Search Results for: We have the children
The nation’s fiscal wake-up call
Recently, I joined a throng of 25 people in a theater with a capacity of 250 to view the premiere of the documentary “IOUSA.” The film, directed by Patrick Creadon, outlines the U.S. national debt, how we got to where we are and the dire predictions for the future. It is loosely coordinated around the “Fiscal Wake-up Tour,” a road show featuring former U.S. Comptroller General David Walker and Robert Bixby, executive director of the Concord Coalition.
I have been a huge fan of the straight-talking Walker since seeing him on CBS’ “60 Minutes” more than a year ago. He gave an impassioned interview then, outlining the rapidly growing federal deficit and its impact on current and future generations.
Joining in a live panel discussion after the film’s showing were Walker, Warren Buffett, Blackstone Group co-founder Peter Peterson, Cato Institute Chairman William Niskanen and AARP CEO Bill Novelli.
While I’m sure they were not as entertaining as the fantasy thrillers being shown in adjacent theaters, the facts and figures laid out in the movie were every bit as chilling as a horror movie to anyone who cares about the future of our country and the country we will leave to our children and grandchildren.
The movie commented on four types of deficits: the U.S. budget deficit, the U.S. trade deficit with other nations, the U.S. deficit of personal savings and a deficit of leadership in addressing these problems.
Detroit’s Education Emergency
The state of Michigan has had and continues to have significant financial problems. This is why it is baffling to me why the Granholm administration continues to pretend everything is OK in the Detroit public schools system.
Currently, Detroit Public Schools has a $400 million budget deficit. This is due to severe financial mismanagement, corruption, and the fact that families are removing their children from the public schools because of their inability to provide effective education. An attorney representing DPS has admitted that there is reason to believe there was some corruption, citing $46 million that was paid out by one department within the school district that was not apparently used to purchase goods or services. The FBI is currently investigating this and other allegations of corruption.
I think that it’s about time that we declare an “education emergency.” The purpose of this declaration will have three goals. First, we need to take drastic steps to make sure we are providing effective education to the children of Detroit. Second, Gov. Granholm needs to put DPS into state receivership. This means that the state Department of Education would temporarily appoint a financial manager for DPS who would have the final say on all financial decisions. Finally, we need to root out the corrupt and incompetent administration officials so that this tragedy does not again occur.
Healthy school meal vs a Big Mac. Which one wins? Ask your inner child
England is bringing in ‘the most robust nutrient standards for school lunches in the world’ – but we might have to force them down children’s throats
This week “the most robust nutrient standards for school lunches in the world” come into force in English primary schools. The new menus announced by the schools secretary, Ed Balls, include healthy versions of lunchroom standards – “from traditional roasts to chilli con carne and shepherd’s pie; from homemade salmon fingers and stir fries to risotto, with fresh fruit, vegetables and salads”.
Junk food is already banned from school canteens and vending machines – but the new standards specify the maximum (fat, saturated fat, sugar, salt) and minimum (carbohydrate, protein, fibre, vitamin A, vitamin C, folate, calcium, iron, zinc) nutrient value of an average school lunch.
Getting high-quality food into schools is only half the issue. According to Balls, many children who eat healthy lunches at primary school stop when they go to senior school – put off by long queues, unpopular menus or having to eat in the same room as teenagers six or seven years older. The guidelines move into new territory by suggesting kids won’t be put off school meals if they are treated “like the paying customers they are”.
Indiana Governor Candidates Discuss Education
ill Long Thompson unveiled a handful of education initiatives Wednesday while Republican Gov. Mitch Daniels introduced five campaign commercials, three of which focus on his own education proposals.
The two face off in November’s gubernatorial election.
“I don’t have all the answers, but we are not meeting our objectives,” Long Thompson said at a Statehouse news conference Wednesday.
One of her proposals is to provide a free book every month to all Hoosier children from birth to age 5. This is modeled after Tennessee’s partnership with Dolly Parton’s “Imagination Library,” but Long Thompson’s program would be paid for with private donations.
She also wants to allow kids who need the extra time and help to attend a fifth year of high school in an effort to improve Indiana’s graduation rate of about 76 percent.
Schools warned of pupils hooked on energy drinks
Children are becoming dependent on energy drinks that have dramatic effects on their concentration and behaviour in schools, drug experts have warned.
Schools are being advised to observe children for signs of agitation which could be a result of excessive caffeine consumption. It follows reports of pupils drinking large quantities of energy drinks or taking caffeine-based pills.
The warning, from the anti-drugs advisory group Drug Education UK, comes as ministers prepare to unveil new measures tomorrow to improve school dinners and advise parents on children’s packed lunches.
Bob Tait, from Drug Education UK, said: “There is a growing problem of caffeine abuse in schools. Most schools have a drug education programme to advise kids against illegal drugs, but there is less known about legal highs.”
He made his warning at a conference of school nurses this week, the Nursing Standard reported. Tait said: “Children will drink them on the walk to school, at break and lunch time. If you have got a child who is worked up on an energy drink, they are going to be agitated during lesson time.”
Why Some Kids Aren’t Heading to School Today
Choosing the most radical education reform there is
So we frown on radicalism. Yet we have embarked on one of the most radical endeavors families can undertake: home-schooling. Given preconceptions about this practice, I should note that we are not anti-government wingnuts living on a compound. We like literature, and nice wines, and Celeste would stab me in the heart with a spoon if I gave her one of those head bonnets the Amish women wear. We are not, in other words, stereotypical home-schooling parents. But neither are most actual home-schooling parents.
Even though Ma and Pa Ingalls sent their children off to the little schoolhouse in Walnut Grove, we’ve decided to start our own. In the eyes of Kansas authorities that’s exactly what we’ve done; regulations require us to establish a school and name it. Ours is the Woodlief Homestead School. I wanted to go with something like: “The School of Revolutionary Resistance,” but Celeste said that was just inviting trouble.
The reason we’ve broken with tradition, or perhaps reverted to a deeper tradition, is not because we oppose sex education, or because we think their egos are too tender for public schools. It’s because we can do a superior job of educating our children. We want to cultivate in them an intellectual breadth and curiosity that public schools no longer offer.
Somewhere there is now an indignant teacher typing an email to instruct me about his profession’s nobility. Perhaps some public schools educate children in multiple languages and musical instruments, have them reading classic literature by age seven, offer intensive studies of math, science, logic, and history, and coach them in public speaking and writing. The thing is, I don’t know where those schools are.A wise friend recently mentioned that “choice is good”. It will be interesting to see if the upcoming Madison School District math review addresses ongoing concerns over reduced rigor. Math Forum audio / video.
To Be Young and Anxiety-Free
Last fall, 12-year-old John Morganti was a very anxious kid. He was too scared to ride the bus to school or have sleepovers at friends’ houses. He had frequent stomachaches, hid out in the nurse’s office and begged his mother to let him skip school.
“He would get so scared, he would be in a little ball in the corner,” says John’s mother, Danielle Morganti, of Pittsgrove, N.J.
John was later diagnosed with an anxiety disorder and underwent a treatment known as cognitive behavioral therapy. By spring, he had largely recovered and was happily taking the bus and playing with friends at parties.
Historically, anxiety disorders were seen as something that primarily hit teens and adults. Anxious kids, many experts thought, would simply grow out of their fears. But now, many doctors believe that John’s illness was caught at the ideal time. Indeed, there’s a new push by doctors and therapists to identify children afflicted with anxiety disorders — even those as young as preschool age — and treat them early.
Great Teaching, Not Buildings, Make Great Schools
As happens in many urban school systems, D.C. school and D.C. Council officials have been in a tiff over the repair and renovation of aging buildings. Nobody wants children to walk into schools with peeling paint, leaky roofs and windows that won’t open. Many inner-city educators believe such neglect sends the dispiriting message that nobody cares about these kids.
But are fresh plaster, up-to-date wiring and fine landscaping real signs of a great school?
Take a look at the 52-year-old former church school at 421 Alabama Ave. in Anacostia. Teachers say some floors shake if you stomp on them. Weeds poke out from under the brick walls. Yet great teaching has occurred inside. Two first-rate schools, the Thurgood Marshall Academy Public Charter High School and the KIPP DC: AIM Academy, have occupied that space in the past few years, and the Imagine charter network, also with a good record, is opening a school there. Or check out the School Without Walls, a D.C. public high school sought out by parents with Ivy League dreams. Its building, now being renovated, was a wreck, but inside, students embraced an A-plus curriculum.
How about the suburbs? Drive past the rust-stained, 44-year-old campus at 6560 Braddock Rd. in the Alexandria area of Fairfax County. Dean Tistadt, chief operating officer of Fairfax schools, says the place needs an electrical upgrade. A lot of windows should be replaced. He is sorry that his crews can’t do the major work until 2012. It doesn’t look like a place I would want to send my kids, yet the sign in front says it is the Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, maybe the best public school in America.
Ten years ago, I wrote a book about high schools with golden reputations in some of the country’s most expensive suburbs. They were full of Advanced Placement classes and fine teachers, but I was astonished at how bad some of the buildings were. Mamaroneck High School, in one of the most affluent parts of Westchester County, N.Y., had three 66-year-old boilers that repeatedly broke down and many clocks that didn’t work. La Jolla High School, north of San Diego, full of science fair winners, was a collection of stained stucco classrooms and courtyards of dead grass.Matthews is right, great teaching is key. Somewhat related, it will be interesting to see what Madison’s new far west side elementary school’s (Olson) enrollment looks like this month.
Raising the Bar: How Parents Can Fix Education
Everyone, it seems, has a complaint about the schools. Indifferent bureaucracy, change-averse unions, faddish curricula, soaring school taxes matched with mediocre student performance — the list is long and seemingly unchanging.
At the start of yet another school year, it’s time for some radical change in your local schools — a specific change that only parents can bring about. It’s a thing already being done in some far-off countries but that remains strangely rare here in America. It’s something I’ve tried — and, despite the skepticism of friends and neighbors, it seems to work.
What is this miracle that lies within the reach of nearly every family? It’s simple. All you have to do is to start insisting that your children fully apply themselves to their studies — and commit yourself to doing your part. That means making sure they do all the work expected of them as well as their abilities allow. It also means making sure everything at home stands behind these principles and supports the idea of learning.
These will sound like obvious ideas. In fact, given all the distractions of modern life, it is a radical departure from the normal order of things. Let’s face it: More than budgets or bureaucrats, more than textbooks or teachers, parents are the reason that kids perform as they do in school.
In Support of the November, 2008 Madison School District Referendum
Community and Schools Together:
We have a referendum!
Community and Schools Together (CAST) has been working to educate the public on the need to change the state finance system and support referendums that preserve and expand the good our schools do. We are eager to continue this work and help pass the referendum the Madison Metropolitan School District Board of Education approved on Monday, August 25, 2008.
“The support and interest from everyone has been great,” said Franklin and Wright parent and CAST member Thomas J. Mertz. “We’ve got a strong organization, lots of enthusiasm, and we’re ready to do everything we can to pass this referendum and move our schools beyond the painful annual cuts. Our community values education. It’s a good referendum and we are confident the community will support it.”
Community and Schools Together (CAST) strongly supports the Madison Metropolitan School District Board of Education’s decision to place a three-year recurring referendum on the November 4, 2008 ballot. This is the best way for the district to address the legislated structural deficit we will face over the next few years.Much more on the November, 2008 Referendum here.
Education Reformers call for Longer School Days, Performance-Driven Teacher Pay & Expanded School Choice
America’s leading voices on education reform joined in Denver to call on Democratic leaders to steer public education in a new direction. On the eve of the Democratic National Convention, more than two dozen progressive elected officials, education reform advocates, school leaders and civil rights groups from across the country gathered at the Denver Art Museum to release the Ed Challenge for Change, which highlights new ideas for closing America’s devastating achievement gap.
“An entrepreneurial explosion has occurred over the last few years in public education,” said Joe Williams, Executive Director of Democrats for Education Reform, the organization responsible for conceiving the Ed Challenge for Change. “The creativity exhibited by this new group of educators is helping raise student achievement, empower teachers, close the minority learning gap, and bring hope to places where it’s been in very short supply. It’s a movement that we believe Sen. Obama and other Democrats have taken to heart, and we hope to see these reforms increase in schools across America during the Obama Administration.”An eclectic mix of Democratic wunderkinds, tough-talking education reformers and one elder statesman – former Gov. Roy Romer – are challenging their party to step away from teachers unions and return to fighting for the educational rights of poor and minority children.
“It is a battle for the heart of the Democratic Party,” said Corey Booker, the 39-year-old rising star mayor of Newark, N.J.
“We have been wrong in education,” Booker said of his party and its alliances with teachers unions that put adults before children. “It’s time to get right.”
Booker was among those who appeared Sunday at the Denver Art Museum to challenge the Democratic Party to reconsider its course on education.
In references sometimes veiled and sometimes blunt, they tackled the party’s often- cozy relationship with the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers, which typically support – financially and otherwise – Democratic candidates.One panelist–I think it was Peter Groff, president of the Colorado State Senate, got the ball rolling by complaining that when the children’s agenda meets the adult agenda, the “adult agenda wins too often.” Then Cory Booker of Newark attacked teachers unions specifically–and there was applause. In a room of 500 people at the Democratic convention! “The politics are so vicious,” Booker complained, remembering how he’d been told his political career would be over if he kept pushing school choice, how early on he’d gotten help from Republicans rather than from Democrats.
L.A. teacher goes to Washington to the Teaching Ambassador Fellowship
hat would you say if you were given the opportunity to tell the Department of Education how the policies and programs that the federal government supported were affecting the students and teachers in our schools? Well, that is exactly what I will be doing for the next year along with 24 colleagues from around the country.
I am a kindergarten/first grade teacher in Los Angeles, but have a one-year appointment to work with the Department of Education in Washington, D.C. This is the first time that the department has formally involved teacher input into the policies and programs that affect our children. The program is called the Teaching Ambassador Fellowship Program. There are five Washington ambassadors that work in the department offices and 20 classroom ambassadors who work from their classrooms for the year.
We want to get the word out about how policies are made and how teachers can have an impact as leaders. Another teacher, Jocelyn Pickford, brought the idea to Secretary Margaret Spellings, who loved it. The teacher ambassadors represent urban, rural and suburban communities and K-12 levels. These are teachers who have dedicated themselves to make a real difference in public education. We want to share our stories and be part of the solution.
Taxpayers should NOT be asked to give the Madison School Board a blank check!
Active Citizens for Education (ACE) calls for the Madison Metropolitan School District Board of Education to delay making specific decisions for the presentation of a recurring referendum to the taxpayers for a vote on the November election ballot.
Passage of a recurring referendum on the November 2008 ballot would allow the board and school administration to permanently exceed the state mandated revenue spending caps. Such a move to fix a so-called current “budget gap” would allow the board and administration to exceed annual spending caps permanently, every year into the future. This would virtually give the board a “blank check” from district taxpayers to plug future budget gaps or shortfalls. It could prevent the board and administration from having to carefully and thoughtfully budget, like every taxpayer must do when their household budget faces tough economic times and shortfalls.
The plans and communications presented in recent weeks by the board and administration provide greater hope for more effective decision-making now and in the future. The recommendations for changes in policy and accountability options in community services, transportation, lease contracts, fund balances and capital expansion (maintenance) will have positive impacts on reducing the so-called “budget gap.”
The Board must earn the trust of the taxpayers by clearly showing that they can be “good stewards” of taxpayer dollars. Past experience has not earned that trust! If a referendum is ultimately required to fix upcoming budgets, it should be a non-recurring referendum, thereby preventing ‘mortgaging’ the future with year-after-year, permanent increases in spending authority.
The Board and administration must correct the absence of specific processes and strategies for analysis and evaluation of business and educational services, programs, practices and policies. Urgent and substantial investments of time and work are critical for these processes to evolve into hard evidence. This evidence is absolutely necessary to show the public that serious steps are under way to provide clear, concrete data and options for identifying the most effective and efficient results-oriented management of the financial resources of the district. It must be shown that the resources will be directly applied to improvements in student learning and achievement.
A Promise of Pre-K for All Is Still Far Off in New York
More than 10 years after New York’s political and education leaders promised to work toward providing access to pre-kindergarten classes to every 4-year-old across the state, more than a third of the 677 local school districts have no such programs. Last year, fewer than 91,000 children attended state-financed pre-kindergarten classes — 38 percent of the state’s 4-year-olds.
The early promise of universal pre-kindergarten programs was undermined by state budget problems, especially after 9/11, and local districts were never required to offer them. But even as funding dedicated to pre-kindergarten has more than doubled over the last three years, hundreds of mainly suburban and rural districts have rejected the state money, with many saying they would have to cut other things or raise taxes to establish the programs.
Last year, local districts passed up $67.5 million of the $438 million the state set aside for pre-K.
“Universal pre-K is an idea that looks good on paper, but it doesn’t work for a district of this size,” said Superintendent Edward Ehmann of the Smithtown school district on Long Island, which turned down $459,000 in state aid because, he said, it would cover only a quarter of the cost of providing pre-kindergarten to 750 children.
Cash Incentives and Achievement in School
In the second half of the 1990’s, student grades in Ecuador started to fall. In response, the government set up a conditional cash transfer program for poor families which would pay parents for making sure their children attended school for a predefined number of days.
While most research has shown that the cash payment program has indeed increased attendance levels, there’s little known about how students performed.
Now, Ecuadorian economist Juan Ponce and Arjun Bedi of the Institute for the Study of Labor have run the numbers and conclude that there was no positive (or negative) impact on grades from the incentive pay program.
Buildings rise, test scores fall
Spate of school expansions is no tonic for student proficiency
The $102 million spent on reviving the concept of the neighborhood school in Milwaukee hasn’t improved academic success at most of the schools where the money was used, a Journal Sentinel investigation found.
With a few exceptions, student achievement has shown little improvement – and in some cases it has fallen dramatically – at 22 schools that were among the largest beneficiaries of the district’s school construction program.
The district’s Neighborhood Schools Initiative was conceived as a way to get children off buses and into their local schools – which MPS officials hoped to improve with new classrooms, before-school and after-school services, and such things as state-of-the-art science labs and libraries.
But bricks and mortar have not raised student performance, testing data shows.
In 16 of the 22 schools, the percentage of fourth-graders rated as proficient or better in reading was lower last year than it was in 2002 – the year the school building initiative hit high gear. Nine schools saw their math scores drop.
Overall, combined fourth-grade reading and math scores have declined sharply at a half dozen of the22 schools where more than $1 million was spent on improvements. Only five schools have had major increases in their combined reading and math performance.
From Crayons to Condoms: The Ugly Truth About America’s Public Schools
Synopsis
The American public school system, once the envy of the world, is now a cesspool of political correctness, ineptitude and violence, yet its administrators demand – and receive – far more funding per child than do higher-performing private and religious schools.
From “teachers” who can barely comprehend English to the elevation of foreign cultures and ideals above our own, from the mainstreaming of violent juvenile felons to demands that “queer studies” be considered as vital as math, our classrooms have become havens for indoctrination, sexual license and failed educational fads.
In From Crayons to Condoms, you’ll experience today’s public schools as never before, through the voices of parents and children left stranded in the system, the same voices that teachers unions and school administrators are determined to stifle. Here’s a “must-read” for every parent concerned about their child’s future, and for every taxpayer sick of being dunned endlessly to prop up a failed system.via Barnes & Noble. Clusty Search: Steve Baldwin & Karen Holgate.
Preschool programs feel kindergarten squeeze
More parents opt for ‘free’ classes for 4-year-olds
Patti Zarling @ Green Bay Press-Gazette:
Kindergarten classes for 4-year-olds through a few area public school systems haven’t started yet, but some local private preschools already are losing students.
Two local programs are ending or on the verge of it, saying they can’t afford to maintain preschools, partly because of the launch of public 4-year-old kindergarten.
A few area school districts, including Ashwaubenon, Green Bay and West De Pere, are starting 4-year-old kindergarten programs this fall.
Advocates say the programs provide education and school-preparation to students regardless of family income. But critics liken the programs to free babysitting and worry that districts will dumb down curriculum.
Green Bay has more than 800 children enrolled so far in its 4-year-old kindergarten program for 2008-2009; Ashwaubenon has more than 100 and West De Pere has 178. State rules require districts to partner with private day cares to receive state grants for the programs.Recently arrived Madison Superintendent Dan Nerad spent most of his career in the Green Bay Schools.
Homeschool Victory
Wall Street Journal Editorial:
Hold on to your hats. Common sense and constitutionalism have prevailed in the California judiciary. Last week, the Second District Court of Appeal in Los Angeles declared that parents who homeschool don’t need teaching credentials in order to educate their own children.
Amazingly, the three judges were overturning their own February decision. We quote from their recent revelation: “It is important to recognize that it is not for us to consider, as a matter of policy, whether homeschooling should be permitted in California. That job is for the Legislature. It is not the duty of the courts to make the law; we endeavor to interpret it.”
What prompted this fit of judicial restraint?
A Teachable Moment: On Changes in Governance and Curriculum in New Orleans Schools
But it wasn’t only sympathy for the survivors of Katrina that drew them to New Orleans. The city’s disastrously low-performing school system was almost entirely washed away in the flood — many of the buildings were destroyed, the school board was taken over and all the teachers were fired. What is being built in its place is an educational landscape unlike any other, a radical experiment in reform. More than half of the city’s public-school students are now being educated in charter schools, publicly financed but privately run, and most of the rest are enrolled in schools run by an unusually decentralized and rapidly changing school district. From across the country, and in increasing numbers, hundreds of ambitious, idealistic young educators like Hardrick and Sanders have descended on New Orleans, determined to take advantage of the opportunity not just to innovate and reinvent but also to prove to the rest of the country that an entire city of children in the demographic generally considered the hardest to educate — poor African-American kids — can achieve high levels of academic success.
Katrina struck at a critical moment in the evolution of the contemporary education-reform movement. President Bush’s education initiative, No Child Left Behind, had shined a light on the underperformance of poor minority students across the country by requiring, for the first time, that a school successfully educate not just its best students but its poor and minority students too in order to be counted as successful. Scattered across the country were a growing number of schools, often intensive charter schools, that seemed to be succeeding with disadvantaged students in a consistent and measurable way. But these schools were isolated examples. No one had figured out how to “scale up” those successes to transform an entire urban school district. There were ambitious new superintendents in Philadelphia, New York City, Denver and Chicago, all determined to reform their school systems to better serve poor children, but even those who seemed to be succeeding were doing so in incremental ways, lifting the percentage of students passing statewide or citywide tests to, say, 40 from 30 or to 50 from 40.Related:Clusty Search:
Fascinating. Innovation occurs at the edges and is more likely to flourish in the absence of traditional monolithic governance, or a “one size fits all” approach to education.
More from Kevin Carey.
Decoding the five stages of the college application process
I am a short-term crisis counselor. For more than 15 years, I’ve guided high school seniors through applications, personal statements, deadlines and all the pressure that goes along with the process. As a college counselor in both public and private schools, I have worked with many kids, held a lot of hands and pulled out the tissue box on several occasions. And, I have survived this journey three times with my own children. The first time around, my daughter did all the work, and my husband and I “just” paid the application fees. My older son had a different approach to the process and involved me a bit more, even allowing me to drag him off to look at the college he eventually fell in love with. My younger son danced dangerously close to every deadline and finally pulled the rabbit out of the hat at the last moment. Happily, all three landed where they wanted to be, and we were still speaking to one another when the dust settled.
Meeks Solicits Support for Chicago School Boycott Plan
State Sen. James Meeks (D-Chicago) met privately with the City Council’s Black Caucus last week to explain his plan to have hundreds of Chicago Public School students boycott the first four days of classes.
Implied, but not stated, was the fact that Meeks would like aldermanic support for his controversial tactics. Apparently, he’s not going to get it.
On Tuesday, the Black Caucus will hold a news conference to turn up the heat on Gov. Blagojevich and the General Assembly to address the school funding disparity between rich and poor districts.
But, the aldermen will not take a stand on Meeks’ boycott threat.
“We can’t take an official position. We didn’t have a consensus. All of us want our children in school. That’s really the bottom line,” said Ald. Freddrenna Lyle (6th).
A Second-Rate Secondary Education
High schools need to start treating their students with the same respect colleges do.
The weakest and most vulnerable element in education, particularly in the developed world, is the education of adolescents in our secondary-school systems. Relative economic prosperity and the extension of leisure time have spawned an inconsistent but prevalent postponement of adulthood. On the one hand, as consumers and future citizens, young people between the ages of 13 and 18 are afforded considerable status and independence. Yet they remain infantilized in terms of their education, despite the earlier onset of maturation. Standards and expectations are too low. Modern democracies are increasingly inclined to ensure rates of close to 100 percent completion of a secondary school that can lead to university education. This has intensified an unresolved struggle between the demands of equity and the requirements of excellence. If we do not address these problems, the quality of university education will be at risk.
To make secondary education meaningful, more intellectual demands of an adult nature should be placed on adolescents. They should be required to use primary materials of learning, not standardized textbooks; original work should be emphasized, not imitative, uniform assignments; and above all, students should undergo inspired teaching by experts. Curricula should be based on current problems and issues, not disciplines defined a century ago. Statistics and probability need to be brought to the forefront, given our need to assess risk and handle data, replacing calculus as the entry-level college requirement. Secondary schools and their programs of study are not only intellectually out of date, but socially obsolete. They were designed decades ago for large children, not today’s young adults.Raise, not lower standards. Quite a concept. Clusty Search: Leon Botstein.
High School Redesign.
Madison police calls near local high schools: 1996-2006
Madison School District Safety Coordinator Luis Yudice (Luis is a retired Police Officer and a East High Grad) at a recent West High School neighborhood crime discussion (10/18/2007):
“Big picture perspective:
Our community really has changed a lot within the past five years. I sense a great deal of stress within the police department.
Citywide issues
Increasing violence involving girls. He has looked at a lot of data with the District Attorney’s office. Girls are extremely angry.
Angry parents are coming into the schools.
Increasing issues in the neighborhood that end up in the schools. Mentioned South Transfer Point beating and that Principal Ed Holmes mediated the situation at an early stage.
Growing gang violence issue particularly in the east side schools. We do have gang activity at Memorial and West but most of the issues are at Lafollete and East. Dealing with this via training and building relationships
What the school are experiencing is a reflection of what is going on in the community.”Madison Police Chief Noble Wray, via Bill Lueders @ Isthmus (7/30/2008):
He (Wray) began by talking about perceptions of crime, and especially the notion that it’s getting worse in Madison. He stressed that it wasn’t just the media and public who felt this way: “If I would ask the average beat cop, I think they would say it’s gotten worse.” But, he added, “Worse compared to what?”
The absence of local safety data spurred several SIS contributors to obtain and publish the police call data displayed below. Attorney and parent Chan Stroman provided pro bono public records assistance. Chan’s work on this matter extended to the Wisconsin Attorney General’s office.
A few important notes on this data:
- 13% of the records could not be geocoded and therefore are not included in the summary information. The downloadable 1996-2006 police call data .zip file is comprehensive, however.
- Clicking on the numbers below takes the reader to a detail page. This page includes all matching police calls and a downloadable .csv file of same. The csv file can be opened in Excel, Numbers and many data management tools.
- This summary is rather brief, I hope others download the data and have a look.
Police Calls within .25 miles of:
Madison East Area
Edgewood Area
LaFollette Area
Memorial Area
West Area
1996
1285
392
324
869
728
1997
1351
455
403
896
750
1998
1340
343
488
875
703
1999
1281
352
477
969
772
2000
1391
300
528
888
933
2001
1476
305
480
769
1034
2002
1470
363
491
886
1019
2003
1362
349
403
865
921
2004
1455
346
449
989
1012
2005
1311
325
465
994
917
2006
1221
330
389
1105
838
Weapons Incident / Offense
Madison East Area
Edgewood Area
LaFollette Area
Memorial Area
West Area
1996
5
0
3
4
6
1997
5
0
3
4
0
1998
10
0
5
2
1
1999
10
0
5
4
0
2000
4
0
6
2
5
2001
3
0
3
0
0
2002
11
0
3
5
5
2003
4
1
1
4
5
2004
4
0
9
7
4
2005
9
0
6
6
2
2006
10
1
5
7
3
Drug Incident
Madison East Area
Edgewood Area
LaFollette Area
Memorial Area
West Area
1996
10
0
10
9
7
1997
16
0
7
6
4
1998
12
1
8
10
6
1999
18
0
7
18
4
2000
16
2
13
17
12
2001
18
0
10
20
12
2002
22
0
14
16
12
2003
23
2
18
15
8
2004
26
0
20
17
7
2005
19
0
17
20
12
2006
24
2
11
15
8
Arrested Juvenile
Madison East Area
Edgewood Area
LaFollette Area
Memorial Area
West Area
1996
59
1
35
28
38
1997
72
0
83
52
29
1998
21
0
34
17
14
1999
16
0
29
24
7
2000
42
0
76
14
15
2001
52
0
66
19
15
2002
51
0
69
13
12
2003
9
0
9
9
3
2004
8
0
8
9
4
2005
11
0
10
7
3
2006
6
0
21
11
4
Bomb Threat
Madison East Area
Edgewood Area
LaFollette Area
Memorial Area
West Area
1996
1
0
0
0
1
1997
1
0
1
0
0
1998
4
2
0
0
1
1999
7
0
15
0
1
2000
4
0
17
2
1
2001
1
0
8
10
11
2002
2
0
9
0
4
2003
1
0
2
1
11
2004
6
0
4
0
6
2005
1
0
4
0
0
2006
3
0
0
0
4
Related links:
- 1996-2006 Madison Police Calls 20MB .zip file
- Externalities in the Classroom: How Children Exposed to Domestic Violence Affect Everyone’s Kids
- Parents Seek Safety Report Cards
- Educating the Community on Gangs in Madison
- Madison School Board Discusses Discipline, Safety, Cell Phones and Code of Conduct
- Gangs & School Violence Forum: Audio / Video
- Madison’s public high schools feature an “open campus”
- The Madison School District & Corwin Kronenberg
- It is important to remember the event coding “assault, battery, information, etc” may vary from day to day and person to person.
- The last two digits of individual street numbers was removed by the Madison Police Department. Those interested in geocoding the data can substitute “99” for the “xx”.
- I have requested an electronic copy of the 2007 data and will update this information upon receipt.
McCain on Education at the Urban League
Nowhere are the limitations of conventional thinking any more apparent than in education policy. After decades of hearing the same big promises from the public education establishment, and seeing the same poor results, it is surely time to shake off old ways and to demand new reforms. That isn’t just my opinion; it is the conviction of parents in poor neighborhoods across this nation who want better lives for their children.
Just ask the families in New Orleans who will soon have the chance to remove their sons and daughters from failing schools, and enroll them instead in a school-choice scholarship program. That program in Louisiana was proposed by Democratic state legislators and signed into law by Governor Bobby Jindal. Just three years after Katrina, they are bringing real hope to poor neighborhoods, and showing how much can be achieved when both parties work together for real reform. Or ask parents in the disadvantaged neighborhoods of Washington, D.C. whether they want more choices in education. The District’s Opportunity Scholarship program serves more than 1,900 boys and girls from families with an average income of 23,000 dollars a year. And more than 7,000 more families have applied for that program. What they all have in common is the desire to get their kids into a better school.
Democrats in Congress, including my opponent, oppose the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship program. In remarks to the American Federation of Teachers last month, Senator Obama dismissed public support for private school vouchers for low-income Americans as, “tired rhetoric about vouchers and school choice.” All of that went over well with the teachers union, but where does it leave families and their children who are stuck in failing schools?John McCain, the father of private school students, criticized Democratic rival Barack Obama on Friday for choosing private over public school for his kids.
The difference, according to the Arizona Republican, is that he — not Obama — favors vouchers that give parents more school choices.
“Everybody should have the same choice Cindy and I and Sen. Obama did,” McCain told the National Urban League, an influential black organization that Obama will address on Saturday.
2008 Streetball & Block Party next Saturday August 9th at Penn Park; 12 noon to 7 pm
Via a Johnny Winston, Jr. email:
The Johnny Winston, Jr. 2008 Streetball and Block Party will be held on Saturday August 9th from 12 noon to 7:00 p.m. at Penn Park (South Madison – Corner of Fisher and Buick Street). “Streetball” is a full court, “5 on 5” Adult Men’s Basketball tournament featuring some of the best basketball players in the City of Madison, Milwaukee, Beloit, Rockford and other cities. The rain date for basketball games only is Sunday August 10th.
The “block party” activities for youth and families include: old and new school music by D.J. Double D and Speakerboxx DJ’s; funk and soul music by the Rick Flowers Band, youth drill and dance team competition, free bingo sponsored by DeJope Gaming; face painting and youth activities sponsored by Madison School and Community Recreation, YMCA of Dane County, Dane County Neighborhood Intervention Program; The Boys & Girls Club of Dane County, the Madison Children’s Museum, pony rides by “Big Bill and Little Joe” and more. This event includes information booths and vendors selling a variety of foods and other items.
This is a safe, family event that has taken the place of the “South Madison Block Party.” The Madison Police Department and other neighborhood groups are supporting this as a positive activity for the South Madison community. Over the past seven years, $10,000 has been donated to charitable programs that benefit South Madison and support education such as the Boys & Girls Club and the Southside Raiders Youth Football and Cheerleading Teams.
In all, this event will provide a wonderful organized activity for neighborhood residents to enjoy this summer. If you have any questions, would like to volunteer or discuss any further details, please feel free to call (608) 347-9715; e-mail at: johnnywinstonjr@hotmail.com or www.madisonstreetball.com. Hope to see you there!
Please feel free to forward this information to other interested persons or organizations.
Camp Codependence
A response to last week’s NYT story on summer camps by Judy Warner. I’m sure we all read, with equal parts disgust and delectation, The Times’ story last week on affluent parents who just can’t let go when their children abandon them for sleep-away camp. In case you missed it, the article presented fathers and […]
Bypassing School Boundary Maps
Despite a court ruling this week that upheld the School Board’s decision to reshuffle high schools for hundreds of western Fairfax County students, many parents have found a way to bypass the new boundary map and send their children to campuses of their choice.
More than a third of the 226 rising freshmen who were to be added to the roster of South Lakes High School for the coming year have transferred to nearby high schools for curricular reasons, school system records showed. Most of the 85 students who left the Reston school applied to pursue Advanced Placement classes not offered at South Lakes High. By contrast, nine incoming freshmen transferred from the school last year for similar reasons.
History Books
Will Fitzhugh
The Concord Review
29 July 2008
Katherine Kersten tells me that at Providence Academy in Plymouth, Minnesota, high school history students are required to read James McPherson’s Battle Cry of Freedom [946 pages] and Paul Johnson’s History of the American People [1,104 pages] in their entirety.
It seems likely to me that when these students get to college and find reading lists in their courses in History, Political Science, Economics, and the like, which require them to read nonfiction books, they will be somewhat ready for them, having read at least two serious nonfiction books in their Lower Education years.
For the vast majority of our public secondary students this may not be the case. As almost universally, the assignment of reading and writing is left up to the English departments in the high schools, most students now read only novels and other fiction.
While the National Endowment for the Arts has conducted a $300,000 study of the pleasure reading habits of young people and others, no foundation or government agency, including the National Endowment for the Humanities, has show an interest in asking whether our secondary students read one complete nonfiction book before graduation and if so, what book would it be?
Greater Rome Chamber of Commerce supports education sales tax
The board of directors of the Greater Rome Chamber of Commerce voted unanimously Thursday to support the third phase of the special purpose, local option sales tax for education.
Floyd County citizens will go to the polls on Sept. 16 to vote on SPLOST III.
“Rome and Floyd County have a commitment to offering superior educational opportunities for our children,” said Randy Quick, chairman of the Chamber board and general manager of South 107. “Education is often identified by current employers as necessary to their continuation of business.”
Quick said prospective businesses and industries exploring expansion and relocation to Rome and Floyd County look at the educational opportunities offered.
In Memory of Randy Pausch …
“Last Lecture” Professor Randy Pausch, 47, Dies Tara Parker-Pope The New York Times Randy Pausch, the Carnegie Mellon computer science professor whose last lecture became an Internet sensation and bestselling book, has died of pancreatic cancer. He was 47.
Chicago high school emphasizes fundamentals – and a world view
Jordan Nolan didn’t have to show up after school on a Friday in late May for a discussion about the invisible children of Uganda. Neither did about 30 other teenagers sprawled on couches and chairs in a classroom at Walter Payton College Prep High School in Chicago.
But after a brief presentation by four students, they engaged in a spirited, hour-long debate about just whose responsibility it is to try to end a civil war fought with kidnapped child soldiers.
The turnout wasn’t surprising, not even at the end of a week near the end of the school year.
Not at a public high school that’s an American showcase for how to prepare young people for a globally competitive economy in the 21century.
While the national and international conversation grows louder about how to define a world-class education, Payton is a real-life laboratory.
Senate school budget creates room for more competition
With the district facing a $400 million deficit — roughly one-third of its total budget — a careful accounting of how it is using its money would seem to be in order.
“That’s a fairly significant gift for the district of Detroit for which we get nothing in return,” Sen. Wayne Kuipers, R-Holland, Senate Education Committee chairman, said after he voted no on the plan. “We get no deficit reduction plan, no power to audit the district.”
But in truth, the introduction of more high-quality charters is the best education reform Detroit parents could ask for from the Legislature. It will force Detroit school district to either fix itself or wither away.
Parents who have an alternative will not keep their children in failing schools. This is, in effect, a last chance for Detroit to get it right.The article implies that Detroit spends about $1.2 Billion to educate around 100,000 students annually (roughly 12K per student). Madison’s 2008-2009 current budget is $367M spends $15,156 per student.
Autism is “A Fraud, a Racket”
From Media Matters: On July 16, the No. 3 syndicated radio talk show host in the country, Michael Savage, made the following statement on autism: “Now, you want me to tell you my opinion on autism? … A fraud, a racket.” Savage went on to say: Now, the illness du jour is autism. You know […]
Saving Young Men With Career Academies
By usual measures of student progress, America’s high school career academies have been a failure. One of the longest and most scientific education studies ever conducted concluded they did not improve test scores or graduation rates or college success for urban youth. People like me, obsessed with raising student achievement, saw those numbers and said: Well, too bad. Let’s try something else.
And yet, because the career academy research by the New York-based MDRC (formerly known as the Manpower Demonstration Research Corp.) was so detailed and professional, we have just learned that the academies accomplished something perhaps even better than higher passing rates on reading exams. They produced young men who got better-paying jobs, were more likely to live independently with children and a spouse or partner and were more likely to be married and have custody of their children.
This is a remarkable finding. It has the power not only to revitalize vocational education but to shift the emphasis of school assessment toward long-range effects on students’ lives, not just on how well they did in school and college.MDRC:
Established more than 30 years ago, Career Academies have become a widely used high school reform initiative that aims to keep students engaged in school and prepare them for successful transitions to postsecondary education and employment. Typically serving between 150 and 200 students from grades 9 or 10 through grade 12, Career Academies are organized as small learning communities, combine academic and technical curricula around a career theme, and establish partnerships with local employers to provide work-based learning opportunities. There are estimated to be more than 2,500 Career Academies operating around the country.
Since 1993, MDRC has been conducting a uniquely rigorous evaluation of the Career Academy approach that uses a random assignment research design in a diverse group of nine high schools across the United States. Located in medium- and large-sized school districts, the schools confront many of the educational challenges found in low-income urban settings. The participating Career Academies were able to implement and sustain the core features of the approach, and they served a cross-section of the student populations in their host schools. This report describes how Career Academies influenced students’ labor market prospects and postsecondary educational attainment in the eight years following their expected graduation. The results are based on the experiences of more than 1,400 young people, approximately 85 percent of whom are Hispanic or African-American.
Policing kids with autism is a new challenge on the beat
A barefoot girl in her nightgown is picked up wandering along a dark Dane County highway. Sheriff deputies have no idea how the little girl got there, who she is, what happened to her, or where to take her.
A young man walks out of a camp for adults with cognitive disabilities and into the woods. It takes thousands of searchers a week to find Keith Kennedy — naked, weak, covered with scratches and ticks, but alive.
A 7-year-old with blue eyes slips out of the basement of his house in Saratoga. On the fifth day of a massive search, rescue dogs find Benjamin Heil in a nearby pond, drowned.
These recent Wisconsin cases all involved individuals with autism, a devastating brain disorder that impairs judgment and communication. Over the past decade, the number of children diagnosed with this disorder has multiplied tenfold, and the national Centers for Disease Control now considers autism to be a public health crisis. Autism frequently wreaks havoc not just on a child’s entire family, but on law and safety enforcement in the streets. The problem is expected to get worse as this population grows up.
The $20,000 Question: Why are these kids typing on unplugged computers?
Stephanie Banchero and Patricia Callahan:
The state is squandering taxpayer money on dubious after-school grants, including many that rewarded one lawmaker’s political supporters, a Tribune investigation found.
In a church on Chicago’s West Side, two homeless children fiddled aimlessly on unplugged computers, awaiting their “tutor.”
Another church sat darkened and padlocked during after-school hours even though it was presented as a tutoring center.
A woman used her grant for billboard ads that would encourage teens to attend community college, but she pocketed nearly half the money. The billboards have yet to appear.
A School Where One Size Doesn’t Fit All
“The model is inspired by the success of home-schoolers,” he said. Students will set their class schedules, enabling them to learn at their pace and in their styles. Teachers will act as advisers, not taskmasters.
As for homework, “the one-size-fits-all [model] mandated in today’s schools is largely counterproductive,” Shusterman says in a slide presentation he uses to sell his idea. School for Tomorrow will have a home reading requirement and “encourage and support individualized, student-initiated homework.”
Much of Shusterman’s plan is inspired by John Dewey, a 20th-century educational philosopher whose devotees have called for teachers to be “guides on the side, not sages on the stage.” Dewey led a movement called progressive education in which, he said, children learn best when pursuing individual projects that allow them to explore their world.
Many teachers, in both private and public schools, use project-based learning to a degree. But at School for Tomorrow, Shusterman said, every course and project will be linked to this question: What does a high school graduate need to know and need to be able to do to thrive in college, the workplace and life in the 21st century?
Calm Down or Else
The children return from school confused, scared and sometimes with bruises on their wrists, arms or face. Many won’t talk about what happened, or simply can’t, because they are unable to communicate easily, if at all.
“What Tim eventually said,” said John Miller, a podiatrist in Allegany, N.Y., about his son, then 12, “was that he didn’t want to go to school because he thought the school was trying to kill him.”
Dr. Miller learned that Tim, who has Asperger’s syndrome, was being unusually confrontational in class, and that more than once teachers had held him down on the floor to “calm him down,” according to logs teachers kept to track his behavior; on at least one occasion, adults held Tim prone for 20 minutes until he stopped struggling.
The Millers are suing the district, in part for costs of therapy for their son as a result of the restraints. The district did not dispute the logs but denied that teachers behaved improperly.
On Being More Like Ted Widerski
https://www.schoolinfosystem.org/archives/2008/06/ted_widerski.php
Education: Where’s the Pride; Where’s the Shame?
William Falzett III I live in a small town, the kind of town many parents seek out in an effort to raise their children away from the precocious material culture of the suburbs, and the tough third world neighborhoods in and around the cities. We have successfully escaped most of that stuff in our small […]
An Interview with San Diego Superintendent Terry Grier: On New Endeavors
1) Terry, you have just taken over as Superintendent of San Diego Public School. How did this come about?
Late last year, I was conducted by the search firm conducing the San Diego Unified School District’s Superintendent search to determine my interest.I had served as Superintendent of the 71,000 student Guilford County School District, Greensboro, NC, for the past eight years.I was in ‘good standing’ with the GCS school board, enjoyed my job, and had many friends in the Guilford County community.After reviewing the San Diego job description and researching the district’s history, challenges, and opportunities, I thought my experiences and background would be a good match.I flew to San Diego and met with the board of education and was impressed with their passion for educating all children to much higher levels.Following an initial interview, the process gained speed. My wife Nancy and I were invited back to a second interview the following week.Two days later, we were notified that SDUSD board members wanted to visit Guilford County the following weekend.Following their visit, we began contract negotiations.Much more on Terry Grier here.
State curriculum on legalities of parenting coming to Texas high schools this fall
Do you know the difference between an “alleged father” and a “presumed father?” Your child soon will.
The Texas attorney general’s office has created a new parenting curriculum that will be required in every public high school this fall. It will cover everything from the legalese of paternity to dealing with relationship violence.
State officials say the goal is twofold: They want to teach teenage parents their legal rights and they want to show other students the difficulties of being a parent in hopes that they’ll wait to have children.
The program, which has already drawn some skepticism, promises to bring personal and family values out of the home and into the classroom.
“The purpose is to help young people make responsible decisions about their futures,” said Janece Rolfe of the attorney general’s child support division. “What we’re hoping to do is prevent children from having to enter the child support system.”
Georgia notifies parents before releasing awful test scores
Parents whose children failed the math test will be notified by local schools. The state requires eighth-graders to pass the reading and math exams to move to high school.
Students who failed math exams — as well as those who might have failed reading — can retake the exam this summer. Schools will provide optional free classes to get them ready. Students who failed the social studies exam don’t face any consequences under Georgia law.
State Superintendent of Schools Kathy Cox said test scores in both subjects dropped because students took harder tests to match the state’s tougher and more rigorous curriculum.
“When you raise standards and expectations, it is not unusual to see a temporary dip in the percent of students who are meeting those expectations,” Cox wrote in a statement released Monday afternoon. “We have seen this in other grades and other areas of the curriculum.”
Juvenile courts can confuse kids, parents, report says
Two years in the making, a report on California’s juvenile courts warns that children and parents are often bewildered by what happens in courtrooms, and judges and attorneys don’t always have access to all the information they need to make decisions.
The California Judicial Council’s stem-to-stern inspection is the first full-scale examination of court procedures and effectiveness. Juvenile courts were established statewide in 1961.
Many courts are failing in their basic responsibility to make sure children and parents know what is happening to them, according to the report, which was released in April.
“A lot of it is as basic as a kid who doesn’t understand what the word allegation’ means,” said Judge Brian John Back, who headed the examination. “And when we have a room full of prosecutors, defense lawyers all using numbers from penal codes, shorthand and jargon, the kids just cannot comprehend what has just happened to them,” said Back, who spent six years as presiding judge at Ventura County’s Juvenile Court. “Juveniles uniformly said, We have no idea what just happened in court.’ There is an inability for them to know what judges and attorneys do.”
State funding helps fuel preschool boom
Lisa Downs Henry’s father and stepmother opened Downs Preschool in 1984 as a private day care center in Watkinsville, Ga. Business was good, but it really took off in 1995 after the state approved state lottery receipts to pay for pre-kindergarten classes.
The family converted the day care center into a preschool, which has since become a kind of institution in Oconee County, an hour’s drive east of Atlanta. Of 12 preschool classes countywide, Downs boasts seven.
Each fall, Henry, the school’s director, welcomes a new class of 140 children, all 4-year-olds, all attending tuition-free.
“Since it’s state-funded, you just don’t have to hound parents about money,” she says.Related: Missed opportunity for 4K. I’ve heard that there has been some discussion regarding 4K and a potential fall, 2008 Madison School spending referendum. It will be interesting to see how this plays out, given the short amount of time between now and November.
Education Reform: How to learn the right lessons from other countries’ schools
THE children at Kulosaari primary school, in a suburb of Helsinki, seem unfazed by the stream of foreign visitors wandering through their classrooms. The head teacher and her staff find it commonplace too—and no wonder. The world is beating a path to Finland to find out what made this unostentatious Nordic country top of international education league tables. Finland’s education ministry has three full-time staff handling school visits by foreign politicians, officials and journalists. The schools in the shop window rotate each year; currently, Kulosaari is on call, along with around 15 others. Pirkko Kotilainen, one of the three officials, says her busiest period was during Finland’s European Union presidency, when she had to arrange school visits for 300 foreign journalists in just six months of 2006.
Finland’s status as an education-tourism hot spot is a result of the hot fashion in education policy: to look abroad for lessons in schooling. Some destinations appeal to niche markets: Sweden’s “voucher” system draws school choice aficionados; New Zealand’s skinny education bureaucracy appeals to decentralisers. Policymakers who regard the stick as mightier than the carrot admire the hard-hitting schools inspectorate and high-stakes mandatory tests in England (other bits of Britain have different systems).
New Schools for Poor?
Some prominent Denver foundations are working on a plan that could create new schools for thousands of poor children in Colorado in the next few years.
The loose-knit group, called the New Schools Collaborative, includes the Piton Foundation, the Donnell-Kay Foundation and the Daniels Fund, names known for their work in urban education.
The idea is to pool money and knowledge to help jump-start the creation or replication of schools that have proved successful with students from low-income families.
That includes expanding homegrown models such as West Denver Preparatory Charter School on South Federal Boulevard, which Head of School Chris Gibbons wants to grow from a single school to three by 2015.
Q&A with the US Education Secretary: Challenge Assumptions about Time and Teachers
Education has long been a passion of U.S. Education Secretary Margaret Spellings, stretching back to the 1980s, when she worked in the Texas Legislature. While serving as chief domestic policy adviser to President George W. Bush, she was an architect of the 2001 federal No Child Left Behind Act. Its goal is for all children to become proficient in math and reading by 2014.
In 2005, the same year she became education secretary, Spellings convened the Commission on the Future of Higher Education to look at how to improve post-secondary institutions. Spellings is the first mother of school-age children to serve as education secretary, and only the second woman to be appointed to the post. In her final few months on the job, much of her time has been devoted to shoring up support for the No Child Left Behind law.
Q. Does the United States need to create world-class schools in every community, and, if so, why?
A. Absolutely, emphatically, yes. And why? Because we pride ourselves on being the center of innovation and creativity, and that has brought us the Internet and other technologies, but we are at risk of losing that. Our country has gotten more diverse [in terms of poverty and children learning to speak English as a second language], so some of the work is more challenging. More education is necessary for everybody. We have to pick up the pace. No Child Left Behind is about that.
In Defense of Home Schooling
Feb. 28 ruling by the 2nd District Court of Appeal barred parents from home schooling their children unless they have teaching credentials. Supporters of home schooling say the decision, if upheld, would make California the most restrictive of the 50 states on the issue and turn thousands of parents into outlaws.
Monday’s rehearing in the case drew at least 45 lawyers representing the California attorney general, the governor, the state Department of Education and several religious-liberty legal foundations, as well as home-school father Mark Landstrom of Northridge.
His son Glenn, 21, who accompanied him, is now a student at Patrick Henry College in Virginia, a small evangelical Christian school.
“It helped me feel really prepared for college,” Glenn Landstrom said of his home-based education in an interview outside the courtroom. He dismissed the assertion that home schoolers are intolerant of those of diverse backgrounds as “kind of a strange rumor.”
Kids making a difference: Sport for Africa CAR WASH June 28th at Middleton Cycle
Bulleh Bablitch via email:
Project Liberia inspires students to give
Middleton/Madison, Wis. — With the Summer in full bloom, it would be easy for any area high school student to spend his or her time sleeping away their summer and hanging out with their friends. But for one group of students at Middleton High School, there is no time like the present to start a new project, aimed at helping those in need halfway around the world.
For the past six weeks, this group of students have been collecting used sports equipment for children in the country of Liberia, all in the name of helping the youth of this nation, which is recovering from a 15-year civil war, learn how to see each other as teammates rather than enemies. Now that they have collected the items, it is time to raise the money needed to ship the items to Liberia.
156 Wisconsin Schools Fail to Meet No Child Left Behind Standards
The number of Wisconsin schools that didn’t meet standards set by the federal No Child Left Behind Act and could face sanctions increased from 95 to 156 this year, including the entire Madison Metropolitan School District.
Of the 156 schools on the list released Tuesday by the state Department of Public Instruction, 82 were in the Milwaukee Public School district. Seven of the schools on the list were charter schools.
Besides individual schools on the list, four entire districts made the list for not meeting the standards. That lists includes the school districts of Beloit, Madison, Milwaukee and Racine.Bill Novak (Interestingly, this Capital Times article originally had many comments, which are now gone):
Superintendent Art Rainwater told The Capital Times the list is “ludicrous,” the district doesn’t pay attention to it, and the district will do what’s best for the students and not gear curriculum to meet the criteria set by the federal government.
“As we’ve said from the day this law was passed, it is only a matter of time before every school in America is on the list,” Rainwater said. “It’s a law that impossible to meet, because eventually if every single student in a school isn’t successful, you are on the list.”No Child Left Behind allows states to set their own standards. The Fordham Institute has given Wisconsin’s academic standards a “D” in recent years. Neal McCluskey has more on states setting their own standards:
NCLB’s biggest problem is that it’s designed to help Washington politicians appear all things to all people. To look tough on bad schools, it requires states to establish standards and tests in reading, math and science, and it requires all schools to make annual progress toward 100% reading and math proficiency by 2014. To preserve local control, however, it allows states to set their own standards, “adequate yearly progress” goals, and definitions of proficiency. As a result, states have set low standards, enabling politicians to declare victory amid rising test scores without taking any truly substantive action.
NCLB’s perverse effects are illustrated by Michigan, which dropped its relatively demanding standards when it had over 1,500 schools on NCLB’s first “needs improvement” list. The July 2002 transformation of then-state superintendent Tom Watkins captures NCLB’s power. Early that month, when discussing the effects of state budget cuts on Michigan schools, Mr. Watkins declared that cuts or no cuts, “We don’t lower standards in this state!” A few weeks later, thanks to NCLB, Michigan cut drastically the percentage of students who needed to hit proficiency on state tests for a school to make adequate yearly progress. “Michigan stretches to do what’s right with our children,” Mr. Watkins said, “but we’re not going to shoot ourselves in the foot.”Madison’s Leopold and Lincoln elementary schools were among the list of schools failing to attain the standards, marking the first time that a Madison elementary school made the list.
Three Madison middle schools — Sherman, Cherokee and Toki — also joined the list, which continued to include the district’s four major high schools: East, West, La Follette and Memorial. Madison’s Black Hawk Middle School, which was on the list last year, made enough academic progress to be removed from it.
Does 8th-Grade Pomp Fit the Circumstance?
Andre Cowling, who just finished his first year as principal of Harvard Elementary, one of the poorest-performing schools in Chicago, said the South Side’s eighth-grade celebrations are like “Easter Sunday on steroids.”
In a speech last Sunday at a Chicago church, Barack Obama took on the pomp and purpose of these ceremonies. “Now hold on a second — this is just eighth grade,” he said. “So, let’s not go over the top. Let’s not have a huge party. Let’s just give them a handshake.” He continued: “You’re supposed to graduate from eighth grade.”
Mr. Obama was wading into a simmering debate about eighth-grade ceremonies and their attendant hoopla. Do they inspire at-risk students to remain in high school and beyond? Or do they imply finality?
While some educators are grateful that notice is still being paid to academic achievement, others deride the festivities as overpraising what should be routine accomplishment. Some principals, school superintendents and legislators are trying to scale back the grandeur. But stepping between parents and ever-escalating celebrations of their children’s achievements can be dicey, at best.
School Choice is Change you Can Believe In
Barack and Michelle Obama send their children to an upscale private school. When asked about it during last year’s YouTube debate, Sen. Obama responded that it was “the best option” for his children.
Several hundred low-income parents in our nation’s capital have also sent their children to private and parochial schools, with the help of a federal program that provides Opportunity Scholarships. Like Mr. and Mrs. Obama, most of these parents are African-American. And like Mr. and Mrs. Obama, they too believe the schools they’ve chosen represent the “best option” for their children.
Now these parents have a question for Mr. Obama. Is Mr. Change-You-Can-Believe-In going to let his fellow Democrats take away the one change that is working for them?Chris Christoff on Obama’s Flint Education speech:
Barack Obama’s plans to invest more taxpayer dollars on early education, college tuition tax credits and incentives for prospective teachers resonated with those attending his speech Monday at Kettering University in Flint.
Germans eye kindergarten for next engineers
Germany’s shortage of engineers has become so acute that some of its leading companies are turning to nursery schools to guarantee future supplies.
Industrial giants such as Siemens and Bosch are among hundreds of companies giving materials and money to kindergartens to try to interest children as young as three in technology and science.
Many European countries from Switzerland to Spain suffer shortages of graduates. But the problem is especially acute in Germany, renowned as a land of engineering. German companies have 95,000 vacancies for engineers and only about 40,000 are trained, according to the engineers’ association.
“It is a new development in that we have seen we need to start very early with children. Starting at school is not good enough – we need to help them to understand as early as possible how things work,” said Maria Schumm-Tschauder, head of Siemens’ Generation21 education programme.
Milwaukee Suburbs’ schools becoming lands of many tongues
Students raised speaking languages other than English have been a steadily growing part of Wisconsin’s population, but few were prepared for this finding when the state adopted a new test for identifying such children a few years ago:
The school districts of Racine and St. Francis surged ahead of Milwaukee Public Schools, each with a higher percentage of their students labeled English language learners, in the 2005-’06 school year.
That trend continued in the 2006-’07 school year, with the Waukesha School District exhibiting a higher proportion of students with limited English proficiency than MPS, according to data from the state Department of Public Instruction. The Kenosha Unified School District registered a higher percentage of such students as well, and the Franklin School District wasn’t too far behind.
Madison Math Task Force Minutes
March 7, 2008 Meeting [rtf / pdf]. Well worth reading for those interested in the use of Connected Math and Core Plus, among others, in our schools.
A few interesting items:
- Mitchell Nathan proposed a change to the name of the Work Group to more authentically describe its intent. There was consensus to accept the change in designation for the Work Group from “Curriculum Review and Research Findings” to “Learning from Curricula.”
- “Addresses the misconception that there is one curriculum. There are a number of curricula at play, with the exception of the narrowing down at the middle school level, but teachers are also drawing from supplementary materials. There are a range of pathways for math experiences. The work plan would give an overview by level of program of what exists. “
- “Could say that variety is good for children to have places to plug into. Could expand on the normative idea of purchasing commercial curricula vs. richer, in-house materials. Standards tell the teachers what needs to be taught. Published materials often are missing some aspect of the standards. District tries to define core resources; guides that help people with classroom organization.” Fascinating, given the move toward one size fits all in high school, such as English 9 and 10.
- “Want to include a summary of the NRC report that came out in favor of Connected Math but was not conclusive—cannot control for teacher effects, positive effects of all curricula, etc. “
- “Would like to give some portrayal of the opportunities for accelerated performance — want to document informal ways things are made available for differentiation. “
- “Include elementary math targeted at middle school, e.g., Math Masters. There is information out there to address the Math Masters program and its effect on student achievement.”
- “Data are available to conclude that there is equity in terms of resources”
- “District will have trend data, including the period when Connected Math was implemented, and control for changes in demographics and see if there was a change. No way to link students who took the WKCE with a particular curriculum experience (ed: some years ago, I recall a teacher asked Administration at a PTO meeting whether they would track students who took Singapore Math at the Elementary level: “No”). That kind of data table has to be built, including controls and something to match teacher quality. May recommend that not worth looking at WKCE scores of CM (Connected Math) student or a case study is worth doing. “
- The Parent Survey will be mailed to the homes of 1500 parents of students across all grades currently enrolled in MMSD math classes. The Teacher Survey will be conducted via the district’s web site using the Infinite Campus System.
- MMSD Math Task Force website
To solve racial disparities, parents, schools call truce
Minneapolis schools are hoping a new cooperative agreement with African-American parents will smooth some of the hard feelings over school closings last year and help close the district’s student achievement gap.
The idea is for black parents to help get their children ready to learn while the school district works with parents to help the kids succeed.
On average, black kids in Minneapolis schools do about half as well as their white classmates. They get disciplined more often. They get fewer diplomas.
That education gap has been the source of an increasingly bitter struggle in the city, but a group of parents and the school board have decided to call a truce.
The district voted Tuesday, to work with parents on what they’re calling a memorandum of agreement. It’s modeled on other agreements, like a pact with the NAACP and St. Paul Police and American Indian families and Minneapolis schools.
San Francisco Prosecutes Adults for Student Truancy
San Francisco District Attorney Kamala Harris issued citations Tuesday against six parents whose young children missed at least 50 days of school this year, the first time the city has prosecuted adults for student truancy.
Harris cited the parents of four children, ages 6 to 13, on charges that they kept the children home despite repeated efforts by the school district and law enforcement to address the problem.
“The charges are that they have violated California’s Education Code and allowed their children to go without an education,” Harris said at a news conference with the city’s school chief, Carlos Garcia.
She called chronic truancy a matter of public safety and said the vast majority of prison inmates and homicide victims are dropouts or habitual truants.
The Enemy Within British Education
Melanie Phillips via a kind reader:
In my book All Must Have Prizes, first published in 1996, in which I charted the disintegration of education and deconstruction of knowledge in Britain, I noted that this onslaught had resulted from the hijack of education by left-wing ideologues hell-bent on destroying British society. These people were entrenched in university departments of education. So when the government tried to address education decline by imposing a national curriculum and turned to the ‘experts’ to help them do so, the people who wrote that curriculum and sat on the curriculum boards and other education quangos were the very people who were doing the damage in the first place.
Twelve years on, Britain’s education system has disintegrated yet further and exactly the same kind of people are doing the same damage. Today’s Daily Mail reports that Professor John White, who specialises in ‘the philosophy of education’ and a government adviser on curriculum reform, says that children should no longer be taught traditional subjects at school because they are ‘middle-class’ creations and ‘mere stepping stones to wealth’ and that lessons should teach ‘personal skills’ instead.The professor believes the origins of our subject-based education system can be traced back to 19th century middle-class values. While public schools focused largely on the classics, and elementary schools for the working class concentrated on the three Rs, middle-class schools taught a range of academic subjects.
These included English, maths, history, geography, science and Latin or a modern language. They ‘fed into the idea of academic learning as the mark of a well-heeled middle- class’, he said last night. The Tories then attempted to impose these middle-class values by introducing a traditional subject-based curriculum in 1988. But this ‘alienated many youngsters, especially from disadvantaged backgrounds’, he claimed.
Milwaukee Schools Ordered to Do More for Special needs
Jeffrey Spitzer-Resnick, the attorney representing the plaintiffs in the case, said Sunday that the decision will bring “the most substantial reform in MPS history,” one that will bring higher graduation rates, fewer discipline problems and improved test scores within a few a years.
MPS officials have fought the goals set forth in the decision of Federal Magistrate Judge Aaron Goodstein, saying they would lead to big increases in spending and taxes and actually harm children and lower educational standards. MPS spokeswoman Roseann St. Aubin said Superintendent William Andrekopoulos and School Board members had not yet seen the decision and did not want to comment until they met about it. She quoted Andrekopoulos saying only, “We’re going to continue to move forward with education reforms that meet the needs of all our children.”
Goodstein’s decision, signed Friday and circulated over the weekend, came down on every point in favor of the position of the plaintiffs, an organization now known as Disability Rights Wisconsin, and in favor of a settlement reached recently between that organization and the state Department of Public Instruction, which was also a defendant in the case. Goodstein rejected all grounds MPS offered for finding things wrong with that settlement.
On Arizona’s Proposed School District Consolidation
1. Given the high-interest and often emotionally charged and political topic of education and school districts, what has been your experience serving on the commission?
I think all of us on the Commission have been inspired by the commitment we’ve seen from parents and educators throughout Arizona to turning our system around so it can better serve our children. Their insights and input strongly shaped the recommendations we presented to Gov. Janet Napolitano last December. But make no mistake, change is hard and we expected some degree of resistance to our plan simply because it meant the end of the status quo. I am a little disappointed that some have rushed to judgment without fully investigating our proposals or considering the benefits of making better use of our precious educational resources. We hope to dispel some of these concerns this summer during a series of public forums that will be scheduled across the state.
Shameful effort to undermine charter school
San Jose Mercury News Editorial:
Leadership Public Schools’ longstanding battle with the Campbell Union High School District is over.
The district has won. Families of low-income Hispanics, whom the school was designed to serve, have lost.
The board of the non-profit San Francisco-based charter organization voted last week to shut down its Campbell high school after only two years of operation. Leadership is calling the closing a consolidation.
Students will be bused to Overfelt High in East San Jose, where Leadership has a 10-year lease from charter-welcoming East Side Union High School District.
But let’s be straight: This was sabotage by Campbell Union. And it points to weaknesses in the state law that says school districts must provide space to charter schools.
Proposition 39 requires that districts provide equivalent facilities, but only on a yearly basis. So many anti-charter districts, like Campbell, use the provision to give charters a literal run-around and force them to move every year.
Leadership opened two years ago with 120 ninth-graders in rented space at a church not far from Del Mar High, the target area where there was a concentration of long-under-served Hispanic children. (Perhaps showing the value of competition, Del Mar itself has made considerable strides in the past few years under Principal Jim Russell.)
Fate of D.C. Voucher Program Darkens
Valerie Strauss & Bill Turque:
The groundbreaking federal voucher program that enables nearly 2,000 D.C. children to attend private schools is facing an uncertain future in the Democrat-controlled Congress and may well be heading into its final year of operation, according to officials and supporters of the program.
Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-D.C.) said this week that she is working on a plan to phase out the controversial D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program, the first in the country to provide federal money for vouchers. Norton said she wants to proceed in a way that will not harm recipients. But she added that she regarded the program, narrowly approved in 2004 for five years by the then-Republican majority, as on its last legs.
“We have to protect the children, who are the truly innocent victims here,” said Norton, who like many Democrats opposes vouchers as a threat to public school systems. “But I can tell you that the Democratic Congress is not about to extend this program.”
Three Child Psychiatry Experts at Harvard Made Millions from Drug Makers
Gardiner Harris & Benedict Carey:
A world-renowned Harvard child psychiatrist whose work has helped fuel an explosion in the use of powerful antipsychotic medicines in children earned at least $1.6 million in consulting fees from drug makers from 2000 to 2007 but for years did not report much of this income to university officials, according to information given Congressional investigators.
By failing to report income, the psychiatrist, Dr. Joseph Biederman, and a colleague in the psychiatry department at Harvard Medical School, Dr. Timothy E. Wilens, may have violated federal and university research rules designed to police potential conflicts of interest, according to Senator Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa. Some of their research is financed by government grants.
Like Dr. Biederman, Dr. Wilens belatedly reported earning at least $1.6 million from 2000 to 2007, and another Harvard colleague, Dr. Thomas Spencer, reported earning at least $1 million after being pressed by Mr. Grassley’s investigators. But even these amended disclosures may understate the researchers’ outside income because some entries contradict payment information from drug makers, Mr. Grassley found.
Mary Olsky, EAGLE School co-founder, decides to retire
Twenty-six years ago, Mary Olsky was looking for a more challenging educational environment for her children. What ultimately happened has helped thousands of students over the years.
“I didn’t see this happening,” she said recently of Eagle School, which she co-founded with Betty Connor in 1982. Olsky is stepping down as co-director of the school, which now has 182 students, 20 teachers and six to 10 parent aides, and an expansive building at 5454 Gunflint Trail in Fitchburg.
In the 1980s, Olksy had recently moved to the Madison area with her husband and four children, ages 4 to 10, from Chicago. She thought Madison would provide a better educational environment for her children, but was disappointed.
Shortly after meeting Connor, they visited several schools around the country and rented a room in Hoyt School, which the district had closed and was renting rooms to a variety of organizations. They collected materials from a variety of sources and started with 12 students, including two of her children.
By 1985, they had outgrown their space and moved to another former school in Madison. One of the parents was a developer and helped them purchase land and build a school in Middleton. After adding two additions, they purchased land in Fitchburg and constructed the current building.
“We had sworn that we’d never have more than 100 kids or build our own building. What happened has become part of our general philosophy, which is to see problems and try to solve them instead of being rigid,” Olsky.
What happened after California abolished bilingual education
TEN years to the day after California banned teaching in any language other than English, Erlinda Paredes runs through a new sentence with her kindergarten class. “El payaso se llama Botones”, she intones—“the clown’s name is Buttons”. When a pupil asks a question in English, she responds in Spanish. It is an improbable scene. But the abolition of bilingual education has not worked out in quite the way anybody expected.
Before 1998 some 400,000 Californian children were shunted into classes where they heard as little as 30 minutes of English each day. The hope was that they would learn mathematics and other subjects in their native tongue (usually Spanish) while they gently made the transition to English. The result was an educational barrio. So that year Ron Unz, a software engineer, sponsored a ballot measure that mandated teaching in English unless parents demanded otherwise. Proposition 227 passed easily, with considerable support from Hispanics. Voters in two other states, Massachusetts and Arizona, have since followed suit.
In Santa Ana, a mostly poor Latino city in Orange county, the number of children in bilingual classes promptly halved. Demand would have been even less had schools not prodded parents to request waivers for their children. In the past few years demand for bilingual education has fallen further. This year 22,000 pupils in Santa Ana are enrolled in “structured English immersion” programmes, where they hear little but that language. Just 646 are taught bilingually.
Follow the Special Ed Money
Jay Greene is dubious about Response To Intervention — trying to educate children well so they’re not diagnosed as learning disabled — because he thinks schools have an incentive to put kids in special ed.
Essentially, RTI frees-up money to get schools to do what they presumably should have been doing already — providing well-designed instruction in the early grades. Unless we think that the main impediment to well-designed instruction was that schools lacked the funding to do it, diverting 15% of special education money to early-grade instruction will not get them to do anything significantly different from what they were already doing.
On Finland’s Schools
I AM feeling nostalgic. I spent two years in Finland in the late 1990s on a European Union post-doctoral fellowship at the University of Jyvaskyla in central Finland, and haven’t been back since. I wonder how much things will have changed—the country had only just joined the European Union back then, and has since joined the euro and experienced an economic boom.
First stop this morning is Kulosaari comprehensive school, in a suburb of Helsinki. Finnish comprehensives teach children from seven to 16; after that almost all youngsters spend another three years in either grammar or vocational schools.
Kulosaari school is lovely. The children are calm (far calmer than those at my son’s primary school in Cambridge, England) and talk to adults respectfully, but as equals.
Dan Wood, from Maidstone in England, one of two native English speakers on the staff, teaches children in the school’s bilingual programme. He has been in Finland for ten years now, and has no intention of leaving. “My mum works in a school at home,” he tells me. “I really just don’t want to go back to that system, the stress of school inspections.”
Referendum’s Reprise
Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel Editorial:
Faced with growing numbers of students, what should school officials in Hartford and Germantown do to provide adequate school facilities?
One is tempted to ask just what part of “no” school officials in Germantown and Hartford don’t understand.
Faced with the rejection by voters of a school building referendum in April, the Germantown School Board probably will try again in November with the same referendum. Meanwhile, in Hartford, officials haven’t given up their quest for a new school despite being shot down twice – in November and April referendum balloting – by a 2-1 or better ratio.
Some consider their efforts arrogance and a slap in the face to voters. Maybe. But maybe it’s a sincere attempt to find the best answer to a simple challenge faced by both communities.
Germantown and Hartford schools are a part of growing communities that every year are adding more subdivisions with families that include children. Those kids have to be educated somewhere. And as families grow, classrooms grow and become crowded. School officials in both districts contend that they need new elementary schools to cope with that growth.
Prevention called cure for school violence
Communities and schools should take a preventive approach to school violence rather than focus solely on punishing students who have behavior problems, experts said yesterday at a summit on school violence.
Students are looking for structure, high academic expectations, and teachers who understand and can communicate with them, said Ivan J. Juzang, a consultant who gave the keynote address at the daylong meeting at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. Providing those basics will make schools safer, he said.
The summit was organized by Rep. Elijah E. Cummings and State Superintendent of Schools Nancy S. Grasmick after several high-profile incidents of violence in schools this year, including the beating of a Baltimore teacher that became nationwide news after it was recorded on a student’s cell phone and posted on the Internet.
The summit was called to find solutions to the problems of school violence, but the conversation among participants and speakers focused more broadly on the need to intervene in the lives of troubled children as early as elementary school. The participants included legislators, teachers, school board members, community leaders, parents and students from across the state.Related:
- Gangs & School Violence Forum
- Corwin Kronenberg SIS links, Clusty Search
- Cell phone video of a local school fight was recently posted online.
Accelerated Math Adds Up To a Division Over Merits
Next fall, 26 of the sharpest fifth-grade minds at Potomac Elementary School will study seventh-grade math. The rest of the fifth grade will learn sixth-grade math. Fifth-grade math will be left to the third- and fourth-graders.
Public schools nationwide are working to increase the number of students who study Algebra I, the traditional first-year high school math course, in eighth grade. Many Washington area schools have gone further, pushing large numbers of students two or three years ahead of the grade-level curriculum.
Math study in Montgomery County has evolved from one or two academic paths to many. Acceleration often begins in kindergarten. In a county known for demanding parents, the math push has generated an unexpected backlash. Many parents say children are pushed too far, too fast.
Sixty Montgomery math teachers complained, in a November forum, that students were being led into math classes beyond their abilities.Related links:
- Math Forum Audio, Video and Links.
- West High School Math teachers letter to Isthmus
Their 3 R’s include running
Midday recess at Riverside Elementary School had reached a cacophonic pitch Monday, with students tossing assorted balls through the air, when a class of kindergartners added to the mix by bolting around the play area.
Far from scolding the children, their teachers encouraged the activity.
What happens on this vast plot of gravel, the thinking goes, can be as important as what goes on inside the classroom.
“When you’re talking about education, you have to look at the whole child,” Riverside counselor Kara Baker said, “because if they’re not well, they’re not going to learn.”
That focus on wellness has won the school recognition over the past two years, as a Governor’s School Health Award silver-level winner.
Riverside was the only Waukesha County school to receive the award in 2008. James Fenimore Cooper School in Milwaukee was a gold award winner.
Private vs. Public Schools
The lawn is meticulously manicured, as if the groundskeeper’s tools include a cuticle scissors. Classic brick buildings, a bell tolling the hour and concrete lion statues almost convince me that I’m at an East Coast college. But this is Lakeside School in Northeast Seattle.
This is where super-achievers went to school – Bill Gates, Paul Allen and Craig McCaw to name a few. Many of Seattle’s affluent families send their kids here for a challenging private education. With an acceptance rate of 24 percent, Lakeside is the most elite private high school in the Northwest. So what am I doing here?
Just wandering, and wondering if my children would have a better start in life if they went to private schools.
“As someone who has experienced both public schooling and private schooling, there is absolutely no doubt in my mind: sending your child to a private school is one of the best decisions you can make for him or her,” says Peter Rasmussen, a recent Lakeside alumnus. “In retrospect, if my parents made me pay my tuition all by myself, I would have. That’s how valuable a Lakeside education is.”
Words from an e-mail conversation with Rasmussen scroll across my brain as I glance around Lakeside: “Absolutely no doubt … one of the best decisions … that’s how valuable.”
A lot of families are like the Rasmussens. In Seattle, almost one out of four students attends private schools, according to an estimate from Seattle Public Schools. The national average is one in 10.
I’ve talked with the president of Seattle Preparatory School, the mom of a Holy Names Academy student, researchers at the Center on Education Policy and a local education author. They’ve given me a better understanding of why private education is extraordinary and also what public schools do well. Which is better for my kids? For your kids?
Related Links:
- Lakeside School
- Seattle Preparatory School
- Holy Names Academy
- Islander Middle School
- Seattle Public Schools
- Whitman Middle School – Seattle
- Ballard High School
- Center on Education Policy: Are Private High Schools Better than Public High Schools?
Continue reading here.
Back to school for cities: Solutions to urban problems begin with improving schools
Big city school boards and superintendents have generally failed to provide the accountability and leadership needed to educate the many disadvantaged children they serve. Mayors and the federal government must take stronger roles in improving urban schools.
In an increasingly global and knowledge-based economy, nothing is more important to the future of cities and to the nation as a whole than education.
America’s beleaguered cities cannot rebound without good public schools, now plagued by lack of money, unresponsive bureaucracies, declining enrollments, high dropout and poverty rates, and low academic standards. State and federal contributions to school budgets have not made up for huge inequities in local support.
At their best, public schools give the most disadvantaged children a chance to succeed, but rarely the clear path that children find in affluent districts. More than 50 years after the landmark Brown v. Board of Education case declared segregation unconstitutional, the nation’s schools remain practically as unequal as ever — and in places such as metro Detroit, nearly as segregated as they were in 1950.
National Spelling Bee Brings Out Protesters Who R Thru With Through
A fyoo duhzen ambishuhss intelectchooals, a handful ov British skool teechers and wuhn rokit siuhntist ar triing to chang the way we spel.
They are the leaders of the spelling-reform movement, a passionate but sporadic 800-year-old campaign to simplify English orthography. In its long and failure-ridden history, the movement has tried to convince an indifferent public of the need for a spelling system based on pronunciation.
Reformers, including Mark Twain, Charles Darwin and Theodore Roosevelt, argued that phonetic spellings would make it easier for children, foreigners and adults with learning disabilities to read and write. For centuries, few listened, and the movement, exhausted by its own rhetoric and disputes within its ranks, sputtered out. It’s back.
Spelling reform is currently enjoying a renaissance in the U.S. and Britain. At a time when young people are inventing their own shorthand for email and text messages, the reformers see a fresh opportunity 2 convert people 2 the cause.
In recent years, the ranks of Britain’s Spelling Society and the American Literacy Council have swelled from a few stalwart members to more than 500, which in this effort is a lot. Reformers are energized: Some are writing to dictionary editors urging them to include simplified spellings in new editions. Others are organizing academic conferences, including one on June 7 in Coventry, England, on “The Cost of Spelling.” The American Literacy Council just allocated $45,000 of its $250,000 private endowment to develop a series of DVDs using simplified spelling to teach English to international students. The Spelling Society has hired its first publicist.
US Schools: Not that Bad
America’s educational system is easier than those in China and India — but it’s still teaching valuable life lessons
Students have 2 million minutes—the time from the beginning of eighth grade to high school graduation—to build the intellectual foundation they’ll need for professional success. That’s the premise of a new documentary, Two Million Minutes, that’s making waves in education and political circles.
The film tracks six students—two each in the U.S., India, and China—during their senior year of high school. The Indian and Chinese students work diligently on math and science, while the American students work hard but appear less focused and leave plenty of time for video games and social lives. The message is that because of our education system, we’re getting left behind.
Two Million Minutes provides a provocative glimpse of the global competition now facing U.S. students. And the conclusion many are drawing is that to keep our edge, our children need to study more math and science and work harder. It is true that the U.S. education system should be improved; that’s essential for economic success.
But the solution isn’t for us to become just like our new competitors. We need to do what we do better.
Childhood Obesity Rates Stop Rising
The obesity epidemic may have peaked among U.S. children, halting a decades-long trend of inexorably expanding waistlines among the nation’s youngest and most vulnerable, federal health officials reported yesterday.
A new analysis of the most recent data collected by an ongoing government survey, considered the most authoritative on the subject, detected the first sign since the 1980s that the proportion of 2-to-19-year-olds who are overweight may have stopped rising, the National Center for Health Statistics reported.
Japan Urges Limiting Kids Cell Phones
Japanese youngsters are getting so addicted to Internet-linking cell phones that the government is starting a program warning parents and schools to limit their use among children.
The government is worried about how elementary and junior high school students are getting sucked into cyberspace crimes, spending long hours exchanging mobile e-mail and suffering other negative effects of cell phone overuse, Masaharu Kuba, a government official overseeing the initiative, said Tuesday.
“Japanese parents are giving cell phones to their children without giving it enough thought,” he said. “In Japan, cell phones have become an expensive toy.”
The recommendations have been submitted from an education reform panel to Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda’s administration, and were approved this week.
The panel is also asking Japanese makers to develop cell phones with only the talking function, and GPS, or global positioning system, a satellite-navigation feature that can help ensure a child’s safety.
Working Relationship: Patrick Spottiswoode, director of education at Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre, and his PA, Adrienne Gillam
“We get 100,000 students a year, aged from 3 to postgraduates,” says Patrick Spottiswoode, the Globe’s education director, “and at our busiest, we have 800 in a day. Children often arrive bored and cynical, but once they’ve been introduced to Shakespeare, they become animated and positive.” His PA, Adrienne Gillam, sees it for herself: “It’s wonderful to watch an audience of kids come alive,” she says.
The education programme is run by 23 members of staff with the help of 60 freelancers, usually actors who have been specially trained in each year group’s syllabus and can help students of all ages to create a production in less than a day.
The events have come a long way since 1984 when Patrick arrived — by coincidence, on Shakespeare’s birthday. He recalls: “I was working on a PhD and decided to take a year off, but 24 years later, I’m still here. There were only two members of staff, and the job advertisement was for someone to run an arts centre, museum and cafe. In reality, I started the arts centre with L200 of my own books, the museum was in a leaking warehouse and the cafe consisted of a kettle.”
Middleton High School Students Collect Donations to Aid Individuals in War-Torn Nation
Project Liberia inspires students to give
With the school year winding down and summer almost here, it would be easy for any area high school student to spend his or her time simply counting down the days to the start of summer fun. But for one group of students at Middleton High School, there is no time like the present to start a new project, aimed at helping those in need halfway around the world.
For the past three weeks, this group of students have been collecting used sports equipment for children in the country of Liberia, all in the name of helping the youth of this nation, which is recovering from a 15-year civil war, learn how to see each other as teammates rather than enemies.
The inspiration for the project — titled Sports For Africa and part of a burgeoning non-profit organization called Project Liberia — came from 16-year-old Laytee Norkeh, whose mother and father are Liberian nationals. As Norkeh and her friends listened to heartbreaking stories of the great need that exists across the small West African country, they couldn’t help but see an opportunity to get involved.
“We felt a strong need to take matters into our own hands and help those who are so helpless,” Norkeh says. “It takes so little to make such a big difference in the lives of these people. We want to help them and give them hope of a better future.”
Norkeh, along with Eli Rosen, Carli Kopatz, Lexie Jordee, Sam Delabarre, Ashley Guse, Campbell White, David Ripp, Alex Koritzinsky, and John Zimmerman have been working to collect used sports equipment at their school and other local businesses. The collection runs from May 28 – June 6th. Laytee has created a video which will be shown to the student body beginning May 28th.
About Project Liberia:Project Liberia is a collection of individual programs designed to meet some of the most pressing needs for a nation recovering from a devastating civil war. Each venture — from building a community center, developing a micro-loan system and bringing sports equipment to children in villages and orphanages — has been developed to enhance the physical, mental, emotional and spiritual fiber of the people of Liberia. 501(c)(3) status pending.
For more information, please contact Bulleh Bablitch at (608) 577-6711 or project.liberia@yahoo.com.
Liberia via the CIA’s World Factbook.
Students with learning disabilities get extra attention at Walbridge, a private Madison school
One morning, students at Walbridge School used their fingers to trace letters representing sounds in a mix of sand and sparkling glitter on a paper plate.
When a student was squeamish about the task, he asked if he could trace with a pen instead of his finger.
This lesson is an example of the multisensory approach taken by Walbridge School, which was founded in 1986. The private, nonprofit school enrolls children in grades 1 through 8 at 7035 Old Sauk Road on the Far West Side.
“We teach children who learn differently, who cannot succeed with traditional ways of learning,” said Gary Lewis, head of the school.
The primary concerns for students at Walbridge are learning issues rather than behavioral, he said. Some have specific disabilities such as dyslexia, dysgraphia and attention deficit disorder.
Some students have other concerns such as confusion over space and time.
An Interview with Terry Grier, San Diego’s New Superintendent
What kind of reforms are you planning for the district?
The budget crisis is not over. We’ve got to look at closing small schools. There are 40 with enrollments under 400.
How would you help the district’s poorest-performing schools?
I’d like to look at lowering class size to an average of 15 (students) in grades kindergarten, one and two at 10 to 15 of our most impacted schools. Some of these schools have a tremendous mobility factor; I’d to treat them like magnets and provide busing if (students) move, as many of them often do for various reasons, so they can continue at the same school.
What about the rest of the district?
I want schools to have flexibility. But one thing I think – and research says – all schools could benefit from is creating a sense of community by keeping cohorts of children together in kindergarten, first and second grades.
What about high schools?
I’d like every high school to offer at least 10 Advanced Placement courses. It’s not ethical to deny some students access to this curriculum.Links:
- Clusty Search: Terry Grier
- Dane County High School AP Offering Comparison
State curriculum on legalities of parenting coming to Texas high schools this fall
Do you know the difference between an “alleged father” and a “presumed father?” Your child soon will.
The Texas attorney general’s office has created a new parenting curriculum that will be required in every public high school this fall. It will cover everything from the legalese of paternity to dealing with relationship violence.
State officials say the goal is twofold: They want to teach teenage parents their legal rights and they want to show other students the difficulties of being a parent in hopes that they’ll wait to have children.
The program, which has already drawn some skepticism, promises to bring personal and family values out of the home and into the classroom.
Rio School District Voters Approve a $1,270,000 Referendum
Voters in the Rio School District approved a referendum on Tuesday that some called a last-ditch effort to save the school district.
The referendum was to exceed the levy limits over the next three years for a total of $1,270,000.
The final vote was 627 to 340 in favor of the referendum.
Village leaders and business owners said the existence of the school ensures the small town’s survival.
“I’ve seen towns in other states that have lost schools and they’ve become ghost towns,” said resident Jennifer Wearne.
Wearne has two children in Rio schools.
High School Challenge Index, 2008
The Newsweek and Washington Post Challenge Index measures a public high school’s effort to challenge its students. The formula is simple: Divide the number of Advanced Placement, International Baccalaureate or Cambridge tests a school gave by the number of seniors who graduated in May or June. Tests taken by all students, not just seniors, are counted. Magnet or charter schools with SAT combined verbal and math averages higher than 1300, or ACT average scores above 29, are not included, since they do not have enough average students who need a challenge.
The rating is not a measurement of the overall quality of the school but illuminates one factor that many educators consider important.
The list below includes all public schools with a rating of 1.000. There are nearly 1,400 — the top 5 percent of all 27,000 U.S. high schools in encouraging students to take AP, IB or Cambridge tests. Also listed are the name of the city or school district and the percentage of a school’s students whose family incomes are low enough to qualify for federally subsidized lunches and who also apply for that program. The portion of subsidized-lunch applicants is a rough indicator of a school’s poverty level. High-poverty schools are at a disadvantage in persuading students to take college-level courses, but some on this list have succeeded in doing so anyway.
The Equity and Excellence rate is the percentage of all seniors who have had at least one score on an AP, IB or Cambridge test that would qualify them for college credit. The average AP Equity and Excellence rate for all U.S. schools is about 15 percent.Milwaukee Rufus King ranked highest among the 21 Wisconsin High Schools at #209. The only Madison area high school to make the list is Verona at #808.
Related: Dane County, WI AP High School Course offerings.
Jay Matthews has more:This week, Newsweek magazine and its Web site Newsweek.com unveil this year’s Top High Schools list, based on a rating system I invented a decade ago called the Challenge Index. The index ranks schools based on college-level course participation, adding up the number of Advanced Placement, International Baccalaureate and other college-level tests in a given year for a given school, and dividing that total by its number of graduating seniors.
Several weeks ago I asked students, teachers and parents to tell me how this annual ranking affected their schools. Here is a sampling of several points of view, both critical and complimentary.
* * *
So, with regard to your Challenge Index — it really is a quick and dirty way of assessing schools. Very ambitious and probably very imperfect. However, there isn’t anything else out there like it. I think the reason our school systems are not very good compared to other countries is that we underestimate the abilities of our children. I think too the education field is fuzzy — not very good data or evidence to support the programs that are out there. . . . More and better research is needed. And of course there are the socioeconomic/family issues of some schools/districts that cannot/will not be fixed with just higher expectations.
— Terry Adirim Montgomery CountyPrevious SIS Challenge Index links and notes. Clusty search on the Challenge Index.
Letters on: Improvements to New Orleans Schools
Letters regarding “Changes at New Orleans Schools Bring Gains in Test Scores“:
Re “Changes at New Orleans Schools Bring Gains in Test Scores” (news article, May 7):
We’re pleased to see that New Orleans schoolchildren are making academic gains, such as improving their scores on the latest Louisiana Educational Assessment Program.
As your article points out, post-Katrina schools have invested in reforms like intensifying tutorial and after-school programs. These reforms have long been promoted by the United Teachers of New Orleans.
But one should not get the impression that the higher scores are a direct result of importing new teachers to the city. We applaud the efforts of every teacher who has come to work in New Orleans schools. But some of our most successful schools, like Bethune Elementary and Sophie B. Wright, are those that employ the highest percentages of veteran teachers who are familiar with their students’ communities
Educational Romanticism: On Requiring Every Child to Be Above Average
This is the story of educational romanticism in elementary and secondary schools — its rise, its etiology, and, we have reason to hope, its approaching demise.
Educational romanticism consists of the belief that just about all children who are not doing well in school have the potential to do much better. Correlatively, educational romantics believe that the academic achievement of children is determined mainly by the opportunities they receive; that innate intellectual limits (if they exist at all) play a minor role; and that the current K-12 schools have huge room for improvement. Educational romanticism characterizes reformers of both Left and Right, though in different ways.
Educational romantics of the Left focus on race, class, and gender. It is children of color, children of poor parents, and girls whose performance is artificially depressed, and their academic achievement will blossom as soon as they are liberated from the racism, classism, and sexism embedded in American education. Those of the Right see public education as an ineffectual monopoly, and think that educational achievement will blossom when school choice liberates children from politically correct curricula and obdurate teachers’ unions.Clusty Search on Charles Murray.
Pennsylvania Charter Schools Growth
More than a decade after charter schools became legal in Pennsylvania, it is safe to say the schools, once considered experimental and still sometimes controversial, are here to stay.
About 64,000 students are enrolled in 126 charter schools statewide, and about 20,000 are on charter school waiting lists, according to the Pennsylvania Coalition of Charter Schools.
Nearly half of the schools are in Philadelphia. But parents of Western Pennsylvania students — including 2,355 children living in Pittsburgh — also have chosen charter schools, which can be bricks-and-mortar buildings or cyber schools.
Their staying power will be in evident this week as the Pennsylvania Coalition of Charter Schools, a statewide advocacy and support organization, conducts its state convention at the Pittsburgh Marriott City Center, Uptown. The meeting, which began yesterday, runs through tomorrow and is expected to attract more than 1,000 people.
Psychiatric Help 5c
Will Fitzhugh
The Concord Review
15 May 2008
In Peanuts, when we see Lucy offering Psychiatric Help for a nickel, we know it is a joke: (“The Psychiatrist is IN”), but when English teachers in the schools insist that students write about the most intimate details of their private lives for school assignments, that is not a joke, it is an unwarranted intrusion.
There are a couple of major problems with the “personal writing” that has taken over so many of the writing assignments for the English classes in our schools.
First, the teachers are asking students to share information about their personal lives that is none of the teachers’ business. The vast majority of English teachers are not qualified as psychologists, much less as psychiatrists, and they should not pretend that they are.
Second, the time spent by students writing assignments for their teachers in their personal diaries is subtracted from time they need to spend learning how to do the academic expository writing they will need to be able to do when they leave school, for college and for work.
I will leave it to others to explain why English teachers have gone down this road in so many of our schools. I have written a number of articles about Creative Nonfiction and Contentless Writing, and the like, to try to encourage some attention to the retreat (or flight) from academic writing in our schools.
Assistant LA Superintendent Sounds Off
Mitchell Landsberg interviews Ramon Cortines:
“I’ve tackled some of the sacred cows in my recommendations, such as the issues of contracts, how much money we could receive from that. Such as the issue of health benefits, and how much money we could receive by capping that. And increasing the co-pay.”
Cortines was at times unsparing of LAUSD’s failures, saying that the district is organized for the benefit of the adults who work there, not the children they are hired to serve. He said the school board passes too many resolutions that “aren’t worth the paper [they’re] printed on.” And he said the district had “abdicated our responsibility” for Locke High School, which is about to be turned over to Green Dot Public Schools, the big charter operator. Students didn’t get a pass, though: He said the district needs to enforce “a code of behavior” based on the idea that they don’t just have rights — they also have responsibilities.Clusty Search: Ramon Cortines.
Check the Facts: Few States Set World-Class Standards
Summer 2008 (vol. 8, no. 3) Table of Contents CHECK THE FACTS: Few States Set World-Class Standards
In fact, most render the notion of proficiency meaningless
Paul E. Peterson and Frederick M. Hess:
As the debate over the reauthorization of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) makes its murky way through the political swamp, one thing has become crystal clear: Though NCLB requires that virtually all children become proficient by the year 2014, states disagree on the level of accomplishment in math and reading a proficient child should possess. A few states have been setting world-class standards, but most are well off that mark—in some cases to a laughable degree.
In this report, we use 2007 test-score information to evaluate the rigor of each state’s proficiency standards against the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), an achievement measure that is recognized nationally and has international credibility as well. The analysis extends previous work (see “Johnny Can Read…in Some States,” features, Summer 2005, and “Keeping an Eye on State Standards,” features, Summer 2006) that used 2003 and 2005 test-score data and finds in the new data a noticeable decline, especially at the 8th-grade level. In Figure 1, we rank the rigor of state proficiency standards using the same A to F scale teachers use to grade students. Those that receive an A have the toughest definitions of student proficiency, while those with an F have the least rigorous.
Measuring Standards
That states vary widely in their definitions of student proficiency seems little short of bizarre. Agreement on what constitutes “proficiency” would seem the essential starting point: if students are to know what is expected of them, teachers are to know what to teach, and parents are to have a measuring stick for their schools. In the absence of such agreement, it is impossible to determine how student achievement stacks up across states and countries.
One national metric for performance does exist, the National Assessment of Educational Progress. The NAEP is a series of tests administered under the auspices of the U.S. Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics. Known as the Nation’s Report Card, the NAEP tests measure proficiency in reading and math among 4th and 8th graders nationwide as well as in every state. The NAEP sets its proficiency standard through a well-established, if complex, technical process. Basically, it asks informed experts to judge the difficulty of each of the items in its test bank. The experts’ handiwork received a pat on the back recently when the American Institutes for Research (AIR) showed that NAEP’s definition of “proficiency” was very similar to the standard used by designers of international tests of student achievement. Proficiency has acquired roughly the same meaning in Europe and Asia, and in the United States—as long as the NAEP standard is employed.
Are gifted students getting left out?
Carla Rivera Highly intelligent, talented students need special programs to keep them engaged and challenged. But experts say too often they aren’t even identified — especially in low-income and minority schools. If you reviewed Dalton Sargent’s report cards, you’d know only half his story. The 15-year-old Altadena junior has lousy grades in many subjects. He […]
No Small Plan: Public Boarding Schools for Chicago
Carlos Sadovi and Stephanie Banchero, via a kind reader’s email:
Public boarding schools where homeless children and those from troubled homes could find the safety and stability to learn are being pursued by Chicago Public Schools officials.
Under the plan, still in the nascent stages, the first pilot residential program could open as soon as fall 2009. District officials hope to launch as many as six such schools in the following years, including at least one that would operate as a year-round school.
The proposal puts Chicago at the forefront of urban school reform, as cities struggle to raise the academic achievement of students hampered by dysfunctional homes and other obstacles outside school.
Some districts, including Chicago, have looked for solutions from small schools to single-sex campuses. But residential schools are a bolder — and far more expensive — proposition. Long an option for the affluent, boarding schools are virtually unheard of for the disadvantaged.
Chicago Public Schools chief Arne Duncan said he does not want to be in the “parenting” business, but he worries that some homes and some neighborhoods are unsafe, making education an afterthought.
“Some children should not go home at night; some of them we need 24-7,” he told the Tribune. “We want to serve children who are really not getting enough structure at home. There’s a certain point where dad is in jail or has disappeared and mom is on crack … where there isn’t a stable grandmother, that child is being raised by the streets.”
Chicago school officials are still working through details of the plan, and it’s not clear whether the schools would be run by the district, outside agencies or some combination of the two.
It’s also not certain how the schools would be funded, who would shoulder the liability of keeping students overnight or how students would be selected.
In April, as part of its Renaissance 2010 new schools program, the district will put out a formal request for boarding school proposals. Officials have already met with interested groups in Chicago.
Officials have also visited several public and private boarding schools across the country and asked some to submit proposals.
Duncan said he has dreamed for years about opening boarding schools, but only last year, when he hired Josh Edelman, son of Children’s Defense Fund founder Marian Wright Edelman, did the idea take off.
Some of California’s most gifted students are being ignored, advocates say
If you reviewed Dalton Sargent’s report cards, you’d know only half his story. The 15-year-old Altadena junior has lousy grades in many subjects. He has blown off assignments and been dissatisfied with many of his teachers. It would be accurate to call him a problematic student. But he is also gifted.
Dalton is among the sizable number of highly intelligent or talented children in the nation’s classrooms who find little in the standard curriculum to rouse their interest and who often fall by the wayside.
With schools under intense pressure from state and federal mandates such as No Child Left Behind to raise test scores of low-achieving pupils, the educational needs of gifted students — who usually perform well on standardized tests — too often are ignored, advocates say.
Nationally, about 3 million kindergarten through 12th-grade students are identified as gifted, but 80% of them do not receive specialized instruction, experts say. Studies have found that 5% to 20% of students who drop out are gifted.
There is no federal law mandating special programs for gifted children, though many educators argue that these students — whose curiosity and creativity often coexist with emotional and social problems — deserve the same status as those with special needs. Services for gifted students vary from state to state. In California, about 512,000 students are enrolled in the Gifted and Talented Education program, which aims to provide specialized and accelerated instruction.Linda Scholl @ Wisconsin Center for Education Research: SCALE Case Study: Evolution of K-8 Science Instructional Guidance in Madison Metropolitan School District [PDF report]
In addition, by instituting a standards-based report card system K-8, the department has increased accountability for teaching to the standards.
The Department is struggling, however, to sharpen its efforts to reduce the achievement gap. While progress has been made in third grade reading, significant gaps are still evident in other subject areas, including math and science. Educational equity issues within the school district are the source of much public controversy, with a relatively small but vocal parent community that is advocating for directing greater resources toward meeting the needs of high achieving students. This has slowed efforts to implement strong academic equity initiatives, particularly at the middle and early high school levels. Nonetheless, T&L content areas specialists continue working with teachers to provide a rigorous curriculum and to differentiate instruction for all students. In that context, the new high school biology initiative represents a significant effort to raise the achievement of students of color and economic disadvantage.WCER’s tight relationship with the Madison School District has been the source of some controversy.
Related:
- Value Added Assessment (Report Cards)
- Wisconsin DPI Academic Standards (DPI Website).
- Bruce King’s evaluation of West High School’s Small Learning Community initiative and pushback at East High over planned curriculum changes.
- Lucy Mathiak’s 2006 post on Madison dropouts who tested at the high end of the scale.
Scholl’s error, in my view, is viewing the controversy as an issue of “advocating for directing greater resources toward meeting the needs of high achieving students”. The real issue is raising standards for all, rathing than reducing the curriculum quality (see West High School Math teachers letter to the Isthmus:
Moreover, parents of future West High students should take notice: As you read this, our department is under pressure from the administration and the math coordinator’s office to phase out our “accelerated” course offerings beginning next year. Rather than addressing the problems of equity and closing the gap by identifying minority math talent earlier, and fostering minority participation in the accelerated programs, our administration wants to take the cheaper way out by forcing all kids into a one-size-fits-all curriculum.
It seems the administration and our school board have re-defined “success” as merely producing “fewer failures.” Astonishingly, excellence in student achievement is visited by some school district administrators with apathy at best, and with contempt at worst. But, while raising low achievers is a laudable goal, it is woefully short-sighted and, ironically, racist in the most insidious way. Somehow, limiting opportunities for excellence has become the definition of providing equity! Could there be a greater insult to the minority community?)
A friend mentioned a few years ago that the problems are in elementary and middle school. Rather than addressing those, the administration is trying to make high school changes.
Thanks to a reader for sending along these links.
Charter Schools are Great, but Not Why You Think
Charter schools allowed Mike Feinberg and Dave Levin to create the burgeoning and phenomenally successful KIPP network of middle schools serving almost exclusively poor, minority, and previously low-achieving children. Charter schools allowed veteran labor organizer Steve Barr to create Green Dot Public Schools as an alternative to the terrible high schools in Los Angeles. Charter schools gave a couple of young management consultants the ability to create the nation’s first, and very successful, urban public boarding school in impoverished Southeast DC. And so on.
Given the opportunity, the best charter schools (and to be clear, there are certainly bad ones) haven’t tried to reinvent the wheel. They’ve just balanced the wheel, fine-tuned it, reinforced the parts that were weak, and made sure it was in maximum working order. Charter school laws opened a conduit for talent, energy, and philanthropic money directed toward public education, resources that previously had no way to break into a bureaucratized monopoly state school system. Even if that’s all they did, that’s way more than enough.Carey is spot on. Cracking the legacy public school governance monolith is essential to progress. “Progress requires conflict”.
Bad Rap on the Schools
Oh, look. There’s a new film that portrays American teenagers as distracted slackers who don’t stand a chance against the zealous young strivers in China and India. It must be an election year, when American politicians, egged on by corporate leaders, suddenly become indignant about the state of America’s public schools. If we don’t do something, they thunder, our children will wind up working as bellhops in resorts owned by those Asian go- getters.
The one-hour documentary, conceived and financed by Robert A. Compton, a high-tech entrepreneur, follows two teenagers in Carmel, Indiana, as they sporadically apply themselves to their studies in their spare time between after school jobs and sports. The film, called Two Million Minutes, cuts to similar pairs of high schoolers in India and China who do little but attend classes, labor over homework, and work with their tutors. Two Million Minutes has become a key part of the ED in ’08 campaign, a $60 million effort by Bill Gates and other wealthy worriers to convince the presidential candidates to get serious about fixing our schools.
Most of the time, I cheer such well-intentioned and powerful promoters of academic achievement. I have been writing about the lack of challenge in American high schools for 25 years. It astonishes me that we treat many high schoolers as if they were intellectual infants, actively discouraging them from taking the college-level Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate courses that would prepare them for higher education and add some challenge to their bland high school curricula. I share what I imagine is Bill Gates’s distress at seeing Carmel High’s Brittany Brechbuhl watching Grey’s Anatomy on television with her friends while they make half hearted stabs at their math homework.Via Flypaper.
On Madison’s Lack of a 4K Program
In Madison, where schools Superintendent Art Rainwater in a 2004 memo described 4K as potentially “the next best tool” for raising students’ performance and narrowing the racial achievement gap, years of study and talks with leaders of early childhood education centers have failed to produce results.
“It’s one of the things that I regret the most, that I think would have made a big impact, that I was not able to do,” said Rainwater, who is retiring next month after leading the district for a decade.
“We’ve never been able to get around the money,” said Rainwater, whose tenure was marked by annual multimillion-dollar budget cuts to conform to the state’s limits on how much money districts can raise from local property taxpayers.
A complicating factor was the opposition of Madison Teachers Inc., the teachers union, to the idea that the 4K program would include preschool teachers not employed by the School District. However, Rainwater said he’s “always believed that those things could have been resolved” if money had been available.
Starting a 4K program for an estimated 1,700 students would cost Madison $5 million the first year and $2.5 million the second year before it would get full state funding in the third year under the state’s school-funding system.
In comparison, the entire state grant available to defray Wisconsin districts’ startup costs next year is $3 million — and that amount is being shared by 32 eligible districts.
One of those districts, Green Bay, is headed by Daniel Nerad, who has been hired to succeed Rainwater in Madison.
“I am excited about it,” said Madison School Board President Arlene Silveira, who is envious of the 4K sign-up information that appears on the Green Bay district’s Web site. “He’s gone out and he’s made it work in Green Bay. That will certainly help us here as we start taking the message forward again.
Madison’s inability to start 4K has gained the attention of national advocates of 4K programs, who hail Wisconsin’s approach as a model during the current national economic downturn. Milwaukee, the state’s largest district, long has offered 4K.
“It’s been disappointing that Madison has been very slow to step up to provide for its children,” said Libby Doggett, executive director of Pre-K Now, a national nonprofit group in Washington, D.C., that campaigns for kindergarten programs for children ages 3 and 4.
“The way 4K is being done in your state is the right way.”Related:
- Marc Eisen: Missed Opportunity for 4K and High School Redesign
- MMSD Budget History: Madison’s spending has grown about 50% from 1998 ($245,131,022) to 2008 ($367,806,712) while enrollment has declined slightly from 25,132 to 24,268 ($13,997/student).
Educating the Community on Gangs in Madison
Many times people hide their heads in the sand when there is an accusation of behavior in Madison that might put the community at risk. “Not in my neighborhood” seems to be the response from many citizens in denial when the community is tainted with the reality of the growth of gang activity in Madison.
On this note, a group of University of Wisconsin-Madison social work students wanted to raise awareness in Madison of the prevalent increase in gang activity in Dane County communities. As a group project, they have researched the existence of gangs, their history, their trends and movement that could put children at risk.
On April 23 at Leopold Elementary School, Erin Wearing, Corrina Flannery, Amanda Galaviz, Teresa Rhiel, and Yer Lee, students of Professor Sandy Magana’s Advanced Macro Practice Social Work class, coordinated a community outreach event and informational session. It was presented for parents and educators in the Madison and surrounding communities by the Dane County Youth Gang Prevention Task Force.
Madison Police Detective George Chavez and Officer Lester Moore, along with Frank Rodriquez of the DARK Progam shed some light on the growing activity surrounding gang involvement in this area.Gangs & School Violence Forum audio and video.
Making Teacher Hiring Less Comfortable
For those who still think helping children learn is everybody’s top priority in our schools, let me cite a disturbing dispute over where to send several hundred teachers at 23 D.C. schools that are about to be closed for inadequate enrollment.
D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee wants the principals of her remaining schools to decide which of those excess teachers they will hire, within the limits of a contract that guarantees them jobs somewhere in the system. Urban schools don’t work if all adults in each building don’t agree on what must be done to make them work. There is no chance of that shared vision if each principal is not allowed to pick the players on his or her team.
Unfortunately, many kind and well-intentioned teachers and parents in the District and other cities have a different view. Their first priority is not so much that children learn, but that they feel secure and comfortable. They want those excess teachers to accompany the students they know at their current school to whichever school the children are transferred to. That way, they say, the kids will have an easier and more comfortable transition.
Some members of the Washington Teachers’ Union, which is in the midst of a leadership fight, also say they fear Rhee is resisting this more genial approach because she wants to get rid of any teachers who can’t find principals who want them.
