schoolinfosystem.org
David Blaska: The teachers union laid down a gauntlet of demands — over two dozen! — before they would return, including (Surprise! Surprise!) that teachers union default: More Money, aka “hazard pay.” Socialist provocateur John Nichols had their back. When a former governor encouraged schools to reopen for in-class instruction, Comrade Nichols lit the match: “Scott Walker is exploiting the pandemic […]
David Blaska: Who is behind the lawsuit seeking to bring down Wisconsin’s school choice program that helps 52,000 low-income, often minority students, escape failing public schools? Guy named Kirk Bangstad. Killing school choice is written into the Democrat(ic) party platform. Obeisance to the teachers union and the one-size-fits-all government school monopoly is central to Woke progressivism. […]
Chad Adelman: Public charter schools are more productive than traditional school districts in terms of their ability to translate a given level of investment into math and reading gains for students. That’s the finding of a new report from researchers at the University of Arkansas. Charter schools in Indianapolis; Camden, New Jersey; San Antonio, Texas; and New […]
Will Flanders and Noah Diekemper Annually, when Wisconsin’s new school report cards are released, we learn that Wisconsin’s schools must all be located in Lake Wobegone, where everyone is above average. School districts like Beloit (14.1% proficiency in reading) and Milwaukee (11.5% proficiency in math) are somehow not judged to be deserving of a ranking […]
Scott Girard The Madison Metropolitan School District once again “met expectations” for student learning in 2022-23 and six of its schools received the highest possible rating, according to state report cards released Tuesday. Two MMSD schools failed to meet expectations, the lowest rating. The district’s score of 68.3 was a slight increase over last year’s […]
Judd Legum: Last month, Baggett submitted a form seeking to remove The Almost Moon by Alice Sebold from a Santa Rosa school library, alleging the book was pornographic. On October 25, the librarian from Milton High School reached out to Baggett and said the first step in the challenge process was to have a meeting […]
Corrinne Hess: The proposed bill, authored by Sen. Mary Felzkowski, R-Irma, and state Rep. Jeff Mursau, R-Crivitz, extends that exception to applicants for all licenses that require the FORT exam. Felzkowski and Mursau did not respond to requests for comment. Lawmakers, DPI and the Wisconsin Association of School Boards say the change is necessary to […]
Corrine Hess: The state report cards include data on multiple indicators for multiple school years across four priority areas: achievement, growth, target group outcomes, and on-track to graduation. A district or school’s overall accountability score places it in one of five overall accountability ratings: Significantly Exceeds Expectations (five stars), Exceeds Expectations (four stars), Meets Expectations […]
Will Flanders: WILL Research Director Will Flanders’s new policy brief, Needs Improvement: How Wisconsin’s Report Card Can Mislead Parents, provides an important explanation of how Wisconsin’s school report cards work and how the various inputs work towards a school’s score. Specifically, Flanders highlights: The Report (PDF). Underly and our long term disastrous reading results…. WEAC: $1.57 million for […]
Abbey Machtig: The Madison School District is in the middle of two referendums approved by voters in 2020. The $317 million capital referendum has gone toward building a new elementary school and funding significant high-school renovations. The smaller operating referendum gave the district an additional $33 million to work with over four years. Despite this […]
Ann Althouse If you’re not seeing the replies there — I know I’m not — then read “Randi Weingarten gets educated about exactly who is to blame for the rise in homeschooling/The American Federation of Teachers union boss shared an article on ‘What’s behind the increase in homeschooling’” Underly and our long term disastrous reading results…. […]
Chad Aldeman: At the national level, public schools spent an average of $15,810 per pupil in 2019-20, not including debt or construction costs. But that figure hides tremendous variation across the country. Idaho and Utah schools, for instance, spent less than $10,000 per pupil, whereas Vermont; Washington, D.C., and New York schools spent upward of $25,000 per […]
Wayne Shockley: Kirk Bangstad and Julie Underwood attempted to make a case against private school vouchers in their column on Wednesday, “Why we’re fighting against private school vouchers.” While they do make a couple of good points in their arguments, such as the need for greater accountability, most of their points are not valid. One […]
Recently, @bangstad and Julie Underwood had an oped in the @WiStateJournal attempting to justify their lawsuit to end #SchoolChoice in WI. Like most of what has been released in this effort, it is full of half-truths and at-best misunderstandings of school choice. A 🧵 — Will Flanders (@WillFlandersWI) November 7, 2023 Underly and our long term […]
Daniel Bice: Back in 2021, Democratic operative Sachin Chheda played a major role in helping Jill Underly get elected state school superintendent. Now Underly appears to be returning the favor. Underly announced Monday that she is hiring Chheda to a $138,000-per-year job at the Department of Public Instruction, which Underly oversees. Chheda started his new job on Monday as […]
Jackie Valley, Ariel Gilreath, Claire Bryan, Trisha Powell Crain, Maura Turcotte and Talia Richman: “I don’t really like math but I kind of do,” James says. “It’s challenging but I like it.” Across the country, schools are scrambling to get students caught up in math as post-pandemic test scores reveal the depth of kids’ missing […]
Ruth Conniff: Still, the inequities among public schools in richer and poorer property tax districts are nothing compared to the existential threat to public education from a parallel system of publicly funded private schools that has been nurtured and promoted by a national network of right-wing think tanks, well funded lobbyists and anti-government ideologues. For […]
Heather Hollingsworth: Beyond third grade, fewer teachers each year know how to help students who are lacking key foundational reading skills, said Elizabeth Albro, an executive at the U.S. Department of Education’s independent research arm, the Institute of Education Sciences. Nationally, students suffered deep learning setbacks in reading and math during the pandemic. Last year’s […]
Sara Randazzo & Scott Calvert: In the race to fix a nationwide reading crisis that worsened during the pandemic, more states are threatening to make students repeat third grade to help them catch up. Tennessee, Michigan and North Carolina are among at least 16 states that have tried in recent years to use reading tests […]
NCTQ All children deserve to learn to read, and all teachers deserve the preparation and support that will allow them to help their students achieve this goal. Yet more than one-third of fourth graders—1.3 million children1 in the U.S.—cannot read at a basic level.2 Not learning how to read has lifelong consequences. Students who are not […]
WisPolitics: Underly road a historic wave of cashflow to win in 2021, marking a significant win for Dems of the GOP. While the race was officially nonpartisan, the Dem Party contributed $949,844 to Underly’s campaign, which spent $1.53 million over the election. In all, candidates and outside groups spent $3 million on the race, a […]
Troy Closson: As New York embarks on an ambitious plan to overhaul how children in the nation’s largest school system are taught to read, schools leaders face a significant obstacle: educators’ skepticism. Dozens of cities and states have sought to transform reading instruction in recent years, driven by decades of research known as the “science of reading.” But […]
Scott Girard: “I’d been looking forward to high school and it was so hyped up,” said West High School senior Alex Vakar. “It felt like this necessary period for growth because people always talk about them being the best days of their lives, and we missed out on half of that.” Dances, sports, time with […]
Troy Closson: As New York embarks on an ambitious plan to overhaul how children in the nation’s largest school system are taught to read, schools leaders face a significant obstacle: educators’ skepticism. Dozens of cities and states have sought to transform reading instruction in recent years, driven by decades of research known as the “science of reading.” But […]
Jorgen Veisdal: Following his undergraduate studies in mathematics, Wald applied to (but was barred from entering) the University of Vienna for graduate studies. The university had quotas for Jewish students. Nonetheless, Wald still travelled to Vienna. He entered an engineering school for a year before reaching out to the mathematical institute at the University of […]
Scott Girard: “Most teachers are still learning how to teach reading from the commercial materials that they’re being supplied,” he said. “These materials are defective. What teachers have traditionally learned from them is poor practices. “What’s the effect? Some kids are going to learn to read anyway, but for a lot of children it makes […]
St Johns: St. John’s College is best known for its reading list and the Great Books curriculum that was adopted in 1937. While the list of books has evolved over the last century, the tradition of all students reading foundational texts of Western civilization remains. The reading list at St. John’s includes classic works in […]
Kaleem Caire: Thank you CapTimes for printing my OpEd. Interestingly, in a conversation with the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction yesterday, state officials told us that we are legally obligated to count our students who are enrolled and present on the day of the pupil count (tomorrow, Friday). This is state law. They also told […]
The reading ape: ‘Once you learn to read you will be forever free,’ is the quotation by Frederick Douglass (2017, p1) that adorns numerous primary school libraries across England and who would disagree? With 25% of young offenders having reading skills below that of the average seven-year-old and 60% of the prison population having literacy […]
Jeb Bush: The U.S. has a choice: Give up on a generation or confront this challenge head-on. Some adults find it easier to give up. They won’t say it out loud; they’ll simply lower expectations. Or they’ll explain away the drop in scores, blaming the pandemic when scores had already begun to decline before Covid […]
Troy.edu: “I hear from friends working for corporations in Birmingham and Atlanta who are afraid that woke ideologies are creeping into their offices and board rooms. They question why their employers are taking positions on controversial issues–unrelated to their apolitical business–that could alienate consumers,” he said. The Free Enterprise Scholars will participate in the Johnson […]
Ngozi Nwanji Stephen and Ayesha Curry are taking action to increase the literacy rate for children through their Eat. Learn. Play. Foundation. ABC7 reports that the Currys have unveiled the first of 150 Little Town Libraries that will be spread out across Oakland, CA — with an aim to provide 30,000 books to the youth. The libraries are […]
Apporva Mandavilli: Much of the withheld information could help state and local health officials better target their efforts to bring the virus under control. Detailed, timely data on hospitalizations by age and race would help health officials identify and help the populations at highest risk. Information on hospitalizations and death by age and vaccination status […]
Jeffrey Mervis: A new data-rich report by the National Science Foundation (NSF) confirms China has overtaken the United States as the world’s leader in several key scientific metrics, including the overall number of papers published and patents awarded. U.S. scientists also have serious competition from foreign researchers in certain fields, it finds. That loss of […]
Martin Kulldorff and Jay Bhattacharya: The pandemic is on its way out, but how many Americans think the U.S. approach succeeded? More than 600,000 Americans died from Covid, and lockdowns have left extensive collateral damage. Trust in science has eroded, and the damage won’t be limited to epidemiology, virology and public health. Scientists in other […]
Scott Girard: One City Schools received a $1 million donation from the W. Jerome Frautschi Foundation to support the school as it expands to serve students in grades 4K-12. “The Frautschi family has a long history of investing in initiatives to make Madison a great city for everyone, dating back to their contributions to downtown […]
Nate Hochman: The conservative education-reform movement has long evaluated itself in quantitative terms. Right-leaning educrats calculate their successes and failures as one would assess a tax cut or an infrastructure bill, measuring the effects of their reforms in terms of proficiency rates in math and reading, graduation and dropout numbers, and cost efficiency. That, in turn, […]
WMC Foundation PDF: When it comes to education funding in Wisconsin, both Republicans and Democrats have made it a priority. The most recent State Budget approved spending $14.2 billion in state tax dollars on K-12 education – roughly 36 percent of the general fund budget. s spending has continued to climb in recent years, educational […]
Kvistad noted that MMSD completed a report similar to this one in 2011, but said it ended up “on a shelf.” This time, she said, the district has “got to do something different,” 12 Slide Presentation (PDF): Charge to the Task Force: 1. Reviewing and becoming familiar with the best evidence about the most effective […]
Minneapolis, among the most segregated school districts in the country, with one of the widest racial academic gaps, is in the midst of a sweeping plan to overhaul and integrate its schools. And unlike previous desegregation efforts, which typically required children of color to travel to white schools, Minneapolis officials are asking white families to […]
Mark Seidenberg: Fountas and Pinnell have written a series of blog posts defending their popular curriculum, which is being criticized as based on discredited ideas about how children learn to read. (See Emily Hanford’s post here; EdReports evaluation here, many comments in the blogosphere.) The question is why school systems should continue to invest in the F&P curriculum and […]
NCTQ: Among the four core subjects, the greatest number of test takers pass the mathematics subtest, both on the first-attempt—the focus of this brief—and after multiple attempts (the “best-attempt” pass rate).2 This is surprising, perhaps, given the familiar anecdotes documenting elementary teachers’ math anxiety. Where do aspiring teachers struggle the most? It is the social studies subtest which test […]
Anya Kamenetz: Instead, the parents she talks to are upset that their children are still struggling, socially and emotionally as well as academically. She likens extended remote schooling to a form of “solitary confinement.” Fights are breaking out at school. Bus driver shortages have parents summoned to pick their kids up unpredictably. There are substitutes covering classes. […]
Richard Phelps: In a review essay appearing in the Fall 2019 issue of AQ, James Shuls criticized author Sandra Stotsky for suggesting in her 2018 book Changing the Course of Failure that the federal government should take control of the education of low-achieving students by establishing something resembling boarding schools. “That’s a dangerous belief,” Shuls […]
Bonnie Snyder At the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education(FIRE), our longstanding concerns about the deteriorating free speech culture in higher education led to the suspicion that many of these pernicious problems originate before students ever set foot on campus. This spurred us to expand our organizational aims to include high school outreach, in order to teach […]
National Council on teacher quality: The quality of the teacher workforce is especially important in the early grades, when teachers bear an extraordinary responsibility, building a solid foundation for students in both the knowledge and skills they will need to succeed in later grades, as well as in their future lives. The past year and […]
Joanne Jacobs: Only 45 percent of would-be elementary teachers pass state licensing tests on the first try in states with strong testing systems concludes a new report by the National Council on Teacher Quality. Twenty-two percent of those who fail — 30 percent of test takers of color — never try again, reports Driven by […]
Quin Hillyer: I wrote yesterday about how the school district in the Chicago suburb of Evanston teaches that the nuclear family must be aggressively undermined as a vehicle of white supremacism. I wrote about how this ideology holds that “the very foundations” of republican government and its “principles of constitutional law” must be challenged. The […]
Independent Institute: California is on the verge of politicizing K-12 math in a potentially disastrous way. Its proposed Mathematics Curriculum Framework is presented as a step toward social justice and racial equity, but its effect would be the opposite—to rob all Californians, especially the poorest and most vulnerable, who always suffer most when schools fail to teach […]
Wisconsin Supreme Court: For the respondent, there was a brief filed by Remzy D. Bitar, Sadie R. Zurfluh, and Municipal and Litigation Group ̧ Waukesha. There was an oral argument by Remzy D. Bitar. For the petitioners Wisconsin Council of Religious and Independent Schools, et al., there was a reply brief filed by Richard M. […]
Emily Oster, Rebecca Jack, Clare Halloran, John Schoof, Diana McLeod: This paper reports on the correlation of mitigation practices with staff and student COVID-19 case rates in Florida, New York, and Massachusetts during the 2020-2021 school year. We analyze data collected by the COVID-19 School Response Dashboard and focus on student density, ventilation upgrades, and […]
To keep the merit-based entrance to Boston Exam Schools, a group of Boston parents established BPCAE, a non-profit organization (NPO) in November 2020. BPCAE is a platform for all to maintain academic excellence in Boston Exam Schools. We also focus on enhancing the K-6 grade education foundation for exam schools. Lawsuit by parents lost in […]
Robert Pondisco: If there’s one lesson education policymakers might have learned in the last twenty-five years, it’s that it’s not hard to make schools and districts do something, but it’s extremely hard to make them do it well. There has always been at least a tacit assumption among policy wonks that schools and teachers are […]
Will Flanders: In the last few days, a debate has jump-started regarding grants from the Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL) following reporting from Wisconsin Spotlight on questionable activities in Green Bay. CTCL is a foundation heavily funded by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. It describes its mission as “ensur(ing) elections are secure, voters have confidence in election outcomes, and democracy thrives as civic engagement grows.” However, […]
edreports.org: The instructional materials districts choose can make a difference. At EdReports, our reviews of English language arts (ELA) programs are designed to empower educators with high-quality content to support the kind of reading instruction that helps all students succeed in school and beyond. EdReports’ review process for K-5 ELA instructional materials is built on […]
Joseph Henrich: In the wake of the spread of Protestantism, the literacy rates in the newly reforming populations in Britain, Sweden, and the Netherlands surged past more cosmopolitan places like Italy and France. Motivated by eternal salvation, parents and leaders made sure the children learned to read. The sharpest test of this idea comes from […]
Amber Walker: I sometimes wonder where I would be today if my kindergarten teacher hadn’t encouraged my mother to have me take the admissions exam for Chicago’s selective elementary schools. That one test result earned me a coveted spot at Edward W. Beasley Academic Center, one of the city’s gifted and talented elementary programs, where […]
Gloria Reyes: FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE December 1, 2020 Madison School Board President Gloria Reyes Will Not Seek Re-election Statement by Gloria Reyes I am announcing today that I will not seek re-election to the Madison School Board. This has been a difficult decision. I’ve made it after much consideration, consultation with my family, and as […]
Greg Piper: City has turned a blind eye to all other political ‘defacement’ for months In the aftermath of George Floyd’s death in Minneapolis police custody in May, Washington, D.C. Mayor Muriel commissioned a two-block-long street mural reading BLACK LIVES MATTER just north of the White House. She allowed Black Lives Matter activists to paint […]
Scott Girard: Immediately, the operating referendum approval means district officials can implement the “passing referendum budget,” which includes $6 million in extra funds. That will go toward initiatives including early literacy, Black Excellence and a slight base wage increase for staff. The School Board passed two versions of the 2020-21 budget Oct. 30, one for […]
Hi, I’m cap tines K-12 education reporter Scott Gerard. Today. Our cap times IDFs panel will discuss how will COVID-19 change K-12 education. I’m lucky to have three wonderful panelists with me to help answer that question. Marilee McKenzie is a teacher at Middleton’s Clark street community school, where she has worked since the school was in its planning stages.
She’s in her [00:03:00] 11th year of teaching. Dr. Gloria Ladson billings is a nationally recognized education expert who was a U w Madison faculty member for more than 26 years, including as a professor in the departments of curriculum and instruction, educational policy studies and educational leadership and policy analysis.
She is also the current president of the national Academy of education. Finally dr. Carlton Jenkins is the new superintendent of the Madison metropolitan school district. He started the districts top job in August, coming from the Robbinsdale school district in Minnesota, where he worked for the past five years, Jenkins began his career in the Madison area.
Having worked in Beloit and at Memorial high school in early 1990s before moving to various districts around the country. Thank you all so much for being here. Mary Lee, I’m going to start with you. You’ve been working with students directly throughout this pandemic. How has it gone? Both in the spring when changes were very sudden, and then this fall with a summer to reflect and [00:04:00] plan, it’s been interesting for sure.
Um, overall, I would say the it’s been hard. There has been nothing about this have been like, ah, It’s really, it makes my life easy. It’s been really challenging. And at the same time, the amount of growth and learning that we’ve been able to do as staff has been incredible. And I think about how teachers have moved from face-to-face to online to then planning for.
Scott Girard: While schedules vary from school to school, some are publicly available online and show a more traditional school day — in front of a screen instead of in a classroom. At Elvehjem Elementary School, for example, second graders will have a morning meeting from 8:30-9 a.m., a “foundational skills” lesson from 9-9:30 a.m. […]
Joanne Jacobs: Thirty years ago, Milwaukee launched a private-school voucher program for low-income students. In 1998, when religious schools were allowed to participate, enrollment expanded. Overall, test scores for voucher students resemble their public school counterparts. But there’s a critical difference: Voucher students are more likely to complete high school, enroll in college and earn a […]
Taxpayers have long supported the Madison School District’s far above average spending, while tolerating our long term, disastrous reading results. The district has placed substantial tax and spending increase referendums on the November, 2020 Presidential ballot. A presenter [org chart] further mentioned that Madison spends about $1 per square foot in annual budget maintenance while […]
Charles Lipson: In the early 1950s, at the nadir of McCarthyism, the Cincinnati Reds baseball team was so fearful of anti-communist crusaders that it actually changed the team’s name. Overnight, they reverted to their original name, the Cincinnati Red Stockings, and then for several years became the Redlegs. The anti-communism was justified; the mob mentality […]
Henry Dyer: In 2004, before he reached the age of 20, Andrey Alimetov created what has become one of the most viewed websites of the coronavirus pandemic, Worldometer. The site has shot into the top 100 Alexa rankings. Coronavirus data collated by Worldometer has gone on to be cited by the Government, politicians, media outlets, […]
Public Counsel: A historic agreement was reached today between the plaintiffs and Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer in the Gary B. v. Whitmer literacy suit. The agreement will preserve a groundbreaking opinion by the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals which held that a basic minimum education, including literacy, is a Constitutional right, and includes an immediate […]
Max Eden: This June, pandemic conditions permitting, Harvard University will host a conference—not open to the public—to discuss the purported dangers of homeschooling and strategies for legal reform. The co-organizer, Harvard law professor Elizabeth Bartholet, believes that homeschooling should be banned, as it is “a realm of near-absolute parental power. . . . inconsistent with a […]
UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALSFOR THE SIXTH CIRCUIT, via a kind reader: “The recognition of a fundamental right is no small matter. This is particularly true when the right in question is something that the state must affirmatively provide. But just as this Court should not supplant the state’s policy judgments with its own, neither […]
Karin Chenoweth: In the words of the report, Montgomery County’s curriculum does “not include the necessary components to adequately address foundational skills.” If you’re not immersed in these issues, you might not recognize just how scathing this language is. Montgomery County fails to do what just about all cognitive scientists and most reading researchers agree […]
Morrison Foerster: Superior court Judge Rupert Byrdsong today received notice of a wide-ranging settlement in a major education lawsuit brought by students, parents and advocacy groups against the State of California. The lawsuit was the first civil rights action brought under any state constitution to protect students’ right to access to literacy. The ability to […]
Logan Wroge: “I don’t think that actually stating they’re supporting these policies actually means that anything will change,” said Mark Seidenberg, a UW-Madison psychology professor. “I don’t take their statement as anything more than an attempt to defuse some of the controversy and some of the criticism that’s being directed their way.” While there’s broad […]
R. Shep Melnick: The central, unstated assumption of Hannah-Jones and other defenders of court-ordered busing is that the meaning of the crucial term “desegregation” remained constant from Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 to busing in Boston two decades later. To oppose busing in Detroit, Dayton, or Delaware (as Biden did), so the story […]
WILL: Waukesha Circuit Court Judge Bohren issued a summary judgement order Tuesday in favor of School Choice Wisconsin Action (SCWA), a WILL client, that sued the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction (DPI), the state education agency, for their unfair, illegal treatment of private schools in Wisconsin’s choice programs. WILL filed the lawsuit on behalf of […]
Wisconsin Legislature: –State Representative John Nygren (R-Marinette), Co-Chair of the Joint Committee on Finance and State Representative Jeremy (R-Fond du Lac), Chair of the Assembly Education Committee released the following statement calling for an audit of the Department of Public Instruction: “Representing nearly one-fifth of the entire state budget, the Department of Public Instruction budget […]
The Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction: State Superintendent Carolyn Stanford Taylor announced her decision today not to run in the 2021 election for state superintendent of public instruction. Gov. Tony Evers appointed Stanford Taylor to the office in January 2019, and her term ends July 2021. “I am honored to have been appointed by Governor […]
DJ Buck: Among high school students, I’ve seen puzzled looks in response to the mention of Adolf Hitler, segregation, Thomas Jefferson, the Cold War, Aristotle and the Bill of Rights—among other things. This shocking lack of knowledge has a noxious effect on student thought. Take a question I gave during a video assignment: to which […]
Daniel Willingham: American students remain stumped by math. The 2019 scores for the National Assessment of Educational Progress test — known as NAEP — were published last month, showing that performance for fourth- and eighth-graders hasn’t budged since 2009. That’s a year after the National Mathematics Advisory Panel, convened by President George W. Bush, concluded that […]
Matthew Ladner: Americans thus seem to see their public education system as falling short in a variety of ways and aren’t especially optimistic about future improvement. Republicans exhibited the greatest amount of optimism, with 24 percent forecasting that the American public school system would be a “model of excellence around the world” in 20 years. […]
Molly Beck: Less than half of Wisconsin students again this year are considered to be proficient in reading and math — a trend Assembly Speaker Robin Vos on Thursday called “disturbing.” The percentage of students in public and private voucher schools scoring well in reading and math on state tests dropped slightly during the 2018-19 […]
Judith Siers-Poisson: An education expert explains why he thinks that teachers leaving the profession is at the heart of the current teacher shortages. And he offers advice on how to retain experienced educators, while making it a more attractive career to young people. Tim Slekar notes and links. Additional Wisconsin Public Radio appearances: February, 2019. […]
: More than 2,500 teachers in Wisconsin worked in schools using emergency licenses during the 2017-18 school year, according to DPI data. In the Madison Metropolitan School District, 109 teachers were on emergency licenses during the 2016-17 school year after 67 the preceding school year. Teachers who work with some of the state’s most vulnerable […]
Dana Ansel: Last year, the Massachusetts Legislature decided that the time had come to understand the state of education that gifted students receive in Massachusetts. They issued a mandate for the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education to review the policy and practices of education in public schools for gifted students as well as for […]
Mark Seidenberg Wisconsin legislators are considering an important issue: how to help dyslexic children who struggle to read. You might think that helping poor readers is something everyone could get behind, but no. Dyslexia was identified in the 1920s and has been studied all over the world. It affects about 15% of all children, runs […]
mp3 audio – Machine Transcript follows [Better transcript, via a kind reader PDF]: I’m Carousel Baird and we have a fabulous and exciting show lined up today. Such a fabulous guy sitting right across from me right here in the studio. Is Madison metropolitan school district current superintendent? She still here in charge of all […]
Citizen Stewart: Ravitch, by contrast, has fallen irreparably into polemics so much that her daily blogs put her in league with Alex Jones’ made-for-YouTube Info Wars. Along those lines, her blog-fart today ties “the charter industry” to the “infamous pedophile and “super-rich” Jeffrey Epstein. “In 2013, his foundation issued a press release announcing that he […]
Molly Worthen: A small band of students will travel to Sitka, Alaska, this month to help reinvent higher education. They won’t be taking online courses, or abandoning the humanities in favor of classes in business or STEM, or paying high tuition to fund the salaries of more Assistant Vice Provosts for Student Life. They represent […]
Jenny Peek: Mark Seidenberg, a UW-Madison professor and cognitive neuroscientist, has spent decades researching the way humans acquire language. He is blunt about Wisconsin’s schools’ ability to teach children to read: “If you want your kid to learn to read you can’t assume that the school’s going to take care of it. You have to […]
Karen Vaites: “Thank you so much to EWA, congratulations to my fellow finalists, and there’s so much great reporting, education reporting going on right now–I’ve been coming to this conference and I’ve been a part of this community for a long time, and I’m just so grateful to be in the profession that all of […]
Libby Sobic and Will Flanders: This change in accreditation also makes it more difficult for existing private schools to join the parental choice program because it is one more regulation that the school must comply with. The plan is even more ridiculous when one considers that Wisconsin’s public schools aren’t required to go through any […]
Michelle Obama: Without telling me, she went over to the school and began a weeks-long process of behind-the-scenes lobbying, which led to me and a couple of other high-performing kids getting quietly pulled out of class, given a battery of tests, and about a week later reinstalled permanently into a bright and orderly third-grade class […]
Negassi Tesfamichael: Gov. Evers had been at DPI for a while until now. Has there been a foundation at DPI built by Gov. Evers that you feel like you can expand upon? Initially, I went to DPI in 2001 — that was when Libby Burmaster became superintendent. And Libby and I worked together in the […]
Bethany Blankley: The documents DPI sent to school superintendents are the very documents WILL requested. DPI also sent school superintendents the final “joint federal notification packets” on ESSA, which also stipulated that the information not be made public before March 5. As a result, DPI could be applying a federal accountability system to schools and […]
Word Atlas: The importance of a journal can never be over emphasised. Journals help you build patience, consistency, good observatory skills and an ability to write whether you are inspired or not. Journals also make excellent muses when you need inspiration to write. Reading through past writings can birth ideas that make good foundations for […]
Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction: The Every Student Succeeds Act – a major federal education law – requires DPI to identify the lowest performing public schools and schools with low performing student groups in each state. Each state outlined their plans for this new federal accountability system, in which the state detailed their accountability indicators, […]
: It seems that the plan is to reduce University course selection to just one subject: Victim Group Studies. Mary Frances Williams is a courageous person. Reading about her experience tells us much about the modern Academy. Here is a long quote about the heart of the matter, but I recommend reading the whole thing […]
NCTQ: Our nation’s schools employ 3 million teachers and rely on 27,000 programs in 2,000 separate institutions for training those teachers. Since 2006, NCTQ has reviewed programs, made recommendations, and highlighted the best we’ve seen of key elements for undergraduate and graduate programs for elementary, secondary and special education. Wisconsin DPI’s ongoing efforts to weaken […]
Joanne Jacobs:: 1. Which of the following is true of qualitative measures of text complexity? A. They describe statistical measurements of a text. B. They rely on computer algorithms to describe text. C. They involve attributes that can be measured only by human readers. D. They account for the different motivational levels readers bring to […]
Jessie Opoien: A WILL spokesman said on Tuesday that the organization had received the documents and its attorneys are currently reviewing them. “It is deeply disappointing it has taken DPI months to comply with our request,” said WILL deputy counsel Tom Kamenick in a statement. “The public has a right to know how DPI is […]
Molly Beck: He said in the Milwaukee program especially, enrollment freezes in private voucher schools would disproportionately affect children of color living in low-income households. “Most of our families don’t have the kind of income where they would have realistic choices,” he said at the time. Under Evers’ proposal, voucher schools also would be banned […]