Search Results for: One City
Aiming to Coach Students to Excellence in Exams
LIKE a football coach before a big game, James Carlo, a vice principal at the Newton Street School, ticked off last-minute pointers to a group of 32 middle-school students hunkered silently around folding metal tables in the cafeteria.
Do not waste time. Do not get distracted. Do not get nervous.
“Please, please, please pull up what strength you have and what concentration you have and just attack that test,” Mr. Carlo told the students on a recent Wednesday morning. “It shouldn’t just be all the schools and districts around us that are scoring high on this test.”
As public schools everywhere gear up for the annual state assessments, few others have as much to prove — or as much at stake. Newton, with 500 students in prekindergarten through eighth grade, has come under escalating sanctions under the federal No Child Left Behind law because many of its students have scored below proficiency on the standardized test known as NJ ASK, which covers language arts, math and science. It is one of only 4 schools in this city — and among 38 schools in New Jersey, 57 in New York and 6 in Connecticut — that have missed testing benchmarks for seven consecutive years and now risk being shut down or overhauled if there is no sign of improvement.
Vietnam School Reform
Vietnam is developing the UNICEF ‘friendlier school’ model to boost primary education
Vietnam will expand UNICEF’s “Friendlier School” model across the nation. The concept, which has already been applied experimentally, has been found to improve educational quality and help students enjoy studying, said Nguyen Thien Nhan, Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Education and Training.
The minister was speaking at a ceremony yesterday to launch a campaign to extend the model developed at Van Phuc secondary school in Ha Dong City in the northern province of Ha Tay.
The model’s purpose is to create a safer, fairer educational environment, attract students to study, ensure their rights and improve teaching quality. Creating an interesting educational environment is focused on keeping students from being bored so that they can enjoy their studies.
“Being friendlier is also a good way of preventing students from leaving schools,” said Associate Professor Tran Kieu, former director of the Institute of Educational Sciences.
Recently, the Ministry of Education and Training (MOET) released a report showing that by March, 2008, about 147,000 students had quit school.
One of the 10 reasons given was the rigid and uninspiring teaching environment that had limited students’ interest in studying.
Graffiti, bomb threat found at Janesville school
A bomb threat found written on doors at Kennedy Elementary School this morning prompted a search inside the school and police combing the neighborhood, but school went on as normal, said Principal Niel Bender.
The threat included “racial inferences” in addition to a threat of an explosion today at the school, Deputy Police Chief Dave Moore said.
The graffiti was done in what appeared to be white crayon on the front doors and one other door, and it was removed, Bender said.
The school is located at 3901 Randolph Road on the city’s east side.( Map )
High School Challenge Index, 2008
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 CountyPrevious SIS Challenge Index links and notes. Clusty search on the Challenge Index.
Urban-education scholar Charles Payne sets out to measure the University’s efforts at school improvement.
University of Chicago Magazine, via a kind reader’s email:
Charles M. Payne has been a scholar of urban education long enough to see many fashions of public-school reform come and go. The School of Social Service Administration’s Frank P. Hixon professor, Payne first developed an interest in education in 1969, while a Syracuse University undergraduate. Administrators there, Payne recalls, had brought an inner-city school to campus with a bold, if naive and unfocused, purpose: “to change this.” The program failed to establish a model for effective school reform, Payne says, because “none of us understood how hard this was going to be.”
With a sociology PhD from Northwestern University and 40 years of research and advocacy under his belt, Payne believes that the same core problem—a misunderstanding of the difficulties involved—continues to hinder school-reform efforts. His years as founding director of an education nonprofit in Orange, New Jersey, and studying schools in Chicago and around the world have taught him that the solution to school failure is deep and fundamental. Initiatives that focus on particular grade levels or types of students don’t work, Payne says. In a book out this May, So Much Reform, So Little Change: The Persistence of Failure in Urban Schools (Harvard Education Press, 2008), he argues that rather than searching for the silver-bullet program that will turn a school around, would-be reformers must strike at the “culture of failure” that perpetuates dismal school performance.
An End to Classroom Surfing
University of Chicago Law School:
The University of Chicago Law School has removed Internet access in most classrooms in order to ensure the value of the classroom experience.
With the implementation of wireless Internet access in Law School classrooms came better opportunities for students, who typically carry laptop computers, to be online during class—a common practice at institutions across the country, said Saul Levmore, Dean of the Law School.
“As soon as we discovered that we had the capacity turn off Internet access during class time, we felt that we ought to move in that direction. Our goal is to provide the best legal educational experience in the country, with students and faculty focused on the exchange of ideas in a thorough, engaging manner,” said Levmore, who noted that many students have expressed support of the decision to remove wireless access in classrooms, including second-year Law School student Peter Rock Ternes.
“What makes our Law School is our faculty,” Ternes said. “I think it makes sense to encourage focusing on them and on the classroom discussions.”More at Freakonomics.
Locally, the Madison School Board will discuss “Modifications to Board Policy and Procedure 4403 concerning Student Possession and Use of Cell Phones and Other Electronic Devices” Monday evening, May 19, 2008.
Caught in a Swirl of Drug Violence, Mexico Vows to Fight Back
President Felipe Calderón and dozens of federal agents attended the funeral of the chief of the federal police on Friday morning, a day after his assassination, even as investigators focused on the possibility that someone inside the police force had tipped off the killers to his location.
The services for the federal police chief, Commander Edgar Millán Gómez, and two other agents killed in the line of duty this week started just a half-hour after four armed men shot and killed a commander in Mexico City’s police force outside his home.
Newspapers here, moreover, were full of reports of battles between drug gangs in Sinaloa State, including one involving a bazooka. A sense that violence by organized crime had spun out of control seemed to hang over the country.
After the service, Mr. Calderón, escorted by heavier security than usual, traveled to Tamaulipas State on the border with Texas, where drug dealers have clashed repeatedly with troops and the federal police, to send the message that his administration would not be intimidated by Mr. Millán’s assassination.
Letters on: Improvements to New Orleans Schools
Letters regarding “Changes at New Orleans Schools Bring Gains in Test Scores“:
Re “Changes at New Orleans Schools Bring Gains in Test Scores” (news article, May 7):
We’re pleased to see that New Orleans schoolchildren are making academic gains, such as improving their scores on the latest Louisiana Educational Assessment Program.
As your article points out, post-Katrina schools have invested in reforms like intensifying tutorial and after-school programs. These reforms have long been promoted by the United Teachers of New Orleans.
But one should not get the impression that the higher scores are a direct result of importing new teachers to the city. We applaud the efforts of every teacher who has come to work in New Orleans schools. But some of our most successful schools, like Bethune Elementary and Sophie B. Wright, are those that employ the highest percentages of veteran teachers who are familiar with their students’ communities
No Small Plan: Public Boarding Schools for Chicago
Carlos Sadovi and Stephanie Banchero, via a kind reader’s email:
Public boarding schools where homeless children and those from troubled homes could find the safety and stability to learn are being pursued by Chicago Public Schools officials.
Under the plan, still in the nascent stages, the first pilot residential program could open as soon as fall 2009. District officials hope to launch as many as six such schools in the following years, including at least one that would operate as a year-round school.
The proposal puts Chicago at the forefront of urban school reform, as cities struggle to raise the academic achievement of students hampered by dysfunctional homes and other obstacles outside school.
Some districts, including Chicago, have looked for solutions from small schools to single-sex campuses. But residential schools are a bolder — and far more expensive — proposition. Long an option for the affluent, boarding schools are virtually unheard of for the disadvantaged.
Chicago Public Schools chief Arne Duncan said he does not want to be in the “parenting” business, but he worries that some homes and some neighborhoods are unsafe, making education an afterthought.
“Some children should not go home at night; some of them we need 24-7,” he told the Tribune. “We want to serve children who are really not getting enough structure at home. There’s a certain point where dad is in jail or has disappeared and mom is on crack … where there isn’t a stable grandmother, that child is being raised by the streets.”
Chicago school officials are still working through details of the plan, and it’s not clear whether the schools would be run by the district, outside agencies or some combination of the two.
It’s also not certain how the schools would be funded, who would shoulder the liability of keeping students overnight or how students would be selected.
In April, as part of its Renaissance 2010 new schools program, the district will put out a formal request for boarding school proposals. Officials have already met with interested groups in Chicago.
Officials have also visited several public and private boarding schools across the country and asked some to submit proposals.
Duncan said he has dreamed for years about opening boarding schools, but only last year, when he hired Josh Edelman, son of Children’s Defense Fund founder Marian Wright Edelman, did the idea take off.
Red ties and boys’ pride: Sowing the seeds of good schools in the Midwest
EVERY weekday, 300 boys gather in a gym on Chicago’s South Side. They are all black. More than 80% are poor. Over the past few weeks Chicago has seen a surge in gang violence. But here boys stand in straight lines. Each wears a blazer and a red tie. And in unison they begin to shout their creed: “We believe. We are the young men of Urban Prep. We are college-bound.”
Urban Prep Charter Academy opened in 2006, part of an effort to bring 100 new schools to Chicago’s bleakest areas by 2010. Richard Daley, the city’s mayor, announced Renaissance 2010 (“Ren 10”) in 2004; Chicago’s business leaders created the Renaissance Schools Fund (RSF) to help support it. Backers of this ambitious scheme hope it will spur competition across the school district. On May 6th RSF held a conference to discuss the “new market of public education”.
At the core of Ren 10 is the desire to welcome “education entrepreneurs”, as RSF calls them. Ren 10 lets them start schools and run them mostly as they choose (for example, with longer days and, in some cases, their own salary structure); it also sets the standards they must meet. Schools receive money on a per pupil basis, and may raise private funds as well.
DC Chancellor Rhee Moves to Dismiss up to 30 Principals
D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee, continuing a series of aggressive personnel moves, has started notifying principals — possibly as many as 30 — that they will not be reappointed for the 2008-09 academic year, officials said yesterday.
Turnover among principals, who work under one-year appointments, typically occurs near the end of the school term. About 15 to 20 are usually dismissed, according to the Council of School Officers, which represents principals.
This year’s changes are the subject of heightened interest, however, because Rhee is required to overhaul 27 city schools that have failed to make adequate progress under the federal No Child Left Behind law. Ten high schools, including Anacostia, Eastern and Wilson, 11 middle schools and six elementary schools are subject to sweeping changes in management and curriculum under the measure.
A form letter over Rhee’s signature went out to the principals identified for firing yesterday afternoon. It was to be followed by a series of one-on-one meetings between the principals and instructional superintendents, their immediate supervisors, said Rhee’s spokeswoman, Mafara Hobson.
Empty Nest Cure: Texas Mother Finds Meaning as a Mentor
After children leave home, many parents with empty nests must search hard for new pursuits to give their lives meaning. After Pat Rosenberg’s two daughters left for college, Ms. Rosenberg, 61, a longtime volunteer in the Houston public schools, found new purpose in mentoring a student — a poor teenager who, by his own account, was drifting toward a life of crime in his tough inner-city neighborhood.
In his unusual relationship with Ms. Rosenberg and other adult mentors, Tristan Love, now 18, says he found the strength to turn his life around, becoming a sought-after public speaker committed to attending college and pursuing a career in law. Ms. Rosenberg tells the story:
The Challenge: “We moved to Houston in 1986 for my husband David’s career, before our two daughters entered school. I got deeply involved in the schools right away and stayed involved as our daughters’ grew up. I was a room mother and headed the Parent Teacher Organization (PTO) in both middle school and high school. When they were at school, I was often at school, too.
“After our second daughter left for college 2-1/2 years ago, our house became incredibly quiet. It was a real period of adjustment. All of a sudden, this person who has been sitting at your dinner table with you, and going out and coming home late, and keeping you worried all the time, is gone.
Making the Grade:
International testing that is used to predict the grim future of US science and technology is being vastly misinterpreted
Obviously, the US population 301,139,947 is much, much larger than the countries included on this graph. Japan: 127,433,494, United Kingdom: 60,776,238 and Germany: 82,400,996.
Via a kind reader’s email: Hal Salzman & Lindsay Lowell:The future educational path for the United States should come from looking within the country rather than lionizing faraway test-score champions. Our analysis3 of the data suggests two fundamental problems that require different approaches. First, pedagogies must address science literacy for the large numbers of low-performing students. Second, education policy for our highest-performing students needs to meet actual labour-market demand.
In the United States, a decade’s worth of international test rankings based on slender measures of academic achievement in science and maths have been stretched far beyond their usefulness. Perhaps policy-makers feel it is better to motivate policy by pointing to high-scoring Czechs with fear, instead of noting our high-scoring Minnesotans as examples to emulate. But looking within the United States may be the best way to learn about effective education. As the PISA authors emphasize in their report, 90% of the variance in the scores is within countries rather than between countries. Therefore, most of what one can learn about high performance is due to the variation in factors within the nation’s borders. It would seem far more effective to transfer best practices across city and state lines than over oceans.PISA website.
Clusty search: Hal Salzman and Lindsay Lowell.
From High School to the Future
With loads of financial support from both CPS (Arnie Duncan) and the Gates Foundation (among others) CCSR and the school system built a tracking system that allows them to follow kids out of high school and into college & work, to see how they do– and even more importantly, to figure out how to help them do better.
It’s so unusual for a school district, especially one as large as Chicago’s (130+ high schools!) to have the data capacity to do this. The vast majority of high schools in the U.S. rely on a student exit questionnaire administered in the spring of senior year, which asks kids “What are your plans for the fall” (choices include 4 yr college, 2yr college, work, etc) and their responses are used as a proxy for the real destination. In other words, the college-going rate for a high school or district is based on a student’s self-report in May of senior year. This is a highly inaccurate measure, as several different data sources have proven– plenty of kids who say they are going to college do not (or do not go to the kind of school they said they were going to, even if they were admitted and accepted) because they realize they cannot afford it, or get side-tracked during the summer, and many who say they aren’t going, do decide to show up at a community college. Clearly districts need a much more reliable source of information if they are to learn about their high school graduates, and use that information to inform and change their educational practices.Useful.
Financial Literacy
“EVERYBODY wants it. Nobody understands it. Money is the great taboo. People just won’t talk about it. And that is what leads you to subprime. Take the greed and the financial misrepresentation out of it, and the root of this crisis is massive levels of financial illiteracy.”
For years John Bryant has been telling anyone who will listen about the problems caused by widespread ignorance of finance. In 1992, in the aftermath of the Los Angeles riots, he founded Operation HOPE, a non-profit organisation, to give poor people in the worst-hit parts of the city “a hand-up, not a handout” through a mixture of financial education, advice and basic banking. Among other things, Operation HOPE offers mortgage advice to homebuyers and runs “Banking on Our Future”, a national personal-finance course of five hour-long sessions that has already been taken by hundreds of thousands of young people, most of them high-school students.
The council is not short of expertise. It is chaired by Charles Schwab, eponymous boss of a broking firm. Its other members include the head of Junior Achievement, which has been teaching children about money since 1919, and a co-author of “Rich Dad, Poor Dad”, a self-help bestseller. Already, it has approved a new curriculum for middle-school students, “MoneyMath: Lessons for Life“. (Lesson one: the secret to becoming a millionaire. Answer: save, save, save.) It is starting a pilot programme to work out how to connect the “unbanked” to financial institutions. And it is supporting what, echoing the Peace Corps, is called the Financial Literacy Corps: a group of people with knowledge of finance who will volunteer to advise those in financial difficulties.Yet another math curriculum. One of the things I noticed when paging through the large Connected Math (CMP) textbooks a few years ago was the consumer oriented nature of the content (as opposed to a creative approach).
Survey of South LA Students
A survey of 6,008 South Los Angeles high school students shows that many are frightened by violence in school, deeply dissatisfied with their choices of college preparatory classes, and — perhaps most striking — exhibit symptoms of clinical depression.
“A lot of students are depressed because of the conditions in their school,” said Anna Exiga, a junior at Jordan High School who was one of the organizers of the survey. “They see that their school is failing them, their teachers are failing them, there’s racial tension and gang violence, and also many feel that their schools are not schools — their schools look more like prisons.”
The survey, released late Thursday, was conducted in seven South L.A. public schools by a community youth organization, South Central Youth Empowered Thru Action (SCYEA), with technical guidance from the psychology department at Loyola Marymount University. It suggested that many students in some of the city’s poorest, most violent neighborhoods believe their schools set the bar for success too low — and then shove students beneath it.
In fact, the student organizers said they don’t like to use the word “dropout” to describe their many peers who leave school. They prefer “pushout,” because they believe the school system is pushing students to fail.
Coalition Releases State Of Black Madison Report
New group the State of Black Madison Coalition said it is out to “change the plight of African Americans in the community,” and members warned if that doesn’t happen, Madison could see the major problems that plague Beloit and Milwaukee.
The new coalition of African American focused groups, armed with a new report called “The State of Black Madison 2008: Before the Tipping Point,” issued a call to action Tuesday to the entire Madison community.
It said Madison is on the precipice of change and if problems of disparity between whites and blacks are not addressed, the city might, as the one coalition member put it, “plunge into intractable problems that plague most major urban cities.”
The reports details the state of African Americans in Madison, saying if trends from 1990-2005 continue, it will take 265 years for the income gap between blacks and the rest of the Dane County community to disappear.
“A city should be measured by how close the weakest link is to the strongest link. My friends, in Madison we are football fields apart,” said Scott Gray, president and CEO of the Urban League of Greater MadisonAfrican-American city leaders say the black community is in trouble and hope a new report called the State of Black Madison will be a catalyst for change.
The summary report, Before the Tipping Point, was released today by the State of Black Madison Coalition. They based their findings on information from the Center on Wisconsin Strategy and other recent research. Among the discoveries: racial disparity is most prevalent in the areas of criminal justice, education, health care and housing. 37-percent of African Americans in Dane County live in poverty today, as compared to just 11-percent of the community as a whole. And if trends that turned up between 1990-2005 continue, it will take 265 years for the income gap between blacks and the rest of the county to disappear.Complete report (pdf).
Critics Cost Muslim Educator Her Dream School
Debbie Almontaser dreamed of starting a public school like no other in New York City. Children of Arab descent would join students of other ethnicities, learning Arabic together. By graduation, they would be fluent in the language and groomed for the country’s elite colleges. They would be ready, in Ms. Almontaser’s words, to become “ambassadors of peace and hope.”
Things have not gone according to plan. Only one-fifth of the 60 students at the Khalil Gibran International Academy are Arab-American. Since the school opened in Brooklyn last fall, children have been suspended for carrying weapons, repeatedly gotten into fights and taunted an Arabic teacher by calling her a “terrorist,” staff members and students said in interviews.
The academy’s troubles reach well beyond its cramped corridors in Boerum Hill. The school’s creation provoked a controversy so incendiary that Ms. Almontaser stepped down as the founding principal just weeks before classes began last September. Ms. Almontaser, a teacher by training and an activist who had carefully built ties with Christians and Jews, said she was forced to resign by the mayor’s office following a campaign that pitted her against a chorus of critics who claimed she had a militant Islamic agenda.
Madison’s Two New School Board Members
Marj Passman is so excited she ‘s having trouble sleeping.
Ed Hughes is sleeping just fine — so far, he adds with a chuckle.
Monday evening, Passman and Hughes will be sworn in as members of the Madison School Board. It will mark the first time either has held public office.
Their path to the board was easier than expected — both ran unopposed — and their arrival comes at an unusually quiet moment in Madison ‘s public school system. Thanks to a one-time windfall from special city of Madison taxing districts, the schools are averting budget cuts for the first time in 14 years.
But Passman, 66, a retired teacher, and Hughes, 55, a lawyer, know that by summer ‘s end the board will be deep into discussions about asking voters to approve millions of dollars in extra taxes to avoid budget cuts for coming years.
They ‘ve been doing their homework to join the board — an act that will become official with a ceremony at the board ‘s 5 p.m. meeting at the district ‘s headquarters, 545 W. Dayton St.
Passman and Hughes fill the seats held by retiring board members Carol Carstensen, the board ‘s senior member who gained detailed knowledge of issues while serving since 1990, and Lawrie Kobza, who developed a reputation for carefully scrutinizing the district ‘s operations during her single three-year term.Related Wisconsin State Journal Editorial:
Few jobs are as difficult and thankless as serving on a local school board.
Just ask Lawrie Kobza and Carol Carstensen.
The two Madison School Board members chose not to seek re-election this spring after years of honorable and energetic service.
Their replacements — Ed Hughes and Marj Passman — were sworn in Monday evening.
The fact that no one in Madison, a city steeped in political activism, chose to challenge Hughes or Passman for the two open board seats suggests increasing wariness toward the rigors of the task.
The job comes with token pay, a slew of long meetings, frequent controversy and angry calls at home. On top of that, the state has put public schools into a vise of mandates and caps that virtually require unpopular board decisions.
2008 MMSD Joe Thomas Community Service Awards
On April 14, the Madison Metropolitan School District’s Board of Education honored eight students with the Joe Thomas Community Service Award. The award was initiated in 1995 to honor the memory of a highly respected minority services coordinator at West High School.
The award recognizes high school seniors who have made a measurable impact through community service, demonstrate commitment to high academic standards and go above and beyond expectations.
The 2008 Joe Thomas Community Service Award winners are: Marcus Thomas Chavous, Tony Freiberg, Allison Freid, Amadou Fofana, Tiffany Jones, Dorothea McDonald, Namratta Sehgal and Darnell Small.
Read more at at The Capital City Hues.
Congratulations to each of these outstanding young people!
AP Drops Four Courses, Three over Demographics
Officials overseeing the Advanced Placement program have announced that they intend to drop AP classes and exams in four subject areas, in a pullback expected to affect about 12,500 students and 2,500 teachers worldwide.
Following the end of the 2008-09 academic year, there will be no AP courses or exams in Italian, Latin literature, French literature, and computer science AB, said officials at the College Board, the New York City-based nonprofit organization that owns the AP brand.
The College Board has in past years withdrawn one undersubscribed AP course at a time, but has never taken so many courses off its table of offerings in the half-century since the program started as a way for students to take college-level courses and potentially earn college credit while still in high school.
Trevor Packer, the College Board vice president who oversees the AP program, said the decision was made at a trustee meeting on March 27, and that AP teachers in the affected subjects were notified by e-mail April 3. “Of course, it’s sad for them,” he said of the teachers.
Mr. Packer said the decision was made principally because of demographic considerations.
Only a tiny fraction of the members of underrepresented minority groups who take AP exams take the tests in one of those four affected subject areas, he said.
The College Board has made it a priority to reach such students, including those who are African- American and Hispanic.
“For us, [the question is], are we able to achieve our mission of reaching a broader range of students?” Mr. Packer said.
He added that no additional AP courses would be cut for at least the next five years.
“School Pressures Push Families into Country Houses”
When Alexa Kent and her husband had their fourth child, the Upper West Siders sat down and calculated that they were on their way to spending $1.5 million on schools before their children even got to college.
“Enough already,” Ms. Kent said. They decided to pull their children out of private school and take up residence full-time at their six-bedroom country house in Connecticut, 90 minutes outside of Manhattan. By enrolling their children in the local public school, they saved an estimated $150,000 a year in pre-tax dollars. At a time when the private grade school admission process is more difficult than ever in the city — there is a one in 18 chance of getting in, according to some estimates — and the tuition for grade school often tops that of a college, more families are opting to sell their New York City apartments and move into their country houses.
“I see this happening all the time,” the founder of Manhattan Private School Advisors, Amanda Uhry, said.
Milwaukee School Board Approves Large Busing Cut, Shift Funds to Classroom
A unanimous Milwaukee School Board agreed Thursday night “to reduce massive busing” in Milwaukee Public Schools, but to soften a proposed timetable for achieving ambitious cuts.
But while all nine members generally agreed on the goal of getting more kids off buses and into improved neighborhood schools, what will actually result will not be clear for perhaps several years.
The board action, in effect, fired the starting gun on a process that will require balancing the desire of thousands of parents to send their children to schools somewhere other than their neighborhood with the desire to see more money spent in classrooms and less on buses.
Board member Michael Bonds, who proposed the resolution, said, “This is an opportunity for us to put millions of dollars back into the classroom, to provide our students with a quality, comprehensive education.”A bold, green move. More here.
MPS Parentnet:Last night MPS board members moved to reduce voluntary busing, for a potential savings of millions of dollars. In our recent meeting with Directors Spence and Thompson, busing has been identified as a source of tremendous savings. Despite the Neighborhood Schools Initiative, students are still being bused all over city to schools that are not citywide.
All members seem to support the idea of reducing busing, but several are concerned about options for parents who use the bus as child care. It’s important for the district to keep in mind that its main mission is to educate children, first and foremost. It can’t be in the position of sacrificing the academic goals of the district in order to provide services for parents that it can no longer afford.
Proposal to Cut Milwaukee School Busing by 70%!
A Milwaukee School Board committee voted unanimously Tuesday night “to reduce massive busing” within Milwaukee Public Schools, a step that could lead to major changes in the way the system functions and the options parents and students are given in selecting schools.
The board’s finance committee said it wanted $20 million cut from the amount spent on busing by the 2009-’10 school year, more than two-thirds of the amount spent to bus students who do not fit into special categories or have special needs.
If implemented as envisioned by the main sponsor, board member Michael Bonds, the $20 million savings would be spent on a list of efforts to improve and build up faltering schools, primarily on the north side.
More broadly, it would be the strongest step toward cutting busing in Milwaukee since court ordered school desegregation began in 1976. At one time, more than 70% of all students in the city were bused to school; currently, more than 50% of students are bused, and MPS spends more than $55 million on busing.
The African American Education Council, an organization founded by state Rep. Polly Williams (D-Milwaukee), has been pushing for a year for a large cut in busing in the city and was behind its inclusion as a goal in a strategic plan MPS adopted last year. Members of the organization were key advocates for Bonds’A bold, fascinating and energy friendly move.
Gifted or not, challenge students to reach higher
Des Moines Register
Nicholas Colangelo is director of the Belin-Blank Center for Gifted Education and Talent Development, Iowa City, established in 1988 at the University of Iowa. His hands-on experience includes teaching middle-school social studies in New York and serving as an elementary-school counselor in Vermont in the 1970s. Four years ago, he co-authored with colleagues the report “A Nation Deceived: How Schools Hold Back America’s Brightest Students.”
Q. The alarm has been sounded that U.S. students are not prepared for the growing global competition they face. But is that true of this country’s brightest students? Are our most gifted students being challenged with sufficient rigor?
A. When it comes to matching top students to top students, we are probably pretty close. But what concerns me is that the top students in the United States do not necessarily get the challenge they need across the board. It really is about ZIP code. We have taken for granted that our top students are getting what they need. If we gave our top students more opportunities to take Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate and other [accelerated opportunities], they would reveal they are capable of doing much more than we think.
Q. Has the federal No Child Left Behind law affected the ability of schools to challenge all students to excel?
A. As far as I’m concerned, the No Child Left Behind law has done nothing on behalf of high-ability students. Essentially, No Child Left Behind has focused on kids below a standard, ignoring kids above that standard. You should have no law that makes a portion of the students invisible. They are all our kids, and they all deserve our attention and energy.
Columbus, Stoughton Granted Startup Funds for 4-Year-Old Kindergarten; Background on Madison’s inaction
School districts in Stoughton, Columbus, Deerfield, Sauk Prairie and Janesville were among 32 statewide named Monday to receive Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction grants to start kindergarten programs for 4-year-olds.
But it may not be enough for at least one area district.
Getting 4-year-olds enrolled in kindergarten is a key step to raising student achievement levels and graduation rates, particularly among children from low-income families, national research has shown, DPI spokesman Patrick Gasper said.
School districts’ efforts to launch 4K programs have been hampered because it takes three years to get full funding for the program under the state’s school-finance system, according to DPI.
That’s what these grants are supposed to address with $3 million announced for 4K programs to start this fall.
Columbus, one of the school districts that qualified for the grant, would get an estimated $62,814 to enroll 87 children this fall.Related: Marc Eisen on Missed Opportunity for 4K and High School Redesign.
The good news is that the feds refused to fund the school district’s proposal to revamp the high schools. The plan was wrongheaded in many respects, including its seeming intent to eliminate advanced classes that are overwhelmingly white and mix kids of distressingly varied achievement levels in the same classrooms.
This is a recipe for encouraging more middle-class flight to the suburbs. And, more to the point, addressing the achievement gap in high school is way too late. Turning around a hormone-surging teenager after eight years of educational frustration and failure is painfully hard.
We need to save these kids when they’re still kids. We need to pull them up to grade level well before they hit the wasteland of middle school. That’s why kindergarten for 4-year-olds is a community imperative.
As it happens, state school Supt. Elizabeth Burmaster issued a report last week announcing that 283 of Wisconsin’s 426 school districts now offer 4K. Enrollment has doubled since 2001, to almost 28,000 4-year-olds statewide.
Burmaster nailed it when she cited research showing that quality early-childhood programs prepare children “to successfully transition into school by bridging the effects of poverty, allowing children from economically disadvantaged families to gain an equal footing with their peers.”Madison Teachers Inc.’s John Matthews on 4 Year Old Kindergarten:
For many years, recognizing the value to both children and the community, Madison Teachers Inc. has endorsed 4-year-old kindergarten being universally accessible to all.
This forward-thinking educational opportunity will provide all children with an opportunity to develop the skills they need to be better prepared to proceed with their education, with the benefit of 4- year-old kindergarten. They will be more successful, not only in school, but in life.
Four-year-old kindergarten is just one more way in which Madison schools will be on the cutting edge, offering the best educational opportunities to children. In a city that values education as we do, there is no question that people understand the value it provides.
Because of the increasing financial pressures placed upon the Madison School District, resulting from state- imposed revenue limits, many educational services and programs have been cut to the bone.
During the 2001-02 budget cycle, the axe unfortunately fell on the district’s 4-year-old kindergarten program. The School Board was forced to eliminate the remaining $380,000 funding then available to those families opting to enroll their children in the program.Jason Shephard on John Matthews:
This includes its opposition to collaborative 4-year-old kindergarten, virtual classes and charter schools, all of which might improve the chances of low achievers and help retain a crucial cadre of students from higher-income families. Virtual classes would allow the district to expand its offerings beyond its traditional curriculum, helping everyone from teen parents to those seeking high-level math and science courses. But the union has fought the district’s attempts to offer classes that are not led by MTI teachers.
As for charter schools, MTI has long opposed them and lobbied behind the scenes last year to kill the Studio School, an arts and technology charter that the school board rejected by a 4-3 vote. (Many have also speculated that Winston’s last minute flip-flop was partly to appease the union.)
“There have become these huge blind spots in a system where the superintendent doesn’t raise certain issues because it will upset the union,” Robarts says. “Everyone ends up being subject to the one big political player in the system, and that’s the teachers union.”
MTI’s opposition was a major factor in Rainwater’s decision to kill a 4-year-old kindergarten proposal in 2003, a city official told Isthmus last year (See “How can we help poor students achieve more?” 3/22/07).
Matthews’ major problem with a collaborative proposal is that district money would support daycare workers who are not MTI members. “The basic union concept gets shot,” he says. “And if you shoot it there, where else are you going to shoot it?”
At times, Matthews can appear downright callous. He says he has no problem with the district opening up its own 4K program, which would cost more and require significant physical space that the district doesn’t have. It would also devastate the city’s accredited non-profit daycare providers by siphoning off older kids whose enrollment offsets costs associated with infants and toddlers.
“Not my problem,” Matthews retorts.It will be interesting to see where incoming Madison Superintendent Dan Nerad takes this issue.
Kindergarten.
Trapped in the Middle – Income Stagnates
Are you better off than you were eight years ago? For a growing number of middle-class Americans, the answer is “No.”
Here and elsewhere, middle-class earnings aren’t keeping up with the cost of living. Rising gasoline and food prices, health bills, child-care and education costs are leaving less to set aside for retirement. With the housing market in turmoil, even the asset many had come to count on — the value of their homes — is threatened.It isn’t just a reflection of the current economic slowdown and rise in commodity prices: Middle-class incomes have been stagnant for several years. The well-heeled keep doing better, with the wealthiest 1% of U.S. families garnering the largest share of income since 1929.
“This is a squeezing-down cycle, and people are trying to hang on,” says Randy Riggs, pastor at First Presbyterian Church in this city in the heart of Pennsylvania Dutch Country. “Five years ago, I had these visions of what the church could do and hoped to raise funds to do so. I can’t be a dreamer at the moment.” Mr. Riggs says he recently tabled a project to renovate the church’s chapel because he sensed he couldn’t raise enough money.More food for thought with respect to taxes and school spending.
Grading Racine’s Three Superintendent Finalists
Grading Racine Unified’s three superintendent finalists began Monday, after a busy day of meetings with school stakeholders: students, teachers, principals, administrators and business leaders among them. The day concluded with a public forum at the Golden Rondelle, at which about 200 citizens got to hear brief statements from the candidates and their answers to submitted questions.
Everyone was well-behaved (although Bill Krummel, picketing outside, carried a sign charging the “pillars” of Unified with complicity to a murder), and all the candidates received polite applause, but when it was over there was a clear consensus.
Here’s how I’d grade the three, based mostly on their appearance Monday night:
Dr. Craig Bangtson: F (because that’s the lowest grade I’m allowed to give)
Dr. Barbara Moore Pulliam: B
Dr. Carlinda Purcell: A
One school board member put them in the same order after the presentation, with Purcell clearly the front-runner. When I teased a Unified principal that Bangtson would be her new boss, she said, “Don’t even joke about it.”
Schools Ease Transition to High School
The transition to high school made Kayla Owens nervous.
Entering high school, I was getting ready for another step in my life: harder work, a different mind-set, different people.
She had been one of the older students at Hartford University School, a kindergarten through eighth-grade program on the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee campus, and didn’t know what to expect at the all-girls Catholic school where she was headed.
“I was getting ready for another step in my life: harder work, a different mind-set, different people,” said Owens, now a junior at St. Joan Antida High School.
This fall, the high school will launch a new program aimed at helping its first-year students – who come from dozens of feeder schools around the city – identify with their new school and get on the college prep path. The yearlong program will assign a team of teachers to work with ninth-graders on study skills and will try to get their parents involved from day one.
Many of the school’s first-year students need early academic intervention, said Elizabeth Stengel, St. Joan Antida’s admissions officer.
Pride in public schools fuels positive involvement
According to her job description, West Roxbury’s Kathleen Colby is the YMCA’s liaison to the classrooms of this city, charged with assuring parents that Boston public schools offer “good and valid options” for their children.
That, of course, challenges a widely held assumption that public education in this city is a wasteland.
“I’ve heard that, too,” she said. “Absolutely. And the people who make that assumption are absolutely wrong. There are fabulous things happening in this city that no one knows about because no one writes about them.”
When the Y created the job five years ago, Colby was such an obvious candidate that she began receiving calls and e-mails from friends and teachers, urging her to apply.
“It’s not a job as much as it’s a passion,” she explained. “I’ve been talking about our schools for years because of what my own kids have experienced. We’ve received so much that I just can’t help wanting to give something back.”Colby’s son is a student at Boston’s Latin School. BLS is part of the Boston public schools but “admits students on a competitive basis“.
Technology in the Madison Schools
I am the parent of 2 children, one in first grade and the other soon to enter Kindergarten. I recently registered my child for Kindergarten where I was handed a very helpful folder with lots of great information in it. It had pictures of children learning in various contexts and text touting the wonderful education […]
Madison Mayor Proposes Expansion of Low Income Housing Throughout Dane County in an Effort to Reduce the MMSD’s Low Income Population
Mayor Dave Cieslewicz is proposing a regional approach to affordable housing to help ease high concentrations of poor students in Madison schools.
Cieslewicz is proposing to merge the city and Dane County public housing authorities into a single entity that would take a more regional view.
The authorities handle federal vouchers that offset rent payments, public housing and support first-time buyers.
Cieslewicz also wants to make communities outside Madison eligible for money from the city’s Affordable Housing Trust Fund, which now stands at $4 million.
Over time, the proposals might spread low-income housing more evenly through the region, which would help all schools, Cieslewicz said.Madison Demographics: 82.2% white (Dane County = 87.5%) with 15% of the population living below poverty (2000 census; Dane County = 9.4%). 43% of the Madison School District’s students were classified as “low income” for the 2007-2008 school year.
Madison School District Administration’s Proposed 2008-2009 Budget Published
The observation of school district budgeting can be fascinating. Numbers are big (9 or more digits) and the politics often significant. Many factors affect such expenditures including, local property taxes, state and federal redistributed tax dollars, enrollment, grants, referendums, new programs, politics and periodically, local priorities. The Madison School District Administration released it’s proposed 2008-2009 $367,806,712 budget Friday, April 4, 2008.
There will be a number of versions between now and sometime next year. The numbers will change.
Allocations were sent to the schools on March 5, 2008 prior to the budget’s public release. MMSD 2008-2009 Budget timeline.
I’ve summarized budget and enrollment information from1995 through 2008-2009 below:
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.
School Choice, Now More Than Ever
This week’s revelation that 17 of the nation’s 50 largest cities have high school graduation rates below 50% surely saddened many. But it surprised few people attuned to the state of U.S. public education. Proponents of education choice have long believed that dropout rates fall when families can pick the schools best suited for their children.
So news that Sol Stern, a veteran advocate of school choice, is having second thoughts about the ability of market forces to improve education outcomes is noteworthy. Mr. Stern explains his change of heart in the current issue of the indispensable City Journal, a quarterly magazine published by the Manhattan Institute. And his revised views on the school choice movement warrant a response.
Inside of two decades, charter school enrollment in the U.S. has climbed to 1.1 million from zero. Two tiny voucher programs in Maine and Vermont blossomed into 21 programs in 13 states and the District of Columbia. Tuition tax credits, once puny and rare, are now sizeable and commonplace. The idea that teacher pay should be based on performance, not just seniority, is gaining ground. Not bad for a small band of education reformers facing skepticism from the liberal media and outright hostility from well-funded, politically connected heavies like the National Education Association.Related: Alan Borsuk: Wisconsin Black 8th-Graders Rank Worst in Nation in Writing and 2007 Nation’s Report Card: Writing.
Long Beach school district is a finalist for Broad Prize
The Long Beach Unified School District was again named a finalist Wednesday for the prestigious Broad Prize, which honors academic excellence and strong performance by minority and poor students in urban districts across the nation.
“It’s a huge honor,” said Christopher J. Steinhauser, superintendent of the nearly 91,000-student district. “We pride ourselves on a path of continual improvement, and to be recognized by the [Eli and Edythe Broad] foundation as one of the top five school systems in America every time we’ve been eligible is a huge honor for teachers, students and parents.”
In 2003, Long Beach Unified won the prize, which includes $500,000 in college scholarships. The district — the third-largest in California — has been a top-five finalist every year it has been eligible since the inception of the prize, an honor that comes with $125,000 in scholarships. Districts that win the prize are then ineligible for three years.
The four other finalists this year are districts in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., and Miami, as well as the Aldine Independent School District near Houston and the Brownsville Independent School District on the Texas-Mexico border. The winner will be announced Oct. 14 in New York City.
2007 “Nation’s Report Card – Writing” Now Available
National Center for Education Statistics:
This report presents the results of the 2007 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) writing assessment. It was administered to a nationally representative sample of more than 165,000 eighth- and twelfth-graders from public and private schools. In addition to national results, the report includes state and urban district results for grade 8 public school students. Forty-five states, the Department of Defense schools, and 10 urban districts voluntarily participated. To measure their writing skills, the assessment engaged students in narrative, informative, and persuasive writing tasks. NAEP presents the writing results as scale scores and achievement-level percentages. Results are also reported for student performance by various demographic characteristics such as race/ethnicity, gender, and eligibility for the National School Lunch Program. The 2007 national results are compared with results from the 2002 and 1998 assessments. At grades 8 and 12, average writing scores and the percentages of students performing at or above Basic were higher than in both previous assessments. The White — Black score gap narrowed at grade 8 compared to 1998 and 2002 but showed no significant change at grade 12. The gender score gap showed no significant change at grade 8 compared with previous assessments but narrowed at grade 12 since 2002. Eighth-graders eligible for free or reduced-price school lunch scored lower on average than students who were not eligible. Compared with 2002, average writing scores for eighth-graders increased in 19 states and the Department of Defense schools, and scores decreased in one state. Compared with 1998, scores increased in 28 states and the Department of Defense Schools, and no states showed a decrease. Scores for most urban districts at grade 8 were comparable to or higher than scores for large central cities but were below the national average. Trend results are available for 4 of the 10 urban districts.
36% of Wisconsin 8th grade students scored proficient and advanced, tied for 9th best. Complete Report: 3.9MB PDF File.
Sam Dillon:About one-third of America’s eighth-grade students, and about one in four high school seniors, are proficient writers, according to results of a nationwide test released on Thursday.
The test, administered last year, showed that there were modest increases in the writing skills of low-performing students since the last time a similar exam was given, in 2002. But the skills of high-performing eighth and 12th graders remained flat or declined.
Girls far outperformed boys in the test, with 41 percent of eighth-grade girls scoring at or above the proficient level, compared with 20 percent of eighth-grade boys.
New Jersey and Connecticut were the two top-performing states, with more than half their students scoring at or above the proficient level (56 percent in New Jersey, 53 percent in Connecticut). Those two and seventeen other states ranked above New York, where 31 percent of students wrote at the proficient level.Joanne offers notes and links.
The Grinding Battle with Circumstance: Charter Schools and the Potential of School-Based Collective Bargaining
Jonathan Gyurko [196K PDF]:
Despite its teacher union origins as a vehicle for teacher-led, bottom-up innovation and early bi-partisan support, the charter movement was adopted by political conservatives as a vehicle for market-oriented education reforms. In the process, teacher unions largely repudiated an idea they helped launch. Yet recently, a flurry of discussion has emerged regarding an evolving and potentially productive relationship between charter schools and teacher unions. These discussions were precipitated by the recent actions of a few notable policy entrepreneurs whose work may suggest political and policy alternatives that could advance and sustain the policies embedded in the charter model.
This paper chronicles the political history of the charter school movement in the United States, starting with ideas promulgated by the late American Federation of Teachers President Albert Shanker and continuing through the embrace of charter schools by political conservatives. Through a review of available research, the paper assesses the current state of the charter school movement, including an assessment of charter school achievement data and a critique of the charter school policy framework, with particular emphasis on charter school financing, philanthropic support, and access to human capital. The paper also describes the recent and politically counter-intuitive work by the United Federation of Teachers, New York City’s teachers union, in founding two charter schools.
With the broad history and state of the charter school movement established, this paper analyzes recent events through the agenda setting frameworks developed by Baumgartner and Jones (1993) and Kingdon (1984). Specifically, the paper argues that the charter school movement may be approaching an instance of “punctuated equilibrium” due to the charter school movement’s changing “policy image” and the loss of “monopolistic control” over the charter school agenda by a small interest group. The paper concludes that school-based collective bargaining may be a “new institutional structure” that could have transformative and productive consequences for the charter school movement.
Creativity Step by Step: A Conversation with Choreographer Twyla Tharp
The notion that some people are simply born artistic – and that there is a profile that can help organizations identify them – is quite firmly entrenched. All the talk of genetic determination nowadays undoubtedly has a lot to do with that. But the idea that creativity is a predetermined personality trait probably appeals at a psychological level because it gives people an excuse for not innovating or initiating change themselves, reducing the problem of creativity to a recruitment challenge.
Significantly, the people least likely to buy into the idea that creativity is preordained are the creative geniuses themselves. Choreographer Twyla Tharp, for one, doesn’t subscribe to any notion of effortless artistry. As someone who has changed the face of dance, she’s certainly qualified to have an opinion. The winner of a MacArthur fellowship (popularly called “the genius grant”), two Emmy awards, and a Tony award, she has written and directed television programs, created Broadway productions, and choreographed dances for the movies Hair, Ragtime, and Amadeus. Tharp, now 66, did all this while creating more than 130 dances—many of which have become classics—for her own company, the Joffrey Ballet, the New York City Ballet, the Paris Opera Ballet, London’s Royal Ballet, and American Ballet Theatre. The author of two books, she is now in the process of simultaneously developing new ballets for the Miami City Ballet, American Ballet Theatre, and Pacific Northwest Ballet.
At her Manhattan home, Tharp met with HBR senior editor Diane Coutu to discuss what it takes to be a choreographer. In these pages, she shares what she has learned about fostering creativity, initiating change, and firing even top-notch performers when push comes to shove. In her suffer-no-fools way, she talks about her “monomaniacal absorption” with her work and the need to be tough, even ruthless, when that work is at stake. What follows is an edited version of their conversation.
Annual review rates state-funded preschool programs
Although many states, including Kansas, are subsidizing public preschool for growing numbers of children, Missouri is serving fewer than it did five years ago.
The National Institute for Early Education Research on Wednesday released its yearly review of state-funded preschool. It found that more states are spending more money to enroll more children in higher-quality preschools. That’s important because children who attend good preschools on average do better on social and learning yardsticks.
Nationally, spending bumped to $3,642 per child, reversing four years of falling support. And for the first time, more than 1 million children nationwide were enrolled in state-funded preschool during the 2006-2007 school year.
Locally, the picture differs quite a bit between Kansas and Missouri.
Support for preschool is reflected in Kansas’ At-Risk Four-Year-Old Children Preschool Program. From the 2001-2002 school year, enrollment grew 168 percent to 5,971 in 2006-2007.
In Missouri, enrollment for 3- and 4-year-olds in 2006-2007 was 4,972, a 12-percent increase over the year before, but a 12-percent drop from 2001-2002. One factor has been stagnant funding, said Jo Anne Ralston, director of Early Childhood Education for the state education department.
“Legislators have crafted bills to get more funding for preschool, but there has not been a lot of support,” she said. On the contrary, Ralston said, Missouri’s preschool program competes with veterans and other constituencies for fees from casinos.
Charter advocates rethink school reform
Die-hard charter school advocates are rethinking their approach to school reform and the ability of competition and charter schools alone to transform American urban schools and their awful student achievement rates.
It’s a surprising change and it’s hardly common, particularly at the grassroots level.
Still, in recent weeks a number of the country’s leading pro-charter think-tanks and leaders have published pieces, announced policies or made statements indicating their reconsideration — and it likely will have an enormous impact on policymaking and Republican politics.
From New York City to Detroit to Atlanta, charter advocates have echoed writer Sol Stern, an important conservative voice on education reform, when he wrote in a recent edition of the City Journal: “education reformers ought to resist unreflective support for elegant-sounding theories, derived from the study of economic activity, that don’t produce verifiable results in the classroom.”
Passing Eighth Grade Gets a Little Harder
The Bloomberg administration won approval for a new eighth-grade promotion policy last night at a meeting repeatedly interrupted by the chanting and heckling of parents who contend that the policy amounts to blaming students for the failings of the city’s middle schools.
The policy requires next year’s eighth graders to pass classes in core subject areas and to score at a basic level on standardized English and math exams to be promoted. The Panel for Educational Policy, which oversees the city schools, approved the policy by a vote of 11 to 1 in its meeting at Tweed Courthouse, the Education Department’s headquarters. Eight of the 13 members on the panel — there is one vacancy — are appointed by Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, and the five borough presidents appoint one each.
From the moment the meeting began, it was punctuated by parents chanting, “Postpone the vote” and “No plan, no vote,” a reference to what they said was the department’s lack of a comprehensive plan for fixing the city’s middle schools.
PSYCHOLOGYZATION
At Harvard University, the Harvard Graduate School of Law is called Harvard Law School, the Harvard Graduate School of Medicine is called Harvard Medical School, but Harvard Education School is called the Harvard Graduate School of Education—surely that indicates something… In any case, Harvard Education School is kind enough to offer, on its website, an […]
What you usually don’t hear about WEAC
It’s amazing how much some people dislike WEAC.
One e-mailer called it a “collective” (like the Borg?). Another said teachers love unionization “because you can’t think for yourselves!”
The Wisconsin Education Association Council has never told me how to think or what to teach. WEAC may take positions on issues, but its members can think what they want – and do. I have attended at least five WEAC Representative Assemblies, and I assure you that the debate is vigorous and disagreement is extensive.
I wonder which organizations those e-mailers belong to that might encourage free thinking and not allegiance to dogma from on high. The Republican Party perhaps? The National Rifle Association? The Catholic Church?
News media repeatedly refer to the “powerful teachers union” as if it’s somehow emptying our pockets and preventing life from being beautiful. Rep. Don Pridemore (R-Hartford), whose newsletters used to cite a “WEAC Atrocity of the Month,” wrote that the union influences every education decision in the state.
At Charter School: Higher Teacher Pay
A New York City charter school set to open in 2009 in Washington Heights will test one of the most fundamental questions in education: Whether significantly higher pay for teachers is the key to improving schools.
The school, which will run from fifth to eighth grades, is promising to pay teachers $125,000, plus a potential bonus based on schoolwide performance. That is nearly twice as much as the average New York City public school teacher earns, roughly two and a half times the national average teacher salary and higher than the base salary of all but the most senior teachers in the most generous districts nationwide.
The school’s creator and first principal, Zeke M. Vanderhoek, contends that high salaries will lure the best teachers. He says he wants to put into practice the conclusion reached by a growing body of research: that teacher quality — not star principals, laptop computers or abundant electives — is the crucial ingredient for success.
“I would much rather put a phenomenal, great teacher in a field with 30 kids and nothing else than take the mediocre teacher and give them half the number of students and give them all the technology in the world,” said Mr. Vanderhoek, 31, a Yale graduate and former middle school teacher who built a test preparation company that pays its tutors far more than the competition.Related: The Teacher Free Agent Market in Denver.
Next Question: Can Students Be Paid to Excel?
The fourth graders squirmed in their seats, waiting for their prizes. In a few minutes, they would learn how much money they had earned for their scores on recent reading and math exams. Some would receive nearly $50 for acing the standardized tests, a small fortune for many at this school, P.S. 188 on the Lower East Side of Manhattan.
When the rewards were handed out, Jazmin Roman was eager to celebrate her $39.72. She whispered to her friend Abigail Ortega, “How much did you get?” Abigail mouthed a barely audible answer: $36.87. Edgar Berlanga pumped his fist in the air to celebrate his $34.50.
The children were unaware that their teacher, Ruth Lopez, also stood to gain financially from their achievement. If students show marked improvement on state tests during the school year, each teacher at Public School 188 could receive a bonus of as much as $3,000.
School districts nationwide have seized on the idea that a key to improving schools is to pay for performance, whether through bonuses for teachers and principals, or rewards like cash prizes for students. New York City, with the largest public school system in the country, is in the forefront of this movement, with more than 200 schools experimenting with one incentive or another. In more than a dozen schools, students, teachers and principals are all eligible for extra money, based on students’ performance on standardized tests.
Let Them Drop Out, Then Get Them Back
Every time I hear from a teacher, I learn something. It may be a new reading report, a promising homework technique, a story of a student’s success. And sometimes it is a taboo-busting, eye-widening, troublemaking idea. Consider the e-mail that Michael Goldstein, founder of the MATCH Charter Public High School in Boston, sent, saying that if a kid wants to drop out, let him.
I would usually hit the delete button on something that impolitic. But Goldstein has created one of the most successful inner-city high schools in the country. He has proven to me time and again that he knows what he is talking about.
I think our awful dropout rate — only half of urban low-income students complete high school — is the most difficult educational problem in the country. It may require much more than our usual buzzword solutions such as “engaging lessons,” “personal contact” or “individualized instruction.” What Goldstein wants to do is sort of educational jujitsu: Let the force of the kid’s rush out of school bring him back, somewhat later, with enough money to get the learning he finally realizes he needs.
I am going to quote Goldstein’s e-mail in full, because anyone who is willing to risk his splendid reputation to this degree should have a chance to explain all the details. He wrote in response to my request for solutions to the hopelessness found in many of our urban high schools, exemplified by Washington Post Staff Writer Lonnae O’Neal Parker’s two-part series in November on Calvin Coolidge Senior High School senior Jonathan Lewis, a potential dropout if there ever was one.
As driving deaths mount, some teens ask for tighter restrictions
AP:
Sami Wilson has attended the funerals of seven friends in the past two years. She’s 17 years old.
Wilson is a senior at Princeton High School, which has been particularly hard hit by traffic deaths involving teenagers.
”You kind of just get used to the feeling of a funeral around here,” Wilson told the Star Tribune.
But it’s not just a problem in this one Minnesota city. No state in the country has a higher percentage of teenagers behind the wheel in deadly crashes than Minnesota.
Teens were driving in 18.4 percent of Minnesota’s fatal traffic accidents from 2004 to 2006, according to figures compiled by the U.S. Department of Transportation. The national average was 14.3 percent.
Roughly every five days, a Minnesota teen dies in a traffic crash. Already this month, a 17-year-old died without a seat belt in a head-on crash in Winona County, while another 17-year-old crossed the center line and collided head-on with a bus in southeastern Morrison county, killing a 53-year-old driver.
The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety recently gave Minnesota and nine other states a marginal grade because they don’t limit teenage riders and night driving.
Many states, including Wisconsin, prohibit 16-year-olds from carrying more than one passenger or driving after midnight. In the last year, legislatures in Illinois, Ohio and Idaho tightened night driving or passenger laws for teen drivers.
Looking Back With Retiring Madison Superintendent Art Rainwater
Before he leaves his post as head of the Madison Metropolitan School District, Art Rainwater reflects on the past, present and future of public education for all in a city and a school system that look and feel very different than the ones he was introduced to a decade-and-a-half ago
For an Arkansas native who grew up professionally in Kansas City–and who still looks like he’d be right at home on a Southern high-school football field–it’s hard to imagine Madison schools without Art Rainwater at the helm. The guy’s right up there with Soglin and Alvarez: They hail from somewhere else but if you didn’t know it you’d think they’ve been Madisonians all along.
But just as our collective recollection of his predecessor Cheryl Wilhoyte’s tumultuous term as schools superintendent has faded, so too will our familiarity with the large and at times imposing personality of Rainwater, sixty-five, after he retires in June. What will fade more slowly is the impact he has had on the Madison school district.
While it remains one of the best school districts in America, MMSD faces profound challenges that the next superintendent will inherit from Rainwater, who arrived in Madison almost fourteen years ago to design and implement the district’s first magnet school. He came from the Kansas City, Missouri School District, where he started as a principal in 1987 and finished as special assistant to the superintendent, the number-two position in the district. If Rainwater has seemed comfortable in the eye of the storm, it’s because his career matured amid the extremely difficult and sometimes ugly stress of one of America’s most bitter desegregation battles–a battle that in 1994 looked like it might flare anew.
Changing Suburbs: “The Next Slum?”
Strange days are upon the residents of many a suburban cul-de-sac. Once-tidy yards have become overgrown, as the houses they front have gone vacant. Signs of physical and social disorder are spreading.
At Windy Ridge, a recently built starter-home development seven miles northwest of Charlotte, North Carolina, 81 of the community’s 132 small, vinyl-sided houses were in foreclosure as of late last year. Vandals have kicked in doors and stripped the copper wire from vacant houses; drug users and homeless people have furtively moved in. In December, after a stray bullet blasted through her son’s bedroom and into her own, Laurie Talbot, who’d moved to Windy Ridge from New York in 2005, told The Charlotte Observer, “I thought I’d bought a home in Pleasantville. I never imagined in my wildest dreams that stuff like this would happen.”
In the Franklin Reserve neighborhood of Elk Grove, California, south of Sacramento, the houses are nicer than those at Windy Ridge—many once sold for well over $500,000—but the phenomenon is the same. At the height of the boom, 10,000 new homes were built there in just four years. Now many are empty; renters of dubious character occupy others. Graffiti, broken windows, and other markers of decay have multiplied. Susan McDonald, president of the local residents’ association and an executive at a local bank, told the Associated Press, “There’s been gang activity. Things have really been changing, the last few years.”
In the first half of last year, residential burglaries rose by 35 percent and robberies by 58 percent in suburban Lee County, Florida, where one in four houses stands empty. Charlotte’s crime rates have stayed flat overall in recent years—but from 2003 to 2006, in the 10 suburbs of the city that have experienced the highest foreclosure rates, crime rose 33 percent. Civic organizations in some suburbs have begun to mow the lawns around empty houses to keep up the appearance of stability. Police departments are mapping foreclosures in an effort to identify emerging criminal hot spots.This is an interesting issue to consider, as school districts continue to ponder new edge schools.
Battery Arrest at LaFollette High School
On Tuesday afternoon a La Follette High School principal was attempting to escort to the office a couple of students who had been arguing. One student (the 16 year old listed above) did not want to go to the office and became hostile. She began yelling and ended up punching the principal in the face. A Madison Police officer witnessed the act. That officer was also punched in the face while arresting the student. The melee took place during class passing time, and the arresting officer described the situation in a report as “extremely disturbing and disruptive to the school environment.”
Following the arrest pepper spray and a box cutter were found to be in the 16-year-old’s possession. These were grounds for additional tentative charges. The student also spit her gum on the floor, which is a violation of Madison’s Expectorating Ordinance.Via Isthmus.
Madison Superintendent Candidate Steve Gallon Accepts Plainfield, NJ Position
The promise of big news was fulfilled Tuesday when the Board of Education approved Steve Gallon III as the next schools superintendent.
Gallon will begin a four-year term July 1 at a salary of $198,000, with other contract details to be negotiated.
Before the vote, three board members who visited the Miami-Dade school district effusively testified that Gallon, the winner among 30 candidates and five finalists, possessed qualities hardly ever seen before in a chief school administrator in Plainfield. The meeting reached a crescendo when Gallon himself was introduced and took the microphone to give the kind of hope that the district has been longing for.
Gallon alluded to being a finalist for another superintendent position, but said he chose Plainfield instead.
“I want to be here,” Gallon said.
Among his credentials, Gallon survived growing up in Liberty City, one of Miami’s toughest neighborhoods, and went on to achieve high recognition as an educator, motivational speaker, author and exemplar of success against all odds.
AP Trends: Tests Soar, Scores Slip
While more American public school students are taking Advanced Placement tests, the proportion of tests receiving what is deemed a passing score has dipped, and the mean score is down for the fourth year in a row, an Education Week analysis of newly released data from the College Board shows.
Data released here this week by the New York City-based nonprofit organization that owns the AP brand shows that a greater-than-ever proportion of students overall—more than 15 percent of the public high school class of 2007—scored at least one 3 on an AP test. The tests are graded on a scale of 1 to 5, the highest score.
Yet, as the number of AP exams taken in U.S. public schools has ballooned by almost 25 percent over the four years that the College Board has released its “AP Report to the Nation,” the percentage of exams that received at least a 3—the minimum score that the College Board considers predictive of success in college—has slipped from about 60 percent to 57 percent.
The mean score on the nearly 2 million AP exams taken by students in last year’s U.S. public graduating class was 2.83, down from 2.9 in 2004.
“That happens,” said Jennifer Topiel, a spokeswoman for the College Board. “Any psychometrician can tell you that as participation grows, scores go down.”
Still, Ms. Topiel said the score declines are a major concern for the organization, as are widening score gaps between some racial and ethnic groups, “particularly those among underrepresented students who are not being prepared and not having the same resources.”Links:
- Dane County High School AP Course Offering Summay
- Madison United for Academic Excellence discussion of local AP Course Offerings
- The College Board: AP Report to The Nation
DC Schools Chancellor Wants to Test “Differentiated Learning”
D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee plans to establish an experimental program that would offer customized lessons for disabled, regular and gifted students in the same classroom, a key component of her strategy to reduce exorbitant special education costs.
Rhee’s proposal would launch a “differentiated learning” laboratory at West Elementary School in Northwest Washington, then replicate it citywide. Under the proposal, which is being met with skepticism from some West teachers and parents, the system would hire a private special-education school to run the program.
The proposal is among several actions Rhee is taking to overhaul special education, which for years has lacked high-quality programs for learning-disabled and physically disabled students. The system spends about $137 million on private school tuition annually for about 2,400 children (out of more than 9,400 disabled students) whom it cannot serve in the public schools.
Since 2006, the D.C. public schools have been under a federal court order to eliminate a backlog of more than 1,000 decisions from hearing officers regarding placement of students in special education programs. The order stemmed from a consent decree that settled a class-action suit filed by parents protesting the system’s long delay in providing services for the students.
Federal law requires schools to practice “inclusion” — putting special education students in regular classrooms whenever possible — a mandate the system has ignored in countless cases, advocates say. Under differentiated learning or differentiated instruction, an approach that has been used in schools in Prince George’s and Montgomery counties and across the nation over the past decade, students are grouped in the same classroom according to their ability levels and learning styles. They get the same lesson but are given different assignments and tasks based on their abilities.
For instance, a third-grade class in St. Louis recently was assigned to report on Martin Luther King Jr., with some students writing a timeline, others illustrating pages and others comparing the era of the slain civil rights leader to today.
Rhee is proposing to go a step further than most other districts using the concept. She wants to treat all students in the differentiated instruction classrooms much like special education students, with each getting an education plan outlining how teachers would address the child’s specific strengths, weaknesses and learning style.
Special education “is about individualization of instruction — that is going to be the overarching theme of these schools. Every kid — gifted kids — need really good individualization,” Rhee said in an interview. “All kids will benefit when we’re operating in that manner.”
Chicago’s Turnaround Plans for Failing Schools
It looks like a typical day at a typical American grammar school: Students proceed in single file down hallways, a class of fourth-graders listens to their teacher read aloud, and students in another class work in small groups on independent projects.
But Andre Cowling, the tall, imposing new principal of Harvard Elementary on Chicago’s South Side, shakes his head in wonder at it all. Last year, he says, “this wouldn’t have been possible.”
Harvard is one of several public schools here to get a top-to-bottom housecleaning in recent years – including replacing the principal and most teachers – in a bid to lift student achievement out of the nation’s academic basement. The drastic approach is known as “turnaround,” and Chicago is embracing it more than any US city, though it’s unproven and is controversial among teachers, many parents, and students.
“It’s risky in that it’s new and has an untested track record,” says Andrew Calkins, senior vice president at Mass Insight, a nonprofit group focused on school reform, and coauthor of a report on turnaround schools. “It’s logical in that the other choice is to keep on doing what’s been tried before, and we know what the results of that will be. What you try to do if you’re Chicago is to minimize the risk and maximize the possibility of a good outcome” by thinking through everything that’s needed to improve the climate for learning at a school.
Miami Expands Magnet Access
Miami-Dade Schools Superintendent Rudy Crew rolled out a proposal Thursday to provide students throughout the county with greater access to specialty programs such as magnet schools, International Baccalaureate programs and K-8 Centers.
The proposed plan, dubbed the Equity & Access Plan, will create rigorous, specialized academic programs in areas that don’t yet have them, Crew said. It would run for three years, beginning in 2008, and cost about $6 million.
”When you look at the map, what you’ll essentially see is that the distribution [of programs] here has been at best, or possibly at worst, random,” Crew said. “This conversation was based largely on the need to change that map so you have more children having access to high-demand programs.”
Currently, most K-8 centers are clustered in the southern half of the county or near Aventura. Many urban neighborhoods, other than downtown Miami, do not have magnet programs nearby.
And the lone specialty school for math and science, the Maritime and Science Technology Academy, is tucked away on Key Biscayne.
Among Crew’s recommendations:
- Develop 10 new International Baccalaureate programs, to join the 14 existing programs. Hialeah-Miami Lakes Senior, Miami Carol City Senior, and Miami Beach Senior would be among the host schools.
- Open two new mathematics and science senior high school programs. One would be a senior high school for medical technologies at the former Homestead Hospital. The other would be in northwest Miami-Dade County.
- Develop six new magnet programs, four of which would be housed in schools in the southern part of the county.
While Crew said he is prepared to raise money to fund future projects, likely through federal and state grants, he said his initial goal was to take a strategic look at the placement of academic programs.
One of the three finalists for the Madison Superintendent position, Steve Gallon, hailed from Miami-Dade.
Milwaukee Hiring 200+ Teachers for Reading & Math
Milwaukee Public Schools is hiring more than 200 new teachers and undertaking more than $16 million in new spending for the second semester, with the goals of improving students’ reading and math abilities and improving high school programs.
Frequently using the phrase “a sense of urgency,” Superintendent William Andrekopoulos said this week that the unusual midyear shakeup in the status quo in many MPS schools is causing stresses in some parts of the system and on many adults but will benefit children.
Speaking about a new program to teach reading to older students who are reading poorly, he said: “We’ve done something we haven’t done before, create a sense of urgency around improving children’s reading. . . . Sometimes, if that makes people uncomfortable, so be it.”
The initiatives are clearly stretching the capacity of the system, from the central office, which is scrambling to hire teachers, to individual schools, where sometimes major changes in schedules are being made at midyear and with short deadlines for implementation.
In part because of the new programs, MPS has an unusual number of teaching positions available – 397 such openings were listed on the system’s Web site as of Monday, the most recent update. That equals about 7% of all teaching jobs in the district. Andrekopoulos said that without the new jobs included, the total openings would not be so unusual for this time of year.
Green Charter Schools Meeting
You’re invited to an important discussion about “green” public schools with environment-focused educational programs and practices.
Date: February 11, 2008 (Monday Afternoon)
Time: 1:30pm to 3:30pm
Site: U.W.- Madison Arboretum
Join this facilitated discussion among educators, students, environmental leaders, policymakers, green charter school friends, news media, school officials, and founding directors of the new Green Charter Schools Network.
Discussion & Reception
Facilitator: Doug Thomas, Director, EdVisions
Share your opinions about:
Green Charter School Choices in Public Education
Student Experiences at Green Charter Schools including River Crossing Charter School Students
What’s It Mean to Be an Educated Person?
Creating the Capacity for Change
Young People and the Environmental Legacies of:
Aldo Leopold
Gaylord Nelson
Sigurd Olson
Innovating with School and Schooling — “Innovating” linked at Education / Evolving
VICTORIA RYDBERG and STUDENTS from River Crossing Charter School will join us at the February 11 discussion along with TIA NELSON, Gaylord Nelson’s daughter; JEFF NANIA, Director, Wisconsin Waterfowl Association; SARA LAIMON, Teacher, Environmental Charter High School, L.A., California; JIM McGRATH, JULIE SPALDING, & JIM TANGEN-FOSTER, Educators & Founders of Green Charter Schools; STEFAN ANDERSON, Headmaster, Conserve School, and many other environmentalists and educators.
Please RSVP to sennb@charter.net or 608 238 7491
Madison Superintendent Candidate Steve Gallon’s Public Appearance
Watch a 28 minute question and answer session at Monona Terrace yesterday, download the .mp4 video file (175mb, CTRL-Click this link) or listen to this 11.3MB mp3 audio file. Learn more about the other candidates: Jim McIntyre and Dan Nerad.
Related Links:
- Dr. Steve Gallon, District Administrative Director – Miami/Dade Public Schools, Miami, Florida [Clusty Search / Google Search / Live Search / Yahoo Search]
- Desired Superintendent Characteristics
- Five Candidates Named
- Learn more about the three candidates
- WKOW-TV
- NBC15
- Hire the best
- Susan Troller:
As a life-long resident of southern Florida, school superintendent candidate Steve Gallon III grimaced, then grinned, when asked about how he liked Wisconsin weather.
Known as a motivational speaker as well as a top teacher, principal and administrator in the Miami/Dade County public school system, Gallon quickly got back on message: He sees his experiences as an educator and a leader as a good match for the school district here, especially given its rapidly changing demographics and challenges in funding.
He said the issue of underperforming students is not so much one of ethnicity but of economics.
“What we have to do is embrace the reality that gaps in achievement exist,” Gallon said. Much of it, he said, has to do with economic disadvantage.
“It’s the 800-pound gorilla in the room. You must acknowledge that work needs to be done before you’re going to be successful in dealing with it,” he said.
Gallon, 39, is one of three finalists for the position of school superintendent here. He talked with community members and the media in a meet and greet session late Monday afternoon at Monona Terrace. There will be similar sessions today and Wednesday for candidates James McIntyre, chief operating officer for the Boston public schools and Daniel Nerad, superintendent of the Green Bay district.
In responses to questions from the audience, Gallon applauded the notion of working closely with the resources of the University of Wisconsin, said he believed in the least restrictive environment for special education students and cautioned that problems facing schools in terms of funding weren’t likely to be solved easily.
Rethinking Principal Priorities of Training
Jay Matthews: Cities across America have long hunted for tougher, better-trained principals to turn around struggling schools full of impoverished children. A major university and an influential group of educators in Texas are proposing a provocative way to meet the demand: They say urban principals of the future can skip the traditional education school credentials […]
Baltimore Battles Childhood Obesity
Baltimore should improve access to fresh produce and recreational activities in low-income neighborhoods to stem childhood obesity, according to a City Council task force report released yesterday.
“This is more serious than smoking,” said City Councilwoman Agnes Welch, who has overseen the issue in the council. “Let this be a movement: We’re going to stop childhood obesity in the city of Baltimore.”
The report recommends creating health zones in which city officials would work with schools, food stores and churches in three- to four-block areas to ensure that healthy food is available and that children have safe places to be physically active.
Madison School Superintendent Finalists Named Later Today
And then there will be three.
Members of the Madison School Board will narrow the field of candidates for the next superintendent of the school district from five to three late today. School Board President Arlene Silveira said she expected that the three final candidates would be named sometime late this afternoon or early evening, following three candidate interviews today and two on Friday.
The five candidates are: Bart Anderson, county superintendent of the Franklin County Educational Service Center in Columbus, Ohio; Steve Gallon, district administrative director of the Miami/Dade Public Schools; James McIntyre, chief operating officer of the Boston Public Schools; Daniel Nerad, superintendent of schools, Green Bay Public Schools and Marguerite Vanden Wyngaard, chief academic officer, Racine Public School District.
The Capital Times asked candidates why they would like to come to Madison and what accomplishments have given them pride in their careers. Anderson, McIntyre and Vanden Wyngaard were interviewed by phone, and Nerad responded by e-mail. Steve Gallon did not respond to several calls asking for his answers to the two questions.Related:
Toki Middle School Child Enticement Case
On Tuesday January 15th around 9:24 Madison Police were called to Toki Middle School to take a report of an attempted child enticement. Two girls, ages 13 and 11, said they were followed by a man in a car as they walked to school along Raymond Road from Mckenna Blvd. to Whitney Way. At a couple of points in time the students say the man spoke to them through an open passenger’s side window. First he told the girls, “You guys are going to be late for school.” Following this comment the students quickened their pace. The man in the car continued to follow slowly behind them. After another block or two the man said, “I know your Dad, it’s okay, I can give you a ride … hop in.” One of the girls replied, “You don’t know my Dad.” They walked even more quickly eventually crossing from the south side of Raymond to the north side at Whitney Way where they cut in to the Walgreen’s parking lot. They then observed the man in the car speed up and continue eastbound on Raymond. The girls immediately contacted a guidance counselor
New Jersey Overhauls School Finance
Over the objections of big-city Democrats and suburban Republicans, Gov. Corzine’s sweeping overhaul of how New Jersey pays for public education passed the Legislature last night.
Corzine and his allies in the Legislature say the measure would more fairly distribute nearly $8 billion in annual state education aid.
The bill would hike this year’s state education funding by 7 percent. Some districts would see an increase of as much as 20 percent, and all would get at least a 2 percent increase.
But urban lawmakers bitterly predicted the bill would harm 31 disadvantaged school districts, including those in Camden, Newark and others that have received tens of millions in extra school aid in recent years.
Republicans, meanwhile, criticized a part of the law that would for the first time allocate a big chunk of state special-education aid based on the relative wealth of communities.
As a result, affluent schools would get less per handicapped student, under the theory that local taxpayers can more easily pick up that cost.
As Corzine pushed to get the bill through yesterday on the last day of the lame-duck legislative sessions, its passage became a cliff-hanger in the Senate.
There, Democratic leaders initially could only muster 20 “yes” votes – one short of a majority – after the chamber’s six African American senators, all Democrats, linked up with Republicans to vote against the measure.
Pre-K Expansion Measure’s Varying Standards Faulted
Early childhood experts and parents expressed support yesterday for a measure before the D.C. Council that would extend pre-kindergarten programs to 2,000 more 3- and 4-year-olds in the city.
Although researchers and education advocates at the council hearing agreed that pre-K can boost academic achievement in later years, debate centered on what constitutes a high-quality program for D.C. students.
A provision in the measure, introduced last month by council Chairman Vincent C. Gray (D), would require pre-K teachers in traditional public schools, charters and new community-based programs funded through the proposal to have a bachelor’s degree in early childhood education, child development or family studies immediately. Teachers in existing community-based programs would not be required to have their bachelor’s degrees until 2014.
That point drew opposition.
“Pre-K teachers with BA degrees achieve better results,” said Libby Doggett, executive director of Pre-K Now, which is advocating for expanded early childhood programs in the city. “Permitting some classrooms to do it one way and others to do it another way is the wrong approach,” she added.
Mo. tries new approach on teen offenders
At age 9, Korey Davis came home from school with gang writing on his arm. At 10, he jacked his first car. At 13, he and some buddies got guns, used them to relieve a man of his Jeep, and later, while trying to outrun a police helicopter, smacked their hot wheels into a fire hydrant.
For his exploits, the tough-talking teen pulled not only a 15-year sentence (the police subsequently connected him to three previous car thefts) but got “certified” as an adult offender and shipped off to the St. Louis City workhouse to inspire a change of heart.
It didn’t have the desired effect.
“I wasn’t wanting to listen to nobody. If you wasn’t my momma, or anybody in my family, I wasn’t gonna listen to you, period,” says Korey, now 19. “I was very rebellious.”
At that stage, most states would have written Korey off and begun shuttling him from one adult prison to the next, where he likely would have sat in sterile cells, joined a gang, and spent his days and nights plotting his next crime.
I’d welcome a Bloomy run centered on education
There was a time when Presidents and presidential candidates took bold and principled steps on critical issues of the day. Candidate John Kennedy helped free the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. from jail on a ludicrous charge during the 1960 campaign. President Dwight Eisenhower used federal troops to protect the right of the Little Rock Nine to attend an integrated school. Some wonder if we may ever see such leadership again, particularly on issues we care about.
Next week, Mayor Bloomberg is attending a bipartisan meeting in Oklahoma hosted by former Sen. David Boren that is intended, as Boren puts it, to be “shock therapy” for all presidential candidates to grapple with the issues rather than each other, and, if they don’t, perhaps Bloomberg will run.
As one who has employed shock therapy on occasion to get the system to work, I support such a meeting – and am keenly interested in what a Bloomberg candidacy would mean for America. If I were his adviser (which I am not), I would urge him to base the core of his domestic platform on the notion that education is the civil rights issue for the 21st century, because without it, one cannot pursue the American Dream.
This focus on education would not be new to the mayor. He demanded – and received – control of the city’s unwieldy education system so that one person could be held accountable. He has challenged all of us, including me, to reevaluate our notions of what constitutes a sound and basic education, and he has made progress, however imperfect. Innovative programs like new small schools have improved graduation rates, while the achievement gap between white students and students of color has narrowed. And now city public schools receive report cards as well as their students.
More Leaders Need Apply
Wisconsin State Journal Editorial:
If there ‘s one institution in Madison that needs strong leaders to tackle huge challenges, it ‘s the city ‘s school district.
Unfortunately, only two people are seeking two open School Board seats in the coming spring election. The deadline for declaring a candidacy was Wednesday.
That means voters won ‘t have any choice in who will serve, barring any late write-in campaigns.
That ‘s a shame — one that Madison can ‘t afford to repeat.
he rigors of a campaign test potential board members and help the community choose which direction to take the district.
Competitive School Board campaigns also draw considerable and much-needed attention to huge local issues, such as the increasing number of children who show up for kindergarten unprepared, rising health insurance costs for school employees, shifting demographics, school security and tight limits on spending.
Madison School Board Candidates are “Shoo-ins”
Ed Hughes, a Madison attorney, and Marj Passman, a retired local teacher, will fill two Madison School Board seats in the spring election on April 1. They are running unopposed for seats now held by Lawrie Kobza, a single-term board member, and Carol Carstensen, who has served since 1990 and is by far the most senior member of the board.
In fact, when Hughes and Passman join the board, only Johnny Winston Jr. will have served more than one three-year term.
James Ely, an East High School custodian who had filed papers Dec. 27 with the City Clerk’s Office to register as a candidate for Carstensen’s Seat 7, decided to withdraw from the race because he was unable to complete the necessary filing information to change his candidacy to a run for Kobza’s Seat 6.
Hughes is running for Seat 7, and Passman is the candidate for Seat 6. Neither Hughes nor Passman has previously served on the board, although Passman lost a race last year against Maya Cole.
Sade’s Story: An Update
When we last spoke to Sade Daniels, the 18-year-old former foster youth was making nervous preparations for her first semester at Clark Atlanta University. The nervousness would be familiar to any parent who’s ever sent a child to a new school: She was full of questions like, Will I make any friends? Will I like my teachers? Will I like going to a new place? The difference, of course, is that for most of her life Daniels has had to offer the comforting responses to her own questions. The stakes were even higher this time: Daniels was leaving behind everything and everyone she knew in Oakland to pursue a big dream in a new, unknown city. Nationwide, less than 5 percent of former foster children finish college.
Daniels’ first semester proved to be a rough transition. She struggled to negotiate her own class schedule and financial arrangements. “I didn’t feel like [Clark Atlanta University officials] had a lot of sympathy for my situation,” she said. She looked for someone to help guide her on things like class selection but found no one – “There’s not a lot of guidance counselors there, or if there are, they’re hiding,” she said.
Anaheim YMCA invests in kids’ education
Long after the final bell at Thomas Jefferson Elementary School in Anaheim, more than 100 students from first through sixth grade sit quietly at their desks. The only sounds are of pencils moving, chairs squeaking and the occasional whisper.
This is homework time for one of the 46 schools where 4,800 students are enrolled in Anaheim Achieves, an after-school program operated by the Anaheim Family YMCA.
In room 16, first-graders have finished their homework assignments and are drawing a picture of a cat from a book. Some glance at others’ work. Some giggle. Some are fully absorbed. Once done, students must write a sentence describing what is happening in the picture.
“It helps them with their comprehension skills,” said Julia Turchek, a first-grade teacher who volunteers every Monday and Wednesday.
Now in its ninth year, the program works closely with several Orange County school districts, such as Magnolia, Savanna, Centralia and Anaheim, and collaborates with other support groups, including the city of Anaheim, Orange County Department of Education, Boys and Girls Clubs of America and AmeriCorps. Together they help address the academic and mentoring needs of children.
To Provide Quality Music Education Now, Schools Could Learn From the Past
School’s out for the holidays, and it’s probably the last thing on anyone’s mind. But in the marginalized world of music education, a good deal of serious thinking needs to be done. Now that Charles Dickens’s Christmas ghosts have made their rounds for the year, perhaps they might be enlisted to provide perspective and encourage some soul-searching.
The crisis of the moment has partly to do with Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s announcement last summer that New York City schools would be required to teach the arts, and that principals would be rated annually on their success, much as they are in other subjects. In theory this could put some muscle behind the adventurous curriculum (or blueprint, as it is called) that the city’s Department of Education and a panel of arts consultants drew up in 2004: a kindergarten-through-12th-grade program that envisions choral and instrumental performance, the fostering of musical literacy and the consideration of the role music plays in communities and the world at large. The music proposed for this course was admirably boundary-free, cutting a swath from Beethoven and Puccini through folk songs, spirituals, jazz and pop.
The problem is that the 2004 blueprint is recommended rather than required. Given the paucity of music teachers in the system — there was one music teacher for every 1,200 students in 2006, Education Department officials have said — schools that could execute it in all its glory were few. Exactly how (and how quickly) that can change is unclear.
D.C. education chief says school choice shouldn’t be reserved for the rich.
Collin Levy interviews Michelle Rhee:
“I see it as a social justice issue–I want them all to be in excellent schools. The kids in Tenleytown are getting a wildly different educational experience than the kids in Anacostia, so our schools are not serving their purpose.”
So says D.C. schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee, who has brought an unusual sense of urgency to her new job. One of her first decisions was to get rid of the furniture. When she arrived last summer, she says, there was a whole area, complete with couch and chair and TV for lounging in her sprawling, pink-carpeted office. Wasted space, she thought, “When am I ever going to have time to sit?”
That was a pretty good prediction for a woman whose first five months on the job have been a whirlwind of jousting with the dinosaurs in the city’s education bureaucracy. So far, in her quest to turn around the public school system, she’s taken on the unions, the city council and, most recently, hundreds of angry central-office workers.
This week, the city council gave preliminary approval to Chancellor Rhee’s request for authority to fire nonunion employees in the central office. She knew it was going to be a political firestorm, but she’s worked hard to convince her skeptics that protecting an ossified bureaucracy isn’t in anyone’s best interests. “I think it’s a critical piece of this equation,” she says of the personnel legislation, “and if someone like me can come in, guns blazing, and make all the hard calls . . . we can actually see how much progress we can make for the kids.”Clusty search on Michelle Rhee.
“Mother Makes Sure Her Kids Don’t Make the Same Mistakes She Did”
Her mother had her young and Tawana Webster did the same with her kids, the first one born when she was still a child.
Looking for love, acceptance, who’s to say why she became pregnant at 14? She still doesn’t know.
But she didn’t want the same for her children.
Her oldest, a 19-year-old graduate of Schlagle High School, received a junior college football scholarship. She attended each of his high school games, froze in the bleachers and cheered him on.
Her 17-year-old daughter graduates next year and wants to be a nurse. Schlagle teacher Mal McCluskey called recently and said a boy was hanging all over her. Webster sat her daughter down that night before dinner.
Your conduct and the way you carry yourself are very important, Webster, 34, told her. You don’t want people thinking of you that way. You have more going for you than that. Learn from my mistakes.
In Chicago, High School Principals Get Grilled Downtown
Top education officials are taking a get-tough approach in their struggle to improve city high schools. They’re grilling all the principals on everything from test scores to student attendance. The sessions are modeled on a successful crime prevention program in New York and they are subjecting principals to a level of scrutiny they aren’t used to.
In recent years, the story of Chicago’s public schools has been one of two different districts, the elementary schools and the high schools. In the lower grades, test scores are on the rise and optimism abounds. But in the high schools, large numbers of kids continue to drop out, the graduation rate remains stuck at around fifty percent and test scores have shown little to no improvement. Arne Duncan is Chicago Public Schools’ CEO.
DUNCAN: And so we really wanted to put a spotlight on high school performance. Principals are accountable for their body of work, which is their school’s performance.
To drive home the message, Duncan and his aides are embracing a program initially designed to cut down on crime, not high school dropouts. The New York City Police Department launched COMPSTAT in 1994. Every week, local precinct commanders would come before top police officials, armed with statistics, and have their crime-fighting strategies picked apart. The Chicago Public Schools version of the program puts high school principals in the hot seat.
16 Year Old Mugged Near West High Thursday Evening
Around 6:26 p.m. on December 20th Madison police responded to the 2300 block of Eton Ridge to meet with a robbery victim. A 16-year-old told police he had just finished basketball practice and was crossing Regent Street when he observed a group of approximately seven individuals. The victim walked from Regent Street to Virginia Terrace [MAP]
to where his car was parked on Eton Ridge. As he neared his vehicle he says three from the group he had noted moments earlier came up quickly behind him. He says perpetrator #1 grabbed him and demanded money. He did not have any money. The victim says #1 next rummaged through his pockets and stole his iPhone.
No weapon was seen, and it is not known whether this robbery and another (case #152841) that happened on N. Mills Street two hours later are connected.
A Few Words on Sports
Sports provide many opportunities for students, often well beyond the physical effort, competition and team building skills. These two articles provide different perspectives on sports, particularly the climate around such activities and the people who give so much time to our next generation.
Matthew Defour:The Dane County Sheriff ‘s Office has fired Lt. Shawn Haney because he released to the Waunakee School District a report on a September underage drinking party allegedly involving Waunakee High School students.
Lester Pines, attorney for the 21-year veteran of the department who has no previous disciplinary record, said the termination was based on an ethics violation resulting from a “conflict of interest. ”
The sheriff ‘s report described a Sept. 30 incident that led to five people, including a member of the Waunakee High School football team, being charged with various misdemeanors. According to a criminal complaint filed Nov. 13, a witness told sheriff ‘s deputies investigating the party that “the majority of the Waunakee High School football team ” was at the party.
Waunakee School District Superintendent Charles Pursell did not return messages left Tuesday. He previously said several students, including football players, were disciplined in connection with the party and an elementary school teacher ‘s aide accused of hosting the party resigned. He also has said players weren ‘t disciplined before an important playoff game because the district ‘s investigation had not yet determined that any of them attended the party.The coaching lifer, much like the three-sport varsity athlete, is on its way to extinction.
But walk into a Wisconsin Lutheran boys basketball practice, and it’s obvious there is plenty of life left in that team’s 62-year-old coach.
It has been quite a season for Dale Walz and the Vikings (4-1). Walz picked up his 500th career victory Dec. 7 when the Vikings topped Hartford, 58-47. More good news came Sunday when he learned he will be enshrined in the Wisconsin Basketball Coaches Association Hall of Fame next October.
Walz, in his 35th year as a coach at the prep level, enjoys the game as much as ever. The Vikings play host to Slinger in a big Wisconsin Little Ten Conference game tonight at 7:30.
“I’ve known since college I wanted to be a high school basketball coach,” Walz said. “The challenge is always there. There’s not a day that goes by at any time of the year when I don’t think about basketball.”
Walz, an assistant principal at Wisconsin Lutheran, has remained true to himself while making subtle adjustments to how the game and kids have changed since he ran his first practice at Lakeside Lutheran in 1973.
“He’s still intense, but everybody mellows a little,” said Ryan Walz, Walz’s second-oldest son and the Vikings’ junior varsity coach. “He’s changed with the kids, which is part of the reason he’s coached as long as he has.”I learned a number of things from my coaches many (!) years ago – including Walz. Those include:
- the benefit of persistence and a willingness to keep on when most others give up, (I consider this an invaluable lesson),
- Drive, sometimes bordering on fanaticism 🙂
- The ability to push your body far beyond what was previously possible – and why that is important for one’s self confidence,
- Competing against the best is the fastest route to improvement,
- Duplicity, that is; things are not always black and white. The Waunakee story above reminded me of the fog that is athletic conduct rules (or, cheating – more), something important to understand as one travels through life,
- Growing up: the minute I realized that the NFL or NBA was not in my future, I became more interested in lifelong pursuits, including academics.
Looking back to the 1970’s, I am astonished at the level of time and effort my coaches put into a ragtag group of kids. Creating winners out of such raw material is an art.
Update: Susan Lampert Smith:Boy, that Homecoming drinking party in Waunakee has a hangover that won’t go away.
So far, it’s cost the jobs of a Waunakee teacher’s aide, at whose home the party was allegedly held, and that of a 22-year veteran of the Dane County Sheriff’s Office, who was apparently fired ratting out the miscreants to the WIAA. Of course, that might have been because his son played for the football team of Waunakee’s arch rival, DeForest.
There are some lessons to be drawn from this fiasco: First, it seems that high school sports are just a little too important to people who are old enough to know better.
DeForest wasn’t the only Badger Conference town where people were rubbing their hands together in glee over rumors that, as one witness told the cops, “the majority of the Waunakee High School football team” was at the party. The celebrants hoped the players would get punished and miss some games. But really, why celebrate an event that could have cost lives in drunken-driving crashes?
Top 10 Education Concerns
Michael Shaughnessy interviews the Washington Post’s Jay Matthews:
7) What do you see as the top ten concerns in education? What are the biggest concerns in the Washington Circle?
My concerns or Washington’s? I will go with mine:
- Low standards and expectations in low-income schools.
- Very inadequate teacher training in our education schools.
- Failure to challenge average students in nearly all high schools with AP and IB courses.
- Corrupt and change-adverse bureaucracies in big city districts.
- A tendency to judge schools by how many low income kids they have, the more there are the worse the school in the public mind.
- A widespread feeling on the part of teachers, because of their
inherent humanity, that it is wrong to put a child in a challenging situation where they may fail, when that risk of failure is just what they need to learn and grow.- The widespread belief among middle class parents that their child must get into a well known college or they won’t be as successful in life.
- A failure to realize that inner city and rural schools need to give students more time to learn, and should have longer school days and school years.
- A failure to realize that the best schools–like the KIPP charter schools in the inner cities—are small and run by well-recruited and trained principals who have the power to hire all their teachers, and quickly fire the ones that do not work out.
- The resistance to the expansion of charter schools in most school district offices.
Matthews list is comprehensive and on target.
Virtual schools here to stay; law, courts must adapt
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.Where to Educate Your Child? Madison Area is #2
Via a reader’s email: David Savageau (Contributing Editor of Expansion Management Management):
Three out of 10 of us either work in an educational institution or learn in one. Education eats up 8% of the Gross National Product. Keeping it all going is the biggest line item on city budgets. Whether the results are worth it sometimes makes teachers and parents–and administrators and politicians–raise their voices and point fingers.
In the 1930s, the United States was fragmented into 130,000 school districts. After decades of consolidation, there are now fewer than 15,000. They range in size from hundreds that don’t actually operate schools–but bus children to other districts–to giants like the Los Angeles Unified District, with three-quarters of a million students.
Greater Chicago has 332 public school districts and 589 private schools within its eight counties. Metropolitan Los Angeles takes in 35 public library systems. Greater Denver counts 15 public and private colleges and universities. Moving into any of America’s metro areas means stepping into a thicket of school districts, library systems, private school options and public and private college and universities.Here are some of their top locations:
- Washington, DC – Arlington, VA
- Madison, WI
- Cambridge-Newton-Framingham
- Baltimore -Towson
- Akron, OH
- Columbus, OH
- Albany-Schenectady-Troy, NY
- Syracuse, NY
- St. Louis, MO
- Ann Arbor, MI
The Madison area has incredible resources for our children. The key of course, is leveraging that and being open to working effectively with many organizations, something Marc Eisen mentioned in his recent article. Madison’s new Superintendent has a tremendous opportunity to leverage the community from curricular, arts, sports, health/wellness, financial and volunteer perspectives.
Related:
- Where have all the students gone?
- Madison School District small learning community Grant application(s) and history.
- My Life and Times with the Madison Public Schools.
- Update on Credit for Non-MMSD Courses.
The Madison area, which includes all of Dane County as well as immediately adjoining areas, was awarded A+ for class size and spending per pupil in public schools, and for the popularity of the city’s public library.
The greater Madison area scored an A for being close to a college town and for offering college options.
Private school options in the greater Madison area were graded at B+.
There has been some confusion in the response to the rankings because they lump together numerous school districts — urban, suburban and rural.The engineering-based program is just one example of the district’s willingness to bring college-level learning to his high school students. That effort appears to be paying off nationally, WISC-TV reported.
“It reinforces that what we’re trying to do as a district and as an area is working,” said Granberg. “And it’s getting recognized on a national level, not just a local or state level.”
“This is not a community that accepts anything but the best and so that bar is always high,” said Madison Metropolitan School District Superintendent Art Rainwater.
Rainwater also credits the ranking to teacher development programs.
“We spend an awful amount of time and an awful amount of effort working with our teachers in terms of how they deliver instruction to individual children,” said Rainwater.
He said the school district will continue to improve techniques, focusing on the needs of every student.Minneapolis School District Aims for a New Start
The Minneapolis school district has been struggling in the past few years with low student achievement, declining enrollment, money shortages, and frequent leadership changes. Now, its leaders are staking their hopes on a new strategic plan to help revitalize the system and rebuild public confidence.
At a meeting last week, the school board adopted a set of nine recommendations drawn from the plan 36K PDF. They form a broad outline for the district as it addresses complaints that have prompted hundreds of city families to sign their children up for private, charter, and nearby suburban schools.
The recommendations include raising expectations and academic rigor for students, correcting practices that perpetuate racial and socioeconomic achievement gaps, building a stronger corps of principals and teachers, and shoring up the district’s financial health.
Minneapolis’ strategic plan still must be shaped into concrete steps to be implemented in the coming months, a process made tougher by next year’s projected $11 million shortfall in the roughly $650 million budget.For a Few, the More Kids the Merrier
There’s an odd phenomenon being reported in tony enclaves across the country: highly educated, highly compensated couples popping out four or more children–happily and by choice. In Loudoun County, a suburb of Washington, four-packs of siblings rule the playgrounds. In New York City, real estate agents tell of families buying two or three adjacent apartments to create giant spaces for their giant broods. Oradell, N.J., is home to so many sprawling clans that residents call it Fouradell. In a suburb of Chicago, the sibling boomlet is called the Wheaton Four.
Of course, big families never really disappeared. Immigrants tend to have more kids, as do Mormons, some Catholics and a growing cadre of fundamentalist Christians. But in the U.S. today, the average number of children per mom is about 2, compared with 2.5 in the 1970s. While 34.3% of married women ages 40 to 44 had four or more children in 1976, only 11.5% did in 2004, according to the Current Population Survey. Though factoring in affluence can be statistically tricky, an analysis by Steven Martin, associate professor of sociology at the University of Maryland, shows that the proportion of affluent families with four or more kids increased from 7% in 1991-96 to 11% in 1998-2004. Andrew Cherlin, a sociology professor at Johns Hopkins University, speculates, “For most people, two is enough because there are so many other competing ways to spend your time and money. People prefer to have fewer kids and invest more in them. My guess is the wealthy are having more because they enjoy children, and they have the time and resources to raise them well. They don’t have to make those trade-offs.”Madison School Board Debates School Security
The Madison school board on Monday night is set to consider approving a $780,000 plan to tackle problem behavior in middle and high schools.
Principals have been complaining that behavior issues are creeping up, said Assistant Superintendent Pam Nash. That includes everything from running in the hallways to bullying to fighting.
School officials want to hire what amounts to be a behavior coach in its middle and high schools. The staff person would work with students with behavior issues, reaching out to them and contacting their parents or county agencies, as needed.At the high school level, the proposal would add four behavior and case managers to work with students who are already having problems, who may be disengaged or disruptive.
At the middle school level, the district wants to add seven and a half positive behavior coordinators who would help teach students how to be better school citizens.
“In our middle schools, I would say if there is one area that we have seen a bit of a shift in behavior, it’s bus behavior,” said Pam Nash, assistant superintendent for Madison Middle and High Schools. “We have more issues on middle school buses than any of us would like. That’s an area, that behavior piece, that we want to target as well.”
Part of the school security proposal would include adding two extra security guards at each of the city’s four high school and installing surveillance and radio equipment at middle schools.A School on The Brink
The kids at St. Peter’s School have started asking questions, and like any good first-grade teacher, Colleen O’Dwyer is a master of deflection.
“I tell them nothing’s been decided,” she was saying, as she and Courtney Carthas, a second-grade teacher, sat with seven kids for the after-school book club.
Technically, that’s true, as the final decision to close the Dorchester parochial school has not been made by Cardinal Sean O’Malley. But the stars and the numbers are aligned against St. Peter’s, and it is only a matter of time.
To describe St. Peter’s as a victim of consolidation in an archdiocese trying to stem a decline in enrollment in its urban schools is to completely miss the importance of the building and those who people it. Sitting on Bowdoin Street, at the foot of Meetinghouse Hill, St. Peter’s is more than a school. It is a haven, a sanctuary, four stories of red-brick proof that all is not lost in one of the city’s toughest neighborhoods.
St. Peter’s has 156 students, but with its after-school programs serves about 400 children who live around Meetinghouse Hill. One of them is Alaister Santos, a chatty, personable first-grader. When they were preparing to commemorate the first anniversary of the death of the great Barry O’Brien, the school’s biggest private benefactor, Alaister had only one question: “Where was he shot?”OU study looks into how parenting affects teens
AP:
An ongoing study done by the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center is examining how parenting and other factors affect the long-term behavior of teenagers.
The “youth asset study” is being funded by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Researchers are looking at how 17 “assets,” including parental involvement and religion, factor into teenage behavior.
During the past five years, researchers have interviewed 2,200 Oklahoma City-area children and their parents, looking into risky behaviors and the level of parental involvement. The goal of the $4 million study is to determine which assets strongly correlate with well-adjusted teens and, conversely, those assets that don’t seem to affect teens involved in activities including drug use and sex.
“The most important analysis will be to see how these (behaviors) change over time … and how the presence or absence of assets contributes to those changes,” said principal investigator Roy Oman, an associate professor at the OU College of Public Health.New! Improved! It’s School! – Marketing Schools
In an age of media saturation and ubiquitous advertising, some schools are trying professional marketing campaigns to sell the notion that ‘school is cool.’
In most places kids may not be overjoyed to attend school, but they tolerate it. It’s a stepping stone, their parents remind them over and over, to better things, like college, an interesting, well-paying job and a stable family life. In other places, especially poor neighborhoods, though, kids don’t regard school as a necessary evil but rather as a burden. For a lot of kids in poor neighborhoods, school is definitely not cool.
“It’s no secret,” says New York City schools chief Joel Klein. “All you have to do is ask kids in these areas and they’ll tell you: school is not their thing. They don’t want to be identified as being good at it. Studying is not something they want to be seen doing,” he says.
So Klein is setting out to sell school achievement to schoolchildren—much in the same way that kids are sold soda, breakfast cereal or pop music. With the help of an as yet unnamed advertising agency, he’s launching a slick multimedia campaign complete with celebrity pitchmen, viral marketing schemes, free videos and give-away prizes aimed at “rebranding” academics.Matching Top Colleges, Low Income Students
Jim Carlton Wall Street Journal Last year, when Amherst College welcomed 473 new students to its idyllic campus, 10% of them came from QuestBridge. But QuestBridge is no elite private school. It’s a nonprofit start-up in Palo Alto, Calif., that matches gifted, low-income students with 20 of the nation’s top colleges. In return, the schools […]
Certain high schools have a remarkable record of sending their students to elite colleges
As college-application season enters its most stressful final stretch, parents want to know if their children’s schools are delivering the goods — consistently getting students into top universities.
It’s a tricky question to answer, but for a snapshot, The Wall Street Journal examined this year’s freshman classes at eight highly selective colleges to find out where they went to high school. New York City private schools and New England prep schools continue to hold sway — Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass., is a virtual factory, sending 19 kids to Harvard this fall — but these institutions are seeing some new competition from schools overseas and public schools that focus on math and science.
The 10 schools that performed best in our survey are all private schools. Two top performers overall are located in South Korea. Daewon Foreign Language High School in Seoul sent 14% of its graduating class to the eight colleges we examined — that’s more than four times the acceptance rate of the prestigious Horace Greeley High School in Chappaqua, N.Y.
No ranking of high schools is perfect, and this one offers a cross-section, rather than an exhaustive appraisal, of college admissions. For our survey, we chose eight colleges with an average admissions selectivity of 18% and whose accepted applicants had reading and math SAT scores in the 1350-1450 range, according to the College Board: Harvard, Princeton, MIT, Williams, Pomona, Swarthmore, the University of Chicago and Johns Hopkins. Some colleges that would otherwise have met our criteria were excluded from our study because information on their students’ high-school alma maters was unavailable. All the colleges in our survey received a record number of applications last year.National Math Panel Unveils Draft Report
Students’ success in mathematics, and algebra specifically, hinges largely on their mastering a focused, clearly defined set of topics in that subject in early grades, the draft report of a federal panel concludes.
The long-awaited report of the National Mathematics Advisory Panel is still very much in flux. Members of the White House-commissioned group staged their 10th, and what was supposed to be their final, meeting in a hotel here Nov. 28, though they indicated that numerous revisions to the document are yet to come.
The panel spent most of a day debating and rewriting a 68-page draft of the report. The draft makes recommendations and findings on curricular content, learning processes, training and evaluation of teachers, instructional practices, assessment, and research as those topics apply to math in grades pre-K through 8.
“International and domestic comparisons show that American students have not been succeeding in the mathematical part of their education at anything like a leadership level,” the report says. “Particularly disturbing is the consistent finding that American students achieve in mathematics progressively more poorly at higher grades.”
The 19-member panel has reviewed an estimated 18,000 research documents and reports as part of its work, which began in 2006. But its draft document also bemoans the paucity of available research in several areas of math—including instruction and teacher training. Government needs to do more, it says, to support research with “large enough samples of students, classrooms, teachers, and schools to identify reliable effects.”
The draft attempts to define the core features of a legitimate school algebra course as opposed to one, the panelists said, that presents watered-down math under that course title. Topics in an algebra course should include concepts such as symbols and expressions, functions, quadratic relations, and others, it notes.
The working report also spells out specific concepts in math that are too often neglected in pre-K through grade 8 math instruction generally, such as fractions, whole numbers, and particular elements of geometry and measurement.
“We don’t spend enough time on them and we don’t assess them,” panel member Camilla Persson Benbow, an educational psychologist at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tenn., said of fractions. “[They’re] really not well mastered by schoolchildren.”
In arguing in behalf of a more focused curriculum in elementary and middle schools, the panel lists several “benchmarks for critical foundations” in prekindergarten through 8th grade math, leading to algebra. The goal is to develop fluency with fractions, whole numbers, and other topics. The panel drew from a diverse assortment of documents, including the 2006 “Curriculum Focal Points,” published by the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, as well as Singapore’s national standards and a number of U.S. state math standards.In Praise of “Thought Competition” (Writing, Math and other Academic Competitions)
Monday: After a long day at his New York City private school, Ben, 16, heads to my creative writing lab to work on his heartfelt memoir about his parents’ bitter divorce. Tuesday: Alison, 15, rushes from her elite private school in the Bronx to work on her short screenplay about a gifted, mean and eccentric boy. Lily, 13, pops in whenever she can to polish her hilarious short story narrated by an insomniac owl.
Ben, Alison and Lily, along with another few dozen who attend my afterschool writing program, also attend top-notch New York private schools that cost upwards of $25,000 a year. So why, one might wonder, do these kids need an extracurricular creative writing coach? The answer is simple, though twisted: Their schools — while touting well-known athletic teams — are offshoots of the “progressive education” movement and uphold a categorical belief that “thought competition” is treacherous.
Administrators of these schools will not support their students in literary, science or math competitions, including the most prestigious creative writing event in the country: the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards. So we at Writopia Lab help these kids to join the 10,000 young literati from across the country who are hurrying to meet the event’s January deadline, as well as deadlines for other competitions.
For decades now, psychology and pedagogy researchers have been debating the impact of competition on young people’s self-esteem, with those wary of thought competition taking the lead. Most New York parents of public or private school students have felt the awkward reverberations of this trend — which avoids naming winners — when Johnny takes home a certificate for “participation” in the school’s science fair. (Do you hang that one up on the wall?)
But some, and ironically those who attend some of the most desirable schools in the region, feel the reverberations in deeper, more painful ways. “Two years after my son left a school that prohibited him from entering a national math competition,” says one mother, “he still writes angry essays about why the jocks in his former school were allowed to compete throughout the city while he wasn’t allowed to win the same honors for his gifts.” Sam, her son, felt uncool in the eyes of his peers, and undervalued (and sometimes even resented) by the administration.
Mel Levine, a professor at the University of North Carolina and one of the foremost authorities in the country on how children learn, believes the impact of the collaborative education movement has been devastating to an entire generation. When students are rewarded for participation rather than achievement, Dr. Levine suggests, they don’t have a strong sense of what they are good at and what they’re not. Thus older members of Generation Y might be in for quite a shock when they show up for work at their first jobs. “They expect to be immediate heroes and heroines. They expect a lot of feedback on a daily basis. They expect grade inflation, they expect to be told what a wonderful job they’re doing,” says Dr. Levine.Links:
In school reform, billions of dollars — but not much bang
When Mayor Bloomberg took control of the city’s schools, he made a solemn promise to raise student achievement and rein in a notoriously inefficient and money-wasting school system. In fact, in his January 2003 speech unveiling his administration’s Children First reforms, the mayor suggested that the $12 billion then going to the schools was sufficient to bring about academic improvement. That’s because he and Schools Chancellor Joel Klein were now going to “make sure we get the most value for the school system’s dollar.”
Five years later, we have new, unimpeachable data on the schools that allows us to assess whether the mayor’s promise to deliver a much bigger education bang for the taxpayers’ buck has been fulfilled.
The short answer: not by a longshot. First, let’s examine the dollar side of the equation. The 2003 budget for the schools, Bloomberg’s first, was $12.5 billion, including pension costs and debt service. About $1.2 billion of this total came from federal education funds, another $5.6 billion from the state, and $5.6 billion from direct city contributions. The current budget, including pension and debt service, stands at $19.7 billion. This represents an increase of $7 billion – more than 50% – in total education spending in five years.America’s Most Obese Cities
To better understand the local and state implications of the obesity epidemic, we ranked the nation’s heaviest cities. In doing so, we discovered states with multiple offenders, metropolitan areas with expanding waistlines and a high representation of Southern cities. Worse yet, after claiming the title of the most sedentary city, Memphis, Tenn., has also ranked first as the country’s most obese.
Behind the Numbers
To determine which cities were the most obese, we looked at 2006 data on body mass index, or BMI, collected by the Centers for Disease Control’s Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System, which conducts phone interviews with residents of metropolitan areas about health issues, including obesity, diabetes and exercise.
In this case, participants report their height and weight, which survey analysts use to calculate a BMI. Those with a BMI between 18.5 and 24.9 are considered at a healthy weight, those with a BMI between 25 and 29.9 are considered overweight, and those with a BMI of 30 or higher are considered obese. About 32% of the nation is obese, according to the Centers for Disease Control; Memphis ranked above the national average at 34%.How to Fix Struggling High Schools
I think the people running our high schools, as well we parents, need to stop making compromises that sustain the cycle of failure. Kind and thoughtful educators and parents, such as the ones in Parker’s articles, are trying to get through each day without hurting too many feelings or forcing too many confrontations. When the choice is between letting standards continue to slip or making a scene, few people want to be drama queens, which is too bad.
The best inner-city educators begin each day knowing they are going to have to confront apathy again and again. They shove it away as if it were a kidnapper trying to steal their children. To succeed, a high school like Coolidge needs a unified team of such people, who follow the same standards of regular attendance, daily preparation for school, high achievement and attention and decorum in the classroom.
It sounds impossible, but it’s not. There are inner-city schools right now, including some charter, religious and private schools that operate that way. It takes strength and intelligence and humor and love for young people, and an abhorrence for the limp compromises that have created such sickly schools as Coolidge.
I asked several expert educators how they would fix schools like that. Michael A. Durso, principal of Springbrook High School in Silver Spring, said: “These problems did not occur overnight and will not be resolved easily or in a short time.” Michael Riley, superintendent of the Bellevue, Wash., schools, said: “Anyone who thinks there is a quick fix, that taking a couple of dramatic steps will make this situation better overnight, is kidding himself.”Seeking a ‘Gold Standard’ in D.C. Charter Education
In the charter school movement’s endless quest to recruit students, some of the best independent public schools support each other by word of mouth. The KIPP DC: KEY Academy, a high-performing middle school, has sent 15 graduates to Washington Mathematics Science Technology, one of the better charter high schools. But KIPP teachers steer their graduates away from some charter schools.
“If I said which they were, the principals would kill me,” said Susan Schaeffler, KIPP DC’s executive director.
Now, some charter leaders in the city that is a national epicenter for their movement are planning to take the next step in this sifting process. They say they want to create a “gold standard designation,” to publicly identify for the first time which charters are doing the most to raise teaching quality and academic achievement for low-income students.
Ramona Edelin, executive director of the D.C. Association of Chartered Public Schools, likened the initiative to a certification system to show “what high quality really means in terms of children of color from impoverished backgrounds, which is the vast majority of the students charter schools educate here.”Madison School District School Security Discussion
Madison School Board: Monday evening, November 12, 2007: 40MB mp3 audio file. Participants include: Superintendent Art Rainwater, East High Principal Al Harris, Cherokee Middle School Principal Karen Seno, Sennett Middle School Principal Colleen Lodholz and Pam Nash, assistant Superintendent for Secondary Schools.
A few notes:
- First 30 minutes: The City of Madison has agreed to fund police overtime in the schools. Johnny Winston, Jr. asked about supporting temporary “shows of force” to respond to issues that arise. Maya Cole asked what they (Administrators) do when staff choose not to get involved. East High Principal Al Harris mentioned that his staff conducts hall sweeps hourly. Sennett Principal Colleen Lodholz mentioned that they keep only one entrance open during recess.
- 52 minutes: Al Harris discussed the importance of consistency for staff, students and parents. He has named an assistant principal to be responsible for security. East now has data for the past year for comparison purposes. Additional assistant principals are responsible for classrooms, transitions and athletics.
- 55 minutes: Art Rainwater discussed District-wide procedures, a checklist for major incidents and that today parents are often informed before anyone else due to cell phones and text messaging.
- Recommendations (at 60 minutes):
- Pam Nash mentioned a strong need for increased communication. She discussed the recent West High School community forums and their new personal safety handbook. This handbook includes an outline of how West is supervised.
- 68 to 74 minutes: A discussion of the District’s equity policy vis a vis resource allocations for special needs students.
- 77 minutes – Steve Hartley discusses his experiences with community resources.
- 81+ minutes: Steve Hartley mentioned the need for improved tracking and Art Rainwater discussed perceptions vs what is actually happening. He also mentioned that the District is looking at alternative programs for some of these children. Student Board Representative Joe Carlsmith mentioned that these issues are not a big part of student life. He had not yet seen the new West High safety handbook. Carol Carstensen discussed (95 minutes) that these issues are not the common day to day experiences of our students and that contacts from the public are sometimes based more on rumor and gossip than actual reality.
I’m glad the Board and Administration had this discussion.
Related:Students in Boston’s Pilot School Outpacing Others
When Lindsey Jones was deciding which high school to attend in a district that offers nearly three dozen options for secondary education, she was swayed by the Boston Community Leadership Academy’s claims that it would prepare her well for college. She didn’t realize how well until she started classes at the 400-student academy, part of a network of small schools the Boston district established more than a decade ago to provide alternatives outside its traditional system of large, comprehensive high schools and selective exam schools.
A four-year study of that network, released this week, shows that the academy and the nine other “pilot” high schools in the 56,000-student district are seeing more students through to graduation than regular high schools here. They also have significantly higher promotion and graduation rates, fewer dropouts, and fewer disciplinary issues.
Conceived in 1994 as the district’s response to charter schools, pilot schools have won praise from educators, business leaders, and community groups for providing school choice and innovation within the city’s public school system.
Still, some observers say their results are due more to the schools’ ability to choose or remove teachers, lower proportions of high-needs students, and the control they have in selecting students or weeding out those who are not likely to succeed in them.Strong Results, High Demand, a Four Year Study of Boston’s Pilot High Schools 4.3MB PDF.
Educational Rewards
Paul Peterson & Matthew Chingos:
For-profit management of public schools is still in its infancy, and many wonder whether it can have a positive effect on student learning. In Philadelphia, that idea has been put to the test. The results, as we report in a paper issued last Friday by the Harvard Program on Education Policy and Governance, would not surprise Adam Smith.
The 18th-century economist explained that those who need to make a profit have strong incentives to do well by their customers. But can Smith’s theory actually work when one is talking about educating students in the most challenging of urban schools — at the very heart of a major metropolis? The answer appears to be yes.
When for-profit management of public schools was first proposed in Philadelphia six years ago, many in that city were extremely skeptical, if not aggressively hostile. So the Philadelphia School Reform Commission, the entity responsible for the innovation, gave only the 30 lowest performing schools to for-profit companies, while another 16 were given to nonprofit organizations, including two of the city’s major universities (Temple and the University of Pennsylvania). Others were reorganized by the school district itself.Revisiting Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Health Outcomes At and After Birth
Intergroup differences in health can reflect on and result in unequal life opportunities. In particular, racial and ethnic disparities in birth outcomes have long been a concern for both researchers and policy makers. Differences in health at birth are especially critical because they may lead to disparities in health as well as socioeconomic conditions throughout one’s whole life. This dissertation contributes to three aspects of the existing literature regarding race/ethnicity and birth outcomes: First, it uses a propensity scoring estimation method to reassess the differences in birth outcomes across racial/ethnic groups. The result suggests the use of OLS may not be a practical concern, although propensity score estimation shows its own advantages and thus should be used as sensitivity analysis to complement OLS. Second, an examination of biracial infants shows that father’s race and ethnicity are relatively unimportant, but the presence of unreported fathers has a strong association with birth outcomes, which might be a source of bias in existing data, and a significant signal of potential post-birth health problems. Finally, this research investigates the competing power of different birth outcome measures as predictors of infant mortality. The results show that the importance of risk factors and birth outcome measures varies by race/ethnicity, gender, and time, which suggests a need to tailor prevention and education efforts, especially during the postneonatal period. These results, taken in combination, lead to the conclusion that policy makers need to not only continue focusing on closing the recognized gap between black and other racial/ethnic groups in birth outcomes, but also pay more attention to subpopulations that are traditionally not considered as at risk and certain time periods that are previously regarded as less risky.
Parents prove charter schools work
The magic of charter schools isn’t so much the innovation they strive to achieve. The magic is the effect these schools have on parents.
At the Nuestro Mundo charter school on Madison’s East Side, you have to win a lottery to get your child into the program. This is true even for parents like me who live just a few blocks from Allis Elementary School, where Nuestro Mundo (which means “Our World ” in Spanish) is housed.
Imagine that — parents flooding a city school with enrollment applications for their kids. This is the opposite trend that Madison fears and must avoid.
Though rarely discussed in a frank way, Madison is increasingly nervous about middle- to upper-income parents losing faith in city schools and moving to the suburbs. As so many Madison leaders love to say: “As the schools go, so goes the city. ” Madison doesn ‘t want to become Milwaukee.Related: Where have all the students gone?
“Identical Strangers’ Explore Nature vs. Nurture”
What is it that makes us who we really are? Our life experiences or our DNA? Paula Bernstein and Elyse Schein were born and raised in New York City. Both women were adopted as infants and raised by loving families. They met for the first time when they were 35 years old and found they were “identical strangers”: they had been separated as infants as part of a secret research study of identical twins designed to examine the question of nature verses nurture. “When the families adopted these children, they were told that their child was already part of an ongoing child study. But of course, they neglected to tell them the key element of the study, which is that it was child development among twins raised in different homes,” Bernstein said. The results of the study, that ended in 1980, have been sealed until 2066 and given to an archive at Yale University. Of the 13 children involved in the study, three sets of twins and one set of triplets have discovered one another. The other four subjects of the study still do not know they have identical twins.
