schoolinfosystem.org
A small but growing number of schools are using experimental therapies to retrain students’ hearing and vision, in essence reteaching them to hear and see. It’s a bid to reverse problems with the ability to focus and learn brought on by years of excessive TV, poor nutrition and, for some, in vitro drug exposure.
At Gordon Parks Elementary School, a charter school in Kansas City, Mo., 60% of kindergartners in 2004 failed a visual-skills test. Most had 20/20 vision, but they struggled to focus on moving objects, track lines of print and refocus from near to far.
That fall, Gordon Parks began regular lessons in visual skills. Therapist Cheryl Steffenella says dangerous neighborhoods and the ubiquity of TV and video games means many of her students “aren’t doing kid things” — climbing trees, jumping and running — that help develop visual and motor skills. Even playing video games that require a lot of eye movement exercises children’s vision minimally, she says.
Former Providence School Board Member Julie Steiny:
Across the nation, charter laws have spawned certain schools that are so successful they’re being replicated in other towns and states.
Nonprofit providers of these nationally acclaimed schools have been wooed and welcomed into communities hungry for better, more-effective options. The best of these models can prove their strategies’ merits with lots of encouraging data, testimonies from happy parents and impressive stories about their successful students.
These networks include the Knowledge is Power Program (KIPP), Achievement First and the Green Dot Schools, among others. Pop down to New Haven, Conn., to see the thing of beauty that is the Amistad Academy run by Achievement First. Or drive up to Lynn, Mass., to take in a KIPP.
Can Rhode Island benefit from these proven successes? In a word, no.
Our laws fiercely protect Rhode Island’s educational status quo, as though it were a real treasure like Narragansett Bay or our historical architecture. The protectionist laws make it impossible for outside providers to do business in the state. (One could argue that the state laws make it impossible even for local schools to do business effectively. Certain Rhode Island charter schools are now being crushed by our protectionist culture.)
Take as only one example Rhode Island’s General Law 16-13-6 which cements teacher tenure, seniority and “bumping” into place, leaving Rhode Island administrators little if any control over the quality of their staff. No school providers from saner states can possibly assure us that they can be successful here if they can’t retain the stability of their staff and let ineffective teachers go, when necessary. Longtime Rhode Island residents have been drinking the protectionist Kool-Aid for so long they forget what effective school governance might look like.Fascinating.
Journalists, particularly me, tend to get excited about charter schools, the independently run public schools that have produced — at least in some cases — major improvements in achievement for children from low-income families. The charter educators I write about are often young, energetic, witty, noble and pretty much irresistible. But their charter schools, which use tax dollars with little oversight, are relatively new and untried. Like all experiments, they could easily fizzle.
That is the point of a short, readable and fact-filled new book, “Keeping the Promise? The Debate over Charter Schools,” available for $16.95 at http://rethinkingschools.org. The seven chapters make the best case I have ever read for a skeptical attitude toward the nation’s 4,000 charter schools. For reasons I will explain, it did not change my view of charters, but it should spark, as the subtitle says, a thought-provoking debate.
The Newsweek and Washington Post Challenge Index measures a public high school’s effort to challenge its students. The formula is simple: Divide the number of Advanced Placement, International Baccalaureate or Cambridge tests a school gave by the number of seniors who graduated in May or June. Tests taken by all students, not just seniors, are counted. Magnet or charter schools with SAT combined verbal and math averages higher than 1300, or ACT average scores above 29, are not included, since they do not have enough average students who need a challenge.
The rating is not a measurement of the overall quality of the school but illuminates one factor that many educators consider important.
The list below includes all public schools with a rating of 1.000. There are nearly 1,400 — the top 5 percent of all 27,000 U.S. high schools in encouraging students to take AP, IB or Cambridge tests. Also listed are the name of the city or school district and the percentage of a school’s students whose family incomes are low enough to qualify for federally subsidized lunches and who also apply for that program. The portion of subsidized-lunch applicants is a rough indicator of a school’s poverty level. High-poverty schools are at a disadvantage in persuading students to take college-level courses, but some on this list have succeeded in doing so anyway.
The Equity and Excellence rate is the percentage of all seniors who have had at least one score on an AP, IB or Cambridge test that would qualify them for college credit. The average AP Equity and Excellence rate for all U.S. schools is about 15 percent.Milwaukee Rufus King ranked highest among the 21 Wisconsin High Schools at #209. The only Madison area high school to make the list is Verona at #808.
Related: Dane County, WI AP High School Course offerings.
Jay Matthews has more:This week, Newsweek magazine and its Web site Newsweek.com unveil this year’s Top High Schools list, based on a rating system I invented a decade ago called the Challenge Index. The index ranks schools based on college-level course participation, adding up the number of Advanced Placement, International Baccalaureate and other college-level tests in a given year for a given school, and dividing that total by its number of graduating seniors.
Several weeks ago I asked students, teachers and parents to tell me how this annual ranking affected their schools. Here is a sampling of several points of view, both critical and complimentary.
* * *
So, with regard to your Challenge Index — it really is a quick and dirty way of assessing schools. Very ambitious and probably very imperfect. However, there isn’t anything else out there like it. I think the reason our school systems are not very good compared to other countries is that we underestimate the abilities of our children. I think too the education field is fuzzy — not very good data or evidence to support the programs that are out there. . . . More and better research is needed. And of course there are the socioeconomic/family issues of some schools/districts that cannot/will not be fixed with just higher expectations.
— Terry Adirim Montgomery CountyPrevious SIS Challenge Index links and notes. Clusty search on the Challenge Index.
Carlos Sadovi and Stephanie Banchero, via a kind reader’s email:
Public boarding schools where homeless children and those from troubled homes could find the safety and stability to learn are being pursued by Chicago Public Schools officials.
Under the plan, still in the nascent stages, the first pilot residential program could open as soon as fall 2009. District officials hope to launch as many as six such schools in the following years, including at least one that would operate as a year-round school.
The proposal puts Chicago at the forefront of urban school reform, as cities struggle to raise the academic achievement of students hampered by dysfunctional homes and other obstacles outside school.
Some districts, including Chicago, have looked for solutions from small schools to single-sex campuses. But residential schools are a bolder — and far more expensive — proposition. Long an option for the affluent, boarding schools are virtually unheard of for the disadvantaged.
Chicago Public Schools chief Arne Duncan said he does not want to be in the “parenting” business, but he worries that some homes and some neighborhoods are unsafe, making education an afterthought.
“Some children should not go home at night; some of them we need 24-7,” he told the Tribune. “We want to serve children who are really not getting enough structure at home. There’s a certain point where dad is in jail or has disappeared and mom is on crack … where there isn’t a stable grandmother, that child is being raised by the streets.”
Chicago school officials are still working through details of the plan, and it’s not clear whether the schools would be run by the district, outside agencies or some combination of the two.
It’s also not certain how the schools would be funded, who would shoulder the liability of keeping students overnight or how students would be selected.
In April, as part of its Renaissance 2010 new schools program, the district will put out a formal request for boarding school proposals. Officials have already met with interested groups in Chicago.
Officials have also visited several public and private boarding schools across the country and asked some to submit proposals.
Duncan said he has dreamed for years about opening boarding schools, but only last year, when he hired Josh Edelman, son of Children’s Defense Fund founder Marian Wright Edelman, did the idea take off.
Across the nation, educators are struggling to turn around troubled schools. In the District of Columbia, Chancellor Michelle Rhee has teams seeking to overhaul 27 schools targeted for “restructuring” by the federal No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB).
This is hardly uncharted territory. Reformers have spent decades proposing new remedies for low-performing schools. Magnet programs, schools without walls, block scheduling, site-based management, and a litany of other popular ideas have emerged, only to disappoint.
Today, NCLB’s mandated restructuring of schools that fail to make “adequate yearly progress” for five consecutive years has fueled extensive new efforts. NCLB spells out five options for such schools: reopening as a public charter school; replacing most staff; contracting out operations to a new organization; turning the keys over to the state; or adopting “any other major restructuring of the school’s governance.” Modest variations of the amorphous fifth option have proven the most popular, by far.
More than 2,000 schools across the United States are currently in the process of restructuring, which has given rise to a nascent “turnaround” industry. The Louisiana School Turnaround Specialist Program is recruiting and grooming a cadre of school leaders. In New York, the Rensselaerville Institute runs a school turnaround program. At the University of Virginia, the graduate schools of education and business have partnered to train “turnaround specialists.” In Chicago, the Chicago International Charter School has launched ChicagoRise to provide management expertise and support for turnaround projects.
EVERY weekday, 300 boys gather in a gym on Chicago’s South Side. They are all black. More than 80% are poor. Over the past few weeks Chicago has seen a surge in gang violence. But here boys stand in straight lines. Each wears a blazer and a red tie. And in unison they begin to shout their creed: “We believe. We are the young men of Urban Prep. We are college-bound.”
Urban Prep Charter Academy opened in 2006, part of an effort to bring 100 new schools to Chicago’s bleakest areas by 2010. Richard Daley, the city’s mayor, announced Renaissance 2010 (“Ren 10”) in 2004; Chicago’s business leaders created the Renaissance Schools Fund (RSF) to help support it. Backers of this ambitious scheme hope it will spur competition across the school district. On May 6th RSF held a conference to discuss the “new market of public education”.
At the core of Ren 10 is the desire to welcome “education entrepreneurs”, as RSF calls them. Ren 10 lets them start schools and run them mostly as they choose (for example, with longer days and, in some cases, their own salary structure); it also sets the standards they must meet. Schools receive money on a per pupil basis, and may raise private funds as well.
At 27, Deanna Singh is determined to change the dismal statistic that only 5% of African-American adults in Milwaukee have a four-year college degree.
So determined that she has launched her own charter school, where her inaugural sixth-grade students already identify their class by the year they will graduate from college.
She aims to build a culture that refuses to accept what she witnessed years ago as a volunteer in Washington, D.C., schools – 11th- and 12th-graders who could barely read or write.
Both students and staff at her Milwaukee Renaissance Academy, 2212 N. 12th St., follow the succinct dictum of a mural in the school’s stairwell: “No excuses!”
High expectations propelled Singh from her father’s north side gas station – where she spent much of the first five years of her life – through Elmbrook Schools and on to the top-notch East Coast universities where she received her college and law degrees.
Educators argue often whether their work should be judged by test scores. There are thoughtful people on both sides of the debate. We journalists tend to focus on exam results because so many of our readers say that is what they want, and such information is relatively easy to get from regular public schools.
Private schools, unfortunately, rarely provide such information, and data from public charter schools have also been difficult to obtain. Charters are public schools; their students, unlike private school students, take the same state tests regular public school students do. But they are not part of the public school systems that have staffs assigned to gather and release test score results, so their data sometimes emerge in a haphazard way, or not at all.
Thank goodness, then, for those few charter school groups that focus intently on test data and make that data readily available to the public. Those school networks include Achievement First, Aspire, Green Dot, Edison, IDEA, Noble Street, Uncommon Schools, YES and a few others designed to give children from low-income families the extra time, encouragement and great teaching they need.
In the ongoing debate over school choice in its various dimensions such as vouchers, tuition tax credits, charter schools, a stepping back to obtain a broader overview seems to be virtually nonexistent, or at least it is rare to find such an observation. The fact of the matter is that school choice is already a reality for the overwhelming majority of students and their parents.
The largest such category consists of those choosing the public school they attend. A few years ago a survey of public school parents as to why they live where they do found a majority, about 53%, said it was so the children could attend school in the district, or even to live in the attendance area of the specific school being used. Fifty-three percent of about 50,000,000 public school students is twenty-six million.
As an aside this leads to a few pertinent considerations as well. Opponents of school choice, especially of the use of vouchers, regularly base that opposition on the view that this would permit wholesale flight from the public schools. This, of course, is actually not just a weak defense of their position but strengthens the pro-voucher view because it is saying that students, or at least huge numbers of them, are being forced to attend public schools against their will and, in the words of former National Education Association (NEA) President Keith Geiger, they can’t be allowed to “escape.”
Moreover it shows a lack of awareness of the public opinion poll and its implication that 26 million students are not going to go anywhere, vouchers or no, since they are already where they and/or their parents want to be. And there are perhaps at least a few million more who are happy where they are but didn’t show up in the poll because they aren’t where they are because they specifically moved there for that purpose but coincidentally already lived where they find the schools to be satisfactory. However, that number, whatever it may be, will not be included here because its actual size is unknown.
Letters to the Wall Street Journal Editor regarding School Choice: Now More Than Ever:
We, of course, have school choice in America as long as those who choose a non-public school pay their own way.
The failure of some public schools to achieve academic excellence should not be used as an argument in favor of vouchers. The real issue is whether or not our present system of financing education affords all students freedom of choice in selecting a school — public or private. Truly, the present system does not provide this freedom of choice.
Bob Meldrum
Harper Woods, Mich.
Mr. Riley presents a good argument illustrating the benefits of school choice replete with the results of studies on charter schools and the like. He doesn’t need to limit the illustration to schools and school choice programs. The simple facts are that public schools in the U.S. are a state-run monopoly and that a free market will outperform a monopoly every time.
Do you really need a study to see freedom’s superior ability to deliver goods and services that are actually needed and wanted? If so, there was a big study in the last century. It was called the Soviet Union. This century continues with several smaller studies — Cuba, Venezuela, North Korea and Argentina, to name a few.
Recently, I wrote about Tarek ibn Ziyad Academy (TIZA), a K-8 charter school in Inver Grove Heights. Charter schools are public schools and by law must not endorse or promote religion.
Evidence suggests, however, that TIZA is an Islamic school, funded by Minnesota taxpayers.
TIZA has many characteristics that suggest a religious school. It shares the headquarters building of the Muslim American Society of Minnesota, whose mission is “establishing Islam in Minnesota.” The building also houses a mosque. TIZA’s executive director, Asad Zaman, is a Muslim imam, or religious leader, and its sponsor is an organization called Islamic Relief.
This week’s revelation that 17 of the nation’s 50 largest cities have high school graduation rates below 50% surely saddened many. But it surprised few people attuned to the state of U.S. public education. Proponents of education choice have long believed that dropout rates fall when families can pick the schools best suited for their children.
So news that Sol Stern, a veteran advocate of school choice, is having second thoughts about the ability of market forces to improve education outcomes is noteworthy. Mr. Stern explains his change of heart in the current issue of the indispensable City Journal, a quarterly magazine published by the Manhattan Institute. And his revised views on the school choice movement warrant a response.
Inside of two decades, charter school enrollment in the U.S. has climbed to 1.1 million from zero. Two tiny voucher programs in Maine and Vermont blossomed into 21 programs in 13 states and the District of Columbia. Tuition tax credits, once puny and rare, are now sizeable and commonplace. The idea that teacher pay should be based on performance, not just seniority, is gaining ground. Not bad for a small band of education reformers facing skepticism from the liberal media and outright hostility from well-funded, politically connected heavies like the National Education Association.Related: Alan Borsuk: Wisconsin Black 8th-Graders Rank Worst in Nation in Writing and 2007 Nation’s Report Card: Writing.
This is the time of year many parents seek advice on how to find a good elementary, middle or high school, public or private, for their children. Usually I send them a Washington Post article I wrote on this subject three years ago. But this is such an important topic to so many families, I decided to update my thoughts. Here are 10 suggestions, in no particular order. As you’ll see in recommendation number 10, your own thoughts and feelings should always be the deciding factor.
1. Buy an expensive house and you can be almost sure that the local school will be good.
This is an admittedly cynical notion, but there is truth in it. Newcomers often say to themselves, “Let’s find a school or school district we like and then find the house.” Yet most school systems in this area are so good, and parental affluence is so closely tied to educational quality, that if you buy a pricey house, the nearest school is almost guaranteed to be what you are looking for.
2. Look at the data.
In my opinion, based on 22 years of visiting schools and looking at data, the two largest school districts in the Washington area, Fairfax and Montgomery counties, are so well run that even their low-income neighborhoods have schools and teachers that compare with the best in the country. I think the same is true for public schools in Arlington, Clarke, Loudoun and Prince William counties, and the cities of Falls Church and Alexandria. (I’m based in Northern Virginia, so I have closer first-hand knowledge of school systems on that side of the Potomac River.) I also think all the D.C. public schools west of Rock Creek Park are as good as those in the suburbs.
My beliefs are influenced by data on how much schools challenge all of their students, even those with average records of achievement, to take college-level courses and tests before they finish high school. I call this the Challenge Index. (For more on the index, see recommendation No. 9 below.) I want to stress that other systems in the area have some fine public schools. Case in point: All four public high schools in Calvert County appear to be pushing students solidly toward college-level work. There are also some good charter schools. But in some places, you have to look more carefully to find them.
Wisconsin State Journal Editorial:
An audit to help gauge how virtual schools are performing in Wisconsin is reasonable.
But slapping a cap on how many children can enroll in online schools is unnecessary and potentially harmful.
Gov. Jim Doyle ‘s last-minute demand for a cap threatens to ruin a solid bipartisan deal to keep these interesting schools going.
The governor should drop his veto threat, and the Legislature should give Doyle and the teachers union the audit they want.
That way, a dozen virtual schools in Wisconsin serving 3,500 students can stay open and expand if more parents choose to enroll their children.
Key state lawmakers recently put together compromise legislation to keep virtual schools going after a court ruling threatened to shut them down. A court ruled in December that the Wisconsin Virtual Academy, based in suburban Milwaukee, violates state laws controlling teacher certification, charter schools and open enrollment.
Maya Cole:
Dear friends,
First, I would like to let you know that I have new podcasts and blog posts up on my website! You can get information on how our superintendent search evolved and learn how school districts lobby the legislature at a state level through the Wisconsin Association of School Boards.
I am also happy to report that several of us on the Board have begun to meet (after a long hiatus) as members of the Dane County School Board Consortium. The Madison School Board will be hosting other districts next month at LaFollette High School. We will be discussing how we can engage and listen to the public on boundary changes. We hope to come together in the future and combine our lobbying efforts as representatives of Dane County schools. If you know of any state or local officials who would be interested in joining us to learn more about issues facing school districts, please feel free to send them my e-mail address.
I also have two new podcasts, five minutes in length, that explain all you need to know about No Child Left Behind and its re-authorization this year. I met with Sennett school teacher David Wasserman and promised him I would work on engaging the public on this important issue. Please take a listen and pass it on to your friends.
These past few months I have been working hard on many issues on behalf of the school district. I met many fascinating educators and members of the community that are interested in our schools. Some of the Board highlights include, but are not limited to:
The executive director of the Wisconsin Association of School Boards said today that he is disappointed that compromise legislation that would have ensured the survival of the state’s virtual schools seems to be falling apart.
“We had a bipartisan legislation that virtual schools could continue and meet our state standards and now we’re getting into some last-minute politicking and I think that’s very disappointing,” said John Ashley, whose group includes nearly all of the state’s 426 school boards.
“It was a legitimate bipartisan effort that’s unraveling,” he said. “And I think the real effect is going to be on our students. It’s unfortunate to see politics at this stage. I mean we don’t have that much of a (legislative) session left.”
In contrast, the Wisconsin Education Association Council, which brought a lawsuit that now threatens the ability of the state’s virtual charter schools to enroll students statewide and collect taxpayer dollars, released a statement by its president supporting the state Senate’s latest action.More here.
Following a December appeals court decision that questioned the legality of about a dozen virtual schools in the state, officials with those schools worked hard to convince their students’ families they would remain open until summer.
Now, amid the three-week application period for participation in the state’s open enrollment program, they are trying to convince both current and prospective families that they will be around for at least another year. And they are doing so through a blitz of online open houses, information sessions and advertising hitting all corners of Wisconsin.
“Some of them (parents) are real concerned and some of them don’t seem concerned at all,” said Kurt Bergland, principal of Wisconsin Virtual Academy, a virtual charter school run by the Northern Ozaukee School District. “I guess the proof will be in the pudding when someone actually puts us down on their open enrollment application.”
WIVA is under perhaps more pressure than other virtual charter schools in the state, as the target of a lawsuit filed by the Wisconsin Education Association Council charging it operated in violation of state laws regarding teacher licensure, charter schools and open enrollment. A three-judge panel of the District 2 Court of Appeals in Waukesha issued a decision with statewide implications that sided with WEAC, the state’s largest teachers union.
Charter schools — public schools that have been exempted from selected state and local regulations — are changing the competitive landscape of American elementary, middle and high schools. Some have had a rocky track record; some have been plagued by mismanagement and poor performance. But overall, the exchange of greater autonomy for greater accountability has worked. Those that have failed to perform have been shut down.
In Los Angeles, which has more charter schools than anywhere in the nation, charters are the key to raising the performance of all public schools. And they offer a lesson that can be applied elsewhere.
Consider the stark reality of the Los Angeles Unified School District: Of the more than 700,000 students in the nation’s second-largest district, only 44% graduate in four years. For Latino students, that number drops to 41%.
Now look at the graduation rates of high-performing charter schools, which usually replace lower-performing public ones: Green Dot Public Schools, which operates 12 charter schools in Los Angeles, has an 80% graduation rate. Of those students, nearly all go on to college, and two-thirds attend four-year universities. In the next five years, Green Dot will expand to serve a remarkable 8% of all high school students in Los Angeles.
Weekday mornings, three of Tracie Weldie’s children eat breakfast, make beds and trudge off to public school — in their case, downstairs to their basement in a suburb here, where their mother leads them through math and other lessons outlined by an Internet-based charter school.
Half a million American children take classes online, with a significant group, like the Weldies, getting all their schooling from virtual public schools. The rapid growth of these schools has provoked debates in courtrooms and legislatures over money, as the schools compete with local districts for millions in public dollars, and over issues like whether online learning is appropriate for young children.
One of the sharpest debates has concerned the Weldies’ school in Wisconsin, where last week the backers of online education persuaded state lawmakers to keep it and 11 other virtual schools open despite a court ruling against them and the opposition of the teachers union. John Watson, a consultant in Colorado who does an annual survey of education that is based on the Internet, said events in Wisconsin followed the pattern in other states where online schools have proliferated fast.
“Somebody says, ‘What’s going on, does this make sense?’ ” Mr. Watson said. “And after some inquiry most states have said, ‘Yes, we like online learning, but these are such new ways of teaching children that we’ll need to change some regulations and get some more oversight.’ ”
Two models of online schooling predominate. In Florida, Illinois and half a dozen other states, growth has been driven by a state-led, state-financed virtual school that does not give a diploma but offers courses that supplement regular work at a traditional school. Generally, these schools enroll only middle and high school students.
The Wisconsin Court of Appeals has given supporters of the state’s virtual charter schools another reason to hope the Legislature is able to alter state law to save online education.
Yesterday, the publication committee for the appeals court approved publishing a decision by a three-judge appellate panel from Waukesha issued last December. The move means that decision – which found that a virtual school operated by the Northern Ozaukee School District violated several statutes – now applies statewide.
The state Department of Public Instruction has said that it would not distribute aid through open enrollment if the opinion were published. That could mean that school districts like Waukesha and Appleton, which like Northern Ozaukee operate virtual schools with large numbers of open-enrollees, lose out on millions of dollars of state aid.Much more on Wisconsin’s virtual schools controversy here.
Nuestro Mundo Principal Gary Zehrbach, who has headed the Madison School District’s only English-Spanish charter school since its opening in 2004, is leaving his post at the end of this school year.
District officials hope to name his replacement in April.
“It has been a very difficult decision to make, and yet the time has come for me to return to Arizona to be closer to my family,” Zehrbach said Tuesday in a letter to parents.
Wisconsin State Journal Editorial:
The Legislature may actually complete an important assignment quickly and on time, earning high marks from voters.
Yes, we are talking about the Wisconsin Legislature, the same group of truants who logged one of the longest and latest budget stalemates in state history last year.
Maybe the Capitol gang is finally learning the importance of punctuality and cooperation.
Let ‘s hope so.
Key lawmakers announced a compromise bill Thursday that will keep open a dozen online schools in Wisconsin. The proposal also seeks to improve the quality of learning delivered via computer to educate more than 3,000 students in their homes.
The state Court of Appeals had put the future of virtual education in jeopardy last month. The District 2 Court in Waukesha ruled that the Wisconsin Virtual Academy, based in suburban Milwaukee, violates state laws controlling teacher certification, charter schools and open enrollment.
Our public education system should be designed to meet the needs of all students. For the last few years, online schools have provided an important public school option for many of Wisconsin’s families, proving to be a perfect fit for a wide range of students requiring the freedom and flexibility to set their own pace and learn on their own time.
Unfortunately, the recent state Court of Appeals decision regarding the Wisconsin Virtual Academy has created some ambiguity. This has directly affected WiVA, and some have suggested it has broader implications for all virtual education. However, we don’t believe the ruling affects iQ Academy Wisconsin, an online high school that is part of the Waukesha School District, and other schools that operate like us.
Unlike WiVA, iQ Academy relies solely on state-certified public school teachers to provide formal instruction. Our teachers are employed by and largely located inside the Waukesha School District. We are confident that iQ Academy complies with all relevant state laws.
Nevertheless, as a strong advocate of online education options, I urge our government officials to clarify any ambiguity and set virtual education on a firm footing.
If there is a positive from this ruling, it is the additional attention focused on online education. Many who may not have been aware of the high quality of education being provided online are taking a closer look. We welcome that.
Olusanya is one of thousands of parents scrambling to find good school fits for their families during MPS’ three-week enrollment period, through next Friday.
A new tool in the search this year is the Milwaukee School Chooser, a 100-plus-page directory of MPS schools and charters, independent charters and private schools, published this month by the local affiliate of the San Francisco-based Great Schools organization.
Milwaukee is at the front of the national conversation about parental choices largely because of its charter schools and the Milwaukee Parental Choice voucher program, said Jodi Goldberg, who directs Great Schools’ local office, which opened in November.
“It seemed like a great opportunity to come in and work on behalf of parents so that no matter what their needs are, they know what’s available to them,” said Goldberg, a longtime Milwaukee education activist who is married to MPS School Board member Danny Goldberg.
Great Schools’ efforts in Milwaukee are funded by the Walton Family, Joyce and Robertson foundations.
The Media play a pivotal role in determining how and why research influences public opinion with regard to policy. Political scientists Shanto Inyengar and Donald Kinder have shown through experimental research involving televised news how the presentation of news stories can have a powerful impact on what Americans think about issues.1 Prominent columns and articles, especially in the big East Coast papers, influence political behavior among the policy and political elites and offer signals about elite thought and opinion on key issues. The debates about the research on school choice illustrate the broader challenges the media face when translating research for public consumption.
At a superficial level, school choice is a relatively easy debate for the media to cover. It can be simplified into arguments for and against vouchers, charter schools, and altering the definition of “public” schooling, and these arguments are often boiled down to an easy framework of “public” versus “private.” Likewise, the question of increases in test scores fits readily into a debate about whether school choice is “working” or not. While such framing greatly oversimplifies the issues, it nonetheless drives much of the coverage precisely because it offers easy contrasts.
Seventh grader Marcy Thompson is caught in the middle of a national policy debate that could close her school and help determine the future of online education.
Thompson is one of a growing number of students nationwide trading home schooling and public schools for virtual ones where licensed teachers oversee her progress from afar.
She is enrolled in the Wisconsin Virtual Academy, a charter school based north of Milwaukee, but spends her days 130 miles away at home studying everything from literature to algebra under her mother’s guidance and a curriculum provided by the school district.
via email (with an opportunity to sign on below): As you make your selection for the next Superintendent of MMSD, we ask you to choose a candidate that will be able to address the needs of all students, including those of gifted and talented (GT) students. We strongly urge you to hire a candidate that […]
Rafael Gomez is hosting a discussion of school models (traditional, charter, magnet) with Madison School District Superintendent Art Rainwater.
When: 6:30p.m. Tuesday January 8, 2008.
Where:
Covenant Presbyterian Church
318 South Segoe Rd
Madison, WI 53705 [Map]
Background:
Many communities offer a growing number of K-12 educational options. Learn about Madison’s current offerings and the climate for future charter/magnet initiatives.
Format:
Question and Answer
Rafael has hosted a number of previous forums, including those that address:
It won’t exactly be a jolly post-Christmas gift that each principal in Milwaukee Public Schools will receive Jan. 9.
What they will get are packets of information on the budget forecast for next year and the numbers they are to use in putting together a spending plan for their schools.
Good luck, principals – the information in most every case is going to be grim, so much so that some schools may ask to close or merge with others.
The planning assumptions put together by MPS administrators and approved by the Milwaukee School Board include:
• Another major decline in enrollment, 4.7% in the main roster of MPS schools, 4.1% when alternative schools and charter schools not staffed by MPS employees are included.
If the forecast proves true, there will be 77,546 students in September 2008 in that main roster, which is to say, the schools you normally think of when you think of MPS, compared with 96,942 in September 1998, a decline of more than 20% in a decade. The decline from a year ago to this year was 3.8%.
Including the alternative and charter schools, the forecast is for 83,787 for next fall, down from 87,360 this year.
A charter school that will serve students with autism-spectrum disorders in grades 6 to 10 is being hailed as a haven for teens with special needs — and their families.
You can see the ache in Tamara Phillips’ eyes.
As her autistic daughter, now 14, has grown, so too has the loneliness: her daughter’s loneliness in school, but also the parents’ loneliness — because having an autistic child can seem a solitary climb up a very long hill. “There’s a lot of pain,” Phillips said.
Tired of it feeling alone and weary of years of pushing public schools to better educate their kids, a group of parents of autistic children is starting a charter school specifically for older students with the disorder. When Lionsgate Academy opens, scheduled for the fall of 2008, it will be the only public school in Minnesota — and one of only a handful in the country — designed for children with autism-spectrum disorders.
The schools are virtual, but the children learning from them are very real.
And, sometimes, real kids have real problems.
Brennan Fredericks, 16, had big problems in middle school. His parents, Dan and Donna of Black Earth, said his former school did little to protect him from bullies. He has life-threatening food allergies and, his mother said, other kids would throw peanut butter sandwiches at him and taunt him.
“He ‘d sit all alone at a table labeled peanut ‘ and get picked on, ” Donna Fredericks said.
It got so bad that the thought of going to school made him ill.
After home schooling their son through much of eighth grade, the family was delighted to find the Monroe Virtual High School, a charter school run out of the Monroe School District.
To fulfill high school requirements, Brennan can choose between high school and college courses, which arrive with books and online homework. When it ‘s time to take exams, a teacher from the Monroe school drives to Black Earth and administers the test at the local library.
It has worked well for a kid who struggled in regular school.
Insight School of Wisconsin, one of the state’s newest publicly chartered virtual schools, could not disagree more profoundly with the recent Court of Appeals ruling that a virtual school violated Wisconsin law because its teachers and students are not entirely located within one school district’s borders.
The ruling is a step back for education. It hurts Wisconsin’s quest to be economically competitive in a high-tech, online educational world. Most disturbingly, it hurts some of the neediest students we’re all trying so hard to help.
The Appeals Court ruling denies what is already happening in schools. As a former teacher and principal, let me point out the obvious: Technology has changed the classroom. Online schools, video programming and Web-based distance learning have obliterated school district borders. The world is now our classroom.
Visit a school today and you’ll likely see that it’s already linked to one of the state’s 33 distance learning networks. You might see a distance-taught class over BadgerNet taught by teachers in another city, state or country.
The Minneapolis school district has been struggling in the past few years with low student achievement, declining enrollment, money shortages, and frequent leadership changes. Now, its leaders are staking their hopes on a new strategic plan to help revitalize the system and rebuild public confidence.
At a meeting last week, the school board adopted a set of nine recommendations drawn from the plan 36K PDF. They form a broad outline for the district as it addresses complaints that have prompted hundreds of city families to sign their children up for private, charter, and nearby suburban schools.
The recommendations include raising expectations and academic rigor for students, correcting practices that perpetuate racial and socioeconomic achievement gaps, building a stronger corps of principals and teachers, and shoring up the district’s financial health.
Minneapolis’ strategic plan still must be shaped into concrete steps to be implemented in the coming months, a process made tougher by next year’s projected $11 million shortfall in the roughly $650 million budget.
The Washington Post Challenge Index measures a public high school’s effort to challenge its students. The formula is simple: Divide the number of Advanced Placement, International Baccalaureate or Cambridge tests a school gave by the number of seniors who graduated in June. Tests taken by all students, not just seniors, are counted. Magnet or charter schools with SAT combined verbal and math averages higher than 1300, or ACT average scores above 27, are not included, since they do not have enough average students who need a challenge.
The rating is not a measurement of the overall quality of the school but illuminates one factor that many educators consider important.Local schools on the list include: Madison Memorial and Verona
Wisconsin State Journal Editorial:
The state Court of Appeals just handed the Legislature an important assignment:
Update state laws governing public education to take advantage of the opportunities presented by online learning in virtual schools.
Lawmakers should dig into the homework, starting now.
Virtual schools, which deliver coursework via computer to educate students in their homes, have great potential as a cost-effective alternative to standard schools.
But last week the District 2 Court of Appeals in Waukesha put the future of virtual education in Wisconsin in doubt.
The court ruled that the Wisconsin Virtual Academy based in suburban Milwaukee violates state laws controlling teacher certification, charter schools and open enrollment.
The three-judge panel also put the academy in a financial bind by ordering the state to stop paying for students who attend the academy when those students are not residents of the local school district.
Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel Editorial:
Wisconsin kids may be locked out of the virtual schoolhouse after a state Court of Appeals decision Wednesday that threatens the future of online learning for public schoolchildren. But the Legislature can fix the problem by crafting a law that makes clear that the state supports such alternative and innovative means of instruction.
………
Virtual schools offer parents a credible alternative for students who don’t do well in traditional settings. Judging from 2006 Wisconsin Knowledge and Concepts Examination scores, the kids attending Wisconsin Virtual Academy are thriving. They score at or above the state average in most subjects at nearly every grade level.
This sort of competition, also seen in the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program, has the potential to improve education in Wisconsin. The Legislature, as well as state Superintendent Elizabeth Burmaster, must embrace such innovation instead of shrinking from it.“They could learn a lot from our teachers about a new way of teaching,” Rose Fernandez told a radio interviewer.
She’s a parent at Wisconsin Virtual Academy, the Fredonia-based online public charter school. She was talking about the Wisconsin Education Association Council, the state teachers union whose slogan is, “Every kid deserves a great school.”
WEAC, not in a learning mood, had just gotten a court to outlaw Fernandez’s kids’ great school. About 850 children who attend the school are now left hanging after Wednesday’s Wisconsin Court of Appeals decision. The school will stay open while it appeals, but a further loss would endanger every virtual school in the state.
Why would the teachers union try to kill a high-performing public school?
Because, said a written statement from the union, laws written for traditional schools can’t be applied to virtual schools. We need new laws to “make them accountable.”
Accountable? Such as testing students and reporting results? They do that. The academy’s scores on state tests are just dandy – exactly in line with schools in Cross Plains, Mukwonago and Fond du Lac that the academy families I talked to would otherwise use. Ninety-two percent of the academy’s students score proficient or advanced in reading.
And if the virtual school doesn’t satisfy, parents can put their kids back in the school down the block. Yet it’s the virtual school that may get closed. Have you heard of the union suing to close any brick-and-mortar schools that are failing?
All irrelevant, argued the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction. It sought, with the union, to close the academy. Whether the school successfully teaches is beside the point, said the department’s lawyer. Whether it fits the state’s regulatory model is what counts. The court agreed.
This makes Wisconsin unique, says Susan Patrick, who heads the North American Council for Online Learning. She used to head educational technology at the U.S. Department of Education. She says to her knowledge, no state has shut down virtual schools over a teacher licensing dispute.
Court Opinion.
Wisconsin Coalition of Virtual School Families Statement
WEAC (Wisconsin State Teachers Union)
Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction Statement
Top Wisconsin Lobbyists (2005-2006 Legislative Session) via the Wisconsin State Ethics Board (1.7MB PDF):Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce $1,591,931
Wisconsin Education Association Council $1,533,186
Wisconsin Hospital Association Inc (WHA) $1,532,927
Wisconsin Independent Businesses Inc $1,103,747
Wisconsin Merchants Federation $1,088,632
Wisconsin Farm Bureau Federation $1,084,664
Forest County Potawatomi Community $860,260
Arjo Wiggins Appleton Limited $843,677
Wisconsin Insurance Alliance $755,313
Wisconsin Energy Corporation $722,367
Wisconsin Counties Association $720,284Much more on the Wisconsin Virtual Academy here.
Amy Hetzner:A virtual school based in the Northern Ozaukee School District plans to appeal a court ruling that it violates several state laws and ask for a stay of an order that would prevent it from receiving payments for non-district students enrolled at the school.
The ruling against Wisconsin Virtual Academy “threatens every online school program in Wisconsin,” WiVA Principal Kurt Bergland said. “There’s thousands of kids and teachers and families in all those schools that are now involved with this, whether they realize it or not.”
The decision by the District 2 Court of Appeals in Waukesha, which was released today, overturns a previous decision by an Ozaukee County judge.
“As the law presently stands, the charter school, open-enrollment and teacher certification statutes are clear and unambiguous, and the District is not in compliance with any of them,” Judge Richard Brown wrote on behalf of the three-judge panel that decided the case.There were three issues. The first two had to do with where the school was located and where the children attend. State law requires that the answer to both questions be the district that chartered the school, Northern Ozaukee. The school’s administrative offices are located there but its teachers work from home around the state and the students, who do their work at home, also live in various locations. The Court of Appeals held that the district is, literally, located wherever its teachers live and that its students attend at wherever their home happens to be. You can read the statute that way, but that reading is by no means compelled. It seems just as plausible to say that the school is located, and children attend, at the location where the administrative offices are located.
California public schools dominated a national ranking of high schools released Friday, countering the usual depiction of the state’s schools as lagging behind their counterparts elsewhere in the country.
In a first-ever ranking of high schools by U.S. News & World Report magazine — best-known for its influential and controversial ranking of colleges and universities — 23 of the top 100 schools in the nation were from California, including 10 from the Los Angeles area.
No other state has as many schools on the list, although New York City and its suburbs, with 20 schools, have by far the most of any metropolitan area, and Massachusetts has the highest percentage of its schools ranked among the top 505 profiled.
The top-ranked school in California was Pacific Collegiate School, a charter campus in Santa Cruz, which was ranked No. 2 in the country behind Thomas Jefferson High in Virginia, just outside Washington, D.C.
Also in the top 10 were the Oxford Academy at No. 4, a college preparatory school in the Anaheim Union High School District that accepts students by examination, and the Preuss School at No. 10, a charter school under the joint oversight of the San Diego Unified School District and UC San Diego. The Preuss School is currently under a cloud because of allegations of grade-tampering, but that would apparently not have affected its ranking, since U.S. News relied on standardized test scores, not grades.
In the Los Angeles area, the top-rated school was Gretchen Whitney High in Cerritos, at No. 12. The ranking was the latest in a long list of honors for the school, and Principal Patricia Hager was both proud and circumspect.
“Well, I’d like to be No. 1,” she joked in an interview. “I’m very proud because this is a very special place, and I appreciate any opportunity I get to have that recognized.”
At the same time, she said, “It’s interesting how we define things like ‘successful’ and ‘top performer’ — what does it mean? As a public educator, it concerns me how we use those terms. Every school has something going for it, so in a way it’s unfair to other schools that don’t score highly on tests. Philosophically it’s a dilemma, but I won’t refuse the attention.”
If your definition of “public school” is the regular public school system, you are talking about a slice of Milwaukee’s educational infrastructure in which the student population is getting smaller each year.
But if your definition means any school where public dollars pay for children’s educations, you’re talking about a bigger pie, with more ingredients – a pie unlike anything served elsewhere in the United States.
Voucher schools, charter schools, alternative schools, ways of sending kids to schools in other communities – parents, especially those with low income, continue to have a wide array of choices in Milwaukee, all of them funded by public dollars.
Thousands of parents are taking advantage of that. Enrollment statistics for this year show more than 30% of all Milwaukee kids whose educations are paid for with tax dollars attend schools outside the main roster of Milwaukee Public Schools. That appears to be the highest percentage on record.
While enrollment in MPS elementary, middle and high schools fell almost 4% to 81,681, the number of students using publicly funded vouchers to attend 122 private schools in the city rose 8% to 19,233.
I think the people running our high schools, as well we parents, need to stop making compromises that sustain the cycle of failure. Kind and thoughtful educators and parents, such as the ones in Parker’s articles, are trying to get through each day without hurting too many feelings or forcing too many confrontations. When the choice is between letting standards continue to slip or making a scene, few people want to be drama queens, which is too bad.
The best inner-city educators begin each day knowing they are going to have to confront apathy again and again. They shove it away as if it were a kidnapper trying to steal their children. To succeed, a high school like Coolidge needs a unified team of such people, who follow the same standards of regular attendance, daily preparation for school, high achievement and attention and decorum in the classroom.
It sounds impossible, but it’s not. There are inner-city schools right now, including some charter, religious and private schools that operate that way. It takes strength and intelligence and humor and love for young people, and an abhorrence for the limp compromises that have created such sickly schools as Coolidge.
I asked several expert educators how they would fix schools like that. Michael A. Durso, principal of Springbrook High School in Silver Spring, said: “These problems did not occur overnight and will not be resolved easily or in a short time.” Michael Riley, superintendent of the Bellevue, Wash., schools, said: “Anyone who thinks there is a quick fix, that taking a couple of dramatic steps will make this situation better overnight, is kidding himself.”
In the charter school movement’s endless quest to recruit students, some of the best independent public schools support each other by word of mouth. The KIPP DC: KEY Academy, a high-performing middle school, has sent 15 graduates to Washington Mathematics Science Technology, one of the better charter high schools. But KIPP teachers steer their graduates away from some charter schools.
“If I said which they were, the principals would kill me,” said Susan Schaeffler, KIPP DC’s executive director.
Now, some charter leaders in the city that is a national epicenter for their movement are planning to take the next step in this sifting process. They say they want to create a “gold standard designation,” to publicly identify for the first time which charters are doing the most to raise teaching quality and academic achievement for low-income students.
Ramona Edelin, executive director of the D.C. Association of Chartered Public Schools, likened the initiative to a certification system to show “what high quality really means in terms of children of color from impoverished backgrounds, which is the vast majority of the students charter schools educate here.”
IN THE 1990s New York City’s success in cutting crime became a model for America and the world. Innovative policing methods, guided by the “broken windows” philosophy of cracking down on minor offences to encourage a culture of lawfulness, showed that a seemingly hopeless situation could be turned around. It made the name of the mayor, Rudy Giuliani, now a presidential aspirant.
Hopeless is how many people feel about America’s government-funded public schools, particularly in the dodgier parts of big cities, where graduation rates are shockingly low and many fail to achieve basic levels of literacy and numeracy. As with urban crime, failing urban schools are preoccupying countries the world over. And just as New York pointed the way on fighting crime, under another mayor, Michael Bloomberg, it is now emerging as a model for school reform.
On November 5th Mr Bloomberg announced a new “report card” for the city’s schools, designed to make them accountable for their performance. The highest-graded schools will get an increased budget and perhaps a bonus for the principal (head teacher). Schools that fail will not be tolerated: unless their performance improves, their principals will be fired, and if that does not do the trick, they will be closed. This is the culmination of a series of reforms that began when Mr Bloomberg campaigned for, and won, direct control of the school system after becoming mayor in 2002. Even before the “report cards”, there have been impressive signs of improvement, including higher test scores and better graduation rates.Progress Reports grade each school with an A, B, C, D, or F. These reports help parents, teachers, principals, and others understand how well schools are doing—and compare them to other, similar schools. Most schools received pilot Progress Reports for the 2005-06 school year in spring 2007. Progress Reports for Early Childhood and Special Education schools will be piloted during the 2007-08 academic year.
To find the Progress Report for your school, go to Find a School and enter the school’s name or number. This will bring you to the school’s Web page. Click on “Statistics,” which is a link on the left side of the page, where various accountability information can be found for each school. You can also ask your parent coordinator for a copy of your school’s Progress Report or e-mail PR_Support@schools.nyc.gov with questions. Click here to view the Progress Report results for all schools Citywide.
Schools that get As and Bs on their Progress Reports will be eligible for rewards. The Department of Education will work with schools that get low grades to help them improve. Schools that get low grades will also face consequences, such as leadership changes or closure. This is an important part of our work to hold children’s schools accountable for living up to the high standards we all expect them to achieve.Bringing accountability and competition to New York City’s struggling schools.
THE 220 children are called scholars, not students, at the Excellence charter school in Brooklyn‘s impoverished Bedford-Stuyvesant district. To promote the highest expectations, the scholars—who are all boys, mostly black and more than half of whom get free or subsidised school lunches—are encouraged to think beyond school, to university. Outside each classroom is a plaque, with the name of a teacher’s alma mater, and then the year (2024 in the case of the kindergarten), in which the boys will graduate from college.
Like the other charter schools that are fast multiplying across America, Excellence is an independently run public school that has been allowed greater flexibility in its operations in return for greater accountability, though it cannot select its pupils, instead choosing them by lottery. If it fails, the principal (head teacher) will be held accountable, and the school could be closed. Three years old, Excellence is living up to its name: 92% of its third-grade scholars (eight-year-olds, the oldest boys it has, so far) scored “advanced” or “proficient” in New York state English language exams this year, compared to an average (for fourth-graders) across the state of 68% and only 62% in the Big Apple. They did even better in mathematics.
The Economist (Los Angeles & New Orleans):
OUTSIDE New York, as usual, it is a different story. Most American mayors look longingly at Michael Bloomberg’s accomplishments and wish they were equally mighty. West of the Mississippi, none has succeeded in seizing control of a school system. Nor are they likely to be able to do so: the early 20th century progressive movement, strongest in the West, severely blunted their powers. “We haven’t had reform from the top here,” says Eli Broad, a Los Angeles philanthropist. “So instead we’re seeing change from the bottom up.”
In the vanguard are charter schools like the Academy of Opportunity [Ask Google Live Yahoo] in south-central Los Angeles. Here 13- and 14-year-olds, almost all of them black or Hispanic, firmly shake your hand and outline their plans to go to Yale and Stanford. They work long hours—from 7.30am to 5pm five days a week, plus four hours every other Saturday. The grind pays off. At the end of their first year in the school just 28% of pupils are proficient or advanced in maths, compared to 48% of pupils elsewhere in California. By the time they leave, three years later, they far outperform their peers.
When Lindsey Jones was deciding which high school to attend in a district that offers nearly three dozen options for secondary education, she was swayed by the Boston Community Leadership Academy’s claims that it would prepare her well for college. She didn’t realize how well until she started classes at the 400-student academy, part of a network of small schools the Boston district established more than a decade ago to provide alternatives outside its traditional system of large, comprehensive high schools and selective exam schools.
A four-year study of that network, released this week, shows that the academy and the nine other “pilot” high schools in the 56,000-student district are seeing more students through to graduation than regular high schools here. They also have significantly higher promotion and graduation rates, fewer dropouts, and fewer disciplinary issues.
Conceived in 1994 as the district’s response to charter schools, pilot schools have won praise from educators, business leaders, and community groups for providing school choice and innovation within the city’s public school system.
Still, some observers say their results are due more to the schools’ ability to choose or remove teachers, lower proportions of high-needs students, and the control they have in selecting students or weeding out those who are not likely to succeed in them.Strong Results, High Demand, a Four Year Study of Boston’s Pilot High Schools 4.3MB PDF.
Students and staff at James C. Wright Middle School will commemorate the tenth anniversary of the charter school through a Give Us 10! campaign. Wright students will read 10 books outside of the classroom curriculum and then create a mural showcasing their hand prints and the book titles they’ve read. This colorful symbol of student achievement will be showcased in the LMC at Wright.
Community members are welcome to join in the celebration by honoring students who reach the ten book goal. They can show their support by contributing $10 to the Wright Middle School Endowment at the Foundation for Madison’s Public Schools, so they too can Give Us 10!
Since March, Dixon Deutsch and his students have been quietly experimenting with a little website that could one day rock the foundation of how schools do business.
A K-2 teacher at Achievement First Bushwick Elementary Charter School in Brooklyn, N.Y., Deutsch, 28, has been using Free-Reading.net, a reading instruction program that allows him to download, copy and share lessons with colleagues.
He can visit the website and comment on what works and what doesn’t. He can modify lessons to suit his students’ needs and post the modifications online: Think of a cross between a first-grade reading workbook and Wikipedia, the popular online encyclopedia written and edited by users.
If Deutsch wants to see a lesson taught by someone who already has mastered it, he clicks on a YouTube video linked to the site and sees a short demo. “I find it’s more teacher-friendly than a textbook,” he says.Related: Open Source Reading Instruction.
This new Cato book is a good introduction to the empirical literature on vouchers and charter schools. For my taste it places too much weight on standardized tests, but admittedly that is the main way to compare educational results over time or across countries. I believe the lax nature of government schooling in the U.S. often leaves the upper tail of the distribution free to dream and create, but I would not wish to push that as an argument against vouchers. If you’re interested in bad arguments against vouchers, and their rebuttals, Megan McArdle offers a long post.
Anjuman Ali: Madison’s schools are doing a remarkable job of educating children despite challenges posed by changing demographics and shrinking budgets. But schools need our help to keep giving kids the skills and knowledge they need to succeed in life. I learned this by being principal for a day at Wright Middle School on the […]
Alan Borsuk: Before your very eyes, ladies and gentleman, see the Incredible Shrinking School System. Well, maybe it’s not incredible. But it is certainly shrinking. It also continues, bit by bit, to become a district where the faces of the students are those of minority children. Official attendance figures for this fall, released by Milwaukee […]
Diana Jean Schemo: As the director of high schools in the gang-infested neighborhoods of the East Side of Los Angeles, Guadalupe Paramo struggles every day with educational dysfunction. For the past half-dozen years, not even one in five students at her district’s teeming high schools has been able to do grade-level math or English. At […]
Via a reader’s email: Bob Hebert:
I asked a high school kid walking along Commonwealth Avenue if he knew who the vice president of the United States was.
He thought for a moment and then said, “No.”
I told him to take a guess.
He thought for another moment, looked at me skeptically, and finally gave up. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t know.”
The latest federal test results showed some improvement in public school math and reading scores, but there is no reason to celebrate these minuscule gains. We need so much more. A four-year college degree is now all but mandatory for building and sustaining a middle-class standard of living in the U.S.
Over the next 20 or 30 years, when today’s children are raising children of their own in an ever more technologically advanced and globalized society, the educational requirements will only grow more rigorous and unforgiving.
A one- or two-point gain in fourth grade test scores here or there is not meaningful in the face of that overarching 21st-century challenge.
What’s needed is a wholesale transformation of the public school system from the broken-down postwar model of the past 50 or 60 years. The U.S. has not yet faced up to the fact that it needs a school system capable of fulfilling the educational needs of children growing up in an era that will be at least as different from the 20th century as the 20th was from the 19th.
“We’re not good at thinking about magnitudes,” said Thomas Kane, a professor of education and economics at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. “We’ve got a bunch of little things that we think are moving in the right direction, but we haven’t stepped back and thought, ‘O.K., how big an improvement are we really talking about?’ ” Professor Kane and I were discussing what he believes are the two areas that have the greatest potential for radically improving the way children are taught in the U.S. Both are being neglected by the education establishment.Herbert is spot on. The same old, same old (or, “Same Service”) strategy at ever larger dollar amounts has clearly run its course.
Herbert’s words focus on addressing teacher quality“Concerned about raising the quality of teachers, states and local school districts have consistently focused on the credentials, rather than the demonstrated effectiveness — or ineffectiveness — of teachers in the classroom.”
, and alternative school models:
The second area to be mined for potentially transformative effects is the wide and varied field of alternative school models. We should be rigorously studying those schools that appear to be having the biggest positive effects on student achievement. Are the effects real? If so, what accounts for them?
The Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP), to cite one example, is a charter school network that has consistently gotten extraordinary academic results from low-income students. It has worked in cities big and small, and in rural areas. Like other successful models, it has adopted a longer school day and places great demands on its teachers and students.
Said Professor Kane: “These alternative models that involve the longer school day and a much more dramatic intervention for kids are promising. If that’s what it takes, then we need to know that, and sooner rather than later.”
Democrats for Education Reform: But the times seem to have changed a bit. At Monday’s night’s DFER DC launch at the Hotel Washington, Jackson seemed to be embracing what I like to call the Anti-Crappy Schools Doctrine. Forget whether a school is a traditional public school, or a charter school, or private school – how […]
Nathanial Popper: When the Tarek ibn Ziyad Academy opened four years ago in suburban Minneapolis, the school was a bold experiment and its survival was in question. There was the scramble to attract students that any charter school faces, but Tarek ibn Ziyad had the additional worry of a constitutional challenge, given the school’s sponsorship […]
OnPoint with Tom Ashbrook: Entrepreneur Steve Barr is on a mission to replace the worst public school in Los Angeles with charter schools. Barr has got an army of supporters behind him, from union organizers to teachers unions, from LA’s mayor to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Barr has got brass knuckles, and with […]
Jay Matthews: The first thing I noticed about the KIPP School Summit, the annual meeting of the country’s most intriguing public school network, was the food. It was cheap, simple and abundant — potato chips, popcorn, corn chips, juice bars, hamburgers and fajitas available outside the many meeting rooms last week. This was fuel for […]
Center for Policy Studies and Hamline University: Traditional schooling is ‘torqued out’. We need to create radically different models of school/ing. Existing organizations don’t innovate well. Most different schools will have to be created new. The states’ charter laws make it possible now to create new and different schools. In redesigning schools we should focus […]
Howard Blume & Carla Rivera: When it comes to looking out for her children and grandchildren, Patricia Britt, a no-nonsense hospital nursing director, is nobody’s fool. Yet here she is, in late July, beside herself because she hasn’t yet settled on a school for her 8-year-old grandson Corey to attend in the fall. Britt and […]
Jennifer Mrozowski: New Detroit Public Schools superintendent Connie Calloway said Thursday that she does not support charter schools, and she intends to present ideas that will help draw students back to the struggling school system. “Charter schools mean suicide for public schools,” said Calloway during her first board meeting, causing the crowd at Kettering High […]
Nanette Asimov: University Preparatory Charter High School in East Oakland bills itself as a high-end academy where students attract recruiters from the nation’s top universities. Photos of young scholars in caps and gowns grace its Web site above the names of colleges that accepted them — Oberlin, Dartmouth, Pomona, Whitman. But that bright image belies […]
Eliot Spitzer: In a 30-minute presentation entitled “Unfinished Business,” given to more than 400 of the state’s most powerful and influential television and radio professionals, Gov. Spitzer made the case his administration has much to be proud of since he took office in January. Among the educational accomplishments touted in his talk was the doubling […]
Welcome to the new GREEN CHARTER SCHOOLS NETWORK. You’re invited to connect with educators, environmentalists, parents, school leaders and others who are creating and operating environmental charter schools throughout the country. Here are examples of more than 40 “green” charter schools. Wisconsin’s former U.S. Senator and Earth Day founder Gaylord Nelson often stressed the importance […]
Nelson Hernandez: Maryland will receive an $18.2 million federal grant to fund the expansion of the state’s nascent charter school program, state education officials announced yesterday. The grant may allow the state to launch as many as 30 additional charter schools during the next three years, a spokesman for the Maryland State Department of Education […]
Kwame Kilpatrick: Imagine what would happen if Detroit’s auto manufacturers decided to build and sell only mid-size sedans. Despite whatever media campaign they might mount to convince consumers a mid-size sedan was what they should buy, there would clearly still be buyers who would want to purchase SUVs or other types of vehicles. Worse, there […]
Memorial is the only Madison High School in the top 1200 (1084), while Verona ranked 738th. Washington Post: The Washington Post Challenge Index measures a public high school’s effort to challenge its students. The formula is simple: Divide the number of Advanced Placement, International Baccalaureate or Cambridge tests a school gave by the number of […]
Yvonne Wenger: Home-schoolers and students attending public, private or charter schools can take online classes after Gov. Mark Sanford on Thursday signed a new law creating the South Carolina Virtual School Program. The law, which will be administered by the state Department of Education, will allow students a chance to enroll in online courses that […]
Susan Troller: Board members tussled over dozens of suggestions to try to find money to return various programs and services to the district that had been cut by the administration in an effort to balance the $339.6 million budget. The administration had originally proposed about $8 million in cuts, including $2 million from special education […]
Alan Borsuk: Where there once were 15 large high schools in the Milwaukee Public Schools system, there will be about 50 high schools of all different sizes under the MPS umbrella this fall, and many have untraditional names. The options outside MPS used to be primarily a handful of large Catholic and Lutheran high schools. […]
Dear Editor: My ten years on the Madison School Board have convinced me that the board’s highest priorities must be new ideas and new community partnerships. Maya Cole gets my vote for Seat 5 because innovation is her top priority and she has the energy to bring the community together to plan for the future. […]
Christine & Trent Sveom kindly forwarded candidate responses to additional questions not contained within the previously posted Video from the March 5, 2007 West High Forum. The questions: Please explain your views on additional charter schools given the success of Nuestro Mundo here in Madison and several offerings in Appleton just to name a few? […]
The Economist: The hard lessons of segregation WAYNE CLOUGH, the president of the Georgia Institute of Technology, has just moved into a new office. The workmen are still in the corridors outside, generating noise and dust. A few years ago the site, in Atlanta, was full of drug addicts and prostitutes. The hotel across the […]
In an editorial on Saturday, the Wisconsin State Journal endorsed Maya Cole for school board: Maya Cole likes to say that the Madison School Board needs to look outside the box. She is right. To solve budget shortfalls, address the district’s shifting demographics and narrow the achievement gap between minority and white students, the board […]
via email: Our School: The Inspiring Story of Two Teachers, One Big Idea and the Charter School That Beat the Odds (Palgrave Macmillan) brings readers inside a San Jose charter high school that prepares students who are “failing but not in jail” to succeed at four-year colleges. The book just came out in paperback. I’ll […]
The Madison West High School PTSO held a school board candidate forum Monday night. Topics included: Madison High School Comparison A candidate’s ability to listen, interact and work successfully with other board members Past and future referenda support Candidate views on the $333M+ budget for our 24,000 students Extensive conversations on the part of Marj […]
In the context of the Madison School District’s financial challenges, it’s easy to understand why creating a new program may seem unthinkable. Yet creativity can prove a strong ally in times of adversity. Take the prospect of the latest charter school idea to come before the Madison School Board, and consider these points: As a […]
George Will: Fifty-seven years later, Sumner Elementary School in Topeka is back in the news. That city’s board of education is still wrongly preventing the right people from getting into that building. Two educators wanted to use Sumner for a charter school, a public school entitled to operate outside the confinements of dictated curricula and […]
Allison Sherry: Some of the Denver’s most popular public schools will get pots of cash this spring for attracting students from out of the district or from charter schools. The move is designed to draw students back to Denver public schools, which have lost more than 8,000 students in the past six years. Places like […]
The Madison School Board discussed the proposed Madison Studio School recently. Watch the video and read these recent articles: Mayoral Candidates Endorse the Studio School by Susan Troller Board Wants Study of Studio School by Deborah Ziff Don’t Rush Approval of Studio School by John Keckhaver Chafing at Charters by Jason Shephard: But citizen praise […]
The Madison Board of Education is faced with several great challenges over the next few months. One of the biggest is the announcement that Superintendent Art Rainwater will retire at the end of the June 2008. The board will be working with a consultant to assist in hiring the next superintendent. Another board challenge is […]
Mark Hicks: The reorganization is part of the district’s controversial plan to shutter 47 schools this summer and five more during summer 2008 in a bid to save $19 million. The struggling district lost nearly 12,600 students last fall after a teachers strike, and more than 50,000 have left in the last eight years. The […]
Taxpayers, parents and students, particularly those who will enter our schools over the next few decades will benefit from more local choices if the Madison Studio School can lift off, soon. The Madison School District Administration’s recent history has been marked by a reduction in choice for parents and students and generally a monolithic approach […]
Scott Milfred: The Madison School District just went through a successful school building referendum. Yet a key argument by opponents resonated with the public. The critics asked: Why not close an East Side school with falling enrollment to help pay for construction of a school on the far West Side where the number of students […]
Joann Gonchar: On a 10-acre parcel at the southern edge of the master-planned community that is emerging on the site of Denver’s former Stapleton International Airport, educators at an unusual high school are working to provide its diverse student body with a rigorous science, math, and technology focused liberal arts education. The Denver School of […]
If you do, then your support of The Studio School charter school proposal is critical. Please let the school board know. Write letters. Email them [comments@madison.k12.wi.us]. Call them. Attend the meeting on January 22nd! I have heard from a board member that if the “pressure” to vote for opening this school in the fall isn’t […]
Paul Teske, Jody Fitzpatrick, and Gabriel Kaplan [1.1MB PDF Report]: Starting with the economist Milton Friedman, supporters of school choice have assumed that competition would lead to better schools, and that parents could do a better job of assigning children to schools than could school administrators. The debate on the first assumption is raging. The […]
The Madison School Board Communication Committee’s upcoming meeting includes an interesting 2007-2009 legislative agenda for state education finance changes that would increase District annual spending (current budget is $333,000,000) at a higher than normal rate (typically in the 3.8% range): 4. 2007-09 Legislative Agenda a. Work to create a school finance system that defines that […]
Dion Haynes: “We’re trying to see if a local school can do things that the present school system is too dysfunctional to handle,” said Chuck Samuels, chairman of Wilson’s local school restructuring team, the group of parents and teachers that advises the principal. “From this seed of a pilot project could grow more autonomy for […]
Howard Blume and Joel Rubin: A Superior Court judge Thursday struck down legislation that gave Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa substantial authority over the Los Angeles Unified School District, a stunning setback to his plans for assuming direct control of dozens of Los Angeles schools. Judge Dzintra Janavs said the law, which would have taken effect Jan. […]
Watch this 2 hour discussion or download the 69MB video clip. Much more on the Madison Studio School. Ben Popper: “I want to know why these charter options exist in other parts of the state, but not in Madison,” said Christina Navaro. “Here in the shadow of this amazing university, why don’t we have the […]
Steven Elbow’s Tuesday article in The Capital Times on the proposed Madison Studio School included a rather tantalizing opening quote from organizer Nancy Donahue: When Nancy Donahue began her effort for a charter school in Madison, she had no idea she would be wading into a world of politics. “It’s a campaign,” said Donahue, who […]
Will you have an opportunity to register SUPPORT for The STUDIO SCHOOL at today’s (5:00pm) public hearing by the Madison School Board? With the approval of the school board, the public charter school of arts and technology would open next fall in Madison. See more about The STUDIO SCHOOL (SIS Links) here: Cap Times WSJ […]
Mike Antonucci: It was a big job, but the National Council on Teacher Quality has put together a database that will allow you to “easily search the contents of collective bargaining agreements and board policies from the nation’s 50 largest public school districts.” NCTQ will unveil it in DC on January 4. I’m guessing that […]
Here’s a new report about 8 successful charter SECONDARY schools See info ATTACHED [Charter High Schools | Edvisions] about New Country Charter School, an EdVisions School, with its teacher-owned cooperative and student-driven project-based learning program. Nick Hanson: Minnesota New Country School doesn’t look much like a regular high school, and it sure doesn’t feel like […]
Bob Lang, Director, Wisconsin Legislative Fiscal Bureau [88K PDF]: In response to requests from a number of legislators, this office has prepared information on the amount of general school aids to be received by each of the 425 school districts in 2006-07. This memorandum describes the three types of aid funded from the general school […]
Stacey Childress, Richard Elmore and Allen Grossman writing in the Harvard Business Review: One of the biggest management challenges anywhere is how to improve student performance in America’s urban public schools. There has been no shortage of proposed solutions: Find great principals and give them power; create competitive markets with charters, vouchers, and choice; establish […]
With all of the talk about the district’s high schools going through a redesign process (similar to what the middle schools did last summer), I think it’s important that as many interested people as possible attend the East High United meeting at 7 p.m. on Nov. 9 at East High School [map/directions]. I recently asked […]
Naush Boghossian: LAUSD has 103 of the independent public schools, the most of any district in the nation. It has opened 40 charters since 2005. Young projects that the LAUSD will continue to add 20 to 30 charters a year. Statewide, more than 300 charter schools are in development. District officials, as well as the […]
Ted Kolderie and Joe Graba, charter school leaders at Education/Evolving urge legislators to expand Wisconsin’s charter school law: “The Importance of Innovation in Chartering” Remarks to the Legislative Study Committee on Charter Schools By Ted Kolderie and Joe Graba, Education/Evolving October 17, 2006 TED KOLDERIE Let me try to set the context for the Legislature’s […]
Larry Abramson: Today, there are only about one-third as many students attending the New Orleans public school system as there were before Hurricane Katrina. The system is recovering from the storm, and from a state takeover to address years of failing test scores. As a result, it has been completely remade, and is now being […]
Kathryn Newmark & Veronique De Rugy: According to the plan’s “educational network model,” the school system would include a mix of charter, contract, and system-run schools, organized in small “networks” of similar schools. The Algiers Charter School Association, for example, could be one network within the larger school system. All schools will have considerable autonomy—including […]