Happy and healthy new year to all…. and now let’s start off the new decade with, appropriately for an education blog, a quiz.
I thought about doing one of those top 10 education story of the year or decade lists, but realized it would be repetitive: Budget cuts hurt K-12; budget cuts squeeze community colleges big-time; budget cuts and endowment losses bring pain to colleges and universities … etc.
A quiz sounded more fun. Here are some unusual education stories you may not have read in 2009. Take a look and guess from where they came.
The quiz follows, and the answer sheet will be in a separate posting, complete with links, below this one. You can find it here.
Let me know how you do, and send in other stories that you think would be interesting to share.
At Landover middle school, philosophy is part of lunch menu
Schools these days focus mostly on preparing students for tests of reading and math, but during lunchtime at Kenmoor Middle School in Landover, the youngsters sitting in a small circle were tackling the really deep questions: Ethics. Fairness. How to split dessert.
All three issues turned up as the seventh- and eighth-graders in the Philosophy Club tackled the question of the day: “Imagine that you are babysitting a 6-year-old and an 8-year-old. The parents have left some treats for dessert: two bananas, a lollipop and an ice cream bar. The parents’ instructions are to allow each child to choose one treat. Unfortunately, both kids want the ice cream bar. How can you distribute the goods fairly?”
Someone suggested that they split the ice cream bar in half, but other students had other ideas.
More required P.E.–a bad idea from good people
Sometimes it is the smartest, most concerned policymakers who do the most harm to schools. My favorite recent example is the Healthy Schools Act, a bill introduced by D.C. council member Mary M. Cheh and Council Chairman Vincent C. Gray two weeks ago.
Cheh and Gray are good people trying to address a national epidemic of childhood obesity and insufficient physical activity. In Cheh’s press release she notes that 18 percent of D.C. high school students are obese, 70 percent fail to meet the U.S. Centers for Disease Control recommended levels of physical activity and 84 percent do not attend physical education classes daily. It is their solution that troubles me.
I am unqualified to comment on the food parts of the bill. I have never written about nutrition. I would be embarrassed to reveal the amount of crackers, cookies and ice cream I eat each day. I can only wonder how D.C. will pay for the required fresh produce from local growers in all schools, and how they will get students to eat it.
The bill’s physical education requirements are its worst part– a nifty-sounding reform that many of the District’s best principals and teachers will declare one of the dumbest ideas they ever heard.
Nobel physicist Smoot smarter than a 5th-grader
For much of his life, astrophysicist George Smoot III has been what he calls a “scientific outlaw.”
It was his passion for searching and investigating outside the mainstream that won the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory scientist the Nobel Prize for physics in 2006 for evidence supporting the Big Bang Theory. Even among his nerdy peers, the effusive Smoot was on the fringes, playing football in high school, trekking in Nepal, attending the Academy Awards, listening to music like Jay Z and Avril Lavigne on his iPod and volunteering as a sound tech for Jerry Garcia back in the day..
How Michigan education reforms will unfold is unclear
How sweeping education reforms signed into law Monday will be implemented in Michigan remains unclear to area school officials.
Gov. Jennifer Granholm on Monday signed reforms that make it easier to close failing schools, link teacher pay to performance and hold school administrators accountable. The bills also raise the dropout age from 16 to 18, starting with the Class of 2016; allow up to 32 more charter schools to open each year; give professionals from areas other than education an alternative way to become teachers, and allow for cyber-schools to educate students who have dropped out online.
State Superintendent Mike Flanagan said up to 200 low-performing schools could end up under state control as a result of the new laws.
The legislation is part of Michigan’s effort to win money from the Obama administration’s Race to the Top competition tied to education reform. Michigan could get up to $400 million if it’s among the winners.
Local school boards and unions now face a Thursday deadline to sign a “Memorandum of Understanding” that indicates their support for the reforms. The memorandums are to be included with the state’s Race to the Top application. School districts where the board and union do not sign an agreement risk losing their share of the money.
UFT And Elected Officials: Charter Schools Must Be Public Schools, Serving All Students
With growing appeals for changes in New York’s charter school law, prominent elected officials joined the United Federation of Teachers today in a call for major reforms which would ensure that charter schools become public schools in the fullest meaning of the term — not private schools supported with public funds.
State Senator John Sampson, leader of the Senate’s majority Democratic Conference, and New York City Comptroller John Liu joined UFT President Michael Mulgrew in this call. State Senators Eric Schneiderman and Toby Stavisky and State Assembly members Michael Benedetto, Alan Maisel, Jose Peralta, Adam Clayton Powell, IV and Linda Rosenthal were present and participating in the call.
Among the proposed changes are:
a mandate for charter schools to serve the same proportion of the neediest students as the local community district in which they are located;
Clusty Search: Leo Casey.
Michigan Teaching School Tries Something New
America’s teachers’ colleges are facing some pressure to reinvent themselves.
Education Secretary Arne Duncan has been leading the assault, with a series of speeches calling for better teacher training. Duncan says it’s crucial that education schools revamp their curricula so they can help replace a wave of baby boomers who will soon retire from teaching.
One university is trying to rebuild its teacher-training program from the ground up.
At the University of Michigan School of Education, Dean Deborah Ball and her faculty have taken apart their training program and reassembled it, trying to figure out what skills teachers really need.
Katie Westin, a senior at the University of Michigan and a student teacher, says that when she compares notes with teachers-in-training at other schools, it’s clear that her program is more hands-on.
“We expect people to be reliably able to carry out that work. We don’t seem to have that same level of expectation or requirement around teaching,” Ball says.
School Daze
FWIW, I’ve started a blog to provide timely updates and more depth on Madison Metropolitan School District issues and initiatives.
http://lucymathiak.blogspot.com/
Monthly Update From Madison BOE President Arlene Silveira
Reading Programs: The Board received a presentation on Reading Recovery in the district. A number of questions were raised about our reading programs and how programs worked together to ensure we were meeting the needs of all of our students. Therefore, the Board requested a full evaluation of all reading programs at the elementary level so we have a better understanding of the big reading picture.
Superintendent Goals: As part of the Superintendent evaluation process the Board, in conjunction with the Superintendent, developed goals for the Superintendent. There are a lot of details associated with each goal. The Goal area and targeted Results of each goal are below:
1. Goal Area: Increase the percentage of students who are proficient and advanced in reading. Results: Increased proficiency and advanced proficiency on WKCE or its replacement, other district assessment or standards-based tests. By 2012-14, 100% of students will meet this target.
2. Goal Area: Increase the percentage of students at all grade levels who attend school at 96% or more. Results: Increase attendance for students in every grade, with a specific focus on the students in key transition grades. By 2014-15, 96% or more of students will meet this target.
3. Goal Area: Increase the percentage of students on track for credit attainment for graduation in four years. Results: Increased percentage of students on track for credit attainment for graduation. By 2014-15, 90% or more will meet this target.
4. Goal Area: Completion of a review of the District’s organizational structure and organizational systems/processes and develop a plan to align the work of the Administration to the District’s mission and Strategic Plan. Results: This goal will be assessed by Board approval and successful Administrative implementation of a Plan that aligns the work of the Administration with the District’s mission and Strategic Plan and to principles of quality organizations, and is fiscally sustainable over time.
5. Goal Area: Board relations. Results: Development and implementation of a sustainable system for improving and demonstrating effective communication with the Board of Education.
6. Goal Area: Implement the Strategic Plan action steps targeted for year one as approved by the Board of Education. Results: A report in June 2010 outlining progress toward implementation of the action steps including any evaluation of new programs that has occurred using the approved performance measures.
7. Goal Area: Leadership development goal. To focus on encouraging the heart in others and challenging the process.
What’s Up in January?: 2010 will be a busy year. Items of interest on our January agenda: Decision on the implementation of 4-year-old kindergarten; Race to the Top funds; initial presentation of an environmental charter middle school; core performance measures associated with the strategic plan; and kick-off of the 2010-11 budget process.
Thanks for all you do for our children. Please let us know if you have any questions or comments at board@madison.k12.wi.us .
Elmbrook gets UW-Waukesha classes: “Professors Save Students the Trip”
Amy Hetzner, via a kind reader’s email:
By the time the first bell rings at Brookfield Central High School, most of the students in Room 22 are immersed in college-level vector equations, reviewing for their final exam on the Friday before Christmas.
Senior Lea Gulotta, however, looks on the bright side of waking early every morning for the past semester so she can take a Calculus 3 class taught at the school by a college professor.
“We get to sleep in for a month,” she said, noting that the regular high school semester won’t end until mid-January.
There’s another positive to Brookfield Central’s agreement with the University of Wisconsin-Waukesha continuing education department, which brought the advanced mathematics class to the high school this year as part of the state’s youth options program. Under youth options, school districts pick up the costs of courses at Wisconsin colleges if they don’t have similar offerings available to students.
Instead of seeing students spend extra time commuting and attending class on a college campus, the arrangement placed the professor in the high school to teach 11 students who had completed advanced-placement calculus as juniors. Two of the students in the class come from the Elmbrook School District’s other high school, Brookfield East.
Elmbrook pays UW-Waukesha the same tuition that it would pay if its students chose to attend the college campus on their own, she said.
Related: Janet Mertz’s tireless crusade on credit for non-Madison School District classes.
Preliminary Draft of the Milwaukee Mayoral Control Legislation:
LRB 3737/P2 Milwaukee Transforms Education for All Our Children (TEACH) Act
via a kind reader’s email 180K PDF:
Milwaukee Public Schools Reading & Math Proficiency 15K PDF.
Related: Madison School District Reading and the Poverty Achievement Gap.
The Replacements: On Substitute Teaching and Days Out of the Classroom
TWO years ago, during lunch with a second-grade teacher in the Chicago area, I mentioned that I was going to substitute teach. The teacher — I’ll call him Dan — started into a story about his own experience with a substitute, which is easily summarized: Dan left a lesson plan; the sub didn’t follow it. So, he ended by asking, how hard can substitute teaching be?
I smiled, said nothing and bit into my Reuben.
Over the next two years, I would learn — as I subbed once a week for a variety of classes, including kindergarten, sixth grade, middle-school social studies, high-school chemistry, phys ed, art, Spanish, and English as a second language — that Dan’s story is standard teacher fare. Last time I heard it, though, I didn’t bite my sandwich or my tongue.
As much as I became frustrated by the lack of training and support, I was most angered by how many days teachers were out of their classrooms. Nationwide, 5.2 percent of teachers are absent on any given day, a rate three times as high as that of professionals outside teaching and more than one and a half times as high as that of teachers in Britain. Teachers in America are most likely to be absent on Fridays, followed by Mondays.
This means that children have substitute teachers for nearly a year of their kindergarten-through-12th-grade education. Taxpayers shell out $4 billion a year for subs.
I subbed for many legitimately ill teachers and for many attending educational conferences. But my first assignment was to fill in for a sixth-grade teacher who went to a home-and-garden show. My last was for a first-grade teacher who said she needed a mental health day because her class was so difficult.
Making College ‘Relevant’
THOMAS COLLEGE, a liberal arts school in Maine, advertises itself as Home of the Guaranteed Job! Students who can’t find work in their fields within six months of graduation can come back to take classes free, or have the college pay their student loans for a year.
The University of Louisiana, Lafayette, is eliminating its philosophy major, while Michigan State University is doing away with American studies and classics, after years of declining enrollments in those majors.
And in a class called “The English Major in the Workplace,” at the University of Texas, Austin, students read “Death of a Salesman” but also learn to network, write a résumé and come off well in an interview.
Even before they arrive on campus, students — and their parents — are increasingly focused on what comes after college. What’s the return on investment, especially as the cost of that investment keeps rising? How will that major translate into a job?
Creativity in Schools in Europe: A survey of Teachers
The Institute for Prospective Technological Studies: CACHIA Romina, FERRARI Anusca, KEARNEY Caroline, PUNIE Yves, VAN DEN BERGHE Wouter, WASTIAU Patricia – 1MB PDF:
An overwhelming majority of teachers are convinced that creativity can be applied to every domain of knowledge and that everyone can be creative. They also subscribe to the idea that creativity is a fundamental skill to be developed in schools, even if they are more ambiguous about how it can be taught, and less sure still about how it can be assessed.
Survey respondents were asked to express their opinion about how they view creativity, as a general concept as well as in the school context, on a scale of 5 ranging from ‘strongly agree’ to ‘strongly disagree’. The results are displayed in Figure 1.
Literature reports that very often people, including teachers, refer to creativity as being related exclusively to artistic or musical performances, as springing from natural talent, and as being the characteristic of a genius. These myths about creativity stifle the creative potential of students and create barriers to fostering creativity in schools.
To a large extent, the teachers that took part in our survey have an understanding of creativity which goes against such myths. Almost all teachers who took part in the survey are convinced that creativity can be applied to every domain of knowledge (95,5%) , and to every school subject. More than 60% are even strongly convinced of this. They confirm this view very clearly by disagreeing to a large extent with a statement restricting creativity to the realm of artistic and cultural expression (85%).
Top-tier schools widen the net Elite institutions seek non-Chinese speakers
Two elite English-medium schools offering the local curriculum have drawn up bold expansion plans that will enable them to admit children from non-Chinese-speaking families.
St Paul’s Co-educational College and Diocesan Boys School are setting up boarding houses and International Baccalaureate programmes and have devised adapted Chinese-language programmes for pupils who are not native speakers of Chinese.
The moves will permit the Direct Subsidy Scheme schools, which require all pupils to study Chinese language, to widen their nets to include children from English-speaking families, as well as foreign pupils and ethnic minority children.
Currently, almost all pupils at the schools, which are obliged to offer the local curriculum and will run the IB Diploma alongside it, have Chinese as their mother tongue and most are permanent residents.
The science of science education
More minority students need to be lured into the sciences. One program has been a resounding success.
At most universities, freshman chemistry, a class I’ve taught for nearly 40 years, is the first course students take on the road to a career in the health professions or the biological or physical sciences. It’s a tough course, and for many students it’s the obstacle that keeps them from majoring in science. This is particularly true for minority students.
In 2005, more than two-thirds of the American scientific workforce was composed of white males. But by 2050, white males will make up less than one-fourth of the population. If the pipeline fails to produce qualified nonwhite scientists, we will, in effect, be competing against the rest of the world with one hand tied behind our backs.
We’ve been able to survive for the last several decades in large measure because of the “brain drain” — the fact that the most able students from other countries, particularly China and India, have come here to study science at our best universities and, in many cases, have stayed to become key players in our scientific endeavors.
Can Inner-City Prep School Succeed? Answer Is YES
It was Deadline Day at YES Prep North Central, the day college applications were supposed to be finished, the day essays, personal statements and a seemingly endless series of forms needed to be slipped into white envelopes, ready for submission.
The day the school’s first graduating class would take one leap closer to college.
The seniors inside Room A121 were sprinting, scurrying and stumbling to the finish line. They hunched over plastic banquet tables, brows furrowed and eyed fixed on the screens of Dell laptop computers. Keyboards clattered, papers rustled and sighs swept across the room like waves of nervous energy.
So much was riding on this.
True education reform starts with good teachers
There is a lot of talk about education reform, but let’s face it: True education reform takes place once the classroom door closes. A recent report by the National Council on Teacher Quality (“Human Capital in Seattle Public Schools”) reinforces this point. The most effective education reform begins and ends in the classroom. Nothing we do at the state level can replace the value of a superior teacher.
So what is the measurement of a premier educator? It’s more than just a student’s test scores.
The best teachers value their students as individuals. Danyell Laughlin, an English teacher in Silverdale, works tirelessly to show students that each one “of them is valuable and has valuable things to share.” Every child is a priority, and because that child is valued, that child values learning.
Our best teachers foster a respect for self and others, a love for learning, and a child’s capacity to dream and achieve those dreams.
The best teachers also believe that each and every child can learn. Their belief in their students is contagious.
The search for a good teacher
Is a good teacher hard to find?
Statistically, no. A good teacher is easy to find if you check their SAT scores, their resumes and then see if their students’ standardized test scores beat the average and close the gap. But a really good teacher–one that isn’t just perfect on paper, but is also effective in the classroom–is harder to seek out. No one can pinpoint what exactly makes a good teacher, if not their results from the students.
So the search begins. The Gates Foundation, a large proponent for education reform, has dedicated $2.6 million towards finding what exactly makes a good, effective teacher. The study, called the Measures of Effective Teaching (MET), will last two years, beginning with the 2009 school year, with the goal to figure out how to measure the effectiveness of a teacher without having to rely on the performance results from the students’ standardized test scores.
This study is going beyond just measuring test scores. They realize that it is going to be hard to take into consideration what all a teacher does in the classroom. They’ve upped the ante by asking for volunteer teachers to sign up their classrooms to be observed by way of videotape, their students’ test scores and also by taking test themselves.
As complex investments plunge, 5 Wisconsin school districts pressured over loans
As five Wisconsin school districts face increased pressure to return millions of dollars in loans, the $200 million in investments they undertook with money from that debt are almost entirely without value and unlikely to pay back when they mature in 2013, according to representatives for the districts.
The districts said in a statement to the Journal Sentinel that one of the investments had stopped paying interest two months ago after a dramatic decline in value. The statement did not indicate which investment had ceased paying interest, but one of the schools’ attorneys, Stephen Kravit, had earlier identified it as an investment devised by the Royal Bank of Canada known as Sentinel Limited Series 2.
The five districts involved – Kenosha, Kimberly, Waukesha, West Allis-West Milwaukee and Whitefish Bay – invested $115 million in Sentinel 2 through trusts, using a combination of existing assets or borrowed money.
The $10 million invested by Whitefish Bay and $5 million by Kimberly were the entire amounts they invested in complicated transactions undertaken in 2006 on the advice of bankers from Stifel, Nicolaus & Co. Inc. The West Allis-West Milwaukee and Waukesha districts invested $40 million each in Sentinel 2 and Kenosha invested $20 million.
Madison’s Assistant Superintendent for Business Services, Erik Kass, formerly worked for the Waukesha School District.
DeKalb County schools: Cars and credibility now in question
Clearly, the great car deals that DeKalb school officials arranged for themselves were wrong. As the AJC reports in an exclusive investigation:
Patricia “Pat” Pope, whose involvement in multimillion-dollar school construction projects is under investigation by county authorities, purchased a black 2005 Ford Explorer from the school district for $5,442 — about one-third the car’s market value at the time, according to county documents obtained by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
Pope also asked the county’s maintenance department to overhaul the car with new tires and a paint job before she bought it, according to a state agency that investigated the purchase. The department did about $2,500 worth of work on the car.
The arrangement appears similar to a 2007 car purchase by DeKalb schools Superintendent Crawford Lewis. Pope also played a major role in that transaction, documents show.
The Georgia Department of Audits and Accounts investigated both purchases and determined that the difference between the price Pope and Lewis paid for the vehicles and the cars’ fair market values amounted to a “gratuity,” or extra compensation, which Georgia law forbids.
In D.C. teacher assessments, details make a difference
I am still receiving e-mails about my Nov. 23 column on Dan Goldfarb, the first teacher to share with me the results of an evaluation under the new D.C. teacher assessment plan, IMPACT.
Goldfarb was not happy with his score, 2.3 out of a possible 4 points. He said the rules forced his evaluator to focus on trivia, such as whether he had been — to quote the IMPACT guidelines — “affirming (verbally or in writing) student effort or the connection between hard work and achievement.” He said the evaluator told his principal of his complaints about the program and about D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee, violating confidentiality.
Goldfarb had legitimate gripes. But his evaluation was a tiny sample of this innovative attempt to rate teachers. When I sought evaluations from teachers not as opposed to IMPACT, several said they would send theirs, but so far only one has.
That evaluation differed from Goldfarb’s in intriguing ways. The score was almost perfect, 3.92 out of 4. The analysis, however, seemed somewhat out of sync with the thinking behind the program.
Just the facts, please, as we ponder Milwaukee Public Schools’ change
The state Senate’s Education Committee will hold a public hearing at the Milwaukee Public Schools central office, 5225 W. Vliet St., at 10 a.m. Tuesday to hear people’s thoughts about proposals to change the way MPS is governed.
Some people – Gov. Jim Doyle and some legislators – seem to think this hearing is a significant step toward legislative action. I’m dubious, for two reasons:
1. Count me as one who thinks the prospects are not good for action in the Legislature on any major changes, especially the idea of giving control of MPS to Milwaukee’s mayor. The Democratic legislative leaders made that clear by not even taking up proposals in December. Republicans aren’t in the mood to help Mayor Tom Barrett, a Democratic candidate for governor. (Today’s political trivia question: How many members of the Senate Education Committee are from Milwaukee? Zero.)
2. I’m tired of the political posturing, on all sides, about change in MPS. With a few exceptions, so little of it is attached to real commitment to doing better. And so much of it pays little attention to the facts, with ideology, belief or just plain incorrect statements trumping careful, focused use of real, live facts.
Landing a Job of the Future Takes a Two-Track Mind
If you’re gearing up for a job search now as an undergraduate or returning student, there are several bright spots where new jobs and promising career paths are expected to emerge in the next few years.
Technology, health care and education will continue to be hot job sectors, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ outlook for job growth between 2008 and 2018. But those and other fields will yield new opportunities, and even some tried-and-true fields will bring some new jobs that will combine a variety of skill sets.
The degrees employers say they’ll most look for include finance, engineering and computer science, says Andrea Koncz, employment-information manager at the National Association of Colleges and Employers. But to land the jobs that will see some of the most growth, job seekers will need to branch out and pick up secondary skills or combine hard science study with softer skills, career experts say, which many students already are doing. “Students are positioned well for future employment, particularly in specialized fields,” Ms. Koncz says.
Career experts say the key to securing jobs in growing fields will be coupling an in-demand degree with expertise in emerging trends. For example, communications pros will have to master social media and the analytics that come with it; nursing students will have to learn about risk management and electronic records; and techies will need to keep up with the latest in Web marketing, user-experience design and other Web-related skills.
Madison School District’s Infinite Campus Teacher Tool and Parent/Student Portal Report: Approximately 2/3 of Middle and High School Parents don’t use it
This report summarizes data on the use of Infinite Campus teacher tools and the Parent and Student Portal. Data come from a survey conducted among all teachers responsible for students within the Infinite Campus system and an analysis of the Infinite Campus data base. Below are highlights from the report.
About half of all middle and high school teachers responsible for providing grades to students are using the grade book tool.
Grade book use has declined over the past year at the middle school level due to the introduction of standards- based grading. In addition to the change in grading approach, the grade book tool in Infinite Campus does not handle standards-based grading as efficiently as traditional grading.
Lesson Planner and Grade book use is most common among World Languages, Physical Education, and Science teachers and less common among fine arts and language arts/reading teachers.
Grade book and other tool use is most common among teachers with less than three years of teaching experience. Seventy percent ofteachers responding to the survey within these years of experience category report using the tools compared with about half of all other experience categories.
Most of the other teacher tools within Infinite Campus, e.g., Messenger, Newsletters, reports, etc., are not being used due to a lack of familiarity with them.
Many teachers expressed interest in learning about how they can use other digital tools such as the Moodie learning management system, blogs, wikis, and Drupal web pages.
About one third of parents with high school students use the Infinite Campus Parent Portal. Slightly less than 30 percent of parents of middle school students use the Portal.
Having just been introduced to elementary schools this fall, slightly more that ten percent of parents of students at this level use the Portal.
Parents of white students are more likely to use the Portal than are parents of students within other racial/ethnic subgroups.
About half of all high school students have used the Portal at one time this school year.
About one in five middle school students have used the Portal this year.
Variation in student portal use is wide across the middle and high schools.
Follow up is planned during January 2010 with staff on how we can address some ofthe issues related to enhancing the use of these tools among staff, parents, and students.
This report is scheduled to be provided to the Board of Education in February 2010.
$4,431,115 Two Year Cost for 4K in Madison
Madison School District Superintendent Dan Nerad 650K PDF:
The Board ofEducation over the past two months has received information relative to the programdesignofa4-kprogramandsomebudgetscenariosrelativetothe4-kprogram. The budget scenarios showed the Community Model Option where the community providers provided to the district the amount necessary to support their programs and two concepts for allowing this fee to decrease.
Over the past month, administration and the community providers have met to discuss the amount to be brought forward as a fee per child for the community early childhood centers. The amount within your packet reflects that amount the early childhood community has asked ofthe district.
Information Contained in your packet: Budget Impact:
The budget impact sheet is reflective of all costs associated with the operation ofa community based model for four-year-old kindergarten. This model reflects the latest numbers proposed by the community for the per child reimbursement, along with an escalator of 3% each year. The model also reflects the latest information from the DPI, that shows we are currently not likely to be eligible to receive the 4-k startup grants with the State of Wisconsin budget. These numbers show a negative budget balance of $4,188,069 in year 1 and a negative budget balance of $243,046in year two, for a total two year negative balanceof $4,431,115. This becomes the target for further information within your packet relative to “Financing Options” for 4-k.
Rhee vows to shield D.C. teachers, supplies amid budget cuts
D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee has vowed to protect funding for teachers and classroom supplies as she prepares to cut the system’s overall budget by $22 million because of shrinking tax revenue and the end of one-time federal stimulus spending.
The fiscal 2011 budget, which begins in October, is projected to shrink from $779 million to $757 million. Spending would fall most sharply in the “school support category,” including security, food service and after-school programs. Rhee’s central office would also face cuts.
But Rhee said this week that financial constraints won’t limit her efforts to transform historically poor academic performance in the 45,000-student system.
“Obviously financial times like this make things tough, but no, they won’t stop us from being successful,” Rhee said in an e-mail Thursday.
Race to the Top Insights: Part 1
Mchele McNeil:, via a kind reader’s email
I spent the morning in a U.S. Department of Education technical-assistance planning seminar on Race to the Top, and have picked up a lot of interesting tidbits. Many states are in attendance–including Hawaii, Mississippi, New Mexico, North Dakota, and Tennessee (including education commissioner Tim Webb), just to name a few. Interestingly, Texas is also in attendance, I’m told.
The seminar will continue well into the afternoon, but so far, here are the insights I’ve picked up about this $4 billion competition:
Race to the Top Director Joanne Weiss emphasized that there will be a lot of losers in Phase 1 of the application, so states shouldn’t worry if they want to wait until the second round of competition. “We promise there will be plenty of money left in Phase 2,” she said.
Madison School District’s Strategic Objectives Performance Measures
Madison Superintendent Dan Nerad 600K PDF:
Attached are the revised performance measures we will use to help monitor progress in meeting the Strategic Objectives Action Steps. Goals for the WKCE scores remained at 100% success rate as that is the requirement in No Child Left Behind legislation. Other goal areas were reduced to 95% as the target.
Related: Madison School District’s Strategic Plan.
Madison School District Talented and Gifted Education Plan Update
Identification Criteria – Several action steps within Goal 1 are based on the need for a clearly defined criteria and process to identify students as talented and gifted. The Talented and Gifted (TAG) Division staff has established and confirmed identification criteria including: 1) consideration of students’ levels of academic performance; 2) grade level performance data employing the historical two-year above grade level as a marker; and 3) consideration of several student data sources, including input and information from teachers and family. Work will continue into the spring semester to incorporate these data sources to create a student profile and, pending individual student performance level indicators, a Differentiated Education Plan (DEP) for students.
Monitoring Model – TAG staff continues work with the Research and Evaluation Department to create a model for student data analysis to aid in identification. These models will be research- based and provide the information needed to make identification, programming, and additional diagnostic decisions pertaining to individual students. It has been determined that the Student Intervention Monitoring System (SIMS) can be used as the tracking and reporting system. It currently containing much of the student information needed, including assessment and other data from Infinite Campus, that will make up the student profile component of a TAG student report. T AG staff will use SIMS in the current form to develop student profiles and Differentiated Education Plans (DEPs). Next steps include customizing reports in SIMS to meet future documentation/Plan development needs=
Milwaukee school takeover is baffling political battle
Why would Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett, running for governor, continue an apparently losing fight on a controversial local issue that doesn’t gain him any votes statewide while tearing apart his political base at home?
Barrett’s attempt to seize control of Milwaukee Public Schools from the elected School Board failed to muster enough support in the Legislature recently to even bring up the issue after Gov. Jim Doyle called a special session. The Legislature adjourned without discussing mayoral control.
Meanwhile, the Milwaukee School Board, under the leadership of President Michael Bonds, has narrowed its national search for a new superintendent down to three finalists — two African-Americans and a Latino — all with experience in urban school districts.
Extending an olive branch, Bonds invited Barrett to personally interview the three finalists and make a recommendation to the board.
He also named Barrett to a community panel advising the board on the selection. The diverse committee includes Alphonso Thurman, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee dean of education, state Rep. Annette Polly Williams, former Mayor Marvin Pratt, private philanthropist Julia Uihlein and prominent Latino, Hmong, American Indian and union leaders.
Women in the workforce Female power
Across the rich world more women are working than ever before. Coping with this change will be one of the great challenges of the coming decades
THE economic empowerment of women across the rich world is one of the most remarkable revolutions of the past 50 years. It is remarkable because of the extent of the change: millions of people who were once dependent on men have taken control of their own economic fates. It is remarkable also because it has produced so little friction: a change that affects the most intimate aspects of people’s identities has been widely welcomed by men as well as women. Dramatic social change seldom takes such a benign form.
Yet even benign change can come with a sting in its tail. Social arrangements have not caught up with economic changes. Many children have paid a price for the rise of the two-income household. Many women–and indeed many men–feel that they are caught in an ever-tightening tangle of commitments. If the empowerment of women was one of the great changes of the past 50 years, dealing with its social consequences will be one of the great challenges of the next 50.
Commentary on Charter Schools in the Madison School District
Madison School Board Vice President Lucy Mathiak:
On Monday, the Board of Education will have a presentation by the planning group that is proposing an environmentally-focused project-based charter middle school. The Badger Rock Middle School is the first charter proposal to come before the board since the Studio School debacle a few years back. From what we are hearing in the community, it is not likely to be the last (more on that later).
Proposed Charter: Badger Rock Middle School
What we will be deciding now: The board will be asked to approve the group’s initial proposal, which will form the basis of a planning grant application to the Department of Public Instruction. If the planning grant is awarded, the group will carry out additional work necessary to develop and design the charter school in greater detail, and develop a proposal that would come before the board requesting approval of the creation of the school and its charter.
When Straight is a bit Narrow
This at least was the view of Martin Heidegger when he gave the title Holzwege – literally Woodpaths – to his first postwar collection of essays. As he wrote in the foreword: “In the wood are paths that wind along until they end quite suddenly in an impenetrable thicket.” To be on a woodpath is a conversational German expression that means to be on the wrong track, a way that goes nowhere. But Heidegger’s point is that nowhere might turn out to be somewhere. “Woodcutters and foresters,” after all, “are familiar with these paths” and none is quite identical to another. Woodpaths don’t lead you definitively out of the woods but, then, by learning woodways and woodcraft, you might come to see the wood as somewhere full of possibility.
In my years as a university teacher I found that students increasingly wanted Roman roads or motorways rather than woodpaths. They wanted what were called “clear goals and objectives”, narrower than my old-fashioned idea of nurturing a more humane person; or rather, they wished to be presented with the shortest, quickest way of acquiring the grades they needed … to get other grades. They seemed to want to be given the answers, rather than the means to explore and generate questions.
“I’ve been in Detention for years and I’m a Teacher”
When I began teaching in New York City 37 years ago, if you were reported for serious misconduct, you were sent to a Board of Education office until the matter was resolved. But as the system grew, removing teachers from the classroom became standard for even the most trivial offence. The board’s offices got so crowded they began leasing buildings around the city to use as “reassignment centres”, nicknamed “rubber rooms”.
As many as 800 to 1,000 teachers are in rubber rooms on any given day; it’s an academic Guantánamo Bay. Many go stir-crazy. Brooklyn’s Chapel Street rubber room is huge but so crowded that people are almost falling out of the windows.
Easy Money For College Can Mess You Up, Man
When the government subsidizes something, we wind up with more of it. When it subsidizes something heavily–and combines that subsidy with an aggressive campaign encouraging consumption of that thing from the presidential bully pulpit–we wind up with a lot more of it.
Oceans of federal money gush into higher education every day, and every administration promises more to come. That gush obscures the real demand for educated workers. The result is lots of cashiers and waitresses with B.A.s, and lots of people with student loan debt that’s tough for them to repay. For most students, the federal subsides geared toward nudging them to consume more education actually result in the acquisition of more education debt.
On the corporate side (and the non-profit side, for that matter) the subsidy encourages institutions to shape their practices around grabbing as much of that “free” money as possible. As critics of for-profit education never fail to note:
What inspired the founder of Room To Read
John Wood’s epiphany, almost to his own embarrassment, took place in a Nepalese monastery. As he describes it in his book, Leaving Microsoft to Change the World, the then high-flying computer executive plucked up the courage to leave corporate life and start an educational charity over a brass bowl of piping hot yak-butter tea surrounded by 30 chanting monks. “Oh, no, this is going to sound like a terrible cliché,” he wrote. “Western guy walks into monastery and changes the course of his life.”
In truth, Wood’s life had begun to change several months before. Aged 35, on a trekking holiday to Nepal, he had been appalled at the near-absence of books in the mountain schools. That, plus a growing disenchantment with his life as a corporate warrior-cum-slave, persuaded him to return to Nepal the following year with thousands of books. Books for Nepal, as Room to Read was called before its rapid international expansion forced a change of name, started out small. But as soon as Wood had broken from Microsoft, he began to apply the lessons he had learnt in business to his fledgling charity.
Tracking An Emerging Movement: A Report on Expanded-Time Schools in America
Fifteen years ago, the National Education Commission on Time and Learning explained that the American school calendar of 180 six-hour days stands as the “design flaw” of our education system, for schools could not be expected to enable children to achieve high standards within the confines of the antiquated schedule. Today, a small but growing number of schools have begun to overcome this “flaw” by operating with school days substantially longer than the six-hour norm and, in many cases, a calendar that exceeds the standard 180 days.
The National Center on Time & Learning (NCTL), with the support of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, has produced this groundbreaking report on the state of what can be called “expanded- time schools.” Through this effort, NCTL has helped to define and bring together this previously unidentified category of schools, while still recog- nizing the considerable diversity among this group. Extracting and analyzing information from NCTL’s newly created database of over 650 schools that feature an expanded day and/or year, this report describes the various trends emerging among these schools, including issues related to costs, time use and student outcomes. The searchable database is available on our website, www.timeandlearning.org.
Seattle Times Editorial “Wrong on Everything”
The Seattle Times has a sort of Year-In-Review editorial about education in today’s paper. Nearly every statement in the editorial is either incorrect, unsubstantiated, or misguided.
“Academic standards were raised” They were? Where? How? By whom? I didn’t see anyone raising any standards this year.
“The Legislature amended the Basic Education Act, a giant leap forward in an 18-year education-reform effort.” Yes, they voted for it, but they didn’t fund it and they are now in Court saying that they are already fulfilling their obligation to funding education, so they are denying it. The amended act is lip service – hardly a step forward, let alone a giant leap.
They said that the delay in making high stakes math and science tests a graduation requirement was a gaffe. No, the gaffe has been miseducating students in math and science for the past ten years. These tests were supposed to be used to hold adults accountable, not students. Where are the adults who have suffered negative consequences for these failures? Why punish the students, the people with the least power to influence the system?
High School Career Academies: A 40-Year Proven Model for Improving College and Career Readiness
Career academies are a time-tested model for improving academic achievement readying students for both college and careers, and engaging the world outside of school in the work of reforming them. As lawmakers work to craft policies that will dramatically improve American public education, career academies should be recognized for their effectiveness and included in reform efforts.
K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: Wisconsin’s Budget Deficit Climbs to $2.71Billion
The state of Wisconsin ended its fiscal year last June with a $2.71 billion budget deficit, a new state report shows.
That’s an 8 percent increase over last year’s deficit of $2.5 billion. The report shows the financial challenges ahead for the next state leader who will take over in January 2011 after Gov. Jim Doyle leaves office.
The figures on the shortfall in the state’s main account differ from those in most state reports, which simply figure how much cash the state has. This report, which is prepared according to generally accepted accounting rules, also takes into account spending that the state has promised to make in the future.
A week before Christmas, an important report appeared on a Wisconsin government website. There were no press releases from Madison politicians. No headline news stories.
Yet no public official, taxpayer, or citizen can afford to ignore the report’s bottom line: According to its just-released financial statements, state government closed its 2008-09 books with a $2.71 billion deficit in its general fund.
To many readers, this might come as a surprise. By law, state government is supposed to balance its budget. On paper, it does. However, for more than a decade, governors and legislators of both parties have “balanced” budgets through use of accounting maneuvers, timing delays, borrowing, and billions in one-time money.
When the state controller, a CPA, prepares the state’s official financial statements, he must follow generally accepted accounting principles, or GAAP. That means he must reverse the budget gimmicks and accurately represent the state’s true financial condition. When he does this, the budget’s black ink turns red.
Berkeley High May Cut Out Science Labs
The proposal would trade labs seen as benefiting white students for resources to help struggling students.
Berkeley High School is considering a controversial proposal to eliminate science labs and the five science teachers who teach them to free up more resources to help struggling students.
The proposal to put the science-lab cuts on the table was approved recently by Berkeley High’s School Governance Council, a body of teachers, parents, and students who oversee a plan to change the structure of the high school to address Berkeley’s dismal racial achievement gap, where white students are doing far better than the state average while black and Latino students are doing worse.
Paul Gibson, an alternate parent representative on the School Governance Council, said that information presented at council meetings suggests that the science labs were largely classes for white students. He said the decision to consider cutting the labs in order to redirect resources to underperforming students was virtually unanimous.
Science teachers were understandably horrified by the proposal. “The majority of the science department believes that this major policy decision affecting the entire student body, the faculty, and the community has been made without any notification, without a hearing,” said Mardi Sicular-Mertens, the senior member of Berkeley High School’s science department, at last week’s school board meeting.
La Shawn Barber has more.
Related: English 10.
A remarkable journey to the Rose Parade for blind marching band
Dan Abendschein, via a kind reader’s email:
Their journey to the 121st Rose Parade is a marvel even to the Ohio State School for the Blind’s marching band leader Dan Kelly.
“It’s very exciting,” said Kelly, who also teaches technology at the school. “It started small, but it’s grown and snowballed – and here we are.”
Back in 1998, the Ohio State School for the Blind’s music program involved only vocal music. Now, just over a decade later, the school’s marching band will perform in one of the world’s top showcases for marching bands – the first blind band ever to march in the Rose Parade.
The band was one of 19 that performed at the two-day Bandfest, which ended Wednesday at Pasadena City College’s football field. It featured all of the marching bands that will appear in the Rose Parade.
But the event also gives the bands a chance to showcase their performance abilities in a larger arena, performing formations they will not be able to do at the parade.
Happy New Year!
Father Invents ‘VerbalVictor’ App To Help Disabled Son ‘Speak’ Thru iPad
Victor Pauca will have plenty of presents to unwrap on Christmas, but the 5-year-old Winston-Salem boy has already received the best gift he’ll get this year: the ability to communicate.
Victor has a rare genetic disorder that delays development of a number of skills, including speech. To help him and others with disabilities, his father, Paul, and some of his students at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem have created an application for the iPhone and iPad that turns their touch screens into communications tools.
The VerbalVictor app allows parents and caregivers to take pictures and record phrases to go with them. These become “buttons” on the screen that Victor touches when he wants to communicate. A picture of the backyard, for example, can be accompanied by a recording of a sentence like “I want to go outside and play.” When Victor touches it, his parents or teachers know what he wants to do.
New York Department of Education creed to marginalize PTA fund raising overturned
They’re not quite gambling halls or casinos, but public schools might have to get a Games of Chance License from the state if they want to continue some of their fundraisers.
According to a new proposal, which will be voted on later this month, schools cannot hold raffles, such as 50-50s or Chinese auctions, unless they have the license from the state Racing and Wagering Board, which also involves getting an ID number and filling out numerous forms.
The changes, updated yesterday, followed an earlier proposal that banned raffles all together. The policy, along with parents’ concerns, was outlined in an Advance story on Monday.
City officials said the policy was originally written by the Department of Education’s legal department, but once they realized the impact it would have on PTAs, raffles were approved once again.
Blueprint For Connecticut Public Schools
This state does well in schooling better-off suburban children. But it fails low-income children, who are mostly concentrated in city schools. Poor students in the fourth and eighth grades in Connecticut score three grade levels below their more comfortable peers — the worst achievement gap in the nation — even though this state is among the highest per-pupil spenders in the nation.
Connecticut’s goals for the next decade, starting in 2011, should be to end that terrible distinction and reach the No. 1 spot on “the nation’s report card,” the National Assessment of Educational Progress. Gov.-elect Dan Malloy’s choice of education commissioner will be critical.
The legislature and Board of Education made commendable strides in 2010 by increasing pre-K funding and adding more rigorous high school graduation requirements in math, science and languages, among other things.
Why Washington area schools are the best
The end of the year is a time to count blessings. Let’s start with the underappreciated fact that the Washington area is the best place in the country for children to both learn the mysteries of science, math, English and history, and to become comfortable with stark differences in race and culture.
I’ve looked all over the country for schools–particularly high schools–that have a critical mass of committed parents and educators of various backgrounds who are determined to create a lively learning environment for every child. It was hard to find that when I lived in Pasadena, Calif., which was still reeling from massive white flight after a desegregation fight. It wasn’t much better when we moved to Westchester County, N.Y., where schools were very short of minorities and low-income people.
Coming to Washington, it took time to see the difference. As usual, everyone complained about public education. That’s an American pastime. But the more high schools I visited here, the more I realized this was—at least relatively speaking– the Shangri-la of American education. There were more schools in one place than I had ever seen that fit my profile—well-mixed, well-run, with families committed to strong instruction. They shrugged off neighbors who, betraying unexamined biases, wondered how they could send their kids to THOSE schools.
As college costs rise, loans become harder to get
When Daniel Ottalini entered the University of Maryland in 2004, his family had an array of choices to cover the cost — cheap student loans, a second mortgage at low rates, credit cards with high limits and their own soaring investments.
By the time his younger brother, Russell, started at the University of Pittsburgh this fall, the financial crisis had left the family with fewer options. Russell has had to juggle several jobs in school, and the money he could borrow came with a much higher interest rate that could climb even further over time.
The upheaval in financial markets did not just eliminate generous lending for home buyers; it also ended an era of easy credit for students and their families facing the soaring cost of a college degree.
To pay for higher education, most Americans had come to rely on a range of financial products born of the Wall Street boom. Nearly all of these shrank or disappeared in the storm that engulfed the stock and debt markets.
A National Survey on Mothers’ Attitude on Fathering
National Fatherhood Initiative:
On December 1, 2009, National Fatherhood Initiative (NFI) released Mama Says: A National Survey of Mothers’ Attitudes on Fathering, the first-ever national survey taking an in-depth look at how today’s mothers view fathers and fatherhood.
Conducted online by the University of Texas Office of Survey Research, Mama Says surveyed 1,533 mothers over the age of 18 with at least one child in the home under the age of 18. They were asked a series of over 80 questions dealing with a range of topics, such as their general opinions about fatherhood, views on work-family balance, and obstacles to good fathering.
The study is a companion piece to NFI’s 2006 study, Pop’s Culture: A National Survey of Dads’ Attitudes on Fathering. The report was co-authored by Dr. Norval Glenn, PhD. and Dr. Barbara Dafoe Whitehead, PhD.
SIDS report: Many doctors don’t stress back-sleeping guidelines
Although the practice is viewed as essential to keeping babies safe, nearly a third of all caregivers still don’t regularly put infants on their backs to sleep, according to a new report published Monday.
Despite guidelines from pediatricians and a national educational campaign in place since the mid-1990s, researchers found that while there was a dramatic increase in back-sleeping during the first years of the push, the percentage of parents following the recommendations has been virtually unchanged since 2001 – holding at just over 70 percent – although that’s still a substantial improvement from the 25 percent rate in 1993.
Pediatricians and the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development called for the change in sleeping practices in the face of a large body of evidence that placing infants on their backs reduced the risk of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, the leading cause of infant death in the first year of life in the United States.
Foreign Language Teaching in U.S. Schools: Results of a National Survey
CAL has completed a comprehensive survey of K-12 foreign language programs nationwide, describing how our schools are meeting the need for language instruction to prepare global citizens. For comparative purposes, the survey has collected statistical data in 1987, 1997, and 2008. Elementary and secondary schools from a nationally representative sample of more the 5,000 public and private schools completed a questionnaire during the 2007-2008 school year. The 2008 survey results complement and enhance the field’s existing knowledge base regarding foreign language instruction and enrollment in the United States.
The report of the survey, Foreign Language Teaching in U.S. Schools: Results of a National Survey, provides detailed information on current patterns and shifts over the past 20 years in languages and programs offered, enrollment in language programs, curricula, assessment, and teaching materials, qualifications, and trainings, as well as reactions to national reform issues such as the national foreign language standards and the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) legislation. The survey results revealed that foreign language instruction remained relatively stable at the high school level over the past decade but decreased substantially in elementary and middle schools. Moreover, only a small percentage of the elementary and middle schools not teaching languages planned to implement a language program within the next two years. The findings indicate a serious disconnect between the national call to educate world citizens with high-level language skills and the current state of foreign language instruction in schools across the country. This report contains complete survey results, along with recommendations on developing rigorous long sequence (K-12 programs whose goals are for students to achieve high levels of language proficiency, and are of interest to anyone interested in increasing language capacity in the United States. 2009.
The truth about Arne Duncan and the Chicago schools
My colleague Nick Anderson, the Post’s national education reporter, has done a wonderfully balanced and nuanced job of answering a question I am often asked: If Arne Duncan is such a hotshot education secretary, then why are the Chicago schools he once led so bad?
Anderson’s front page story Tuesday provides all the relevant facts—disappointing test score gains, watered-down Illinois state standards, Duncan turnaround projects that didn’t work. But he also puts it in context, showing where Duncan forced some improvements and how daunting Chicago’s problems are.
He also makes it clear that you can’t expect anyone to transform our urban school systems in a big way quickly. The improvements that occur are always on the margins. Those districts will never rise to the level of their suburban neighbors. But you can see Duncan has been working at this very hard for many years, and (if you look at what he has actually said rather than what sloppy writers like me have suggested) he has been honest about how far his home town still needs to go.
Getting an education–it’s about power
We all know that securing a good education for your children is strongly influenced by clout. Do we have it or not? The mayor’s kid usually gets more attention than the grocery checker’s kid. If you have taken the trouble to make friends with the principal, you are more likely to get your way than if you never appear in the building, or even PTA meetings.
But rarely have I seen a better illustration of this than my colleague Emma Brown’s terrific piece leading the Monday Metro section about how much Army and Marine Corps families are gaining from those services’ decisions to back their members when they seek help for children with disabilities.
Among other examples, she tells how Karen Driscoll, wife of a Marine Corps officer, was told by officials of a northern San Diego County school district that they could only offer a classroom aide for her son ten hours a week. The child’s previous school in Fairfax County had provided 21 hours and told her that was what she deserved under federal law.
Most parents seeking special education services know what that means. They are in for a long period of testy meetings, long emails, expensive private evaluations and maybe even legal action before they get what they need, if they ever do. But because of a new Marine Corps initiative, Driscoll had the services of a caseworker and a special education attorney in her meetings with school officials, and soon got what she was looking for.
Teacher Support for Compensation Reform Surveys Show Less Experienced Teachers Are More Supportive of Differentiated Compensation
Download this memo (pdf)
Policymakers have grappled in recent years with strategies for improving the effectiveness of the teaching workforce, particularly that segment serving students in poverty. There is a growing consensus that state and district systems for attracting, evaluating, developing, compensating, and retaining effective teachers are in need of a major overhaul. Three polls find that inexperienced teachers are open to reforms to one of these systems–compensation systems.
A number of promising compensation reform programs have shown that changes in payment structures often include upgrades to other systems as well, such as those needed for evaluating and developing teachers. It is unclear whether inexperienced teachers will continue to support differentiated compensation as they become more experienced, but these findings indicate that the time is ripe for targeting differentiated compensation to new teachers at the federal, state, and district level.
Targeting these new teachers is critical. Reforming the profession in ways that appeal to them could help increase the retention rates of the effective teachers in this group. Several forms of differentiated compensation reward the most effective teachers, hopefully increasing the proportion of highly effective teachers in the profession. And it is likely that these teachers will be more supportive of differentiated compensation as veterans if they have a positive experience with it early on in their career. If districts want to reform compensation systems more broadly, it is important that they eventually have veterans on board with these reforms.
30% of Teens Report Abuse in Relationships
“All I remember was landing face first on the floor,” said Tina, 18.
Tina – disguised for her safety – says the violence spiraled out of control during her six-month relationship with her 17-year-old boyfriend.
“I remember he got on top of me and he was slapping me back and forth,” Tina said. “And he said, ‘next time you walk by me, acknowledge me. Say that you love me.'”
Raped, beaten and berated on a regular basis, she stayed with him, believing the abuse was part of a normal relationship.
“I knew my aunt went through it so I thought, you know, if she stuck it out with him, with her husband for years, that I should just do the same and keep my mouth shut,” she added.
When another 15-year old – who did not want to be indentified – met a cute boy in one of her high school classes – she was smitten.
A much-needed message from state’s education commissioner
David Steiner, New York’s new education commissioner, gave a stirring address last week about where he hopes to lead public education in this state. He’s setting his sights very high, and both his message and his method are laudable. The State Education Department has needed an effective communicator at the top.
“Teaching well is a deeply complex professional activity,” Steiner told the Board..
In East Bay, where pollution goes, health problems follow
Sandy Kleffman & Suzanne Bohan:
In some hardscrabble East Bay neighborhoods, people die of heart disease and cancer at three times the rates found just a few miles away in more well-to-do communities.
Children living near busy freeways in Oakland are hospitalized for asthma at 12 times the rate of young people in Lafayette’s wooded housing tracts.
The East Bay’s striking health inequities extend far beyond life expectancy and involve more than differences between the rich and the poor. Disparities exist up and down the East Bay’s socioeconomic ladder, according to data compiled by the Alameda County Public Health Department for Bay Area News Group.
Middle-class communities in Dublin, Castro Valley and Fremont have higher heart disease death rates than wealthier neighborhoods in Walnut Creek and Berkeley, but lower rates than struggling areas of East Oakland and North Richmond.
These facts have led public-health leaders to advocate to equalize opportunities for healthful living, instead of focusing only on a never-ending battle to treat disease.
Silicon Valley companies’ help needed to shore up math education
Thirteen-year-old Kayla Savage was failing math. Like many of her classmates in middle school, she hated the subject. Stuck in a large seventh-grade class with a teacher who had little time to offer individual help, Kayla was lost among rational numbers and polynomials.
Her frustration led to a phobia of math, an all-too-common affliction that often starts in middle school and threatens to derail students’ future math studies in high school and chances for college.
Kayla is like thousands of students across America who struggle with math. The struggle in California is borne out by this grim U.S. Education Department statistic: Students in California rank 40th in eighth-grade math, a critical year in math learning that sets the path for math success in high school and beyond.
In Santa Clara County, only about 39 percent of eighth-graders meet the California standard for Algebra I proficiency. One study showed that less than one-third of eighth-graders have the skills or interest to pursue a math or science career. Yet these careers are the drivers of our future.
Silicon Valley Education Foundation.
Notes on the history of information overload
I spent most of today tracking down some information about the history of information overload, so I though I’d blog it in case someone else is looking into this. Also, I may well be getting it wrong, in which case please correct me. (The following is sketchy because it’s just notes ‘n’ pointers.)
I started with Alvin Toffler’s explanation of info overload in the 1970 edition of Future Shock. He introduces the concept carefully, expressing it as the next syndrome up from sensory overload.
So, I tried to find the origins of the phrase “sensory overload.” The earliest reference I could find (after getting some help from the Twitterverse, which pointed me to a citation in the OED) was in coverage of a June, 1958 talk at a conference held at Harvard Medical School. The article in Science (vol 129, p. 222) lists some of the papers, including:
Educators face new challenges
The decade began with ambitious plans for raising the bar on public education and student achievement.
After winning office as the nation’s 43rd president, George W. Bush introduced a federal program, dubbed No Child Left Behind, aimed at improving education through higher standards and greater accountability.
For the better part of the decade, educators and school administrators worked diligently to implement the program and meet its expectations.
More recently, however, a recession of historic proportions has taken a heavy toll on the public school system, prompting deep budget cuts, and in some cases, a rethinking of what schools will offer.
“Our future depends on our ability to prepare the next generation for success in the hyper-competitive global economy,” said Jack O’Connell, state superintendent of public instruction. “In order to deliver the quality education our students need, we must get off this budget roller coaster and find a stable, long-term solution to education funding. Our future depends on it.”
Kindness taught in Seattle school’s online class
If you recently found a shiny gold dollar coin in downtown Bellevue, thank the kindness class. Ditto if you stumbled upon a piece of glass art in Pioneer Square, or a lottery ticket taped to a bus shelter with a note saying, “This may be your lucky day.”
Since mid-September, the 250 people in Puget Sound Community School’s online course learned about kindness by practicing it.
Along the way, they took emotional risks, repaired relationships, improved their outlook on the world, and realized that kindness is contagious.
Times Guest Column on STEM Education
There was a guest column in the Seattle Times by Bonnie Dunbar, the president and CEO of The Museum of Flight and a former astronaut, encouraging the community to support STEM education efforts.
The column itself was the usual pointless pablum that we typically see in these guest columns. Lots of goals with no action plan. The interesting bit, as usual, comes in the reader comments in which members of the community writes that we DON’T need more engineers because there are lots of them standing in unemployment lines and that engineering jobs are being outsourced to India and China or to people from India and China who come to the U.S. on guest worker visas.
This article is also written completely without reference to the ineffective math education methods adopted over the past ten years.
Rx for Hunger: Affordable Housing
Children’s HealthWatch Boston:
A new report by Children’s HealthWatch and the Medical-Legal Partnership | Boston finds that housing plays a significant role in protecting young children from food insecurity and the health risks of being seriously underweight. This new report confirms that increased support for subsidized housing must be part of the strategy for ending childhood hunger.
Indicators of School Crime & Safety: 2008
National Center for Education Statistics:
A joint effort by the Bureau of Justice Statistics and National Center for Education Statistics, this annual report examines crime occurring in school as well as on the way to and from school. It provides the most current detailed statistical information to inform the Nation on the nature of crime in schools. This report presents data on crime at school from the perspectives of students, teachers, principals, and the general population from an array of sources–the National Crime Victimization Survey, the School Crime Supplement to the National Crime Victimization Survey, the Youth Risk Behavior Survey, the School Survey on Crime and Safety and the School and Staffing Survey. Data on crime away from school are also presented to place school crime in the context of crime in the larger society.
Test Data Help Cloud Duncan’s Legacy as Chicago Schools Chief
Soon after Arne Duncan left his job as schools chief here to become one of the most powerful U.S. education secretaries ever, his former students sat for federal achievement tests. This month, the mathematics report card was delivered: Chicago trailed several cities in performance and progress made over six years.
Miami, Houston and New York had higher scores than Chicago on the National Assessment of Educational Progress. Boston, San Diego and Atlanta had bigger gains. Even fourth-graders in the much-maligned D.C. schools improved nearly twice as much since 2003.
The federal readout is just one measure of Duncan’s record as chief executive of the nation’s third-largest system. Others show advances on various fronts. But the new math scores signal that Chicago is nowhere near the head of the pack in urban school improvement, even though Duncan often cites the successes of his tenure as he crusades to fix public education.
On Teacher Mentoring
Every morning before their classes start at North Middle School in Menomonee Falls, teachers Becky Zimprich and Kristi Seston have a chance to catch up with each other.
Everything from instructional questions about how to handle specific issues with students to more technical inquiries about how to navigate the district’s grading system is fodder for the discussions between the two. The fellow teachers of English language learners were paired up by the Menomonee Falls School District’s mentoring program for Zimprich’s first year teaching in the district.
“I find the mentoring program awesome,” said Zimprich, who has 16 years teaching experience, mostly in elementary and technology education. “It doesn’t matter if you’re a new teacher or experienced teacher. It helps you acclimate to the school. It helps you acclimate to the district.”
Menomonee Falls Superintendent Keith Marty is a consultant for the Madison school District’s “Strategic Planning Process“.
Technology Leapfrogs Schools and Jurisdictions
Plainfield East High School doesn’t have a senior class. But it clearly possesses a new staple of American education: “sexting.” I urge a surely chagrined Principal Anthony Manville to buy several large boxes of fig leaves.
A 16-year-old honors student took a nude photo of herself, used her cellphone to send it to a friend and, bingo, for the last two weeks the photo has made the rounds of the three-year-old school with 1,300 students. Plainfield police seized some students’ phones and passed them on to computer forensic experts at the Will County Sheriff’s Department.
The school is contemplating punishment, the police are interviewing students and James Glasgow, the Will County state’s attorney, is mulling whether to prosecute anybody under Illinois child pornography statutes. In the meantime, everybody can spend time off over the holiday cheerfully consuming “Teens and Sexting,” a study just completed by the Internet and American Life Project at the Pew Research Center.
Based partly on a survey of 800 teenagers, parents and guardians, it underscores the role of cellphones “in the sexual lives of teens and young adults.” Four percent of the teenagers indicated that had dispatched “sexually suggestive nude or nearly nude images or videos of themselves” via text messaging, while 15 percent claimed they had received such images of a person they know.
Autism epidemic in Monroe County, Indiana
Data from local school and federal public health officials suggest that children in Monroe County, Ind., are diagnosed with autism at nearly double the epidemic rate that afflicts the nation.
On Dec. 18, 2009, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) released a new report that put the incidence of autism in the United States at 1 in 110 for children born in 1996, or 0.9 percent of the population. A survey, sponsored by the Maternal and Child Health Bureau of the Health Resources and Services Administration and published in the journal Pediatrics in October, showed 1 in 91 children between the ages of 3 and 17 had autism.
Advantages and Drawbacks to Attending a (Mostly) Women’s College
Recent discussions on this blog about gender balance in colleges and universities have sparked a number of memories of my own college experiences. I thought it would be interesting to share them here and to invite you to share yours, as well.
As noted previously, in 1970 I entered a small college that had, until that year, been the “sister school” of a nearby men’s university. There were only a handful of men in my class, and of course none in the more advanced classes.
I had applied to only three colleges in total, all chosen by my parents, and all in the South; two private women’s schools and this, a well regarded branch of a state university system. I was accepted at all three, and my parents chose to send me to the cheapest school. I was in no position, or mood to argue; I had narrowly escaped secretarial school, at which I would have been a complete failure; I had no money, and because my parents did have money I was not eligible for the juiciest scholarships. I was grateful to be going anywhere.
2010 Education Appropriations Guide
Congress completed the fiscal year 2010 appropriations process on Dec. 13, 2009, finalizing annual funding for nearly all federal education programs through September 2010 at $63.7 billion, up $1.1 billion from the prior year, excluding economic stimulus funding under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. Making sense of the federal education budget and the appropriations process can be a frustrating task for education advocates, state and local policymakers, the media, and the public. The now concluded fiscal year 2010 appropriations process is no exception.
This issue brief is intended to be a helpful guide to the appropriations process and recently enacted fiscal year 2010 education funding. It includes an analysis of funding for major education programs and a timeline of the 2010 appropriations process. It also includes exclusive tables comparing 2010 funding to prior years, the president’s budget request, and funding under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.
Report Finds Problems Plague State-run Juvenile Detention Centers
A report by a state task force recommended today that Gov. David Paterson close or significantly downsize state run juvenile detention facilities. A draft copy of the report obtained by WNYC, says the facilities are damaging young people and wasting taxpayer dollars.
Jeremy Travis, President of John Jay College of Criminal Justice, headed the task force and says the state must shift from a punitive approach to one that’s therapeutic.
The report says 1,600 youth enter the facilities annually, costing the state about $200,000 a year per child. Travis says those resources should be reinvested in services for youth.
“This is a big challenge that we are laying at the doorstep of the state of New York here,” he says. “Other states have made the shift and we have every confidence that New York State can make this transformation as well.”
MMSD Reading and the Poverty Achievement Gap
“The research around early reading intervention illuminates the complex decision making required to meet individual student literacy needs. There seems to be no one right answer, no quick fix for success. While recent research brings up questions as to the cost/benefit of Reading Recovery, what other supports and options are available? One thing is certain, alternative interventions must be in place prior to removing current systems.” Summary, “Reading Recovery: A Synthesis of Research, Data Analysis and Recommendations,” Madison Metropolitan School District Report to the Board of Education, December, 2009.
How well are we teaching our children to read?
The “Annual Measurable Objectives” under No Child Left Behind for Wisconsin call for all students to achieve reading levels of proficient or better under the WKCE by the 2013-14 school year. Benchmarks toward that goal are phased in over time. The current intermediate goal (ending this school year) is 74%. (Put another way, the percentage of students who are below proficient should not exceed 26%.) The goals move up to 80.5% in 2010-11, 87% in 2011-12, and 93.5% in 2012-13.
71.7% of MMSD 3rd graders scored at or above the proficient level on last year’s (November 2008) WKCE reading assessment (this and the rest of the WKCE data cited here are from the DPI web site). This did not quite meet the 74% Annual Measurable Objective. We should be concerned that achievement levels are going down even as achievement targets are going up:
The Annual Measurable Objectives also apply to demographic subgroups, including economically disadvantaged students. Economically disadvantaged students—whose futures are almost wholly dependent on the ability of their schools to teach them to read—and their achievement levels deserve particular attention.
How well are we teaching our children from low-income families to read?
Can we continue to explain/excuse/blame poverty rates for this failure?
What should we do to acknowledge and address this crisis?
Austin, TX School District Budget Survey
Austin Independent School District:
Budget Shortfall: The district is facing a budget shortfall of $15M for FY 2010-11 just to cover normal operating expenses. This deficit grows even larger when additional budget increases are considered for new Instructional programming tied to the District’s Strategic Plan and employee raises. The district is now contemplating various budget reduction proposals to assist in closing the budget gap for FY 2010-11. The District would like to obtain your input and feedback to the proposals that are currently being considered.
The Efficiency Study: In August 2008, the Board of Trustees commissioned an efficiency study that was conducted in May 2009. The study recommended a number of cost savings proposals to assist the District in making budgetary cuts. The District implemented nearly a quarter of the proposed recommendations from the report. A number of the proposals were rejected due to the severity of impact that would have occurred at local schools. Please click on the link: Budget Survey.
YC-Funded Lingt Uses Games To Turn You Into A Language Learning Addict
If there’s one thing that 2009 proved, it’s that there’s nothing like an addictive game to keep people coming back to your service for more. Over the last year, we’ve seen Foursquare and Gowalla tap into this with their colorful badges, and Zynga is making a killing off games like Farmville. But what if you could turn that habit into something that might actually be helpful to school or your career? That’s the premise behind Lingt, a new startup that’s looking to leverage gameplay elements to help with the mother of all repetitive tasks: learning a new language.
The Y Combinator funded company is launching today in public beta, offering a suite of matching games to help English speakers learn Chinese. Using the app is quite straightforward. First, you choose a set of words that you need to learn. You can use a one of Lingt’s suggested lists, a list of vocabulary words drawn from one of thirty US/Chinese textbooks, or you can manually enter your own words. From there, the site will quiz you on the meaning of the words. You can either input your answers via text, by saying them aloud, or as a matching game (click on one of five choices).
Students seek clout beyond campuses
An earlier generation of college students took on the Vietnam War. Now a new generation is poised to take on the mess in Sacramento.
This Christmas break, students from University of California and state and community college campuses will fan out across the state to collect signatures in support of an initiative that would free the Legislature from its two-thirds vote requirement on budget and revenue matters. Their goal is to collect enough signatures by April 15 to qualify for the November 2010 ballot.
Amid a welter of sit-ins, teach-ins and building takeovers, this is a bold effort to reach beyond the campuses and address the chronic problems of a dysfunctional Legislature and the state’s fiscal crisis. If it passes, the California Democracy Act will allow a simple majority in the Legislature to pass a budget and balance it if necessary with new revenue sources.
School district, Austin Education Association reach contract agreement: no salary increases and no benefit changes for two years
Austin Public School (APS) District and the Austin Education Association announced Wednesday that they have reached a contract agreement.
The agreement includes no salary increases and no changes to insurance for the duration of the contract — the 2009-2010 and 2010-2011 years. Approximately 85 percent of association members voted this week. Of voters, 91 percent voted yes to ratify the new contract.>
Extending Foster Care Past 18
George White, 17, knows what happens to many California kids like him when they age out of the foster-care system. One of White’s eight biological siblings recently turned 18. When the payments stopped, his foster parents packed his belongings into plastic trash bags, leaving the teenager homeless while juggling work and classes at an L.A. trade school.
Of the roughly 4,500 18-year-olds who will “emancipate” from care in California every year, one quarter will experience homelessness like White’s brother. To drive this statistic home, White has organized a 4K run through Compton and will ride his bike 1,149 miles: each mile representing one California foster youth who will spend time on the street, in a shelter, or couch surfing. “It’s not enough having people on Capitol Hill saying they will or want to help you, you have to help yourself,” he says in the Compton offices of Peace 4 Kids, an organization that works to provide opportunity for foster kids in a community where services are notoriously lacking.
Last year, Congress authorized giving states matching federal funds to extend foster care until age 21. But the way that law is interpreted could mean that in 27 states, including California and the District of Columbia, 18-year-olds would still be left out in the cold.
Some See Benefits of Mentoring Teachers
Dion Haith was observing a new teacher and decided to make a chart of what she was doing. When the class was over, he showed it to her. She spotted something right away:
All the questions she asked were directed to girls. It wasn’t something she did intentionally. But she did it.
Haith’s observations drove home a lesson: You need to draw all your students into what you’re doing. That’s the kind of lesson Haith is supposed to be teaching as a full-time mentor for young teachers.
But the lessons go well beyond classroom tips. Stephanie Gwin-Matzat said her job requires her to be a bit of a marriage or relationship counselor, a bit of a financial counselor and a bit of a lot of other things. She’ll tell the people she works with how to open a credit union account or how to get photocopies done efficiently.
Cultures clash among classmates at SE Minnesota schools
Abdalla Mursal moved his family from Atlanta to southeastern Minnesota a decade ago to raise his four children in an area with good schools and low crime.
“This city is a very peaceful city and everybody who lives here likes it,” Mursal said of Rochester. “I like this city.”
But in recent months, Mursal and other Somali parents have discovered that their children’s schools aren’t so tranquil, as Somali youngsters have been in fights with white and African American students.
On Oct. 14, another student teased Mursal’s son, Abdirahman, a high school junior, and hit him with a baseball bat at school.
I took a cab some time ago with a Somali Driver in the Western United States. The driver’s cell phone featured a 612 area code – surprising outside of Minneapolis. I asked about this and heard a remarkable story of his entire family leaving Somali as refugees and, finally, in the early 1990’s receiving asylum in the United States. His large family settled in Mineapolis for more than a decade. We had a fascinating discussion about culture, academics, particularly rigor and assimilation.
Rural school districts using 4-day weeks to save funds
When it rained in northern Minnesota a few weeks ago, water leaked into a room in Blackduck High School where students had stored art projects just a few hours earlier. Every project was damaged.
The school district is considering asking voters to approve higher taxes to raise $500,000 to repair the roof. But Superintendent Bob Doetsch is sure that voters would only agree to pay more if they’re convinced the district has done everything possible to save money.
To cut costs, the rural Blackduck, Warroad and Ogilvie school districts decided four months ago to implement a four-day school week as did the MACCRAY district did last year. The four districts say the change hasn’t solved their budget woes, but the shorter week helped. That’s attracted the attention of school officials elsewhere in Minnesota who are considering the change.
City Schools’ New Criteria for Diversity Raise Fears
Crystal Yednak & Darnell Little:
The Chicago public schools’ response to a recent court desegregation ruling — a plan to use students’ social and economic profiles instead of race to achieve classroom diversity — is raising fears that it will undermine the district’s slow and incremental progress on racial diversity.
Chicago schools, like the city itself, are hardly a model of racial integration. But a Chicago News Cooperative analysis of school data shows the district has made modest gains in the magnet, gifted, classical and selective-enrollment schools, where, for nearly 30 years, race has been used as an admission criterion. Those advances may be imperiled in the wake of court rulings that have prompted Chicago Public Schools to look for factors other than race when assigning students to such schools.
Nationwide, court rulings have prompted school districts to seek creative ways to diversify classrooms without using a student’s race as a factor. In Chicago, school officials last week moved ahead with their own experiment.
Instead of race as an admissions factor, they now will use socioeconomic data from the student’s neighborhood — income, education levels, single-parent households, owner-occupied homes and the use of language other than English as the primary tongue — in placing children in selective-enrollment schools.
You Could Hire This Robot Teacher for $77,000
The robot revolution is indeed on its way: Soon we’ll have robovacuums, robot chefs, and now, robots teaching our kids about robots. But it’s not a one-way evolution, as humans are becoming little more futuristic too, with the help of a robo-knee.
Japan’s Bot for School Kids
The robot pictured above is yet another humanoid robot (that’ll be an android, then) joining the ranks currently led by Honda’s amazing Asimo. This unnamed machine is based on a design by ZMP and is pretty capable–even has a video-projection system built in. There’s a lithium battery to give it some autonomy, and all the gyros and accelerometers to give it a sense of balance as its 21 joints let it amble across the floor. It can speak and hear, and it’s WiFi enabled for remote control.
As you can see from the video below, this new robot just isn’t quite in the same class as Asimo. Its locomotion is stilted, and it basically hops from foot to foot while walking–Asimo’s gait, in comparison, is so very human that it can stroll, jog and even run pretty much exactly as we do. Asimo’s sensor array is also smarter, and it has manipulator hands for doing physical tasks.
‘Virtual schools’ gain popularity in Duluth
With the radio playing softly in the background and munching on spoonfuls of noodles and cheese, Maria Vespa sat at her family’s kitchen counter to take her geography mid-term on a recent afternoon.
The 15-year-old stared intently at her computer screen as test questions popped up. She’d study each for a minute, take another bite of lunch and click on an answer. When she got stumped, she pulled out her notebook.
“That’s one of the great things about online school,” Maria said. “You get to use your notes when you’re taking tests.”
Another great thing about online school: instant grades. A few moments after Maria answered the last test question, her score popped up.
“I got a B,” she said. “I would have loved an A, but a B is still pretty good.”
Recession? Teenagers Get It, and Are Cutting Back
After a year of observing their parents pinch pennies and fret about the economy, the nation’s teenagers may be coming to grips with reality.
Sales are down sharply in recent months at nearly every major retail chain catering to teenagers, and interviews with teenagers suggest that the reasons go beyond their own difficulty finding part-time jobs.
“I think my sister and I, throughout this year we’ve kind of lost an interest in getting gifts and things like that,” said Morgan Porpora, 16, who in the past had a list of things she wanted for Christmas. “I guess we’ve noticed the economy and we just kind of even feel bad I guess asking for a lot.”
Kentucky leads the nation in deaths from child abuse and neglect and at least half the deaths have come after the cases came to the attention of child welfare authorities.
Nearly 270 Kentucky children died of abuse or neglect during the past decade — more than half of them in cases where state officials already knew of or suspected problems.
During one recent 12-month period, 41 children died — the highest rate of any state, according to a recent report by the Every Child Matters Education Fund, a Washington child-advocacy group.
In a six-month review of the problem, The Courier-Journal found that:
— Child-protection officials, day-care workers, and parents, friends and relatives missed signs of abuse such as suspicious bruising and evidence of previous injury, or were hesitant to act.
Doyle proposes using possible federal windfall to change how schools are funded
Gov. Jim Doyle wants to use a possible federal windfall to change the way schools are funded in Wisconsin a plan that could help struggling schools but cost property taxpayers.
State schools could win up to $250 million in competitive “Race to the Top” stimulus money next year for programs to improve student learning. As that one-time money runs out, Doyle wants to lift state-imposed revenue caps on qualifying schools so they can raise property taxes if needed to keep the programs in place.
Doyle said his administration would provide more details on the plans in the state’s application for the federal funds, due Jan. 19.
“Part of Race to the Top (reforms) is how you demonstrate that you can sustain them over time,” Doyle said in a year-end interview with the State Journal. “If we can bring these two things together, we can make some really substantial long-term reform.”
Schools are a luxury not a right in Nepal
The children walking along the dusty road, each with a thick stack of textbooks under their arm, are probably an hour away from school. For miles around, there is no sign of anything much: a scattering of stilted houses in the yellowing paddy fields, some buffalo trudging through a road-side ditch, a bridge over the trickle of a river.
In western Nepal, as in much of the country, indeed as in many rural areas in the developing world, schools are a luxury, not a right. In these parts, a 90-minute walk to school is an unremarkable fact of life. Among the children making this daily pilgrimage are girls sponsored by Room to Read, an educational charity that the Financial Times is supporting in this year’s seasonal appeal.
How teacher pay should work
Kim Marshall’s December 16 EdWeek commentary attempts to “demolish the argument for individual merit pay.” He makes good points that suggest that individual bonuses based solely on value-added test scores are not a good idea. He suggests, instead, team-based bonuses and more pay for master teachers.
There’s an alternative in between that most big organizations and it works like this:
- In collaboration with peers and a manager, a Personal Performance Plan, sets out objectives for the year. For a teacher these objectives may include several objective assessments, but would also include team contributions, and a personal growth plan.
- A pool for merit increases is set based on the financial health of the organization and cost of living (let’s assume an annual target of 2.5%)
- Quarterly conversations about performance are summarized in a year end document.
- Merit increases would range from 0% for teachers that accomplished few objectives and 5% for teachers that exceeded expectations.
Gov. Patrick talks education reform at charter school in Norwell
Norwell had an important visitor this past week.
Bay State Gov. Deval Patrick stopped by the South Shore Charter Public School on Friday (Dec. 18), where he held an on-location cabinet meeting and used the opportunity to talk up his education reform bill.
Patrick and his cabinet met with the students and staff at the charter school and talked with Pru Goodale, the school’s executive director, about the school’s initiatives to diversify education through various programs.
“The South Shore Charter School is helping students thrive and opening up worlds of opportunity for them,” Patrick said. “All children deserve the same chance at a world-class education and that’s what our reform package will give them.”
To Deal With Obsession, Some Defriend Facebook
Facebook, the popular networking site, has 350 million members worldwide who, collectively, spend 10 billion minutes there every day, checking in with friends, writing on people’s electronic walls, clicking through photos and generally keeping pace with the drift of their social world.
Make that 9.9 billion and change. Recently, Halley Lamberson, 17, and Monica Reed, 16, juniors at San Francisco University High School, made a pact to help each other resist the lure of the login. Their status might as well now read, “I can’t be bothered.”
“We decided we spent way too much time obsessing over Facebook and it would be better if we took a break from it,” Halley said.
By mutual agreement, the two friends now allow themselves to log on to Facebook on the first Saturday of every month — and only on that day.
Alderman Jim Bohl’s MPS Compromise
With competing plans for governing the Milwaukee Public Schools now petering out in Madison, I’m suggesting a modest compromise that gives each side something it wants.
First, give the Mayor of Milwaukee the ability to appoint the MPS Superintendent. The superintendent would be confirmed by the Common Council, and after confirmation, would serve at the pleasure of the mayor.
Living with their choices Teenage sisters sought freedom in pregnancy, but one found confinement
When the Marquez sisters set out to get pregnant, Edelmira was 14 and Angela was 15.
Having babies, the girls thought, would force their Salvadoran-born parents to stop trying to keep them and their teenage boyfriends apart.
Edelmira was the first to succeed, giving birth to a baby girl in the eighth grade. She regretted it almost immediately, and warned her sister not to get pregnant.
Angela, whose round, brown eyes and shy smile are so similar to Edelmira’s they could almost be twins, stayed quiet.
“I didn’t want her to know I was still trying,” Angela recalls, sheepishly. “When I used to see my sister play with her baby, I was like, ‘She’s so cute; I want my own.’ “
Related: Between Two Worlds: How Young Latinos Come of Age in America.
4k-8 study Monona Grove School District Report
At last nights board meeting former Winnequah Principal Patty McGuinness presented the results of the 4k-8 study commissioned by the board last summer. The report detailed the costs of implementing 4k-8 grade configurations in each community. The proposed configuration would require significant changes to Winnequah school to accomodate programming for Monona 3-8th grade students and some changes to Glacial Drumlin to shift CG 4th graders into the building.
The report (I’ll link it here when it is up on the district website) was very thorough, and I found it a useful exercise to see all the costs and factors that go into making a school laid out in one place. It is worth a read on that basis. One issue identified from the study was that the scheduling wouldn’t work with the current encore staff and additional staffing would be required. These additional requirements hadn’t been worked out, but they would add to the costs included the study.
Human Identity
WITH the construction of the railways in the 19th century, a new sociological phenomenon was born: the travelling criminal. Until then, police had relied on local communities to recognise a bad apple in their midst, but now the felons were on the move, wreaking havoc in communities which had no knowledge of their past and hence no reason to be wary. For law enforcers trying to contain the problem by sharing descriptions of known recidivists, it became imperative to answer one question: what is it that identifies someone as a particular person?
This question has long troubled humanity, of course, and it is explored in all its facets in a new exhibition at the Wellcome Collection in London. One practical application lies in the forensic arena. The first solution offered, branding, was simple and effective. But even in a society that preferred to believe that criminals were born and not made, this was soon deemed unacceptable. So there was a need to find something innate to human beings that remains constant from the cradle to the grave, and that is sufficiently differentiated in the population to make it useful in identifying individuals.
New Programs Aim to Lure Young Into Digital Jobs
Growing up in the ’70s, John Halamka was a bookish child with a penchant for science and electronics. He wore black horn-rimmed glasses and buttoned his shirts up to the collar.
“I was constantly being called a geek or a nerd,” he recalled, chuckling.
Dr. Halamka grew up to be something of a cool nerd, with a career that combines his deep interests in medicine and computing, and downtime that involves rock climbing and kayaking.
Now 47, Dr. Halamka is the chief information officer at the Harvard Medical School, a practicing emergency-ward physician and an adviser to the Obama administration on electronic health records.
Hybrid careers like Dr. Halamka’s that combine computing with other fields will increasingly be the new American jobs of the future, labor experts say. In other words, the nation’s economy is going to need more cool nerds. But not enough young people are embracing computing — often because they are leery of being branded nerds.
20 Hilarious School Exam Answers
The following questions were set in last year’s GCSE examination in England.
These are genuine answers from 16 year olds, not very bright, but entertaining, 16 year olds.
Q. Explain one of the processes by which water can be made safe to drink
A. Flirtation makes water safe to drink because it removes large pollutants like grit, sand, dead sheep and canoeists
Q. How is dew formed
A. The sun shines down on the leaves and makes them perspire
Q. What causes the tides in the oceans
A. The tides are a fight between the earth and the moon. All water tends to flow towards the moon, because there is no water on the moon, and nature abhors a vacuum. I forget where the sun joins the fight
Child care quality studied Better early education would benefit region, but at double the cost
Southeastern Wisconsin could benefit economically by increasing the quality of early childhood education centers, but doing so presents a daunting tradeoff: more than doubling the expense of caring for infants and young children up to age 5.
A three-year study by Public Policy Forum researchers released Tuesday found that a system of high-quality early childhood education programs would cost about $11,500 per child, per year.
In the current system, child care providers are estimated to spend about $5,625 per child annually.
The new report relies on research showing a correlation between high-quality early learning experiences and higher rates of achievement in school, especially for disadvantaged children.
The analysis for policy-makers includes the economic pros and cons of maintaining the status quo, funding a variety of mid-level improvements and implementing a high-quality system of early childhood education across southeastern Wisconsin, said Anneliese Dickman, research director at the Public Policy Forum.
Senator seeks ‘strict testing’ for meat sent to schools
Blake Morrison & Peter Eisler:
A senator on the committee overseeing the National School Lunch Program called Monday for the government to raise its standards for meat sent to schools across the nation.
In a letter to Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., urged “a strict testing program” for ground beef similar to those “used by industry leaders such as Jack in the Box and Costco.”
Although the U.S. Department of Agriculture already sets special inspection and testing requirements for the meat it sends to schools, a USA TODAY investigation this month found that those requirements lag those set by many fast food restaurants and grocery chains.
Rotherham: Detroit schools are on a slow reform path
Call it the soft bigotry of low expectations. As pressure increases on teachers unions to mend their ways and become better partners in school reform, the bar for what constitutes meaningful change seems to be getting lower.
In October, the New Haven (Conn.) Federation of Teachers agreed to a new labor agreement that was hailed by both American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan as a breakthrough and national model. Yet the contract was actually a set of promises and processes to potentially undertake reforms after more discussion and mutual agreement.
Maybe the union was playing for time to make more reform-oriented deals away from the crucible of a labor negotiation. Critics were not buying it and argued the entire thing was a ploy. We’ll know who was right by next summer.
Beverly Hills Schools to Cut Nonresidents
Daniel Kahn has never lived in this city, but he has attended its legendary public schools since the fourth grade. Now in eighth grade, he is vice president of the student council, plays in two school bands and is an A student who has been preparing to tread in his sister’s footsteps at Beverly Hills High School.
But Daniel will almost certainly be looking for a new place to hang his backpack next fall. The school board here intends to do away with hundreds of slots reserved for nonresident children, most of whom live in nearby neighborhoods of Los Angeles where the homes are nice but the city’s public school system is deeply distressed.
The students used to be a financial boon for Beverly Hills, bringing millions of dollars in state aid with them. But California’s budget crisis is changing the way schools are financed in many wealthy cities, suddenly turning the out-of-towners into money losers.
