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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

Foon Rhee:

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.”

Eric Kleefeld:

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.”

Alyson Klein:

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.

Eduwonk:

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

Tim Cullen:

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.

Jason Stein:

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.”

Amy Hetzner:

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. […]

Wisconsin Governor Doyle going after student performance, federal money

Mark Pitsch:

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

Charles Barone:

One of the funnest and most instructive concepts in philosophy is the “logical fallacy.” Here’s an example:

1. Nothing is better than eternal happiness.
2. Eating a hamburger is better than nothing.
3. 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

WisPolitics:

“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

Holly Yan:

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

J. Edward Ketz:

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.”

Jeffrey Sachs:

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

Wall Street Journal:

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

Scott Bauer:

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:

• Todd Price
• Van Mobley
• Lowell Holtz
• Rose Fernandez
• Tony Evers

On Detroit’s Union Work Rules

Logan Robinson:

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

Jason Stein:

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

Michael Alison Chandler:

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 […]

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

Daniel de Vise:

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.

1. 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.
2. Strategic Plan: this initiative will formally begin in January 2009 and will involve a large community group process to develop as an ongoing activity.
3. Meet people: going throughout the community to meet people on their own terms. He will carefully listen. He also has ideas.
4. 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.

1. Early learning opportunities: for pre-kindergarten children. A total community commitment is needed to prevent the ‘achievement gap’ from widening.
2. 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.
3. 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.

4. 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.

Related:

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

Steven Pearlstein:

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

Lisa Nunez:

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

The Capital Times:

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

Bill Lueders:

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

https://www.schoolinfosystem.org/archives/2008/06/ted_widerski.php

More “Algebra” for Chicago Public Schools Eighth Graders

Alexander Russo:

What do you think about the CPS effort to bring more algebra into middle schools?
From Catalyst: “The June board meeting included a brief presentation on student achievement from the Office of Instructional Design and Assessment. A recap of statistics showed that while 40 percent of 8th-graders across the country take algebra, only 8 percent of CPS 8th-graders do.
“With this in mind, Chief Officer Xavier Botana noted how the district is revamping algebra instruction: 8th-grade algebra will now be called “High School Algebra in the Middle Grades,” a name change that Botana said will help parents and others understand that students are tackling high-school-level material.

A commenter nails the issue:

The exit exams have to be real. They can’t be given credit for high school algebra, then show up in high school unprepared to take second year algebra.
Of course, they would only be prepared to take algebra in 8th grade if they have had rigorous math instruction before that. I believe these suburban schools with 40% of 8th graders taking algebra also have pre-algebra programs for kids in the 7th grade.
I’m all for offering rigorous classes; but there has to be some support to help kids get there.

Related:

• Madison West High School Math Teachers letter to Isthmus:
  

  Moreover, parents of future West High students should take notice: As you read this, our department is under pressure from the administration and the math coordinator’s office to phase out our “accelerated” course offerings beginning next year. Rather than addressing the problems of equity and closing the gap by identifying minority math talent earlier, and fostering minority participation in the accelerated programs, our administration wants to take the cheaper way out by forcing all kids into a one-size-fits-all curriculum.

• Math Forum audio / video and links

It will be interesting to see the results of the Madison Math Task Force’s work.

To Avoid Student Turnover, Flint Parents Get Rent Help

Erik Eckholm:

Because he has moved so often, 9-year-old Richard Kennedy has already attended four different schools in Flint. In his mother’s latest rental house the other day, he described how it felt to enter an unfamiliar classroom.
…
In New York, board of education officials said that while they did not have data on trends in student mobility, it had been a prime reason behind efforts to standardize curriculums, so students switching schools would not find their math classes, for example, far out of sync.
High turnover can undermine a multiyear improvement plan. “It becomes a different school, because the core of the students you’re educating has changed,” Dr. Kerbow said.
Even the students who do not switch schools suffer, because teachers must spend more time reviewing materials for newcomers and tend to introduce less material, Dr. Kerbow said, citing what his research had found in Chicago. “The learning trajectory over time is flattened,” he added.

Seems like a useful idea, rather than trying to standardize curriculum across the board. Locally, Mayor Dave recently proposed using suburban housing assistance to reduce urban low income concentration.

What is Public Education?

Lisa Graham Keegan – an adviser to McCain’s 2008 campaign:

One constant cry in the debate over educational reform is that we must save our public schools. But proponents of that argument assume that a public school system must be exactly what we have today: schools clustered in districts governed by centralized bureaucracies that oversee every detail of what goes on in individual schools, from budgets to personnel to curricula. That’s like saying that our steel industry should center on open-hearth furnaces and giant corporations rather than the nimble mini-mills that have largely superseded them. Let’s agree, for argument, that a public school system is a good thing: but why should it look just like it does today—which is what it looked like 50 years ago?
There’s nothing sacrosanct, after all, about the current structure of our public education system. Its roots go back to the nineteenth century, when a geographical community would club together to hire and pay a teacher and later, when things got more complicated, would tax property to provide a local school and then appoint or elect a few people to a small board that would oversee it and hire its teacher. As the communities grew into towns and cities, it seemed logical to expand the governing mechanisms already in place. Tiny school boards slowly swelled into today’s bloated and dysfunctional school districts, responsible for running not one but 5 or 25 or 50 schools.
If we want to save the public schools, we mustn’t confuse the ideal of public education—that every child has the right to a good K-12 education at public expense—with any particular system, including the one we’ve got. Surely we can come up with a modernized definition of public education fit for a new millennium. In Arizona, where I’m Superintendent of Public Instruction, that’s just what we’re trying to achieve. Our new approach, aimed at shifting power from bureaucrats to students and families, has three key, equally essential parts: student-centered funding, parental choice, and tough, objectively measurable, standards.
Start with student-centered funding. In Arizona, we’ve all but replaced an older and more typical system, in which school districts assess and use local property taxes to fund schools, with one in which the state raises the money (including for capital construction) through a statewide tax, straps an equal amount of it to each student’s back, and releases it only when he walks into the school of his choice.
Today’s district is a rigid command-and-control system that offers dissatisfied parents no choices except, if they don’t like the district school, to send their kids to private school or to home-school them. Moreover, like the Soviet Union with its five-year plans, the districts do a poor job of management, for the reason F. A. Hayek pointed out: command-and-control systems suffer from an information deficit. How can a distant district office bureaucrat know how to run a school better than the principals and teachers who work there? Too often, the district just lays down a single set of policies to govern all its schools, imposing one-size-fits-all curricula and disciplinary policies on schools that may have very different needs. The system also seems impervious to reform from within. In my experience, those who join district boards, even those who start out reform-minded, eerily become co-opted and wind up defending the system tooth and nail. It’s just like watching Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
If you need an additional reason to abolish the traditional property-tax funding system, consider this: it’s unfair. Funding education through local property taxes is deeply regressive. It lets rich districts spend more per pupil, at much lower tax rates, than poor districts. After all, a rich district’s citizens who pay $3,000 per year on their $300,000 houses are paying 10 percent in taxes; the poor district’s citizens who pay $1,200 on their $100,000 houses are paying 12 percent.

The Green Bay School District, currently run by incoming Madison Superintendent Dan Nerad spent $11,441 per student ($232,232,000 total budget) in 2006/2007 while Madison spent $12,422 per student ($329,596,000 total budget) during the same period according to School Facts 2007 by WISTAX.
A few other interesting comparisons between the Districts (2006/2007):

	Equity Fund Balance	Enrollment	Low Income	Staff	% Revenues from Property Taxes
Green Bay	$21,900,000 (9.3%)	19,863	44.9%	2445.6	31.8%
Madison	$18,437,000 (6%)	24,908	44.1%	3544.6	67.9%

Related: On education, McCain & Obama may not be far apart.

Mary Olsky, EAGLE School co-founder, decides to retire

Kurt Gutknecht:

Twenty-six years ago, Mary Olsky was looking for a more challenging educational environment for her children. What ultimately happened has helped thousands of students over the years.
“I didn’t see this happening,” she said recently of Eagle School, which she co-founded with Betty Connor in 1982. Olsky is stepping down as co-director of the school, which now has 182 students, 20 teachers and six to 10 parent aides, and an expansive building at 5454 Gunflint Trail in Fitchburg.
In the 1980s, Olksy had recently moved to the Madison area with her husband and four children, ages 4 to 10, from Chicago. She thought Madison would provide a better educational environment for her children, but was disappointed.
Shortly after meeting Connor, they visited several schools around the country and rented a room in Hoyt School, which the district had closed and was renting rooms to a variety of organizations. They collected materials from a variety of sources and started with 12 students, including two of her children.
By 1985, they had outgrown their space and moved to another former school in Madison. One of the parents was a developer and helped them purchase land and build a school in Middleton. After adding two additions, they purchased land in Fitchburg and constructed the current building.
“We had sworn that we’d never have more than 100 kids or build our own building. What happened has become part of our general philosophy, which is to see problems and try to solve them instead of being rigid,” Olsky.

MMSD Retirees — A Season of Thanks

In case you haven’t seen it yet, here is a link to the list of MMSD teachers, administrators and staff who will be retiring at the end of the year. Take a look and see if maybe your child’s favorite elementary school teacher — or perhaps your own favorite secretary — might be there. If […]

Art Rainwater: the great communicator

Capital Times Editorial:

Superintendent Art Rainwater attended his last Madison School Board meeting Monday night, and everything seemed so collegial and functional that it was easy to imagine it had always been this way.
But, of course, it was not.
Art Rainwater took over a school district that was in crisis.
When he succeeded former Superintendent Cheryl Wilhoyte a decade ago, the administration was at odds with much of the School Board, the community and, most seriously, with unions representing teachers and other school employees.
Much of the trouble had to do with Wilhoyte’s unwillingness — perhaps inability — to communicate in a straight-forward manner.
Rainwater changed things immediately.
He was frank and accessible, never spoke in the arcane jargon of education bureaucrats and set up a regular schedule of meetings with board members, community leaders and Madison Teachers Inc. executive director John Matthews.

Related: MMSD Today feature on Art Rainwater. Notes and links on Madison’s incoming Superintendent, Dan Nerad
Much more on retiring Madison Superintendent Art Rainwater.
Tamira Madsen covers Art’s last school board meeting.
Time Flies by Art Rainwater.
The Madison School District’s budget was $200,311,280 (24,710 enrollment) in 1994 and is $367,806,712 for the 2008/2009 (24,268 enrollment) school year.

Garden City New York School Board Seeks to Expand AP & International Baccalaureate Opportunities

Stephanie Mariel Petrellese:

The AB/IB Committee, co-chaired by Drs. Prendergast and Bacotti, and comprised of administrators, teachers and three parents, conducted a comprehensive study of the current AP program and researched the possibility of implementing the IB program. They then compared the two and presented their recommendations to the Board.
“It is clear that some of the issues that we realize are out there with AP programs may in fact be addressed by a rigorous IB program,” said School Board President Kenneth Monaghan. He gave the example of the study of world language. Many students do not pursue foreign language study at the AP level because the course and exam are recognized to be extremely difficult and students are concerned with how it might affect their overall grade point average.
“It’s not that the AP program is irrelevant. It’s not,” he continued. “Nor is it a matter of whether or not the IB program is more relevant. The question is whether or not the two together, or in combination, may balance out each other’s shortcomings and help us devise a program which has greater relevance for our students going forward, in particular for the vast majority of our students who are going on to collegiate work. We want to make sure that they are as prepared as possible.”
The committee will take their research to the next level by establishing contacts with other high-performing districts that are offering the IB program and expanding the number of parents on the committee. Committee members plan to attend a Guild of IB Schools of the Northeast orientation seminar in Commack on June 7th and file an official “Intent to Apply” interest form with the International Baccalaureate Organization. After they file the interest form, teachers and administrators will be allowed to attend professional development Level 1 workshops. The committee will report back to the Board in the fall.

Related:

• Garden City, NY School District
• Garden City Demographics
• Notes and links on Madison’s proposed High School redesign.
• Dane County AP course offering comparison.

I’m glad Garden City included three parents and some teachers on their AP/IB committee.

High School Challenge Index, 2008

Newsweek & Washington Post:

The Newsweek and Washington Post Challenge Index measures a public high school’s effort to challenge its students. The formula is simple: Divide the number of Advanced Placement, International Baccalaureate or Cambridge tests a school gave by the number of seniors who graduated in May or June. Tests taken by all students, not just seniors, are counted. Magnet or charter schools with SAT combined verbal and math averages higher than 1300, or ACT average scores above 29, are not included, since they do not have enough average students who need a challenge.
The rating is not a measurement of the overall quality of the school but illuminates one factor that many educators consider important.
The list below includes all public schools with a rating of 1.000. There are nearly 1,400 — the top 5 percent of all 27,000 U.S. high schools in encouraging students to take AP, IB or Cambridge tests. Also listed are the name of the city or school district and the percentage of a school’s students whose family incomes are low enough to qualify for federally subsidized lunches and who also apply for that program. The portion of subsidized-lunch applicants is a rough indicator of a school’s poverty level. High-poverty schools are at a disadvantage in persuading students to take college-level courses, but some on this list have succeeded in doing so anyway.
The Equity and Excellence rate is the percentage of all seniors who have had at least one score on an AP, IB or Cambridge test that would qualify them for college credit. The average AP Equity and Excellence rate for all U.S. schools is about 15 percent.

Milwaukee Rufus King ranked highest among the 21 Wisconsin High Schools at #209. The only Madison area high school to make the list is Verona at #808.
Related: Dane County, WI AP High School Course offerings.
Jay Matthews has more:

This week, Newsweek magazine and its Web site Newsweek.com unveil this year’s Top High Schools list, based on a rating system I invented a decade ago called the Challenge Index. The index ranks schools based on college-level course participation, adding up the number of Advanced Placement, International Baccalaureate and other college-level tests in a given year for a given school, and dividing that total by its number of graduating seniors.
Several weeks ago I asked students, teachers and parents to tell me how this annual ranking affected their schools. Here is a sampling of several points of view, both critical and complimentary.
* * *
So, with regard to your Challenge Index — it really is a quick and dirty way of assessing schools. Very ambitious and probably very imperfect. However, there isn’t anything else out there like it. I think the reason our school systems are not very good compared to other countries is that we underestimate the abilities of our children. I think too the education field is fuzzy — not very good data or evidence to support the programs that are out there. . . . More and better research is needed. And of course there are the socioeconomic/family issues of some schools/districts that cannot/will not be fixed with just higher expectations.
— Terry Adirim Montgomery County

Previous SIS Challenge Index links and notes. Clusty search on the Challenge Index.

Great education debate: Reforming the grade system

Steve Friess:

When principal Debbie Brockett announced a policy last fall of not allowing teachers to issue any score less than 50 to failing students, she thought she was adopting a means of leveling out an unfair grading curve.
To many outraged teachers at Las Vegas High, however, Brockett’s plan amounted to fuzzy new math designed to offer unfair assistance to low-achieving students.
They protested, and she backed down. But in the process, both sides stepped into one of the hottest grading debates within academic circles today. Across the USA, education experts and school administrators are trying to determine how and whether to reform grading systems to give failing students a better chance to catch up.
“I made a bad call at the time, going with past experience, and I didn’t expect it to become controversial,” says Brockett, who had just been promoted from a middle school where her minimum-F policy was in place. “Now it’s an ongoing conversation we’re having.”

Proposed report cards changes have generated some controversy in Madison.

Leopold seeks long-term solutions

Kurt Gutknecht:

Leopold Elementary School is getting a new principal this summer but for many teachers and parents, it seems like déjà vu all over again.
For years, Leopold has dealt with a series of temporary remedies to deal with overcrowding, including sending students to different schools, a new addition and remodeling space to accommodate more classrooms.
The Leopold Parent Faculty Organization is asking the Madison Metropolitan School Board to find a long-term solution to the problem, although it might accept some temporary measures en route to a “real” solution.
Some worry that some of temporary solutions, such as carving out more classroom space, may turn out to be the status quo, as has happened when “temporary” classrooms came to be considered in determining the school’s capacity.

A 2005 Leopold expansion referendum which would have created an 1100 student facility failed.

Leapold Elementary’s Population Again Rises to the Top

Channel3000:

Dozens of parents and staff members attended Monday night’s Madison Metropolitan School District’s Board of Education meeting to shed new light on an old problem: overcrowding at a local elementary school.
The issue of overcrowding at Aldo Leopold Elementary School is prompting some parents and teachers to tell the board solutions they’d like to see to relieve the problem.
Some said that the obvious solution would be to build a new Leopold Elementary or perhaps to adjust the school’s boundaries. The group presenting the board with the findings of a parent-teacher survey about the challenges at the school, WISC-TV reported.
The school is at 99 percent attendance with 718 students and can only handle eight more students, officials said.

Monday evening’s Board meeting included a brief discussion of a much larger Leapold School – perhaps similar to the failed 2005 referendum that would have created a building suitable for 1100+students.

Some of California’s most gifted students are being ignored, advocates say

Carla Rivera:

If you reviewed Dalton Sargent’s report cards, you’d know only half his story. The 15-year-old Altadena junior has lousy grades in many subjects. He has blown off assignments and been dissatisfied with many of his teachers. It would be accurate to call him a problematic student. But he is also gifted.
Dalton is among the sizable number of highly intelligent or talented children in the nation’s classrooms who find little in the standard curriculum to rouse their interest and who often fall by the wayside.
With schools under intense pressure from state and federal mandates such as No Child Left Behind to raise test scores of low-achieving pupils, the educational needs of gifted students — who usually perform well on standardized tests — too often are ignored, advocates say.
Nationally, about 3 million kindergarten through 12th-grade students are identified as gifted, but 80% of them do not receive specialized instruction, experts say. Studies have found that 5% to 20% of students who drop out are gifted.
There is no federal law mandating special programs for gifted children, though many educators argue that these students — whose curiosity and creativity often coexist with emotional and social problems — deserve the same status as those with special needs. Services for gifted students vary from state to state. In California, about 512,000 students are enrolled in the Gifted and Talented Education program, which aims to provide specialized and accelerated instruction.

Linda Scholl @ Wisconsin Center for Education Research: SCALE Case Study: Evolution of K-8 Science Instructional Guidance in Madison Metropolitan School District [PDF report]

In addition, by instituting a standards-based report card system K-8, the department has increased accountability for teaching to the standards.
The Department is struggling, however, to sharpen its efforts to reduce the achievement gap. While progress has been made in third grade reading, significant gaps are still evident in other subject areas, including math and science. Educational equity issues within the school district are the source of much public controversy, with a relatively small but vocal parent community that is advocating for directing greater resources toward meeting the needs of high achieving students. This has slowed efforts to implement strong academic equity initiatives, particularly at the middle and early high school levels. Nonetheless, T&L content areas specialists continue working with teachers to provide a rigorous curriculum and to differentiate instruction for all students. In that context, the new high school biology initiative represents a significant effort to raise the achievement of students of color and economic disadvantage.

WCER’s tight relationship with the Madison School District has been the source of some controversy.
Related:

• Value Added Assessment (Report Cards)
• Wisconsin DPI Academic Standards (DPI Website).
• Bruce King’s evaluation of West High School’s Small Learning Community initiative and pushback at East High over planned curriculum changes.
• Lucy Mathiak’s 2006 post on Madison dropouts who tested at the high end of the scale.

Scholl’s error, in my view, is viewing the controversy as an issue of “advocating for directing greater resources toward meeting the needs of high achieving students”. The real issue is raising standards for all, rathing than reducing the curriculum quality (see West High School Math teachers letter to the Isthmus:

Moreover, parents of future West High students should take notice: As you read this, our department is under pressure from the administration and the math coordinator’s office to phase out our “accelerated” course offerings beginning next year. Rather than addressing the problems of equity and closing the gap by identifying minority math talent earlier, and fostering minority participation in the accelerated programs, our administration wants to take the cheaper way out by forcing all kids into a one-size-fits-all curriculum.
It seems the administration and our school board have re-defined “success” as merely producing “fewer failures.” Astonishingly, excellence in student achievement is visited by some school district administrators with apathy at best, and with contempt at worst. But, while raising low achievers is a laudable goal, it is woefully short-sighted and, ironically, racist in the most insidious way. Somehow, limiting opportunities for excellence has become the definition of providing equity! Could there be a greater insult to the minority community?

)
A friend mentioned a few years ago that the problems are in elementary and middle school. Rather than addressing those, the administration is trying to make high school changes.
Thanks to a reader for sending along these links.

Media Education Coverage: An Oxymoron?

Lucy Mathiak’s recent comments regarding the lack of substantive local media education coverage inspired a Mitch Henck discussion (actually rant) [15MB mp3 audio file]. Henck notes that the fault lies with us, the (mostly non) voting public. Apathy certainly reigns. A useful example is Monday’s School Board’s 56 minute $367,806,712 2008/2009 budget discussion. The brief chat included these topics:

• Retiring Superintendent Art Rainwater’s view on the District’s structural deficit and the decline in it’s equity (Assets – Liabilities = Equity; Britannica on the The Balance Sheet) from $48,000,000 in the year 2000 to $24,000,000 in 2006 (it is now about 8% of the budget or $20M). (See Lawrie Kobza’s discussion of this issue in November, 2006. Lawrie spent a great deal of time digging into and disclosing the structural deficits.) Art also mentioned the resulting downgrade in the District’s bond rating (results in somewhat higher interest rates).
• Marj asked an interesting question about the K-1 combination and staff scheduling vis a vis the present Teacher Union Contract.
• Lucy asked about specials scheduling (about 17 minutes).
• Maya asked about the combined K-1 Art classes (“Class and a half” art and music) and whether we are losing instructional minutes. She advocated for being “open and honest with the public” about this change. Art responded (23 minutes) vociferously about the reduction in services, the necessity for the community to vote yes on operating referendums, ACT scores and National Merit Scholars.
• Beth mentioned (about 30 minutes) that “the district has done amazing things with less resources”. She also discussed teacher tools, curriculum and information sharing.
• Ed Hughes (about 37 minutes) asked about the Madison Family Literacy initiative at Leopold and Northport. Lucy inquired about Fund 80 support for this project.
• Maya later inquired (45 minutes) about a possible increase in Wisconsin DPI’s common school fund for libraries and left over Title 1 funds supporting future staff costs rather than professional development.
• Beth (about 48 minutes) advocated accelerated computer deployments to the schools. Lucy followed up and asked about the District’s installation schedule. Johnny followed up on this matter with a question regarding the most recent maintenance referendum which included $500,000 annually for technology.
• Lucy discussed (52 minutes) contingency funds for energy costs as well as providing some discretion for incoming superintendent Dan Nerad.

Rick Berg notes that some homes are selling below assessed value, which will affect the local tax base (property taxes for schools) and potential referendums:

But the marketplace will ultimately expose any gaps between assessment and true market value. And that could force local governments to choose between reducing spending (not likely) and hiking the mill rate (more likely) to make up for the decreasing value of real estate.
Pity the poor homeowners who see the value of their home fall 10%, 20% or even 30% with no corresponding savings in their property tax bill, or, worse yet, their tax bill goes up! Therein lie the seeds of a genuine taxpayer revolt. Brace yourselves. It’s gonna be a rough ride.

The Wisconsin Department of Revenue noted recently that Wisconsin state tax collections are up 2.3% year to date [136K PDF]. Redistributed state tax dollars represented 17.2% of the District’s revenues in 2005 (via the Citizen’s Budget).
Daniel de Vise dives into Montgomery County, Maryland’s school budget:

The budget for Montgomery County’s public schools has doubled in 10 years, a massive investment in smaller classes, better-paid teachers and specialized programs to serve growing ranks of low-income and immigrant children.
That era might be coming to an end. The County Council will adopt an education budget this month that provides the smallest year-to-year increase in a decade for public schools. County Executive Isiah Leggett (D) has recommended trimming $51 million from the $2.11 billion spending plan submitted by the Board of Education.
County leaders say the budget can no longer keep up with the spending pace of Superintendent Jerry D. Weast, who has overseen a billion-dollar expansion since his arrival in 1999. Weast has reduced elementary class sizes, expanded preschool and kindergarten programs and invested heavily in the high-poverty area of the county known around his office as the Red Zone.
“Laudable goals, objectives, nobody’s going to argue with that,” Leggett said in a recent interview at his Rockville office. “But is it affordable?”
It’s a question being asked of every department in a county whose overall budget has swelled from $2.1 billion in fiscal 1998 to $4.3 billion this year, a growth rate Leggett terms “unacceptable.”

Montgomery County enrolls 137,745 students and spent $2,100,000,000 this year ($15,245/student). Madison’s spending has grown about 50% from 1998 ($245,131,022) to 2008 ($367,806,712) while enrollment has declined slightly from 25,132 to 24,268 ($13,997/student).
I’ve not seen any local media coverage of the District’s budget this week.
Thanks to a reader for sending this in.
Oxymoron

Toki Middle School’s Justice Club Asks for Community Help

Channel3000:

Some Toki Middle School students are shining a positive light on the school, despite recent negative incidents.
On Monday night, several Toki students spoke before the Madison School Board.
“We’re there, we care and want positive things to be noticed about Toki too,” explained one student.
“Toki Middle School is a unique learning environment with a lot of vibrant successful students that are a reflection of the teachers,” said another student.
The students were part of the school’s Social Justice Club.
“People at Toki make mistakes and learn from their mistakes just like everyone else in the world,” said one student.
Those mistakes were the two separate school fights that were videotaped with a camera phone and posted on Youtube.com
District officials said the students involved were disciplined.
“Toki is a wonderful school,” said Superintendent Art Rainwater. “It’s filled with wonderful kids and wonderful teachers and somehow in the rush to the press and the rush to complain we lose sight of that.

Tamira Madsen has more.

Online Education Cast as “Disruptive Innovation”

Andrew Trotter:

Technology-based forces of “disruptive innovation” are gathering around public education and will overhaul the way K-12 students learn—with potentially dramatic consequences for established public schools, according to an upcoming book that draws parallels to disruptions in other industries.
Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns predicts that the growth in computer-based delivery of education will accelerate swiftly until, by 2019, half of all high school classes will be taught over the Internet.
Clayton M. Christensen, the book’s lead author and a business professor at Harvard University, is well respected in the business world for his best-sellers The Innovator’s Dilemma, published in 1997, and The Innovator’s Solution, published in 2003.
Those books analyze why leading companies in various industries—computers, electronics, retail, and others—were knocked off by upstarts that were better able to take advantage of innovations based on new technology and changing conditions.
School organizations are similarly vulnerable, Mr. Christensen contends.
“The schools as they are now structured cannot do it,” he said in an interview, referring to adapting successfully to coming computer-based innovations. “Even the best managers in the world, if they were heads of departments in schools and the administrators of schools, could not do it.”
Under Mr. Christensen’s analytical model, the tables typically turn in an industry even when the dominant companies are well aware of a disruptive innovation and try to use it to transform themselves

There’s no doubt that a revolution is underway in education. LIke other industries, it is doubtful that many of the current players will make the turn, which is likely why issues such as credit for non MMSD courses is evidently such a problem. Two related articles by Cringely provide useful background.
More:

Like the leaders in other industries, the education establishment has crammed down technology onto its existing architecture, which is dominated by the “monolithic” processes of textbook creation and adoption, teaching practices and training, and standardized assessment—which, despite some efforts at individualization, by and large treat students the same, the book says.
But new providers are stepping forward to serve students that mainline education does not serve, or serve well, the authors write. Those students, which the book describes as K-12 education’s version of “nonconsumers,” include those lacking access to Advanced Placement courses, needing alternatives to standard classroom instruction, homebound or home-schooled students, those needing to make up course credits to graduate—and even prekindergarten children.
By addressing those groups, providers such as charter schools, companies catering to home schoolers, private tutoring companies, and online-curriculum companies have developed their methods and tapped networks of students, parents, and teachers for ideas.
Those providers will gradually improve their tools to offer instruction that is more student-centered, in part by breaking courses into modules that can be recombined specifically for each student, the authors predict.
Such providers’ approaches, the authors argue, will also become more affordable, and they will start attracting more and more students from regular schools.

What to Do With Gifted Students?

Jay Matthews:

I received a letter a few weeks ago from a mother in Prince William County, home to one of the Washington area’s big suburban school systems. It starkly captured the parental frustration at the heart of the national debate over what to do with very gifted students. I ran her letter, with a short response, in my weekly Post column, “Extra Credit,” in which I answer reader mail. That column produced so many letters that I decided to lay out the debate in this column, using the limitless space of the Internet. I have not been very sympathetic with parents of gifted kids. Some of the reaction below echoes things I have said. But I find it difficult to justify forcing Nancy Klimavicz’s son to spend valuable time on busywork. If anyone has any good way out of this impasse, e-mail me at mathewsj@washpost.com.
Dear Extra Credit:
I’ve started this letter many times over the past several months. After my gifted son received rejections from Virginia Tech, James Madison University and William and Mary, I figured it’s time to warn other parents. If you have a very bright student, home-school him.
My son was reading a college-level book in third grade when the gifted education specialist recommended just that. Academically, we figured he’d learn and grow regardless of the environment, but his weakness was social interaction with his peers. We believed childhood should include high school sports teams and clubs, and we remembered being influenced by one or two teachers who were passionate about their subjects. We decided to leave him in public school.

A Look at Sacramento’s High School “Redesign” Initiative

Linking Education and Economic Development and the Sacramento City Unified School District [488K PDF]:

Over the past five years, the Sacramento City Unified School District (SCUSD) in partnership with LEED—Linking Education and Economic Development, the Carnegie Corporation of New York, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has implemented a system-wide redesign of the District’s high schools. With the assistance of community members, teachers principals, and especially parents and students, we have worked to create new models for high school learning in the 21st Century. To share the results of this effort, including accomplishments, lessons learned, and ongoing challenges, partners came together to create the “Report to the Community on the Education for the 21st Century (e21) High School Redesign Initiative: 2002-2007 and Beyond”. This Executive Summary captures some of the key elements of this Report

Complete report [1.9MB]
LEED Website.
Bruce King’s evaluation of Madison West High School’s Small Learning Community (SLC) implementation.
Examining the data from Madison’s SLC grants.

Toki Middle School Security/Safety Update

Channel3000:

This school year some parents, teachers and staff have complained about increasing safety and violence issues at Toki, including bad behavior at the school.
Last March, after a packed PTO meeting, school district officials added another security guard and a “dean of students” to help keep the peace. A positive behavior curriculum program was initiated as well.
“We certainly have a greater comfort level with where the school is headed at this point,” Yudice said.
However, some said that a couple of recent fights at the school posted on YouTube.com show the problems haven’t gotten any better.
PTO President Betsy Reck said teachers have told her things have not improved, despite the extra efforts the last month or so. She said many believe more needs to be done.
“It’s a typical, almost daily, occurrence, the fights at Toki,” Reck said. “It’s a very sad sort of affairs over there right now that they cannot get that under control.”
Last week, police were called to the school for two fights, which apparently were caught on video by students and posted recently on YouTube.com. They have since been removed from the site.

More here and here.
Andy Hall & Karen Rivedal review local school policies on video capture and internet access.

Green Charter School News

Environmental Charter High School (CA)
Michael Frome Academy (MN)
“Hands On, Feet Wet” at River Crossing Charter School (WI)
Yuba Environmental Science Charter Academy (CA)
Prairie Crossing Charter School (IL)
Laura Jeffrey Academy (MN)
Keyes to Learning Charter School (CA)

Schools ignored abuse warnings for 2 decades

John Iwasaki:

Seattle Public Schools will pay $3 million for failing to act on dozens of warnings that a popular teacher was molesting some of his fifth-grade students, a pattern that lasted two decades.
The most abused girl will receive $2.5 million, which her attorney said will be the largest reported settlement paid by a school district in Washington to a single victim in a sex-abuse case.
Under the settlement, approved Monday in King County Superior Court, the district acknowledged negligence in failing to protect two girls from Laurence “Shayne” Hill, 58, who has admitted to molesting at least seven girls while teaching at Broadview-Thomson Elementary in North Seattle.
The girls’ lawyers said the district protected Hill even though at least 15 teachers and staff members made at least 30 reports to administrators that he was grabbing girls’ buttocks and having them sit on his lap, sometimes in darkened classrooms, since the mid-1980s.

Related by Doug Erickson & Andy Hall: Former Waunakee educational assistant wasn’t reported by the Madison Schools.

Eighth Grade Vocabulary List: 1978

Well worth reading [1.2MB PDF]:

rivulet: A small stream or brook. The ancient rivulet was conducted according to customs that were centuries old. The children enjoyed wading in the rivulet. The manuscript needed only minor rivulets before publication. A pleasant rivulet trickled through the fields.
firth: A narrow inlet or arm of the sea. (A firth may refer to any narrow arm of the sea or more particular to the opening of a river into the sea. Because the coast of Scotland is dotted with so many firths, the word has come to be associated with that country.) The soldier explored the firths that cut into the coastline. The young child was severely reprimanded for having committed the firth. After swimming across the firth, he was completely exhausted. The coast was cut with many narrow firths, which were ideal hideouts for smugglers.

Related: Dick Askey: Content Knowledge Examinations for Teachers Past and Present and NAEP writing scores – 2007 along with an article by Alan Borsuk. A Touch of Greatness:

You won’t find ten-year old children reciting Shakespeare soliloquies, acting out the Cuban Missile Crisis or performing Sophocles plays in most American classrooms today. But Albert Cullum’s elementary school students did all this and more. Combining interviews with Cullum and his former students with stunning archival footage filmed by director Robert Downey, Sr., A TOUCH OF GREATNESS documents the extraordinary work of this maverick public school teacher who embraced creativity, motivation and self-esteem in the classroom through the use of poetry, drama and imaginative play.
Regarded by academics as one of the most influential educators of the 1960s and ‘70s, Cullum championed what is, by today’s standards, an unorthodox educational philosophy: the belief that the only way teachers can be successful with children is to speak directly to their hearts and to their instinctive and largely ignored capacity to quickly understand and identify with the great personalities, ideas and emotions found in classical literature. To that end, Cullum regularly taught his elementary school children literary masterpieces, exposed them to great works of art and engaged them in the events of world history. Without leaving the classroom, his students visited King Tut’s tomb, attended joint sessions of the U.S. Congress, operated on “bleeding” nouns in his “grammar hospital,” and clamored to play the timeless roles of Julius Caesar, Lady Macbeth and Hamlet.
When Cullum was an elementary school teacher in the New York City suburbs during the 1960s, his friend Robert Downey helped film several student plays and classroom events. In A TOUCH OF GREATNESS, these lush black and white films, with original music created by Tom O’Horgan, capture the work of this radical teacher and his students’ love of learning.

New Math Textbooks Irk Some Parents

Ian Shapira:

Greg Barlow, an Air Force officer in the defense secretary’s office at the Pentagon, was helping his 8-year-old son, Christian, one recent night with a vexing problem: What is 674 plus 249?
The Prince William County third-grader did not stack the numbers and carry digits from one column to the next, the way generations have learned. Applying lessons from his school’s new math textbook, “Investigations in Number, Data, and Space,” Christian tried breaking the problem into easier-to-digest numbers.
But after several seconds, he got stumped. He drew lines connecting digits, and his computation amounted to an upside-down pyramid with numbers at the bottom. His father, in a teacherly tone, nudged him toward the old-fashioned method. “How would you do that another way?” Barlow asked.
In Prince William and elsewhere in the country, a math textbook series has fomented upheaval among some parents and teachers who say its methods are convoluted and fail to help children master basic math skills and facts. Educators who favor the series say it helps young students learn math in a deeper way as they prepare for the rigors of algebra.
The debate over “Investigations in Number, Data, and Space,” a Pearson School series used in thousands of elementary classrooms, including some in Arlington, Fairfax, Loudoun and Howard counties, is one of the newer fronts in the math wars. Such battles over textbooks and teaching methods are fueled in part by the anxieties of parents who often feel powerless over their children’s education, especially in subjects they know.
The curriculum, introduced in the 1990s and updated in a second edition issued last fall, offers one answer to the nation’s increasingly urgent quest for stronger elementary math education. The nonprofit organization TERC, based in Cambridge, Mass., developed “Investigations” with support from the National Science Foundation.

Related Links:

• 35 of 37 UW Math Department members open letter to the Madison School District.
• Math Forum Audio / Video & Links
• West High School Math Teacher Letter
• UW Math Professor Emeritus Dick Askey reviews Madison School District Math performance information.
• NCTM Press Release
• NCTM Report: Curriculum Focal Points. 18.9MB Full PDF report
• Joanne notes that Kitchen Table Math compares NCTM’s new curriculum focal points to the sequence of topics in Singapore Math.

Speaking of Report Cards: “So, Is That Like an A?”

Maura Casey:

Time was that a fifth grader’s greatest concern about gym was whether he or she would be picked last for the kickball team. Now, in schools in Hartford, that 10-year-old would-be athlete is being graded on how he or she “establishes and maintains a healthy lifestyle by avoiding risk-taking behavior.” In music class, students are being graded on how they make “connections between music and other disciplines through evaluation and analysis of compositions and performances.” That is pretty far from just trying to sing “Yankee Doodle” on key.
These examples come from a new report card, introduced last November in all of Hartford’s elementary schools. It measures 58 academic, social and behavioral skills and, including other information, can run as long as seven pages.
Not surprisingly, the language was produced by a committee. Some of the wording is clear; anyone can understand “shows courtesy and respect toward others.” But the academic measurements, which are designed to grade areas of student performance that are also measured on state standardized tests, seem more likely to confuse than illuminate.
Christopher Leone, the spokesman for the Hartford school district, said that the goal was to give parents more detailed information about the progress of their children. He says that so far the response from parents has been overwhelmingly positive. The district hasn’t surveyed the teachers, but the report card made me appreciate, as nothing else has ever done, why teachers say they are buried in paperwork.

Much more on Madison’s proposed report card changes here.

“A Modest Proposal for the Schools:”
Eliminate local control

A provocative title for a must read. It addresses a number of issues, from local outsize influence on school boards to Wisconsin’s low state standards:

Congress erred big-time when NCLB assigned each state to set its own standards and devise and score its own tests … this study underscores the folly of a big modern nation, worried about its global competitiveness, nodding with approval as Wisconsin sets its eighth-grade reading passing level at the 14th percentile while South Carolina sets its at the 71st percentile.

Matt Miller via a kind reader’s email:

It wasn’t just the slate and pencil on every desk, or the absence of daily beatings. As Horace Mann sat in a Leipzig classroom in the summer of 1843, it was the entire Prussian system of schools that impressed him. Mann was six years into the work as Massachusetts secretary of education that would earn him lasting fame as the “father of public education.” He had sailed from Boston to England several weeks earlier with his new wife, combining a European honeymoon with educational fact-finding. In England, the couple had been startled by the luxury and refinement of the upper classes, which exceeded anything they had seen in America and stood in stark contrast to the poverty and ignorance of the masses. If the United States was to avoid this awful chasm and the social upheaval it seemed sure to create, he thought, education was the answer. Now he was seeing firsthand the Prussian schools that were the talk of reformers on both sides of the Atlantic.
In Massachusetts, Mann’s vision of “common schools,” publicly funded and attended by all, represented an inspiring democratic advance over the state’s hodgepodge of privately funded and charity schools. But beyond using the bully pulpit, Mann had little power to make his vision a reality. Prussia, by contrast, had a system designed from the center. School attendance was compulsory. Teachers were trained at national institutes with the same care that went into training military officers. Their enthusiasm for their subjects was contagious, and their devotion to students evoked reciprocal affection and respect, making Boston’s routine resort to classroom whippings seem barbaric.
Mann also admired Prussia’s rigorous national curriculum and tests. The results spoke for themselves: illiteracy had been vanquished. To be sure, Prussian schools sought to create obedient subjects of the kaiser—hardly Mann’s aim. Yet the lessons were undeniable, and Mann returned home determined to share what he had seen. In the seventh of his legendary “Annual Reports” on education to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, he touted the benefits of a national system and cautioned against the “calamities which result … from leaving this most important of all the functions of a government to chance.”
Mann’s epiphany that summer put him on the wrong side of America’s tradition of radical localism when it came to schools. And although his efforts in the years that followed made Massachusetts a model for taxpayer-funded schools and state-sponsored teacher training, the obsession with local control—not incidentally, an almost uniquely American obsession—still dominates U.S. education to this day. For much of the 150 or so years between Mann’s era and now, the system served us adequately: during that time, we extended more schooling to more people than any nation had before and rose to superpower status. But let’s look at what local control gives us today, in the “flat” world in which our students will have to compete.
The United States spends more than nearly every other nation on schools, but out of 29 developed countries in a 2003 assessment, we ranked 24th in math and in problem-solving, 18th in science, and 15th in reading. Half of all black and Latino students in the U.S. don’t graduate on time (or ever) from high school. As of 2005, about 70 percent of eighth-graders were not proficient in reading. By the end of eighth grade, what passes for a math curriculum in America is two years behind that of other countries.
Dismal fact after dismal fact; by now, they are hardly news. But in the 25 years since the landmark report A Nation at Risk sounded the alarm about our educational mediocrity, America’s response has been scattershot and ineffective, orchestrated mainly by some 15,000 school districts acting alone, with help more recently from the states. It’s as if after Pearl Harbor, FDR had suggested we prepare for war through the uncoordinated efforts of thousands of small factories; they’d know what kinds of planes and tanks were needed, right?
When you look at what local control of education has wrought, the conclusion is inescapable: we must carry Mann’s insights to their logical end and nationalize our schools, to some degree. But before delving into the details of why and how, let’s back up for a moment and consider what brought us to this pass.

Related:

• Clusty Search: Horace Mann
• 2006 Fordham Foundation Report that gave Wisconsin a D- in academic standards
• Many links and notes on Wisconsin’s test score requirements and results.
• Value Added Assessment and the Madison School District.

Making Better Use of Limited Resources, Part I

Wisconsin Center for Education Research:

Over the past 15 years, WCER’s Consortium for Policy Research in Education (CPRE) has worked to find better ways to allocate education funds and to link them to powerful school-based strategies to boost student learning. This is the second of a four-part series covering highlights from CPRE research. This article covers reallocating dollars at the school level and by educational strategy; documenting best practices in school finance adequacy; and using resources to double student performance.
Reallocating School-Level Funds
The U.S. education system educates only about one-third of the nation’s students to a rigorous proficiency standard. Improving education productivity must be placed onto the policy agenda and the practice agenda, says UW-Madison education professor and CPRE director Allan Odden. The goal of teaching all, or nearly all, students to high standards will require doubling or tripling student academic achievement.
But it’s unlikely that education funding will correspondingly increase, Odden says. To accomplish this goal, schools will need to adopt more powerful educational strategies and, in the process, reallocate funds. CPRE research found many examples of schools that reallocated their resources to improve student performance. From that research CPRE created a dozen case studies of schools—urban, suburban, and rural—that had reallocated resources to use teachers, time, and funds more productively.
Dissatisfied with their students’ performance, these schools redesigned their entire education programs. By reallocating resources and restructuring they transformed themselves into more productive educational organizations. They tended to spend more time on core academic subjects and they often provided lower class sizes for those subjects. They invested more in teacher professional development and provided more effective help for struggling students, including one-to-one tutoring. Subsequent research showed that many, but not all, designs produced higher levels of student achievement than typical schools.

Texas School District Challenges State “Robin Hood” Finance System

Terrance Stutz:

Protests from this small school district nestled in the Texas Hill Country are reverberating across the state’s school finance landscape.
School board members – backed by parents and local business owners – have decided to say “no” when their payment comes due next month under the state’s “Robin Hood” school funding law.
Wimberley is one of more than 160 high-wealth school districts – including several in the Dallas area – that are required to share their property tax revenue with other districts. But residents here insist that their students will suffer if they turn the money over to the state.
“We’re not going to pay it,” said Gary Pigg, vice president of the Wimberley school board and a small-business owner. “Our teachers are some of the lowest-paid in the area. Our buildings need massive repairs. We keep running a deficit – and they still want us to give money away.
“It’s unconstitutional – and I’m ready to go to jail if I have to.”
Mr. Pigg and the rest of the Wimberley school board voted last fall to withhold the payment of an estimated $3.1 million in local property taxes – one-sixth of the district’s total revenue – that was supposed to be sent to the state under the share-the-wealth school finance law passed in 1993. The law was passed in response to a series of court orders calling for equalized funding among school districts.

Wisconsin’s school finance system takes a similar approach: High property assessement values reduce state aids. Unlike Texas, Wisconsin simply redistributes fewer state tax dollars to Districts with “high” property values, such as Madison. Texas requires Districts to send some of their property tax receipts to the state to be redistributed to other districts. School finance has many complicated aspects, one of which is a “Robin Hood” like provision. Another is “Negative Aid“: If Madison increases spending via referendums, it loses state aid. This situation is referenced in the article:

Regarding the possibility of a tax hike, Mr. York noted that an increase would require voter approval – something that is not likely to happen with residents knowing that a big chunk of their money will be taken by the state.

One of the many ironies in our school finance system is that there is an incentive to grow the tax base, or the annual assessment increases. The politicians can then point to the flat or small growth in the mill rate, rather than the growth in the total tax burden.
Finally, those who strongly advocate for changes in Wisconsin’s school finance system must be ready for unintended consequences, such as reduced funding for “rich” districts, like Madison. Madison’s spending has increased at an average rate of 5.25% over the past 20 years, while enrollment has remained essentially flat (though the student population has changed).

Virginia Parents Resist Math “Investigations” Curriculum

Ian Shapira:

A group of Prince William County parents is mounting a campaign to repeal a new elementary school math curriculum, using an Internet discussion group and an online petition to gather support and fuel criticism.
The group, whose members include parents from such elementary schools as Westridge, Ashland and Springwoods as well as teachers from various schools, plans to present the Prince William County School Board in February with its petition, which has about 500 names. Parents in the group, whose Web site ( http://www.pwcteachmathright.com) lists several of their complaints, say that the Investigations curriculum is putting their children behind grade level and is too convoluted.
The group’s formation comes right after the school system presented a year-long study of the curriculum that showed 80 percent of second-graders and 70 percent of first-graders are proficient on all 10 subtests of the Stanford Diagnostic Mathematics Test. The school system wants to continue studying the program and incorporate data from student performance on the state Standards of Learning exams.
School Board member Julie C. Lucas (Neabsco) said in an interview that she wants to examine the program inside a classroom to assess its effectiveness. She added that she has been hearing positive reviews from at least one principal in her district but that she wants to withhold making public comments until she visits schools.
The Investigations program has been undergoing a phased-in implementation since the School Board adopted its materials in 2006. In the 2006-07 academic year, kindergarten through second grade started the program; this year, third-graders began it; and next year, fourth-graders will use the material.
Investigations teaches children new ways of learning mathematics and solving problems. For instance, a student may not need to learn how to add 37 and 23 by stacking the figures on top of each other, and carrying the numbers. They may learn to add up the tens and then combine the seven and three to arrive at 60.

Related:

• Math Forum Audio / Video
• Madison School District’s Math Task Force
• Clusty Search: Math Investigations
• Teaching Math Right website:
  

  Why this website?
  …Because our children – ALL children – deserve a quality mathematics education in PWCS!!
  In 2006 PWCS directed mandatory implementation of the elementary school mathematics curriculum TERC – “Investigations in Number, Data, and Space” in all PWCS elementary schools. The traditional, proven, successful mathematics program was abandoned for a “discovery learning” program that has a record of failure across the country.
  Of all the VA Department of Education approved elementary math text/materials, “Investigations” least adequately supports the VA Standards of Learning. Yet it was somehow “the right choice” for PWCS children. Parents of 2nd and 3d graders are already realizing the negative impact of this program in only a year and a half’s worth of “Investigations.” Children subjected to this program end up two years behind where they should be in mathematics fluency and competency by the end of 5th grade. PWCS is committed to experimenting with our children’s future. We think our children and our tax dollars deserve better.

Online school offers fine, flexible education

Lisa McClure:

Our public education system should be designed to meet the needs of all students. For the last few years, online schools have provided an important public school option for many of Wisconsin’s families, proving to be a perfect fit for a wide range of students requiring the freedom and flexibility to set their own pace and learn on their own time.
Unfortunately, the recent state Court of Appeals decision regarding the Wisconsin Virtual Academy has created some ambiguity. This has directly affected WiVA, and some have suggested it has broader implications for all virtual education. However, we don’t believe the ruling affects iQ Academy Wisconsin, an online high school that is part of the Waukesha School District, and other schools that operate like us.
Unlike WiVA, iQ Academy relies solely on state-certified public school teachers to provide formal instruction. Our teachers are employed by and largely located inside the Waukesha School District. We are confident that iQ Academy complies with all relevant state laws.
Nevertheless, as a strong advocate of online education options, I urge our government officials to clarify any ambiguity and set virtual education on a firm footing.
If there is a positive from this ruling, it is the additional attention focused on online education. Many who may not have been aware of the high quality of education being provided online are taking a closer look. We welcome that.

Union Bigs (WEAC) Should Hit the Books

Wisconsin State Journal Editorial:

he teachers union in Wisconsin wants all public schools to spend more time teaching students about organized labor.
Here ‘s a better idea with much greater need:
Require the leaders of the teachers union to enroll in a remedial civics class.
The Wisconsin Education Association Council showed how badly it needs a refresher course in the basic framework of American government when it lobbied against a sensible limit on the governor ‘s out-of-control veto powers.
WEAC suffers the dubious distinction of being the only organization in the state to register this year with the state Ethics Board to lobby against Senate Joint Resolution 5. The resolution, heading to voters for final approval this spring, will rein in the most outlandish veto power in the nation — the notorious “Frankenstein ” veto.
Modern governors, Republicans and Democrats, have used this veto trick with increasing gall. They cross out all but a handful of unrelated words and figures across long passages of spending bills. The remaining bits and pieces of sentences can then be stitched together to create law completely unrelated to the original text.
It ‘s a lot like the way literature ‘s Dr. Frankenstein stitched together his monster.

Virtual schools here to stay; law, courts must adapt

Jeff Bush:

Insight School of Wisconsin, one of the state’s newest publicly chartered virtual schools, could not disagree more profoundly with the recent Court of Appeals ruling that a virtual school violated Wisconsin law because its teachers and students are not entirely located within one school district’s borders.
The ruling is a step back for education. It hurts Wisconsin’s quest to be economically competitive in a high-tech, online educational world. Most disturbingly, it hurts some of the neediest students we’re all trying so hard to help.
The Appeals Court ruling denies what is already happening in schools. As a former teacher and principal, let me point out the obvious: Technology has changed the classroom. Online schools, video programming and Web-based distance learning have obliterated school district borders. The world is now our classroom.
Visit a school today and you’ll likely see that it’s already linked to one of the state’s 33 distance learning networks. You might see a distance-taught class over BadgerNet taught by teachers in another city, state or country.

25 in Oregon turn down federal money that binds them to No Child Left Behind rules

Betsy Hammond & Lisa Grace Legnicer:

A t least 25 Oregon schools whose students are behind in reading and math have turned down federal aid intended to help those students learn more, an analysis by The Oregonian has found.
Not taking the money — typically $200,000 a year — allows a school to dodge consequences and pressure to improve brought by the federal No Child Left Behind law.
As a result, students in those schools don’t get free tutoring and don’t have the extra teachers and teacher training that federal money would buy. Parents don’t get letters notifying them of their school’s achievement problems and plans to improve, and students lose the opportunity to transfer to a better-performing school.
“Why would they turn down the money? It’s not like we don’t need the tutoring,” says Madison junior Betelehem Shenbulo. She would have failed algebra II last year without the help of a tutor paid with federal funds, the 16-year-old says.
“I have seen people struggle this year, really struggle, but tutoring is not available anymore,” she says. “We should still have it.”
Under No Child Left Behind, any school receiving federal funds to help disadvantaged students that misses academic performance targets two years in a row is put on a federal must-improve list.
Nationwide, more than 2,500 schools — including 80 in Oregon — have been put on the federal list. They face consequences if they don’t improve.

Advocating Teach for America in Wisconsin

Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel Editorial:

It’s exhausting work, the pay is low, the fruits of the labor are sometimes hard to see. But those facts haven’t discouraged thousands of America’s brightest college students from applying to work for the fast-growing non-profit Teach for America.
Wisconsin’s most troubled urban school districts might benefit from this program, in which new graduates from some of America’s most prestigious universities spend two years teaching in low-income schools.
State education officials, local administrators and the teachers unions should make reasonable accommodations so that no artificial barriers prevent the program from being launched in Wisconsin. The Kern Family Foundation of Waukesha, which has education reform as part of its mission, is pushing to bring Teach for America to the state.
Teach for America grew out of a senior thesis by founder Wendy Kopp at Princeton University. During its first year in 1990, the organization sent 500 people into six low-income communities. This year, 5,000 TFA teachers are working across the country, and the TFA alumni network numbers thousands more.
Teach for America recruits and trains recent graduates from schools like Dartmouth, Princeton, Notre Dame, Marquette and the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The 2007 class has 43 UW alumni; nearly 500 from Wisconsin’s public and private schools have participated since the program’s inception. TFA trains the new teachers and helps them obtain alternative certifications; the schools pay their salaries.

Millar: Improving education in math and science

Terry Millar: Improvement in math and science education is a priority in Madison, as it is across the nation. Science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) training is not only of growing importance to our technology-dependent society, these disciplines also represent esthetically compelling advances in human knowledge that all students should have the opportunity to appreciate. […]

Waukesha Schools go to Mediation over teacher contracts: Trading Jobs for Compensation?

Pete Kennedy:

The word “mediation” usually isn’t all that menacing. But these days, and in this district, “mediation” packs plenty of punch.
A few weeks ago the Waukesha School Board announced it had taken its teachers to mediation. That means a neutral party will try to negotiate a settlement between the teachers union (the Education Association of Waukesha) and the board.
What’s most significant about the board’s action is the mediator can declare an impasse and send the proposals to an arbitrator. And that, my friend, is a big deal.
Why? First, because arbitration is the labor-relations version of high-stakes poker. It’s a winner-take-all proposition. Both sides present their proposal to a (supposedly) neutral third party, who picks the plan he or she believes fairest. There is no in-between – you win or you lose.
Arbitration also is a big deal because it’s hardly ever done, at least when state public schools are involved.
“Yes, it’s significant,” said David Schmidt, superintendent of the School District of Waukesha for the past 10 years. “It’s the first time we’ve done it since I’ve been here.”
Schmidt says he is fine with the teachers union, that the real trouble is in Madison. (The EAW is very much in agreement.) But right now, the problem has to be fixed closer to home. “What we can control locally are our expenditures,” Schmidt says.

Links and notes on Madison’s recent teacher’s contract.

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.

Running Start gives high-schoolers jump-start on college credit

Amy Rolph:

If those college-prep classes feel a little emptier in high school these days, it’s because they are. About 10 percent of the students aren’t there.
Those 17,000 juniors and seniors aren’t truant. They’re enrolled at the local community college, getting a jump-start on earning college credit before high school graduation even rolls around.
That’s about how many high school students the State Board of Community and Technical Colleges estimates are enrolled in Running Start, the early entrance program that lets qualifying juniors and seniors earn college and high school credit at the same time and without paying anything. Enrollment has grown steadily since the program’s launch in 1990 — so much so that community college officials say it’s costing them almost $35 million a year to educate those extra high school students.
Success has its price, and the community colleges will ask the Legislature for $35 million more over five years — specifically $7 million each year.
“Over time, the Running Start program has grown successfully and the reimbursement the colleges get has stayed the same, while inflation has steadily grown,” said Suzy Ames, spokeswoman for the state community college board.
Community colleges are entitled to 70 percent of the money earmarked for each Running Start student, Ames said. But with more students wanting to start college early, the colleges have to add classes, faculty and staff to accommodate them.

Related: Madison’s Dual Enrollment Climate.
Running Start.
Celeste Flint:

I don’t think Seattle’s coffee addiction is making our students smarter. High schools have lowered the bar too far, and everybody knows it.
At age 10, American students score well above the international average, but by age 15, when American students are tested against those in 40 other countries, they drop to 25th place, according to an ABC report.
Youth literally get dumber the longer they stay in American schools.
With high school teachers so sensitive to self-esteem issues that they make it impossible to fail, it’s only natural that motivated young people want to get out.
Running Start is the fire escape out of the collapsing American education system. But as a result, the 17,000 Washington Running Start students, many who aren’t quite ready for higher education, are taking a toll on college courses.
Many high school students just don’t have the maturity to handle a real workload, and as a result the dumbing-down continues into college.
Being a transfer student from a community college, I witnessed countless high school students regularly skip classes, not do the homework and then complain until the teacher slowed down the course. Inevitably half the material was re-taught.

Desired Superintendent Characteristics

The Board of Education of the Madison Metropolitan School District, after consulting staff, students, parents and community members, seeks an educational leader who is student-centered and demonstrates the following characteristics:
Possessing:

• Leadership experience and demonstrated success in a diverse community and school district
  
  
• Leadership experience and demonstrated success in challenging and engaging students at all points along the educational performance continuum
  
  
• Effective communication skills
  
  
• Strong collaborative and visionary leadership skills
  
  
• Unquestioned integrity
  
  
• Excellent organizational and fiscal management skills

Ability to:

• Deal directly and fairly with faculty, staff, students, parents and community members
  
  
• Be accessible, open-minded and consider all points of view before making decisions
  
  
• Build consensus and support for a shared vision for the future
  
  
• Develop positive working relationships with a wide variety of constituent groups

The individual selected is expected to be highly visible in and engaged with the schools and community. Successful experience as a superintendent or district level administrator in a similar urban environment and school district size is preferred.
Hazard, Young, Attea & Associates, Ltd. Executive Summary 960K PDF File:

This report summarizes the findings of the Leadership Profile Assessment conducted by Hazard, Young, Attea & Associates, Ltd. (HYA) for the Board of Education of Madison Metropolitan School District (MMSD). The data contained herein were obtained from reviewing approximately 185 completed Leadership Profile Assessment forms, 220 emailed responses and interviews with approximately 240 persons identified b y the Board, in either individual, focus group or community input settings, on September 19 and 20, 2007. The questionnaire, interviews and focus groups were structured to gather data to assist the Board in detennining the primary characteristics it might seek in its next superintendent of schools. Through this process, the consultants attempted to identify the personal and professional characteristics desired in the superintendent, as well as the skill sets necessary to maintain what constituent groups value and to address current and emerging issues which the District might be facing.
Information obtained through interviews, emails and completed questionnaires reflects similar views from all groups with respect to the multiple strengths of MMSD. Respondents were extremely proud of their District’s national recognition for educational excellence. They voiced pride in their students’ excellent test scores, the District’s exceedingly high number of National Merit Semifinalists and its ability to provide top quality academic programs in an environment of rapidly changing demographics. Given the changes in the socio-economic, racial and ethnic make-up of the student body, residents identified as major strengths the District’s commitment to reduce the achievement gap between Caucasian and minority students, its willingness to address issues of diversity and its provision of training in best practices to assist staff in meeting the special needs of a diverse student population.
Respondents also pointed to MMSD’ s commitment to neighborhood schools, retention of small class sizes in most elementary schools, rigorous curriculum, support of music programs and the arts, broad range of sports and other extra-curricular activities, high expectations of a well educated parent constituency and its excellent special education program with the focus on the inclusion of students in regular classrooms. Residents cited the strong support for the District by caring, involved parents and by a community that values high academic standards and achievement. Other strengths cited included the District’s bright, motivated students and its highly competent, dedicated, hard-working teachers and support staff committed to the success of all students. Building administrators were commended for their dedication, accessibility and innovative leadership in providing programs that reflect the needs of their individual school populations. All respondents cited MMSD’s proximity to and partnership with UW-Madison and Edgewood College as invaluable assets.
The over-arching challenge cited by all respondents centered on the MMSD’ s future ability to maintain its excellent academic programs and student performance, given the District’s insufficient financial resources, significant budget cuts and ever-growing low-income and ELL student populations. These concerns are interrelated and if not addressed successfully could eventually become the self-fulfilling cause of what respondents feared the most: the exodus of a considerable number of high-performing upper/middle class students to private or suburban schools as a “bright flight” mentality overrides parental desire to provide children with a “real world” enviromnent of socio-economic, ethnic and racial diversity.
Concern over the funding issue was expressed in several ways: failure to cut the personnel costs of a “top heavy” central office, more equitable funding of the various schools, state level politics that restrict local access to property taxes and fail to increase state funding, the cost of responding to the arbitrary mandates of t he NCLB law, the future need for a referendum to increase property taxes and a strong teachers’ union perceived as placing its salary/benefit issues, restrictions on management prerogatives and undue influence over the Board ahead of the District’s interests. The impact of continued budget cuts strikes at the quality and reputation of the educational program, with fear of an erosion of the comprehensive curriculum and after-school activities, reduction in aides who help classroom teachers with ELL and special education students; curtailment of music, fine arts and gifted programs; increases in class size; lack of classroom supplies; postponed maintenance and renovation of aging facilities; need to update technology and the lack of long-range financial planning as the District confronts one financial crisis after another.
Concern over the impact of the changing demographics was also expressed in various ways: fear that the rising cost of responding to the special needs of an increasingly diverse student population and efforts to close the achievement gap will reduce the dollars available to maintain electives and enrichment programs for regular and gifted students; the changing school culture in which gang activity, fights between students, a pervasive lack of respect by students toward authority are perceived as the norm, which in turn generates fear that the schools are no longer as safe as they used to be; the need to provide more relevant programs for the non-college bound students and the need to address the high minority student dropout rate. Concern that students from minority group populations are disproportionately disciplined, suspended and/or expelled was also expressed.
Almost all constituent groups felt that the Board and Administration need to gain the trust of parents and the community through communication that clearly identifies the fiscal issues and the criteria on which funding and budget decisions are based. Many expressed the view that the Board and Administration’s lack of transparency in district decision-making and show of disrespect toward those who question administrative proposals have eroded constituent support. A concerted effort by the Board and Administration to become more creative in publicizing the successes of MMSD’s outstanding educational opportunities might encourage mor e young upper/middle class families to move into the District and convince others to remain.
Respondents agreed on many of the attributes that would assist a new superintendent in addressing the issues confronting MMSD. They want a student-centered, collaborative educational leader of unquestioned integrity with superior communication, interpersonal and management skills. He/she should have strategic plmming skills and feel comfortable with the involvement of parents, teachers and community members in shaping a vision for the District’s future direction. The successful candidate should be a consensus builder who has had experience in meeting the needs of an ethnically and socio-economically diverse student population. He/she should b e sensitive and proactive in addressing diversity issues and a strong advocate of effective programs for ELL and gifted students and of inclusion programs for special education students. The new superintendent should be open to new ideas and encourage staff to take risks with research-based initiatives that engage students in learning and maintain high academic expectations as they work together toward common goals. When confronted with controversial issues, he/she should be willing to seek the views of those affected, examine all options and then make the tough decisions. The new superintendent should have the courage of his/her convictions and support decisions based on what is best for all students
The successful individual should have a firm understanding of fiscal management and budgets, K-12 curriculum and best practice and the importance of technology in the classroom. He/she should be a strong supporter of music, fine arts and after-school activities. The new superintendent should have successful experience dealing collaboratively with a Board and establishing agreement on their respective govemance roles. He/she should have a proven record of recruiting minority staff and hiring competent people who are empowered to strive for excellence and are held accountable.
He/she should b e visible in the school buildings and at school events, enjoy interacting with students and staff, be actively involved in the community and seek opportunities to develop positive working relationships with state and local officials, business and community groups. The individual should be a personable, accessible, open-minded leader who engages staff, students, parents and the community in dialogue, keeps them well informed and responds respectfully to inquiries in a timely, forthright manner.
While it is unlikely tofind a candidate who possesses all of the characteristics desired by respondents, HYA and the Board intend to meet the challenge of finding an individual who possesses many of the skills and character traits required to address the issues described b y the constituent groups. We expect the new superintendent to provide the leadership that inspires trust and unites the community in its support for MMSD’s efforts to achieve an even higher level of performance for its students and staff.
Respectfully submitted,
Marvin Edwards
Jim Rickabaugh
Joan Levy

960K Executive Summary.

Board Talks Will Focus on a New Blueprint

Susan Troller The Capital Times September 25, 2007 Football coach Barry Switzer’s famous quote, “Some people are born on third base and go through life thinking they hit a triple,” could easily apply to schools and school districts that take credit for students who enter school with every advantage and continue as high achievers all […]

The HOPE (Having Options in Public Education) Coalition

The HOPE (Having Options in Public Education) Coalition is a grassroots group of concerned parents, educators, and community members who believe creating and sustaining new educational options would strengthen MMSD. New options in public schools would benefit students, families, teachers, and our community. Options are needed because “one size does not fit all”! The diversity […]

Do Milwaukee’s Public Schools Spend Too Much

Bruce Murphy: That was certainly the suggestion of a new Wisconsin Taxpayers Alliance study, which was done for the Metropolitan Milwaukee Association of Commerce. The latter’s leader, Tim Sheehy, has been a frequent critic of local governments for paying benefits he believes are too high. In the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel article covering the study, Sheehy […]

Washington State’s Math Standards Review

Donna Gordon Blankinship: The board’s executive director, Edie Harding, said public comment required some changes to a draft report the committee circulated last month, but the basic message is the same: The state needs tougher math standards and clearer guidance for teachers, parents and students. The draft report called for putting more emphasis on learning […]

West HS English 10: Request for Data

Here is an email I sent to the BOE, asking them to request important outcome data for West HS’s English 10 initiative. Embedded in the email is my own request for such data. As both a content and a process issue, I should think this would be of interest to all SIS readers. By all […]

A bit of Tangential, International News

Both articles below are at best, thinly related to this site’s purpose. However, I think they each merit a link and a read: Thailand to keep on repatriating Hmong to Laos by Pracha Hariraksapitak: Thailand has no plans to halt its repatriation of ethnic Hmong to communist Laos despite appeals by U.S. Congressmen and the […]

Mary Gulbrandsen Reflects

Retiring Madison School District Chief of Staff Mary Gulbrandsen: I can use the words privileged and honored when I think of all of the people with whom I have been lucky enough to work, but it is much more than that. I have learned so much from the occupational and physical therapy staff, the psychology […]

Cartoonist among role models for high school boys.

Oh, that every one of our high schools had a “AAA” (“African American Achievement”) Team. —LAF Susan Troller The Capital Times 8/1/2007 The only guy who can truly hold you back is the guy in the mirror,” cartoonist Robb Armstrong told a group of mostly male, mostly African-American students at La Follette High School on […]

Advocating Teacher Merit Pay

Wisconsin State Journal Editorial: Wisconsin should reward hard-working, innovative teachers such as William Farnsworth with merit pay. Farnsworth, a science teacher at Waunakee Intermediate School, received the 2006 Presidential Award for Excellence in Mathematics and Science Teaching. He was the only Wisconsin teacher among the 93 teachers honored. Performance-based pay serves as an incentive for […]

The “Small School Hype”

Diane Ravitch: I like small schools, but I also like middle-size schools. About ten years ago, Valerie Lee of the University of Michigan did a study in which she asked what was the ideal size for a high school, and she concluded that the ideal school was small enough for kids to be known by […]

Parent Training Opportunity with Corwin Kronenberg

The District will be holding a parent training session with Corwin Kronenberg on Wednesday, August 22, from 7:00 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. at the Hilton Garden Inn on Deming Way. Mr. Kronenberg’s focus will be “A Parent’s Approach to Above-the-Line-Behavior for Students.” Teachers will be doing an all-day training with Mr. Kronenberg on August 20 […]

Board of Education Activity in 2006-07

A few weeks ago, the Madison BOE received a summary of what the board and its committees had done in its meetings during the past year. I am posting the entire document as an extended entry as community information. It provides a lot more detail, a good overview, and a glimpse at the pieces that […]

‘Time of healing’ needed in Palo Alto school district

Consultants warn of ‘escalated hostility’ if Board of Education, superintendent don’t address dysfunctional management practices Susan Hong: New Palo Alto schools’ Superintendent Kevin Skelly and the Palo Alto Board of Education ought to spearhead a “time of healing” in the school district, consultants Geoff Ball and Associates advised the school board Tuesday night. The recommendation […]

MMSD student/teacher assaults/injuries 2006-2007

Madison Parent: Details of the data behind the “School assaults, by the numbers” item (thank you, Bill Lueders) in this week’s Isthmus are posted here (sorted by school name), and here (subtotals of incidents by school type). The reports included incidents through June 4, 2007, so any incidents that occurred during the final fortnight of […]

Cut Costs for Teacher Health Insurance (Or Not)

Wisconsin State Journal Editorial: The district proposed to add two more HMO options for teachers. If a teacher chose any of the three HMO options, the district would pay the full premium. But if a teacher chose the high-cost WPS option, the district would pay only up to the cost of the highest-priced HMO plan. […]

Statement on MMSD/MTI Tentative Collective Bargaining Agreement Vote

After much consideration, I have decided to vote against the tentative agreement negotiated by the District and the MTI teachers union. I will do so because the agreement fails to include significant health insurance changes, and as a result, unreasonably depresses the salary increases that can be provided to our teachers. While the total salary […]

MMSD and MTI reach tentative contract agreement

Madison Metropolitan School District: The Madison Metropolitan School District and Madison Teachers Incorporated reached a tentative agreement yesterday on the terms and conditions of a new two-year collective bargaining agreement for MTI’s 2,400 member teacher bargaining unit. The contract, for the period from July 1, 2007 to June 30, 2009, needs ratification from both the […]

Accelerated Biology at West HS Stands Still

I have a friend who is fond of saying “never ascribe to maliciousness that which can be accounted for by incompetence.” These words have become a touchstone for me in my dealings with the Madison schools. I work harder than some people might ever believe to remember that every teacher, administrator and staff person I […]

“The Public Needs to Know What’s Going On”

Madison Parent’s School Safety Site: Today’s “Watchdog” section of Isthmus has a quick report (at the link, scroll down to the third item, titled “Dangerous work, take 2″) on recent incidents of violence in Madison schools against school staffers. In two of the incidents where staffers were injured, police declined to file criminal charges, citing […]

An Interesting Report on the Financial Condition and Position of the Milwaukee Public Schools

Wisconsin Taxpayers Alliance and the Metropolitan Milwaukee Association of Commerce [330K PDF]: As will be seen, MPS already has many challenges: Declining student numbers and a host of viable options for K12 students and their families; Rising and, in some cases, difficult to control costs. Though MPS’s finances are similar to other large, diverse districts, […]

On Parochial School Busing

Arlene Silveira: I want to clarify the facts about the Madison School Board’s decision on private school busing. This is a financial budget change with no hidden agenda. This is not about “us versus them.” This is not about Madison schools being “afraid of diversity.” We embrace diversity. Visit any of our schools and see […]

MMSD Paid Math Consultant on Math Task Force

Click to view MMSD Accounting Details. A number of questions have been raised over the past few years regarding the Madison School District’s math curriculum: West High Math Teachers: Moreover, parents of future West High students should take notice: As you read this, our department is under pressure from the administration and the math coordinator’s […]

Van Pao will be green school

The Van Pao Elementary School will be certified for Leadership in Energy and Envrionmental Design (LEED), according to a story from Channel3000: In spite of the controversy over its name, Vang Pao Elementary is officially under construction. Ground was broken at the new school site on Wednesday. School board members along with Superintendent Art Rainwater […]

2007 Challenge Index: Ranking America’s High Schools

Memorial is the only Madison High School in the top 1200 (1084), while Verona ranked 738th. Washington Post: The Washington Post Challenge Index measures a public high school’s effort to challenge its students. The formula is simple: Divide the number of Advanced Placement, International Baccalaureate or Cambridge tests a school gave by the number of […]

2007 / 2008 Budget Approved: School Board keeps Lindbergh open

Susan Troller: Board members tussled over dozens of suggestions to try to find money to return various programs and services to the district that had been cut by the administration in an effort to balance the $339.6 million budget. The administration had originally proposed about $8 million in cuts, including $2 million from special education […]

MMSD / MTI Contract Negotiations Begin: Health Care Changes Proposed

Susan Troller: The district and Madison Teachers Inc. exchanged initial proposals Wednesday to begin negotiations on a new two-year contract that will run through June 30, 2009. The current one expires June 30. “Frankly, I was shocked and appalled by the school district’s initial proposal because it was replete with take-backs in teachers’ rights as […]