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Growing Cheers for the Home-Schooled Team



Joe Drape:

Taber Spani, one of the best high school girls basketball players in the nation, holds hands with two opponents as a coach reads a Bible verse. It is the way each game in the National Christian Homeschool Basketball Championships begins.
This is more than a postseason tournament for the 300 boys and girls teams from 19 states that have competed here over the past six days. As the stands packed with parents and the baselines overrun by small children attest, this is also a jamboree to celebrate faith and family.
“You build friendships here with other girls who know what it’s like to be self-motivated and disciplined and share your values,” said Spani, a junior who plays for the Metro Academy Mavericks of Olathe, Kan. “I wouldn’t trade this tournament for anything.”
Only a decade ago, home-school athletics was considered little more than organized recess for children without traditional classrooms. Now, home-school players are tracked by scouts, and dozens of them have accepted scholarships to colleges as small as Blue Mountain in Mississippi and as well known as Iowa State.




U.S. students ‘middle of the pack’ compared with world




Click for a larger version of this image.

Greg Toppo:

Educators and politicians these days make a point of saying that U.S. schoolchildren aren’t just competing locally for good, high-paying jobs — they’re competing globally.
A detailed study lets them know just how well kids may do if they really compete globally someday — and it’s not exactly pretty.
Crunching the most recent data from a pair of U.S. and international math and science exams for middle-schoolers, Gary Phillips, a researcher at the non-profit American Institutes for Research (AIR), a non-partisan Washington think tank, finds a decidedly mixed picture: Students in most states perform as well as — or better than — peers in most foreign countries.
But he also finds that even those in the highest-scoring states, such as Massachusetts and Minnesota, are significantly below a handful of top-scoring nations such as Singapore, Hong Kong, South Korea, Taiwan and Japan.

1.9MB PDF Report:

In mathematics, students in 49 states and the District of Columbia are behind their counterparts in Singapore, Hong Kong, South Korea, Taiwan and Japan. Students in Massachusetts are on a par with Japanese students, but trail the other four nations. In science, students in Massachusetts, Minnesota, Montana, New Hampshire, North Dakota, South Dakota, Vermont and Wisconsin trail only students in Singapore and Taiwan, while performing equal or better than students in the other 45 countries surveyed.
“More than a century ago Louis Pasteur revealed the secret to invention and innovation when he said ‘chance favors the prepared mind’. The take away message from this report is that the United States is loosing the race to prepare the minds of the future generation,” said Dr. Phillips.
Students in the District of Columbia had the lowest U.S. performance in mathematics (they did not participate in the science test). In math, the average D.C. student is at the Below Basic level, putting them behind students in 29 countries and ahead of those in 14 countries. In science, nine states are at the Below Basic level: Florida, Arizona, Louisiana, Nevada, New Mexico, Alabama, Hawaii, California and Mississippi.

Clusty Search: National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) | Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMMS)




The Pangloss Index: How States Game the No Child Left Behind Act: Wisconsin Tied for #1



Kevin Carey:

This report includes an updated Pangloss Index, based on a new round of state reports submitted in 2007. As Table 1 shows, many states look about the same Wisconsin and Iowa are tied for first, distinguishing themselves by insisting that their states house a pair of educational utopias along the upper Mississippi River. In contrast, Massachusetts—which is the highest-performing state in the country according to the NAEP—continues to hold itself to far tougher standards than most, showing up at 46th, near the bottom of the list.

Alan Borsuk:

Wisconsin – especially the state Department of Public Instruction – continues to avoid taking steps to increase the success of low-performing children in the state, a national non-profit organization says in a report released today.
For the second year in a row, Education Sector put Wisconsin at the top of its Pangloss Index, a ranking of states based on how much they are overly cheery about how their students are doing. Much of the ranking is based on the author’s assessment of data related to what a state is doing to comply with the federal No Child Left Behind education law.
“Wisconsin policy-makers are fooling parents by pretending that everything is perfect,” said Kevin Carey, research and policy manager for the organization. “As a result, the most vulnerable students aren’t getting the attention they need.”
DPI officials declined to comment on the new report because they had not seen it yet. In 2006, Tony Evers, the deputy state superintendent of public instruction, objected strongly to a nearly identical ranking from Education Sector and said state officials and schools were focused on improving student achievement, especially of low-income and minority students on the short end of achievement gaps in education.
The report is the latest of several over the last two years from several national groups that have said Wisconsin is generally not doing enough to challenge its schools and students to do better. The groups can be described politically as centrist to conservative and broadly supportive of No Child Left Behind. Education Sector’s founders include Andrew Rotherham, a former education adviser to President Bill Clinton, and the group describes itself as non-partisan.
Several of the reports have contrasted Wisconsin and Massachusetts as states with similar histories of offering high-quality education but different approaches toward setting statewide standards now. Massachusetts has drawn praise for action it has taken in areas such as testing the proficiency of teachers, setting the bar high on standardized tests and developing rigorous education standards.
The Education Sector report and Carey did the same. The report rated Massachusetts as 46th in the nation, meaning it is one of the most demanding states when it comes to giving schools high ratings.
Carey said that in 1992, Wisconsin outscored Massachusetts in the nationwide testing program known as NAEP, the National Assessment of Educational Progress. But Wisconsin is now behind that state in every area of NAEP testing, he said.
“Unlike Wisconsin, Massachusetts has really challenged its schools,” Carey said.

Additional commentary from TJ Mertz and Joanne Jacobs. All about Pangloss.




On American School Reform: the pressure for change is coming from parents, which bodes well



The Economist (Los Angeles & New Orleans):

OUTSIDE New York, as usual, it is a different story. Most American mayors look longingly at Michael Bloomberg’s accomplishments and wish they were equally mighty. West of the Mississippi, none has succeeded in seizing control of a school system. Nor are they likely to be able to do so: the early 20th century progressive movement, strongest in the West, severely blunted their powers. “We haven’t had reform from the top here,” says Eli Broad, a Los Angeles philanthropist. “So instead we’re seeing change from the bottom up.”
In the vanguard are charter schools like the Academy of Opportunity [Ask Google Live Yahoo] in south-central Los Angeles. Here 13- and 14-year-olds, almost all of them black or Hispanic, firmly shake your hand and outline their plans to go to Yale and Stanford. They work long hours—from 7.30am to 5pm five days a week, plus four hours every other Saturday. The grind pays off. At the end of their first year in the school just 28% of pupils are proficient or advanced in maths, compared to 48% of pupils elsewhere in California. By the time they leave, three years later, they far outperform their peers.




Online Education: Tailoring, Measuring and ‘Bridging’



Andy Guess:

As information technology leaders convened for the Educause meetings Thursday in Seattle, they talked about some of the same issues that are attracting attention in higher ed outside of technology circles: links to K-12, making courses more engaging and measuring what students learn.
Looming over the proceedings was the stepped-up pressure from state governments, accreditors and the Department of Education that has led in recent years to a greater focus on assessment and learning outcomes. The implication of the accountability movement on information technology is clear in an example offered by Blackboard’s Peter Segall, the company’s president for higher education in North America: The two-year public colleges in Mississippi have adopted the company’s outcome system to track student progress against specific goals, he said. The reason? To “demonstrate accountability” to the citizens of the state.




Is Wisconsin’s ACT Rank Inflated?



Bruce Murphy:

Last week, we got the annual good news that Wisconsin “scores near top on ACT once again,” as a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel headline declared. Aping her predecessors, state Superintendent Elizabeth Burmaster hailed the results as proof of how dandy we’re doing in Badgerland. The “composite score speaks well of our students’ academic achievement and the support they receive from their parents and teachers,” she declared.
But are we really doing that well? A close look at the ACT test data offers some reason for caution. Yes, Wisconsin’s average score of 22.3 was high compared to the national average of 21.2 (with scores ranging from 18.9 for Mississippi to 23.5 for Massachusetts), but the percentage of students taking the test here is lower than in 15 states. While 70 percent of Wisconsin students take the test, the percentage is 100 in Illinois and Colorado, 96 in Tennessee and Mississippi, and ranges from 71 to 82 percent for another 11 states.
Why does this matter? As the percentage of students taking the test increases, you are likely to include more low-attendance and low-performance students in the mix, pushing the average score lower.
Burmaster brags that Wisconsin has maintained its high ACT score even as the percentage of students taking the test rose. But the increase was minimal, rising from 68 percent in 2002 to 70 percent last year. That includes a steady rise in the number of African-American and Hispanic students taking the test, but they still remain underrepresented.
“We allow people in this state to pound their chest while ignoring the fact that Milwaukee has significantly fewer kids taking (the ACT),” Milwaukee School Board member Terry Falk declared in the JS story. (Falk, a former contributor to Milwaukee Magazine, sure knows how to give good quotes.)
As a reality check, I looked at state scores combined with the percentage of students taking the test to estimate which states we might actually trail. A state like Mississippi, for instance, can be quickly rejected: Yes, 96 percent of students took the test, but the average score of 18.9 was abysmally low, worst among all 50 states. Even if Wisconsin tested 96 percent of students, its average score would never drop that low.




US Per Student Spending, By State



US Census Bureau:

The nation’s public school districts spent an average of $8,701 per student on elementary and secondary education in fiscal year 2005, up 5 percent from $8,287 the previous year, the U.S. Census Bureau reported today.
Findings from Public Education Finances: 2005, show that New York spent $14,119 per student — the highest amount among states and state equivalents. Just behind was neighboring New Jersey at $13,800, the District of Columbia at $12,979, Vermont ($11,835) and Connecticut ($11,572). Seven of the top 10 with the highest per pupil expenditures were in the Northeast.
Utah spent the least per student ($5,257), followed by Arizona ($6,261), Idaho ($6,283), Mississippi ($6,575) and Oklahoma ($6,613). All 10 of the states with the lowest spending per student were in the West or South.
The report and associated data files contain information for all local public school systems in the country. For example, in New York City, the largest school district in the country, per pupil spending was $13,755.
In all, public school systems spent $497 billion, up from $472.3 billion the previous year. Of these expenditures, the largest portions went to instruction ($258.3 billion) and support services such as pupil transportation and school administration ($146.3 billion).

Madison spends $13,684 per student ($333,101,865 2006/2007 citizen’s budget) / 24,342 students




Fixing Dixie’s tricksy schools



The Economist:

The hard lessons of segregation
WAYNE CLOUGH, the president of the Georgia Institute of Technology, has just moved into a new office. The workmen are still in the corridors outside, generating noise and dust. A few years ago the site, in Atlanta, was full of drug addicts and prostitutes. The hotel across the street was boarded up and inhabited by vagrants. Now Georgia Tech is building a “sustainable, energy-efficient campus” with white roofs, recycled building materials and a system for catching and using rainwater. It is a bit more expensive, says Mr Clough, but “if you plan to be around for a while, you’ll recapture the costs eventually.”
Georgia Tech has a global reputation. Its 16,000 students will mostly go on to careers in engineering, medicine or some other tough and lucrative field. But Mr Clough does have some worries. Southern universities got into the research game later than their northern rivals, so the region is behind the curve in attracting high-tech industries, he says. From time to time, fundamentalists try to teach creationism as science in southern public schools, which “reinforces the backward image”. But his biggest worry is that not enough young southerners are mastering science and maths.
“Brother Dave” Gardner, a stand-up comic from Tennessee, greeted the 1954 Supreme Court order to end segregated schools with the quip: “Let ’em go to school, beloved. We went, and we didn’t learn nothin’.” That was harsh, but partly grounded in fact. The point of school segregation was to keep blacks down and whites separate. When it ended, many white parents moved their children from newly integrated public schools to private schools whose chief selling point was whiteness, not academic rigour.

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Wisconsin Math, reading proficiency are much higher on state exams than on federal



Amy Hetzner:

Wisconsin students continue to fare far better on the state’s standardized tests than they do on those given by the federal government, according to a new analysis that raises questions about what it means to be “proficient.”
About 70% to 85% of Wisconsin students were considered proficient or better on the state’s reading and math tests for the 2005-’06 school year. Yet only 33% to 40% of the state’s fourth- and eighth-graders scored at least proficient on the most recent National Assessment of Educational Progress in those subjects, according to the study by the Wisconsin Taxpayers Alliance.
The state was one of 16 in the country that had a proficiency gap of 45 to 55 percentage points, the Taxpayers Alliance found. Several states, such as Oklahoma and Mississippi, had even larger differences between the percentage of students considered proficient by their states as opposed to the federal government.
“It just creates confusion,” said Dale Knapp, research director for the Taxpayers Alliance. “We want a sense of what our students know, where they sort of stand. And we’re really getting two different answers that are very different answers.”
The blame doesn’t necessarily fall on the Wisconsin Knowledge and Concepts Examinations, said Tony Evers, deputy superintendent of the state Department of Public Instruction, which administers the tests annually.
“Math is the same in Madison as it is in Missouri as it is in Mumbai.” – Michael Petrilli,
Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, a group that has raised the idea of national standards
“What that ought to be is a big signal to the folks in Wisconsin that they really need to evaluate the rigor of their standards and their assessment.” – Daria Hall, Education Trust

More on the Fordham Foundation’s report and EdTrust. Finally, WISTAX offers a free report on testing.




Jacob Stockinger: A ‘yes’ vote for schools ensures a better future



This is one of the best things I read recently on support for public education.
TJM
Jacob Stockinger: A ‘yes’ vote for schools ensures a better future
By Jacob Stockinger
There is a lot I don’t know about my parents. But I do know this: They would never have voted no on a school referendum.
They grew up in the Depression, then worked and fought their ways through World War II.
They saw how the GI Bill revolutionized American society and ushered in the postwar economic boom. They knew the value of education.
If the schools said they needed something – more staff, another building, more books – then they got it.
I am absolutely sure my parents and their generation thought there was no better way to spend money than on schools. Schools meant jobs, of course – better jobs and better-paying jobs. But schools also meant better-educated children, smart children. And schools were the great equalizer that meant upward social mobility and held a community together. Schools guaranteed a future: Good schools, good future. Bad schools, bad future.
Schools were the linchpin, the axis of American society. That’s the same reason why they would never have questioned a teacher’s judgment over one of their own children’s complaints. Teachers were always right because they were the teachers.
And the reason I can still remember the name of the local superintendent of schools – Dr. Bruce Hulbert – was because my parents spoke of him with awe and respect as a man who was not looking to steal from their checking account but instead to help their children.
It’s probably the same reason I can recall so many of my teachers’ names – Mrs. Cuneo, in whose second-grade class I took part in the Salk polio vaccine trials, and Mr. Firestone, my sixth-grade teacher who made me memorize the multiplication tables and then sing in Gilbert and Sullivan’s “The Pirates of Penzance.” And so on right though high school and undergraduate school and graduate school.
I find myself thinking of my parents now, wondering what they would do in the current atmosphere of criticism and even hostility directed at the schools.
They were middle-class, not wealthy, so when they paid taxes, it was not always happily but it was always with gratitude. They believed that paying taxes was a patriotic duty, the price you paid for living in a privileged, free and – in those days – increasingly egalitarian society.
Taxes were the cement that held us together, the concrete expression of the social contract. Taxes, they felt, were a form of insurance that guaranteed life would get better for everyone, especially for their own children.
But they knew value, and they knew that no dollar buys more value than a dollar you spend on educating a child.
Of course, times have changed.
Things are more expensive. And we have forgotten what life was really like – for the poor, for the elderly, for ethnic minorities, for the disabled – when we had the small government and low taxes that today’s Republicans have bamboozled people into thinking were the good old days. My parents, and their parents, knew better.
But whatever fixes we need now, we should not deprive the children.
Yes, I see room for changes.
•We need to shift the burden of funding from the property tax. I think the income tax is more appropriate, along with a sales tax. And what would be wrong with just a plain old education tax?
•We need to correct the feeling that the public has been lied to. School spending keeps going up and up, but we keep seeing reports that American students have become less competitive internationally. Is someone crying wolf?
Let me suggest that a lot of the confusion has to do with bookkeeping. I would like to see the health costs for special education come from the state Department of Health and Family Services budget. I would like to see how much money goes for actual curriculum and instruction. Call it truth in spending.
Mind you, I am not suggesting that special education is wrong or too expensive. It is important for us to provide it. ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^But we should have a better idea of just how much everything costs and whether some areas benefit because others are shortchanged.
•We need to stop lobbying groups like the Wisconsin Millionaires Club – I’m sorry, I mean Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce – from luring money away from other social programs for socialized business disguised as free market capitalism.
•We need to become prouder of paying taxes because they are, despite some instances of waste or mismanagement, generally very good deals. If you want Mississippi taxes, are you really ready for Mississippi schools and Mississippi health care and Mississippi arts?
•We need to make Washington pay its fair share of education costs. If we can fight wars as a nation, we can educate children as a nation.
So for the sake of myself, my parents and the children, I will vote yes on the Nov. 7 referendum for Madison’s schools. I urge you to do the same.
Jacob Stockinger is the culture desk editor of The Capital Times. E-mail: jstockinger@madison.com
Published: November 1, 2006




The Education Issue



Michael Grunwald:

To some extent, the controversy over Reading First reflects an older controversy over reading, pitting “phonics” advocates such as Doherty against “whole language” practitioners such as Johnson.
The administration believes in phonics, which emphasizes repetitive drills that teach children to sound out words. Johnson and other phonics skeptics try to teach the meaning and context of words as well. Reading First money has been steered toward states and local districts that go the phonics route, largely because the Reading First panels that oversaw state applications were stacked with department officials and other phonics fans. “Stack the panel?” Doherty joked in one e-mail. “I have never *heard* of such a thing . . . .” When Reid Lyon, who designed Reading First, complained that a whole-language proponent had received an invitation to participate on an evaluation panel, a top department official replied: “We can’t un-invite her. Just make sure she is on a panel with one of our barracuda types.”
Doherty bragged to Lyon about pressuring Maine, Mississippi and New Jersey to reverse decisions to allow whole-language programs in their schools: “This is for your FYI, as I think this program-bashing is best done off or under the major radar screens.” Massachusetts and North Dakota were also told to drop whole-language programs such as Rigby Literacy, and districts that didn’t do so lost funding. “Ha, ha–Rigby as a CORE program?” Doherty wrote in one internal e-mail. “When pigs fly!”
Said Bruce Hunter, a lobbyist for the American Association of School Administrators: “It’s been obvious all along that the administration knew exactly what it wanted.”
But it wasn’t just about phonics.
Success for All is the phonics program with the strongest record of scientifically proved results, backed by 31 studies rated “conclusive” by the American Institutes for Research. And it has been shut out of Reading First. The nonprofit Success for All Foundation has shed 60 percent of its staff since Reading First began; the program had been growing rapidly, but now 300 schools have dropped it. Betsy Ammons, a principal in North Carolina, watched Success for All improve reading scores at her school, but state officials made her switch to traditional textbooks to qualify for the new grants.

No Child Left Behind Votes: Congress 381 Ayes, 41 Noes 12 NV (Tammy Baldwin voted Aye) | Senate 87 Yea, 10 Nay, 3 Not voting (Feingold Nay, Kohl Yea)




State ranks 13th in national health study



By Anita Weier, The Capital Times, JAnuary 31, 2006
Wisconsin ranked 13th among the states in a national health study, down from ninth in 2004, as obesity and child poverty rose.
The study, titled America’s Health Rankings 2005, analyzed personal behaviors, community environment, health policies and health outcomes.
The healthiest states were Minnesota, Vermont, New Hampshire, Utah and Hawaii, in that order. The least-healthy was Mississippi, followed in order by Louisiana, Tennessee, Arkansas and South Carolina.
Wisconsin’s strengths included a high rate of high school graduation, a low rate of violent crime, a low incidence of infectious diseases and a low rate of uninsured people.

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Bucks 4 Books



This is a neat idea for helping out students displaced by the hurricanes administered by the League of Women Voters. The Wisconsin League is checking to see if MMSD is following up on the grant request piece. Read on if you’d like to contribute:
Melanie Ramey, President
LWV of Wisconsin
122 State Street, Suite. 405
Madison, WI 53703-2500
Phone: 608-256-0827
Fax: 608-256-2853
E-mail: lwvwisconsin@lwvwi.org
http://www.lwvwi.org
Dear Melanie,
Due to Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, many students (K-12) in the Gulf States (Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas) have been driven from their homes and schools. The League of Women Voters of Louisiana Education fund has approved the “Bucks 4 Books” campaign to raise funds to support the displaced children from the Gulf States in their new school districts, whether those school districts are located elsewhere in their native state or in any other of the 48 contiguous states. The LWV of LA Ed Fund needs your support and help in the following tasks:
1. Helping to raise the funds to support this project by sending the attached letter to all of the League,
League allies and partners, the Parent Teacher Organizations, and everyone in your personal e-mail address book(s).
2. Help us to identify the school districts in your state that have taken in the Hurricane evacuees and
encourage the school districts to write for a grants application for financial support of those children’s education materials.
These young people have lost their homes; they do not have to lose their hope. Remember, children learn from example. When we are responsible for them, they will become the responsible future citizens, whom our country needs.
The 100% of the “Bucks for Books” funds raised will be administered in accordance to the guidelines outlined in the attached letter. Since this is a 100% flow through of funds, all solicitation for this campaign will be by e-mail and no expenses may be charged against the donations. All checks should be may payable to: LWV of Louisiana Education Fund, P. O. Box 4451, Baton Rouge, LA 70821-4451
The League of Women Voters is uniquely positioned to meet this challenge with local League presents in all states. Please help us to help our children and the very generous school districts that have taken them in. Please encourage your State League, Local Leagues, Friends, Neighbors and Allies to enthusiastically embrace this very special project, “Bucks 4 Books.” We must measure up for our young people and always . . .
Share the Spirit of League,
Jean Armstrong, President
LWV of Louisiana Education Fund
LWV of Louisiana
225.927.2255




First-To-Worst, PBS Special On California Schools



The California of the 50’s and 60’s was the embodiment of the “American Dream”. Their schools were the best. Today, the California school system ranks at the bottom in the nation, with Mississippi and Guam. Proposition 13 in 1978, and revenue caps require referenda to exceed the caps to be passed by 2/3! majority. Some now admit the California schools have achieved Third World status.
Today, most schools are like the Santa Monica-Malibu School District, serving one of the richest districts in California. The schools here do not have PE, Arts, Music, counselors, and minimal or no electives. A educational fads have taken hold: whole language, new math, multiple choice testing. And, of course, loss of local control to the State legislature.
For a sobering look at a failed school system, click on the transcript.