Laurie Frost and Jeff Henriques:

Thank you for your excellent article on the increase in juvenile crime in our city. May we suggest a followup story?

It is well known that students who are not reading proficiently by fourth grade — when “learning to read” becomes “reading to learn” — do not fare well. For example, they are four times more likely to drop out of school and two-thirds of them will end up in prison or on welfare.

Here are the fourth-grade reading data for the MMSD going back to 2005-06.

We can’t help but wonder if the students we fail to teach to read in early elementary school are the same ones who are “acting out” behaviorally in middle and high school.

If so, might they be trying to tell us something?

Apparently the Madison Police Department sees the same connection between reading level and behavior that we do because it has a new fund — the “Community Reading Fund” — aimed at supporting the educational needs of at-risk students. Readers can make an end-of-year donation to the fund at madisoncommunitypolicingfoundation.org or by sending a check (made out to “MCPF — Community Read”) to the Madison Community Policing Foundation, P.O. Box 44246, Madison, WI, 53744.

Laurie Frost and Jeff Henriques

Madison

Related: Madison Wisconsin High School Graduation Rates, College Readiness, and Student Learning.

Brittany Wallman, Megan O’Matz and Paula McMahon:

Immediately after 17 people were murdered inside Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, the school district launched a persistent effort to keep people from finding out what went wrong.

For months, Broward schools delayed or withheld records, refused to publicly assess the role of employees, spread misinformation and even sought to jail reporters who published the truth.

New information gathered by the South Florida Sun Sentinel proves that the school district knew far more than it’s saying about a disturbed former student obsessed with death and guns who mowed down staff and students with an assault rifle on Valentine’s Day.

After promising an honest assessment of what led to the shooting, the district instead hired a consultant whose primary goal, according to school records, was preparing a legal defense. Then the district kept most of those findings from the public.

Related: Seeing the Forest: Unpacking the Relationship Between Madison School District (WI) Graduation Rates and Student Achievement.

Isaac Stanley-Becker:

This racial and political disparity is among the discoveries made by a pair of social psychologists in a paper forthcoming in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, a peer-reviewed scientific journal published by the American Psychological Association. Cydney Dupree, an assistant professor of organizational behavior at the Yale School of Management, and Susan Fiske, a professor of psychology and public affairs at Princeton, documented what they call a “competence downshift” exhibited by white liberals in interactions with racial minorities, and with black people in particular.

The findings, based on what the authors stress is “preliminary evidence,” raise difficult questions about aspirations for a so-called post-racial society. The results reveal how subtle forms of discrimination may coincide with progress toward equal treatment, or what the paper identifies as “a significant reduction in the expression of explicit prejudice and endorsement of negative stereotypes.”

The psychologists further discovered that white liberals rarely admit to the goal of appearing less competent, a fact that highlights the role of implicit bias and “the covert nature of the competence downshift strategy.”

“White liberals may unwittingly draw on negative stereotypes, dumbing themselves down in a likely well-meaning, ‘folksy,’ but ultimately patronizing, attempt to connect with the outgroup,” argues the paper, titled “Self-Presentation in Interracial Settings: The Competence Downshift by White Liberals.”

The findings could provide a new arrow in the quiver of those who decry identity politics practiced by liberals, and yet the paper hardly applauds conservatives for their approach, reasoning that they are simply “less motivated to affiliate with racial minorities.” In other words, the paper states, white conservatives “would not bother.”

“It’s somewhat counterintuitive,” said Dupree, who is the lead author and whose research was supported by the National Science Foundation as well as by Princeton’s Joint Degree Program in Social Policy. “The idea that people who are most well-intentioned toward racial minorities, the people actually showing up and wanting to forge these connections, they’re the ones who seem to be drawing on stereotypes to do so.”

Perhaps fittingly, Madison has long spent far more than most taxpayer supported K-12 school districts, yet we have simultaneously tolerated long term, disastrous reading results.

Related:

Seeing the Forest: Unpacking the Relationship Between Madison School District (WI) Graduation Rates and Student Achievement.

A majority of the Madison School Board rejected the proposed Madison Preparatory IB Charter school (2011).

“They’re all rich, white kids and they’ll do just fine” — NOT! (2006)

When all third graders read at grade level or beyond by the end of the year, the achievement gap will be closed…and not before (2005)

Michael Lechman, Kathleen Masterson and Eric Figueroa:

The data in this paper on state “formula” funding for K-12 education through the current school year come from a review of state budget documents CBPP conducted in the summer of 2017. An education funding expert in each state, often a budget expert with the state’s education department, reviewed our figures and edited them when necessary.

The figures on both total state and local education funding reflect all state and local revenues dedicated to K-12 education, as reported by the U.S. Census Bureau. The enrollment figures used to analyze total state and total local education funding were taken from the National Center for Education Statistics. Additional adjustments were made to reflect the following state-specific policies or data limitations:

Locally, Madison spending grows annually. We spend around $20,000 per K-12 student, far more than most taxpayer supported K-12 school districts.

Yet, we have long tolerated disastrous reading results, while substantive questions have been raised about increasing graduation rates combined with decreasing achievement data.

Cory Koedel:

I enjoyed reading Fordham’s recent study by Seth Gershenson on a topic that has always been high on my list of interests: grade inflation.

Grade inflation has a number of important implications for education policy at the K–12 and postsecondary levels, but is notoriously difficult to measure. Some of the more compelling evidence on the consequences of grade inflation include (a) Philip Babcock’s 2010 study showing that students with higher grade expectations give less effort, and (b) Kristin Butcher, Patrick McEwan, and Akila Weerapana’s 2014 study showing that students choose college majors based in part on differences in the grades awarded across departments. These studies show that grade inflation has important implications for how much and what type of human capital is produced in our society.

Gershenson performs a clever analysis to help us better understand grade inflation in K–12 schools. The basic idea of his research design is to benchmark course grades against scores on end-of-course exams (EOCs) in Algebra I. While neither the EOC nor the course grade is a complete measure of performance, both provide useful information.

Course grades are assigned by teachers, whereas the Algebra I EOC is independently scored. Noting that grades are a specific type of performance evaluation, we can draw on the larger performance evaluation literature for insight into the factors that drive grade inflation (e.g., see Kevin Murphy and Jeanette Cleveland’s 1991 book, Performance Appraisal). A prime factor in my view is that human nature pushes us to inflate performance evaluations in socially proximal settings. Another is that teachers likely view grades as a reflection of their own performance, rightly or wrongly.

Related: Seeing the Forest: Unpacking the Relationship Between Madison School District (WI) Graduation Rates and Student Achievement.

Howard Blume & Anna Phillips:

Under a proposal being developed confidentially, Beutner would divide the system into 32 “networks,” moving authority and resources out of the central office and into neighborhoods. He is expected to make his plan public next month.

In L.A. Unified’s downtown headquarters, managers and other employees recently have been asked to explain their duties — and to justify why their jobs should continue to exist in a leaner, more localized school system.

The network strategy is not a plan to break up or end L.A. Unified, but it could transform how the school system functions.

“The superintendent is trying to move toward a decentralized system that puts the student first,” said one person close to the process who was not authorized to comment publicly. “He’s trying to generate better educational outcomes. That’s the No. 1 goal.

“Savings from the central bureaucracy could be plowed back into education at the school level,” he said, “as well as [used] to deal with the fiscal crisis the district faces.”

Beutner declined to comment on the plan, saying it would be premature to talk about a work in progress.

Related: Madison spends far more than most, yet we’ve long tolerated disastrous reading results.

2006: They’re all Rich White Kids, and they’ll do just fine, NOT!”

2013: “Plenty of Resources“.

“What’s different, this time?”

2017: Adult employment.

2018: Seeing the Forest: Unpacking the Relationship Between Madison School District (WI) Graduation Rates and Student Achievement

The Baker Center’s 2018 Institutional Confidence Poll Key Finding #2:

How much confidence do you have in the following institutions?

Institutional Confidence, All Respondents

I reflected on this while listening to a Reformation service message. Martin Luther ignited The Reformation 501 years ago.

A salient passage, from the Verse app.

Seeing the Forest: Unpacking the Relationship Between Madison School District (WI) Graduation Rates and Student Achievement

A bit of interesting commentary on the survey and results, here.

Politics (and therefore civics):

The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns. That’s a sea change. They literally know nothing.”

Laurie Frost and Jeff Henriques:

Our analyses revealed that over the course of nine years of instruction, the percentage of minority students in the class of 2017 who were proficient in reading or math was very low and changed very little. At no point did more than 20 percent of black students or 30 percent of Hispanic students achieve grade-level proficiency in either content area. No limitation in the tests used or the data obtained — including any cultural bias that may exist in the tests — can explain away these painful results. Any way you slice it, we are failing to give the bulk of our minority students basic academic skills.

And yet 77 percent of Hispanic students and 72.6 percent of black students in the class of 2017 earned a high school diploma. Clearly most of them did so without having grade level skills. But a high school diploma without high school level reading and math skills is of limited value. What does the future hold for these students?

We have long been frustrated by the way the district selectively compiles, analyzes, and shares student data with the community. We see the situation as a decades-old cultural problem in the Doyle Building and do not hold any single individual responsible for it. For too many district administrators and school board members over the 20+ years we have been paying attention, making the district look good has been more important than thoroughgoing honesty about how our students are doing. In fact, we shared our analyses and concerns with the district administration and school board last month, but have received no response from the administration and only one from a board member.

See the Forest: Unpacking the Relationship between Madison (WI) school district graduation rates and student achievement.

Matthew DeFour:

Not all districts have the same revenue level. DPI spokesman Tom McCarthy highlighted some differences:

The Beloit School District, with higher poverty and lower property values, can receive $9,626 per student, about 83 percent of which comes from state aid. So when revenue limits increase, the district typically uses all of the extra funding without having to raise property taxes much.

The more rural Plum City School District in northern Wisconsin can collect $10,271 per student, about half of which comes from aid and half from property taxes, so when limits increase the district has to engage with its community about whether to raise property taxes.

The Nicolet Union High School District in a higher property value district Milwaukee suburb receives $15,344 per student, only 5 percent of which comes from state aid, so in order to raise funding levels the district must raise property taxes.

McCarthy added, “per pupil aid subverts all of these considerations.”

In the last budget Walker proposed more money for schools than Evers, even with the high price tag of the Evers funding formula change, but most of the increase went to per-pupil aid and property tax credits. Kitchens said the Legislature didn’t use the funding increase to back Evers’ plan because “politically there wasn’t a will to come back and change it.”

He also acknowledged that continuing to pump money into per-pupil aid is problematic.

“If we keep doing that, we’re defeating the purpose of the formula,” Kitchens said. “I know politically there may be advantages to giving everybody something so everybody’s happy, but that does defeat the purpose.”

The Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction, long lead by Mr. Evers, has aborted our one attempt to improve teacher content knowledge requirements, as Massachusetts has done (via MTEL), in an effort to address our disastrous reading results.

Madison spends far more than most taxpayer funded K-12 school districts, nearly 20,000 per student.

Yet, Madison has long tolerated disastrous reading results, and recently promoted improved graduation rates despite declining academic results.

Cory Koedel:

I enjoyed reading Fordham’s recent study by Seth Gershenson on a topic that has always been high on my list of interests: grade inflation.

Grade inflation has a number of important implications for education policy at the K–12 and postsecondary levels, but is notoriously difficult to measure. Some of the more compelling evidence on the consequences of grade inflation include (a) Philip Babcock’s 2010 study showing that students with higher grade expectations give less effort, and (b) Kristin Butcher, Patrick McEwan, and Akila Weerapana’s 2014 study showing that students choose college majors based in part on differences in the grades awarded across departments. These studies show that grade inflation has important implications for how much and what type of human capital is produced in our society.

Gershenson performs a clever analysis to help us better understand grade inflation in K–12 schools. The basic idea of his research design is to benchmark course grades against scores on end-of-course exams (EOCs) in Algebra I. While neither the EOC nor the course grade is a complete measure of performance, both provide useful information.

Course grades are assigned by teachers, whereas the Algebra I EOC is independently scored. Noting that grades are a specific type of performance evaluation, we can draw on the larger performance evaluation literature for insight into the factors that drive grade inflation (e.g., see Kevin Murphy and Jeanette Cleveland’s 1991 book, Performance Appraisal). A prime factor in my view is that human nature pushes us to inflate performance evaluations in socially proximal settings. Another is that teachers likely view grades as a reflection of their own performance, rightly or wrongly.

Related: Seeing the Forest: Unpacking the Relationship Between Madison School District (WI) Graduation Rates and Student Achievement.

Amber M. Northern, Ph.D. and Michael Petrilli:

One of us recently mused that perhaps the reason dismal state test scores don’t resonate with parents is because they conflict with what parents see coming home from school. Who knows their kids better: their teachers or a faceless test provider? The teachers, of course. But what if the grades that teachers assign don’t reflect the state’s high standards? What if practically everyone is getting As and Bs from the teacher—but parents don’t know that?

That was the impetus for Fordham’s newest study, Grade Inflation in High Schools (2005–2016). We wanted to know how easy or hard it is today to get a good grade in high school and whether that has changed over time. We can’t develop solutions until we’ve accurately identified the problem. And in this case, we suspect that one reason for stalled student achievement across the land is that historically trusted grades are telling a vastly different story than other academic measures.

So we teamed up with American University economist Seth Gershenson, who is keenly interested in this topic, and whose prior research on the role of teacher expectations in student outcomes made him a perfect fit to conduct the research.

The study asks three questions:

How frequent and how large are discrepancies between student grades and test scores? Do they vary by school demographics?
To what extent do high school test scores, course grades, attendance, and cumulative GPAs align with student performance on college entrance exams?
How, if at all, have the nature of such discrepancies and the difficulty of receiving an A changed in recent years?

Related: Seeing the Forest: Unpacking the Relationship Between Madison School District (WI) Graduation Rates and Student Achievement.

CBS News:

Our series, School Matters, features extended stories and investigations on education. In this installment, we’re looking at a lawsuit winding its way through the federal appeals process that questions whether access to literacy is a constitutional right. A federal judge in Michigan recently ruled it wasn’t when he dismissed a 2016 case. That case claimed students in some of Detroit’s lowest-performing schools were denied “access” to literacy due to poor management, discrimination and underfunding.

For years, Detroit public schools were under control of emergency managers, who were trying to lift the district out of debt. But, this case has drawn national attention because of its wide-ranging implications, possibly leading to federal changes to the education system.

March 10, 2018: The Wisconsin State Journal published “Madison high school graduation rate for black students soars”.

September 1, 2018: “how are we to understand such high minority student graduation rates in combination with such low minority student achievement?”

2005:

On November 7, Superintendent Art Rainwater made his annual report to the Board of Education on progress toward meeting the district’s student achievement goal in reading. As he did last fall, the superintendent made some interesting claims about the district’s success in closing the academic achievement gap “based on race”.

According to Mr. Rainwater, the place to look for evidence of a closing achievement gap is the comparison of the percentage of African American third graders who score at the lowest level of performance on statewide tests and the percentage of other racial groups scoring at that level. He says that, after accounting for income differences, there is no gap associated with race at the lowest level of achievement in reading. He made the same claim last year, telling the Wisconsin State Journal on September 24, 2004, “for those kids for whom an ability to read would prevent them from being successful, we’ve reduced that percentage very substantially, and basically, for all practical purposes, closed the gap”. Last Monday, he stated that the gap between percentages scoring at the lowest level “is the original gap” that the board set out to close.

Unfortunately, that is not the achievement gap that the board aimed to close.

In 1998, the Madison School Board adopted an important academic goal: “that all students complete the 3rd grade able to read at or beyond grade level”. We adopted this goal in response to recommendations from a citizen study group that believed that minority students who are not competent as readers by the end of the third grade fall behind in all academic areas after third grade.

2006: “They’re all Rich White Kids, and they’ll do just fine, NOT!”

2011: On the 5-2 Madison School Board No (Cole, Hughes, Moss, Passman, Silveira) Madison Preparatory Academy IB Charter School Vote (Howard, Mathiak voted Yes)

2013: Madison’s long term, disastrous reading results.

The Simpson Street Free Press (!) digs: Are Rising MMSD Grad Rates Something to Celebrate?, and digs deeper: Madison’s ACT College Readiness Gap.

In closing, Madison spends far more than most K-12 taxpayer funded organizations.

Federal taxpayers have recently contributed to our property tax base.

Steve Hashem and Douglas Satterfield:

To address these challenges, we must start early. Children’s earliest years are a critical time during which the most rapid brain development happens. This foundation informs their cognition, health, and behavior throughout life.

Research shows that high-quality early education programs deliver real, measurable results in improving outcomes for kids. Such programs can prepare children to start school with critical early math and reading skills, improve student performance, boost graduation rates, deter youth from crime, and even reduce obesity rates by instilling healthy eating and exercise habits at a young age.

For example, a long-term study of the Perry Preschool Program in Michigan found that children who participated in the program were 44 percent more likely to graduate from high school than children left out of the program. A similar study of the Chicago Child-Parent Centers showed that children who did not participate in the program were 70 percent more likely to be arrested for a violent crime by age 18.

A growing body of research also shows that state early education programs, if they are of high enough quality, can deliver solid results.

A new, national study from the Upjohn Institute analyzes thousands of public school district pre-K programs and finds that in states with high-quality programs, there are benefits persisting to at least fourth grade, with significant boosts to math scores.

Here in New Jersey, our state-funded preschool program has followed children through the fourth and fifth grades and found that, compared with a control group, the children served were three-fourths of a year ahead in math and two-thirds of a year ahead in literacy. They were also 31 percent less likely to be placed in special education and were held back 40 percent less often.

Related: Madison’s long term, disastrous reading results.

C. Kirabo Jackson, Cora Wigger and Heyu Xiong:

Audits of public school budgets routinely find evidence of waste. Also, recent evidence finds that when school budgets are strained, public schools can employ cost-saving measures with no ill-effect on students. We theorize that if budget cuts induce schools to eliminate wasteful spending, the effects of spending cuts may be small (and even zero). To explore this empirically, we examine how student performance responded to school spending cuts induced by the Great Recession. We link nationally representative test score and survey data to school spending data and isolate variation in recessionary spending cuts that were unrelated to changes in economic conditions. Consistent with the theory, districts that faced large revenue cuts disproportionately reduced spending on non-core operations. However, they still reduced core operational spending to some extent. A 10 percent school spending cut reduced test scores by about 7.8 percent of a standard deviation. Moreover, a 10 percent spending reduction during all four high-school years was associated with 2.6 percentage points lower graduation rates. While our estimates are smaller than some in the literature, spending cuts do matter.

Related: COMMENTARY ON K-12 TAX, SPENDING AND OUTCOMES: KANSAS CITY AND MADISON:

Matt Barnum:

The study comes with a few important caveats.
The spike in test-score growth toward the end of the five-year grant coincided with the introduction of a new test aligned with the Common Core, the PARCC. It also coincided with an increase in students opting out of state tests, both in Newark and statewide. The researchers try to account for this, but it’s not entirely clear if those changes skewed the findings.

Also, the researchers came to their conclusions by comparing test score growth of Newark’s students to students with similar backgrounds and in similar schools across New Jersey. That doesn’t guarantee that the study is able to isolate the effects of the reforms, but does allow for comparisons to places without the Zuckerberg money or attention.

The results don’t show whether the reforms “worked” — because that’s a complicated question.
The study is focused on standardized test scores, a significant limitation that means it doesn’t speak to other effects of the reforms on students. A separate analysis, funded by the Community Foundation of New Jersey and also released Monday, points out that high school graduation rates in Newark rose substantially in 2016 and 2017, after remaining flat between 2012 and 2015. Enrollment in the city schools has also trended upward in recent years.

Source: “Moving Up: Progress in Newark’s Schools from 2010 to 2017”
The results also don’t account for political turmoil or the sense that the reforms were done to — rather than with — the community in Newark, whose schools had been under state control for a over two decades. An agreement was finalized in September to return them to community control.

“Ultimately we’re giving the parents the opportunity to have their democratic rights back,” Baraka told NPR, who argued in the same interview that the Zuckerberg dollars had not improved the school district. “There is no real kind of causal relationship between that money and the development of the traditional public schools in Newark.”

Locally, we have spent far more than most government funded school districts (now nearly $20,000 per student), yet we’ve long tolerated disastrous reading results. Yet, Madison’s non diverse governance model continues unabated, aborting the proposed Madison Preparatory IB Charter school and more recently a quasi Montessori charter proposal.

Amber Walker

Eighty-eight percent of MMSD fifth through 12th graders who are at-risk of not graduating are low-income students. The district report did not specify if the data includes students who have already withdrawn from school.

Before the At-Risk plan was developed, the district would only send a letter home to guardians. Caroline Racine Gilles, the director of multi-tiered systems of supports at MMSD, said the new approach allows schools to collaborate with students and families to develop a path forward.

Now, MMSD is taking a “proactive approach” using data and other early warning systems to identify students before they qualify as at-risk, Racine Gilles said.

“No one likes to get a bad news letter,” she said. “We want to make that personalized contact and really use it as an opportunity to build relationships with our families. We want to partner with them to understand what the barriers are to learning and ensure that we build support to address those barriers.”

Racine Gilles said that each plan will be tailored to the students’ individual needs and parents will receive a copy of the plan and dates to follow-up. Options range from tutoring and mentoring to alternative programs and extended graduation timelines.

They’re all rich white kids and they’ll do just fine – NOT!.

We have long spent far more than most government funded school districts (now nearly $20,000 per student), yet we’ve long tolerated disastrous reading results. Yet, Madison’s non diverse governance model continues unabated, aborting the proposed Madison Preparatory IB Charter school and more recently a quasi Montessori charter proposal.

US News:

STEP 1 | Students perform better than expected in their state.

We looked at reading and math results for students on each state’s proficiency tests and then factored in the percentage of economically disadvantaged students, who tend to score lower.

STEP 2 | Disadvantaged students perform better than state average.

We compared each school’s math and reading proficiency rates for disadvantaged students – black, Hispanic and low-income – with the statewide results for these student groups and then selected schools that were performing better than their state averages.

STEP 3 | Student graduation rates meet or exceed a national standard

We excluded schools from consideration if their graduation rates were lower than 75 percent – a threshold that is higher than a federal law that requires states to give extra resources to schools below 67 percent.

Middleton is 577, Madison Memorial is ranked 1205, West 1831.

Alima Adams:

“I read that New York teachers don’t have to be literate, anymore. Is that true, Mom?,” my seventh-grader asked last week. He’s recently become determined to “fix all education in America” (I have no idea where a son of mine could have picked up such an interest), and was on the Internet doing research. He’d already expressed his surprise at New York City’s less than 50% college readiness graduation rate and the fact that the most frequently failed college course was Algebra.

Now, he wanted to know about the NY Board of Regents decision to eliminate the Academic Literacy Skills Test (ALST) for prospective teachers.

My thirteen year-old son isn’t the only one puzzled by the ruling. I am, too.

Among the move’s supporters are deans of Education Schools. Michael Middleton of Hunter College was quoted by The New York Times as saying, “We already know that our licensure candidates have a bachelor’s degree, which in my mind means they have basic literacy and communication skills.”

First of all, is “basic” really where we want to set the bar for those who educate our children? Don’t we all hope our children progress beyond “basic” themselves?

Related: relaxing Wisconsin’s K-12 teacher licensing requirements.

And, Madison’s long-term disastrous reading results.

Jennifer Cheatham:

With a contested race for state superintendent of public instruction and a legislative session that is swinging into gear, much is at stake for public education in Wisconsin.

One of the fundamental issues at the center of the debate is the potential expansion of “school choice,” which is the term used to describe using public school funds to expand independent charter schools, school vouchers, and a more recent phenomenon called “education savings accounts.”

The way “choice” works is that state lawmakers force public school districts to pay for vouchers for private schools or the creation of charter schools that have no accountability or connection to our local districts.

In other words, even if the state provides us with more aid, which some have promised, it is then drained from our public schools and given to independent charters and private schools on the back end.

This is the thing. Over 50 million students are served in K-12 public schools in the United States. In comparison, 5 million are served in private or independent charter schools. Public education is paramount to the success of our students, our communities and our country.

As a public school superintendent and longtime educator, I am exhausted by the oversimplification of the problem and the potential solutions. That’s because the persistent correlation between socioeconomic status and educational achievement in our country is real. And race, structural racism in particular, is the driving force behind it.

It is absurd to me that some policymakers believe that the solution is simply to give parents “choice” — or in other words, drain more and more resources from public schools.

My key question to our legislators is this: What is your agenda for helping our public schools better serve the vast majority of students in the United States and in Wisconsin? How can you help us do more of what we know works in education?

What can you do to help us address gaps in students’ health and well-being, making it possible for every child to attend school daily and be fully attentive and ready to learn? Even if our academic strategies are perfect, if a child is not ready to learn, we won’t see better results. We have to find ways for our system to ensure those needs are met so that children are ready to excel.

Here in Madison, we are embracing the community school model. Community schools take our support of students and families to the next level through power sharing and integration of coordinated services into schools, where our students and families are every day.

What can you do to help us personalize the educational experience for students? Our students deserve unique educational opportunities that build on their strengths and interests and help them meaningfully explore future college and career options so that they can be successful at each stage of their education and graduate ready for today’s world and today’s economy.

We are doing that locally — through the implementation of our technology integration plan and through the establishment of personalized pathways to graduation at the high school level.

Unfortunately, Madison has long tolerated disastrous reading results. This, despite “plenty of resources“.

Related: Jennifer Cheatham on “what’s different, this time?“.

T Rees Shapiro:

High schools in the Southwest dominate the 2016 U.S. News and World Report rankings of the country’s best high schools, taking six of the top 10 spots in the rankings released Tuesday.

Texas and Arizona high schools earned the top four rankings, and the Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology a Fairfax County, Va. magnet school, was in the fifth spot nationally.

The news magazine collected data on more than 21,500 schools for the report, which for the first time included graduation rates as a factor in the rankings.

Wisconsin high schools.

Middleton appears to be the highest ranked Madison area high school (#656 nationally).

New York Times:

Teachers unions and other critics of federally required standardized tests have behaved in recent years as though killing the testing mandate would magically remedy everything that ails education in the United States. In reality, getting rid of the testing requirement in the early grades would make it impossible for the country to know what if anything children were learning from year to year.

Congress understood this fundamental point, and kept the testing requirement, when it reauthorized the No Child Left Behind Act — now called the Every Student Succeeds Act — last month. But lawmakers ducked the most important problem: the fact that most states still have weak curriculums and graduation requirements that make high school diplomas useless and that leave graduates unprepared for college, the job market or even meeting entry requirements for the Army.

The costs associated with this problem are demonstrated in a recent report by Motoko Rich in The Times, which focused on Berea High School in Greenville, S.C., where the graduation rate has risen to 80 percent, from under 65 percent just four years ago. But college entrance exams given to 11th graders last year showed that only one in 10 students was ready for college-level reading and only about one in 14 was prepared for entry-level college math. On a separate job skills test, only about half of students demonstrated the math proficiency needed to succeed at most jobs.

With results like that, it’s no wonder some South Carolina business leaders are worried that the state is producing high school graduates who are not qualified to compete for higher-skilled jobs at companies like Boeing, Volvo and BMW.

This is a national problem. A recent study from Achieve, a nonpartisan organization that works with the states to raise academic standards, showed that only 18 states and the District of Columbia required all graduates in the class of 2014 to meet the minimum preparation requirements for college — four years of English and math through Algebra II, or its equivalent.

Related:Young Americans cannot do tricky sums without a calculator and Madison’s long term, disastrous reading results.

Abigail Becker:

Test results released in October from the 2015 National Assessment of Educational Progress, a set of tests known as the Nation’s Report Card, reaffirmed Wisconsin’s poor record of educating black children: The state had the worst achievement gap between black and white students in fourth- and eighth-grade reading and math. This is the second time in a row Wisconsin has been ranked the worst among the states assessed.

Wisconsin also has the biggest disparity in graduation rates between black and white students, according to preliminary data from the U.S. Department of Education. The rate for black students in Wisconsin held steady in 2013-14 at 66 percent, while the graduation rate for white students rose a half-point from just over 92 percent to just under 93 percent.

The causes of this gap are complex and extend beyond the four walls of a classroom, often preceding students’ first steps through the schoolhouse doors, researchers say. Factors include poverty and unemployment, historic discrimination, segregated schools and neighborhoods, racial bias and low expectations that damage students’ motivation.

Madison, despite spending more than $17,000 per student annually, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

Annysa Johnson:

Assembly Speaker Robin Vos’ special Task Force on Urban Education will hold the first in a series of public hearings — this one on teacher recruitment, retention and training — at 1 p.m. Tuesday at the State Capitol, Room 412.

The panel will take testimony from the public after hearing from invited individuals and organizations. They include Jennifer Cheatham, superintendent of the Madison Metropolitan School District; University of Wisconsin System President Ray Cross; the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction; Teach for America; the Leadership for Educational Equity; and Pablo Muirhead, coordinator of teacher education for Milwaukee Area Technical College.

Vos created the task force in August to address numerous issues affecting urban schools, including retention and training, poor academic performance among some students and low graduation rates. Public school advocates have criticized the panel, saying it is dominated by Republicans with little or no experience with urban schools and, in some cases, have received significant campaign contributions from voucher- and charter-school proponents.

Task force Chairman, Rep. Jessie Rodriguez (R-Franklin), who worked previously for Hispanics for School Choice, said those concerns had not come up in her discussions with educators and lawmakers.

Related: Madison’s long term, disastrous reading results.

Thomas Arnett:

Fortunately, the tides in education policy are finally pushing the system to realize the importance of its teachers. Test-based accountability is forcing districts to look past their myopic focus on enrollments, course offerings, and graduation rates and to take students’ academic performance more seriously. And because modern research has shown that teachers are the most important school-level factor influencing student achievement, many of today’s most prominent reform efforts focus on ensuring there is an effective, expert teacher in every classroom.
If schools and districts intend to fulfill the mandate to boost student achievement, they will need to adopt new strategies that place paramount emphasis on recruiting and retaining the best teachers. This shift in district strategy should then put individual teachers in a position to negotiate their salaries and working conditions based on the value their individual expertise brings to their schools.
But unfortunately, even in this era of increased accountability, many districts still operate as if teachers are commodities. Instead of recruiting strategically from the best teacher preparation programs in the country, they take the teachers that the nearest regional state school has to offer. Instead of putting together competitive and attractive salary and benefit packages and then working in the early spring to attract the best teachers to their schools, they wait until just before the start of the school year to frantically fill their open teaching slots. Instead of giving principals control over staffing so that they can build great faculty teams across multiple years, they move teachers around capriciously from one year to the next—and sometimes during the middle of the school year—and prioritize allocation targets over effectiveness. Instead of working with individual teachers to find roles where their particular areas of expertise are most relevant, districts often shift teachers at the last minute to grade levels or subject areas that are technically within their certification but realistically outside the domains where those teachers are most experienced, passionate, and able to excel.

Related: a focus on adult employment.

Alan Borsuk:

Don’t want excuses about why things aren’t going better on Milwaukee’s education scene? Well, meet the people who don’t want schools that demand no excuses.

A significant number of the latter are on the Milwaukee School Board. How significant the number is will become clear in coming months.

But it looks like they make up a growing force in deciding what kind of change there will be (or not be).

One of the interesting questions raised by School Board actions in the last two weeks is whether resisting a proposal to open a school will have an impact on Republican legislators in Madison who are considering ideas for taking some power, some schools, or both away from the board.

First, let’s describe “no excuses.” That is a label applied, sometimes in praise, sometimes in criticism, to schools nationwide that pursue ambitious goals with highly structured and strong (sometimes very) discipline. They strongly push, even down to kindergarten, a message that every student, most of them low-income minority kids, will get a college degree.

Basically, the schools stand for accepting no excuses for kids not succeeding. That includes downplaying or dismissing poverty as an explanation for low success rates.

In many instances, the “no excuses” schools have had notably higher rates of graduation and better test scores than nearby conventional schools. But in places such as New Orleans, there has been a lot of blowback against schools that are too demanding and too strict on discipline. Some schools have moderated their practices.

Erin Richards:

Starting in 2015’16, every school that receives taxpayer money would receive an A-F rating based on their performance in the following areas:
Achievement on state tests.
Achievement growth on state tests, based on a statistical analysis called value-added that estimates the impact schools and teachers have on student progress.
The progress in closing achievement gaps between white students and subgroups of students who are poor, of minority races or who have disabilities.
Graduation and attendance rate status and improvement.
The current school report card system went into effect two years ago and took the place of the widely disliked sanctions under the federal No Child Left Behind law.
Gov. Scott Walker once pushed for using A through F grades, but a task force on school accountability had opted for a five-tiered system placing schools in categories from “significantly exceeds expectations” to “fails to meet expectations.”
The 2012-’13 report cards placed 58 schools statewide into the “fails” category. That included 49 in MPS — one is closed, so now there’s 48 — two independent charter schools authorized by the City of Milwaukee, four public schools in Racine and three public schools in Green Bay.

Matthew DeFour & Molly Beck:

Wisconsin’s lowest-performing public schools would be forced to close or reopen as charter schools and the state’s 2-year-old accountability report card would be revamped under a bill unveiled Monday.
The proposal also would require testing for taxpayer-subsidized students at private voucher schools while barring the lowest-performing schools from enrolling new voucher students. Participating private schools also could test all students for accountability purposes.
“We’re going to start holding anybody who gets public money accountable for getting results. That is the bottom line,” said Sen. Luther Olsen, R-Ripon, chairman of the Senate Education Committee, which plans to vote on the amended bill Thursday.
The bill makes several changes to the state’s K-12 school accountability system — including assigning schools letter grades — which itself recently replaced a decade-old system under the federal No Child Left Behind law.

Stephanie Banchero:

There is broad acknowledgment that local schools are performing better since Hurricane Katrina washed away New Orleans’ failing public education system and state authorities took control of many campuses here.
Graduation rates went to 78% last year from 52% before Katrina–surpassing Detroit, Baltimore, Washington, D.C., and Oakland, Calif., cities also struggling to boost achievement among lower-income students. The share of New Orleans students proficient in math, reading, science and social studies increased to 58% in 2012 from 35% before the 2005 storm, state data shows.
School officials now want to ramp up improvements, saying the city’s education marketplace still needs work. The enrollment system is complicated. There are far fewer available seats at good schools than at poor ones, leaving many families to choose between bad and worse. And few students can get into top-rated schools because of limited seats and strict admissions policies.
Boosters, including Republican Gov. Bobby Jindal, say New Orleans points to the future of public education. Giving parents a choice of schools, they say, fosters competition that weeds out badly run campuses. Academically, New Orleans is improving faster than any school district in Louisiana.

Related: Madison’s long term, disastrous reading results.

David Leonhardt:

I sat down last week in Washington with Arne Duncan, the secretary of education, and Mitch Daniels, the former Indiana governor and current Purdue University president, after they had met with several dozen chief executives of big companies to talk about education. Their meeting was at the office of the Business Roundtable, the corporate lobbying group, and joining us for the conversation was John Engler, the former Michigan governor who runs the Business Roundtable.
Neilson Barnard/Getty Images, for The New York Time Education Secretary Arne Duncan
Mr. Duncan is a Democrat, of course, and Mr. Daniels and Mr. Engler are Republicans. But they all sympathize with many of the efforts of the so-called education reform movement. I asked them whether the country’s education system was really in crisis and what mistakes school reformers had made. A lightly edited version of the first part of our conversation follows; the second part will appear on Economix on Thursday.
Leonhardt: You always hear we’re in crisis. But what is the bad news, and what is the good news, and are we making any progress?
Duncan: I do think we have a crisis. I do feel tremendous urgency. If you look at any international comparison – which in a global economy is much more important than 30 or 40 years ago – on no indicator are we anywhere near where we want to be. Whether it’s test scores or college graduation rates, whatever it is, we’re not close. So we’ve got a long way to go. That’s the challenge.
Why I am hopeful is we have seen some real progress. Some things are going the right way. The question is how do we accelerate that progress. College graduations rates are up some. High school graduation rates are up to 30-year highs, which is a big step in the right direction.
The African-American/Latino community is driving much of that improvement, which is very, very important. There is a huge reduction in the number of kids going to dropout factories. We are seeing real progress. The question is how do we get better faster.
Daniels: I am glad that the secretary didn’t pull any punches. I don’t know any other way to read it. In Indiana, we just had, by far, the best results we’ve ever seen in our state. Everything was up. The high-school graduation rate is up 10 percent in just four years. Test scores, advanced-placement scores too. But we’re just nowhere near where we need to be. And the competition is not standing still. So we need many more years of progress at the current rate, and it still maybe too slow. I’m afraid this is a half-empty analysis, but I think it’s an honest one.
Engler: The president of Purdue and the president of the Business Roundtable – we are the consumer groups here at the table. All the products of K-12 system are either going to go to the university or they are going to the work force. The military is not here, but they’re not very different.

Related: Madison’s long time disastrous reading scores and wisconsin2.org

Amanda Ripley:

Kim Ki-hoon earns $4 million a year in South Korea, where he is known as a rock-star teacher–a combination of words not typically heard in the rest of the world. Mr. Kim has been teaching for over 20 years, all of them in the country’s private, after-school tutoring academies, known as hagwons. Unlike most teachers across the globe, he is paid according to the demand for his skills–and he is in high demand.
Kim Ki-Hoon, who teaches in a private after-school academy, earns most of his money from students who watch his lectures online. ‘The harder I work, the more I make,’ he says. ‘I like that.’
Mr. Kim works about 60 hours a week teaching English, although he spends only three of those hours giving lectures. His classes are recorded on video, and the Internet has turned them into commodities, available for purchase online at the rate of $4 an hour. He spends most of his week responding to students’ online requests for help, developing lesson plans and writing accompanying textbooks and workbooks (some 200 to date).
“The harder I work, the more I make,” he says matter of factly. “I like that.”
I traveled to South Korea to see what a free market for teaching talent looks like–one stop in a global tour to discover what the U.S. can learn from the world’s other education superpowers. Thanks in part to such tutoring services, South Korea has dramatically improved its education system over the past several decades and now routinely outperforms the U.S. Sixty years ago, most South Koreans were illiterate; today, South Korean 15-year-olds rank No. 2 in the world in reading, behind Shanghai. The country now has a 93% high-school graduation rate, compared with 77% in the U.S.
….
No country has all the answers. But in an information-driven global economy, a few truths are becoming universal: Children need to know how to think critically in math, reading and science; they must be driven; and they must learn how to adapt, since they will be doing it all their lives. These demands require that schools change, too–or the free market may do it for them.

The Madison School Board President recently wrote: “The notion that parents inherently know what school is best for their kids is an example of conservative magical thinking.”; “For whatever reason, parents as a group tend to undervalue the benefits of diversity in the public schools….”
Related: www.wisconsin2.org.
Ms. Ripley is an Emerson Fellow at the New America Foundation. This essay is adapted from her forthcoming book, “The Smartest Kids in the World–and How They Got That Way,” to be published Aug. 13 by Simon & Schuster.

A. David Dahmer:

The Mann Scholars Ceremony was celebrated at the Wisconsin Institute of Discovery Town Center on the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus June 7.
“It’s a thrill to welcome you all here today to celebrate our new Mann Scholars and our graduating seniors,” said Madison Metropolitan School District Partnerships Coordinator Kathy Price. “The Madison Board of Education and our new [MMSD] Superintendent Jennifer Cheatham are extending their warmest wishes to you tonight and their sincere congratulations. For the Madison District, the Mann Scholars program represents one of our premiere collaboration of family, school, and community partners. This is one that has served as a model for additional scholarship programs that have been launched including the Sanchez Scholars and our the newest scholarship that we have launched — the Reading Recovery Scholarship Program.”
The Mann Educational Opportunity Fund is a scholarship that honors the late Bernard and Kathlyn Mann, long-time African American residents of Madison whose strong belief in education helped ensure the graduation of their five children from Madison Memorial High School and later from universities. The Mann Program’s goal is to provide mentoring and educational tools to students from the Madison Metropolitan School District who show potential for academic achievement but face significant challenges to reaching their full potential.
Mann Scholars are picked every year based on their academic promise, their motivation, their financial need, and the willingness of their families to encourage participation in enrichment activities. They are primarily, but not exclusively, students of color.

Pat Schneider:

It is not an “achievement gap,” says Gloria Ladson-Billings. The disparity in test scores and graduation rates between students of color and white students that is frustrating school officials, parents and communities across the country is an “education debt,” says professor Ladson-Billings of the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Education.
The failure of U.S. school systems to adequately teach African-American students has historical, economic and sociopolitical underpinnings, she says. And it has a moral dimension as well. “We should be putting a lot of energy into ensuring, as the Bible says, we care for those who are the least. That’s our barometer of who we are as a nation.”
A former classroom teacher in her native Philadelphia, Ladson-Billings was later recruited to the UW by former Chancellor Donna Shalala, who reasoned that you have to diversify the faculty before you diversify the students.
More than two decades later, Ladson-Billings is an assistant chancellor and professor in what she says is the highest-ranked department of curriculum and instruction in the world, and there still are not enough teachers of color in collegiate training or in the classroom.

Bill Novak:

If Wisconsin students and parents are looking for one of the best values in the country in higher education, stay at home.
Kiplinger’s Personal Finance has ranked UW-Madison 13th in its list of the 100 best values in public colleges, the second year in a row the state’s flagship university has been ranked in that spot.
The survey tapped North Carolina as the best value in public education for the 12th year in a row, or since the survey started.
The publication looked at data from close to 600 public four-year colleges and universities to come up with the survey results, based on criteria such as admission rates, percentage of student returning to school as sophomores, student-faculty ratios, tuition, financial aid and low average debt at graduation.

Peg Tyre:

New Dorp’s Writing Revolution, which placed an intense focus, across nearly every academic subject, on teaching the skills that underlie good analytical writing, was a dramatic departure from what most American students–especially low performers–are taught in high school. The program challenged long-held assumptions about the students and bitterly divided the staff. It also yielded extraordinary results. By the time they were sophomores, the students who had begun receiving the writing instruction as freshmen were already scoring higher on exams than any previous New Dorp class. Pass rates for the English Regents, for example, bounced from 67 percent in June 2009 to 89 percent in 2011; for the global-­history exam, pass rates rose from 64 to 75 percent. The school reduced its Regents-repeater classes–cram courses designed to help struggling students collect a graduation requirement–from five classes of 35 students to two classes of 20 students.
The number of kids enrolling in a program that allows them to take college-level classes shot up from 148 students in 2006 to 412 students last year. Most important, although the makeup of the school has remained about the same–­roughly 40 percent of students are poor, a third are Hispanic, and 12 percent are black–a greater proportion of students who enter as freshmen leave wearing a cap and gown. This spring, the graduation rate is expected to hit 80 percent, a staggering improvement over the 63 percent figure that prevailed before the Writing Revolution began. New Dorp, once the black sheep of the borough, is being held up as a model of successful school turnaround. “To be able to think critically and express that thinking, it’s where we are going,” says Dennis Walcott, New York City’s schools chancellor. “We are thrilled with what has happened there.”
Although New Dorp teachers had observed students failing for years, they never connected that failure to specific flaws in their own teaching. They watched passively as Deirdre De­Angelis got rid of the bad apples on the staff; won foundation money to break the school into smaller, more personalized learning communities; and wooed corporate partners to support after-school programs. Nothing seemed to move the dial.
Her decision in 2008 to focus on how teachers supported writing inside each classroom was not popular. “Most teachers,” said Nell Scharff, an instructional expert DeAngelis hired, “entered into the process with a strongly negative attitude.” They were doing their job, they told her hotly. New Dorp students were simply not smart enough to write at the high-school level. You just had to listen to the way the students talked, one teacher pointed out–they rarely communicated in full sentences, much less expressed complex thoughts. “It was my view that these kids didn’t want to engage their brains,” Fran Simmons, who teaches freshman English, told me. “They were lazy.”

60% to 42%: Madison School District’s Reading Recovery Effectiveness Lags “National Average”: Administration seeks to continue its use:

Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction:

State Superintendent Tony Evers announced 132 Wisconsin School of Recognition awards for the 2012-13 academic year, an honor that recognizes success in educating students from low-income families.
“Congratulations on a strong start to the 2012-13 school year,” Evers said. “These schools are being recognized for their work to break the link between poverty and low academic achievement through rigorous programming and attention to student needs. Their efforts align with our Agenda 2017 goals: to improve graduation rates, reduce dropout rates, and close college and career readiness gaps.”

Matthew DeFour has more.

The Montgomery Business Journal, via a kind reader’s email:

The Grundels’ success story is exactly what Montgomery Public Schools Superintendent Barbara Thompson [bing blekko clusty google] wants to hear. She wants all the district’s nearly 32,000 students to achieve, succeed and enjoy learning.
This fall, the district will launch its International Baccalaureate program and will offer a career technical education program along with seven Career Academies; a growing magnet program for both the arts and academics; and an Advanced Placement (AP) program that continues to expand at a tremendous pace.
“It is a unique pathway for our students having all those programs,” Thompson said. “It means that your child can come into this school district and be challenged at any level. Some of those pathways are going to lead to a four-year college; some will lead to a two-year college; some will lead you right into the world of work. It’s giving students those career pathways that really fit with their strength area.”
Now, you begin to see what all those pieces mean and what the big picture is. “The master plan is to bring our traditional schools up to the level of the magnets,” Thompson said. “That really is the ultimate goal in terms of what we are doing with our rigor and expectations. That is the end game.”
“These are all steps to get us there. I think kids need deliberate steps to get from places, which is why you have the pre-AP program offered at middle school because they can’t just jump into AP in high school.
“It’s why you have the Career Exploratory at middle school because once again you want to go into the Career Academies or career tech. We are making sure that every child takes the explorer test in eighth grade and that goes over their aptitude and skills so when they reach high school they are supposedly doing a four-year plan. That’s every student.”
And the programs that the superintendent has implemented the past few years as well as expanding existing ones, support, encourage and excite targeted groups of students – all students.
The programs on the surface may appear to be disjointed – what does a pre-K program have in common with an Overage Academy – but the common thread is making sure the students succeed.
The pre-K program was expanded from six to 23 programs and turned the closed McKee Elementary School into a pre-K center. Those programs may be cut to 21 because of funding.
That’s the youngest targeted group. Here’s what the district has done for other groups of students:

• Increased graduation rates, although with the state’s new method of computing graduation rates – those numbers are likely to fall as will graduation rates across the state.
• Created a sixth-grade academy to help elementary school students make the transition to middle school.
• Created a ninth-grade academy to help middle school students make the transition to high school.
• Created an Overage Academy to help struggling ninth-graders who are two or more years older than the usual students further advance in their schooling.
• Created a Credit and Grade Recovery program to provide more one-on-one teacher assistance so the students will be able to graduate – and hundreds have.
• Launched an academic magnet program at Johnnie Carr Middle School.
• Reconfigured nearly all the middle schools for grades six through eight.
• Instituted a school-wide dress code.
• Placed a pre-AP program in middle schools.
• Placed a career tech program in middle schools.
• Will launch a Mandarin Chinese program with Auburn University Montgomery that will be at the new eastside high school (in fall 2013) as well as Carr and MacMillan International Academy.
• Consolidated the district by closing some schools and using others in a different way.
• Will bring at least 15 highly qualified Teach for America teachers to the district in the fall – and they usually stay for two years.
• Has begun the process for system-wide accreditation.
• Cut $37 million from the budget over three years and turned a $2.5 million deficit into a surplus of nearly $8 million.

“It really is a puzzle and you are trying to put it together so you create this environment where learning is really exciting for students,” Thompson said. “We are trying to meet those needs of all of our students.
“When I first came here, I gave you the three Rs: relevance, rigor and relationships. All of these programs fall under that category.”
You can imagine, a system with nearly 32,000 students has a lot of needs and you can imagine that Montgomery County’s third-largest employer – about 4,500 people – has a lot of needs. Tom Salter, senior communications officer for MPS, likes to point out that if you combine the students and employees, the school district would be the 13th-largest city in the state. “With that many folks compared to a single, private school that has a hand-picked 600 or 700 in it – it’s different, but it’s not necessarily better to be in a private school.”

“relevance, rigor and relationships” – well said.
Alabama participated in the 2011 TIMSS global exam along with Minnesota and Massachusetts. Wisconsin has never benchmarked our students via the global exams. We have been stuck with the oft-criticized WKCE.
The Montgomery, Alabama schools spent $283,633,475 for 31,470 students ($9,012.82/student) while Madison spent 39% more, or $14,858 per student. The 2011-2012 budget was roughly $369,394,753 for 24,861 students.

Madison School Board Member Ed Hughes:

A few weeks ago, the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction (DPI) released an example of what the upcoming report cards for state schools will look like. The report cards are described as one of the package of reforms that that DPI promised to implement in order to win a waiver from the federal Department of Education from the more onerous burdens of the federal No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act.
One of the qualifications for an NCLB waiver is that a state must put into place an accountability system for schools. The system must take into account results for all students and subgroups of students identified in NCLB on: measures of student achievement in at least reading/language arts and mathematics; graduation rates; and school performance and progress over time. Once a state has adopted a “high-quality assessment,” the system must also take into account student growth.
In announcing the NCLB waiver, DPI claimed that it had established accountability measures that “1) are fair; 2) raise expectations; and 3) provide meaningful measures to inform differentiated recognitions, intervention, and support.”
Designing a fair and meaningful system for assessing the performance of the state’s schools is a worthy endeavor. The emphasis for me is on the “fair” requirement. I consider an assessment system to be fair if it measures how successfully a school promotes the learning of whichever students show up at its door.

Related: Notes and links on the oft-criticized WKCE and Madison’s long term reading recovery challenges.

Eric A. Hanushek, Paul E. Peterson and Ludger Woessmann, via a kind Chan Stroman-Roll email:

“Yet when compared to gains made by students in other countries, progress within the United States is middling, not stellar (see Figure 1). While 24 countries trail the U.S. rate of improvement, another 24 countries appear to be improving at a faster rate. Nor is U.S. progress sufficiently rapid to allow it to catch up with the leaders of the industrialized world.”
“Meanwhile, students in Wisconsin, Michigan, Minnesota, and Indiana were among those making the fewest average gains between 1992 and 2011. Once again, the larger political climate may have affected the progress on the ground. Unlike in the South, the reform movement has made little headway within midwestern states, at least until very recently. Many of the midwestern states had proud education histories symbolized by internationally acclaimed land-grant universities, which have become the pride of East Lansing, Michigan; Madison, Wisconsin; St. Paul, Minnesota; and Lafayette, Indiana. Satisfaction with past accomplishments may have dampened interest in the school reform agenda sweeping through southern, border, and some western states.”
Underlying study: “Achievement Growth: International and U.S. State Trends in Student Performance“

Related:

• Student scores slip with new proficiency benchmarks by Erin Richards
  

  The results: Only 35.8% of Wisconsin’s WKCE test-takers in third through eighth and 10th grade in fall 2011 scored proficient or better in reading, and just 48.1% scored proficient or better in math.
  Compare that with March, when the state released 2011 WKCE results that showed 78% and 82% of students scored proficient or better in math and reading.
  Under the new benchmarks, just 41.9% of white students scored proficient or advanced in reading, and 55.2% met that mark in math on the latest state test. Previously, more than 87% of white students were considered proficient or better in reading, and 84.3% were considered to have scored proficient or better in math in 2011.
  As for the state’s black students – many of whom attend Milwaukee Public Schools – 13.4% are considered proficient or advanced in reading, down from 58.7% using the old grading scale.
  Rep. Steve Kestell, a Republican from Elkhart Lake who chairs the Assembly’s Education Committee, called the revised picture of student performance a “necessary and long-delayed wake-up call for Wisconsin.”
  “We’ve been trying to tell folks for some time that we’ve been looking at things through rose-colored glasses in Wisconsin,” he added. “It was a hard thing to communicate, and it was largely ignored. This is a new awakening.”
  State Sen. Luther Olsen (R-Ripon), who chairs the Senate Education Committee, said: “We’ve known for years that our proficiency-cut scores are way below where they should be, and really, this shows that we have got to do a better job.”
  Under the past decade of No Child Left Behind, Wisconsin had been criticized for having a more lenient bar for proficiency than other states.

• Less than half of state’s students measure proficient under new national standards by Matthew DeFour:
  

  Still, the new results should be a “smack in the face” for Wisconsin, said Adam Gamoran, director of the Wisconsin Center for Education Research at UW-Madison.
  “It’s going to be a wake-up call,” Gamoran said. “It’s a more honest reckoning of where Wisconsin students stand relative to other students across the nation and relative to the goals we want for all of our students.”
  The old results were based on whether students were meeting Wisconsin’s definition of being at grade-level, whereas the new results reflect more rigorous standards of what it means to be prepared for college or a career used for the National Assessment of Educational Progress, also known as the nation’s report card.
  About 3,000 4th and 8th graders in Wisconsin take the NAEP every other year. In 2011, 32 percent of Wisconsin 4th graders scored proficient on NAEP’s reading test and 39 percent scored proficient on the math test.
  The data released Tuesday marks the first time DPI has converted results of the state test, which more than 430,000 students in grades 3-8 and 10 take in the fall, to the NAEP benchmarks.
  DPI won’t release recalculated results for individual schools and districts until the fall, when it also plans to release individual school report cards with ratings on a scale of 0 to 100.
  Kim Henderson, president of the Wisconsin Parent Teacher Association, said parents pay closer attention to state test scores than NAEP scores, so the results could “bring up a lot of good questioning.”

• State sets new, tougher standards for student tests by the Associated Press:
  

  To get the waiver, Wisconsin had to develop its own accountability system in addition to teacher and principal evaluations, among other things.
  The scores will be included on new school report cards to be released in the fall. How well individual students in grades 3-8 and 10 do on reading and math tests they take in November will be released next spring.
  The new school report cards were developed in conjunction with Gov. Scott Walker, legislative leaders and others over the past year. They will include a numerical rating for individual schools from 0-100 based on student achievement, growth, graduation rates and closing of achievement gaps between different groups of students. The scores will generate an overall total that will place each school into one of five categories ranging from “Fails to Meet Expectations” to “Significantly Exceeds Expectations.”
  “This new system will empower parents, allowing them to make education related decisions based on reliable and uniform data,” Walker said in a statement.
  Sample report cards, without actual school data, are posted online to solicit feedback through Aug. 12.

• Numerous notes and links on the oft-criticized WKCE, here.
• wisconsin2.org

Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel:

If Wisconsin wants an educated workforce that can compete in a global economy, it has to stop thinking in terms of education pieces: K-12, colleges and universities, technical schools. It has to start thinking in terms of one system that students can navigate with ease to get the education they want and need, both in basic knowledge and upgrades when they want them; a system aimed at best serving their needs, offering them enrichment and skills.
An important step in that direction was taken Tuesday with the signing of a dual enrollment agreement by state Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Evers and University of Wisconsin Colleges and Extension Chancellor Ray Cross at UW-Marathon County in Wausau. The agreement allows high school students – mostly juniors or seniors – to earn credit that can be transferred easily to state four-year universities or two-year colleges after graduation, along with many private colleges.
Evers said in an interview Tuesday that the initiative “creates some synergy between systems that have not been directly connected in the past,” according to an article by Journal Sentinel reporters Erin Richards and Karen Herzog. “Even though we’re all differently governed, we need to make our systems look more like one instead of two or three or four.”
This helps students in several ways, including reducing the cost of a college degree. That’s more important than ever in light of the increasing cost of a college education. Just last week, UW officials announced a 5.5% hike in tuition.

The devil is in the details, as always.
Much more on credit for non-Madison School District courses, here.
Wisconsin DPI:

UW Colleges and DPI announce expanded dual enrollment program
Program will allow students to take UW Colleges courses at their high schools
High school students in Wisconsin will be able to earn college credits while still in high school under a new dual enrollment program announced by the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction (DPI) and the University of Wisconsin Colleges.
Tony Evers, state superintendent of public instruction, and Ray Cross, chancellor of UW Colleges and UW-Extension, signed an agreement and announced the new statewide model for dually enrolling high school students in high school and UW Colleges courses. They spoke at a June 12 ceremony at the University of Wisconsin-Marathon County, one of the UW Colleges campuses in Wausau. UW Colleges is the UW System’s network of 13 freshman – sophomore campuses and UW Colleges Online.
Evers and Cross said the new partnership would allow students across Wisconsin to access UW Colleges courses in their high schools via classroom teachers and online. The new dual enrollment program would accelerate students’ ability to earn UW credits, reduce the cost of obtaining a college degree, and increase the readiness of high school graduates for either college or the workplace. The program should be in place no later than the 2013-14 school year.
“We’re trying to better serve high school students by bringing our University of Wisconsin courses right into their high schools in a cost-effective way,” said Cross. “We’re committed to making these UW credits as affordable as possible for high school students, their families, and the school districts.”
“More students need the opportunity to take advanced courses and earn high school and college credit simultaneously,” Evers said. “This statewide dual enrollment agreement is a great way for students to get an introduction to college coursework and earn credits before even enrolling in a school of higher education. This will increase the number of students who graduate from high school ready for college and careers.”
Additional information is contained in the complete news release. A copy of the Memorandum of Understanding is available online.

Chris Rickert:

t was already something of a fig leaf for a district that rejected the much less expensive Madison Prep amid opposition from the teachers union and liberal activists who painted the school’s chief advocate, Urban League of Greater Madison president Kaleem Caire, as something of a school privatization Trojan Horse for the right.
(I never really understood how a black guy of modest origins who struggled in the Madison schools himself got tossed in with the likes of Newt Gingrich.)
This despite one of the widest racial achievement gaps in the state and a dismal four-year graduation rate for blacks of 50 percent.
I called Cummings on Saturday to see what he thought of Thursday’s news.
“I hate to be a cynic,” he said, but he’d seen it happen “over and over and over. … It’s easy to wear people out by giving them hope.”
Cummings initially wasn’t a big fan of Madison Prep. It would have served only a few dozen students, he argued, and what minority kids need is a districtwide attitude adjustment toward the issue.

Much more on the proposed Madison Preparatory IB charter school, here.

Madison School Board Member Ed Hughes:

I know how the issue would appear to me if I were on the McFarland school board and I were considering whether to revoke the school’s charter or decline to renew it on the basis of the school’s abysmal graduation rates.
On the one hand, continuation of the arrangement and hence of the income stream from K12 would mean that the district could spend at least $150 more per student on the education of the kids who actually live in McFarland, which is a not insignificant sum. On the other hand, revocation of the charter would mean that K12 would shop around for some other relatively small school district in the state that would be willing to host the virtual school, cash K12’s checks and provide even less oversight. K12 wouldn’t miss a beat and nothing would be accomplished. On top of this, as the McFarland superintendent pointed out, no one’s complaining. I suspect that I wouldn’t be leading the charge to revoke the charter and kiss away that very handy K12 money.

Are traditional public schools, budgets and staff held to the same standards?
Much more the rejected Madison Preparatory IB charter school, here.

MacIver Institute:

The MacIver Institute District Report Card takes an innovative look at the Wisconsin’s fifty largest public school districts and offers a vigorous analysis and traditional letter grading system in this unique analysis. It rates districts across several different measures to create a comprehensive look at how teachers and administrators are performing in their schools. The Report Card goes beyond the typical parochial comparison of neighboring communities to also focus on how children compete on a global level. With a dynamic global economy perpetually in front of us, a broader focus was needed to better understand how our districts stack up across many metrics.
The Report Card takes into account not only how a student is testing, but also how likely a district is to push their students to achieve more. The state has recently increased graduation requirements to include more coursework and more challenging classes. This metric works to gauge the progress that has been made in those departments. Finally, the MI District Report Card factors in a student’s basic background to better understand the challenges that a school district may face and their effectiveness as a result. Educating students from low-income families, as well as other students that have traditionally been difficult to teach, is critically important to the future of Wisconsin.
These rankings go beyond what standardized testing tells us. They take a closer look inside the classroom and assign grades based on achievement, attainment, and student population. Districts that have higher percentages of low-income and limited English proficiency (LEP) students, two factors that are traditionally linked to lower scores on state testing measures, earn extra points to address this greater degree of difficulty for their teachers.

Madison ranked 42nd out of 50 in academic achievement, 40th in student attainment, B- overall.

Craig Maher:

I read an article in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel a few months ago with great interest. It was the story of a University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee education professor who was struggling to make ends meet. My story is not entirely different from his, except that I had the opportunity to make a change, and it led me to accept a position with a university just south of Wisconsin’s border.
My story is one that I fear is being replicated throughout the UW System.
In order to put my recent decision in context, I think it is useful to share a portion of my life story (albeit a condensed version). I was born in Green Bay and moved to Milwaukee at a young age. I attended Forest Home Elementary School, Kosciuszko Middle School and Milwaukee Trade and Technical High School.
No one in my family had ever attended college before my older brother did. A few years later, I followed him to UWM. I went on to earn a bachelor’s degree, master’s degree and a doctorate from UWM. Upon graduation, I took a research position in Madison but remained in Milwaukee because my wife and I enjoyed the area and were closer to family (my wife grew up in Greendale, attended Marquette University and has been working at Children’s Hospital of Wisconsin for the past 22 years).

Wisconsin State Journal Editorial

Congratulations to all of Tuesday’s spring election winners — especially those willing to take on the challenges facing our public schools.
First-time candidate Mary Burke and incumbent Arlene Silveira won big in their bids for Madison School Board.
They and their opponents (Michael Flores and Nichelle Nichols, respectively) deserve credit for leading a community conversation on the future of Madison schools during their high-profile campaigns.
Now comes the time for action. And something bold is needed to boost dismal graduation rates for blacks and Latinos. The status quo isn’t working for a huge portion of minority students.

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

Mike Ford:

The perils of another strategy, finding lower-cost ways to deliver state services, shows up in another Journal Sentinel story this morning on the notable absence of a common school accountability system for all schools receiving public revenue in a new piece of education legislation. Erin Richards writes of the bill:

What is not mentioned in the story is that an identical public, private, and charter school accountability system is functionally impossible, and undesirable. The presence of religion in private choice schools for example requires that the schools spend (and document the purpose of) every dollar they receive annually through the choice program so as not to have a surplus that could be seen as aiding religion. In comparison, having and carrying over a surplus in a public school district may actually be a sign of responsible budgeting. And the heart of the charter school concept is a third party authorizer that serves as the accountability agent. A common accountability system undermines the very idea of a charter school.
More important, if choice and charter face identical public school rules and regulations, there is every reason to expect them to be nothing more than poorly funded public schools that may save the state money, but not increase educational quality. What is needed is a way to ensure all of our schools are accountable and transparent, not identical regulation.

Related: notes and links on Madison’s multi-million dollar Infinite Campus expedition… I’m not sure that a state-wide system makes sense. Rather, the state might create a set of data reporting “standards” that allows local Districts to collect and manage information in the way that they prefer.
More from Erin Richards Wisconsin Accountability article, here:

Its elements include:
A proposal to create a fund to which private donors could contribute money to fund successful literacy and early-childhood development programs.
A proposal to require schools to annually assess all kindergartners for reading readiness.
A proposal to require new elementary and special education teachers to pass a more rigorous reading test.
A proposal for education schools to submit to DPI a list of graduates and their graduation dates, so that the state can better link practicing teachers back to their institution of training.
A proposal to evaluate the performance of all public school teachers and principals.

Alan Schwarz::

Raising new questions about the effectiveness of school discipline, a report scheduled for release on Tuesday found that 31 percent of Texas students were suspended off campus or expelled at least once during their years in middle and high school — at an average of almost four times apiece.
When also considering less serious infractions punished by in-school suspensions, the rate climbed to nearly 60 percent, according to the study by the Council of State Governments, with one in seven students facing such disciplinary measures at least 11 times.

The study linked these disciplinary actions to lower rates of graduation and higher rates of later criminal activity and found that minority students were more likely than whites to face the more severe punishments.

Morgan Smith & Ari Auber:

Almost 55 percent of recent Texas public school students — a disproportionate number of them African-American or with learning disabilities — were suspended at least once between their seventh and 12th grade years, according to a statewide report released today.

The Council of State Governments Justice Center, in partnership with the Public Policy Research Institute of Texas A&M University, analyzed the individual school records of all Texas seventh grade public school students during the years 2000, 2001 and 2002. They tracked the records of nearly 1 million students for at least six years of their secondary school education.

A few local links including a gangs and school violence forum.
Download the report here

Ariel Schwartz:

Want your kids to have a plum job after graduation? Send them to a New York City high school currently being planned by the City University of New York and IBM. The school, which will play host to around 600 students, will span grades 9 to 14. Its students will leave with an associate’s degree–and a guaranteed job with IBM. It’s a “a ticket to the middle class, or even beyond,” according to Mayor Michael Bloomberg.
WNYC reports that IBM has offered $250,000 for New York City to create the computer science-focused school, which is set to open next fall. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is throwing in $3 million. It will be the first high school in the U.S. to go through grade 14. No word on how students will be selected to attend, but we do know that they won’t be academically pre-screened.
The IBM-sponsored high school is part of the larger trend of corporate-sponsored education that has popped up over the past few years. This past spring, Microsoft graduated its first class at the School of the Future, a Philadelphia high school that trains students in a “culture of innovation.” And Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg recently announced a $100 million dollar donation to Newark, New Jersey’s public school system.

Madison’s Promega Corporation offered to work with the Madison School District on a Middle School (Madison Middle School 2000) during the late 1990’s.