
Burke said she would have liked to see Nerad stay and worries his departure could expend the momentum for addressing the achievement gap that has built up over the last year.
Hiring Nerad’s replacement, she said, is “probably the most important issue now facing the board.”
Flores said he has mixed feeling about Nerad’s departure. On one hand, the district now has a new issue to address on top of the achievement gap and the budget. At the same time, there arises the potential for finding a leader who the community embraces and will make difficult decisions.Related:
- Omaha Superintendent Search: Wisconsin educator dealt with unions, protesting teachers
- Madison Superintendent Candidate Dan Nerad’s Public Appearance: January, 2008
- Madison Superintendent Dan Nerad to Leave when Contract Expires in 2013
- Oh, the Places We Go, Madison Superintendents…
- Is $14,858.40 Per Student, Per Year Effective? On Madison Superintendent & School Board Accountability…
Seat 1 Candidates:
Nichelle Nichols
www.nichols4schoolboard.org
email: nnichols4mmsd@gmail.com
Arlene Silveira (incumbent)
www.arleneforschoolboard.com
email: arlene_Silveira@yahoo.com
Seat 2 Candidates:
Mary Burke
www.maryburkeforschoolboard.net
email: maryburkewi@gmail.com
Michael Flores
www.floresforschoolboard.org
email: floresm1977@gmail.com
Arlene Silveira & Michael Flores Madison Teachers, Inc. Candidate Q & A
That Kaleem Caire, the charismatic champion of the Madison Preparatory Academy, is frustrated by the proposal’s defeat before the Madison School Board last month should surprise no one.
But the prospect that resentment over the defeat of the proposal runs so deep that it could poison the initiative’s future prospects as a private school or public charter — that’s a distressing possibility whose existence is just now emerging.
The proposal for the school by the Urban League of Greater Madison has won many supporters because of the embarrassingly persistent achievement gap between whites and minorities in the Madison School District, but when Caire spoke Monday to Communities United, a community group dedicated to social justice, his passionate appeal to go beyond the district’s existing model was laced with anger towards the School Board members who voted down the plan.
Much of the discussion Monday between Caire and a handful of staffers from the Urban League — where he is president and CEO — and those at the Communities United meeting centered around the ultra-sensitive topics of race and racism.
Even in that friendly environment (the informal, nonpartisan coalition was already on record in favor of the school), Caire’s accusations against school officials were rejected as political spin by a Madison City Council member on hand and criticized as more of the “race card” by an African-American activist who has skirmished with Caire before over Madison Prep. But a Latina parent and activist greeted his words as an apt assessment of the situation in Madison schools.Much more on the proposed Madison Preparatory IB charter school, here.
Every race has losers, and the Obama administration’s Race to the Top education grant competition is proving to be no exception.
As nine states await their prize money after coming out on top late last week in the Education Department’s Race to the Top Early Learning Challenge, the rest are left empty-handed, having spent thousands of hours carefully crafting plans that ultimately fell short.
“We invested a ton of time. That time equates to money,” said Bobby Cagle, commissioner of Georgia’s Department of Early Care and Learning.
Mr. Cagle estimated that he and his staff spent more than 2,000 hours on the effort, and said his agency is greatly disappointed by the result.
The Obama administration issued new guidance Friday advising schools and colleges on how they can make race-based enrollment decisions to promote campus diversity, shortly before the Supreme Court is set to consider whether to re-examine a 2003 case holding that universities could sometimes use race in admissions decisions.
“Diverse learning environments promote development of analytical skills, dismantle stereotypes and prepare students to succeed in an increasingly interconnected world,” Attorney General Eric Holder said in a joint release by the Justice and Education departments.
The departments withdrew prior guidance from the Bush administration, which officials said was too vague to assist school administrators seeking to promote diverse student enrollment. The new guidance parses the Supreme Court’s most recent rulings on student diversity to suggest policies the administration believes would not violate the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection of the laws.
Like the former Bush administration guidance, the new documents advise schools to use race-neutral policies if possible. If those prove insufficient, however, the new guidance states that a school “may consider a student’s race as a ‘plus factor’ (among other, nonracial considerations) to achieve its compelling interests” in diversity.
THE latest bad but unsurprising news on education is that reading and writing scores on the SAT have once again declined. The language competence of our high schoolers fell steeply in the 1970s and has never recovered.
This is very worrisome, because the best single measure of the overall quality of our primary and secondary schools is the average verbal score of 17-year-olds. This score correlates with the ability to learn new things readily, to communicate with others and to hold down a job. It also predicts future income.
The decline has led some commentators to embrace demographic determinism — the idea that the verbal scores of disadvantaged students will not significantly rise until we overcome poverty. But that explanation does not account for the huge drop in verbal scores across socioeconomic groups in the 1970s.
Grace Wong has felt the sting of intolerance quite literally, in the rocks thrown at her in Australia, where she pursued a PhD after leaving her native China. In the Boston area, where she’s lived since 1996, she recalls a fellow customer at the deli counter in a Chestnut Hill supermarket telling her to go back to her own country. When Wong’s younger son was born, she took a drastic measure to help protect him, at least on paper, from discrimination: She changed his last name to one that doesn’t sound Asian.
“It’s a difficult time to be Chinese,” says Wong, a scientist who develops medical therapies. “There’s a lot of jealousy out there, because the Chinese do very well. And some people see that as a threat.”
Wong had these worries in mind last month as she waited to hear whether her older son, a good student in his senior year at a top suburban high school, would be accepted to the 11 colleges he had applied to, which she had listed neatly on a color-coded spreadsheet.
The odds, strangely, were stacked against him. After all the attention given to the stereotype that Asian-American parents put enormous pressure on their children to succeed – provoked over the winter by Amy Chua’s controversial Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother – came the indisputable reality this spring that, even if Asian-American students work hard, the doors of top schools were still being slammed shut in many faces.
Education may not be the first thing that comes to voters’ minds this year when they think of the Wisconsin governor’s race, but maybe it should be.
After all, soon after the next governor raises his hand to take the oath of office, he is likely to immediately be confronted with the state’s 2011-’13 biennial budget and a shortfall of about $3 billion.
Education now consumes more than half of the spending by the State of Wisconsin – school aid for kindergarten through 12th grades alone cost about $5 billion this year – even though the state’s portion of education funding has fallen in the last two years and has needed help from federal stimulus dollars.
So, whoever voters select for the state’s top spot could have a big effect on their neighborhood schools as well as on state taxing and spending.
“It’s huge,” Todd Berry, president of the Wisconsin Taxpayers Alliance, said about the school funding issue. “By mathematical definition, if the state has big financial problems, it has real implications for education.”
How Global Universities Are Reshaping the World
By Ben Wildavsky. Princeton Univ. 240 pp. $26.95
Globalization is changing the food we eat, the way we communicate and, increasingly, the way we go to college. Nearly 3 million students were enrolled in universities outside their borders in 2009, a 57 percent increase over the previous decade, according to the Institute of International Education, which facilitates exchange programs.
“The Great Brain Race,” by Ben Wildavsky, takes a comprehensive look at today’s worldwide marketplace for college students — with stops in such places as Singapore, South Korea and Saudi Arabia, where western schools, including the University of Chicago and potentially George Mason University, are opening satellite campuses or where local governments are making heavy investments in American-style research universities. The author, a former education editor at U.S. News & World Report, also explores the latest attempts to rate the world’s top colleges now that more students are degree-shopping across borders.
First, Obama and the education secretary, Arne Duncan, set up a contest. They put down $4.5 billion in Race to the Top money. They issued some general guidelines about what kind of reforms states would have to adopt to get the money. And then they fired the starting gun.
Reformers in at least 23 states have passed reform laws in hopes of getting some of the dough. Some of the state laws represent incremental progress and some represent substantial change. The administration has hung tough, demanding real reform in exchange for dollars. Over all, there’s been a tremendous amount of movement in a brief time.
This is not heavy-handed Washington command-and-control. This is Washington energizing diverse communities of reformers, locality by locality, and giving them more leverage in their struggles against the defenders of the status quo.
Second, the Obama administration used the power of the presidency to break through partisan gridlock. Over the past decade, teacher unions and their allies have become proficient in beating back Republican demands for more charters, accountability and choice. But Obama has swung behind a series of bipartisan reformers who are also confronting union rigidity.
In Rhode Island, the Central Falls superintendent, Frances Gallo, fired all the teachers at one failing school. The unions fought back. Obama sided with Gallo, sending shock waves nationwide. If the president had the guts to confront a sacred Democratic interest group in order to jolt a failing school, then change was truly in the air. Gallo got the concessions she needed to try to improve that school.
For nearly three decades, California’s largest teachers union has all but handpicked the candidate who went on to win the race for state superintendent of public instruction.
It was pretty much a given for the candidate: Get the California Teachers Association’s campaign cash, gain the support of most other education groups in the state and win the race.
This year is different.
In a packed field of 12 candidates, three have emerged as the top contenders for the nonpartisan job. All three are Democrats, two of whom are splitting the support of the education establishment, and a third who has attracted support of non-establishment education reformers.
The three include former South Bay schools superintendent Larry Aceves; state Sen. Gloria Romero, D-Los Angeles; and Assemblyman Tom Torlakson, D-Antioch
New York Daily News Editorial:
The future of charter schools in New York hangs on negotiations between City Hall and teachers union President Michael Mulgrew. This is perverse.
The United Federation of Teachers is fighting to limit the growth of charters even as the state’s application for as much as $700 million in federal Race to the Top money demands letting the number of schools expand.
Mulgrew’s strategy has been to give the nod to upping the charter cap while trying to make it all but impossible for a sponsor to open one of these privately run, publicly funded academies. For example, by creating barriers to moving a charter into unused space in a public school building.
Although the city’s charter schools have almost universally racked up amazing achievement gains, the UFT resists them because most are not unionized. And the more successful charters have become, the greater the resistance has grown
Let’s suppose you have spent your career as a professor at an American education school, training future teachers. Then suppose that your state decided that teachers could get certified without attending an education school at all.
That’s called “alternative certification,” and most of my school of education colleagues are outraged by it.
I take a different view. These new routes into teaching could transform the profession, by attracting the type of student that has eluded education schools for far too long. We should extend an olive branch to our competitors, instead of circling the wagons against them.
The biggest challenger at the moment is Teach for America (TFA), which recruits graduating seniors, mostly from elite colleges, and places them as teachers in public schools following a five-week training course. Last year, a whopping 11% of all Ivy League seniors applied to TFA. It was the No. 1 employer at several other top colleges, including Georgetown and the University of Chicago.
Critics of the Obama administration’s signature education initiative have been breathing fire since it was announced that only Delaware and Tennessee had won first-round grants under the program, known as Race to the Top. Politicians from some losing states have denounced the well-designed scoring system under which the 16 finalists were evaluated. Others have thrown up their hands, suggesting that retooling applications for the next round is more trouble than it’s worth.
Plenty of states will line up for the remaining $3.4 billion. But even if the program ended today, it already has had a huge, beneficial effect on the education reform effort, especially at the state and local levels.