Schools Dump Textbooks for Laptops



Rachel Martin & Christine Brouwer:

For generations, school meant books — lots of books. But not anymore. Around the country, from high school to grad school, textbooks are getting harder to find. Technology has made the library something that can fit into the palm of your hand.
Some schools are doing away with textbooks altogether, turning to computers and even handheld devices such as iPods as educational tools.
Cushing Academy, a private school outside Boston, is dismantling its library altogether, giving away 20,000. Headmaster James Tracy said the decision was simple.




Calculation That Doesn’t Add Up



Scott Jashik:

When critics question the validity of the calculations U.S. News & World Report uses to rank colleges, one answer the editors of the magazine have given is to note that it publishes not only the total rank, but also data on how colleges perform in the various categories that go into the rankings. So a prospective student who cares more about faculty resources or competitiveness or any other factor can see how colleges do there, and judge accordingly.
But if the factor that would-be students and their families care about is a percentage of full-time faculty, you can’t count on the numbers about research universities to be correct. The two universities with the top scores in this category (both claiming 100 percent full-time faculty) have both acknowledged to Inside Higher Ed that they do not include adjunct faculty members in their calculations. U.S. News maintains that colleges do count adjuncts (or are told to) so that figure gives a true sense of the percentage of faculty members who are full time. But the two with 100 percent claims are not alone in boosting their numbers by leaving adjuncts out.
Some colleges that do so say that they read the instructions from U.S. News that way, and others say the magazine is itself inconsistent, in effect inviting them to do so. Others just leave the adjuncts out and don’t indicate that unless asked.




USDA Urges Schools, Hospitals, Others To ‘Buy Local’



NPR:

The U.S. Department of Agriculture is launching a campaign to encourage schools, hospitals, jails and other institutions to buy food from local producers. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack has been trying to get Americans to eat more fruit and vegetables as a way to combat obesity. The campaign also aims to provide income for small farms and boost the economies in rural areas.




NurtureShock: New Thinking About Children



Ashley Merryman & Po Bronson:

Parents often rely on two things when they go about the complex business of raising children: instinct and conventional wisdom. When instinct and the culture’s knowledge about caring for babies don’t magically kick in, new parents suffer a panic commonly referred to as “nurture shock.”
San Francisco writer Po Bronson and Los Angeles journalist Ashley Merryman play off this term for the title of their fascinating new book, “NurtureShock: New Thinking About Children.” The jolt they’re delivering is that much of the conventional wisdom about children and child rearing is based on outdated theories and studies often influenced by incorrect assumptions and wishful thinking.
The good news is that scientific research over the past 10 years has illuminated our understanding of how children develop and behave. But because these significant findings have been overlooked, unenlightened practices in parenting, education and public policy persist. The authors, who have collaborated on articles about the science of parenting for New York and Time magazines, throw open the doors on this research to create a book that is not only groundbreaking but compelling as well. Even if you don’t have children, or your kids are grown, you should find the revelations about how the brain works and the rigors and frustrations of the scientific process captivating.




Parents fight use of new psych meds for kids



Martha Rosenberg:

As newly approved drugs harm and even kill children, more parents are fighting back.
The most dramatic moment for the 70 doctors and 200 spectators attending June FDA hearings about approving new psychiatric drugs for children came when two bereaved mothers approached the open mike.
Liza Ortiz of Austin, Texas, told the advisory panel her 13-year-old son died of Seroquel toxicity in an ICU days after being put on the antipsychotic. “His hands twisted in ways I never thought possible,” she said.
Next was Mary Kitchens of Bandera, Texas, who described Seroquel’s lasting effects on her 13-year-old son Evan after being given the antipsychotic without her knowledge or permission by a residential treatment center.
But for Kitchens the most dramatic moment came after the hearings when she approached Dr. Robert Temple, the FDA’s director of the Office of Drug Evaluation, who had officiated on the panel.




U.S. sweetens tax credits for higher education expenses



Kathy Kristof:

Parents: Save those education receipts.
For the first time — and for a limited time — upper-middle-income parents will be able to take advantage of huge tax breaks for paying college bills.
This is thanks to a law that temporarily supplants the Hope Tax Credit with the far more lucrative and inclusive American Opportunity Tax Credit.
What’s this law and how can you take advantage of it?
The American Opportunity Tax Credit is one of several generous tax breaks that were passed into law in February as part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, aimed at stimulating the U.S. economy.
It provides a federal income tax credit equal to 100% of the first $2,000 in qualified education expenses and 25% of the next $2,000 in expenses per student for qualified families.




Dallas magnet school rank in top of Texas public schools



Holly Hacker:

Several Dallas ISD magnet campuses are among the best public schools in Texas, based on a new set of rankings that considers everything from test scores to class sizes to graduation rates.
The School of Science & Engineering and School for the Talented & Gifted were the No. 1 and No. 2 high schools in the state, according to Children at Risk, a Houston nonprofit group. Also cracking the top 10 was the School of Government, Law & Law Enforcement. All three campuses are housed at the Yvonne A. Ewell Townview Center in Oak Cliff.
In prior years, Children at Risk ranked only schools in the Houston area, but expanded to the rest of the state this year.
Many organizations try to pinpoint top campuses, including Newsweek’s list of the nation’s best high schools, the state’s school rating system and a host of education think tank reports. The Children at Risk study ranks Texas elementary, middle and high school campuses based on more measures than most.
For example, Newsweek picks the best high schools solely on the number of students who take Advanced Placement exams. The state determines quality based on test scores and dropout rates.




Hillsborough (Florida) schools in line for $100 million-plus grant



Sherri Ackerman:

The Hillsborough County school district is in line for a grant that could top $100 million and fund a program school officials hope would ensure almost every student in America graduates from high school.
Hillsborough is one of five nationwide finalists for grants from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Winners will be announced in mid-November. The other finalists include Pittsburgh; Memphis, Tenn.; Omaha, Neb.; and a group of charter schools in Los Angeles.
“We believe we have it,” Hillsborough schools Superintendent MaryEllen Elia said last week.
If so, it would be “the largest grant ever given to a public school district,” she said.
The district signed off last week on a memorandum of understanding with the Seattle-based foundation — the last step before final confirmation, Elia said. Foundation spokesman Chris Williams said it is possible all five finalists will receive money from the Empowering Effective Teachers grant, but award amounts have not been set.




Obama, Education, DC Vouchers & Senator’s School Choices



Las Vegas Review Journal:

Give Mr. Obama credit for much of what he said, and continues to say, about educational reform. In rhetorical defiance of that major Democratic Party constituency, America’s unionized schoolteachers, Mr. Obama deserves credit for talking a good game on merit pay, charter schools, and breaking down the “tenure” barrier that bars removal of ineffective educators.
Unfortunately, in a now familiar pattern, Mr. Obama does not fare as well when one examines his actual actions, in contrast to his rhetoric.
If Mr. Obama favors innovation designed to increase competition and the range of educational options, particularly for underprivileged kids, why on earth did he stand silent on the sidelines last winter as senators from his own party took the fledgling, highly celebrated Washington, D.C., voucher program out behind the barn and shot it?




8 Things I learned this Week



Valerie Strauss:

1) America’s two richest universities–Harvard and Yale–did not come out looking so rich or so smart when it was reported that they each lost about 30 percent of their endowments last year due to lousy investments. The median college endowment decline was 18 percent.
2) Cockroaches are not the only animals that can live for some time without their heads.
I had known before about the roach (from a stint I did helping with KidsPost) But, as I was researching something for The Post’s new Education Page http://washingtonpost.com/education/, I learned the roaches aren’t alone in this stunning feat of nature.
The male praying mantis, for example, apparently stays alive during copulation after the female bites off its head. Enough said.




Should Isaac Use Savings or Debt for College?



Stephen Kreider Yoder and Isaac Yoder:

STEVE: I was checking our family bank-account balance online one night this summer, when my eyes slid down to another account, lower on the bank Web page.
“Interest Checking,” it said, and beside the account number was an astounding dollar figure — much bigger than I expected. It was Isaac’s bank account.
“You should think about adding some more of this money to your Roth IRA,” I told him as he worked at the desk next to me, preparing for college by organizing his most precious asset — the music files on the family computer.
“Hmm,” came the noncommittal reply. I knew how the debate would go next.
As we wrote earlier, The Wall Street Journal pays Isaac for his half of this column. Last year, he agreed to invest part of that in a retirement fund so he has a head start later in life.




Students burn midnight oil at Boston college



Rodrique Ngowi:

Community college professor Kathleen O’Neill was setting the ground rules for her psychology students when she came to an issue she didn’t normally have to address.
“What do we do if you fall asleep?” she asked. “What’s a nice way to gently wake you up? Tap you on the head? Would you want your neighbor to just nudge you?”
Fair question, considering O’Neill’s class begins just before midnight and runs until 2:30 a.m.
This semester, Bunker Hill Community College is offering two classes on the graveyard shift in a move to accommodate an unprecedented boost in enrollment attributed to the struggling economy as people look to augment their job skills without having to pay the tuition costs of more expensive schools.




Democrats sit on both sides of debates on Milwaukee mayoral control, performance pay



Alan Borsuk:

What does it mean to be a Democrat when it comes to education? Does it mean you stand for sticking pretty much to the way things are now, except for adding more money? Or does it mean calling for some big changes in the way things are done?
Those aren’t just philosophical questions. They point to one of the most interesting and significant things to watch as the political thunderstorms build over Milwaukee Public Schools, the state Capitol and the national education world.
In the debate over mayoral takeover of MPS, so far, it’s Gov. Jim Doyle and Mayor Tom Barrett against an array of Milwaukee political and community figures. Almost all of the people on both sides are Democrats.
Use of student performance data in evaluating teachers is almost sure to be a hot issue in the fall session of the Legislature. It’s a good bet Doyle will be on one side and the teachers unions on the other. Again, all Democrats.
The nationwide push for performance pay for teachers, for more charter schools, and for stiffer accountability – it’s President Barack Obama and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan doing the pushing, with resistance from the education establishment, especially teachers unions. And almost all of the cast are Democrats.




School book ban raises censorship concerns in PR



Manuel Ernesto Rivera:

Several university professors in Puerto Rico are protesting a decision to ban five books from the curriculum at public high schools in the U.S. territory because of coarse language.
The Spanish-language books previously were read as part of the 11th grade curriculum, but proofreaders this year alerted education officials about “coarse” slang, including references to genitalia in “Mejor te lo cuento: antologia personal,” by Juan Antonio Ramos.
Also among the banned books is the novel “Aura” by Carlos Fuentes of Mexico, one of Latin America’s most prominent contemporary writers. The other four authors affected are from Puerto Rico.
Magali Garcia Ramis, a communications professor at the University of Puerto Rico, expressed concern Saturday about how books are being evaluated by the island’s Department of Education.
“This kind of mentality rejects everything that is art and only associates sexuality with inappropriateness,” Garcia Ramis said.
Department of Education spokesman Alan Obrador could not be reached, and the Puerto Rico Teachers Association also was unavailable.




Gingrich & Sharpton on Tour for Education Reform



NPR:

Host Scott Simon speaks with Republican former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and Reverend Al Sharpton about President Obama’s health care speech to Congress, U.S. Rep. Joe Wilson’s outburst and their upcoming education reform tour. The duo has joined forces with Education Secretary Arne Duncan to push cities to fix failing schools. The tour will make stops in Philadelphia, New Orleans and Baltimore.




Math illiteracy



This site continues to mention math curricula challenges from time to time, and as long as I am around, and have community math experiences, it will continue to do so.
I try to visit Madison’s wonderful Farmer’s Market weekly. This past weekend, I purchased some fabulous raspberries from an older Hmong couple. Their raspberries are the best. Unfortunately, while I made my purchase, they asked how much change I was due, something I saw repeated with other buyers. They periodically have a younger person around to handle the transactions, or a calculator.
Purchasing tickets at high school sporting events presents yet another opportunity to evaluate high schooler’s basic, but ESSENTIAL math skills. A Dane County teenager could not make change from $10 for three $2 tickets recently. I have experienced this at local retail establishments as well.
Unfortunately, the “Discovery” approach to math does not appear work….




A Virtual Revolution Is Brewing for Colleges



Zephyr Teachout:

Students starting school this year may be part of the last generation for which “going to college” means packing up, getting a dorm room and listening to tenured professors. Undergraduate education is on the verge of a radical reordering. Colleges, like newspapers, will be torn apart by new ways of sharing information enabled by the Internet. The business model that sustained private U.S. colleges cannot survive.
The real force for change is the market: Online classes are just cheaper to produce. Community colleges and for-profit education entrepreneurs are already experimenting with dorm-free, commute-free options. Distance-learning technology will keep improving. Innovators have yet to tap the potential of the aggregator to change the way students earn a degree, making the education business today look like the news biz circa 1999. And as major universities offer some core courses online, we’ll see a cultural shift toward acceptance of what is still, in some circles, a “University of Phoenix” joke.
This doesn’t just mean a different way of learning: The funding of academic research, the culture of the academy and the institution of tenure are all threatened.

K-12 spending will not continue to increase at the rate it has over the past twenty years (5.25% annually in the case of the Madison School District). Online education provides many useful learning opportunities for our students. While it is certainly not the “be all and end all”, virtual learning can be used to supplement and provide more opportunities for all students. Staff can be redeployed where most effective (The budget pinch, flat enrollment despite a growing metropolitan area along with emerging learning opportunities are two major reasons that the Madison School District must review current programs for their academic and financial efficiency. Reading recovery and reform math are two useful examples).
Related: K-12 Tax & Spending Climate, the coming reset in state government spending and the Madison School District’s planned property tax increase. TJ Mertz on the local budget and communications.
Jeff Jarvis has more.




Foreign Languages Fall as Schools Look for Cuts



Winnie Hu:

IN Edgemont, a high-performing Westchester school district, children as young as 7 could recite colors and days of the week in Spanish, but few if any learned to really converse, read or write. So this fall, the district canceled the Spanish lessons offered twice weekly at its two elementary schools since 2003, deciding the time and resources — an estimated $175,000 a year — could be better spent on other subjects.
The software replaced three teachers.
Class consolidation in Yonkers resulted in the loss of four foreign-language teaching positions, and budget cuts have cost Arlington, N.Y., its seventh-grade German program, and Danbury, Conn., several sections of middle school French and Spanish.
And in New Jersey, the Ridgewood district is replacing its three elementary school Spanish teachers with Rosetta Stone, an interactive computer program that cost $70,000, less than half their combined salaries.
“There’s never a replacement for a teacher in the classroom,” said Debra Anderson, a Ridgewood spokeswoman. “But this was a good solution in view of the financial constraints.”




Trying to Save for the Kids’ College? It’s a Bear



Stacey Bradford:

If the bear market has kept you from setting money aside for your child’s college education, you’re not alone.
Because of the economic crisis, 47% of parents are saving less or aren’t saving at all for their kids’ education, according to a Gallup survey released in May by student-loan provider Sallie Mae.
While not saving for that degree may have felt like a smart move while the stock market was crashing, the need to fund your kid’s college account has only grown. For the 2008-2009 school year, the average cost of attending a four-year public school for in-state residents — including tuition and room and board — rose 5.7% to $14,333, according to the College Board. The cost was up 5.6% to $34,132 for a private university. (These numbers aren’t adjusted for inflation.)
Meanwhile, the value of 529 college-savings accounts sank 21% last year, according to Boston consulting firm Financial Research, leaving families with far less tuition money than they had counted on. A 529 plan is a tax-advantaged investment plan offered by individual states.




South Korea’s Latest Export: Its Alphabet



Choe Sang-Hun:

South Korea has long felt under-recognized for its many achievements: it built an economic powerhouse from the ruins of a vicious war in just decades and, after years of authoritarian rule, has created one of Asia’s most vibrant democracies.
Now, one South Korean woman, Lee Ki-nam, is determined to wring more recognition from the world with an unusual export: the Korean alphabet. Ms. Lee is using a fortune she made in real estate to try to take the alphabet to places where native peoples lack indigenous written systems to record their languages.
Her project had its first success — and generated headlines — in July, when children from an Indonesian tribe began learning the Korean alphabet, called Hangul.
“I am doing for the world’s nonwritten languages what Doctors Without Borders is doing in medicine,” Ms. Lee, 75, said in an interview. “There are thousands of such languages. I aim to bring Hangul to all of them.”




Obama’s Chat with 9th Graders



Los Angeles Times:

THE PRESIDENT: Thank you. So this is the first day of high school?
STUDENTS: Yes.
THE PRESIDENT: Wow. I’m trying to remember back to my first day of high school. I can’t remember that far back. But it is great to see all of you here. I’m really proud of my Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, who is just doing a great job trying to create an environment where all of you can learn. And I know it’s a little intimidating with all these cameras around and all this —
SECRETARY DUNCAN: Don’t pay any attention to them.
THE PRESIDENT: — so just pretend that they’re not there.
Here’s the main reason I wanted to come by. As Arne pointed out, when I was growing up, my dad wasn’t in the house. We weren’t poor, but we weren’t rich. My mother had to….
…work really hard, so sometimes my grandparents had to fill in. And my wife, Michelle, who all of you have seen — the First Lady — her dad worked in a — as a — basically in a blue-collar job, an hourly worker. Her mom worked as a secretary. And they lived in a tiny — they didn’t even live in a house, they lived upstairs above her aunt’s house. And so neither of us really had a whole lot when we were growing up, but the one thing that we had was parents who insisted on getting a good education.




Dead Letters Everyone has terrible handwriting these days. My daughter and I set out to fix ours.



Emily Yoffe:

f you have school-age children, you may have noticed their handwriting is terrible. They may communicate incessantly via written word–they can text with their heads in a paper bag–but put a pen in their hands and they can barely write a sentence in decent cursive. It’s not going to be easy to decipher one either, if they think cursive might as well be cuneiform.
My daughter is in the eighth grade, and I realized several years ago that her rudimentary block-letter printing was actually never going to improve because handwriting had been chopped from the school curriculum. Children today learn basic printing in first and second grade, then get cursory instruction in cursive in the third grade–my daughter was given a cursive workbook and told to figure it out herself. She dutifully filled in every page, but she never understood how these looping letters were supposed to become her handwriting, so they never did.




Is the best school the right school?



Lisa Freedman:

Antique dealer Antonia White is sitting exhausted on a sofa. She’s just returned from yet another three-hour stint looking at secondary schools for her 10-year-old daughter Clare. “I’m shattered,” she says. “It’s stressful and boring. All the chemistry labs look the same and all the parents look like people we wouldn’t want to know.”
Her comments will strike a chord with thousands of other parents this autumn, as September and October are peak season for secondary-school open days (parents need to be on the ball as the dates are often only listed on the school’s website, sometimes at the last moment). For the next few weeks, those with children approaching the next stage of their school career (both in the state and private sector) will be making their way along packed corridors, trying to spot the “best” school for their child. It can be an uncomfortable process – at some popular London secondaries the queues stretch down the street. (The public school system still has its main entrance point at 13, after prep school.)
Ideally, anyone looking for a school from age 11 should begin the search when their child has just started Year 5. This helps whittle down the choices before the final year at primary school (Year 6). Drawing up a shortlist when a child is 9 or 10 also allows for a year of coaching for 11-plus exams for selective state and private schools.




Kaplan Virtual Education Expands Online Learning Options for Florida Students



Reuters:

aplan Virtual Education (KVE) today announced partnerships with three school
districts to launch part- and full-time online learning options for students
throughout Glades, Polk and Miami-Dade counties this fall. Last year, the
Florida Legislature required school districts to offer full-time virtual
programs starting during the 2009-10 school year. The virtual public school
options will provide middle and high school students with a variety of online
courses that feature individualized instruction and an engaging curriculum.
The partnerships will provide online learning alternatives for:
* Sixth through 12th grade students in the Glades County School District
* Sixth through 12th grade students in the Miami-Dade County Public School
District
* High school students in the Polk County Public School District
“Kaplan Virtual Education is excited to offer Florida students an education
solution that provides rigorous, high-quality courses that can be tailored to
meet their unique needs and prepare them for success in the 21st century,” said
Charles Thornburgh, president of Kaplan Virtual Education. “Through these
partnerships, students can get one-on-one attention from teachers, take
advantage of engaging learning tools and study virtually anywhere at any time
via the Internet.”




How to Survive Our Worst Schools



Jay Matthews:

was intrigued by a story on the front page of the Post Aug. 9 Written by my colleague Robin Givhan, it focused on a White House internship program for D.C. students that included a recent high school graduate named Clayton Armstrong. Despite his background, he had won the prestigious summer job and a place in the freshman class at the University of Arizona.
The article was so good I wanted to know more. I wondered how Armstrong acquired his obvious academic skills, given that he had graduated from Ballou High School. D.C. has some fine public high schools, but most are bad, and Ballou in my view is the worst. It is part of what is the worst, or next to worst (Detroit is in the running) urban school district in the country.
This year, only 23 percent of Ballou students reached proficiency or above on the D.C. Comprehensive Assessment System tests. As far as I can tell, no Ballou student has ever passed an Advanced Placement test.




Shorewood parents fear impact of suspensions on students’ college admissions



Tom Kertscher:

The Shorewood High School students who are fighting suspensions for toilet papering the school grounds can expect that some colleges would consider the suspensions in weighing the students’ applications.
But it’s unclear whether a one-day suspension would be an important factor weighed by an admissions office, and many colleges don’t ask about suspensions, according to admissions officials.
Five seniors were suspended for the first day of school last week for engaging in the decades-long tradition of hanging toilet paper on the campus just before the start of classes. They also were issued $177 disorderly conduct tickets by police.
Parents of four of the five seniors, each 17, have said they plan to ask that the suspensions be expunged from their sons’ school records, partly because they fear the suspensions could affect the boys’ college admission and scholarship applications. The parents also are angry that no wide-scale announcement was made to let families know that toilet papering would lead to disciplinary action this year, even though such an announcement had been made before the previous school year.




Dropouts Seek a Boost From Equivalency Exams



S. Mitra Kalita:

A growing number of Americans are taking high school equivalency tests in their hunt for any leg up in a bleak labor market.
Adult-education centers across the country report backlogs and waiting lists for prep courses cramming dozens of topics and years of lessons into weeks or months. But the potential for a better job and pay that drives many to seek a General Educational Development diploma comes with a caveat: The certificate generally is of limited value unless students use it as a stepping-stone to further education.
In 2008, the number of people taking the test for their GED diploma grew 6.6% to 777,000 from a year earlier, according to the American Council on Education, which administers the test. Between the first quarters of 2008 and 2009, three states — Louisiana, New Hampshire and North Carolina — and the District of Columbia saw at least a 20% rise in the number of test-takers.
The growth has come as the job market has worsened, especially for those with limited education. The unemployment rate in August for people lacking a high-school diploma was 15.6%, compared with 9.7% for high-school graduates without any college, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.




5 girls die in stampede at a school in New Delhi



AP:

Hundreds of children who were jammed into a narrow school staircase panicked and set off a stampede that left five girls dead and 31 students injured in India’s capital.
Five of the injured were in critical condition, said O.P. Kalra, medical superintendent of Guru Tegh Bahadur Hospital in East Delhi, where the children were taken.
The stampede occurred early Thursday as students arrived for an exam, Kalra told reporters.
Amod Kanth, a well-known child rights activist, said the students were told to move to a higher floor because heavy rain was causing flooding on the ground floor. The stampede occurred when students moving up the stairs met others rushing down.




High School Research Paper Lightens Up



Denise Smith Amos:

“The more students are able to do in research and writing in high school, the more they’ve got a nice leg up.”
At the mere mention of research papers, Kelly Cronin’s usually highly motivated Summit Country Day Upper School students turn listless. Some groan. The Hyde Park Catholic school requires all high school students to write lengthy research papers each year on history, religion or literature.
Cronin’s sophomores write history papers. They pick a topic in late September and by May they’ll have visited libraries, pawed through card catalogs, and plumbed non-fiction books and scholarly articles.
They’ll turn in 200 or so index cards of notes. They’ll write and revise about 15 pages.
Cronin gladly grades 35 or more papers with such titles as “The Role of the Catholic Church in European Witchcraft Trials” and “Star Trek Reflected in President Johnson’s Great Society.”
“It’s time-consuming,” she says. “It takes over your life. But I’m not married, and I don’t have any kids.”
But most high school teachers aren’t like Cronin and most schools aren’t like Summit. At many high schools across the country, the in-depth research paper is dying or dead, education experts say, victims of testing and time constraints.
Juniors and seniors still get English papers, says Anne Flick, a specialist in gifted education in Springfield Township. “But in my day, that was 15 or 20 pages. Nowadays, it’s five.”
High school teachers, averaging 150 to 180 students, can’t take an hour to grade each long paper, Cronin said.
The assignment may not be necessary, says Tiffany Coy, an assistant principal at Oak Hills High in Bridgetown. “Research tells you it’s not necessarily the length; it’s the skills you develop,” she said.
But some educators disagree.
“Students come to college with no experience in writing papers, to the continual frustration of their professors,” said William Fitzhugh, a former high school teacher who publishes The Concord Review, a quarterly in Massachusetts that selects and publishes some of the nation’s best high school papers. [from 36 countries so far]
“If we want students to be able to read and understand college books and to write research papers there, then we must give students a chance to learn how to do that in a rigorous college preparatory program. That is not happening,” he said.
Teachers see the problem. Fitzhugh’s organization commissioned a national study of 400 randomly selected high school teachers in 2002 that showed:
-95% believe research papers, especially history papers, are important.
-62% said they no longer assign even 12-page papers.
-81% never assign 5,000-word or more papers.

(more…)




2 new L.A. arts high schools are a study in contrasts



Mitchell Landsberg:

The schools opened for business this week, one on a $232-million shiny new campus, the other in rented space in a small church. Both have high hopes.
One occupies $232 million worth of serious architecture on a promontory overlooking downtown Los Angeles. The other rents cramped space in a South L.A. church.
One has an address that shouts prestige, with neighbors that include the city’s Roman Catholic cathedral and the Music Center. The other is across the street from an apartment building for the recently homeless.
Two new high schools for the arts debuted this week — a rare enough feat in a down economy. Despite the vast differences in their circumstances, it may be too early to say which of the two has the most potential to nurture the next generation of artists and performers.
The Los Angeles Unified school at 450 N. Grand Ave., perched across the 101 Freeway from the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels, was years in the making and is housed on one of the most expensive and widely praised campuses in the nation. Yet it is only now shaking off more than a year of controversy and false starts in its launch to become the flagship of the district. The Fernando Pullum Performing Arts High School at 51st Street and Broadway may have the feel of something hastily thrown together out of spare parts, but it is led by one of the city’s most respected music educators and has the support of such big-name artists as Kenny Burrell, Jackson Browne, Bill Cosby and Don Cheadle.




In Syracuse, Biden & Geithner promote education’s importance



William Kates:

Getting into college and being able to pay for it are essential to staying on the middle-class track, Vice President Joe Biden told a college audience Wednesday.
“The president and I believe there is no better ticket to the middle class than a college education,” Biden told about 1,000 people inside Goldstein Auditorium at Syracuse University, where he attended law school.
Biden appeared along with Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and Education Secretary Arne Duncan as part of the White House Task Force on Middle Class Families. The task force has held town hall-style meetings across the country focusing on raising the living standards of middle-class, working families.
During Wednesday’s forum, Biden reviewed proposals and reforms the administration believes will make a college degree more attainable for working families.
The administration wants to simplify the financial aid application process, extend eligibility to more students and provide more money for direct student aid while extending tax credits to working families with students.




O.C. school district, ACLU settle suit over ‘Rent’



Seema Mehta:

Newport-Mesa Unified School District agrees to provide harassment and discrimination prevention training after students threatened a girl who appeared in the play and used slurs to describe another.
An Orange County school district where varsity athletes threatened to rape and kill the lead actress in a student production of the musical “Rent” has agreed to provide harassment and discrimination prevention training to Corona del Mar High School students, teachers and administrators and other district officials, according to a legal settlement announced Wednesday. The Newport-Mesa Unified School District will also apologize to the former student.
Because of the settlement, “no one else will have to go through what I went through,” said Hail Ketchum, 17, the victim who, along with family members, identified herself for the first time on Wednesday. She is a freshman studying theater at Loyola Marymount University. “I hope the students at Corona del Mar High School will learn from my experience that it’s possible to stand up for what is right and prevail.”
The campus made headlines across the nation earlier this year when its principal canceled “Rent: School Edition” because of concerns about its content. It was later reinstated. Officials with the American Civil Liberties Union, who sued the district in March, said the controversy over the tale of struggling artists that includes gay characters and some with AIDS was just one example of official tolerance of misogyny and homophobia on campus.




The value of education: Obama’s message good for any classroom



Greg Jordan:

Tuesday I went to Bluefield Intermediate School and watched as fourth-grade students did something that just didn’t happen when I was their age — listen to the president of the United States.
President Obama urged them and other students across the country to stay in school and strive to succeed despite any adversity fate threw their way. He recounted his own struggles to acquire an education, and spoke about how education was a vital part of finding success.
He stayed off controversial topics such as health care and bills like cap and trade, and kept driving home the fact that students needed to take advantage of their opportunities to get an education.
The sight of those children getting to see a live broadcast of the president’s speech brought to mind that time so many years ago when I first heard the word “president.” Things have really changed.

Greg Toppo:

Obama to kids: ‘You can’t drop out of school and into a good job’
President Obama delivered a pointed message to U.S. students Tuesday, telling high-schoolers in a packed Washington-area school gymnasium, “I expect you to get serious this year.”
Ignoring a simmering controversy among political opponents over the planned speech, which was broadcast live coast-to-coast, Obama exhorted students at Wakefield High School to stay in school, ask for help when they need it and resist giving up when school gets difficult. “You can’t drop out of school and into a good job. You’ve got to work for it and train for it and learn for it.”

Wall Street Journal:

A Real Education Outrage
President Obama’s speech to students this week got plenty of attention, and many conservatives looked foolish by fretting about “indoctrination.” They would have done far more good joining those who protested on Tuesday against the President’s decision to shut down a school voucher program for 1,700 low-income kids in Washington, D.C.
“It’s fundamentally wrong for this Administration not to listen to the voices of citizens in this city,” said Kevin Chavous, the former D.C. Council member who organized the protest of parents and kids ignored by most media. Mr. Chavous, a Democrat, is upset that the White House and Democrats in Congress have conspired to shut down the program even though the government’s own evaluation demonstrates improved test scores.




Growing ‘Authentic’ College Applicants



Dan Golden:

As America’s newest graduates were packing for college, high school juniors spent their final summer vacation in anything but a relaxed state. Many juniors and their families look on these months as a last chance to pad a growing list of extracurricular activities and experiences that will be meticulously outlined when they fill out college applications in the fall.
Unfortunately, many of these decisions remain driven by perceived “brand value” based on myth, cohort pressures, and word of mouth. As a high-school-based counselor who has many conversations each year with college-bound students, I would like to suggest an antidote to the many unhealthy pressures and groundless expectations: growing “authentic applicants.”
Authentic applicants take the long view of an educational journey, as they look at what the college years will actually contribute in the form of skills, knowledge, and values to their goal of living a meaningful life. They avoid getting locked into the quest for a “dream school,” a path that would restrict their options. They consider their families’ finances, and they research all the options available, including some little-known ones available at the least-expensive schools. At the same time, they don’t shy away from a selective school that’s right for them simply because it doesn’t fit their budgets.




Across 30 Nations, Public Spending on Higher Education Pays Off, Report Says



Aisha Labi:

The full impact of the global economic crisis on higher-education systems is still unclear, but as national economies struggle to recover their footing and unemployment levels remain high, “the incentives for individuals to stay on in education are likely to rise over the next years,” says a new report from the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development.
The report, “Education at a Glance 2009: OECD Indicators,” is the latest in an annual series that analyzes data on the education systems in the group’s 30 member countries, which include many European democracies, as well as Australia, Canada, Japan, Korea, Mexico, New Zealand, Turkey, and the United States.




Reeducating unions



LA Times:

Even with signs that the U.S. economy might be stirring, this is a strained Labor Day for the many Americans who are going without raises, and whose hours are being cut at the same time that they are asked to take heavier workloads — and especially for those who are without employment.
Teachers find themselves in all these categories, across the nation and right here, where the dire financial condition of the Los Angeles Unified School District has led to layoffs or demotions from regular teaching to substitute, and where class sizes will be larger and other cutbacks will reduce salaries. On a bigger scale, the unions that brought teachers better pay, benefits and job security find themselves at a tipping point, their power under threat in ways that seemed barely possible a few years ago.
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, whose 2005 proposal to modify teacher tenure was brought down by the full-on might of the California Teachers Assn., is now calling for a change in state law that would allow teachers’ performance reviews to be linked to test scores. And there is barely a political peep to be heard about it; the Obama administration has demanded such changes if California is to receive a share of new education funding. Obama and his Education secretary, Arne Duncan, openly admire high-performing charter schools and reform-minded superintendents such as Michelle Rhee of Washington, who is working to revamp tenure rules there.




Lesson Plans, 2009



Timothy Egan:

You’re in third grade, back to school in Texas. Shoes are too tight. Your new shirt is scratchy. And the strange kid sitting next to you — how’s he going to get that pencil out of his nose?
The teachers tell you to file into the gym. They turn on a television. Here comes President Obama. Boorrrrrring. Do you have to listen to this? Is there some kinda test afterward?
Some people in your part of the country didn’t want you to hear the president of the United States. It’s indoctrination. Socialism. Cult of personality. Stuff you’ll learn about on cable news shows.
“This is something you’d expect to see in North Korea or Saddam Hussein’s Iraq,” says Oklahoma State Senator Steve Russell.
Obama starts talking. He says, “If you quit on school, you’re not just quitting on yourself, you’re quitting on your country.”
And then he says, “No one is born being good at things, you become good at things through hard work.”




Roberts Addresses US Education Secretary



Gina Good:

School Superintendent Rob Roberts was in Carson City last week, where he definitely knows his way around the capitol building, meeting regularly with legislators and Gov. Jim Gibbons.
Two weeks ago, Roberts was in Las Vegas to attend an invitation-only conference, attended by school superintendents along with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, Congresswoman Dina Titus, D-Nev., and Nevada Senate Majority Leader, Democrat Steven Horsford along with other dignitaries.
Roberts was the only superintendent asked to address Duncan. “Now, let me tell you about Nye County,” Roberts began.
He made the most of the opportunity, telling the secretary of the challenges of educating students in rural communities and the problems encountered with deep budget cuts.
He challenged the legislators to spend one day with him walking the schools. He said a prior speaker spoke in platitudes about a Las Vegas magnet school, Valley High School, where there are highly qualified teachers in every subject, teaching honors classes.




Trench Warfare on the Board of Ed



Peter Meyer:

I couldn’t believe it.
John, the new board of education president, had just proposed that we move “Old Business” to the beginning of our meetings.
I had spent roughly a year-and-a-half arguing that it made no sense to put Old Business at the end of each school board meeting, which usually arrived about 10pm, the third hour of these star chambers of modern public education. By then, most people, including the lone reporter, had gone home. That, of course, was the point: Old Business was dirty laundry, things not done. Why flaunt it?
I had gotten nowhere with my arguments because my colleagues on the school board thought I was the devil. I was the infamous “rogue” board member, the person that school board associations give seminars about. Not a team player. The local paper wrote an editorial about me that prompted a friend, after church, to remark, “I’ve seen kinder things said about murderers.”
In fact, I had slipped on to the school board as a write-in candidate, after a stealth, two-day campaign waged only by email.




Therapy in Preschools: Can It Have Lasting Benefits?



Sue Shellenbarger:

Like all children, Perry Cunningham, age 4, wants friends. But until recently, he lacked the social skills to reach out to other kids.
When Perry tried to make a friend at his New Haven, Conn., preschool this year, he mimicked a move he had seen his 15-year-old brother make with his buddies–he gave another, much bigger child a playful shove. The big guy’s response: A punch in the face, leaving Perry with a bloody nose.
Courtney Morse Costello is a mental-health consultant at Beary Cherry preschool.
In many classrooms, Perry might simply have been regarded as a troublemaker. But Barbara Giangreco, a mental-health therapist who works in child-care centers and preschools, understood that he was just trying to be friendly, and worked with his mother and teacher on helping him use words to reach out to other kids. All the adults involved agree that Perry’s social skills have improved significantly. He is making friends, and while he still has conflicts with other kids sometimes, he knows how to apologize and make peace.
The idea of assigning mental-health workers to child-care centers and preschools is jarring; I was skeptical when I first heard the idea. Children so small shouldn’t need mental-health help, it seems, and having therapists or counselors working in classrooms seems to risk stigmatizing them with labels, or simply interfering with the innocence of childhood.




Colleges Are Failing in Graduation Rates



David Leonhardt:

If you were going to come up with a list of organizations whose failures had done the most damage to the American economy in recent years, you’d probably have to start with the Wall Street firms and regulatory agencies that brought us the financial crisis. From there, you might move on to Wall Street’s fellow bailout recipients in Detroit, the once-Big Three.
But I would suggest that the list should also include a less obvious nominee: public universities.
At its top levels, the American system of higher education may be the best in the world. Yet in terms of its core mission — turning teenagers into educated college graduates — much of the system is simply failing.
Only 33 percent of the freshmen who enter the University of Massachusetts, Boston, graduate within six years. Less than 41 percent graduate from the University of Montana, and 44 percent from the University of New Mexico. The economist Mark Schneider refers to colleges with such dropout rates as “failure factories,” and they are the norm.
The United States does a good job enrolling teenagers in college, but only half of students who enroll end up with a bachelor’s degree. Among rich countries, only Italy is worse. That’s a big reason inequality has soared, and productivity growth has slowed. Economic growth in this decade was on pace to be slower than in any decade since World War II — even before the financial crisis started.
So identifying the causes of the college dropout crisis matters enormously, and a new book tries to do precisely that.




Employers Needed for First Annual Job and Career Fair at West High School



via email:

Does your business employ high school students or individuals with a high school diploma?
On Thursday, October 8, from 9:00 AM until 2:30 PM, West High School will host a job and career fair with a focus on employment opportunities during and after high school. West High is looking for employers who provide job and career opportunities for students in high school and individuals with a high school diploma.
This job fair is intended to provide both students and staff information about job and career opportunities for individuals with a high school diploma. Additionally, as a result of attending this job fair, students may obtain employment, arrange internships, set up job shadowing experiences, or network with potential employers.
For a $35.00 entry fee per business, West High will provide tables and chairs, a steady stream of 50 to 75 high school students per hour, a break room, volunteers to provide breaks and to assist with set up and take down, and a sit down meal and snacks provided by their culinary arts students.
For more information and a registration form, contact Jonathan Davis, transition teacher, at (608) 516-9512 or by e-mail at jidavis@madison.k12.wi.us

This is a good idea.




What the Public Thinks of Public Schools



Paul Peterson:

Yesterday President Barack Obama delivered a pep talk to America’s schoolchildren. The president owes a separate speech to America’s parents. They deserve some straight talk on the state of our public schools.
According to the just released Education Next poll put out by the Hoover Institution, public assessment of schools has fallen to the lowest level recorded since Americans were first asked to grade schools in 1981. Just 18% of those surveyed gave schools a grade of an A or a B, down from 30% reported by a Gallup poll as recently as 2005.
No less than 25% of those polled by Education Next gave the schools either an F or a D. (In 2005, only 20% gave schools such low marks.)
Beginning in 2002, the grades awarded to schools by the public spurted upward from the doldrums into which they had fallen during the 1990s. Apparently the enactment of No Child Left Behind gave people a sense that schools were improving. But those days are gone. That federal law has lost its luster and nothing else has taken its place.




National Standards



The Concord Review & The National Writing Board
8 September 2009
Specific, detailed, universally-accepted national standards in education are so vital that we have now had them for many decades–in high school sports. Athletics are so important in our systems of secondary education that it is no surprise that we have never settled for the kind of vague general-ability standards that have prevailed for so long in high school academic aptitude tests. If athletic standards were evaluated in the way the SAT measures general academic ability, for example, there would be tests of “general physical fitness” rather than the impressive suite of detailed measures we now use in high school sports.
The tests that we require in football, basketball, track and other sports are not called assessments, but rather games and meets, but they test the participants’ ability to “do” sports in great detail–detail which can be duly communicated to college coaches interested in whether the athletes can perform in a particular sport.
These two different worlds of standards and assessment–athletics and academics–live comfortably side-by-side in our schools, usually without anyone questioning their very different sets of expectations, measures, and rewards.
The things our students have to know when they participate in various athletic activities are universally known and accepted. The things they have to do to be successful in various sports are also universally known and accepted across the country.
The fact that this is not the case for our academic expectations, standards, and rewards for students is the reason there has been so much attention drawn to the problem, at least since the Nation at Risk Report of 1983.
At the moment there are large efforts and expenditures being brought to bear, by the Department of Education, the Education Commission of the States, the Council of Chief State School Officers, many state governments, and others, for the development of academic National Standards for the United States.
There has been, and will continue to be, a lot of controversy over what novels students of English should read, what names, dates and issues history students should be familiar with, what languages, if any, our students should know, and what levels of math and science we can expect of our high school graduates.
The Diploma to Nowhere Report, released by the Strong American Schools Project in the summer of 2008, pointed out that more than one million of our high school graduates are enrolled in remedial courses each year when they get to the colleges which have accepted them. It seems reasonable to assume that the colleges that accepted them had some way of assessing whether those students were ready for the academic work at college, but perhaps the tools for such assessment were not up to the universal standards available for measuring athletic competence.
One area in which academic assessment is especially weak, in my view, is in determining high school students’ readiness for college research papers. The Concord Review did a national study of the assignment of research papers in U.S. public high schools which found that, while 95% of teachers surveyed said research papers were important, or very important, 81% did not assign the kind that would help students get ready for college work. Most of the teachers said they just didn’t have the time to spend on that with students.
Imagine the shock if we discovered that our student football players were not able to block or tackle, in spite of general agreement on their importance, or that our basketball players could not dribble, pass, or shoot baskets with any degree of competence, and, if, when surveyed, our high school coaches said that they were sorry that they just didn’t have time to work on that with their athletes.
Whatever is decided about National Standards for the particular knowledge which all our students should have when they leave school, I hope that there is some realization that learning to do one research paper, of the kind required for every International Baccalaureate Diploma now, should be an essential part of the new standards.
If so, then we come to the problem of assessing, not just the ability of students to write a 500-word “personal essay” for college admissions officers, or to perform the 25-minute display of “writing-on-demand” featured in the SAT writing test and the NAEP assessment of writing, but their work on an actual term paper.
As with our serious assessments in sports, there are no easy shortcuts to an independent assessment of the research papers of our secondary students. Since 1998, the National Writing Board, on a small scale, has produced three-page reports on research papers by high school students from 31 states and two Canadian provinces. Each report has two Readers, and each Reader spends, on average, one hour to read and write their evaluation of each paper. Contrast this with the 30 papers-an-hour assessments of the SAT writing test. The National Writing Board process is time-consuming, but it is, in my biased view, one serious way to assess performance on this basic task that every student will encounter in college.




US university dividend ‘highest in world’



David Turner:

The value of a university education for male students in the US in terms of future earning power is double the rich country average, research by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development suggests.
A male graduate in the US can expect to earn $367,000 extra over his lifetime compared with someone who has merely completed high school.
The income boost for men is higher than for any other country in the world and double the rich-country average of $186,000, suggesting that in the US going to college is particularly key to high earnings.




L.A. Schools Chief Sees Woes as Catalyst



Lauren Schuker:

This city’s school district is the second largest in the nation, with nearly 700,000 students. But it has far fewer dollars per student than other major urban districts. Overcrowding and teacher turnover are among the worst in the country.
As new city schools Superintendent Ramon C. Cortines prepares on Wednesday to start his first full year at the helm, his strategy for a turnaround is to emphasize those very points.
By shining a spotlight on some of the most egregious failings of the city’s schools, Mr. Cortines said he hopes to create enough transparency, embarrassment and even outrage to break a logjam among the school board, city leadership and local teachers union that has stymied past attempts at change.
Mr. Cortines also wants to break a taboo against evaluating teachers’ performance and has threatened to reorganize the city’s worst schools. “I want this district to be data-driven and transparent about everything,” he said. “That means that sometimes we’re not going to look so good. But let me tell you, if we’re going to improve, we need to know where we are.”




The Helicopter Parents Are Hovering on Facebook



Elizabeth Bernstein:

David Rivera recently had someone “unfriend” him on Facebook: His own child.
For months, Dr. Rivera, an obstetrician in Lombard, Ill., had been exasperated that his 25-year-old son, Nate, often complained he was broke and asked for money, yet posted photos of himself on Facebook taken at bars, restaurants, movies and concerts.
Dr. Rivera says he tried to talk to his son, a senior in college, about his spending habits, but his son refused to listen. Frustrated, he finally wrote on his son’s Facebook wall: “I can see what you are blowing your money on, so don’t come whining to me about money.”
“I think they figure that their friends are watching but we’re not, because they think we are old and decrepit and we barely know how to turn the computer on,” says Dr. Rivera, 54-years-old, of being a parent.
In the new era of helicopter parenting, more and more parents and kids are meeting up, and clashing, on Facebook, MySpace and other social-networking sites.




12,000 Teacher Reports, but What to Do With Them?



Jennifer Medina:

As the city’s students return to school on Wednesday, thousands will enter classrooms led by a teacher that the Department of Education has deemed low performing on internal reports. But in a sign of how complicated and controversial the reports are, many teachers never received them, and there are no plans to release them to parents.
The reports use standardized test scores to monitor how much teachers have helped students improve from one year to the next and whether they are successful with particular groups of children, such as boys or those who have struggled for years.
During the last school year, education officials distributed some 12,000 reports that considered how well teachers did in educating students, producing a report for any teacher who taught fourth through eighth grade for the last two years. The reports put New York at the center of a national debate over ways to measure the effectiveness of individual teachers and the role that test scores should play in the evaluations.




A $5 Billion Bet on Better Education



Albert Hunt:

Over these next few weeks, 56 million American kids will start kindergarten through 12th grade. Even before an assignment or test is handed out, Education Secretary Arne Duncan has a grade for the system: B.
“We’ve stagnated,” Mr. Duncan says of the U.S. educational system. “Other countries have passed us by.”
Few dispute that. An evaluation by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development ranked the United States 18th among 36 countries in secondary education. Almost 25 percent of U.S. students fail to graduate from high school on time; in South Korea, it’s 7 percent.

More money, in the absence of structural reform (in my mind, more charters to start with) will not work. Two useful articles here and here.




Private sector investing in charter schools



David Twiddy:

Charter schools, already seeing a surge in students, are getting attention from another group – private investors.
Entertainment Properties Inc., known mostly for sinking its money into movie theaters and wineries, recently bought 22 locations from charter school operator Imagine Schools for about $170 million. The real estate investment trust acts as landlord, while Imagine operates the schools and is using the investment to expand its chain of 74 locations.
“They really are an effective source of long-term financing that we can rely on and enables us to do what we’re best at, which is running schools, and do what they’re best at, which is long-term real estate ownership,” said Barry Sharp, chief financial officer for Arlington, Va.-based Imagine. “It’s a good fit.”
Charter school supporters hope the move by Kansas City-based Entertainment Properties is the first of many such partnerships as they deal with increased interest from parents but not more money to build or expand their facilities.




New campaign questions reliance on testing



Greg Toppo:

If public schools were baseball teams, says Sam Chaltain, Americans wouldn’t have a clue who should be in the playoffs.
That’s because our current rating system relies heavily on a single set of test scores for nearly 50 million students, showing how a sample of them perform on a one-day math or reading test each spring.
To Chaltain, director of the Washington-based think tank Forum for Education & Democracy, that’s like picking playoff teams based on one game’s box score.
As Congress gears up to reauthorize No Child Left Behind (NCLB), the 2002 law that spells out how federal, state and local governments rate schools and spend billions of dollars, Chaltain is leading a new and unlikely campaign to shift the USA’s education conversation away from one-day tests and toward a larger one, focused on “powerful learning and highly effective teaching.”




Christian Girls, Interrupted



Willieam McGurn:

Two Christian girls. Two sets of distraught parents. And two state courts smack in the middle of it.
One of these courts is in New Hampshire, where a judge recently ordered that home-schooled Amanda Kurowski be sent to public school. The order signed by Family Court Justice Lucinda V. Sandler says the 10-year-old’s Christian faith could use some shaking up–and that the local public school is just the place to do it. So while the child’s lawyers at the Alliance Defense Fund, a Christian legal outfit, filed a motion asking the judge to reconsider, last week Amanda started fifth grade at a local public school.
At about the same time Miss Kurowski was starting school in New Hampshire, a state court in Florida was considering what to do with 17-year-old Rifqa Bary. Miss Bary fled to Florida from Ohio a few weeks back, where she sought refuge with a Christian couple whose church she had learned about on Facebook. She says she ran away from home because her father discovered she’d become a Christian–and then threatened to kill her. On Thursday, Circuit Judge Daniel Dawson ordered the girl and her family to try mediation and set a pretrial hearing for the end of the month.




Obama Speech Good for Wakefield, But I Haven’t Changed My Mind



Jay Matthews:

The president’s speech at Wakefield High was a wonderful experience for those hard-working students and the school’s exceptional staff. I was particularly taken with the president’s generosity in answering questions from students before the speech. They will remember this day forever.
But as I said in my much-maligned blog post on Friday, I don’t think it was nearly as big a thrill for students who weren’t there, but watched it on TV at their own schools. It was a great speech, saying all the right stuff. The president knows exactly what is wrong with our schools, and talks about the solutions more clearly and vividly than I do. But most kids have heard versions of his speech before, and without his physical presence, moment loses a lot of its electricity.




Image is Everything



Sara Goldrick Rab:

Sunday’s New York Times features a Style section article that quite frankly turned my stomach (at least, I’m pretty sure it was the article and not the 6 month old fetus I’m carrying!). It describes a debate over Harvard’s decision to sign on to a new, expensive preppy clothing line– one that charges more than $150 for a shirt, and up to $500 for a sports coat. A variety of opinions are represented, from that of the director of admissions and financial aid ( a former aid recipient himself) to an undergraduate who said, “I think it’s good that it’s [Harvard’s] doing something to make money.”
These deals apparently generate about $500,000 per year for the university, which (poor baby) saw its endowment decline by 30% last year. And that money goes to financial aid, so we’re not supposed to worry that Harvard’s being greedy.
And that’s the main issue the reporter tackles–whether the decision to say yes to a clothing line that portrays an elite undergraduate student body conflicts with Harvard’s stated goals of expanding diversity. Whether the money raised is enough to cover the additional costs associated with outreach. The “damage” done.
Well, of course it’s not! Image, we all know, is everything– especially when it comes to those families who rely on media for information in the absence of more informed sources. Harvard’s biggest obstacles to bringing in more students from disadvantaged backgrounds are: (1) image; (2) cost of attendance; and (3) admissions requirements. The school is trying to conquer the second one with financial aid, by promising to cover all demonstrated need. That sounds great, but the fact is that the number of admitted students with tremendous financial need isn’t very substantial– if it were, the amount of money required to fulfill that promise would be much more forboding.




The Day In The Life Of A School Principal



NPR:

High school principals Peter Cahall of Woodrow Wilson High School in Washington, D.C., and Walter Jackson of Alief Taylor High School in Houston, take NPR inside a day in the life of their job. They talk about the challenges of wearing many hats to provide visionary and practical leadership for their school.




Reluctant students of the classics, lend me your earbuds!



Greg Toppo:

Kids, remember this name: Jenny Sawyer.
She may soon be American education’s next “It” girl. Actually, make that its first and only “It” girl.
Only 24 and barely out of college, Sawyer has undertaken an audacious task: writing and shooting, with the help of a small band of filmmakers, more than 1,000 free, one-minute videos that help students understand and enjoy commonly assigned classic works of literature.
It’ll take two years, thousands of hours on a Boston soundstage and countless outfit changes for Sawyer, the only person appearing on camera.
Her website, 60secondrecap.com, is scheduled to go live Tuesday with the first of 100 or so videos covering 10 universally loved (read: hated) works that teenagers have struggled to appreciate since English teachers first walked the Earth. Titles include: The Scarlet Letter, Of Mice and Men, Great Expectations, Hamlet and To Kill a Mockingbird.




Fewer Fliers Sent Home as Schools Put More on Web



Winnie Hu:

The back-to-school packets sent to all 7,800 students here in this hamlet on Long Island’s North Shore grew thicker each year with dozens of pages of notices, fliers and forms — adding up to more than $12,000 in postage alone last year.
Students at Commack High School on Long Island. The Commack School District has limited mailings and put back-to-school packets on its Web site.
But this year, amid a lingering recession and increasing online activity, school officials decided to stop the madness. Teachers and principals were given strict instructions: Limit mailings to a single, first-class envelope per student — and post the overflow on the district’s Web site, in a newly created back-to-school section. The savings: $9,000 in stamps plus $12,000 in salaries for clerks who used to spend up to two weeks assembling the packets.
And, for parents like Debra Miller, a shrinking pile of paperwork to keep up with.
“Since the kids have been in school, there’s never been a pile less than 12 inches high on my kitchen counter,” said Mrs. Miller, a mother of two, who shoves the unsightly pile into a cabinet when she has company. “I can never get out from under the pile, and I’m not alone. We all talk about it.”




Are Dictionaries Becoming Obsolete?



Julia Angwin:

Do we still need dictionaries in the age of Google?
Dictionaries are, after all, giant databases of words compiled by lexicographers who investigate word usages and meanings.
These days, however, Google is our database of meaning. Want to know how to spell assiduous? Type it incorrectly and Google will reply, in its kind-hearted way: “Did you mean: assiduous”? Why yes, Google, I did.
Google then spits out a bunch of links to Web definitions for assiduous. Without clicking on any of them, the two-sentence summaries below each link give me enough to get a sense of the word: “hard working,” and “diligent.”
Still not satisfied? Fine, click on the Google “News” tab – and you will be directed to a page of links where the word assiduous appears in news stories. Presto, sample sentences and usage examples.




Certification Of Teachers as Painful Farce



Jay Matthews:

Iwas flooded with e-mails after my Aug. 24 column on high school teacher Jonathan Keiler. Prince George’s County officials said he was going to lose his certification because he had not taken enough education school courses, even though he had a law degree and was the only person at his school with the highly regarded National Board Certification. Shortly after I told county and state officials that I was going to write about Keiler’s situation, he was told that he had enough courses after all.
That change of tune was maddening to the teachers who wrote me. So were what they considered the uselessness of many education courses they were required to take and the faulty information they often received about the advanced training they did or didn’t need. I learned much from them. Here is a sampling:
“I’m a 17-year science teacher in Montgomery County. I was actually fired two years ago for not having the ‘right’ Advanced Professional Certificate (APC) credits. The online credits I was told would be accepted were denied. I later managed to complete the required credits online from the University of Phoenix — which was extremely lame but easy to do and is recognized by Montgomery County — in less than three weeks. By then the deadline had run out and I was fired from my job but rehired as a long-term substitute. Demoralizing to say the least. Financially I took a very big hit.”




The Hunt for a Good Teacher



Stanley Fish:

I would give entering freshmen two pieces of advice. First, find out who the good teachers are. Ask your adviser; poll older students; search the Internet; and consult the teacher-evaluation guides available at most colleges. (As a professor, I am against those guides; too often they are the vehicles of petty grievances put forward by people who have no long-term stake in the enterprise. But if I were a student, I would take advantage of them.)
To some extent your options will be limited by distribution requirements (in colleges that still have them) and scheduling. But within these limits you should do everything you can to get a seat in the class of a professor known for both his or her knowledge of the material and the ability to make it a window on the larger universe. Years later you may not be able to recall the details of lectures and discussions, but the benefits of being in the company of a challenging mind will be yours forever.
Second, I would advise students to take a composition course even if they have tested out of it. I have taught many students whose SAT scores exempted them from the writing requirement, but a disheartening number of them couldn’t write and an equal number had never been asked to. They managed to get through high-school without learning how to write a clean English sentence, and if you can’t do that you can’t do anything.




Who Controls the Reading List?



Letters to the New York Times:

To the Editor:
As a university literature instructor, I found the idea of allowing middle-school students to choose their own reading lists disturbing.
Would we be so eager to embrace a “choose your own math” or “choose your own history” class?
The answer is no. We expect that students learn the curriculum in those courses whether or not they are “into it.” Literature is no different, and literature courses shouldn’t be treated as glorified book clubs.
By allowing students to bypass difficult texts or texts that don’t seem to relate to their contemporary lives in favor of “Captain Underpants,” teachers miss a valuable opportunity to teach them that real scholastic and intellectual growth often comes when we are most challenged and least comfortable.
Lisa Dunick
Champaign, Ill., Aug. 30, 2009




Don’t Alienate Your Professor



Carol Berkin:

Having survived the teenage years of two children, I know how foolhardy it is to offer advice to 18-year-olds. But, after more than three decades of teaching, I do have a few tips for college freshmen everywhere:
Make sure you are in the class you signed up to take. A week spent trying to figure out why the person you thought was your math teacher keeps talking about Renaissance art is a wasted week — for both of you.
During class, do not: a) beat out a cadence on your desk while the teacher is lecturing; b) sigh audibly more than three or four times during a class period; c) check your watch more than twice during the hour. Do: a) practice a look of genuine interest in the lecture or discussion; b) nod in agreement frequently; c) laugh at all (or at least most) of the professor’s jokes.
Do ask questions if you don’t understand the professor’s point. Do not, however, ask any of the following: “Will this be on the test?” “Does grammar count?” “Do we have to read the whole chapter?” “Can I turn in my paper late?”




Google’s Book Search: A Disaster for Scholars



Geoffrey Nunberg:

Whether the Google books settlement passes muster with the U.S. District Court and the Justice Department, Google’s book search is clearly on track to becoming the world’s largest digital library. No less important, it is also almost certain to be the last one. Google’s five-year head start and its relationships with libraries and publishers give it an effective monopoly: No competitor will be able to come after it on the same scale. Nor is technology going to lower the cost of entry. Scanning will always be an expensive, labor-intensive project. Of course, 50 or 100 years from now control of the collection may pass from Google to somebody else–Elsevier, Unesco, Wal-Mart. But it’s safe to assume that the digitized books that scholars will be working with then will be the very same ones that are sitting on Google’s servers today, augmented by the millions of titles published in the interim.
That realization lends a particular urgency to the concerns that people have voiced about the settlement –about pricing, access, and privacy, among other things. But for scholars, it raises another, equally basic question: What assurances do we have that Google will do this right?
Doing it right depends on what exactly “it” is. Google has been something of a shape-shifter in describing the project. The company likes to refer to Google’s book search as a “library,” but it generally talks about books as just another kind of information resource to be incorporated into Greater Google. As Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google, puts it: “We just feel this is part of our core mission. There is fantastic information in books. Often when I do a search, what is in a book is miles ahead of what I find on a Web site.”




Can Arne Duncan (And $5 Billion) Fix America’s Schools?



Gilbert Cruz:

The secretary of education is on fire. He’s running up and down a makeshift basketball court in a Kentucky parking lot and has just executed one of those rare flashy moves that also manage to be completely functional: a behind-the-back, no-look pass to a teammate, who cuts backdoor for an easy layup. Moments later, he drains a fadeaway jumper with an opponent dead in his face.
On some weekends, when the rest of Washington is on the back nine or a racquetball court, Arne Duncan (whose first name is pronounced Are-knee) can be found playing in three-on-three street-ball tournaments across the nation. On a muggy, overcast Saturday in late July, while 50 Cent’s “I Get Money” blares from a set of speakers, the former head of the Chicago Public Schools pounds the blacktop, alternating between playing intensely and walking off to take calls on his BlackBerry. Almost none of the other ballers know who the white dude with the salt-and-pepper hair is, and even fewer expect him to last long in the tournament. And yet his team goes on to win every game (20-10, 20-6, 18-9, 20-11, 20-10, etc.) and eventually the grand prize of $10,000.
That may sound like a lot of money–Duncan plans to give his share to charity–but it’s chump change compared with the kind of cash he gets to play with at work. The economic-stimulus bill passed by Congress in February included $100 billion in new education spending. Of that total, Duncan has $5 billion in discretionary funding. That money alone makes him the most powerful Education Secretary ever. “I had very little–in the single-digit millions,” says Margaret Spellings, Duncan’s predecessor. “That’s millions, with an m.”




Special education: Public schools pressed to pay for private schooling



Bonnie Miller Rubin:

With a new school year upon us, the long-simmering issue of how best to accommodate special education students has been pushed to the forefront by a major U.S. Supreme Court ruling.
Parents of students with special needs have the right to seek reimbursement from their districts for private school tuition, even if they did not first try their public school’s special education programs, according to the recent ruling.
“This is an extremely important decision,” said Matthew Cohen, a Chicago attorney who specializes in disability law. “It makes it clear that school districts … may be held legally liable for placements that the parents make on their own.”
The practical effect on districts is unclear. Some educators fear the ruling will strain already cash-strapped districts and pit parents against one another as they clash over scarce resources. But it’s unlikely parents will flock to private schools because they have to pay the cost, then seek reimbursement.
Still, schools should take seriously their obligations to provide services provided under the federal Individuals With Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), state officials say. Students are entitled to a “free and appropriate public education” under the law, and districts must pick up the tab for private schooling but only if the district’s efforts to meet a child’s needs have failed.




Grading education isn’t easy



Dennis Willard:

About a decade ago, this newspaper ran a series of articles about the problems facing public education. In those stories, three reporters, myself included, each spent a day following typical fourth-grade students in three different school districts.
In one classroom, the teacher asked students about a spinnaker, and a young man answered by explaining he had seen the sailing ship on a trip to Turkey. In another classroom, when a teacher asked what was the first thing they smelled when they went to the movies, the students fell silent. When the teacher exclaimed, ”popcorn,” we learned many of the students had yet to step into a theater.
Students arrive at the doorsteps of schools each day burdened with backpacks and often varied experiences and economic backgrounds. They are at different learning levels, and for this reason, it is difficult to fairly assess just how much teaching is going on in individual classrooms and buildings and across districts.
During the same period these articles were appearing, the charter-school movement was starting in Ohio. The early advocates for these quasi-public schools pointed to the poor results in urban districts like Akron and especially Cleveland and proudly proclaimed they could teach these failing children better and cheaper.
Choice alone for parents and students was not the early driving force to start charter schools, and don’t let anyone tell you differently. Choice would come later, when the promises to teach cheaper and better were less than fulfilled




New England Prep School Builds Library Without Books



FoxNews:

A New England prep school is getting rid of its traditional library full of books and going digital.
Cushing Academy in Ashburnham, Mass., will give away or toss the 20,000 books in its collection and spend $500,000 on a virtual “learning center,” The Boston Globe reported.
The new space will have flat-screen TVs that show information from the Internet, a $50,000 coffee shop with a $12,000 cappuccino machine and study cubicles that can accommodate laptops, according to the paper
School officials have also spent $10,000 on 18 Amazon.com and Sony electronic readers to replace the old library’s stacks of books.




Milwaukee School Board takes key powers from administration



Erin Richards:

After a Milwaukee School Board vote that created a new accountability office, the superintendent and two board members said the restructuring won’t improve the efficiency of the bureaucracy and may hurt the district’s chances of securing a high-flying new superintendent.
Superintendent William Andrekopoulos strongly opposed the accountability services office proposal, led by School Board President Michael Bonds. Andrekopoulos told the School Board Thursday that it creates a difficult-to-lead “bifurcated system” and takes away from the superintendent key powers, such as heading charter schools and governmental lobbying efforts. He added the plan was not discussed openly with the public or district employees who would be affected.
Changing the district’s organization was based on “fundamental misunderstandings of the existing system” and would “distract from the current efforts to improve the district’s financial and educational position,” he said.
The board approved the new office and job description of its leader Thursday night in a 5-2 vote, with members Jeff Spence and Bruce Thompson opposed and Tim Petersons voting “present.” David Voeltner was absent from the special board meeting.




GeoQUEST teaches history and geology to kids and parents



Pamela Cotant:

As young girls, Kristi Gelsomino and Tia Srachta toured the Cave of the Mounds with their Girl Scout troops from Illinois.
Now, years later, they journeyed back to the site with another mom, Jennifer Carroll, and their daughters who visited the cave with Girl Scout Troop 376 out of St Charles, Ill.
This time, the scouts were participating in a program called the GeoQUEST Walk and Talk for Families, which was started this year
The free program, run by the cave, explores the history of the area and geological features outside the cave itself.
“The GeoQUEST is designed to give back a bit of the history and story of this place without charging them a fee,” said Kim Anderson, education coordinator at Cave of the Mounds.




Deja vu: Report of the 1965 Madison School District Math 9 Textbook Committee



1.7MB PDF by Robert D. Gilberts, Superintendent Madison School District, Ted Losby and the Math 9 Textbook Committee:

The mathematics committee of the junior high schools of Madison has been meeting regularly for four rears with one intention in mind — to improve the mathematics program of the junior high school. After experimenting with three programs in the 7th grade, the Seeing Through Mathematics series, Books 1 and 2, were recommended for adoption and approved in May of 1963.
The committee continued its leadership role in implementing the new program and began evaluation of the 9th grade textbooks available. The committee recommended the adoption of Seeing Through Mathematics, Book 3, published by Scott, Foresman and Company, and Algebra: Its Element and Structure, Book 1, published by Webster Division, McGraw-Hill Book Company, and the Board of Education adopted them on May 3, 1965.
A number of objections to the Seeing Through Mathematics textbooks were made by various University of Wisconsin professors. Dr. R. C. Buck, chairman of the University of Wisconsin Mathematics Department strongly criticized the series. A public objection to the adoption was made at the Board of Education meeting by Dr. Richard Askey of the University Mathematics Department. Later, a formal petition of protest against the adoption of Seeing Through Mathematics, Book 3, was sent to committee members. [related: 2006 Open Letter from 35 UW-Madison Math Professors about the Madison School District’s Math Coordinator position]
The sincerity of the eminently qualified professional mathematicians under Dr. Buck’s chairmanship was recognized by both the administration and the committee as calling for reconsideration of the committee’s decisions over the past three years relative to the choice of Seeing Through Mathematics 1, 2 and 3.
Conversely, the support of the Scott, Foresman and. Company mathematics program and its instruction philosophy, as evidenced by numerous adoptions throughout the country and the pilot studies carried out in the Madison Public Schoolsvindicated that equitable treatment of those holding diametric viewpoints should be given. It was decided that the interests of the students to be taught would be best served through a hearing of both sides before reconsideration.
A special meeting of the Junior High School. Mathematics committee was held on June 10, 1965.
Meeting 1. Presentations were made by Dr. R. C. Buck, Dr. Richard Askey, and Dr. Walter Rudin of the University of Wisconsin Mathematics Department, and Dr. J. B. Rosen, chairman-elect of the University of Wisconsin Computer Sciences Department.
The presentations emphasized the speakers’ major criticism of the Seeing Through Mathematics series — “that these books completely distort the ideas and spirit of modern mathematics, and do not give students a good preparation for future mathematics courses. Examples were used to show that from the speakers’ points of view the emphasis in Seeing Through Mathematics is wrong. They indicated they felt the language overly pedantic, and the mathematics of the textbooks was described as pseudo-mathematics. However, it was pointed out that the choice of topics was good the content was acceptable (except for individual instances), and the treatment was consistent. A question and answer session tollowed the presentations.
……….
After careful consideration of all points of view, the committee unanimously recommended:

  1. that the University of Wisconsin Mathematics and Education Departments be invited to participate with our Curriculum Department in developing end carrying out a program to evaluate the effectiveness of the Seeing Through Mathematics series and, if possible, other “modern” mathematics series in Madison and other school districts in Wisconsin;
  2. that the committee reaffirm its decision to recommend the use of Seeing Through Mathematics, Book 3, and Algebra: Its Elements and structure, Book 1, in grade nine with Seeing Through Mathematics, Book 1 and 2 in grades seven and eight, and that the Department of Curriculum Developnent of the Madison Public Schools continue its study, its evaluation, and its revision of the mathematics curriculum; and
  3. that en in-service program be requested for all junior high school mathematics teachers. (Details to follow in a later bulletin).

Related: The recent Madison School District Math Task Force.
Britannica on deja vu.




How Facebook Ruins Friendships



Elizabeth Bernstein:

Notice to my friends: I love you all dearly.
But I don’t give a hoot that you are “having a busy Monday,” your child “took 30 minutes to brush his teeth,” your dog “just ate an ant trap” or you want to “save the piglets.” And I really, really don’t care which Addams Family member you most resemble. (I could have told you the answer before you took the quiz on Facebook.)
Here’s where you and I went wrong: We took our friendship online. First we began communicating more by email than by phone. Then we switched to “instant messaging” or “texting.” We “friended” each other on Facebook, and began communicating by “tweeting” our thoughts–in 140 characters or less–via Twitter.
All this online social networking was supposed to make us closer. And in some ways it has. Thanks to the Internet, many of us have gotten back in touch with friends from high school and college, shared old and new photos, and become better acquainted with some people we might never have grown close to offline.
Last year, when a friend of mine was hit by a car and went into a coma, his friends and family were able to easily and instantly share news of his medical progress–and send well wishes and support–thanks to a Web page his mom created for him.
But there’s a danger here, too. If we’re not careful, our online interactions can hurt our real-life relationships.




Why College Costs Rise, Even in a Recession



Ron Lieber:

If you have paid a college tuition bill recently, perhaps the sticker shock has abated and your children have been good enough to friend you on Facebook so you can see what they are doing on your dime.
What probably still lingers, however, is the desire to ask some pointed questions of the people who are doing the educating. Where does all that money go? And why can’t the price tag fall for a change?
Earlier this year, the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities announced with some pride that the average increase in tuition and fees at private institutions this school year would be the smallest in 37 years — 4.3 percent, just a little higher than inflation.
Is this where we are supposed to stand up and cheer?
To get some perspective, I set out to find a college president with an M.B.A. and some experience outside the academy. I found one at Lafayette College in Easton, Pa. Its president, Daniel H. Weiss, is an expert in medieval art, but he also worked as a management consultant at Booz Allen Hamilton. So he knows his way around a corporate restructuring.

Cringely ponders education in a “alternate economice universe”.
Change is in the air. Simply throwing more money at the current system is unlikely to drive material improvements.




Equal funding for California’s schools
No one really understands the crazy quilt system now in place.



Los Angeles Times:

If there is one bright spot in the state’s dismal funding of schools this year, it’s that the Legislature is finally paying attention to long-standing and truly nonsensical disparities in the way that money is distributed.
There is no particular pattern to the inequities, except that a handful of the wealthiest school districts receive far more money per student than others, and the differences have nothing to do with what those districts’ relative needs are. Rather, the crazy quilt of funding relies on outdated formulas that made little sense when they were devised and make even less sense now.
The Los Angeles and Inglewood school districts, for instance, have similar populations and educational challenges. Yet Inglewood received $1,400 less per student in 2007-08, the last year for which figures are available. And the relatively affluent Capistrano Unified School District in south Orange County got $1,000 less than that, while the well-off Laguna Beach schools received $3,000 more than Inglewood.




No Child Left Behind testing going online in Hawaii in 2011



Loren Moreno:

The state Department of Education will conduct field studies of an online version of the Hawai’i State Assessment at every school, with plans to replace the paper and pencil test in 2011.
Once the online version of the assessment is fully rolled out in the 2010-11 school year, officials say the testing window will increase from two weeks to nearly eight months, and teachers will be able to administer the test up to three times per student.
The assessment is the state’s measurement under No Child Left Behind. Only the best of the three scores will count toward a school’s annual NCLB status, known commonly as “adequate yearly progress.”
Modeled after the online Oregon Assessment of Knowledge and Skills, superintendent Patricia Hamamoto said administering the Hawai’i assessment by computer will allow teachers to get immediate feedback on how their students are understanding math, reading and science standards. It will also allow teachers to see where students might need more help.




Incompetent teachers



Lexington @ The Economist:

I’VE finally got round to reading Steven Brill’s piece in last week’s New Yorker about incompetent teachers in New York. It’s a brilliant but infuriating description of how hard it is to improve schools because the unions make it so hard to get rid of bad teachers and replace them with good ones.
Brill visits the “Rubber Room”, where teachers whose principals want to sack them sit around doing nothing for years, still drawing their salaries, until arbitrators hear their cases. One interviewee, who is earning more than $100,000 a year for twiddling her thumbs, offers one of the most amusingly outlandish theories I have heard in a while:
Before Bloomberg and Klein [the mayor and schools chancellor, who are trying to introduce a hint of meritocracy to New York’s schools], “there was no such thing as incompetence,” says Brandi Scheiner. She adds:




Milwaukee teachers union has old hand in charge



Alan Borsuk:

Mike Langyel says he wasn’t banging on the piano, like some people say, that night several years ago when a few hundred Milwaukee Public Schools teachers filled the auditorium while the School Board was trying to meet.
“I know I was in the key of C,” he said. “I didn’t have to touch any black keys.” Nothing he played was discordant, he said.
The teachers, unhappy about the state of contract negotiations, disrupted the meeting with boos, noisemakers and catcalls before leaving en masse.
Langyel’s contribution was the piano accompaniment. For some reason, an upright piano used to be kept in the auditorium, right at the foot of the stage, just a few feet from where Superintendent William Andrekopoulos sat. Langyel used it, particularly when Andrekopoulos spoke.
“Business as usual sometimes has to stop when you’re really trying to fight for kids,” Langyel said in an interview recently.
Was what he did that night a good idea? “At the time,” he said.
The piano disappeared after that. But Langyel didn’t.




Wikipedia: It’s a Man’s World



Sady Doyle:

A recent study, reported on the Wall Street Journal’s blog, reveals that only 13 percent of Wikipedia’s contributors are female. This information manages, somehow, to be both unsurprising — Wikipedia feels like a guy thing, somehow — and fascinating, for raising questions about how gender informs the largely anonymous realm of Internet discussion.
One-quarter of respondents who did not contribute said that they hadn’t done so because they were “afraid of getting ‘in trouble'”
Wikipedia aims for democratic participation: Anyone can contribute, and everyone’s contributions are subject to correction by other users. Its subject matter isn’t implicitly gendered: It covers almost any topic that’s relevant enough to warrant an entry. But, in practice, Wikipedia — like any other established subculture, offline or on — rewards some contributors more than others. The site, by its nature, favors people with an intense interest in detail and a high tolerance for debate. (Choosing a discussion page at random, one learns that the entry on frogs once drew critical attention for including a picture of toads. It got slightly heated.)




Loudon residents, school board comfortable with camera at meetings



Hugh Willett:

A Tennessee School Board Association recommendation that would allow school boards to restrict the use of cameras and video recorders from board meetings found little support from the members of the Loudon County School Board on Thursday night.
During a review of TSBA’s proposed policy changes, board members and residents expressed their concerns about the policy. Some were concerned that the Nashville-based TSBA’s suggested policy was unconstitutional.
“I can’t believe you’re getting such bad legal advice,” said Loudon resident Shirley Harrison.
Pat Hunter, a Loudon County activist who has recently posted video clips of school board members and other county officials on her Web site, said she was concerned about taxpayer money being used to fund TSBA.

Power to the people, as it were!




Games Lessons: It sounds like a cop-out, but the future of schooling may lie with video games



The Economist:

SINCE the beginning of mass education, schools have relied on what is known in educational circles as “chalk and talk”. Chalk and blackboard may sometimes be replaced by felt-tip pens and a whiteboard, and electronics in the form of computers may sometimes be bolted on, but the idea of a pedagogue leading his pupils more or less willingly through a day based on periods of study of recognisable academic disciplines, such as mathematics, physics, history, geography and whatever the local language happens to be, has rarely been abandoned.
Abandoning it, though, is what Katie Salen hopes to do. Ms Salen is a games designer and a professor of design and technology at Parsons The New School for Design, in New York. She is also the moving spirit behind Quest to Learn, a new, taxpayer-funded school in that city which is about to open its doors to pupils who will never suffer the indignity of snoring through double French but will, rather, spend their entire days playing games.
Quest to Learn draws on many roots. One is the research of James Gee of the University of Wisconsin. In 2003 Dr Gee published a book called “What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy”, in which he argued that playing such games helps people develop a sense of identity, grasp meaning, learn to follow commands and even pick role models. Another is the MacArthur Foundation’s digital media and learning initiative, which began in 2006 and which has acted as a test-bed for some of Ms Salen’s ideas about educational-games design. A third is the success of the Bank Street School for Children, an independent primary school in New York that practises what its parent, the nearby Bank Street College of Education, preaches in the way of interdisciplinary teaching methods and the encouragement of pupil collaboration.




K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: The Coming Reset in State Government



Mitch Daniels:

State government finances are a wreck. The drop in tax receipts is the worst in a half century. Fewer than 10 states ended the last fiscal year with significant reserves, and three-fourths have deficits exceeding 10% of their budgets. Only an emergency infusion of printed federal funny money is keeping most state boats afloat right now.
Most governors I’ve talked to are so busy bailing that they haven’t checked the long-range forecast. What the radar tells me is that we ain’t seen nothin’ yet. What we are being hit by isn’t a tropical storm that will come and go, with sunshine soon to follow. It’s much more likely that we’re facing a near permanent reduction in state tax revenues that will require us to reduce the size and scope of our state governments. And the time to prepare for this new reality is already at hand.
The coming state government reset will be particularly wrenching after the happy binge that preceded this recession. During the last decade, states increased their spending by an average of 6% per year, gusting to 8% during 2007-08. Much of the government institutions built up in those years will now have to be dismantled.




College Ratings Gone Wild



Jay Matthews:

Four years ago I ranked all of the major college guides for Slate. My piece is still there, if you want to look. It retains some relevance at this time of year, when America has its annual ratings-o-rama. It is more entertaining than informative, but so what? A little amusement might help us better understand what we want in our colleges.
I have been leafing through the guides that just arrived in the mail. There is the Newsweek-Kaplan college guide, where once again I have an article, so in the interests of modesty and objectivity we will ignore it. The granddaddy of guides, U.S. News & World Report’s “America’s Best Colleges,” sits atop my stack, still shiny and proud despite all the abuse it has gotten over the years. “The Best 371 Colleges,” a thick book by The Princeton Review, is a favorite because of its playfulness.
I am also fond of the Washington Monthly college guide. It has found a way to deepen and broaden each year what I once thought was a one-time gimmick–ranking colleges by how well they serve America. I am excited by a new guide, at least new to me, the “Military Friendly Schools” list published by G.I. Jobs magazine. The “What Will They Learn?” report, an unconventional guide by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, shows how the lists might look if we cared about what our colleges were teaching.




A College President Breaks Bread With His Foes



Paul Fain:

College presidents, like mob bosses, have precarious jobs. Both work under the lurking threat of removal, whether by a no-confidence vote or a whacking. For that reason, savvy presidents live by the old rule: Keep your friends close and your enemies closer.
So it was that Paul J. LeBlanc, president of Southern New Hampshire University, decided early last year to hold an intimate chat with a group of his fiercest critics. He put together a list of about a dozen faculty members and invited them to a dinner discussion about the future of the university.
In his e-mailed invitation to the dinner, Mr. LeBlanc gave recipients five reasons that they got the nod, including because they had disagreed with him in the past, had served in leadership positions, or, more simply, “just straight out don’t like me.” (Read the text of the full invitation.)
Mr. LeBlanc booked a private room at a local restaurant, C.R. Sparks. Pizzas, salads, and wine were brought in, and the doors were closed for a three-hour, no-holds barred conversation. The president picked up the bill.




Will California Use Student Test Scores to Evaluate Teachers?



Raymond Barglow:

In decades past, education in California was a top priority for government, and the state’s schools were “the cutting edge of the American Dream.” Today, spending per pupil in the state has fallen to 47th in the country. Due to deep budget cuts, California school districts have been laying off teachers, expanding class sizes, closing some schools, and canceling bus service and summer school programs.
As for future funding of public education–the state of California is caught between the proverbial rock and a hard place. The current dilemma stems from a provision in California’s Education Code that can be interpreted as ruling out the use by state officials of test scores to evaluate teacher performance and compensation. On the one hand, the Obama administration has informed state officials that this provision represents an unacceptable “firewall between students and teacher data” and must be removed if California is to be eligible to receive an educational grant from the administration’s $4.35 billion Race to the Top stimulus fund. On the other hand, California teachers are making it clear through their unions that the use by state government of student test scores to evaluate teachers would be detrimental to education and is an idea that must be rejected.
Taking up this issue has been the Senate Committee on Education, which held a hearing on Aug. 26 chaired by Senator Gloria Romero. The Committee is considering amending California law to ensure that the state qualifies for federal funding. “It is my goal,” Romero says, “to do everything possible to ensure that the Golden State has access to precious federal dollars that can help provide our students the best possible education.”




As Many Schools Earn A’s and B’s, New York City Plans to Raise Standards



Jennifer Medina:

With the vast majority of New York City schools receiving A’s and B’s on the progress reports released this week, Education Department officials said Thursday that they expected to adjust the grading system, in effect ensuring that more schools would receive lower grades next year.
In fact, school officials who helped create the system said they never meant it to be one that would have so many schools earning the highest marks.
“We are going to raise the bar,” said Shael Polakow-Suransky, the chief accountability officer for the department. He said that while he would want to see a wider distribution of the grades, “At the same time, when we set clear goals and schools meet them, they need to be recognized and rewarded for that.”
The huge increase in the number of top marks on the city report cards — 97 percent of schools received an A or B, up from 79 percent in 2008 — was driven by broad gains on state standardized tests in math and English. This year, the number of students who met state standards jumped to 82 percent in math, compared with 74 percent last year. In English, 69 percent of students passed, up from 58 percent.




26-School D.C. Cheating Probe ‘Inconclusive’



Bill Turque:

District officials revealed Thursday that they commissioned an investigation last summer into possible cheating at 26 public and public charter schools where reading and math proficiency on 2008 standardized tests increased markedly.
The probe, an analysis of incorrect student answers that were erased and changed to correct answers, found “anomalies” at some of the schools that administered the D.C. Comprehensive Assessment System (DC-CAS) test. But officials called the investigation, conducted by the test’s publisher, CTB McGraw-Hill, “ultimately inconclusive.”
District officials did not name the schools that were investigated, and they did not release a copy of the CTB McGraw-Hill report, which was requested by The Washington Post on May 29 under the Freedom of Information Act. Officials also offered no explanation for the interval between the conclusion of the investigation in March and their decision to disclose it at a news conference called by Mayor Adrian M. Fenty (D) on Thursday.




Same-sex classes worth a shot



Wisconsin State Journal Editorial:

Anyone who has ever walked the halls of a middle school knows the hormones are hopping and the social drama is intense.
Growing evidence also suggests boys and girls learn best in different ways.
That’s why experimenting with same-sex schools and classes is a welcome trend in Wisconsin. If pilot programs in Beaver Dam and a handful of other districts can boost the attention and achievement of both sexes, more schools should consider separating the girls from the boys in targeted grades and subjects.
Beaver Dam educators are separating sixth-graders into two single-gender classrooms for math, science and English this fall. Other classes such as physical education will still be coed.
Educators in Beaver Dam and elsewhere plan to analyze and compare test scores as well as attendance, discipline and behavioral referrals. Results will be vital in determining whether to continue or expand the effort.




School speech backlash builds



Nia-Malika Henderson:

School districts from Maryland to Texas are fielding angry complaints from parents opposed to President Barack Obama’s back-to-school address Tuesday – forcing districts to find ways to shield students from the speech as conservative opposition to Obama spills into the nation’s classrooms.
The White House says Obama’s address is a sort of pep talk for the nation’s schoolchildren. But conservative commentators have criticized Obama for trying to “indoctrinate” students to his liberal beliefs, and some parents call it an improper mix of politics and education.
“The gist is, ‘I want to see what the president has to say before you expose it to my child.’ Another said, ‘This is Marxist propaganda.’ They are very hostile,” said Patricia O’Neill, a Democrat who is vice president of the Montgomery County School Board, in a district that borders Washington, D.C. “I think it’s disturbing that people don’t want to hear the president, but we live in a diverse society.”
The White House moved Thursday to quell the controversy. First it revised an Education Department lesson plan that drew the ire of conservatives because it called for students to write letters about how they can help the president.

Tim Padgett:

When Barack Obama won Florida last November — the first Democrat to take the Sunshine State since FDR — many saw it as a sign of centrist GOP Governor Charlie Crist’s moderating influence. But lately, Florida’s disgruntled Republicans aren’t looking very moderate. This week, in fact, the peninsula’s GOP registered arguably the loudest outcry over the education speech President Obama plans to deliver to U.S. primary and secondary students via webcast and C-Span next Tuesday. In perhaps the most over-the-top performance, state Republican Chairman Jim Greer called it an attempt to use “our children to spread liberal propaganda” and “President Obama’s socialist ideology.”
Thanks in large part to the Administration’s ham-handed advance work, the strident conservative anger that erupted this summer over health-care reform has shifted from town halls to school halls. On the surface, Obama’s intentions for Tuesday seem nothing more threatening than a presidential pep talk about taking education seriously. But some ill-advised prep material from the Education Department — like suggestions that teachers have students write letters on “how to help the President” and recommendations that those pupils read his books — has left the door ajar (and that’s all it seems to take these days) for Republican charges that Obama “wants to indoctrinate our kids,” as Clara Dean, GOP chairwoman of Florida’s Collier County, puts it. (Read Joe Klein on Barack Obama’s August to forget.)




Madison Marquette Elementary teacher named one of two Wisconsin elementary school teachers of the year



Patricia Simms:

A veteran fourth-grade teacher at Marquette Elementary School was named one of two Wisconsin elementary school teachers of the year today.
State officials surprised Maureen McGilligan-Bentin, who has been teaching 37 years, with the award in a cafeteria full of cheering and clapping students and colleagues.
She will receive $3,000 from U.S. Sen. Herb Kohl’s education foundation and will be competing for a national teaching award throughout the year.
McGilligan-Bentin, 60, lives in Madison, holds an education degree from UW-Madison and was a former professional dancer.

Congratulations!




Education works as a placebo effect



Kai Ryssdal & Tyler Cowen:

KAI RYSSDAL: College students, and their parents, who have yet to write this fall’s tuition checks may want to bear the following statistic in mind. According to the Department of Education, more students are going deeper into debt to pay for school. Last year, total federal student loan payments increased 25 percent. Are students getting what they borrowed for? Commentator Tyler Cowen says yeah they are, sort of.
TYLER COWEN: There’s lots of evidence that placebos work in medicine; people get well simply because they think they’re supposed to.
But we’re learning that placebos apply to a lot of other areas and that includes higher education. Schooling works in large part because it makes people feel they’ve been transformed. Think about it: college graduates earn a lot more than non-graduates, but studying Walt Whitman rarely gets people a job. In reality, the students are jumping through lots of hoops and acquiring a new self-identity.
The educators and the administrators stage a kind of “theater” to convince students that they now belong to an elite group of higher earners. If students believe this story, many of them will then live it.




Lavish public spending on the well-being of children does not always hit the mark



The Economist:

WHEN the poet William Wordsworth declared that “the Child is father of the Man“, he meant that the gifts of childhood endow adults with some of their finest qualities. And many governments, these days, feel that the path to happiness for society as a whole lies through spending on the welfare of its youngest members: their health, education and general well-being. A report* from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), a rich-country think-tank, scrutinises these efforts and asks if the aim is being achieved.
With its stress on quantifiable facts, the spirit of the OECD report differs from one by UNICEF, the UN children’s agency, in 2007 which made waves by saying children in Britain did badly. UNICEF relied too much on asking youngsters how they felt (did they have “kind and helpful” schoolmates?); the new study stresses meatier things like vaccination and test scores.
With equal rigour, the OECD avoids a single index of child welfare in its 30 member states. Instead, after sifting hundreds of variables, the researchers settled on 21 that coalesce into six categories: material well-being; housing and environment; educational well-being; health and safety; risky behaviour; and quality of school life. Then they ranked countries six times.




It’s expensive, so it must be good



The Economist:

THERE are plenty of interesting factoids in this post, on a study examining the well-known U.S. News and World Report annual college rankings. Despite the best efforts of well-intentioned administrators to reduce the influence of the publication’s extremely popular and rather superficial league tables, the rankings get results; movement into or within the top 50 produces dividends in the quality of the following year’s applicant pool.
But this is particularly curious:




The Politics of President Obama’s “Back to School Speech” Beamed to Classrooms



Foon Rhee:

Here’s the latest exhibit on how polarized the country is and how much distrust exists of President Obama.
He plans what seems like a simple speech to students around the country on Tuesday to encourage them to do well in school.
But some Republicans are objecting to the back-to-school message, asserting that Obama wants to indoctrinate students.
Florida GOP Chairman Jim Greer said in a statement that he is “absolutely appalled that taxpayer dollars are being used to spread President Obama’s socialist ideology” and “liberal propaganda.”
Wednesday, after the White House announced the speech, the Department of Education followed up with a letter to school principals and a lesson plan.
Critics pointed to the part of the lesson plan that originally recommended having students “write letters to themselves about what they can do to help the president.”

Eric Kleefeld:

The Department of Education has now changed their supplementary materials on President Obama’s upcoming address to schoolchildren on the importance of education — eliminating a phrase that some conservatives, such as the Florida GOP, happened to have been bashing as evidence of socialist indoctrination in our schools.
In a set of bullet points listed under a heading, “Extension of the Speech,” one of the points used to say: “Write letters to themselves about what they can do to help the president. These would be collected and redistributed at an appropriate later date by the teacher to make students accountable to their goals.”
However, that bullet point now reads as follows: “Write letters to themselves about how they can achieve their short‐term and long‐term education goals. These would be collected and redistributed at an appropriate later date by the teacher to make students accountable to their goals.”

Alyson Klein:

om Horne, Arizona’s superintendent of public instruction, put out his own statement, with an education-oriented critique of the speech and its lesson plans.
Here’s a snippet from his statement:

The White House materials call for a worshipful, rather than critical approach to this speech. For example, the White House communication calls for the students to have ‘notable quotes excerpted (and posted in large print on the board),’ and for the students to discuss ‘how will he inspire us,’ among other things. …In general, in keeping with good education practice, students should be taught to read and think critically about statements coming from politicians and historical figures.

Eduwonk:

Just as it quickly became impossible to have a rationale discussion about health care as August wore on, we could be heading that way on education. If you haven’t heard (don’t get cable news?), President Obama plans to give a speech to the nation’s schoolchildren next week. To accompany it the Department of Education prepared a – gasp – study guide with some ideas for how teachers can use the speech as a, dare I say it, teachable moment.
Conservatives are screaming that this is unprecedented and amounts to indoctrination and a violation of the federal prohibition on involvement in local curricular decisions. Even the usually level-headed Rick Hess has run to the ramparts. We’re getting lectured on indoctrination by the same people who paid national commentators to covertly promote their agenda.
Please. Enough. The only thing this episode shows is how thoroughly broken our politics are. Let’s take the two “issues” in turn.

Michael Alison Chandler & Michael Shear:

The speech, which will be broadcast live from Wakefield High School in Arlington County, was planned as an inspirational message “entirely about encouraging kids to work hard and stay in school,” said White House spokesman Tommy Vietor. Education Secretary Arne Duncan sent a letter to principals nationwide encouraging them to show it.
But the announcement of the speech prompted a frenzied response from some conservatives, who called it an attempt to indoctrinate students, not motivate them.

I think Max Blumenthal provides the right perspective on this political matter:

Although Eisenhower is commonly remembered for a farewell address that raised concerns about the “military-industrial complex,” his letter offers an equally important — and relevant — warning: to beware the danger posed by those seeking freedom from the “mental stress and burden” of democracy.
The story began in 1958, when Eisenhower received a letter from Robert Biggs, a terminally ill World War II veteran. Biggs told the president that he “felt from your recent speeches the feeling of hedging and a little uncertainty.” He added, “We wait for someone to speak for us and back him completely if the statement is made in truth.”
Eisenhower could have discarded Biggs’s note or sent a canned response. But he didn’t. He composed a thoughtful reply. After enduring Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin, who had smeared his old colleague Gen. George C. Marshall as a Communist sympathizer, and having guarded the Republican Party against the newly emergent radical right John Birch Society, which labeled him and much of his cabinet Soviet agents, the president perhaps welcomed the opportunity to expound on his vision of the open society.
“I doubt that citizens like yourself could ever, under our democratic system, be provided with the universal degree of certainty, the confidence in their understanding of our problems, and the clear guidance from higher authority that you believe needed,” Eisenhower wrote on Feb. 10, 1959. “Such unity is not only logical but indeed indispensable in a successful military organization, but in a democracy debate is the breath of life.”

Critical thinking is good for kids and good for society.
I attended a recent Russ Feingold lunch [mp3 audio]. He spoke on a wide range of issues and commendably, took many open forum questions (unlike many elected officials), including mine “How will history view our exploding federalism?”. A fellow luncheon guest asked about Obama’s use of “Czar’s” (operating outside of Senate review and confirmation). Feingold rightly criticized this strategy, which undermines the Constitution.
I would generally not pay much attention to this, but for a friends recent comment that his daughter’s elementary school (Madison School District) teacher assigned six Obama coloring projects last spring.
Wall Street Journal Editorial:

President Obama’s plan to speak to America’s schoolchildren next Tuesday has some Republicans in an uproar. “As the father of four children, I am absolutely appalled that taxpayer dollars are being used to spread President Obama’s socialist ideology,” thunders Jim Greer, chairman of Florida’s Republican Party, in a press release. “President Obama has turned to American’s children to spread his liberal lies, indoctrinating American’s [sic] youngest children before they have a chance to decide for themselves.” Columnists who spy a conspiracy behind every Democrat are also spreading alarm.
This is overwrought, to say the least. According to the Education Department’s Web site, Mr. Obama “will challenge students to work hard, set educational goals, and take responsibility for their learning”–hardly the stuff of the Communist Manifesto or even the Democratic Party platform. America’s children are not so vulnerable that we need to slap an NC-17 rating on Presidential speeches. Given how many minority children struggle in school, a pep talk from the first African-American President could even do some good.
On the other hand, the Department of Education goes a little too far in its lesson plans for teachers to use in conjunction with the speech–especially the one for grades 7 through 12. Before the speech, teachers are urged to use “notable quotes excerpted (and posted in large print on board) from President Obama’s speeches about education” and to “brainstorm” with students about the question “How will he inspire us?” Suggested topics for postspeech discussion include “What resonated with you from President Obama’s speech?” and “What is President Obama inspiring you to do?”




Nearly 1 in 10 in California’s class of 2009 did not pass high school exit exam



Seema Mehta:

Nearly one in 10 students in the class of 2009 did not pass the state’s high school exit exam, which is required to receive a diploma. The results, released Wednesday, were nearly stagnant compared with the previous year.
By the end of their senior year, 90.6% of students in the graduating class had passed the two-part exam, compared with 90.4% in the class of 2008.
“These gains are incremental, but they are in fact significant and they are a true testimony to the tremendous work being done by our professional educators . . . as well as our students,” said state Supt. of Public Instruction Jack O’Connell, whose office released the data.
Beginning in their sophomore year, students have several chances to take the exit exam. A score of at least 55% on the math portion, which is geared to an eighth-grade level, and 60% on the English portion, which is ninth- or 10th-grade level, is required.
The achievement gap between white and Asian students and their Latino and black classmates persisted. More than 95% of Asian students and nearly 96% of white students passed the exam by the end of their senior year, compared with nearly 87% of Latino students and more than 81% of black students. But the data did show the size of the gap narrowing. English-language learners and lower-income students also lagged but have made notable gains since the exam was first required.




Students Borrow More Than Ever For College



Anne Marie Chaker:

Students are borrowing dramatically more to pay for college, accelerating a trend that has wide-ranging implications for a generation of young people.
New numbers from the U.S. Education Department show that federal student-loan disbursements–the total amount borrowed by students and received by schools–in the 2008-09 academic year grew about 25% over the previous year, to $75.1 billion. The amount of money students borrow has long been on the rise. But last year far surpassed past increases, which ranged from as low as 1.7% in the 1998-99 school year to almost 17% in 1994-95, according to figures used in President Barack Obama’s proposed 2010 budget.
The sharp growth is “definitely above expectations,” says Robert Shireman, deputy undersecretary of the Education Department. “But we’re also in an economic situation that nobody predicted.” The eye-opening increase in borrowing is largely due to the dire economic environment, which is causing more people to seek federal loans, he says.
The new numbers highlight how debt has become commonplace in paying for higher education. Today, two-thirds of college students borrow to pay for college, and their average debt load is $23,186 by the time they graduate, according to an analysis of the government’s National Postsecondary Student Aid Study, conducted by financial-aid expert Mark Kantrowitz. Only a dozen years earlier, according to the study, 58% of students borrowed to pay for college, and the average amount borrowed was $13,172.




Milwaukee Public Schools Mayoral Control plan has more questions than answers



Eugene Kane:

As Milwaukee students return to school this week, their first lesson might be to learn a new phrase so they don’t feel out of the loop.
Just like teenagers are known to create new words for their social networking sites, the adults in charge of making decisions about the future of Milwaukee Public Schools have upgraded their lingo, too.
Take note: It’s not being called a “takeover” of MPS anymore; it’s being called “mayoral governance.”
(I know; it doesn’t quite roll off the tongue the same way, does it?)
Mayor Tom Barrett says the new verbiage is the latest attempt to find a less-imposing description of a controversial education initiative that has been attempted by several other public school districts nationally.
With discussions on the topic heating up among social, business and civic groups, it seemed a name change was in order.
“Words do carry connotations,” Barrett said during an interview. “For some people, takeover sounded nefarious.”




Revised Madison school budget boosts tax increase



Gayle Worland:

The owner of a $250,000 Madison home would pay $82.50 more in school property taxes this year under a proposal by city schools superintendent Dan Nerad that seeks to partially cover a projected $9.2 million cut in general state aids to the district.
That’s $80 more than estimated under a preliminary 2009-10 district budget approved by the school board in May, when the board expected state cuts to be less severe.
The tax increase would cover only a portion of the state cut. School officials said the remaining gap would be bridged through cost-saving measures that do not directly affect students.
“Am I comfortable or happy?” with the district’s proposal, said Arlene Silveira, school board president. “No. But the whole (budget) situation doesn’t make me comfortable or happy. I appreciate that there are ways that we can deal with this gap without really cutting programs and without putting too much of a burden back on our community.”
The Madison district’s $350 million budget for the current school year won’t be final until the school board votes on it in late October. Officials are awaiting final student counts in late September, which figure into the amount of aid each district receives from the state.
..
“In terms of where we are in this economy and where we are in public education, you need to be realistic,” said [Erik] Kass. “You need to be conservative, and you need to realize there are things that are going to pop up during the year. But I think you also need to be cognizant of the fact that you’re being a steward of public resources, and you need to utilize those resources to provide a service that the public is giving you the money to provide.”




Washington Monthly’s College Guide



Washington Monthly:

I’d like to welcome you all to the Washington Monthly’s College Guide website and blog. Our aim is for this site to be your one-stop-shop for information about higher education reform. Since 2005, the Washington Monthly has sought to steer the national conversation about higher education away from a maniacal focus on elite schools that is the abiding obsession of the mainstream press and towards the less selective (but often wonderful) rank-and-file colleges and universities where most Americans actually get their educations. This site is the latest step in that effort.
We’re looking to do a few different things here:
· Highlight the Monthly’s annual college rankings, which rate schools not based on crude and easily-manipulated measures of money and prestige, like certain other magazines do, but rather on their contributions to society. Are they producing cutting-edge scientific research and PhDs? Do they steer their graduates into public-service jobs? Do they recruit economically disadvantaged students and help them graduate, or merely cater to the affluent? On these measures, the elite schools don’t do so well. For instance, only one of U.S. News & World Report’s top ten universities–Stanford–makes the Washington Monthly’s top ten, while some institutions that rank high on our list, like South Carolina State (#6) and Jackson State (#22), are buried in the bottom tier of the U.S. News list. We hope you’ll take the time to look at some of the surprising results our methodology led to.