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A School Board Thinks Differently About Delivering Education, and spends less
The school board in a wealthy suburban county south of Denver is considering letting parents use public funds to send their children to private schools–or take classes with private teachers–in a bid to rethink public education.
The proposals on the table in Douglas County constitute a bold step toward outsourcing a segment of public education, and also raise questions about whether the district can afford to lose any public funds to private educators.
Already hit hard by state cutbacks, the local board has cut $90 million from the budget over three years, leaving some principals pleading for family donations to buy math workbooks and copy paper.
“This is novel and interesting–and bound to be controversial,” said Chester E. Finn Jr., president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a conservative, educational think tank in Washington, D.C.
…
Douglas County School District board members are also considering letting students enrolled in public schools opt out of some classes in favor of district-approved alternatives offered at for-profit schools or by private-sector instructors. Students might skip high-school Spanish, for example, to take an advanced seminar in Chinese, or bypass physics to study with a rocket scientist, in person or online.
Another proposal under review calls for expanding publicly-funded services for families that home-school their children.
Superintendent Elizabeth Celania-Fagen said she is not sure which proposals she might support. But in a recent letter to parents of the district’s 56,000 students, she said her leadership team “did not find the ideas alarming” and pledged the district would “set the stage for new thinking in education.”
“These days, you can build a custom computer. You can get a custom latte at Starbucks,” said board member Meghann Silverthorn. “Parents expect the same out of their educational system.”
Related: The ongoing struggle for credit for non Madison School District courses.
Colorado’s Douglas County School District spends $8512.74 per student ($476,977,336 for 56,031 students in 2009). Madison spent $15,241 per student in 2009, a whopping $6,728.26, 79% more than the “wealthy Denver suburbs”.
How NOT to vote for school board & Who Does the Superintendent Report to
Last week, I voted for several people on the Montgomery County school board, one of the few times I ever thought about that body.
As an education writer, I try to stay away from school boards. I know that sounds odd, but over the years, I have found school board meetings to be as interesting, newsworthy and uplifting as visits to the dentist. I avoid them. I talk to teachers, principals, students and parents instead.
I feel guilty about that. School boards have a vital role in a democratic society. They are the link between us and our schools. If you have a complaint that the school system is not addressing, the school board is pretty much the only place to go. So why don’t I make more of an effort to get to know its members?
The recent election reminded me of one reason. The public sources of information about school board members, such as news articles, voters guides and school district Web sites, rarely tell me the most important things to know about those being elected.
The most important decision school board members make is whom to hire as superintendent. Whether they vote for or against the superintendent’s plans for improving schools is also crucial. Cities, including the District, have transferred that power over superintendents to mayors or city councils because their school boards were too distracted by political or personal feuds and failed to support even effective superintendents.
The Madison School District discussed Superintendent Nerad’s review during their 11/8/2010 meeting. Watch the quite interesting discussion here, starting at about 83 minutes..
Tiptoeing around race issue doesn’t solve anything
It was a forum held Wednesday by the Dane County League of Women Voters on “how changing demographics are affecting Dane County schools and human services,” and the speakers — Madison school superintendent Dan Nerad, Sun Prairie district administrator Tim Culver and Dane County director of Human Services Lynn Green — aren’t exactly right wingers.
But it’s odd how the best of intentions can muddle a message, especially when it comes to race, and especially in Madison.
The panel was nothing if not well intentioned, not to mention extremely careful in its language.
Happy- and/or neutral-sounding words like “diversity” and “changing demographics” took the place of the more direct “black” or “Latino” or “poor.” And while it was clear that these changing demographics meant higher rates of poverty and single-parent families, which in turn correlate with more problems in the schools or need for services, the panel chose not to identify them as problems. They were instead “challenges.”
They were also careful to frame their remarks in a spirit of inclusiveness, and Nerad and Culver described efforts to inject “culturally relevant” instruction into their curriculums and to hire more minority teachers.
(I wondered how conservatives would respond to such efforts, widely applauded and rarely questioned in places as liberal as Madison. What does cultural relevancy have to do with learning the three Rs? Do you have to be black to teach a black child?)
The audience was provided with graphics showing student achievement rising during this period of increasing student poverty and diversity, but Nerad and Culver did not make a big deal of that in their remarks. Nerad said after the meeting that too much emphasis on the district’s successes can invite criticism about areas where it isn’t doing so well.
Officials limit access to Stoughton High School after gun threat
Officials limit access to Stoughton High School after gun threat
Responding to rumors that a student might bring a gun to Stoughton High School today, Stoughton police officers patrolled the school Thursday and plan to continue patrols today and Monday, district Administrator Tim Onsager said.
Access to the high school was allowed through only one door all day and at a second door before school, during lunch and after school, principal Mike Kruse said in an e-mail. Most extracurricular activities were canceled Thursday and today, as were staff meetings scheduled for today to allow teachers to remain in the classroom with students, Kruse wrote.
The district continues to investigate the origin of the rumors, but has not been able to substantiate any of the various stories circulating among students. No students have been disciplined so far, Onsager said.
Virtual makeover: Open enrollment, online schools alter education landscape
Eighth-grader James Roll enjoys learning math, science, English and social studies through an online school that lets him learn at his own pace using a computer at home. But he says he likes the art and music classes at what he calls “real school” — Kromrey Middle School in Middleton — even more.
James is a pioneer of sorts, and so is the Middleton-Cross Plains School District, when it comes to computer-based, or virtual, learning.
This year, Middleton launched its 21st Century eSchool. It’s one of just a dozen virtual schools in Wisconsin, and the second in Dane County; last year the McFarland School District became the sponsoring district for the Wisconsin Virtual Academy (WIVA), which opened for the 2009-2010 school year with about 400 students and this year counts twice that many.
The two schools share several key elements: They offer a broad range of online courses, beginning at the kindergarten level and continuing all the way through high school, employ licensed Wisconsin teachers to oversee online learning, and require that students participate in mandatory testing each year.
……
Hughes’ obvious irritation was fueled by recent open enrollment figures showing that Madison has lost more than 150 students to McFarland, both to the Wisconsin Virtual Academy and to McFarland bricks-and-mortar schools.
Hughes expanded on his frustration in a recent piece he wrote for his Ed Hughes School Blog: “Since we have to send about $6,800 per student to districts that receive our open enrollers, this means that we’ll be cutting a (perhaps figurative) check in excess of $1,000,000 to the McFarland School District.”
But McFarland Superintendent Scott Brown says his district is only getting $300 to $350 per student per year from the online school and says the Wisconsin Virtual Academy is not necessarily poaching students from the traditional classroom. “Schools like WIVA have brought a lot of students who may not have been under the tent of public education into school districts like ours.
More options for our children is great for them, parents, business, our communities and taxpayers.
With respect to Ed’s post, providing alternative models at what appears to be substantially lower cost than Madison’s annual $15K per student expenditures is good for all of us, particularly the students.
The financial aspects of the open enrollment and alternative education models gets to the heart of whether traditional districts exist to promote adult employment or student education.
The Khan Academy is worth a visit.. Standing in front of new education models and more choices for our children is a losing proposition. Just yesterday, Apple, Inc. announced the end of hard drives for volume computers with the introduction of a flash memory based notebook. Certainly, hard drive manufacturers will be fighting over a smaller market, but, new opportunities are emerging. Some will take advantage of them, others won’t. Education is no different.
How billionaire donors harm public education
Today the foundation set up by billionaires Eli and Edythe Broad is giving away $2 million to urban school districts that have pursued education reform that they like. On Friday a Florida teacher is running 50 miles to raise money so that he and his fellow teachers don’t have to spend their own money to buy paper and pencils, binders (1- and 2-inch), spiral notebooks, composition books and printer ink.
Together the two events show the perverted way schools are funded in 2010.
Very wealthy people are donating big private money to their own pet projects: charter schools, charter school management companies, teacher assessment systems. (The latest example is Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s $100 million donation to the Newark public schools, given with the provision that Zuckerberg, apparently an education reform expert, play a big role in determining success.)
What this means is that these philanthropists — and not local communities — are determining the course of the country’s school reform efforts and which education research projects get funded. As Buffalo Public Schools Superintendent James A. Williams said in an interview: “They should come out and tell the truth. If they want to privatize public education, they should say so.”
Many aspects of education are driven by the pursuit of money, not just billionaire’s sprinkling it around.
Students caught in middle of Monona Grove contract dispute
Monona Grove teachers receive the best post-retirement benefit package in Dane County, according to the Wisconsin Association of School Boards. Qualifying teachers may retire at 55 and receive district-covered health and dental insurance until age 70. They also receive a payout over three years based on their Social Security allowance.
Depending on projected health care costs, a 2009 retiree earning the maximum benefit would receive $281,000 to $421,000 in benefits, school boards association attorney Bob Butler said.
To retain those benefits over the years, the union has conceded short-term compensation increases, putting their salaries in the middle-to-bottom range compared with neighboring districts, Wollerman said. Gerlach said the healthy benefit package was put in place years ago to encourage retirements and attract new teachers.
The School District’s contentious proposal breaks teachers into three groups: those 10 years away from retirement, new hires and everyone in between. The first group wouldn’t be affected by the major changes. New teachers would receive $1,300 a year while employed toward a Health Reimbursement Account and no post-retirement payout. Teachers in the district that are more than 10 years from retirement would have their district health and dental benefits capped at retirement levels, lose coverage once eligible for Medicare and have their stipend capped at $50,000 total.
What I Might Hope To See in High School Reform
Right now I am struggling to get my head around what the proposed high school reforms are or are not, what problems they are intended to address (TAG? achievement gap? readiness for life after high school? other?), the many interpretations of what is proposed, and whether the proposed reforms would be effective in achieving any of the stated purposes.
In an interesting twist, this process has brought me back to my own personal wish list of what I would like to see in comprehensive high school reform. I believe that any one of the items on the list would make a real difference and in ways that are compatible with DPI requirements and national standards.
My thinking is informed by sources that are predictable and others that may not be obvious but are equally important: personal observation, years of listening at parent meetings and testimony to the school board, numerous national studies and commentaries, and what I have learned from my highly skilled colleagues who work with undergraduate programs at UW-Madison.
In some ways, the debates over the proposed two-strand system, the fate of electives (which I want to keep), consistency across the four high schools, college preparation, national standards, etc., are less important to me than the basic expectations and requirements for the students who enter and graduate from our schools. Without changing those things, I believe that we will be confined to tinkering around the edges without touching some of the fundamental expectations that students will confront after graduation.
I believe that we could make a serious dent in the achievement gap, address long standing dissatisfaction with academic opportunities and challenges, and move toward rebuilding Madison’s reputation for schools that draw people to invest in homes in our metro area and neighborhoods by truly making the changes – vs. planning to study and eventually implement changes – to address the items that are on this list:
1. Increase opportunities for advanced study at all grade levels, whether it is part of an AP curriculum or other courses developed and taught at a higher level with or without special labels. Then remove the unmovable obstacles that keep students from participating.
2. Restore West’s 9th and 10th grade honors courses.
3. Conform MMSD policy and practice to meet or exceed DPI standards at all grade levels, and particularly in regard to graduation requirements.
4. Guaranty that ALL middle school math teachers are proficient in algebraic reasoning and other skills necessary to prepare students to master the high school math and science curriculum.
5. Teach students to write using complete sentences, correct spelling and standard grammatical conventions.
6. Make a compelling case for consistency and then truly implement consistency across the board if that is going to be a rationale for homogenizing the curriculum in our high schools.
For the entire post, go to: http://lucymathiak.blogspot.com/
Are Honors Classes Racist?
High Expectations For All Students is the Way to Beat the Achievement Gaps
Simpson Street Free Press editorial
Chantal Van Ginkel, age 18
Historically, Madison West High School has not had a spotless regard regarding race relations. Before and during the 1990’s, the school was accused by some of segregation. Most white students had their lockers on the second floor, while most minority students used lockers on the ground floor.
To the school’s credit, changes in policies have greatly improved a once hostile environment. Some of these changes include getting rid of remedial classes, and implementing SLC’s or Small Learning Communities.
A more recent change, however, has sparked controversy and heated debate. Madison West High School plans to largely eliminate honors classes. This is part of an attempt to provide equal opportunity for all students by homogenizing their classroom experience.
At one time, this might have been a good step toward desegregation of West’s student body. It is not a good idea now.
To some extent, enrollment in honors courses of all Madison high schools is racially segregated. Affluent students and white students take advanced courses much more frequently than other students.
But in my opinion, the lack of more rigorous courses is a problem. It is a problem for all students at West. Many parents, students and some faculty share this sentiment.
Recently, a petition signed by over a hundred West attendance area parents requested that 9th and 10th grade honors classes be reinstated. When Superintendent Nerad took steps to make this, some members of the West High teaching staff spoke up. They asserted that honors classes are racist. The project to reinstate advanced course offerings for West’s freshmen and sophomores was then abandoned.
Honors classes, in and of themselves, are not inherently racist. Rather, the expectation that only certain students will take these classes is the problem. The fact that too many minority students end up in remedial courses is racist, but eliminating rigorous courses is not the answer.
As writers for this newspaper have said many times, the real racism is the cancer of low expectations. High expectations for all of our students is how we will beat the achievement gaps in local schools. Low expectations will only make our problem worse.
Note: Madison West High School has not had honors classes in 9th and 10th grade for several years. (The only exception to that is the historically lone section of Accelerated Biology, which some West teachers have repeatedly tried to get rid of.) Not only that, but Madison West High School is the only Madison high school that does not have any honors/advanced/accelerated classes in English and Social Studies in 9th and 10th grade. All West 9th and 10th grade students are expected to take regular English 9 and 10 and regular Social Studies 9 and 10, in completely heterogeneous (by ability) classes.
Note: The petition mentioned by the author — the one requesting honors classes in English and Social Studies in 9th and 10th grade — has now been signed by almost 200 current, past and future West community members.
An Emphasis on Adult Employment
This week, President Obama called for the hiring of 10,000 new teachers to beef up math and science achievement. Meanwhile, in America, Earth, Sol-System, public school employment has grown 10 times faster than enrollment for 40 years (see chart), while achievement at the end of high school has stagnated in math and declined in science (see other chart).
Either the president is badly misinformed about our education system or he thinks that promising to hire another 10,000 teachers union members is politically advantageous-in which case he would seem to be badly misinformed about the present political climate. Or he lives in an alternate universe in which Kirk and Spock have facial hair and government monopolies are efficient. It’s hard to say.
Related: Madison School District 2010-2011 Budget Update: $5,100,000 Fund Balance Increase since June, 2009; Property Taxes to Increase 9+%, and Ripon Superintendent Richard Zimman:
“Beware of legacy practices (most of what we do every day is the maintenance of the status quo), @12:40 minutes into the talk – the very public institutions intended for student learning has become focused instead on adult employment. I say that as an employee. Adult practices and attitudes have become embedded in organizational culture governed by strict regulations and union contracts that dictate most of what occurs inside schools today. Any impetus to change direction or structure is met with swift and stiff resistance. It’s as if we are stuck in a time warp keeping a 19th century school model on life support in an attempt to meet 21st century demands.” Zimman went on to discuss the Wisconsin DPI’s vigorous enforcement of teacher licensing practices and provided some unfortunate math & science teacher examples (including the “impossibility” of meeting the demand for such teachers (about 14 minutes)). He further cited exploding teacher salary, benefit and retiree costs eating instructional dollars (“Similar to GM”; “worry” about the children given this situation).
Thanks much for taking the time from your busy schedule to respond to our letter below. I am delighted to note your serious interest in the topic of how to obtain middle school teachers who are highly qualified to teach mathematics to the MMSD’s students so that all might succeed. We are all in agreement with the District’s laudable goal of having all students complete algebra I/geometry or integrated algebra I/geometry by the end of 10th grade. One essential component necessary for achieving this goal is having teachers who are highly competent to teach 6th- through 8th-grade mathematics to our students so they will be well prepared for high school-level mathematics when they arrive in high school.
The primary point on which we seem to disagree is how best to obtain such highly qualified middle school math teachers. It is my strong belief that the MMSD will never succeed in fully staffing all of our middle schools with excellent math teachers, especially in a timely manner, if the primary mechanism for doing so is to provide additional, voluntary math ed opportunities to the District’s K-8 generalists who are currently teaching mathematics in our middle schools. The District currently has a small number of math-certified middle school teachers. It undoubtedly has some additional K-8 generalists who already are or could readily become terrific middle school math teachers with a couple of hundred hours of additional math ed training. However, I sincerely doubt we could ever train dozens of additional K-8 generalists to the level of content knowledge necessary to be outstanding middle school math teachers so that ALL of our middle school students could be taught mathematics by such teachers.
Governor Seeks Pay and Tenure Changes in New Jersey Education Overhaul
New Jersey Governor Chris Christie said he wants to link public school teachers’ pay and tenure to their students’ performance, and to make it easier for districts to fire their worst educators.
“Pay should go to the people who have earned it,” he said today in a town hall meeting in Old Bridge Township. Tenure has become “a sclerosis that coats the veins of our school system.”
Christie, a Republican who has said the state’s education system is costly and failing many children, plans to administratively overhaul the process of teacher performance evaluations and to spend $20 million during the next two years improving a database that tracks them. He also proposed expanding teacher training and “alternative routes” to becoming a principal.
Related, Janet Mertz: An Email to Madison Superintendent Dan Nerad on Math Teacher Hiring Criteria
Serious ideas from State of Education speech. Seriously.
For instance, he’s the only state elected official to actually and seriously float a proposal to repair the broken state funding system for schools. He promises the proposal for his “Funding for Our Future” will be ready to introduce to lawmakers this fall and will include details on its impact on the state’s 424 school districts.
Evers also is interested in the potential of charter schools. Let’s be open and supportive about education alternatives, he says, but mindful of what’s already working well in public schools.
And he says qualified 11th and 12th graders should be allowed to move directly on to post-secondary education or training if they wish. Dual enrollment opportunites for high school age students attending college and technical schools will require a shift in thinking that shares turf and breaks down barriers, making seamless education — pre-K through post-secondary — a reality instead of some distant dream, according to Evers.
As to Evers’ comments on teacher testing, he joins a national conversation that has been sparked, in part, by the Obama administration as well as research that shows the single universal element in improved student performance is teacher quality. We recently featured a story about concerns over teacher evaluation based on student performance and test scores, and the issue has been a potent topic elsewhere, as well.
The proof, as always, is in the pudding, or substance.
Melissa Westbrook wrote a very useful and timely article on education reform:
I think many ed reformers rightly say, “Kids can’t wait.” I agree.
There is nothing more depressing than realizing that any change that might be good will likely come AFTER your child ages out of elementary, middle or high school. Not to say that we don’t do things for the greater good or the future greater good but as a parent, you want for your child now. Of course, we are told that change needs to happen now but the reality is what it might or might not produce in results is years off. (Which matters not to Bill Gates or President Obama because their children are in private schools.)
All this leads to wonder about our teachers and what this change will mean. A reader, Lendlees, passed on a link to a story that appeared in the LA Times about their teacher ratings. (You may recall that the LA Times got the classroom test scores for every single teacher in Los Angeles and published them in ranked order.)
Susan Troller notes that Wisconsin’s oft criticized WKCE (on which Madison’s value added assessment program is based) will be replaced – by 2014:
Evers also promised that the much maligned Wisconsin Knowledge and Concepts Exam, used to test student proficiency in 3rd through 6th, 8th and 10th grades, is on its way out. By 2014, there will be a much better assessment of student proficiency to take its place, Evers says, and he should know. He’s become a leading figure in the push for national core education standards, and for effective means for measuring student progress.
“They have the power, but I don’t think anyone has looked at this. So [once again], I’m the angry black man.”
ibmadison.com interviews Kaleem Caire about the proposed Madison Preparatory Academy, via a kind reader:
In Caire’s mind, kids can’t wait. Consider the data he cites from the ACT District Profile Report for the Madison Metropolitan School District’s 2010 graduating class:
Of students taking the ACT, average test scores differed significantly between African Americans and white students:
English Math Reading Science Composite African Americans 16.3 18.0 17.1 18.4 17.6 Caucasian/White 25.1 25.6 25.8 24.8 25.4 The percent of students meeting ACT College Readiness Benchmark Scores, broken out by ethnicity, for the 2010 graduating class seems more alarming:
Total Tested English (18) Math (22) Reading (21) Science (24) All Students 1,122 81% 68% 71% 51% African Americans 76 38% 24% 25% 9% Caucasian/White 733 90% 77% 79% 60% Hispanic 71 59% 39% 45% 18% Asian/Pacific Isl. 119 67% 65% 61% 45% Numbers like these fuel Caire’s fire, and his vision for The Madison Preparatory Academy for Young Men. “I’m amazed that [the primarily white leadership in the city] hasn’t looked at this data and said, ‘wow!’ They have the power, but I don’t think anyone has looked at this. So [once again], I’m the angry black man.”
Caire understands the challenges that lie ahead. By November, he needs to formally propose the idea to the School Board, after which he will seek a planning grant from the Department of Public Instruction. He anticipates other hurdles along the way. Among them, a misconstrued conception. “Madison believes it’s creative, but the reality is, it’s not innovative.” Will the community accept this idea, or sit back and wait, he wonders.
Second: The resources to do it. “We can survive largely on what the school system can give us [once we’re up and running], but there’s seed money you need to get to that point.”
Third: The teacher’s union response. “No one knows what that will be,” Caire said. “The school board and district are so influenced by the teacher’s union, which represents teachers. We represent kids. To me, it’s not, ‘teachers at all costs,’ it’s ‘kids first.’ We’ll see where our philosophies line up.” He added that the Urban League and those behind the Charter School idea are not at all opposed to the teacher’s union, but the Prep School’s design includes, for example, a school day longer than the teacher’s contract allows. “This isn’t about compensation,” he said of the contract, “it’s about commitment. We don’t want red tape caught up in this, and we want to guarantee long-term success.”
Related: “They’re all rich, white kids and they’ll do just fine” — NOT! and outbound open enrollment.
Value Added Models& Student Information Systems
147K PDF via a Dan Dempsey email:
The following abstract and conclusion is taken from:
Volume 4, Issue 4 – Fall 2009 – Special Issue: Key Issues in Value-Added Modeling
Would Accountability Based on Teacher Value Added Be Smart Policy? An Examination of the Statistical Properties and Policy Alternatives
Douglas N. Harris of University of Wisconsin Madison
Education Finance and Policy Fall 2009, Vol. 4, No. 4: 319-350.
Available here:
http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1162/edfp.2009.4.4.319
Abstract
Annual student testing may make it possible to measure the contributions to student achievement made by individual teachers. But would these “teacher value added” measures help to improve student achievement? I consider the statistical validity, purposes, and costs of teacher value-added policies. Many of the key assumptions of teacher value added are rejected by empirical evidence. However, the assumption violations may not be severe, and value-added measures still seem to contain useful information. I also compare teacher value-added accountability with three main policy alternatives: teacher credentials, school value-added accountability, and formative uses of test data. I argue that using teacher value-added measures is likely to increase student achievement more efficiently than a teacher credentials-only strategy but may not be the most cost-effective policy overall. Resolving this issue will require a new research and policy agenda that goes beyond analysis of assumptions and statistical properties and focuses on the effects of actual policy alternatives.
6. CONCLUSION
A great deal of attention has been paid recently to the statistical assumptions of VAMs, and many of the most important papers are contained in the present volume. The assumptions about the role of past achievement in affecting current achievement (Assumption No. 2) and the lack of variation in teacher effects across student types (Assumption No. 4) seem least problematic. However, unobserved differences are likely to be important, and it is unclear whether the student fixed effects models, or any other models, really account for them (Assumption No. 3). The test scale is also a problem and will likely remain so because the assumptions underlying the scales are untestable. There is relatively little evidence on how administration and teamwork affect teachers (Assumption No. 1).
Related: Value Added Assessment, Standards Based Report Cards and Los Angeles’s Value Added Teacher Data.
Many notes and links on the Madison School District’s student information system: Infinite Campus are here.
Tension grows over Seattle teacher evaluations
Seattle Public Schools wants teacher evaluations and student performance joined at the hip, but the teachers’ union is taking issue with how the district plans to fuse those two factors.
A proposal that would tie teacher evaluations to student growth prompted a 2,000-word refutation e-mail from the Seattle Education Association earlier this week, a sign of friction in ongoing contract negotiations.
“Their mechanized system is one of minimal rewards and automated punishments,” union leaders wrote to members Wednesday.
That statement was sent in response to an e-mail teachers received this week from public schools Superintendent Maria Goodloe-Johnson. She detailed how the school plans to roll out parts of its bargaining proposal — specifically factors related to how teachers’ performances are evaluated.
The district is proposing an four-tier evaluation system that would roll out over two years. Teachers who chose to be evaluated base on to “student growth outcomes and peer and student feedback” would be eligible for perks, including an immediate 1 percent pay increase, eligibility for stipends and other forms of “targeted support.”
I was impressed with Susan Troller’s recent article on Teacher Accountability and the Madison School District, particularly her inquiry to Lisa Wachtel:
The district’s recent decision to provide professional development time for middle and high school teachers through an early release time for students on Wednesdays is part of this focus, according to Wachtel. The district has sponsored an early release time for elementary school teachers since 1976.
She admits there isn’t any data yet to prove whether coaching is a good use of resources when it comes to improving student achievement.
“Anecdotally we’re hearing good things from a number of our schools, but it’s still pretty early to see many specific changes,” she says. “It takes consistency, and practice, to change the way you teach. It’s not easy for anyone; I think it has to be an ongoing effort.”
This is certainly not the only example of such spending initiatives. Jeff Henriques has thoughtfully posted a number of very useful articles over the years, including: Where does MMSD get its numbers from? and District SLC Grant – Examining the Data From Earlier Grants, pt. 3. It appears that these spending items simply reflect growing adult to adult programs within the K-12 world, or a way to channel more funds into the system.
I believe it is inevitable that we will see more “teacher evaluation” programs. What they actually do and whether they are used is of course, another question.
Ideally, every school’s website should include a teacher’s profile page, with their CV, blog and social network links, course syllabus and curriculum notes. Active use of a student information system such as PowerSchool, or Infinite Campus, among others, including all assignments, feedback, periodic communication, syllabus, tests and notes would further provide useful information to parents and students.
Ignorance By Degrees Colleges serve the people who work there more than the students who desperately need to learn something.
Higher education may be heading for a reckoning. For a long time, despite the occasional charge of liberal dogma on campus or of a watered-down curriculum, people tended to think the best of the college and university they attended. Perhaps they attributed their career success or that of their friends to a diploma. Or they felt moved by a particular professor or class. Or they received treatment at a university hospital or otherwise profited from university-based scientific research. Or they just loved March Madness.
Recently, though, a new public skepticism has surfaced, with galling facts to back it up. Over the past 30 years, the average cost of college tuition and fees has risen 250% for private schools and nearly 300% for public schools (in constant dollars). The salaries of professors have also risen much faster than those of other occupations. At Stanford, to take but one example, the salaries of full professors have leapt 58% in constant dollars since the mid-1980s. College presidents do even better. From 1992 to 2008, NYU’s presidential salary climbed to $1.27 million from $443,000. By 2008, a dozen presidents had passed the million-dollar mark.
Meanwhile, tenured and tenure-track professors spend ever less time with students. In 1975, 43% of college teachers were classified as “contingent”–that is, they were temporary instructors and graduate students; today that rate is 70%. Colleges boast of high faculty-to-student ratios, but in practice most courses have a part-timer at the podium.
Related: Ripon Superintendent Richard Zimman:
“Beware of legacy practices (most of what we do every day is the maintenance of the status quo), @12:40 minutes into the talk – the very public institutions intended for student learning has become focused instead on adult employment. I say that as an employee. Adult practices and attitudes have become embedded in organizational culture governed by strict regulations and union contracts that dictate most of what occurs inside schools today. Any impetus to change direction or structure is met with swift and stiff resistance. It’s as if we are stuck in a time warp keeping a 19th century school model on life support in an attempt to meet 21st century demands.” Zimman went on to discuss the Wisconsin DPI’s vigorous enforcement of teacher licensing practices and provided some unfortunate math & science teacher examples (including the “impossibility” of meeting the demand for such teachers (about 14 minutes)). He further cited exploding teacher salary, benefit and retiree costs eating instructional dollars (“Similar to GM”; “worry” about the children given this situation).
Zimman noted that the most recent State of Wisconsin Budget removed the requirement that arbitrators take into consideration revenue limits (a district’s financial condition @17:30) when considering a District’s ability to afford union negotiated compensation packages. The budget also added the amount of teacher preparation time to the list of items that must be negotiated….. “we need to breakthrough the concept that public schools are an expense, not an investment” and at the same time, we must stop looking at schools as a place for adults to work and start treating schools as a place for children to learn.”
Eating away at education: Math doesn’t add up when teacher salaries and budget cuts collide
The math is simple: California schools have less money than most other states, but their teachers are the most highly paid in the nation.
Per pupil spending, on the other hand, trails the national average by about $2,500.
Until the financially troubled state government finds more money to invest in its public schools, which make up more than half of its general fund spending, something has to give.
School budgeting has become a zero-sum game.
California school districts spend more than half of their dollars on teacher pay and benefits. In better times, when education funding rose each year to keep pace with the cost of living, so did salaries. But the state now gives schools less money for each student than it did
Spending in California classrooms declined as a percentage of total education spending over a recent five-year period, even as total school funding increased, according to a Pepperdine University study released Wednesday.
More of the funding increase went to administrators, clerks and technical staff and less to teachers, textbooks, materials and teacher aides, the study found. It was partially funded by a California Chamber of Commerce foundation.
Total K-12 spending increased by $10 billion over the five-year period ending June 30, 2009, from $45.6 billion to $55.6 billion statewide. It rose at a rate greater than the increase in inflation or personal income, according to the study. Yet researchers found that classroom spending dipped from 59 percent of education funding to 57.8 percent over the five years.
The report mentions that California’s average per student expenditure is just under $10,000 annually. Madison’s 2009/2010 per student spending was $15,241 ($370,287,471 budget / 24,295 students).
On Budgets & Professional Development
Patricia Wasley and Stephanie Hirsch:
BUDGETS across the state and nation are being slashed, forcing education leaders to confront economic shortfalls unseen in recent memory and make do with less.
One area especially hard hit by the cuts is professional development — the process by which we ensure our educators are well equipped to meet constantly evolving demands of helping students succeed. Often overlooked, high-quality professional learning is indispensable in generating the outcomes — like better test scores and higher graduation rates — that should be expected of our schools.
Absent high-quality professional learning and support for professional growth, the ability of teachers to meet new challenges becomes compromised and their practices habitual. This makes it more difficult to achieve higher outcomes and is not what we want for our teachers or students.
There has been an increasing emphasis on “adult to adult” expenditures within our public schools, as Ripon Superintendent Richard Zimman noted last summer.
Gates Foundation playing pivotal role in changes for education system
Across the country, public education is in the midst of a quiet revolution. States are embracing voluntary national standards for English and math, while schools are paying teachers based on student performance.
It’s an agenda propelled in part by a flood of money from a billionaire prep-school graduate best known for his software empire: Bill Gates.
In the past 2 1/2 years, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has pledged more than $650 million to schools, public agencies and other groups that buy into its main education priorities.
The largest awards are powering experiments in teacher evaluation and performance pay. The Pittsburgh school district landed $40 million, Los Angeles charter schools $60 million and the Memphis schools $90 million. The Hillsborough County district, which includes Tampa, won the biggest grant: $100 million. That has set the nation’s eighth-largest school system on a quest to reshape its 15,000-member teaching corps by rewarding student achievement instead of seniority.
The Gates Foundation funded a Small Learning Community initiative at Madison West High School
W.Va. education spending audit may prove daunting
A proposed audit of West Virginia’s education spending enjoys widespread support, but that may not make its undertaking any less tricky.
Officials have yet to decide who would conduct the in-depth review, or even how to authorize it. Then there’s the scope. An estimated 14 cents of every dollar spent by the state goes to public education, from pre-kindergarten through 12th grade.
The American Federation of Teachers-West Virginia included an audit in its wish list for next month’s special legislative session focused on education.
“We are not aware of any recent or ongoing investigation regarding the spending practices by governmental departments, agencies and boards of education funded with public education dollars and whether the funds are being used for the intended purpose,” the group said in its outline of the proposal, one of eight it wants lawmakers to consider.
Related: Madison School Board member may seek audit of how 2005 maintenance referendum dollars were spent.
Wisconsin Gubernatorial Candidate Mark Neumann Wants To Get Rid Of Teacher Certification
Channel3000.com, via a kind reader:
Republican gubernatorial candidate Mark Neumann is proposing to get rid of state certification for teachers as part of an education reform plan.
Neumann also is proposing a series of incentives that will encourage private schools and public charter schools to compete with and replace failing public schools.
Neumann is outlining his plans during news conferences in Milwaukee, Madison and Green Bay.
In a phone interview, he said the state should provide suggested qualifications for educators, but actual hiring decisions should be left up to local school boards, superintendents and principals.
Neumann acknowledges that many of his proposals would need approval from the Legislature.
Related: Janet Mertz: An Email to Madison Superintendent Dan Nerad on Math Teacher Hiring Criteria.
Teacher: ‘Worst year in the classroom’ in decades
As a classroom teacher with 30+ years experience, I just completed the absolute worst year in the classroom I have ever endured (and it was NOT the fault of my students–they were great).
“This year I was told what to teach, when to teach, how to teach, how long to teach, who to teach, who not to teach, and how often to test. My students were assessed with easily more than 120 tests of one shape or another within the first 6 months of the school year.
“My ability to make decisions about what is best for my students was taken away by an overzealous attempt to impose ‘consistency’ within my grade group. My school hired an outside consultant who threatened us with our jobs, demanded that everyone comply, and required us to submit data on test results on a weekly basis. If your class didn’t do well, you were certainly going to be in trouble.
“In addition, my class was visited at least twice a month by the consultant, two superintendents, principal, assistant principal, reading coach, math coach, and sometimes even more people. If I was not teaching exactly what they wanted to see, I was in trouble.
I asked Madison’s 3 Superintendent candidates in 2008 if they believed in either “hiring the best teachers” and essentially setting them free, or a “top down” approach to teaching. Madison continues to expand adult to adult spending (“coaches”, “professional development”).
Houston School District’s Strategic Plan, an Update
HISD is working to develop a long-term strategic plan for the district that will build upon the Declaration of Beliefs and Visions and provide a road map for our future. The purpose of this strategic direction is to provide clarity around our priorities of Placing an Effective Teacher in Every Classroom, Supporting the Principal as the CEO, Developing Central Standards, Ensuring Accountability, and Cultivating Stakeholder Commitment. We believe these key, overarching strategies will help HISD achieve its goals and become the best school district in America.
To develop our long-term Strategic Direction, we are working with a in a six-month effort that started in February, 2010 and will culminate in August with the release of the final plan. The first step involved a diagnostic research effort to understand the current state of the district across a number of critical dimensions such as student achievement and organizational effectiveness. It also included analyzing other transformation efforts within HISD and across the country to ensure that the best ideas are being considered in our planning process. We have also started to gather input from members of Team HISD and we will continue to do so over the next several months. Click here to view the preliminary findings (.pdf)
True transformation does not happen overnight and cannot happen without the participation of every member of Team HISD. For this process to be authentic and meaningful, HISD needs all of you -parents, teachers, principals, students, the business community, nonprofit partners, and broader community members- to be fully engaged.
312K PDF
Ericka Mellon: Only 15 percent of HISD freshmen graduate college.
Related: Notes and links on Madison’s Strategic Planning Process. More here.
Why should education be exempt from recession budgeting?
Jay Gould, a 19th-century railroad tycoon and unrepentant rapscallion, said he was a Democrat when in Democratic districts and a Republican when in Republican districts but that he was always for the Erie Railroad. Gould, emblematic of Gilded Age rapaciousness, was called a robber baron. What should we call people whose defining constancy is that they are always for unionized public employees? Call them Democrats.
This week, when Congress returns from its Memorial Day recess, many Democrats, having gone an eternity — more than a week — without spending billions of their constituents’ money, will try to make up for lost time by sending another $23 billion to states to prevent teachers from being laid off. The alternative to this “desperately” needed bailout, says Education Secretary Arne Duncan, is “catastrophe.” Amazing. Just 16 months ago, in the stimulus legislation, Congress shoveled about $100 billion to education, including $48 billion in direct aid to states. According to a University of Washington study, this saved more than 342,000 teaching and school staff positions — about 5.5 percent of all the positions in America’s 15,000 school systems.
The federal component of education spending on kindergarten through 12th grade, the quintessential state and local responsibility, has doubled since 2000, to 15 percent. Now the supposed emergency, and states’ dependency, may be becoming routine and perpetual.
Related: The Madison School Board discusses travel and professional development spending for the 2010-2011 budget and Bloomberg: US’s $13 Trillion Debt Poised to Overtake GDP.
Parents plow hopes and savings into new school for children with autism
Shawn Doherty via a kind reader’s email:
It started out as the dreaming of a lonely mother overwhelmed and held captive by the challenges of raising twin toddlers with autism, each of whom required up to 43 hours a week of intensive in-home therapy. There should be a refuge where she and others struggling with the devastating developmental disorder could find respite, company, play groups and therapy, Jackie Moen thought. As her boys grew, so did her dreams. Why couldn’t schools build curriculum around these children’s unique talents and needs, rather than forcing many of them to fall short of the rigid classroom norms?
And so Jackie and her husband Ken, joined by a passionate group of other parents, teachers and therapists, have set out to create such a place themselves. In 2007, they bought an old brick schoolhouse in McFarland and poured their savings and a pool of grants and contributions into renovating it into a homey space with donated couches, sunlit classrooms and gleaming wood floors. As soon as the Common Threads Family Resource Center opened in 2007, director of operations Ellen Egen recalls, “the phone calls just kept coming.” Hundreds of children and desperate family members flocked to the cheerful schoolhouse for an array of activities not available elsewhere, including play groups, teen therapy sessions, respite care and mental health counseling. “It grew like magic,” Moen, now the center’s director, recalls.
Cutting and Adding Administrators in the Chicago Public Schools
The Chicago Public Schools is a system so broke it can’t afford sophomore sports, wants assistant coaches to work for free, and has summoned hundreds of teachers to the principal’s office to let them know they’ll be laid off over the summer. But it can still afford to pay 133 central office officials more than $100,000 a year.
That’s what budget reform looks like to schools CEO Ron Huberman.
About two months ago, when Huberman and the Board of Education cut sophomore sports, they said the district, roughly $900 million in the red, could only afford to let freshmen, juniors, and seniors play after-school sports–even after laying off dozens of well paid administrators.
It irked me that a city so rich it could afford to shower subsidies on profitable corporations such as United Airlines and MillerCoors to the tune of hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars couldn’t afford to let sophomores play.
So I decided to do a little digging. After spending hours plowing through the 350-page 2009-2010 CPS budget, I discovered that contrary to cutting wages at the central office, Huberman and the board had given raises to scores of top bureaucrats.
Ruth Robarts classic bears a visit: Annual Spring Four Act Play: Madison School’s Budget Process.
Milwaukee School District Seeks Health Care Changes to Save Jobs
Though shrouded in the overly formal language of district documents, new amendments to the proposed 2010-’11 Milwaukee Public Schools budget signal an ultimatum to unions from the Milwaukee School Board: Accept changes to your health care and be open to a furlough, or watch your colleagues be laid off next year.
In a Strategic Planning and Budget Committee meeting Thursday night that carried into Friday morning, the board got its first chance to discuss and act on amendments to the administration’s proposed $1.3 billion budget, which calls for an estimated 150 to 200 teacher layoffs and hundreds of other staff job eliminations.
Amendments that direct changes to the health-care plan and the implementation of furloughs would require an agreement with labor unions that represent certain employees. But the board’s amendments could set the ball in motion for those discussions.
One of those included restoring about a third of the positions set to be eliminated for teachers, paraprofessionals and general education aides, but only if those bargaining units – namely, the Milwaukee Teachers’ Education Association – agree to accept the less expensive health care plan.
This is not a new topic. Some elements of the Madison School District have sought similar changes.
After autism intervention, boy is now gifted student, musician
When Christopher Xu turned 2, his mother’s worst fears were confirmed. The other babies at her son’s birthday party babbled, gestured and used simple words as they played and interacted with their parents and each other. But Christopher was different.
“He was locked in his own world,” Sophia Sun recalls. “No eye contact. No pointing. No laughing at cartoons or looking at me when I talk to him.”
In fact, Sun says, she and her husband, Yingchun Xu, both Chinese-born computer engineers who earned their graduate degrees in Vancouver, British Columbia, had never known anyone with this kind of remote, inaccessible child.
The couple were living with their older daughters, Iris and Laura, in a Chicago suburb when Christopher was born. Both girls were interactive, affectionate babies, but Christopher paid little attention to his mother, his family or his surroundings. As a toddler he spent most of his time lining up his favorite toys in order or spinning himself in circles — over and over again. When the Xu family went to an air show, his mother pointed to the planes roaring overhead, saying, “Christopher, look at that! Look up!” but the little boy just spun around and around, oblivious to the noise or the world surrounding him.
Now Christopher is 11, and he will soon graduate from the fifth grade at Madison’s John Muir Elementary to head off to middle school. Thanks to the love and persistence of his family, powerful early training, insightful teachers and accepting classmates, his story has changed dramatically, and his remarkable abilities are increasingly apparent.
Much more on autism here and via Wolfram Alpha.
Congratulations to Jill Jokela
Anyone who has worked with Jill Jokela during her fifteen years as a parent of children in the Madison schools would agree that this Distinguished Service Award is long overdue. Administrators, teachers, parents and fellow concerned citizens hold Jill Jokela in the highest regard for her deep and altruistic commitment to our public schools.
Since 1995 when her first child entered kindergarten, Jill has been a generous PTO leader at Mendota Elementary, Black Hawk Middle and East High Schools. Her ability to ask very tough questions, closely examine data and work constructively through challenging issues such as school equity, boundary changes, funding and curriculum have demonstrated, time and time again, the invaluable role of the effective parent activist in a great school district.
On Local School Budgets & Teacher Compensation
I have to at least give credit the WSJ for continuing to keep education front and center of their Sunday opinion section. This last Sunday, under the headline “Protect kids from cuts” the WSJ takes on the issue of closing the remaining Madison SD budget gap and editorializes for a pay freeze for teaching staff. Although the current budget situation probably makes reducing compensation for staff in one way or another inevitable, I don’t think that devaluing the teaching profession can be construed as “Protecting kids”. After all, the number one factor in educational outcomes is the placement of a highly qualified teacher in front of each class.
Attracting quality teachers means we have to be sure it is rewarding profession, so balancing the budget through reductions in teacher compensation is in the long term unsustainable. If the current situation was a one or two year problem then a freeze might serve as a bridge to recovery, and although I don’t know the Madison situation I’m pretty sure their problems are similar to ours: shortfalls that extend year after year for the foreseeable future. The article notes that the Madison teachers receive the “standard” 1% raise this year. This year that seems inappropriate, but the fact that the same 1% is the “standard” every year since 1993 is also a problem.
I don’t think that 1% annual raises have been “standard since 1993”. I would certainly like to see a substantive change in teacher compensation, replacing the current one size fits all approach.
Current Madison School Board Member Ed Hughes, noted in May, 2005 that:
Here is an excerpt from the article in this morning’s State Journal that deserves comment: Matthews said it was worth looking at whether layoffs can be avoided, but he was less optimistic about finding ways to achieve that.
He said MTI’s policy is that members have to have decent wages, even if it means some jobs are lost.
The last teachers contract provided a 1 percent increase in wage scales for each of the past two years. This year’s salary and benefits increase, including raises for seniority or advanced degrees, was projected at 4.9 percent, or $8.48 million. Teachers’ salaries range from $29,324 to $74,380.
“The young teachers are really hurting,” Matthews said, adding that the district is having difficulty attracting teachers because of its starting pay.
Mr. Matthews states that young teachers are really hurting. I assume by “young” he means “recently-hired.” On a state-wide basis, the starting salary for Madison’s teachers ranks lower, relatively speaking, than its salaries for more experienced teachers. Compared to other teacher pay scales in the state, Madison’s scale seems weighted relatively more toward the more-experienced teachers and less toward starting teachers. This has to be a consequence of the union’s bargaining strategy – the union must have bargained over the years for more money at the top and less at the bottom, again relatively speaking. The union is entitled to follow whatever strategy it wants, but it is disingenuous for Mr. Matthews to justify an apparent reluctance to consider different bargaining approaches on the basis of their possible impact on “young teachers.”
According to the article, Mr. Matthews also stated that “the district is having trouble attracting teachers because of its starting pay.” Can this possibly be true? Here’s an excerpt from Jason Shepard’s top-notch article in Isthmus last week, “Even with a UW degree, landing a job in Madison isn’t easy. For every hire made by the Madison district, five applicants are rejected. June Glennon, the district’s employment manager, says more than 1,200 people have applied for teaching jobs next year.”
New Jersey Schools Brace for Cuts
The New Jersey School Boards Association, which surveyed school officials about the state aid cuts, found that 268 districts would lay off teachers and that 185 would make cuts to their education programs.
In addition, 206 districts said they would reduce the number of extracurricular activities, and 96 would charge students an activity fee for the first time.
Districts are also seeking to save on teachers’ salaries and benefits, with 195 considering reopening contracts with local teachers’ unions. An additional 265 are already at the bargaining table. As an incentive, Mr. Christie this week announced a proposal to give additional state aid to districts that negotiate salary freezes.
The school boards association received responses from 323 of the state’s 588 districts about how they were preparing for the possible loss of state money.
Wisconsin School District’s face similar issues: the state ranks in the top 10 in per capita debt and the Federal Government’s debt position continues to deteriorate. Local property taxpayers may bear the brunt of local District spending increases.
Monona Grove School District (WI) uses ACT-related tests to boost academic performance
Test early, test often, and make sure the results you get are meaningful to students, teachers and parents.
Although that may sound simple, in the last three years it’s become a mantra in the Monona Grove School District that’s helping all middle and high school students increase their skills, whether they’re heading to college or a career. The program, based on using ACT-related tests, is helping to establish the suburban Dane County district as a leader in educational innovation in Wisconsin.
In fact, Monona Grove recently hosted a half-day session for administrators and board members from Milwaukee and Madison who were interested in learning more about Monona Grove’s experiences and how the school community is responding to the program. In a pilot program this spring in Madison, students in eighth grade at Sherman Middle School will take ACT’s Explore test for younger students. At Memorial, freshmen will take the Explore test.
Known primarily as a college entrance examination, ACT Inc. also provides a battery of other tests for younger students. Monona Grove is using these tests — the Explore tests for grades 8 and 9, and the Plan tests for grades 10 and 11 — to paint an annual picture of each student’s academic skills and what he or she needs to focus on to be ready to take on the challenges of post-secondary education or the work force. The tests are given midway through the first semester, and results are ready a month later.
“We’re very, very interested in what Monona Grove is doing,” says Pam Nash, assistant superintendent for secondary education for the Madison district. “We’ve heard our state is looking at ACT as a possible replacement for the WKCE (Wisconsin Knowledge and Concepts Exam), and the intrinsic reliability of the ACT is well known. The WKCE is so unrelated to the students. The scores come in so late, it’s not useful.
The Madison School District’s “Value Added Assessment” program uses data from the oft-criticized WKCE.
State-of-the-art sports facility is a boon for Sun Prairie High School
The massive field house inside Sun Prairie’s new high school, which is scheduled to open in the fall, is a facility that can serve a great number of purposes.
As athletic director Jim McClowry is quick to point out, its primary benefit is that of a spacious classroom for physical education students that eliminates overcrowding and gives teachers myriad options of activities to include in the curriculum.
There’s also the obvious advantage to the school district’s student-athletes, who will have a breathtaking venue to call home.
But there’s an ancillary benefit to having a large facility with ample parking, and plenty of other bells and whistles, that has McClowry excited about the future.
Get back in bid for better schools
Wisconsin State Journal Editorial:
To no great surprise, Wisconsin will not be one of the handful of states leading a national push to transform public education.
President Barack Obama announced Thursday that Wisconsin failed to survive even a preliminary round of competition for billions of dollars in federal innovation grants.
It’s a huge disappointment – especially since Obama came to Madison last fall to officially launch the nationwide effort, which he calls a “Race to the Top.”
It’s not yet clear why Wisconsin didn’t make the cut. That’s because the U.S. Department of Education hasn’t released our state’s scores and comments from the judges.
Yet Gov. Jim Doyle’s criticism Thursday of the entrenched Milwaukee School Board and reform-averse state lawmakers was dead-on. The Legislature’s failure to shake up the failing Milwaukee public school district had to hurt our state’s bid for as much as $254 million in Race to the Top funds.
At the same time, Rep. Brett Davis’ criticism of Doyle and the Democratic-run Legislature for kowtowing to the big teachers union was equally apt. The Wisconsin Education Association Council has long resisted big changes in public education, including pay for performance. And the teachers union spent more – by far – on lobbying last year than any other special interest group at the state Capitol.
The hype of ‘value-added’ in teacher evaluation
As a rookie mom, I used to be shocked when another parent expressed horror about a teacher I thought was a superstar. No more. The fact is that your kids’ results will vary with teachers, just as they do with pills, diets and exercise regimens.
Nonetheless, we all want our kids to have at least a few excellent teachers along the way, so it’s tempting to buy into hype about value-added measures (VAM) as a way to separate the excellent from the horrifying, or least the better from the worse.
It’s so tempting that VAM is likely to be part of a reauthorized No Child Left Behind. The problem is, researchers urge caution because of the same kinds of varied results featured in playground conversations.
Value-added measures use test scores to track the growth of individual students as they progress through the grades and see how much “value” a teacher has added.
The Madison School District has been using Value Added Assessment based on the oft – criticized WKCE.
Pull in more parents to school
Wisconsin State Journal Editorial:
A reading day with student performances and food.
A clothing swap for families that doubles as a PTO meeting.
Free transportation, child care and translators so more parents can participate in after-school functions.
Madison schools are doing a lot to draw more parents – especially minority and low-income parents – into their children’s educations. And much of the credit goes to creative parent leaders and teachers.
The stepped-up effort is encouraging and should continue in Madison and across Wisconsin.
The more parents of all backgrounds spend time at their children’s schools, the more likely their children will engage and succeed.
Hysteria Around School Turnarounds
The NYTimes ran a story with this misleading headline and byline:
A Vote to Fire All Teachers at a Failing High School
CENTRAL FALLS, R.I. — A plan to dismiss the entire faculty and staff of the only public high school in this small city just west of the Massachusetts border was approved Tuesday night at an emotional public meeting of the school board.When the teachers failed to adopt a ‘transformation’ plan that included a modest lengthening of the day, the superintendent shifted to Plan B, what federal School Improvement Grants (SIG) call Turnaround, which requires that at least 50% of the staff be replaced. Under Rhode Island law, teachers must be notified of the potential for nonrenewal by March 20, hence the board vote and notices. All the teachers will have the opportunity to reapply, up to half will be rehired.
The hysteria is now reverberating on CNN and papers around the country. Central Falls may be an early example but there are thousands to come. As I began reporting in October, SIG will cause widespread urban disruption. But we’ll all need to be cautious to use language carefully and differentiate between ‘firing all the teachers’ and notifying them of the requirement to reapply for their positions.
Related: Ripon Superintendent Richard Zimman’s speech to the Madison Rotary:
Last Wednesday, Ripon Superintendent Richard Zimman spoke to the Madison Rotary Club on “What Wisconsin’s Public Education Model Needs to Learn from General Motors Before it is too late.” 7MB mp3 audio (the audio quality is not great, but you can hear the talk if you turn up the volume!).
Zimman’s talk ranged far and wide. He discussed Wisconsin’s K-12 funding formula (it is important to remember that school spending increases annually (from 1987 to 2005, spending grew by 5.10% annually in Wisconsin and 5.25% in the Madison School District), though perhaps not in areas some would prefer.
“Beware of legacy practices (most of what we do every day is the maintenance of the status quo), @12:40 minutes into the talk – the very public institutions intended for student learning has become focused instead on adult employment. I say that as an employee. Adult practices and attitudes have become embedded in organizational culture governed by strict regulations and union contracts that dictate most of what occurs inside schools today. Any impetus to change direction or structure is met with swift and stiff resistance. It’s as if we are stuck in a time warp keeping a 19th century school model on life support in an attempt to meet 21st century demands.” Zimman went on to discuss the Wisconsin DPI’s vigorous enforcement of teacher licensing practices and provided some unfortunate math & science teacher examples (including the “impossibility” of meeting the demand for such teachers (about 14 minutes)). He further cited exploding teacher salary, benefit and retiree costs eating instructional dollars (“Similar to GM”; “worry” about the children given this situation).
Change and Race to the Top
Which brings us to this next item, one with twist and turns not completely understandable at this point, but certainly not held up by people like myself as a model of how to “get the job properly done” — to use Herbert’s words.
Diane Ravitch, an intellectual on education policy, difficult to pigeonhole politically (appointed to public office by both G.H.W. Bush and Clinton), but best described as an independent, co-writes a blog with Deborah Meier that some of our readers may be familiar with called “Bridging Differences.” This past week she highlighted a possibly disturbing development in the Race to the Top competition program of the Department of Education, that dangles $4.3 billion to the states with a possible $1.3 billion to follow. Ravitch’s critique suggests that this competition is not run by pragmatists, but rather by ideologues who are led by the Bill Gates Foundation.If this election had been held five years ago, the department would be insisting on small schools, but because Gates has already tried and discarded that approach, the department is promoting the new Gates remedies: charter schools, privatization, and evaluating teachers by student test scores.
Two of the top lieutenants of the Gates Foundation were placed in charge of the competition by Secretary Arne Duncan. Both have backgrounds as leaders in organisations dedicated to creating privately managed schools that operate with public money.
None of this is terribly surprising (See the Sunlight Foundation’s excellent work on the Obama Administration’s insider dealings with PhRMA). Jeff Henriques did a lot of work looking at the Madison School District’s foray into Small Learning Communities.
Is it possible to change the current K-12 bureacracy from within? Ripon Superintendent Richard Zimman spoke about the “adult employment” focus of the K-12 world:
“Beware of legacy practices (most of what we do every day is the maintenance of the status quo), @12:40 minutes into the talk – the very public institutions intended for student learning has become focused instead on adult employment. I say that as an employee. Adult practices and attitudes have become embedded in organizational culture governed by strict regulations and union contracts that dictate most of what occurs inside schools today. Any impetus to change direction or structure is met with swift and stiff resistance. It’s as if we are stuck in a time warp keeping a 19th century school model on life support in an attempt to meet 21st century demands.” Zimman went on to discuss the Wisconsin DPI’s vigorous enforcement of teacher licensing practices and provided some unfortunate math & science teacher examples (including the “impossibility” of meeting the demand for such teachers (about 14 minutes)). He further cited exploding teacher salary, benefit and retiree costs eating instructional dollars (“Similar to GM”; “worry” about the children given this situation).
I suspect that Duncan and many others are trying to significantly change the adult to student process, rather than simply pumping more money into the current K-12 monopoly structures.
They are to be commended for this.
Will there be waste, fraud and abuse? Certainly. Will there be waste fraud and abuse if the funds are spent on traditional K-12 District organizations? Of course. John Stossel notes that when one puts together the numbers, Washington, DC’s schools spend $26,000 per student, while they provide $7,500 to the voucher schools…..
We’re better off with diffused governance across the board. Milwaukee despite its many travails, is developing a rich K-12 environment.
The Verona school board narrowly approved a new Mandarin immersion charter school on a 4-3 vote recently These citizen initiatives offer some hope for new opportunities for our children. I hope we see more of this.
Finally, all of this presents an interesting contrast to what appears to be the Madison School District Administration’s ongoing “same service” governance approach.
Education: Too Important for a Government Monopoly
The government-school establishment has said the same thing for decades: Education is too important to leave to the competitive market. If we really want to help our kids, we must focus more resources on the government schools.
But despite this mantra, the focus is on something other than the kids. When The Washington Post asked George Parker, head of the Washington, D.C., teachers union, about the voucher program there, he said: “Parents are voting with their feet. … As kids continue leaving the system, we will lose teachers. Our very survival depends on having kids in D.C. schools so we’ll have teachers to represent.”
How revealing is that?
Since 1980, government spending on education, adjusted for inflation, has nearly doubled. But test scores have been flat for decades.
Today we spend a stunning $11,000 a year per student — more than $200,000 per classroom. It’s not working. So when will we permit competition and choice, which works great with everything else? I’ll explore those questions on my Fox Business program tomorrow night at 8 and 11 p.m. Eastern time (and again Friday at 10 p.m.).
The people who test students internationally told us that two factors predict a country’s educational success: Do the schools have the autonomy to experiment, and do parents have a choice?
Locally, the Madison School District has 24,295 students and a 2009/2010 budget of $418,415,780. $17,222 per student.
Covington’s bold Kansas City school-closing plan
Congratulations to Kansas City School District Superintendent John Covington.
He’s just take the courageous and correct step of saying the district needs to shutter more than two dozen schools in the ever-shrinking district.
From 74,000 students about 40 years ago to 17,000 now, the district has no reason to continue to operate so many buildings at less than 50 percent capacity.
Covington, however, also must get rid of a proportionate number of administrators at the downtown office building, which has been bloated with staff for many years.
If more than 200 teachers are going to receive pink slips in closed buildings, the downtown administrators should share in the pain.
Read The Star story, which includes other aspects of Covington’s proposal.
Related: Money And School Performance:
Lessons from the Kansas City Desegregation Experiment:
or decades critics of the public schools have been saying, “You can’t solve educational problems by throwing money at them.” The education establishment and its supporters have replied, “No one’s ever tried.” In Kansas City they did try. To improve the education of black students and encourage desegregation, a federal judge invited the Kansas City, Missouri, School District to come up with a cost-is-no-object educational plan and ordered local and state taxpayers to find the money to pay for it.
Kansas City spent as much as $11,700 per pupil–more money per pupil, on a cost of living adjusted basis, than any other of the 280 largest districts in the country. The money bought higher teachers’ salaries, 15 new schools, and such amenities as an Olympic-sized swimming pool with an underwater viewing room, television and animation studios, a robotics lab, a 25-acre wildlife sanctuary, a zoo, a model United Nations with simultaneous translation capability, and field trips to Mexico and Senegal. The student-teacher ratio was 12 or 13 to 1, the lowest of any major school district in the country.
The results were dismal. Test scores did not rise; the black-white gap did not diminish; and there was less, not greater, integration.
The Kansas City experiment suggests that, indeed, educational problems can’t be solved by throwing money at them, that the structural problems of our current educational system are far more important than a lack of material resources, and that the focus on desegregation diverted attention from the real problem, low achievement.
Former Madison School District Superintendent Art Rainwater served in Kansas City prior to his time in Madison.
This is rather astonishing, given the amount of money spent in Kansas City.
Covington calls for closing up to 31 schools
Kansas City Superintendent John Covington this afternoon unveiled his sweeping plan to close half of the district’s schools, redistribute grade levels and sell the downtown central office.
Covington presented his proposal to the school board in advance of a series of forums next week where the community will get to weigh in on what would be the largest swath of closures in district history, as well as a major reorganization.
“Folks, it’s going to hurt,” Covington told an overflow audience. “It’s going to be painful, but if we work together, we’re going to get through it.”
Covington wants to be able to complete the public debate and present a final plan for a vote by the board at its Feb. 24 meeting.
The board and the community have a lot to digest over the next 10 days.
The proposal calls for:
•29 to 31 of the district’s 60 schools would close, including Westport High and Central Middle.
Related: Money And School Performance: Lessons from the Kansas City Desegregation Experiment:
For decades critics of the public schools have been saying, “You can’t solve educational problems by throwing money at them.” The education establishment and its supporters have replied, “No one’s ever tried.” In Kansas City they did try. To improve the education of black students and encourage desegregation, a federal judge invited the Kansas City, Missouri, School District to come up with a cost-is-no-object educational plan and ordered local and state taxpayers to find the money to pay for it.
Kansas City spent as much as $11,700 per pupil–more money per pupil, on a cost of living adjusted basis, than any other of the 280 largest districts in the country. The money bought higher teachers’ salaries, 15 new schools, and such amenities as an Olympic-sized swimming pool with an underwater viewing room, television and animation studios, a robotics lab, a 25-acre wildlife sanctuary, a zoo, a model United Nations with simultaneous translation capability, and field trips to Mexico and Senegal. The student-teacher ratio was 12 or 13 to 1, the lowest of any major school district in the country.
The results were dismal. Test scores did not rise; the black-white gap did not diminish; and there was less, not greater, integration.
The Kansas City experiment suggests that, indeed, educational problems can’t be solved by throwing money at them, that the structural problems of our current educational system are far more important than a lack of material resources, and that the focus on desegregation diverted attention from the real problem, low achievement.
Former Madison School District Superintendent Art Rainwater served in Kansas City prior to his time in Madison.
This is rather astonishing, given the amount of money spent in Kansas City.
‘Algebra-for-All’ Push Found to Yield Poor Results
Spurred by a succession of reports pointing to the importance of algebra as a gateway to college, educators and policymakers embraced “algebra for all” policies in the 1990s and began working to ensure that students take the subject by 9th grade or earlier.
A trickle of studies suggests that in practice, though, getting all students past the algebra hump has proved difficult and has failed, some of the time, to yield the kinds of payoffs educators seek.
Among the newer findings:
• An analysis using longitudinal statewide data on students in Arkansas and Texas found that, for the lowest-scoring 8th graders, even making it one course past Algebra 2 might not be enough to help them become “college and career ready” by the end of high school.
• An evaluation of the Chicago public schools’ efforts to boost algebra coursetaking found that, although more students completed the course by 9th grade as a result of the policy, failure rates increased, grades dropped slightly, test scores did not improve, and students were no more likely to attend college when they left the system.
Related: Madison School District Math Task Force and West High School Math Teachers letter to Isthmus.
Districts turn to arbitration to settle teacher contracts
In an action that’s likely to be repeated across the state, the West Bend School District is preparing to take contract negotiations with its teachers to arbitration, potentially among the first districts to do so since the Legislature removed teacher salary controls that held sway in Wisconsin for 16 years.
District negotiators and representatives for the West Bend Education Association have their first mediation session scheduled for next week, the first step they need to take before they can proceed to binding arbitration.
Administrators say they would prefer being able to resolve their issues with the teachers union by settling a contract through the mediation process. But they also say they are willing to go to arbitration if needed.
“We’re not afraid of it,” said Bill Bracken, labor relations coordinator for Davis & Kuelthau, which is representing the school district.
Other districts apparently aren’t afraid either. At least a couple of school districts outside southeastern Wisconsin are getting ready to certify their final offers after already going through the mediation process, indicating binding arbitration is probable, said Scott Mikesh, a staff attorney with the Wisconsin Association of School Boards.
On Friday, the Elmbrook School District and its teachers union announced they were filing for mediation help in their contract negotiations, although Assistant Superintendent Christine Hedstrom said the two sides were not filing for help with the state and won’t automatically go to arbitration if they reach deadlock.
Related: Madison School District & Madison Teachers Union Reach Tentative Agreement: 3.93% Increase Year 1, 3.99% Year 2; Base Rate $33,242 Year 1, $33,575 Year 2: Requires 50% MTI 4K Members and will “Review the content and frequency of report cards”.
It would be interesting to compare contracts/proposals among similarly sized Districts.
Considering Wisconsin Teacher Licensing “Flexibility”
Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction:
In classrooms across Wisconsin, students learn mathematics, reading, social studies, art, science, and other subjects through integrated projects that show great promise for increased academic achievement. The catch: the collaboration between students and teachers often involves multiple academic subjects, which can present licensing issues for school districts.
“There is no question that parents and students want innovative programs,” said State Superintendent Tony Evers. “The reality of some of today’s educational approaches requires that we look at our licensing regulations to increase flexibility and expand routes to certification to ensure that these programs are taught by highly qualified teachers.”
Related, by Janet Mertz: “An Email to Madison Superintendent Dan Nerad on Math Teacher Hiring Criteria”
Reading Recovery: Effectiveness & Program Description
US Department of Education, Institute of Education Sciences, via a kind reader’s email:
No studies of Reading Recovery® that fall within the scope of the English Language Learners (ELL) review protocol meet What Works Clearinghouse (WWC) evidence standards. The lack of studies meeting WWC evidence standards means that, at this time, the WWC is unable to draw any conclusions based on research about the effectiveness or ineffectiveness of Reading Recovery® on ELL.
Reading Recovery® is a short-term tutoring intervention designed to serve the lowest-achieving (bottom 20%) first-grade students. The goals of Reading Recovery® include: promoting literacy skills; reducing the number of first-grade students who are struggling to read; and preventing long-term reading difficulties. Reading Recovery® supplements classroom teaching with one-to-one tutoring sessions, generally conducted as pull-out sessions during the school day. The tutoring, which is conducted by trained Reading Recovery® teachers, takes place for 30 minutes a day over a period of 12 to 20 weeks.
Homework-tracking Web sites won’t work without teacher input
My former Post colleague Tracy Thompson has two daughters in a Washington area school district. I promised not to say which one. It doesn’t matter, because the issue she raises involves all high-tech schools, of which we have many.
People aren’t using the new Web features designed to help families. Is it because parents like me are technophobes? Not entirely. The reluctant participants who concern Thompson are teachers.
Both of Thompson’s kids have attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder. They have trouble getting their work done. Her school district, like several in the area, has Web sites on which parents can see their children’s assignments. That way, they cannot be fooled by sly evasions when they ask their children, sitting in front of the TV, whether they have any homework.
Thompson was delighted to discover the Web homework schedules when her older daughter was a sixth-grader. Disappointment followed, she said, when “I found out only about half of her teachers used it. Some teachers were weeks behind in updating the info. My older daughter is off to high school next year and has matured amazingly over the past three years, so I don’t have to worry that much about her stuff anymore. But now my younger daughter is in third grade, and I am in my second year of trying to get her teachers to use the Web.”
Related Infinite Campus and the Madison School District. Read the Middle School Report Card Report, which includes information on the District’s use of Infinite Campus.
Wisconsin Race to the Top: Governor/DPI Letter and “Memorandum of Understanding”
via a kind reader’s email; Letter from Governor Doyle and Department of Public Instruction Superintendent Tony Evers [107K PDF]:
We are excited to invite you to participate in Wisconsin’s Race to the Top application to the federal government. Through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, President Obama and Congress provided $4 billion in competitive grant funding to states that move forward with innovations and reform in education.
Earlier this fall, at our request, the Wisconsin Legislature passed bills to make Wisconsin both eligible and more competitive for the Race to the Top grants. Now our local school district leaders – school board members, superintendents, principals, teachers, and other staff – need to prepare their district for participation in Wisconsin’s grant application. Enclosed is the Race to the Top district memorandum of understanding (MOU) that the federal government requires participating districts to sign as part of the state’s Race to the Top grant application. The MOU provides a framework of collaboration between districts and the state articulating the specific roles and responsibilities necessary to implement an approved Race to the Top district grant.
The MOU is divided into two parts – Exhibit I and Exhibit II. To receive any Race to the Top funding, a district must agree to the activities in Exhibit I. Districts that agree to Exhibit I are eligible, if they so choose, to participate in Exhibit II. In Exhibit II districts will receive additional funding for participating in the additional activities. Exhibit I is included in this information and Exhibit II will be forthcoming in the very near future.
“Memorandum of Understanding” [208K PDF]:
I’m told that Madison’s potential intake of “Race to the Top” funds is less than 1% of the current $400MM budget.
Related: US National Debt Tops Debt Limit.
Value-Added Education in the Race to the Top
Bill Clinton may have invented triangulation – the art of finding a “third way” out of a policy dilemma – but U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan is practicing it to make desperately needed improvements in K-12 education. Unfortunately, his promotion of value-added education through “Race to the Top” grants to states could be thrown under the bus by powerful teachers’ unions that view reforms more for how they affect pay and job security than whether they improve student learning.
The traditional view of education holds that it is more process than product. Educators design a process, hire teachers and administrators to run it, put students through it and consider it a success. The focus is on the inputs – how much can we spend, what curriculum shall we use, what class size is best – with very little on measuring outputs, whether students actually learn. The popular surveys of America’s best schools and colleges reinforce this, measuring resources and reputation, not results. As they say, Harvard University has good graduates because it admits strong applicants, not necessarily because of what happens in the educational process.
In the last decade, the federal No Child Left Behind program has ushered in a new era of testing and accountability, seeking to shift the focus to outcomes. But this more businesslike approach does not always fit a people-centered field such as education. Some students test well, and others do not. Some schools serve a disproportionately high number of students who are not well prepared. Even in good schools, a system driven by testing and accountability incentivizes teaching to the test, neglecting other important and interesting ways to engage and educate students. As a result, policymakers and educators have been ambivalent, at best, about the No Child Left Behind regime.
“Value Added Assessment” is underway in Madison, though the work is based in the oft-criticized state WKCE examinations.
Wisconsin Education reform package produces odd alliances
To even be eligible for the funds, however, Obama and U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan had said that Wisconsin would have to repeal its “firewall” law that banned the use of student scores in teacher evaluations.
In his remarks, Obama acknowledged that eliminating the law was controversial in some places but said it was a necessary first step toward bringing a new accountability to classrooms, especially with struggling students.
Normally, that would be a message the Wisconsin Association of School Boards would be eager to hear. But instead, the so-called firewall reform bill passed by the Legislature is a failure in the group’s eyes because it doesn’t allow school districts to use student test scores to discipline or dismiss a teacher whose performance doesn’t measure up.
“While the wording of the legislation might meet the letter of the law, we don’t think it really addresses its spirit,” says Dan Rossmiller, a spokesman for the school boards association.
And because the new law requires collective bargaining over any teacher evaluation plan that includes student test scores, Rossmiller says the school boards association believes the requirement would make the process too unwieldy. “We think it will make it harder to use test scores to evaluate teacher effectiveness, not easier,” he adds. “For that reason, I don’t think we’ll be recommending that school districts try to develop evaluation plans for teachers that include using test scores.”
But Mary Bell, president of WEAC, says the new firewall reform law’s most important purpose is to improve teacher effectiveness and that a focus on using data in a punitive way misses the point.
Classic legislative sausage making.
A Look at the University of Wisconsin’s Value Added Research Center:
Rob Meyer can’t help but get excited when he hears President Barack Obama talking about the need for states to start measuring whether their teachers, schools and districts are doing enough to help students succeed.
“What he’s talking about is what we are doing,” says Meyer, director of the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Value-Added Research Center.
If states hope to secure a piece of Obama’s $4.35 billion “Race to the Top” stimulus money, they’ll have to commit to using research data to evaluate student progress and the effectiveness of teachers, schools and districts.
Crunching numbers and producing statistical models that measure these things is what Meyer and his staff of 50 educators, researchers and various stakeholders do at the Value-Added Research Center, which was founded in 2004. These so-called “value-added” models of evaluation are designed to measure the contributions teachers and schools make to student academic growth. This method not only looks at standardized test results, but also uses statistical models to take into account a range of factors that might affect scores – including a student’s race, English language ability, family income and parental education level.
“What the value-added model is designed to do is measure the effect and contribution of the educational unit on a student, whether it’s a classroom, a team of teachers, a school or a program,” says Meyer. Most other evaluation systems currently in use simply hold schools accountable for how many students at a single point in time are rated proficient on state tests.
Much more on “value added assessment” here, along with the oft-criticized WKCE test, the soft foundation of much of this local work.
An Alabama High School Makes Literacy a Schoolwide Job
An Alabama school that is seen as a national model shows how to teach reading and writing in every subject.
[and the wordless picture books have been a big hit, too!!…Will Fitzhugh]
“The staff cobbled together an approach that incorporates methods and materials used with younger children, such as art projects and wordless picture books, into high-school-level instruction. The idea is to use engaging activities and easy-to-access materials as door-openers to more complex subject matter.
The result is a high school that ‘looks more like an elementary school,’ Mr. Ledbetter said, because teachers find that letting students sketch, cut out, or fold their ideas seems to work well.”
Catherine Gewertz:
The sheep’s-brain dissections are going rather well. Scalpels in hand, high school students are slicing away at the preserved organs and buzzing about what they find. It’s obvious that this lesson has riveted their interest. What’s not so obvious is that it has been as much about literacy as about science.
In preparing for her class in human anatomy and physiology to perform the dissections, Karen Stewart had the students read articles on the brain’s structure and use computer-presentation software to share what they learned. She used “guided notetaking” strategies, explicitly teaching the teenagers how to read the materials and take notes on key scientific concepts. She reinforced those ideas with more articles chosen to grab their interest, such as one on how chocolate affects the brain.
The class also watched and discussed a recent episode of the hit television show “Grey’s Anatomy,” about a patient with an injury to one side of the brain. The students’ work is graded not just on their grasp of the science, but also on the quality of their research and writing about it.
Ms. Stewart isn’t the only teacher who weaves literacy instruction into classes here at Buckhorn High School. It pops up on every corridor. A teacher of Spanish shows his students a self-portrait of the Mexican painter Frida Kahlo and asks what cues it conveys about her culture. A physical education teacher brings his class to the school library to study body mass. And a mathematics teacher burrows into the Latin roots of that discipline’s vocabulary to help students see their related meanings, and uses “concept maps”–visual depictions of ideas–to help them grasp an idea’s steps or parts.
Literacy is shot through everything at this 1,350-student Alabama school in a former cotton field 10 miles south of the Tennessee state line. It’s been an obsession for a decade, ever since school leaders tested their students and found that one-third of the entering freshmen were reading at or below the 7th grade level, many at the 4th or 5th grade level.
“Those numbers completely changed my professional life,” said Sarah Fanning, who oversees curriculum and instruction at Buckhorn High. “I couldn’t eat. I couldn’t sleep. Each of those numbers had a face, and that face went to bed with me at night.”
‘Relentless From the Beginning’
The Buckhorn staff immersed itself in figuring out how to improve student learning by boosting literacy skills in all subjects, something few high schools do now, and even fewer were doing then. That work has made the school a national model. Hosting visitors and making presentations–including at a White House conference in 2006–have become routine parts of its staff members’ schedules.
Adolescent-literacy work such as that at Buckhorn High is taking on a rising profile nationally, as educators search for ways to improve student achievement. Increasingly, scholars urge teachers to abandon the “inoculation” model of literacy, which holds that K-3 students “learn to read,” and older students “read to learn.” Older students are in dire need of sophisticated reading and writing instruction tailored to each discipline, those scholars say, and without it, they risk being unable to access more-complex material. The Carnegie Corporation of New York recently released a report urging that adolescent literacy become a national priority. (“Literacy Woes Put in Focus,” Sept. 23, 2009.)
Selected literacy resources at Buckhorn High School:
Professional Reading
Reading Reminders, Jim Burke
Deeper Reading, Kelly Gallagher
Content Area Reading, Richard R. Vacca and Jo Anne L. Vacca
I Read It, But I Don’t Get It, Cris Tovani
Do I Really Have to Teach Reading? Cris Tovani
Wordless Picture Books
Anno’s Journey, Mitsumasa Anno
Free Fall, David Wiesner
Tuesday, David Wiesner
Freight Train, Donald Crews
Zoom, Istvan Banyai
Content-Area Picture Books and Graphic Novels
Chester Comix series, Bentley Boyd
Just Plain Fancy, Patricia Polacco
Harlem, Walter Dean Myers
The Greedy Triangle, Marilyn Burns
High-Interest, Easy-to-Understand Books for Adolescents
A Child Called “It,” Dave Pelzer
Hole in My Life, Jack Gantos
Crank, Ellen Hopkins
Burned, Ellen Hopkins
The “Twilight Saga” collection, Stephenie Meyer
The “Soundings” and “Currents” series, Orca Publishing
The Bluford High series, Townsend Press
Source: Buckhorn High School
Spotlight on schools
Wisconsin State Journal Editorial:
President Barack Obama handed out some difficult assignments Wednesday at a Madison middle school.
Elected leaders, educators, parents and students need to get these tasks done. The future of Wisconsin and our nation is at stake.
Obama didn’t sugar coat what needs to occur. He talked tough about closing failing schools and firing bad teachers. He told parents and students they were more responsible than anyone for student success, which hinges on high expectations and follow-through.
Yet the “educator in chief” also offered reassurance and rewards, including a chance to win hundreds of millions of dollars in competitive grants.
It’s time to act.
A day after Obama’s visit to Wright Middle School on Madison’s South Side, the Wisconsin Legislature barely approved a bill allowing student test scores to be used in teacher evaluations – something Obama specifically called for. Obama’s Education Secretary Arne Duncan had called Wisconsin’s ban on tying teachers to test data “ridiculous.”
Comments on Obama & Race to the Top
The Department of Education will be accepting proposals for projects aimed at four reform areas:
To reverse the pervasive dumbing-down of academic standards and assessments by states, Race to the Top winners need to work toward adopting common, internationally bench marked K-12 standards that prepare students for success in college and careers.
To close the data gap — which now handcuffs districts from tracking growth in student learning and improving classroom instruction — states will need to monitor advances in student achievement and identify effective instructional practices. To boost the quality of teachers and principals, especially in high-poverty schools and hard-to-staff subjects, states and districts should be able to identify effective teachers and principals — and have strategies for rewarding and retaining more top-notch teachers and improving or replacing ones who aren’t up to the job. Finally, to turn around the lowest-performing schools, states and districts must be ready to institute far-reaching reforms, from replacing staff and leadership to changing the school culture There is one issue standing in the way for Wisconsin: a state law that prevents standardized test results from being used to evaluate teachers, which makes WI ineligible for “Race to the Top” funds. A bill in the legislature aims to repeal that law.
Teacher Performance: White House Press Gaggle by Secretary of Education Arne Duncan Aboard Air Force One 11/4/2009
Q Secretary Duncan, can you articulate why it’s important to link student achievement data with teacher performance, and also why it’s important to lift these caps on the charter schools?
SECRETARY DUNCAN: I’ll take one at a time. On the first one — it’s amazing, I always use the California example because California is a big state — California has 300,000 teachers — 300,000 teachers. The top 10 percent, the top 30,000 teachers in California, would be world-class, would be among the best teachers in the world. The bottom 10 percent in California, the bottom 30,000, probably need to find another line of work, another profession. And nobody can tell you of those 300,000 teachers who’s in what category. There’s no recognition.
And so what I fundamentally believe is that great teaching matters and we need to be able to identify those teachers who routinely are making an extraordinary difference in students’ lives. And to say that teaching has no impact on student performance, on student achievement, just absolutely makes no sense to me. It absolutely degrades the profession.
So the counterargument — so right now as a country basically zero percent of student achievement relates to teacher evaluation. I think that’s a problem. I also think 100 percent — if all you do is look at a test score to evaluate a teacher, I think that’s a problem. So zero is a problem; 100 is a problem. As a country, we’re here, we’re trying to move to a middle point where you would evaluate teachers on multiple measures — that’s really important — not just on a single test score, but, yes, student achievement would be a part of what you look at in evaluating a teacher.
And so whether it’s an individual teacher, whether it’s a school, whether it’s a school district, whether it’s a state, the whole thing as a country we need to do is we need to accelerate the rate of change. We have to get better faster. And there are teachers every single year — just to give you an illustration — there are teachers every single year where the average child in their class is gaining two years of growth — two years of growth per year of instruction. That is herculean work. Those teachers are the unsung heroes in our society. And nobody can tell you who those teachers are.
There are some schools that do that, not just one miraculous teacher or one miraculous student. There are schools that year after year produce students that are showing extraordinary gains. Shouldn’t we know that? Isn’t that something valuable? Shouldn’t we be learning from them?
And the flip side of it, if you have teachers or schools where students are falling further and further behind each year, I think we need to know that as well. And so we just want to have an open, honest conversation, but at the end of the day, teachers should never be evaluated on a single test score. I want to be absolutely clear there should always be multiple measures. But student achievement has to be a piece of what teachers are evaluated on.
And there’s a recent study that came out, The New Teacher Project, that talked about this Widget Effect where 99 percent of teachers were rated as superior. It’s not reality.
On your second point, on charter caps, I’ve been really clear I’m not a fan of charter schools, I’m a fan of good charter schools. And what we need in this country is just more good schools. We need more good elementary, more good middle, more good high schools. No second grader knows whether they’re going to a charter school, or a gifted school, or traditional school, or magnet school. They know, does my teacher care about me? Am I safe? Is there high expectations? Does the principal know who I am?
We need more good schools. And where you have — where you have good charters, we need to replicate them and to learn from them and to grow. Where you have bad charters, we need to close them down and hold them accountable. And so this is not let a thousand flowers bloom, this is trying to take what is being successful and grow.
And what I would say is if something is working, if you reduce — we talked about the graduation rate, if you’re doing something to reduce the dropout rate and increase the graduation rate, would you put a cap on that strategy? Would you ever say that we’re going to cap the number of students who can take AP classes this year? We’re going to limit the number of kids who take — we’re going to limit the number of kids that graduate? We would never do that.
So if something is working, if that innovation is helping us get better, why would you put an artificial cap on it? So let’s let that innovation flourish, but at the same time actually have a high bar and hold folks accountable.
So I was a big fan of successful charter schools in Chicago when I was a superintendent there, but I also closed three charter schools for academic failure. And you need both. Good charters are a big piece of the answer. Bad charters perpetuate the status quo and we need to challenge that.
Prior to the President’s visit, I emailed a number of elected officials and education stakeholders seeking commentary on the Wright Middle School visit. One of my inquiries went to the Wisconsin Charter Schools Association. I asked for a statement on charters in Madison. They declined to make a public statement, which, perhaps is a statement in and of itself.
Remarks by The President and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan in Discussion with Students
1:05 P.M. CST
SECRETARY DUNCAN: Well, we’re thrilled to be here and this is a school that’s getting better and better, and you guys are working really, really hard. And we’ve been lucky. We have a President here who has got a tough, tough job. Being President is tough without the — he’s fighting two wars, a really, really tough economy — I like your shirt.
STUDENT: Thanks. (Laughter.)
SECRETARY DUNCAN: And what amazes me is that week after week, month after month, he just keeps coming back to education, and he’s absolutely passionate about it. He and his wife, the First Lady Michelle Obama, received great educations. Neither one was born with a lot of money, but they worked really hard and had great teachers and great principals and made the most of it. And now he’s our President. So it’s a pretty remarkable journey. The only reason he’s the President is because he got a great education.
So we’re thrilled to be here. He might want to say a few things, and looks like you guys have questions for him. And so we’ll be quick and we’ll open up to your questions.
THE PRESIDENT: Well, it is good to see all of you. Thanks so much for having us.
First of all, I’ve got a great Secretary of Education in Arne Duncan. So he helps school districts all across the country in trying to figure out how to improve what’s going on in the schools. And let me just pick up on something that Arne said earlier.
I was really lucky to have a great education. I didn’t have a lot of money. My parents weren’t famous. In fact, my father left when I was two years old, so I really didn’t grow up with a father in the house; mostly it was my mom and my grandparents. But they always emphasized education and they were able to send me to good schools, and by working hard I was obviously in a position to do some good stuff.
My wife, Michelle, same thing. She grew up on the South Side of Chicago. Her dad was actually disabled, he had multiple sclerosis, but he still worked every day in a blue collar job. And her mom didn’t work, and when she did she was a secretary. But because she worked really hard in school she ended up getting a scholarship to Princeton and to Harvard Law School and ended up really being able to achieve a lot.
So that’s the reason why we are spending a lot of time talking to folks like you, because we want all of you to understand that there’s nothing more important than what you’re doing right here at this school. And Wright has a great reputation, this school is improving all the time, but ultimately how good a school is depends on how well you guys are doing.
And the main message that I just wanted to deliver to you is, every single one of you could be doing the same kinds of things that Arne is doing or I’m doing or you could be running a company or you can be inventing a product or you could — look, anything you can imagine, you can accomplish, but the only way you do it is if you’re succeeding here in school. And we are spending a lot of money to try to improve school buildings and put computers in and make sure that your teachers are well trained and that they are getting the support they need.
So we’re working really hard to try to reform the schools, but ultimately what matters most is how badly you want a good education. If you think that somehow somebody is just going to — you can tilt your head and somebody is going to pour education in your ear, that’s just not how it works. The only way that you end up being in a position to achieve is if you want it, if inside you want it.
And part of the reason why we wanted to talk to you guys is, you’re right at the point now in your lives where what you do is really going to start mattering. My daughters are a little younger than you — Malia is 11, Sasha is eight — but when you’re in grade school, you’re playing — hopefully somebody is making sure you’re doing your homework when you get it, but to some degree you’re still just kind of learning how to learn.
By the time you get to middle school, you’re now going to be confronted with a lot of choices. You’re going to start entering those teenage years where there are a lot of distractions and in some places people will say you don’t need to worry about school or it’s uncool to be smart or — you know, all kinds of things. And, look, I’ll be honest, I went through some of that when I was in high school and I made some mistakes and had some setbacks.
So I just want everybody to understand right now that nothing is going to be more important to you than just being hungry for knowledge. And if all of you decide to do that, then there are going to be teachers and principals and secretaries of education who are going to be there to help you. So hopefully you guys will take that all to heart.
All right. Okay. Now we’re going to kick out everybody so I can let you — you guys can ask me all the really tough questions without having the press here.
END
1:09 P.M CST
Much more on the President’s visit to Madison’s Wright Middle School.
Will reforming teacher salaries bring mile high results?
Denver is to reform in the way teachers are paid what Milwaukee is to private school vouchers: It’s the place that’s broken a lot of new ground and been a magnet for national attention.
With the likelihood that the Wisconsin Legislature will take important steps in the next few weeks that will substantially increase the prospects for changing the classic system for teacher salaries, here’s some advice for Wisconsin from Brad Jupp, a central architect of the Denver system:
“The most important thing to do is not to be so cautious that you don’t move forward,” Jupp said. “Breaking the barrier doesn’t kill you.”
Nationwide for almost a century, salaries of teachers have been set almost entirely by how many years a person has taught and whether the person has a master’s degree or certain amounts of college credits beyond a bachelor’s degree. Research has pretty firmly established that there is little, if any, correlation between teaching quality and those traditional measurements.
The political appeal of changing the way teachers are paid is huge now. The idea of paying good teachers more than bad teachers or using pay as an incentive to improve educational results has become popular across the political spectrum. President Barack Obama is scheduled to visit Madison this week to speak on education, and you can bet he will hit on this point.
New Global Academy to offer specialized courses to students in eight Dane County school districts
The initial program in biomedicine would include courses in the principles of biomedical sciences; human body systems; medical interventions; and science research. The classes likely would be taught by high school teachers, but would incorporate business and academic experts to help teach, offer apprenticeships and career placement.
The academy’s location won’t be decided until leaders know how many students are interested in the program. However, one possibility is holding classes at MATC’s West campus in the former Famous Footwear building, Reis said.
Students – organizers hope about 150 – would travel from their respective high schools to Madison’s Far West Side every day for the courses, which would be part of the academy’s two-year programs. Depending on the interest in the biomedical class, three sections would be taught during the day and possibly one in the evening, Reis said.
Offering a night class would maximize the use of the facility and offer some flexibility to students who live farther outside of Madison, he said.
Verona, Middleton Cross-Plains, Belleville, McFarland, Mount Horeb, Oregon, Wisconsin Heights and Madison school districts have agreed to participate in the academy.
Related: Credit for non Madison School District Courses.
Dyslexia Awareness Videos & We can and must help kids with dyslexia
To promote greater knowledge and understanding of dyslexia and related learning disabilities, The International Dyslexia Association (IDA) designated the month of October as National Dyslexia Awareness Month. “Awareness is key with learning disabilities because if identified early enough, their impacts can be minimized through intervention and effective teaching.”
In order to increase awareness of dyslexia, Wisconsin Literacy posted two videos on its website created by Sun Prairie Cable Access. You will need Quicktime installed on your computer to view the video files. Download it for free here: www.apple.com/quicktime/download.
Living and Learning with Dyslexia: Hope and Possibilities
(Time 36:59)
Dr. Julie Gocey leads a panel discussion on dyslexia with Cheryl Ward (Wisconsin Branch of the International Dyslexia Association), Layla Coleman (Wisconsin Literacy, Inc.), Pam Heyde (Dyslexia Reading Therapist) and Margery Katz (Dyslexia Reading Therapist). The program covers a variety of topics including science-based, multisensory instruction for kids and adults; obstacles for identifying individuals with dyslexia; and lack of training of teachers. A college student with dyslexia shares strategies for academic success.
Educators, parents and health professionals must work together to improve literacy for ALL students in Wisconsin. It is well known that early literacy is one of the most powerful predictors of school success, gainful employment and many measures of health.
For that reason, the sincerest expression of child advocacy is to ensure that ALL students in Wisconsin have the opportunity to become proficient readers. In my experience as a pediatrician, co-founder of the Learning Difference Network, and as a parent, current policies and practices do not routinely provide the 10 percent to 17 percent of our students who have some degree of dyslexia with adequate opportunities for literacy.
Dyslexia is a language-based learning problem, or disability if severe. The impact that this neurobiological, highly heritable condition has on learning to read, write and spell cannot be underestimated.
Dyslexia is the best understood and most studied of all learning difficulties. There is clear evidence that the brains of dyslexic readers function differently than the brains of typical readers. But the good news is this: Reading instruction from highly skilled teachers or tutors who use evidence-based techniques can change how the brain processes print and nearly ALL students can become proficient readers.
Early intervention is critical to successful outcomes, but there is a disconnect between research and practice on many levels.
Current obstacles include myths about dyslexia, lack of early identification and a need for educators to be given training in the science of reading and multi-sensory, systematic, language-based instruction. This is critical for students with dyslexia, but can be beneficial to all learners. For those of us who are able to pay for private testing and instruction for our children, the outcomes can be phenomenal. Unfortunately, where poverty and its associated ills make daily life a struggle, this expert instruction is not routinely available.
Families who ask school personnel about dyslexia are often referred to a physician, who in turn sends them back to school for this educational problem. Educational testing is often denied coverage from insurance companies, though the implications for health and wellness are clear. Unfortunately, parents may be left without useful information from anyone, and appropriate treatment – excellent reading instruction – is further delayed.
October is Dyslexia Awareness Month. On Thursday, Oct. 22, there will be a noon rally in the Capitol rotunda to raise awareness about the need to improve reading instruction for students with dyslexia and for all struggling readers in Wisconsin.
State Rep. Keith Ripp, R-Lodi, is introducing bills this week to help identify and help children with dyslexia. One bill calls for screening for specific skills to find kids with a high chance of struggling to learn to read. The other bill aims to improve teacher training to deal with reading problems.
There is too much evidence describing the science of reading, dyslexia and the costs of illiteracy to continue without change. Parents who suspect dyslexia must not be dissuaded from advocating for their children; keep searching until you find help that works.
Health professionals must seek the latest information on this common condition in order to support families and evaluate for related conditions. Educators must seek out training to understand this brain-based condition that requires educational care. The information is solid. We must work together to give ALL our kids the opportunity to read and succeed.
Dr. Julie Gocey is a pediatrician and a clinical assistant professor in the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health and also a co-founder of the Learning Difference Network
via a Margery Katz email.
US Education Secretary Arne Duncans Education School Accountability Speech
What the coverage leaves out is that Duncan won’t be anywhere near the first to tout the importance of teaching or lament the sad state of teacher prep programs. Or the first to mention Alverno, Emporia State, residency programs, the Levine report.
In addition, there are precious few real details in Duncan’s speech about what if any means the Secretary is going to try and use to make ed schools change their evil ways. He mentions changes will come as part of NCLB reauthorization, but that’s a long way off. He mentions teacher quality partnership grants, but that’s less than $200M. No bold specifics like rating ed schools based on graduates’ performance or longevity, or limiting Pell grant eligibility to ed schools that meet certain performance characteristics.
To Duncan’s credit, he notes that this is a quality problem, not a teacher shortage, and that alt cert programs train fewer than 10K candidates a year (out of 200K overall).But it’s just a speech. A very nice, somewhat long, quote-laden speech that someone finally sent me this morning. In other words, in thiss balloon-boy era, it’s news! The text of the speech is below. See for yourself.
Secretary Duncan singles out Wisconsin-based Alverno College (among other institutions) and the state of Louisiana for praise. I also discuss both Alverno College and Louisiana’s teacher preparation accountability system in my policy brief.
“By almost any standard, many, if not most of the nation’s 1,450 schools, colleges, and departments of education are doing a mediocre job of preparing teachers for the realities of the 21st century classroom,” Duncan said today in a speech at Columbia University in New York.
Duncan said hundreds of teachers have told him their colleges didn’t provide enough hands-on classroom training or instruct them in the use of data to improve student learning. He also cited a 2006 report by Arthur Levine, former president of Columbia’s Teachers College, in which 61 percent of educators surveyed said their colleges didn’t offer enough instruction to prepare them for the classroom.
The nation’s 95,000 public schools will have to hire as many as 1 million educators in the next five years as teachers and principals from the so-called baby-boom generation retire, according to Education Department projections. More than half of the new teachers will have been trained at education colleges, Duncan said.
While Secretary of Education Arne Duncan today called for the reform of college programs that educate
teachers, Center for Education Reform president Jeanne Allen said that Duncan must back up his rhetoric with strong provisions regarding teacher quality at the federal level. Allen recently released guidance to the federal government urging tough regulations on federal funds used for state teacher quality efforts.
In response to Duncan’s speech today at Columbia University’s Teachers College, Allen praised the Education Secretary’s demand for revolutionary changes to the way that colleges of education prepare educators, saying that his remarks should serve as a wake up call to teacher unions, education bureaucrats, and entrenched special interests who would block data-driven performance reviews of teachers in an effort to monitor teacher quality throughout their careers.
Ripon School District Administrator Richard Zimman:
“Beware of legacy practices (most of what we do every day is the maintenance of the status quo), @12:40 minutes into the talk – the very public institutions intended for student learning has become focused instead on adult employment. I say that as an employee. Adult practices and attitudes have become embedded in organizational culture governed by strict regulations and union contracts that dictate most of what occurs inside schools today. Any impetus to change direction or structure is met with swift and stiff resistance. It’s as if we are stuck in a time warp keeping a 19th century school model on life support in an attempt to meet 21st century demands.” Zimman went on to discuss the Wisconsin DPI’s vigorous enforcement of teacher licensing practices and provided some unfortunate math & science teacher examples (including the “impossibility” of meeting the demand for such teachers (about 14 minutes)). He further cited exploding teacher salary, benefit and retiree costs eating instructional dollars (“Similar to GM”; “worry” about the children given this situation).
Duncan to ed schools: End ‘mediocre’ training
Education Secretary Arne Duncan, in prepared remarks circulating in advance of a speech Thursday, accuses many of the nation’s schools of education of doing “a mediocre job of preparing teachers for the realities of the 21st-century classroom.”
My colleague Nick Anderson, on the national education beat, and I found the advance text a meaty read.
Duncan’s speech, to be delivered at Columbia University, goes further than any other I can remember from an education secretary in ripping into the failure of education schools to ready teachers for the challenges of the day, particularly the demand for academic growth in all students.
Duncan’s speech points out two major deficiencies in education school teaching with which most critics would agree: They do a bad job teaching students how to manage disruptive classrooms, particularly in low-income neighborhoods, and they don’t offer much in the way of training new teachers how to use data to improve their classroom results.
The excerpts of the speech we were given, however, did not appear to address one part of the classroom management problem that is often raised when successful teachers explain how they learned to keep students in order. These teachers often say they learned by doing, by facing a class alone without help, trying one thing after another until something worked for them. Education school deans have been critical of the Teach for America program, which pushes recent college graduates into classrooms with only a few weeks training, but teachers who have survived that toss-them-into-the-water approach say it works better than class management classes at their teacher’s colleges.
Locally, the UW-Madison School of Education has been involved in many Madison School District initiatives.
On Teacher Unions, Political Power and Reform
Earlier this year Robert Chanin, the recently retired general counsel for the National Education Association, discussed the effectiveness of teachers unions at a gathering in San Diego:
Despite what some of us would like to believe, it is not because of our creative ideas. It is not because of the merit of our positions. It is not because we care about children. And it is not because we have a vision of a great public school for every child.
NEA and its affiliates are effective advocates because we have power.You can see that portion of his 20 minute speech here:
Related: the most recent proposed agreement between the Madison School District and Madison Teacher’s, Inc. , local comments and the expression of political power through the current Democrat majority in the Wisconsin legislature via the elimination of “revenue limits and economic conditions from collective bargaining arbitration”.
Rethinking “Small Learning Communities”: A review of the small-schools structure at North Eugene High nears
Four years after North Eugene High School set out to reinvent itself, the Eugene School Board wants to take stock. [Eugene School Board Goals, Superintendent’s Proposed Goals.]
Within the next month or two, the district — at the board’s behest — will hire an individual or team of educational researchers to try to gauge how well North Eugene’s “small schools” structure is serving students.
“It’s kind of consistent with board goals; we try to have measurable results,” board Chairman Craig Smith said. “We decided that, since the first class has come through, it’s time to see where we are in terms of progress.”
Showing gains — lower dropout rates, improved student achievement, better attendance and greater college readiness — has been difficult at many schools that have taken North Eugene’s path.
Championed and chiefly bankrolled by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the small schools movement aimed to lift student achievement by creating highly personalized schools where all students were known and held to high standards and teachers worked closely together.
But after investing a goodly share of $2 billion into the creation of hundreds of small schools across the country, the Gates Foundation has shifted direction in its high school reform strategy, focusing less on structure and more on effective teaching and curriculum.
“The structural and design changes in schools we focused on in our earlier work simply did not yield those gains,” Vicki Phillips, the foundation’s education director, told Congress last May.
A growing number of grant recipients have dissolved their small schools and are going back to a traditional model, sometimes with some small-school elements intact. Most cite disappointing results or burdensome operating costs, or both. Those schools include Portland’s Madison High School and Mountlake Terrace High School in the Seattle suburbs, a flagship of the initiative that staff members from North visited during the planning phase.
Related:
- Clusty Search: North Eugene High School and the Gates Foundation Small Learning Community Grant.
- Madison School District’s CIO, Kurt Kiefer said recently that:
“smaller learning communities is what they are striving for in high schools. Kiefer says the smaller learning initiative – there is a correlation in decrease in drop out rate with the program.”
- SIS has many, many posts on the controversy over Madison’s implementation of Small Learning Communities.
- Examining the results of Madison West High School’s Small Learning Community Implementation, and its implementation of English 10
Milwaukee Public Schools needs to pick up the pace in reading
Maybe this is the biggest problem facing Milwaukee Public Schools: A panel of national experts ripped reading programs overall in the city, saying they were ineffective, out of date, uncoordinated, led by teachers who were inadequately prepared and who were really doing nothing much to help struggling readers.
Maybe this is the biggest problem facing MPS: That report came nine months ago and the in-the-classroom response so far has been to set four priorities for this school year of breathtaking modesty. Maybe a year from now, there will be big changes, officials say.
We’re talking about reading. Reading. The core skill for success in just about any part of education and in life beyond school. A sore point for MPS for at least a couple decades. Last year, 40% of MPS 10th-graders rated as proficient in reading in state tests, a number in line with a string of prior years.
“The status quo will need to be changed – sometimes dramatically,” said the report from a three-person review team brought in by the state Department of Public Instruction as part of its efforts under federal law to push change in MPS. The report was issued last December, calling for an overhaul of the way reading is taught in MPS – the curriculum used, the way teachers are trained, the way the whole subject is handled from top to bottom.
Since then, an MPS work group was named. The work group got an extension on the time it had to give a draft plan to the DPI. The draft plan was submitted. DPI officials gave some feedback. MPS officials revised their plan. DPI officials took awhile to respond with requests for more changes. It’s late September now. A plan has not been approved. There’s a meeting scheduled in early October.
Related:
- 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 by Ruth Robarts
- Madison schools distort reading data by Mark Seidenberg
- Shameful reading scores for MMSD Sophomores by Ed Blume.
October 16 UPPER MIDWEST GREEN SCHOOLS CONFERENCE
site: NORTHLAND COLLEGE , Ashland, WI
2009 Dates: October 16 (Friday Afternoon Pre-Conference) and October 17 (Saturday Conference)
CONFERENCE PROGRAM & REGISTRATION: Go to Green Charter School Conference Program & Registration Links at Northland College.
CONFERENCE KEYNOTERS:
Connections Human & Natural: What Does It Mean To Be An Educated Person? by William Cronon, Professor of History, Geography, & Environmental Studies, U.W. – Madison
Revitalizing Public Education: Let Teachers Lead the Learning by Joe Graba, Founding Partner, Education / Evolving, forty year professional career in public education most recently as Dean of Hamline University’s Graduate School of Education
SMART By NATURE: Schooling for Sustainability is a new book from the Center for Ecoliteracy . It describes the significance of the emerging green schools sector across the country.
“Smart by Nature is must reading for teachers, school administrators, parents, and the concerned public,” writes leading environmental educator David W. Orr. “It is an encyclopedia of good ideas, principles, and case studies of some of the most exciting developments in education.”
The Green Charter Schools Network and River Crossing Environmental Charter School are featured in Smart By Nature. “We’re all concerned about the environment and sustainability,” says Jim McGrath, GCSNet President. “That’s why we’re doing it — because, really, what could be more important than preparing young people for a sustainable future.”
The book documents with firsthand accounts the success stories of green PK-12 schools in preparing students for future environmental challenges. Smart By Nature is 184 pages with 70 photos, charts and illustrations for $24.95 paper from UCPress.
The Politics of President Obama’s “Back to School Speech” Beamed to Classrooms
Here’s the latest exhibit on how polarized the country is and how much distrust exists of President Obama.
He plans what seems like a simple speech to students around the country on Tuesday to encourage them to do well in school.
But some Republicans are objecting to the back-to-school message, asserting that Obama wants to indoctrinate students.
Florida GOP Chairman Jim Greer said in a statement that he is “absolutely appalled that taxpayer dollars are being used to spread President Obama’s socialist ideology” and “liberal propaganda.”
Wednesday, after the White House announced the speech, the Department of Education followed up with a letter to school principals and a lesson plan.
Critics pointed to the part of the lesson plan that originally recommended having students “write letters to themselves about what they can do to help the president.”
The Department of Education has now changed their supplementary materials on President Obama’s upcoming address to schoolchildren on the importance of education — eliminating a phrase that some conservatives, such as the Florida GOP, happened to have been bashing as evidence of socialist indoctrination in our schools.
In a set of bullet points listed under a heading, “Extension of the Speech,” one of the points used to say: “Write letters to themselves about what they can do to help the president. These would be collected and redistributed at an appropriate later date by the teacher to make students accountable to their goals.”
However, that bullet point now reads as follows: “Write letters to themselves about how they can achieve their short‐term and long‐term education goals. These would be collected and redistributed at an appropriate later date by the teacher to make students accountable to their goals.”
om Horne, Arizona’s superintendent of public instruction, put out his own statement, with an education-oriented critique of the speech and its lesson plans.
Here’s a snippet from his statement:The White House materials call for a worshipful, rather than critical approach to this speech. For example, the White House communication calls for the students to have ‘notable quotes excerpted (and posted in large print on the board),’ and for the students to discuss ‘how will he inspire us,’ among other things. …In general, in keeping with good education practice, students should be taught to read and think critically about statements coming from politicians and historical figures.
Just as it quickly became impossible to have a rationale discussion about health care as August wore on, we could be heading that way on education. If you haven’t heard (don’t get cable news?), President Obama plans to give a speech to the nation’s schoolchildren next week. To accompany it the Department of Education prepared a – gasp – study guide with some ideas for how teachers can use the speech as a, dare I say it, teachable moment.
Conservatives are screaming that this is unprecedented and amounts to indoctrination and a violation of the federal prohibition on involvement in local curricular decisions. Even the usually level-headed Rick Hess has run to the ramparts. We’re getting lectured on indoctrination by the same people who paid national commentators to covertly promote their agenda.
Please. Enough. The only thing this episode shows is how thoroughly broken our politics are. Let’s take the two “issues” in turn.
Michael Alison Chandler & Michael Shear:
The speech, which will be broadcast live from Wakefield High School in Arlington County, was planned as an inspirational message “entirely about encouraging kids to work hard and stay in school,” said White House spokesman Tommy Vietor. Education Secretary Arne Duncan sent a letter to principals nationwide encouraging them to show it.
But the announcement of the speech prompted a frenzied response from some conservatives, who called it an attempt to indoctrinate students, not motivate them.
I think Max Blumenthal provides the right perspective on this political matter:
Although Eisenhower is commonly remembered for a farewell address that raised concerns about the “military-industrial complex,” his letter offers an equally important — and relevant — warning: to beware the danger posed by those seeking freedom from the “mental stress and burden” of democracy.
The story began in 1958, when Eisenhower received a letter from Robert Biggs, a terminally ill World War II veteran. Biggs told the president that he “felt from your recent speeches the feeling of hedging and a little uncertainty.” He added, “We wait for someone to speak for us and back him completely if the statement is made in truth.”
Eisenhower could have discarded Biggs’s note or sent a canned response. But he didn’t. He composed a thoughtful reply. After enduring Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin, who had smeared his old colleague Gen. George C. Marshall as a Communist sympathizer, and having guarded the Republican Party against the newly emergent radical right John Birch Society, which labeled him and much of his cabinet Soviet agents, the president perhaps welcomed the opportunity to expound on his vision of the open society.
“I doubt that citizens like yourself could ever, under our democratic system, be provided with the universal degree of certainty, the confidence in their understanding of our problems, and the clear guidance from higher authority that you believe needed,” Eisenhower wrote on Feb. 10, 1959. “Such unity is not only logical but indeed indispensable in a successful military organization, but in a democracy debate is the breath of life.”
Critical thinking is good for kids and good for society.
I attended a recent Russ Feingold lunch [mp3 audio]. He spoke on a wide range of issues and commendably, took many open forum questions (unlike many elected officials), including mine “How will history view our exploding federalism?”. A fellow luncheon guest asked about Obama’s use of “Czar’s” (operating outside of Senate review and confirmation). Feingold rightly criticized this strategy, which undermines the Constitution.
I would generally not pay much attention to this, but for a friends recent comment that his daughter’s elementary school (Madison School District) teacher assigned six Obama coloring projects last spring.
Wall Street Journal Editorial:
President Obama’s plan to speak to America’s schoolchildren next Tuesday has some Republicans in an uproar. “As the father of four children, I am absolutely appalled that taxpayer dollars are being used to spread President Obama’s socialist ideology,” thunders Jim Greer, chairman of Florida’s Republican Party, in a press release. “President Obama has turned to American’s children to spread his liberal lies, indoctrinating American’s [sic] youngest children before they have a chance to decide for themselves.” Columnists who spy a conspiracy behind every Democrat are also spreading alarm.
This is overwrought, to say the least. According to the Education Department’s Web site, Mr. Obama “will challenge students to work hard, set educational goals, and take responsibility for their learning”–hardly the stuff of the Communist Manifesto or even the Democratic Party platform. America’s children are not so vulnerable that we need to slap an NC-17 rating on Presidential speeches. Given how many minority children struggle in school, a pep talk from the first African-American President could even do some good.
On the other hand, the Department of Education goes a little too far in its lesson plans for teachers to use in conjunction with the speech–especially the one for grades 7 through 12. Before the speech, teachers are urged to use “notable quotes excerpted (and posted in large print on board) from President Obama’s speeches about education” and to “brainstorm” with students about the question “How will he inspire us?” Suggested topics for postspeech discussion include “What resonated with you from President Obama’s speech?” and “What is President Obama inspiring you to do?”
Seize opportunity for education reform in Wisconsin
Three factors have conjoined this month to make education reform in Wisconsin a real possibility in the next year and a half:
- The announcement by Gov. Jim Doyle not to seek re-election but serve out his term.
- The tragic, but courageous incident involving Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett, a promoter of education reform in Wisconsin’s largest city.
- The potential of qualifying for new federal education dollars.
The logjam created by the state teachers union’s political activities — which contribute millions of dollars per election year almost entirely on behalf of Democrats — has led over the past 15 years to no educational policies put forward by Democrats or Republicans.
Some individual legislators have had proposals, but they have not gone far in the legislative process.
The political ground rules in Madison have been too crassly partisan on both sides of the aisle. It goes like this: If the Democrats control Madison, Wisconsin Education Association Council gets what it wants. If Republicans control Madison, WEAC gets nothing that it wants.
This is disheartening to the many people across the political spectrum who want reform and progress.
The newly aligned stars offer a chance to break the logjam. Doyle lacks the need for WEAC because he is not running again. Barrett’s popularity has surged after he was injured when he came to the aid of a woman threatened by a pipe-wielding attacker. And the federal aid is a carrot.
Reformers have been helped by President Barack Obama’s secretary of education, who called one Wisconsin law on education “ridiculous.” That law currently makes Wisconsin ineligible for its share of $4 billion of federal education money.
Wisconsin now has a chance to take advantage of this alignment to make dramatic fixes to the Milwaukee public school system, change Wisconsin law so teachers can be at least partially evaluated by student test scores, and make long overdue changes in K-12 educational funding formulas.
The funding formulas currently in place will, with no doubt, increase property taxes, increase class sizes, and increase teacher layoffs.
One more entity needs to get its star aligned — the state Legislature. The Democrats do need WEAC in 2010. But I believe there are good people in the Legislature who, I hope, will grab this moment.
The goal of public education is clear and simple: improve student achievement. There are three major items that accomplish this:
- Better family structure and parental involvement in schools.
- Adequate funding — without involving students in the unpopular reliance on property taxes, the most unpopular tax of all. Think about it, the funding of our prisons does not involve the property tax wars, but paying to educate our children does.
- Appreciated teachers who continue to stimulate students to improve and are evaluated and rewarded for outstanding performance.
These times for reform do not come often.
Cullen, former state Senate majority leader, is a member of the Janesville School Board.
The Overhaul of Wisconsin’s Assessment System (WKCE) Begins
Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction [52K PDF]:
Wisconsin will transform its statewide testing program to a new system that combines state, district, and classroom assessments and is more responsive to students, teachers, and parents needs while also offering public accountability for education.
“We will be phasing out the Wisconsin Knowledge and Concepts Examinations (WKCE),” said State Superintendent Tony Evers. “We must begin now to make needed changes to our state’s assessment system.” He also explained that the WKCE will still be an important part of the educational landscape for two to three years during test development. “At minimum, students will be taking the WKCEs this fall and again during the 2010-11 school year. Results from these tests will be used for federal accountability purposes,” he said.
“A common sense approach to assessment combines a variety of assessments to give a fuller picture of educational progress for our students and schools,” Evers explained. “Using a balanced approach to assessment, recommended by the Next Generation Assessment Task Force, will be the guiding principle for our work.”
The Next Generation Assessment Task Force, convened in fall 2008, was made up of 42 individuals representing a wide range of backgrounds in education and business. Tom Still, president of the Wisconsin Technology Council, and Joan Wade, administrator for Cooperative Educational Service Agency 6 in Oshkosh, were co-chairs. The task force reviewed the history of assessment in Wisconsin; explored the value, limitations, and costs of a range of assessment approaches; and heard presentations on assessment systems from a number of other states.
It recommended that Wisconsin move to a balanced assessment system that would go beyond annual, large-scale testing like the WKCE.
The state’s top schools official said Thursday that he will blow up the system used to test state students, rousing cheers from local education leaders.
The statewide test used to comply with the federal No Child Left Behind law will be replaced with a broader, more timely approach to judging how well Wisconsin students are performing.
“I’m extremely pleased with this announcement,” said Madison schools Superintendent Dan Nerad. “This is signaling Wisconsin is going to have a healthier assessment tool.”
Task force member Deb Lindsey, director of research and assessment for Milwaukee Public Schools, said she was especially impressed by Oregon’s computerized testing system. The program gives students several opportunities to take state assessments, with their highest scores used for statewide accountability purposes and other scores used for teachers and schools to measure their performance during the school year, she said.
“I like that students in schools have multiple opportunities to take the test, that there is emphasis on progress rather than a single test score,” she said. “I like that the tests are administered online.”
Computerized tests give schools and states an opportunity to develop more meaningful tests because they can assess a wider range of skills by modifying questions based on student answers, Lindsey said. Such tests are more likely to pick up on differences between students who are far above or below grade level than pencil-and-paper tests, which generate good information only for students who are around grade level, she said.
For testing at the high school level, task force member and Oconomowoc High School Principal Joseph Moylan also has a preference.
“I’m hoping it’s the ACT and I’m hoping it’s (given in) the 11th grade,” he said. “That’s what I believe would be the best thing for Wisconsin.”
By administering the ACT college admissions test to all students, as is done in Michigan, Moylan said the state would have a good gauge of students’ college readiness as well as a test that’s important to students. High school officials have lamented that the low-stakes nature of the 10th-grade WKCE distorts results.
Low expectations result in cancerous achievement gap
By ADAEZE OKOLI and DEIDRE GREEN
Okoli, 15, and Green, 18, write for The Simpson Street Free Press, a local newspaper for Dane County teenagers.
Who first decided that being intelligent had a direct relation to being white?
That may seem like a harsh question. But it’s one many high-achieving minority students face every day. When a young minority student chooses to study after school, rather than play basketball, he or she is often ridiculed for “acting white.” This is just plain wrong. And it is an idea born of low expectations.
It’s time we admit the truth. Low expectations damage the chances for success for many kids — especially minority kids. And it’s something we need to guard against here in Dane County.
Many government-funded after-school programs lack substance. They focus on recreation rather than academic achievement. At their core, these programs try to keep students busy and off the streets. That’s OK. But it’s not helping them build a promising future.
Academic success, on the other hand, does. Academic support should be the top priority for after-school programs and in local neighborhood centers.
The same principle should apply in our schools. We don’t have the dollars anymore to spend on fluff. Schools should focus as much time as possible on core subjects. Those who are behind should spend the bulk of their time studying math, science, history, books, music and arts.
To proceed otherwise is to reinforce low expectations, which are a cancer. The achievement gap is just a symptom.
By the time many minority students reach high school, they are behind and unlikely to catch up. Students sense the low expectations. Some teachers stop talking to the kids they believe don’t have potential. The whole nasty reality just keeps repeating itself and discourages these students.
Not all will go to college. But all will benefit from regular exposure to books, science and writing. This means continued high expectations for all students in the critical high school years. It’s never, ever too late to benefit from education.
Brigadier General Marcia Anderson recently told The Simpson Street Press about a trip she took to Ethiopia. She and her colleagues handed out candy to school children until it was gone. Then Anderson gave them pens.
She said the kids were extremely grateful for their pens — much more so than they had been for the candy.
There’s an important and obvious message in this story. Anderson noticed quickly how important school was to these kids. They carried their textbooks so preciously.
These Ethiopian kids share the same dreams as our forefathers. It’s a dream shared by millions of immigrants from all over the world who came to the United States to find a better life.
This dream they believed so fiercely is often called the American dream. It’s a dream that promised equal opportunity and a chance to succeed.
Many kids today have lost sight of that dream. And that’s a shame, given how much our ancestors sacrificed so that we could have a shot at that dream.
Being a hard worker and attaining high goals is in the fabric of our American heritage. All the people who came to America came here with a dream of success. Those who were brought here in chains worked even harder to pursue the American dream.
Success does not come without hard work. And no one should ever be ridiculed for trying to attain an education.
Related posts:
https://www.schoolinfosystem.org/archives/2006/07/acting_white_1.php
https://www.schoolinfosystem.org/archives/2006/01/theyre_all_rich.php
And of course, the new MMSD TAG Plan has — as one of its highest priorities — the early identification and ongoing support of high potential/high ability students of color and poverty —
https://www.schoolinfosystem.org/archives/2009/08/madison_school_136.php
Wisconsin Governor Doyle going after student performance, federal money
Gov. Jim Doyle is planning a series of education reforms designed to boost student achievement and help the state compete for billions of dollars in federal school improvement grants.
The changes include better tracking of student performance, using test data to help evaluate teachers and raising high school graduation requirements.
“We’re going to be working very hard in my administration with the Legislature, with educators in the state, to put together really, I think, a transformational application that will help Wisconsin education for years to come,” Doyle said in a recent interview.
But it’s unclear whether the state would even qualify for the federal money — part of a $4.35 billion program dubbed “Race to the Top” — because of a state law that bars using student test scores to evaluate teachers.
Draft rules for the program prohibit states that have such laws in place from receiving the money. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan last week called Wisconsin’s law “ridiculous.”
Wisconsin Representative Mike Huebsch:
Cut education funding by 3 percent. Check.
Make sure teachers’ raises aren’t jeopardized by the cuts. Check.
Pretend property taxes won’t go up. Check.
Begin dismantling Wisconsin’s School Choice Program. Check.
Jeopardize Wisconsin’s eligibility for new federal education funding. Check.
This is the state of public education in Wisconsin under the leadership of self-proclaimed education governor Jim Doyle and Democrat majorities in the state Senate and Assembly.
Governor Doyle and Democrat lawmakers wrote a state budget that cuts school funding $294 million, raises property taxes $1.5 billion, repeals the Qualified Economic Offer, says local school boards can’t consider the recession, job loss rates, and property values when negotiating teacher compensation and makes politically-motivated changes to the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program (School Choice).
Now the governor shrugs off reports that Wisconsin won’t be eligible to participate in the Obama Administration’s Race to the Top grant program, while Democrat lawmakers remain predictably silent. Approximately $4.35 billion will be doled out to states with plans for reforming public education. Under the proposed application guidelines released by the United States Department of Education last week, only Wisconsin, New York and California would be barred from receiving federal funds.
A Race to the Bottom? Wisconsin’s Academic Standards & Teacher Accountability
One of the funnest and most instructive concepts in philosophy is the “logical fallacy.” Here’s an example:
- Nothing is better than eternal happiness.
- Eating a hamburger is better than nothing.
- Therefore, eating a hamburger is better than eternal happiness.
The arguments being advanced by the interest groups that are lining up in opposition to President Obama’s and Secretary Duncan’s call to tear down teacher-student data firewalls bear a striking similarity to hamburger eating and eternal happiness.
First up, the great state of New York:
1. The Race to the Top Guidance issued by Secretary Duncan on Friday states that:
“to be eligible under this program, a State must not have any legal, statutory, or regulatory barriers to linking student achievement or student growth data to teachers for the purpose of teacher and principal evaluation.”
2. New York law states that:
“The regents shall, prescribe rules for the manner in which the process for evaluation of a candidate for tenure is to be conducted. Such rules shall include a combination of the following minimum standards: a. evaluation of the extent to which the teacher successfully utilized analysis of available student performance data and other relevant information when providing instruction but the teacher shall not be granted or denied tenure based on student performance data.”
Reactions in California and Wisconsin.
Discovery learning in math: Exercises versus problems Part I
Barry Garelick, via email:
By way of introduction, I am neither mathematician nor mathematics teacher, but I majored in math and have used it throughout my career, especially in the last 17 years as an analyst for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. My love of and facility with math is due to good teaching and good textbooks. The teachers I had in primary and secondary school provided explicit instruction and answered students’ questions; they also posed challenging problems that required us to apply what we had learned. The textbooks I used also contained explanations of the material with examples that showed every step of the problem solving process.
I fully expected the same for my daughter, but after seeing what passed for mathematics in her elementary school, I became increasingly distressed over how math is currently taught in many schools.
Optimistically believing that I could make a difference in at least a few students’ lives, I decided to teach math when I retire. I enrolled in education school about two years ago, and have only a 15-week student teaching requirement to go. Although I had a fairly good idea of what I was in for with respect to educational theories, I was still dismayed at what I found in my mathematics education courses.
In class after class, I have heard that when students discover material for themselves, they supposedly learn it more deeply than when it is taught directly. Similarly, I have heard that although direct instruction is effective in helping students learn and use algorithms, it is allegedly ineffective in helping students develop mathematical thinking. Throughout these courses, a general belief has prevailed that answering students’ questions and providing explicit instruction are “handing it to the student” and preventing them from “constructing their own knowledge”–to use the appropriate terminology. Overall, however, I have found that there is general confusion about what “discovery learning” actually means. I hope to make clear in this article what it means, and to identify effective and ineffective methods to foster learning through discovery.
Garelick’s part ii on Discovery learning can be found here.
Related: The Madison School District purchases Singapore Math workbooks with no textbooks or teacher guides. Much more on math here.
Sparks fly over Wisconsin budget’s labor-related provisions
Steven Walters & Stacy Forster:
As the dust settles around the new state budget, partisan disagreement continues over the boost that unions – particularly education unions – got by making it easier for them to sign up thousands of new members and by repealing the 3.8% annual limit on teachers’ pay raises.
The provisions passed because Democrats, who got control of the Legislature for the first time in 14 years, partnered with Democratic Gov. Jim Doyle to advance changes the governor and unions had been pushing for years.
Unions traditionally help elect Democratic politicians. The largest teachers union, the Wisconsin Education Association Council, spent about $2.1 million before last November’s elections, with much of that backing Democrats.
Most of the labor-related provisions in the budget were added to provide people with “good, family-supporting jobs,” said Rep. Mark Pocan (D-Madison), co-chairman of the Legislature’s Finance Committee.
“The idea that we’re shifting back to the worker, rather than just big business and management, that’s part of what Democrats are about,” Pocan said.
It also helped that the two top Democratic legislators, Assembly Speaker Mike Sheridan of Janesville and Senate Majority Leader Russ Decker of Weston, are veteran labor leaders.
Sheridan is the former president of a Janesville union for General Motors; Decker was a union bricklayer when he was elected president of the Central Wisconsin Building Trades.
In a statement, Sheridan said Assembly Democrats focused on giving workers struggling through the recession “an opportunity to negotiate for better working circumstances or wages.” They also made sure the budget included tax breaks to help businesses create and protect jobs, he said.
Republican leaders say taxpayers will be the ultimate losers, when they must pay public employees higher wages and better benefits.
Republicans also say Doyle and Democratic legislative leaders approved the changes to thank unions for their campaign cash and endorsements before last November’s elections. The Democrats also are laying groundwork to win support heading into the 2010 elections, GOP lawmakers say.
One striking example of lobbying effectiveness during challenging economic times: the budget includes a change to arbitration rules between school districts and teacher unions:
To make matters more dire, the long-term legislative proposal specifically exempts school district arbitrations from the requirement that arbitrators consider and give the greatest weight to
revenue limits and local economic conditions. While arbitrators would continue to give these two factors paramount consideration when deciding cases for all other local governments, the importance of fiscal limits and local economic conditions would be specifically diminished for school district arbitration.
This is obviously the kind of thing frequently seen in Washington…. It would be interesting to see the players (and money) behind this legislation. In related local news, the Madison School District and the local teacher union have yet to agree to a new contract. Perhaps this arbitration change plays a role in the process?
Indiana providing teaching fellowships in Science, Technology, Engineering & Mathematics (STEM)
The Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation:
The Woodrow Wilson Indiana Teaching Fellowship seeks to attract talented, committed individuals with backgrounds in the STEM fields–science, technology, engineering, and mathematics–into teaching in high-need Indiana high schools. Learn more…
Funded through a $10 million grant from the Lilly Endowment, the Fellowship offers rigorous disciplinary and pedagogical preparation, extensive clinical experience, and ongoing mentoring. Eligible applicants include current undergraduates, recent college graduates, midcareer professionals, and retirees who have majored in, or had careers in, STEM fields.
When will the MMSD and the State of WI follow suit?
Related:
- Action Needed, Please Sign on…. Math Teacher Hiring in the Madison School District
- An Email to Madison Superintendent Dan Nerad on Math Teacher Hiring Criteria
- Wisconsin bill to boost math and science teachers risky for students
Tony Evers Evokes Change as He Enters Wisconsin DPI Superintendent Office
“Education is all about continued improvement, and the status quo is not satisfactory,” Evers told the audience at a WisPolitics.com luncheon Tuesday at the Madison Club.
In addition to guiding local schools as they navigate state cuts and an influx of federal stimulus funding, Evers is promoting a single federal test and an overhaul of accountability and assessment standards for public education. Under the new system, which Evers said would be formed quickly over the next few months, the state will be able to consistently measure other educational categories aside from test scores.
The test score measurement mandates under the federal No Child Left Behind law drew criticism from Evers for their incomplete picture of education, but he said the federal standard has done educators “a tremendous favor” by showing disparities between performance of white and non-white students.
He also called for a national standard of testing and curriculum, which he said 46 states had backed. He said that Wisconsin isn’t able to truly compare its educational growth to other districts and states because 50 different tests are being administered annually. He also called the current system “economically irrational.”
“Public education, even though it’s a state responsibility, is a national endeavor, and we have to view it as such,” Evers said. “By doing this, we’re going to make our system more transparent.”
Perhaps nothing will test the new state accountability system as much as Milwaukee. Evers went to great lengths to discuss the “magic” that teachers work with many less fortunate students in the state’s largest school district, but recognized a graduation rate that, despite increasing to about 70 percent, lags well behind the state average.
“It’s sort of peaceful knowing that you’re going to work to do nothing” $65 million a year for New York City’s Rubber Room
News: Associated Press
700 NYC teachers are paid to do nothing
By KAREN MATTHEWS–3 days ago (23 June 2009)
NEW YORK (AP) — Hundreds of New York City public school teachers accused of offenses ranging from insubordination to sexual misconduct are being paid their full salaries to sit around all day playing Scrabble, surfing the Internet or just staring at the wall, if that’s what they want to do.
Because their union contract makes it extremely difficult to fire them, the teachers have been banished by the school system to its “rubber rooms“–off-campus office space where they wait months, even years, for their disciplinary hearings.
The 700 or so teachers can practice yoga, work on their novels, paint portraits of their colleagues –pretty much anything but school work. They have summer vacation just like their classroom colleagues and enjoy weekends and holidays through the school year.
“You just basically sit there for eight hours,” said Orlando Ramos, who spent seven months in a rubber room, officially known as a temporary reassignment center, in 2004-2005. “I saw several near-fights. ‘This is my seat.’ ‘I’ve been sitting here for six months.’ That sort of thing.”
Ramos was an assistant principal in East Harlem when he was accused of lying at a hearing on whether to suspend a student. Ramos denied the allegation but quit before his case was resolved and took a job in California.
Because the teachers collect their full salaries of $70,000 or more, the city Department of Education estimates the practice costs the taxpayers $65 million a year. The department blames union rules.
“It is extremely difficult to fire a tenured teacher because of the protections afforded to them in their contract,” spokeswoman Ann Forte said.
City officials said that they make teachers report to a rubber room instead of sending they home because the union contract requires that they be allowed to continue in their jobs in some fashion while their cases are being heard. The contract does not permit them to be given other work.
Ron Davis, a spokesman for the United Federation of Teachers, said the union and the Department of Education reached an agreement last year to try to reduce the amount of time educators spend in reassignment centers, but progress has been slow.
“No one wants teachers who don’t belong in the classroom. However, we cannot neglect the teachers’ rights to due process,” Davis said. The union represents more than 228,000 employees, including nearly 90,000 teachers.
Many teachers say they are being punished because they ran afoul of a vindictive boss or because they blew the whistle when somebody fudged test scores.
“The principal wants you out, you’re gone,” said Michael Thomas, a high school math teacher who has been in a reassignment center for 14 months after accusing an assistant principal of tinkering with test results.
City education officials deny teachers are unfairly targeted but say there has been an effort under Mayor Michael Bloomberg to get incompetents out of the classroom. “There’s been a push to report anything that you see wrong,” Forte said.
Some other school systems likewise pay teachers to do nothing.
Alternative Teacher Certification Works
UW-Madison professors Peter Hewson and Eric Knuth took up a valid cause in their May 15 guest column when they voiced concerns about having under-prepared teachers in Wisconsin classrooms.
But they’re off base in implying that alternative certification programs such as the American Board for Certification of Teacher Excellence, proposed in SB 175, will mean more students won’t have effective teachers.
Research has shown otherwise.
A recent study in “Education Next” showed states with genuine alternative certification programs see higher test scores and more minority teachers. A Brookings Institute study from 2006 showed that teachers who have come through colleges of education are no more effective than teachers who come through an alternative certification program or no certification program at all.
In addition, ABCTE’s rigorous teacher preparation program includes nearly 200 hours of workshops on topics such as pedagogy and classroom assessment. Our exams are difficult, with only 40 percent of candidates passing on the first try. As a result, our teacher retention rate is 85 percent after three years, compared to less than 65 percent for traditional certification routes.
I understand Hewson and Knuth’s motivation for suggesting that an alternative to traditional certification may not produce great teachers. That philosophy is good for their employer, but not — as research has shown — any better for students.
/– David Saba, president, ABCTE, Washington, D.C./
An Economist, an Academic Puzzle and a Lot of Promise
Steven Pearlstein, via a kind reader’s email:
Early in his career, Paul Romer helped solve one of the great puzzles of economics: What makes some economies grow faster than others? His “new growth theory” might one day earn him a Nobel prize.
Then a decade ago, Romer, by then a professor at Stanford University, decided to tackle what may be an even tougher puzzle: Why were so many of his students coming to class unprepared and disengaged?
Romer’s quest began with the proposition that the more time students put into their studies, the more they learn. As Malcolm Gladwell demonstrates in his new book, “Outliers,” that’s certainly true in many other areas of human endeavor — the more you practice scales or swing a club, the better you are at playing piano or hitting a decent golf shot. Why should learning economics be any different?
It took some noodling around, but two years later, Romer raised $10 million in venture capital to start a software company he called Aplia. The idea was to develop interactive exercises that students could do in conjunction with the most widely used college economics textbooks. Students would answer questions, then get immediate feedback on what they got right and wrong, along with some explanations that might help them get it right on a second and third try. Aplia’s team of young Ph.D. economists and software programmers also devised laboratory experiments in which the entire class could participate in simulated markets that give students a practical understanding of concepts like money supply and demand curves.
Locally, the Madison School Board is discussing a proposed technology plan this evening. Ideally, before any more is spent, the Infinite Campus system should be fully implemented, and used by teachers, staff and students. Once that is done, there are many possibilities, including this example.
A Primer on Wisconsin School Revenue Limits
The Wisconsin Taxpayer 3.4MB PDF:
Since 1994, Wisconsin school districts have operated under state-imposed revenue limits and the associated qualified economic offer (QEO) law.
- Revenue limits have helped reduce school property tax increases to less than 5% per year from more than 9% annually prior to the caps.
- The limits have had \aried impacts on school districts, with growing districts experiencing the largest revenue gains. Low-spending districts prior to the caps have seen the largest per student gains.
- The QEO law has helped school districts keep compensation costs somewhat in line with revenue limits. However, since benefits are given more weight, teacher salary increases have slowed.
Since 1994. Wisconsin school districts have operated under slate-imposed revenue limits, which arc tied to inflation and enrollments. The associated qualified economic offer (QEO) law limits staff compensation increases to about 4% annually. With declining student counts, fluctuations in stale school aid. and various concerns over teacher pay. revenue limits and the QEO have attracted increasing debate.
The governor, in his proposed 2009-11 state budget, recommends eliminating the QEO. I le has also talked about providing ways for school districts to move away from revenue limits. This report does not address these specific proposals. Rather, it seeks to help inform discussions by examining the history of revenue limits and the QEO, legislative attempts to fix various issues, and the impacts of limits on schools, educators, and taxpayers.
THE REVENUE LIMIT LAW
School districts collect revenue from a variety of sources. The two largest sources are the property tax and state general (or equalization) aid, General aid is distributed based on district property wealth and spending. Combined, these two revenue sources account for about 75% of an average district’s funding. The remainder is a combination of student fees, federal aid. and state categorical aids. such as those for special education and transportation.
The revenue limit law was implemented in 1994 (1993-94 school year) and caps the amount districts can collect from property taxes and general aid combined. It does not restrict student fees, federal aid. or state categorical aid. A district’s revenue limit is determined by its prior-year cap, an inflation factor, and enrollments. There is an exception to the limit law for districts defined as “low-revenue.” Currently, districts with per student revenues less than S9.000 are allowed to increase their revenues to that level.
Background
While Wisconsin’s revenue limit law began in 1994. its roots date back to several teacher strikes in the early 1970s, culminating with the 1974 Hortonville strike during which 86 teachers were fired. That strike gained national attention.
Related: K-12 tax & spending climate. A number of links on local school spending and tax increases before the implementation of State limits on annual expenditure growth. The Madison School District spent $180,400,000 during the 1992-1993 school year. In 2006, the District spent $331,000,000. The 2009/2010 preliminary Citizen’s Budget proposes spending $367,912,077 [Financial Summary 2.1MB pdf], slightly down from 2008/2009’s $368,012,286.
Dallas-Fort Worth school districts struggle as need for bilingual classes grows
Bilingual education is supposed to be expanding to more languages – such as Vietnamese and Arabic – but many school districts can’t find the teachers to handle the two-language classes.
“The teacher shortage that was there for Spanish now translates to other languages,” said Shannon Terry, Garland ISD’s director of English as a Second Language (ESL) and bilingual education.
Area districts are recruiting for next school year, searching for tough-to-staff areas such as math and science. But bilingual teachers are also in high demand.
The state requires any school district that has at least 20 students in a grade level who speak a language other than English to provide a bilingual program in that language.
In 2007, the State Board for Educator Certification expanded the bilingual program to include Vietnamese, Arabic, Chinese, Japanese and Russian. But that doesn’t mean more diverse teachers are lining up for jobs.
“It’s not common knowledge,” said Terry. “The universities aren’t designing programs necessarily yet to support teachers in securing those credentials.”
The Madison School District, in response to Nuestro Mundo’s desire for a middle school charter, plans to implement dual immersion across the District.
Wisconsin DPI Superintendent: It looks like an interesting race
Despite being outspent $96,129 to $10,500 (WisPolitics) by Tony Evers, Rose Fernandez obtained 31% of yesterday’s vote. Tony Evers received 35%. Here’s a roundup of the election and candidates:
- WisPolitics
- Amy Hetzner:
On Tuesday, he finished just ahead of Rose Fernandez, a former pediatric trauma nurse and parent advocate, in a five-person field.
Although she finished the night in second place, Fernandez, 51, characterized her performance as “a victory for real people over the special interests.”
In addition to being first to declare his candidacy, Evers also captured endorsements – and contributions – from the Wisconsin Education Association Council as well as other labor and education-based groups. WEAC PAC, the political arm of the state’s largest teachers union, contributed $8,625 to Evers’ campaign, in addition to spending nearly $180,000 on media buys for the candidate, according to campaign filings earlier this month.
By contrast, the Fernandez campaign spent $20,000. She said that her message of calling for merit pay for teachers and choices for parents had resonated with voters.
“Tonight, we have all the momentum,” she said. “This is going to be a real choice. It’s going to be a choice between special interests and the status quo, the bureaucracy that is entrenched at the Department of Public Instruction, vs. a focus on the results we are looking for in our investment in education, a push for higher standards instead of higher taxes.”
Evers, 57, has distanced himself somewhat from the current schools superintendent, Elizabeth Burmaster, saying it’s time to be more aggressive about reforming Milwaukee Public Schools and calling for an increase in the state’s graduation rate.
On Tuesday, he denied Fernandez’s charge of favoring special interests - Google News
- John Nichols on the history of the DPI Superintendent.
Students Then and Now
Compared with the students in the 1970s, today’s accounting students are uneducated and unfit for a college education.
I have been teaching full time for over thirty years. If you toss in my apprenticeship teaching as a graduate student, I have taught for almost thirty-five years. During that span of time, one sees many, many students, and it amazes me how different they have been over time, and the inequality continues to grow. Compared with the students in the 1970s, today’s students are uneducated and unfit for a college education.
Before proceeding, let me enunciate two premises. First, I do not think there is any significant difference between the two groups in terms of native, raw intelligence. Instead, the distinction between yesterday’s and today’s students when they first set foot on college campuses rests in their educational backgrounds, analytical thinking, quantitative skills, reading abilities, willingness to work, and their attitudes concerning the educational process. In short, they differ in terms of their readiness for college. Second, I am focusing on the average student who majors in accounting. Both groups arise from a distribution of students. The lower tail of yesteryear’s population had some weak students, and the upper tail of the present-day population has some very strong students; however, when one focuses on the means of these two distributions, he or she finds a huge gap.
To begin, today’s average accounting major cannot perform what used to be Algebra I and II in high school. Students cannot solve simultaneous equations. Students have difficulty with present value computations, not to mention formula derivations. Students even have difficulty employing the high-low method to derive a cost function, something that merely requires one to estimate a straight line from two points.
I would like to discuss in class the partial derivative of a present value formula to ascertain the impact of changes in interest rates, but that has become a fruitless enterprise. Even if students had a course in calculus, the exams probably had multiple choice questions so students guessed their way through the course, they don’t remember what they learned, and whatever they learned was mechanical and superficial.
Related:
- K-12 Tax & Spending History
- State of Wisconsin (taxes & fees) K-12 spending growth
- Madison West High School Math Teachers letter to Isthmus on curriculum reduction.
The Obama Splurge / Stimulus: “A 40 Year Wish List”
Via a kind reader’s email: The Wall Street Journal:
“Never let a serious crisis go to waste. What I mean by that is it’s an opportunity to do things you couldn’t do before.”
So said White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel in November, and Democrats in Congress are certainly taking his advice to heart.
And don’t forget education, which would get $66 billion more. That’s more than the entire Education Department spent a mere 10 years ago and is on top of the doubling under President Bush. Some $6 billion of this will subsidize university building projects. If you think the intention here is to help kids learn, the House declares on page 257 that “No recipient . . . shall use such funds to provide financial assistance to students to attend private elementary or secondary schools.” Horrors: Some money might go to nonunion teachers.”
The US debate over the fiscal stimulus is remarkable in its neglect of the medium term – that is, the budgetary challenges over a period of five to 10 years. Neither the White House nor Congress has offered the public a scenario of how the proposed mega-deficits will affect the budget and government programmes beyond the next 12 to 24 months. Without a sound medium-term fiscal framework, the stimulus package can easily do more harm than good, since the prospect of trillion-dollar-plus deficits as far as the eye can see will weigh heavily on the confidence of consumers and businesses, and thereby undermine even the short-term benefits of the stimulus package.
We are told that we have to rush without thinking lest the entire economy collapse. This is belied by recent events. The spring 2008 stimulus package of $100bn (€76bn, £71bn) in tax rebates was rushed into effect in a similar way and we now know it had little stimulus effect. The rebates were largely saved or used to pay down credit card debt, rather than spent. The $700bn troubled asset relief programme bail-out was also rushed into effect and its results have been notoriously poor.
The Tarp has not revived the banks or their lending, but it has supported a massive transfer of taxpayer wealth to the management and owners of well-connected financial institutions. Some of those transfers – as in the case of Merrill Lynch using its government-financed sale to Bank of America to enable $4bn in bonuses last month – are beyond egregious. Yet the US is now inured to corruption and in such a rush that even billions of dollars of public funds shovelled into Merrill’s private pockets in broad daylight barely merited a day’s news cycle.
More from Victor Davis Hanson and Greg Mankiw on the Congressional Budget Office:
So only 8 percent of this spending occurs in budget year 2009, and only 41 percent occurs in first two years. Note that spending on transfer payments and tax relief occurs much faster than this: click through to the above link for details.
Mario Rizzo quotes Keynes:
“Organized public works, at home and abroad, may be the right cure for a chronic tendency to a deficiency of effective demand. But they are not capable of sufficiently rapid organisation (and above all cannot be reversed or undone at a later date), to be the most serviceable instrument for the prevention of the trade cycle.”
Finally, a look at the origins of the Madison School District’s $18M slice of the splurge. Long time Wisconsin Congressman David Obey is chair of the House Appropriations Committee, a position that gives him a prime seat for earmarks.
Finally, Nanette Asimove notes the proposed borrowing and printing money for California.
A Charter Setback in Florida
As Chicago schools chief, Arne Duncan has found innovative ways to skirt the restrictive cap on the number of charter schools that can operate in Illinois, thus expanding opportunities for low-income kids. So it’s instructive to contrast Mr. Duncan’s can-do attitude with that of Florida Governor Charlie Crist, whose inaction last week handed a victory to opponents of school choice.
On December 2 a Florida District Court struck down a law that created the Florida Schools of Excellence Commission, an alternative authorizer of charter schools formed in 2006 under Governor Crist’s predecessor, Jeb Bush. The state had 30 days to appeal to the Florida Supreme Court but let the deadline pass last week.
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The upshot is that only local school boards will be able to authorize charter schools, creating a fox-in-the-hen-house situation in which the same institutions that most oppose school choice will be in a position to block its expansion. Charter schools compete with district schools for students and teachers. And the teachers unions that control the traditional public school system fear that more charters mean smaller school districts and fewer dues-paying union jobs.
Locally, the Studio School charter initiative was killed by a slight Madison School Board majority.
On Eliminating Wisconsin Teacher Salary Growth Caps (QEO)
Wisconsin State Journal Editorial:
Spend more with less money.
That’s the impossible demand Democrats who run the state Capitol seem anxious to make on local school boards across Wisconsin.
Democrats who control the governor’s office and the Legislature suggest they’re going to repeal a long-standing law that effectively caps annual pay raises for public school teachers. Democrats have been promising to remove the cap for more than a decade and now have the political power to do so.
But allowing higher annual raises for teachers will require more money from somewhere. And state leaders don’t have any dollars to spare. They’re staring at a record state budget shortfall.
So where will the money come from?
Not from property taxes. Gov. Jim Doyle and other Democrats suggest they’ll keep in place a state cap on local school district revenue. Revenue caps limit how much local property tax levies can increase.
That will leave school boards with higher salary expenses but no easy way to pay for them.
Dave Blaska noted that WEAC spent $2,100,000 on five Wisconsin Assembly races in 2008.
Five running for state schools chief
Five people are vying to become the next superintendent of education in Wisconsin, a position that will help shape education policy in the state for the next four years.
The five come from a variety of backgrounds — one is a school superintendent, two are college professors, one is a virtual schools leader, and another is the deputy superintendent.
Tuesday is the deadline for those who want to run for the position to file signatures with the state. It’s also the deadline for all other spring elections, including judicial openings and the state Supreme Court.
The field for the education secretary race and any other with more than two candidates will be narrowed to two in a Feb. 17 primary. The election is April 7. The new education secretary takes over July 1 for Libby Burmaster, who decided against seeking a third term.
The state superintendent is largely an administrative post, with little actual power over setting policy, but able to use the position to advocate for their priorities across the state.
The superintendent is responsible for governing Wisconsin’s public schools, administering state and federal aid, and offering guidance to teachers and administrators. The superintendent also crafts a spending request every two years to run the agency and provide state aid to public schools, which is subject to approval by the Legislature.
Despite the diverse field seeking the post this year, all five candidates agree on many issues such as the need for reform statewide, changes to the No Child Left Behind Law, and improving Milwaukee schools. But they also disagree on major areas, such as the need to repeal a law affecting teacher salaries, that could play a major factor in who wins.
The candidates:
On Detroit’s Union Work Rules
The collective bargaining agreement with the UAW is a heavily negotiated document the size of a small telephone book. It is virtually identical for each of the Detroit Three, owing to “pattern” bargaining, but it doesn’t exist at all in their U.S. competition, the nonunionized transplants. Not only work rules, but fundamental business decisions to sell, close or spin-off plants are forbidden without permission. That permission may come, but only at a price, since everything that affects the workplace must be negotiated.
Both the UAW and the Detroit Three maintain large staffs of lawyers, contract administrators, and financial and human-resources representatives whose principal job is to negotiate with the other side. These staffs are at all levels, from the factory floor to corporate headquarters and the UAW’s “Solidarity House” in downtown Detroit.
The collective bargaining agreements are now renegotiated every four years; in each negotiation the power and penetration of the union grows. If the company asks to change the flow of work for any reason, from cost-savings to vehicle improvements, the local union president will listen politely, and then say something like, “We can help you with this, but what’s in it for my guys?”
Typically, he will have a list of things he wants, some understandable (better cafeterias) some questionable (hire my nephew), but there is always a quid pro quo. These mutually sustaining bureaucracies exist to negotiate with each other.
In an environment of downsizing, the problem is exacerbated, as the entrenched bargaining structure causes innumerable inefficiencies. Typically each plant or warehouse is a “bargaining unit” and has a union president, who has a staff. If the company consolidates facilities, there will be no need for two presidents and two staffs. Since neither president wants to play musical chairs, they will both point to the bargaining agreement and resist consolidation. As a result, unnecessary facilities are not sold, but kept open, lit and heated, just to preserve a redundant bargaining-unit president and his team.
Many teacher union agreements are patterned after the United Auto Workers. Here’s a look at several agreements:
- Madison 172 Pages
- Boulder, CO 76 pages
- Milwaukee 258 pages
- Ann Arbor 218 pages
- Seattle: 124 pages
- Chicago 236 pages
- Charlotte Teacher schedule (North Carolina teacher salaries are set at the state level)
Teacher Union’s “Exposed” looks at work rules and reform, among other topics.
An Interview with Will Fitzhugh: About Academic Excellence and Writing
Michael F. Shaughnessy:
1) Will, you recently gave a talk in Madison, Wisconsin. What exactly did you speak about?
WF: A group of professors, teachers, business people, lawyers and community people invited me to speak at the University of Wisconsin in Madison about the work of The Concord Review since 1987, and about the problems of college readiness and academic writing for high school students.
The Boston Public Schools just reported that 67% of the graduating class of 2000 who had gone on to higher education had failed to earn a certificate, an associate’s degree or a bachelor’s degree by 2008. Also, the Strong American Schools program just reported that more than a million of our high school graduates are in remedial education in college each year.
I recommend their report: Diploma to Nowhere, which came out last summer. While many foundations, such as Gates, and others, have focused on getting our students into college, too little attention has been paid to how few are ready for college work and how many drop out without any degree.
2) “We believe that the pursuit of academic excellence in secondary schools should be given the same attention as the pursuit of excellence in sports and other extracurricular activities.” This is a quote from The Concord Review. Now, I am asking you to hypothesize here–why do you think high schools across America seem to be preoccupied with sports and not academics?
WF: In Madison I also had a chance to speak about the huge imbalance in our attention to scholars and athletes at the high school level. I had recently seen a nationally televised high school football game in which, at breaks in the action, an athlete would come to the sidelines, and announce, to the national audience, which college he had decided to “sign” with. This is a far cry from what happens for high school scholars. High school coaches get a lot of attention for their best athletes, but if the coach also happens to be a history teacher, he or she will hear nothing from a college in the way of interest in his or her most outstanding history student.
When Kareem Abdul Jabbar was a very tall high school senior at Power Memorial Academy in New York, he not only heard from the head coaches at 60 college basketball programs, he also got a personal letter from Jackie Robinson of baseball fame and from Ralph Bunche at the United Nations, urging him to go to UCLA, which he did. That same year, in the U.S., the top ten high school history students heard from no one, and it has been that way every year since.
The lobby of every public high school is full of trophies for sports, and there is usually nothing about academic achievement. For some odd reason, attention to exemplary work in academics is seen as elitist, while heaps of attention to athletic achievement is not seen in the same way. Strange…The Boston Globe has 150 pages on year on high school athletes and no pages on high school academic achievement. Do we somehow believe that our society needs good athletes far more than it needs good students, and that is why we are so reluctant to celebrate fine academic work?
William Fitzhugh, Editor of Concord Review Presentation
William Fitzhugh, Editor of Concord Review. Varsity Academics®
The video of this presentation is about 1 1/2 hours long. Click on the image at left to watch the video. The video will play immediately, while the file continues to download. MP3 Audio is available here.
We are pleased to have William Fitzhugh, Editor of The Concord Review, present this lecture on history research and publication of original papers by high school students.
From an interview with Education News, William Fitzhugh summarizes some items from his Madison presentation:
“A group of professors, teachers, business people, lawyers and community people invited me to speak at the University of Wisconsin in Madison about the work of The Concord Review since 1987, and about the problems of college readiness and academic writing for high school students.
The Boston Public Schools just reported that 67% of the graduating class of 2000 who had gone on to higher education had failed to earn a certificate, an associate’s degree or a bachelor’s degree by 2008. Also, the Strong American Schools program just reported that more than a million of our high school graduates are in remedial education in college each year.
I recommend their report: Diploma to Nowhere, which came out last summer. While many foundations, such as Gates, and others, have focused on getting our students into college, too little attention has been paid to how few are ready for college work and how many drop out without any degree.
In Madison I also had a chance to speak about the huge imbalance in our attention to scholars and athletes at the high school level. I had recently seen a nationally televised high school football game in which, at breaks in the action, an athlete would come to the sidelines, and announce, to the national audience, which college he had decided to “sign” with. This is a far cry from what happens for high school scholars. High school coaches get a lot of attention for their best athletes, but if the coach also happens to be a history teacher, he or she will hear nothing from a college in the way of interest in his or her most outstanding history student.
With Democrats in charge, Wisconsin teacher pay cap could bite the dust
I don’t think it’s any secret that we think the QEO should be eliminated,” said Bell, whose union spent more than $2 million to help Democrats win control of the Assembly this fall. “It’s not productive for our school districts or my members.”
The union appears to have found a willing partner in the next Legislature. Already, state schools superintendent Libby Burmaster has included repealing the QEO in her budget request to Doyle. Carrie Lynch, a spokeswoman for Senate Majority Leader Russ Decker, D-Weston, said Decker supports a repeal, and Senate Democrats voted for it in the last budget. Assembly Speaker-elect Mike Sheridan, D-Janesville, said Democrats in his house would be “looking at it very closely.”
But Beloit homeowner Dwight Brass said he feared school boards would end up allowing teachers’ pay to rise too much, and with it property taxes. “The trend would be the school board would want to avoid conflict” with the union, he said.
Dan Rossmiller, a lobbyist for the Wisconsin Association of School Boards, said removing the QEO while leaving revenue caps in place would mean disaster for schools. Their main expense — teacher salaries — would grow much faster than their revenues would be permitted to grow, he said.
“It’s certainly going to mean cuts in teachers’ positions if it does go away,” he said of the QEO.
Keeping Notes Afloat in Class
Third-graders at Hunters Woods Elementary School are required to learn the fundamentals of the violin. They know how to stand up straight, how to hold their instruments and how to use the tippy tips of their fingers when they press on the strings so they don’t make what their teacher calls “an icky sound.”
After learning a grand total of eight notes, they also know how to make music. Their repertoire one fall morning included pieces from a range of cultures and styles: “Caribbean Island,” “Seminole Chant,” “Good King Wenceslas.”
In Fairfax County and elsewhere, students often begin studying violin in fourth grade. Hunters Woods, an arts and science magnet school in Reston, gives them a one-year head start. Experts say the earlier children begin, the more likely they are to succeed in music.
Hunters Woods, with 950 students, is one of more than a dozen local schools in which teachers are trained through the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts to infuse arts education into other subjects. For instance, students might build instruments from recycled materials, learn science through lessons on sound and vibration or study math through measurement and patterning. Some also compose songs with lyrics inspired by Virginia history.
But music programs and the rest of the education budget are under scrutiny as the county School Board seeks to close a $220 million budget shortfall for the fiscal year that begins in July. One proposal to save about $850,000 would trim band and strings teaching positions, making it tough to keep such programs in third and fourth grades, said Roger Tomhave, fine arts coordinator for Fairfax schools.
This tune sounds familiar. Madison formerly offered a 4th grade strings program (now only in 5th).
Top national honor goes to Simpson Street Free Press
The Capital Times
Madison’s Simpson Street Free Press, the newspaper written and produced by young people for other young people, was recognized Thursday in a White House ceremony as one of the country’s best youth programs.
The paper, which was founded in 1992 to help struggling students on the south side of Madison improve their writing and academic skills, received the 2008 “Coming Up Taller” award, an initiative of the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities that is designed to recognize the nation’s best and most innovative youth programs.
The national honor is one of several awards the paper has earned in recent years for its effective methods of engaging and building the skills of young people.
The Free Press’ first headquarters was a makeshift community center in the old Simpson Street apartments on the city’s southeast side and involved just a handful of students. It now has its office and newsroom in nearby South Towne Mall and has a staff of nearly 40 student reporters who come from diverse backgrounds and neighborhoods. Young people apply for jobs at the paper and, once hired, meet assignment deadlines and attendance and school performance guidelines while they produce regular issues of the newspaper.
The staff, which ranges in age from 11 to 18, writes and produces the content of the Free Press. They research and produce articles on history, geography, science, literary criticism and the arts. Some write sports stories, and others write regular columns. The young reporters all work in an authentic newsroom environment. They write and rewrite articles several times before they are accepted for publication.
The paper is circulated at numerous outlets in the Madison area, including in all city schools. The Free Press provides lesson plans to teachers who want to use the paper in their classroom. Currently about 23,000 copies of each issue are printed. Subscription information is available online.
No middle school report cards??!!
I received a newsletter in the mail yesterday from Toki Middle School, where my son is now a sixth-grader. The principal’s letter says:
“With the introduction of standards-based middle school report cards, we decided to send first quarter progress reports only to students currently not meeting grade level standards in curricular areas.”
So, assuming my child meets the standards, he just doesn’t matter? He’s not worth the time to figure out how to fill out the new report cards? The teachers are taking an extra half day today (early release: 11:30) to work more on dealing with these new report cards – and they’ve already taken at least one or two other days – but it’s still too hard to give my child a report card?
What if I want to know how well my child is doing? What if I want to know if he’s EXCEEDING the standards? Oh, wait…. I forgot. MMSD doesn’t care if he exceeds them. They just want to know if he MEETS them. God forbid I learn how MUCH he’s exceeding them by, or if he’s just skating and is merely meeting the standards. Or if he excels in one subject but is simply OK in another. We went through this in elementary school, so I suppose it should be no surprise that it’s happening in middle school.
I know there’s a teacher conference coming up, but if they’re not giving us report cards, then I’m thinking 15 minutes isn’t enough time to really lay out my child’s strengths and weaknesses in several different subjects. It’s not enough time for the teacher to give me a thorough assessment of my child’s progress. Oh, wait….I forgot. MMSD doesn’t care about giving me a thorough assessment. Judging from our experience in elementary school, the teachers just want you in and out of there as quickly as possible. They don’t want to answer my questions about how we can help him at home so he can do better in any subjects. (“Your son is a joy to have in class. He’s doing well in all subjects. He talks a little too much, but we’re working on that. Thanks for coming!”)
They DID send home a note asking if I needed to meet with any of his Unified Arts teachers (in addition to just his homeroom teacher) – but I checked no, because I assumed we’d be getting report cards with information from all his teachers! Nice of MMSD to wait until AFTER those papers had been turned in to let us know we wouldn’t be GETTING report cards. (Yes, I’ll be emailing the principal to let her know I’ve changed my mind.)
Oh, and I CAN sign in to Infinite Campus to see what’s going on with my child’s record (which hopefully is updated more often that the Toki Web site, which we were told would be updated every three or four weeks, but hasn’t been updated since before the beginning of school). But to do this, I have to **go into the school during school hours** with a photo ID. I can’t just use social security numbers or anything else to access this online. Could they be more clear in the message that they’d rather you not use Infinite Campus?
Isn’t it bad enough that MMSD doesn’t do thorough third-quarter report cards, because they believe not enough time has elapsed between the second and third quarters to make any discernible improvement? If my child isn’t making any improvement, if my child’s work isn’t worthy of a report card, then WHAT’S HE DOING IN SCHOOL?
We moved here four years ago, so looking forward to the “great” Madison schools. We couldn’t have been more wrong. My bright children are lagging. My sixth-grade son who tested as gifted before we moved to Madison is no longer (witness his dropping test scores – oh, wait…they’re still average or above, so MMSD doesn’t care).
I’ve brought up my concerns repeatedly. I’ve offered constructive suggestions. I’ve offered to help, at school and at home. I did two years as a PTO president in the elementary school and struggled unsuccessfully to get improvements. I might as well have thrown myself in front of a semi truck for all the good it’s done and for how beaten down I feel by this school system. The minute this housing market turns around, I’m investigating the nearby schooling options with an eye toward getting the heck out of here. I’m SO FED UP with MMSD and it’s reverse-discrimination against children who are average and above.
Class-action lawsuit, anyone?
Online Grading Systems Mean No More Changing D’s to B’s
Parents and students in a growing number of Washington area schools can track fluctuations in a grade-point average from the nearest computer in real time, a ritual that can become as addictive as watching political polls or a stock-market index.
The proliferation of online grading systems has transformed relations among teachers, parents and students and changed the rhythm of the school year. Internet-based programs including SchoolMAX and Edulink are pushing mid-term progress reports into obsolescence. Prospective failure is no longer a bombshell dropped in a parent-teacher conference. A bad grade on a test can’t be concealed by discarding the evidence. A student can log on at school, or a parent at work, to see the immediate impact of a missed assignment on the cumulative grade or to calculate what score on the next quiz might raise an 89.5 to a 90. Report cards hold little surprise.
“Half of the time, I know what grade my daughter got on something before she does,” said Susan Young, mother of an eighth-grader at Montgomery Village Middle School in Montgomery County.
Parents say the programs reconnect them to the academic lives of their children, a relationship that can decay as students move from elementary to middle and high school.
The Madison School District uses a system called “Infinite Campus“. A number of nearby districts use Powerschool, among others.
DCPAC Dan Nerad Meeting Summary
A video tape of the entire presentation and discussion with Dr. Nerad may be viewed by visiting this internet link: https://www.schoolinfosystem.org/archives/2008/09/ madison_superin_10.php
Dan Nerad opened his remarks by stating his commitment to efforts for always continuing change and improvement with the engagement of the community. He outlined four areas of focus on where we are going from here.
- Funding: must balance district needs and taxpayer needs. He mentioned the referendum to help keep current programs in place and it will not include “new” things.
- Strategic Plan: this initiative will formally begin in January 2009 and will involve a large community group process to develop as an ongoing activity.
- Meet people: going throughout the community to meet people on their own terms. He will carefully listen. He also has ideas.
- Teaching and learning mission: there are notable achievement gaps we need to face head-on. The “achievement gap” is serious. The broader mission not only includes workforce development but also helping students learn to be better people. We have a “tale of two school districts” – numbers of high achievers (including National Merit Scholars), but not doing well with a lot of other students. Low income and minority students are furtherest away from standards that must be met. Need to be more transparent with the journey to fix this problem and where we are not good. Must have the help of the community. The focus must be to improve learning for ALL kids, it is a “both/and” proposition with a need to reframe the issue to help all kids move forward from where they are. Must use best practices in contemporary assessment, curriculum, pedagogy and instructional methods.
Dr. Nerad discussed five areas about which he sees a need for community-wide conversations for how to meet needs in the district.
- Early learning opportunities: for pre-kindergarten children. A total community commitment is needed to prevent the ‘achievement gap’ from widening.
- High schools: How do we want high schools to be? Need to be more responsive. The curriculum needs to be more career oriented. Need to break down the ‘silos’ between high school, tech schools and colleges. Need to help students move through the opportunities differently. The Small Learning Communities Grant recently awarded to the district for high schools and with the help of the community will aid the processes for changes in the high schools.
- School safety: there must be an on-going commitment for changes. Nerad cited three areas for change:
a. A stronger curriculum helping people relate with other people, their differences and conflicts.
b. A response system to safety. Schools must be the safest of sanctuaries for living, learning and development.
c.Must make better use of research-based technology that makes sense.
- Math curriculum and instruction: Cited the recent Math Task Force Report
a. Good news: several recommendations for curriculum, instruction and policies for change.
b. Bad news: our students take less math than other urban schools in the state; there are notable differences in the achievement gap.
- Fine Arts: Cited recent Fine Arts Task Force Report. Fine arts curriculum and activities in the schools, once a strength, has been whittled away due to budget constraints. We must deal with the ‘hands of the clock’ going forward and develop a closer integration of the schools and community in this area.
School District Steps Back from Controversial Math Curriculum
Janese Heavin via a kind reader’s email:
Columbia Public Schools’ chief academic officer said the district is ready to compromise with the community when it comes to elementary math. But Sally Beth Lyon, who oversees district curricula, stopped short of saying concepts-based math would be replaced by a more traditional program.
“We’re going to figure out how to get something done so we can all move forward,” she told the Tribune. “We’re still at the table and will discuss the best way to move forward and include and acknowledge the community concerns we’re hearing.”
Lyon’s comments followed last night’s Board of Education meeting, where board member Ines Segert accused the district of appointing people to district math committees who are biased toward investigative math programs and not appointing mathematicians who favor more traditional math instruction.
Segert cited three University of Missouri math education professors who serve on district committees and have received grant funds to train Columbia teachers how to use concepts-based math materials. “They instruct teachers in a certain ideology that happens to be used in these textbooks we have in class,” said Segert, a vocal advocate of returning traditional math to classrooms.
Lyon’s comments followed what was almost a scolding from board member Ines Segert during last night’s board meeting. Segert criticized the district for appointing math education professors on math committees who seem to benefit from investigative math curriculum. She also accused the district of giving people incomplete data and summaries that skew results to justify current practices.
Lyon denied that anyone making curricula decisions receive district dollars. Any grant money they get comes from federal and state sources, she said.
Related: Madison School District Math Task Force Discussion.
A Watershed Teacher Labor Negotiation in Washington, DC
As we head into the Labor Day weekend, it is only fitting that we consider what may be the country’s most significant contract negotiation, which happens to be going on right here in Washington between the teachers union and the District’s dynamic and determined new schools chancellor, Michelle Rhee.
Negotiations are stalled over Rhee’s proposal to give teachers the option of earning up to $131,000 during the 10-month school year in exchange for giving up absolute job security and a personnel-and-pay system based almost exclusively on years served.
If Rhee succeeds in ending tenure and seniority as we know them while introducing merit pay into one of the country’s most expensive and underperforming school systems, it would be a watershed event in U.S. labor history, on a par with President Ronald Reagan’s firing of striking air traffic controllers in 1981. It would trigger a national debate on why public employees continue to enjoy what amounts to ironclad job security without accountability while the taxpayers who fund their salaries have long since been forced to accept the realities of a performance-based global economy.
Union leaders from around the country, concerned about the attention the Rhee proposal has received and the precedent it could set, have been pressing the Washington local to resist. But Rhee clearly has the upper hand. The chancellor has the solid support of the mayor and city council, and should it come to a showdown, there is little doubt that the voters would stand behind her in a battle with a union already badly tarnished by an embezzlement scandal and deeply implicated in the school system’s chronic failure.
There are signs that things may be a bit different in Madison today, compared to past practices.
Verona High School’s new AP moves in
New Verona Area High School (VAHS) Associate Principal Otistine Tracey Williams approaches her students with a strong attitude. “I will listen to you,” she says. “I have high expectations, and I want you to reach them. I will be your biggest cheerleader. But, I will hold you accountable.”
As one of three associate principals at VAHS, Williams supports approximately 450 students, their families, and their teachers through grades 10, 11, and 12. “The associate principals manage the day-to-day ins and outs of the school — primarily discipline, attendance, and staff issues,” says Williams. “We also work with the parents.”
Williams envisions her new position as a conduit, “working with students who may not connect with the school and finding ways to get them connected,” she says. “I love that. Now [at VAHS] I can do it on a larger scale.”
Dreams for school’s accessible playground prove boundless
Members of the Elvehjem Elementary School community, including students, teachers, parents and other supporters of a unique idea, watched Friday as groundbreaking occurred for a playground designed to be inclusionary to all.
The new playground is designed for use by all kids, including those with disabilities who could not participate in play with their peers on older models of playgrounds.
Last year members of the Elvehjem community decided to enter a national contest for a Boundless Playground and submitted an essay they hoped would win the day for the east side school. But they fell just short, finishing third out of 900 entries.
Eric Hainstock: Free at Last
Prison may be the best thing that ever happened to Eric Hainstock
Eric Hainstock’s first letter to Isthmus, dated April 15, 2008, got right to the point: “When I was 15 years old I shot my high school principal. I never meant for this to happen. He grabbed me from behind and I got scared. I was already pretty stressed, so that freaked me out even more. Please don’t get me wrong, I am not blaming Mr. Klang for grabbing me. But I am blaming him, the teachers, social services and the school as a whole for never listening to me…. No one ever listened.”
Like other communications to follow, the letter is a plaintive appeal for understanding, with a heavy dollop of self-pity. “No one ever listened”? Perhaps it felt that way to Hainstock.
“I want my story told,” wrote Hainstock, now 17, who picked Isthmus on the recommendation of his “celly,” a former Madison resident. “I want all the social service agencies to listen, the schools, parents all over the state.” He pegged his purpose as altruistic — to make sure no one else would ever have to “live in the hell that I did.” (Quotations from Hainstock’s letters have been edited for spelling and style.)
On Being More Like Ted Widerski
I’ve been convinced that a comment I made on another thread about Ted Widerski deserves to be shared as a post. –LAF
“I’ll miss him” only begins to capture it for me. Ted was HUGELY important to the student advocacy work I do in the District. I think I/we won’t know — fully — what we’ve lost until the school year begins to unfold.
People have said that Ted was a tireless and “courageous” advocate for TAG students, and that he was. I couldn’t agree more. At the same time, I can’t help but think “why should it require boundless courage and limitless persistence simply to get smart kids’ educational needs met?” Sigh.
On a more positive note, it has occurred to me that there are two things each of us could do to honor Ted’s memory. The first is to donate to the “Ted Widerski Mathfest Fund.” There is no better way to honor Ted than to insure that the mathfests he worked so hard to create, implement and protect KEEP HAPPENING. Send your check — appropriately marked “Ted Widerski Mathfests” — to the Foundation for Madison’s Public Schools, 455 Science Drive, Madison, WI, 53711.
The second thing each of us could do to honor Ted’s memory is to approach the coming school year with the happy intention of becoming more like him. So much of what we are up against in our advocacy work is a matter of misunderstanding, misinformation and misguided attitude. With a change in all of that – and few, if any, more dollars – the situation for our students could be profoundly different.
Practically speaking, what might it mean to “become more like Ted?” Well, here are a few beginning thoughts about that. I’m sure some of you will have many more.
