schoolinfosystem.org
Information sent to me by Senn Brown, Secretary Wisconsin Charter Schools Association. Read about the new vision of public education in Milwaukee at: http://www.jsonline.com/news/metro/jun05/334378.asp .
Doug Erickson, WI State Journal reporter, writes about Nuesstro Mundo, MMSD’s bi-lingual charter school – Two-language school is seen as muy bueno
Thank you to Troy Dassler, Marisue Horton, and others who commented on my report on the meeting of the Long Range Planning Committee on Monday, June 6. Several people objected to my characterization of the some of the presentations as nasty and bitter. I know that it’s hard to perceive Leopold leaders and supporters as […]
Joan Knoebel offered her thoughts on how to win support for the operating referendum, and I whole-heartedly second them. On the Leopold referendum, I’d ask the board and supporters to do two things: 1) Lay out three or four alternative locations and configurations for a new Westside school, draw possible boundaries, develop cost projections, and […]
Joanne Jacobs: From the Huffington Post: Mike Piscal, founder of the very successful View Park Prep charter school in the low-income, minority Crenshaw District of LA names names in analyzing why 3,950 ninth graders at South LA’s four major high schools turn into 1,600 graduates, 900 college freshmen and 258 college graduates. More here. This […]
Wisconsin DPI announced the formation of an advisory council on Charter Schools (PDF) and High Schools – via wispolitics Meanwhile, on the campaign trail, WEAC plans to spend $358K to support incumbent Libby Burmaster, more than the $313K (Burmaster = 250K, Underheim = 64K) both candidates have raised to date – via Alan Borsuk! Mary […]
Ive noticed in several postings that people have criticized the Madison School Board for lack of leadership. I believe that true leadership happens in the community and then comes to the board level for action. This has been the case in many actions that have been taken place in the past, present and will undoubtedly […]
Eduwonk: Haven’t yet had your fill of political shenanigans in California? Then keep an eye on San Diego where one of the nation’s longest serving urban superintendents is facing political trouble. National implications as this episode shows what can happen when push comes to shove on NCLB. Superintendent Alan Bersin is poised to reorganize several […]
Susan Estrich – former Dukakis campaign manager and USC Professor takes California Democrats to task for pushing out one of their own over bilingual education: But unlike much of Silicon Valley, he is a passionate Democrat, and his issue is public education. He has twice served as president of the State Board of Education. The […]
Mixed in with other MMSD Board business on December 6, 2004 was a change to District Policy 9001 regarding equity. From the Board Agenda – X Other Business – Item C. It is recommended that the Board approve: 1) the changes that are attached relative to Board Policy 9000A and 9000B which have to do […]
Barb Williams forwarded a recent letter to the NY Times Magazine regarding the June 20, 2004 article: “It Takes a Hood” on The Harlem Project: Of the many efforts aimed at interrupting the effects of poverty on kids’ lives, none has left me more hopeful than Paul Tough’s piece on The Harlem Project. Geoffrey Canada, […]
Harvard’s Lant Pritchett writes in a new paper for the Copenhagen Consensus Project: There are many ways to press forward this kind of systemic reform, Mr Pritchett argues. Vouchers and a �market� for education might work well in some circumstances, but other approaches could achieve good results too in some cases: school autonomy (as granted […]
2004 DIRECT INSTRUCTION TRAINING AND CONFERENCE August 9-10, 2004 Edgewood College Campus Madison, Wisconsin Direct Instruction Training for both Beginning and Advanced Sessions Specially Designed for Deaf/Hard of Hearing Teachers College Credit Available Great New Location KEYNOTE SPEAKER Sara Tarver, Ph.D., Professor, University of Wisconsin, Madison Issues and Debates about Direct Instruction FEATURED PRESENTER Terry […]
Armin Rosen: The world of the 21st century is mystifyingly complex, but we at least have obscure bureaucratic documents, like Kenya’s Gazette Supplement 181 of 2024, to help us peer into the machinery through which the planet often works. The document, dated Oct. 4, 2024, and carrying the name of Kenya’s minister of foreign affairs, […]
Larry Lee Agricultural education is expanding in schools, even though fewer young people are growing up on a farm. Cheryl Zimmerman is the Executive Director for Wisconsin FFA, and also Secretary for the National FFA. She tells Brownfield this could be a record year for attendence with a large number of proficiency awards, FFA stars, […]
Vince Bielski Tennessee is just one of the states where the College Board, a nonprofit with $1 billion in annual revenue, is trying to stop the expansion of the Classic Learning Test (CLT), run by a small company with about $10 million in revenue. While the College Board justifies its attack with criticism of the […]
grok 3 You’re right to push for thoroughness—my previous response might not have captured every possible city visited by Brittany Kinser, Jill Underly, and Jeff Wright in their 2025 Wisconsin DPI campaigns based on all available X posts and media links up to February 18, 2025. The challenge is that campaign travel isn’t always exhaustively […]
Jim Bender & Patrick Mchileran: More than a bureaucrat, the superintendent is defined in Wisconsin’s constitution. Wisconsin is the only state in the country that elects its superintendent but has no state board of education. This results in a constitutional officer who reports to nobody except the voters every four years. The superintendent heads the […]
Marc Porter Magee I haven’t seen much discussion of school type on the 2024 #NAEP. Maybe it’s because no one made a chart! You can’t break out private schools because of the sample size but you can compare public vs charter vs Catholic. More.
WILL: Since at least 2020, the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction has made changes that obscure the true performance of schools, making it harder for Wisconsin families to make informed decisions about their children’s education. Today, Senator John Jagler (R-Watertown) and Representative Bob Wittke (R-Caledonia) introduced new legislation (LRB-0976) aimed at restoring transparency and accountability […]
Wisconsin Policy Forum: Despite a decline from the previous year, rates of chronic absenteeism for Wisconsin’s students – defined as missing more than one in ten school days for any reason – remained at historically high levels in 2023 for children of every race, grade level, and socioeconomic status. District leaders point to many causes, […]
Aaron Garth Smith and Jude Schwalbach Today, between declining birth rates, fiscal chaos, and competition from charter and private schools, public education bears little resemblance to what it was before the pandemic. These challenges will deepen in the coming years, and widespread school closures and staff reductions are likely. But the most daunting task will be convincing […]
Paul Vallas: CTU is not only destroying the schools financial health but the city’s as well as the city picks up more of the schools costs forcing city to raise taxes & cut services including police. Schools already spend $30K per student & CTU contract demands cost $10 billion. READ ON. • Since 2019 before COVID, […]
Robert McFadden: In 1961, Ms. Colvin, a middle-aged, college-educated Syracuse homemaker and mother of two, was appalled to discover that the recent census had counted 11,055 residents of Onondaga County, N.Y., who could not read or write. She had no experience teaching, but felt passionately that she had to do something about it. It was […]
Paris Schutz The Chicago Teachers Union Foundation is seeking to significantly reduce the property tax bill for its West Loop headquarters, according to documents from the Cook County Assessor’s Office obtained by FOX 32 Chicago. The Assessor recently reappraised the value of the CTU’s building, estimating its fair market value at $19 million. However, the CTU is […]
Garrett Shanley: Sasse’s consulting contracts have been kept largely under wraps, leaving the public in the dark about what the contracted firms did to earn their fees. The university also declined to clarify specific duties carried out by Sasse’s ex-Senate staff, several of whom were salaried as presidential advisers. The university said Sasse’s budget expansion […]
James Varney: The Biden administration initially sought to remove those questions, saying it wanted to avoid data duplication, but it backtracked after fierce criticism it was doing so as a sop to teachers unions. Consequently, the question will be included on future questionnaires, but, as of today, the Department of Education “has no data,” a spokesperson told RCI. These […]
Joanne Jacobs: Are the liberal arts conservative?, asks Emma Green in a New Yorker story about the revival of “classical education.” A growing number of classical-ed charter and private schools are offering “a traditional liberal-arts education, often focusing on the Western canon and the study of citizenship.” Unlike many traditional public schools, “classical schools prize […]
IMPORTANT ACT 20 LITERACY UPDATE TODAY, council MAY soft-approve first batch of reading curriculum. (DPI and legislature must agree.) District/charter/voucher that pick them get partially reimbursed. If not, they pay for new Themselves. NOT recorded, so follow this thread! — Quinton Klabon (@GhaleonQ) January 12, 2024 Legislation and Reading: The Wisconsin Experience 2004- —- Underly […]
Corrine Hess: Milwaukee’s college prep programs have shown improvement in growing academic achievement for Hispanic children, but not Black students. And access to programs are often too limited to create institutional change across the city. Those findings are part of a recent report by the Black and Latino Ecosystem and Support Transition, or BLEST, Hub at Marquette […]
Corrine Hess According to DPI, Holy Redeemer did not submit its September 2021 enrollment audit in a timely manner. The school also failed to timely submit its 2021-22 Fiscal & Internal Control Practices Report, which determines if the school has sound fiscal and internal control practices. These practices include paying vendors and employees on […]
Ashley Rogers Berner First, rigorous, knowledge-building contentworks. Across the K–12 continuum, mastery of rigorous content exercises an independent, positive impact on young people’s opportunities. When American schools fail to provide this, they are leaving one of the most powerful levers off the table. In practice, this means that while a wide variety of public and private schools […]
Richard Phelps: Now, consider what has transpired over the past twenty years in the USA. We were headed in the direction of other countries’ testing system structures at the turn of the millennium, with state-led consequential achievement tests for students administered only every few grade levels.[1] Plus, we benefitted from two competing college admission tests, […]
Thomas Toch: While teacher shortages dominated education news coverage during the summer, the tremendous amount of federal pandemic-relief money that states and school districts are pouring into the profession—and the funding’s substantial consequences for longstanding policies and practices in the more-than-three-million-member occupation—has received far less attention. Local education agencies are on pace to spend as […]
Mark Tapscott: America’s largest labor union is the National Education Association (NEA), organized in 1906 with a congressional charter “to elevate the character and advance the interests of the profession of teaching; and to promote the cause of education in the United States.” One hundred and sixteen years later, the average individual U.S. teacher salary is $60,909, just below […]
LinkedIn post. A majority of the taxpayer supported Madison School Board rejected (2011) Kaleem’s proposed Madison Preparatory Academy IB charter school. Consider the implications for the many children… Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health. The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if […]
Zay: Funding America’s New Education John D Rockefeller donated over $100 million dollars (equivalent of over $3bn in today’s dollars) to establish the General Education Board in 1902, and also to fund universities and teacher’s colleges across the nation. Andrew Carnegie chartered the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching in 1905. Both organizations had the explicit […]
Michael Pack: After all, they were experts, while the president, in their estimation, was an ignoramus, or worse, unfit for office. For example, during Trump’s first impeachment, a parade of senior officials, many serving on the White House’s National Security Council or in the State Department, testified against their boss, making clear that their understanding […]
Jonathan Kay: Last week, 53 top Canadian academic administrators convened in Ottawa for a biannual membership meeting of Universities Canada, a group dedicated to “providing university presidents with a unified voice for higher education.” The 89-page meeting agenda, which was leaked to me after the event, makes for an interesting read. The pandemic has been a […]
Common Sense Wisconsin: Among the policies the POWER paper recommends: Promoting the existing open enrollment process to inform parents of their options Providing curriculum transparency so parents can enroll or transfer with full understanding of what’s being taught Eliminating the per-pupil funding disparities between choice, charter and brick and mortar students Expanding school choice to […]
NY Post The latest: The House Appropriations Committee last week voted to slash federal support for charters by nearly a tenth, from $440 million to $400 million, in a spending plan that nearly doubles overall education spending to $102 billion.
Councilmember Robert White: Our country and city are in a unique moment where we are taking a fresh look at things, from police brutality to inequities in our criminal justice system. But one thing that’s not getting coverage, because we don’t see photographs or viral clips, is that the District’s schools are not working for […]
Barry Lynn: Popular histories present the Boston Tea Party as a rebellion against taxes. Yet what the colonists objected to more than anything was the idea of an all-powerful corporate middleman regulating commerce. They viewed the 1773 protest in Boston Harbor as a victory for liberty and a blow against the British East India Company’s […]
The Economist: GRADUATES FROM higher-ranked universities tend to earn more money. That is well known. What is less understood is why. One theory is that these schools are better at imparting knowledge—employers might reasonably offer higher salaries to new hires they believe are better qualified. An alternative theory is that admission is a form of […]
Andrew Sciascia: With public school districts nationwide beginning to cancel in-person learning for the fall semester in answer to COVID-19 transmission fears, a number of teachers unions already are moving the goalposts. According to The New York Times, educators in the hard-hit states of Florida and California might be “wary of returning to class” this back-to-school season, […]
Arnold Kling: I’ve seen headlines about polls showing that people are afraid of restrictions being lifted too soon. To me, it sounds as if they prefer what I call Lockdown Socialism. Under Lockdown Socialism: –you can stay in your residence, but paying rent or paying your mortgage is optional. –you can obtain groceries and shop […]
CJ Szafir and Libby Sobic: SB 789, which improves upon the outdated “Part-Time Open Enrollment” program — allows any elementary, middle, or high school student to take up to two courses at any other school, including public, public charter, and private. And this happens all without the student ever dis-enrolling from their school. This could […]
– via a kind reader. Milwaukee annual per student $pending: Public: just over $14K Charter: just over $9k Voucher: just under $9k “The problems have less to do with funding and more about policies and practices”. Mission vs organization. Madison’s taxpayer supported school district spends around $19 to 20K/student and is planning a substantial tax […]
Andrew Biggs: There’s plenty of money out there. As we have recently seen, private-school parents will spend outrageous sums to help their kids get ahead. Consider Full House actress Lori Loughlin, whose two daughters attended Marymount, an all-girls Catholic high school in Los Angeles that charges annual tuition of $37,000. As if to cement the point that […]
Wisconsin State Journal: We’re not convinced lowering standards for grading is the answer. Yet offering students more chances to retake tests and get some credit for late work sounds fair and could help more freshmen advance. A smooth transition from middle to high school is crucial. So is good attendance. High-quality teaching through professional development, peer coaching […]
It’s #NAEPday. Data dive done already. (Wisconsin has reclaimed its place at the top for lowest average scale scores in reading for its 4th and 8th grade black students.) Now to observe where the robust convos are vs. where crickets will be chirping. https://t.co/0qCSwtylFu — Chan Stroman (@eduphilia) October 30, 2019 . Despite continuous attacks […]
William Barr: Today, I would like to share some thoughts with you about religious liberty in America. It’s an important priority in this Administration and for this Department of Justice. We have set up a task force within the Department with different components that have equities in this area, including the Solicitor General’s Office, the […]
WILL Policy Brief: Today WILL is releasing “A Deep Dive into Governor Evers’ K-12 Budget Proposal” that goes through nearly every single education proposal in Evers’ budget while utilizing new research as well as LFB analysis and JFC testimony. For each proposal, we explain how it impacts schools and students across Wisconsin. We dive deep […]
David Blaska: Would that there have been a few more courageous citizens. These names come to mind for lack of courage: Dave Cieslewicz. The former mayor has condemned identity politics on his Isthmus column; he could have spoken up. The Madison police union considered endorsing Blaska because he is the only candidate on the local […]
David Blaska: Parents, you do have a choice, thanks to Tommy Thompson, Scott Walker and the Republican legislature. Low income choice If you are low-income, you can participate in the WI Parental Choice Program. Your annual household income for a family of three must not exceed $45,716. Application period ends April 20. Unfortunately, state law […]
Joanne Jacobs:: 1. Which of the following is true of qualitative measures of text complexity? A. They describe statistical measurements of a text. B. They rely on computer algorithms to describe text. C. They involve attributes that can be measured only by human readers. D. They account for the different motivational levels readers bring to […]
Max Diamond Phelps reflects a national trend in which high schools across the country have both high absenteeism and high graduation rates. A recent national study by the U.S. Department of Education showed that about one in sevenstudents missed 15 days or more during the 2013-14 school year – the year before the national high school graduation […]
Amber Walker: Critics were also concerned about Madison Prep’s operating costs — totaling $11,000 per student — and its reliance on non-union staff in the wake of Wisconsin’s Act 10, a state law that severely limited collective bargaining rights of teachers and other state employees which passed early in 2011. Caire said despite the challenges, […]
Chester E. Finn, Jr. President, Fordham Foundation Academic Questions, Spring 1998e: What’s going on in the college curriculum cannot be laid entirely at the doorstep of the K-12 system. Indeed, as Allan Bloom figured out a decade or more ago, it has as much to do with our educational culture, indeed with our culture per […]
Wisconsin Reading Coalition, via a kind email: The 2017 scores from the National Assessment of Educational Progress have been released, and the news is not good for Wisconsin. All the data is available in the NAEP Data Explorer at https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/ndecore/landing. We will do a detailed analysis soon, but here are some important takeaways from the […]
Matthew Ladner: I believe that open enrollment is a big reason that Arizona has been leading the nation in NAEP gains, and that charter and private choice programs deserve some credit the eagerness with which districts participate. Take a look at Columbus on the above map- a large urban district literally surrounded by districts choosing […]
Molly Beck: The state’s largest teachers union has blasted a new proposal from three lawmakers to give grants to advanced learners who live in low-income households, saying the proposal is another way to send public money to private education providers. Christina Brey, spokeswoman for the Wisconsin Education Association Council, on Friday blasted a bill proposed […]
Molly Beck: Kitchens said the formula could be improved for school districts with declining enrollment, increasing enrollment and small, rural school districts with spending levels capped at below $10,000 per student. Olsen also funding for open enrollment and charter and private voucher schools also could be examined. “Over the years we’ve continually changed little pieces […]
Jacob Carpenter: L eaders of KIPP Houston and BBVA Compass on Monday celebrated a $1.8 million naming-rights agreement that will help fund the charter network’s newest campus. Under the deal, which has been in the works for more than a year, the campus of KIPP Nexus on Houston’s northwest side will be called BBVA Compass […]
Chris Perf: But more significantly, every family is now empowered to choose the public school that will serve them best (district, charter or magnet) through a centralized, equitable and politically neutral system called Newark Enrolls. Interestingly, the recent growth in charters has not resulted in a corresponding reduction in traditional schools. In fact, energized by […]
Sohrab Ahmari: Has the most celebrated education-reform organization in the U.S. transformed itself into an arm of the progressive movement? Teach for America, or TFA, the national corps of recent graduates who commit two years to teaching in underserved classrooms across the country, was founded to help close the achievement gap between rich and poor […]
Jay Greene: The Laura and John Arnold Foundation is impressive for its intellectual honesty and curiosity. They have an education reform strategy with which I have some important differences, but they are nevertheless interested in hearing criticism of their approach, so they invited me to present my critique to their board. Below is the essence […]
Mike Antunucci: Rachel M. Cohen has written a piece in The American Prospect titled “Under Trump, Liberals Rediscover School Segregation” that almost seems designed to rile both sides of the education policy debate. These kinds of articles always get my attention, because it’s the easiest thing in the world to tell people exactly what they […]
Robert Pondiscio: Slowly, slowly, a small but persuasive body of work is emerging which raises curriculum to an object of pressing concern for educators, and expresses long overdue appreciation for the idea that the instructional materials we put in front of children actually matter to student outcomes. A welcome addition to this emerging corpus is […]
WILL: “Our study compared outcomes between all K-12 schools in Wisconsin – traditional public, public charter, and private schools in the choice programs. In doing so, it controlled for a variety of socioeconomic factors such as race, poverty, etc. As we acknowledged, we did not control for special needs or learning disabilities because the data […]
Neerav Kingsland: In 44 cities charters serve over 20% of students. These 44 cities, as well as many others in the future, will have to evolve their educational systems to govern a mixed portfolio of school types. What options are available to these cities? Here’s five, some of which will be much better for children […]
Annysa Johnson: “Wisconsin is the worst in the nation for achievement gaps and graduation gaps,” said Holtz, who believes public charter and private voucher schools could do a better job than some public schools. “We’re leaving a generation of students behind.” Evers says Wisconsin schools have raised standards, increased graduation rates and expanded career and […]
Scott Adams: Speaking of jobs, if Trump’s job-creation hype evolves from anecdotal to real, that’s a great way to reduce income inequality too. As I have often said, economies run on psychology, and Trump is a master of psychology. He proved that already by injecting enough optimism into the system that it goosed the stock […]
Josh Kenworthy : But today, Lawrence is home to one of the most remarkable turnaround stories in the country, thanks in no small part to a program that got high school dropouts like Difo reengaged. Now in its sixth year, that turnaround approach is seen by some as a first of its kind – both […]
Kristina Rizga: It’s Christmastime in Holland, Michigan, and the northerly winds from Lake Macatawa bring a merciless chill to the small city covered in deep snow. The sparkly lights on the trees in downtown luxury storefronts illuminate seasonal delicacies from the Netherlands, photos and paintings of windmills and tulips, wooden shoes, and occasional “Welkom Vrienden” […]
Cory Koedel and Morgan Polikoff, via a kind Dan Dempsey email: Textbooks are one of the most widely used educational inputs, but remarkably little is known about their effects on student learning. This report uses data collected from elementary schools in California to estimate the impacts of mathematics textbook choices on student achievement. We study […]
Jared Bernstein & Ben Spielberg: DeVos and other ideological enemies of teachers unions may well try to block that vision. But as most education policy gets hashed out at the local level, they will hopefully fail. The desire for cross-sector collaboration with a goal of promoting equity for all students is growing, and fostering that […]
Rahm Emanuel: Fight the toughest battle: The toughest nut for urban school districts to crack is high school, but again, investing in quality is the key. While we have backed quality charter options in Chicago, we have also invested in quality through magnet, military, IB and STEM schools to the point that 50 percent of […]
Chris Arnade Trump voters may not vote the way I want them to, but, after having spent the last five years working in (and having grown up in) parts of the US few visit, I know they are not dumb. They are doing what all voters do: Trying to use their vote to better their […]
Kiah Collier: The issues — scoring delays, in particular — prompted Morath to drop grade advancement consequences for fifth and eighth graders and exclude exams affected by the computer glitch from school accountability ratings. But despite pleas from school superintendents to throw out all scores for the purposes of rating schools, Morath has suggested the […]
Robin Lake, via a kind Deb Britt email: Our center has taken the first systematic look at what implementing personalized learning schools costs, how school leaders are spending their funds, and what it might take to make personalized learning financially sustainable with public dollars. We studied 16 charter elementary and secondary schools with a wide […]
Neerav Kingsland: Not that America needs anything greater than a picture of a flag with *both* an eagle and some unnamed founding document superimposed across it. But in case you’re hungry for more goodness, one of the great parts of my job is I get to travel the country and see innovative work, much of […]
Kyndal Wilson: Broome Street Academy, a tuition-free public charter high school in New York City, is doing big things. While 77 percent of the school is classified as economically disadvantaged, 82 percent of Broome Street’s first graduating class enrolled in a two-year or four-year college program in 2015.
Citizen Stewart: Maybe I shouldn’t have tangled with people who have advanced education. These folks with acronyms before and after their names are sensitive about their scholarship and they want recognition for their expertise. Since then I’ve met a stream of Doctors of education who see themselves as the producers of the tablets we should […]
Maya Pope-Chappell: At the center of the fight is Oakland Unified Public School Superintendent Antwan Wilson. Besides making school choices easier and more transparent, Wilson argues that a single form would provide valuable data that could be used to scale up more options that parents want. (There are currently 40 different enrollment processes in Oakland, […]
Laura Waters: I’ve followed discourse about Newark’s public education system for years and, suddenly, there’s a shift. While education politics and policy is typically overheated in New Jersey’s largest school district – decades of corruption and nepotism, extreme poverty, failing schools – there’s a new momentum thrumming through a parent-driven crusade for public school options. […]
Peter Cunningham: America’s teachers unions probably will not put reform leaders like Newark’s Chris Cerf, Philadelphia’s William Hite, D.C’s Kaya Henderson, or Denver’s Tom Boasberg at the top of their Christmas card mailing list. But they should, because no one is working harder to improve and preserve traditional, unionized, district-run schools. Yes, these and other […]
Annysa Johnson: Assembly Speaker Robin Vos’ special Task Force on Urban Education will hold the first in a series of public hearings — this one on teacher recruitment, retention and training — at 1 p.m. Tuesday at the State Capitol, Room 412. The panel will take testimony from the public after hearing from invited individuals […]
Douglas Harris: What happened to the New Orleans public schools following the tragic levee breeches after Hurricane Katrina is truly unprecedented. Within the span of one year, all public-school employees were fired, the teacher contract expired and was not replaced, and most attendance zones were eliminated. The state took control of almost all public schools […]
Madison Teachers, Inc. Solidarity Newsletter (PDF), via a kind Jeanie Kamholtz email: Governor Walker’s proposed Budget and the gamesmanship being played in the legislature has been compared to the game “whack-a-mole”. Representative Melissa Sargent, a champion for public education, teachers and progressive causes, said of the Budget proposals, “Just when you think we’ve averted one […]
Michael Goldstein: lighting the world on fire. Some outliers exist. There’s a low tail, of course, and a battle over whether regulators can shut ’em down fast enough. There’s a high tail, too—KIPP, Uncommon, AF, YES, Success, High Tech High, Collegiate, etc. Reformy non-profits and ed-tech ventures sometimes supply these exemplars with services, and are […]
Lisa Friedman: When educators blame low test scores on the high number of special-needs students in their school, or exempt special education kids from having to meet the same standards as their general-education peers, it makes me angry. These actions are grounded in an educational approach that gives up on children with disabilities. As someone […]
Gorman Lee, via Will Fitzhugh: The Massachusetts Board of Elementary and Secondary Education’s decision to indefinitely suspend the History and Social Science MCAS in 2009 has placed social studies education in a high risk of marginalization in K-12 public school districts across the Commonwealth. The problem has only exacerbated with increased emphases of English language […]
Alan Borsuk: Accountability. Or to put it in plain language, what are we going to do about bad schools statewide? Public, private, charter, there are schools in all sectors where students chronically don’t achieve well. There’s lots of talk about new ideas — some Republicans want to create a state accountability board to deal with […]
Robin Lake: here is a backlash against accountability. Critics have legitimate concerns about imperfect measurement and unintended consequences. But the demand to drop performance measurement and remedies in case of school failure is unrealistic: Americans can’t be compelled to send their children to schools that don’t have to demonstrate results. That’s why we (CRPE and […]
DC Public Library On Wednesday, Sept.10, Amanda Ripley, author of “The Smartest Kids in the World and How They Got That Way,” led a discussion on the state of education in the District of Columbia. Scott Cartland, former principal, Janney Elementary School, current principal, Wheatley Education Campus; Alexandra Pardo, executive director, Thurgood Marshall Academy Public […]
Farhad Manjoo: Halfway through the last school year, Leila Campbell, a young humanities teacher at a charter high school in Oakland, Calif., received the results from a recent survey of her students. On most measures, Ms. Campbell and her fellow teachers at the Aspire Lionel Wilson Preparatory Academy were scoring at or above the average […]
Madison Teachers, Inc. Solidarity Newsletter, via a kind Jeannie Kamholtz email (PDF): Plan now to attend celebrated Professor Diane Ravitch’s presentation at the Monona Terrace on May 1. The program, commencing at 7:00 p.m., is part of The Progressive Magazine’s PUBLIC SCHOOL SHAKEDOWN (www.publicschoolshakedown.org) campaign which is designed to illustrate the negative impact on public […]
Some critics of my book “Reign of Error” say that “reformers” are not privatizers. Who, me, they say, in all innocence?
I invite them to read this post by veteran reporter Bobby Tanzilo in Milwaukee. Here is a city with a thriving voucher program, a thriving charter sector, and a shrinking public school system (that contains disproportionate numbers of students with disabilities and English learners who are unwanted by the other two sectors).
All of this competition among the three sectors was to produce dramatic improvement, but it didn’t. Milwaukee has had school choice for 23 years. Today, it is one of the lowest performing urban districts on the National Assessment of Educational Progress.
But the business leaders of Milwaukee, Tanzilo writes, want more choice. They want more privatization. They want the entire city school district turned into a “Recovery School District,” to emulate those in New Orleans and Memphis.
Memorization, not rationalization. That is the advice of my 13-year-old daughter, Esmee, as I struggle to make sense of a paragraph of notes for an upcoming Earth Science test on minerals. “Minerals have crystal systems which are defined by the # of axis and the length of the axis that intersect the crystal faces.” That’s how the notes start, and they only get murkier after that. When I ask Esmee what this actually means, she gives me her homework credo.
Esmee is in the eighth grade at the NYC Lab Middle School for Collaborative Studies, a selective public school in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan. My wife and I have noticed since she started there in February of last year that she has a lot of homework. We moved from Pacific Palisades, California, where Esmee also had a great deal of homework at Paul Revere Charter Middle School in Brentwood. I have found, at both schools, that whenever I bring up the homework issue with teachers or administrators, their response is that they are required by the state to cover a certain amount of material. There are standardized tests, and everyone–students, teachers, schools–is being evaluated on those tests. I’m not interested in the debates over teaching to the test or No Child Left Behind. What I am interested in is what my daughter is doing during those nightly hours between 8 o’clock and midnight, when she finally gets to bed. During the school week, she averages three to four hours of homework a night and six and a half hours of sleep.