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On Early Childhood Education
Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel Editorial Board:
Kindergarten for 3-year-olds has been a smash hit at Bruce Guadalupe Community School on Milwaukee’s near south side, where, bucking what is supposed to be their fate, low-income students perform at a high academic level.
Jill Matusin, who teaches 5-year-olds at the charter school, swears by 3K.
“The difference – it was amazing,” she says of two sisters in her classroom in successive years – one who started in 5K and the other in 3K. The sister with the head start was far more advanced in numbers, colors, language and social skills.
The results so impressed Bruce Guadalupe that it is set to open four more 3K classrooms this fall – setting a splendid example for the state, which must boost preschool education, particularly for needy children. This strategy would narrow, if not close, the gaps in academic achievement between the poor and the middle class, whites and blacks, Anglos and Latinos.
Decades of study have led educators to this consensus: When aimed at kids from lower-income families, quality early childhood education boosts academic attainment, high school graduation rates, college attendance and future wages, and it reduces truancy, crime and teenage pregnancies.
Abolish the SAT
The SAT got him into Harvard from a small Iowa town. But now, CHARLES MURRAY wants to abolish the test. It’s unnecessary and, worse, a negative force in American life.
For most high school students who want to attend an elite college, the SAT is more than a test. It is one of life’s landmarks. Waiting for the scores—one for verbal, one for math, and now one for writing, with a possible 800 on each—is painfully suspenseful. The exact scores are commonly remembered forever after.
So it has been for half a century. But events of recent years have challenged the SAT’s position. In 2001, Richard Atkinson, president of the University of California, proposed dropping the SAT as a requirement for admission. More and more prestigious small colleges, such as Middlebury and Bennington, are making the SAT optional. The charge that the SAT is slanted in favor of privileged children—“a wealth test,” as Harvard law professor Lani Guinier calls it—has been ubiquitous. I have watched the attacks on the SAT with dismay. Back in 1961, the test helped get me into Harvard from a small Iowa town by giving me a way to show that I could compete with applicants from Exeter and Andover. Ever since, I have seen the SAT as the friend of the little guy, just as James Bryant Conant, president of Harvard, said it would be when he urged the SAT upon the nation in the 1940s.
“Fuzzy Math” War in Seattle
Educators and parents say it’s a debate between conceptual vs. computational math.
It’s a battle centered around curriculum, teaching materials and textbooks with the question on everyone’s mind: What is the best way for students to learn math?
The debate has spurred Eastside parents to sign petitions and lobby district officials for changes; some even have decided to run for school board.
What most students are learning in Eastside classrooms and across the nation is known as “conceptual” math, sometimes called new math, or what Killeen and other parents call “fuzzy” math.
In elementary grades, it focuses more on the “why,” not just the “how.” Students are asked to explain what the numbers mean, not just what the correct answer is. They are shown different ways to do the same problem and are encouraged to find their own methods.
But some parents say this method is shortchanging children, leaving them without a solid foundation in basic math concepts.
Board of Education Activity in 2006-07
A few weeks ago, the Madison BOE received a summary of what the board and its committees had done in its meetings during the past year. I am posting the entire document as an extended entry as community information. It provides a lot more detail, a good overview, and a glimpse at the pieces that didn’t make it into the print and broadcast media.
Potter Has Limited Effect on Reading Habits
Of all the magical powers wielded by Harry Potter, perhaps none has cast a stronger spell than his supposed ability to transform the reading habits of young people. In what has become near mythology about the wildly popular series by J. K. Rowling, many parents, teachers, librarians and booksellers have credited it with inspiring a generation of kids to read for pleasure in a world dominated by instant messaging and music downloads.
And so it has, for many children. But in keeping with the intricately plotted novels themselves, the truth about Harry Potter and reading is not quite so straightforward a success story. Indeed, as the series draws to a much-lamented close, federal statistics show that the percentage of youngsters who read for fun continues to drop significantly as children get older, at almost exactly the same rate as before Harry Potter came along.
Transferring Up: In Support of Cross-District Transfers
Congress has an opportunity to take advantage of the opening created by Justice Kennedy later this year when it reauthorizes the federal No Child Left Behind Act. The law gives children the right to transfer from a low-performing school to a high-performing school if the low-performing school has failed to demonstrate adequate improvement two years after being warned of its shortcomings.
Unfortunately, the transfer provision has until now been a bust. Less than 3 percent of eligible children have been able to transfer, in part because of the scarcity of space in high-performing schools within most urban districts. Although the law does not prohibit transfers between urban and suburban schools, it offers no inducements to the states to make this possible.
Democrats in the Senate should therefore introduce an amendment to authorize and make easier cross-district transfers — not on a specifically race-conscious basis, but solely to fulfill the professed intention of the law.
“School Choice Increases School Segregation”
Choice is generally thought to be a good thing. But with any choice comes consequence–intentional or otherwise.
When it comes to choosing where our children go to school, researchers have found as educational choices increase, our public schools become more racially segregated.
Salvatore Saporito and Deenesh Sohoni, faculty in William and Mary’s sociology department, wanted to see if the racial mix and poverty rates of students in public schools matches those of the neighborhoods the schools serve. For instance, if census data identifies the population of the area served by a certain elementary school as 48 percent white, 37 percent black and 15 percent Hispanic, then shouldn’t the school’s enrollment reflect that mix?
It should, but research by Saporito and Sohoni indicates that it often doesn’t, at least in many of the nation’s largest school districts. So what’s going on? It’s important to know; so important that their research is part of evidence presented in two current U.S. Supreme Court cases.
Their research draws a connection between school choice and segregation, but hasn’t yet tackled the “whys.” Are some parents more financially able to exercise school choice than their neighbors? Are there racial motives? And what motivates parents to keep their children in neighborhood schools, because staying in the local schools is also a choice–or is it?
Saporito and Sohoni’s next step is to investigate those thousands and thousands of individual family decisions that drive the trend–the individual tiles that make up the mosaic their research already has revealed. The size and scope of their work so far will make that next step a daunting task, but their mastery of mapping technology will make it a little easier.
Tutor Vista
Our mission is to provide world-class tutoring and high-quality content to students around the world. TutorVista.com is the premier online destination for affordable education – anytime, anywhere and in any subject. Students can access our service from the convenience of their home or school. They use our comprehensive and thorough lessons and question bank to master any subject and have access to a live tutor around the clock. TutorVista helps students excel in school and in competitive examinations.
but TutorVista, an online tuition service, is aimed squarely at customers in the developed world. Mr Ganesh founded the company in late 2005 after spotting that personal tutoring for American schoolchildren was unaffordable for most parents. His solution is to use tutors in India to teach Western students over the internet. The teachers all work from home, which means that the company is better able to avoid India’s high-wage employment hotspots. TutorVista further hammers home its labour-cost advantage through its pricing model. It offers unlimited tuition in a range of subjects for a subscription fee of $100 per month in America (and £50 a month in Britain, where the service launched earlier this year) rather than charging by the hour. Tutors are available around the clock; appointments can be made with only 12 hours’ notice.
It is too early to gauge the impact of the service on educational outcomes, says Mr Ganesh, but take-up is brisk. TutorVista has 2,200 paying subscribers at the moment (most of them in America) and hopes to boost that figure to 10,000 by the end of the year. The company is expected to become profitable in 2008. Even cheaper pricing packages are on the way. Launches of the service are planned for Australia and Canada. Mr Ganesh is also investigating the potential of offering tuition in English as a second language to students in South Korea, where high rates of broadband penetration make the market attractive. Get that right, and China looms as an even bigger prize.
TutorVista, along with Rosetta Stone and other online tools offer practical options for families who seek new learning opportunities unavailable via traditional models. The nearby Oregon school district may add languages to their elementary programs. CyraKnow offers handy “phrase books” for the iPod.
Many school libraries open so… Beat the Heat – Read!
Madison Metropolitan School District:
This summer the Madison School District is again running a summer library access project. The project’s primary goal is to ensure that Madison elementary-age school children, from both public and private schools, have easy access to library materials during their summer break.
By providing such access, the district hopes to minimize reading achievement loss during the summer months for students who might not otherwise have ready access to reading materials. Some studies suggest that 80% of the achievement difference between high income and low income students may be attributable to summer reading loss.
So Much Paperwork, So Little Time to Teach
Allison Rabenau celebrated an inauspicious milestone on the otherwise unremarkable day of Oct. 18, 2004. Six weeks into her first year as a teacher, she finally taught a class.
Ms. Rabenau had left a long career as a stage manager in the commercial theater to learn how to teach English as a second language to immigrant children in New York’s public schools. The only problem, she quickly discovered, was that the avalanche of paperwork and other assignments meant she actually got to teach only sporadically.
In a perfect, if dispiriting bit of symmetry, her initial year at Public School 123 in Harlem ended the same way it began. Ms. Rabenau lost the last six weeks of the spring term to prepare, administer, then score a standardized test for English fluency.
Essentially, her teaching year, and her students’ learning year, had run only from mid-October to mid-April, with numerous interruptions even then. During the time when the students were entitled to instruction in English, they were sitting in other courses that they may or may not have understood.
Jefferson on Public Education: Defying Conventional Wisdom
“If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.” Thomas Jefferson
The Fourth of July is fireworks, festivities and images of a gathering of remarkable men determined “to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them.”
For me the Fourth of July is those things and a question: What sort of education produced these men? What schools might produce their like again? There are clues. The author of the Declaration of Independence had much to say about educating the very young.
Thomas Jefferson lobbied the Virginia General Assembly to implement a system of publicly-funded schools. He failed. It would be sixty years before Horace Mann traveled the state of Massachusetts on horseback advocating a system of “common schools” and decades more before most states would follow Massachusetts’ lead.
Jefferson’s vision for public education is, nonetheless, illuminating and provocative. The main source is his Notes on the State of Virginia, first published in 1785. Here are some of the key features of his plan — in the original spelling, where quoted:
- Attendance is voluntary. “It is better to tolerate that rare instance of a parent’s refusing to let his child be educated, than to shock the common feelings by a forcible transportation and education of the infant against the will of his father.” (1)
- Every child is entitled to three years of instruction in reading, writing, and arithmetic.
- The reading for the primary school years is mainly history. “The first stage of this education . . . wherein the great mass of the people will receive their instruction, the principal foundations of future order will be laid here. Instead therefore of putting the Bible and Testament into the hands of the children, at an age when their judgments are not sufficiently matured for religious enquiries, their memories may here be stored with the most useful facts from Grecian, Roman, European, and American history.”
And later in the text, Jefferson writes that “of all the views of this law, none is more important, none more legitimate, than that of rendering the people the safe, as they are the ultimate, guardians of their own liberty. For this purpose the reading in the first stage, where they will receive their whole education, is proposed, as has been said, to be chiefly historical. History by apprising them of the past will enable them to judge of the future; it will avail them of the experience of other times and other nations; it will qualify them as judges of the actions and designs of men; it will enable them to know ambition under every disguise it may assume; and knowing it, to defeat its views.”- The “best genius in the school of those whose parents are too poor to give them further education” is entitled to a fourth and fifth year at a “grammar school.”
- Students at grammar schools study “Greek, Latin, geography, and the higher branches of numerical arithmetic.”
- After a trial period of one or two years, the best student at each grammar school is selected for six years of further instruction. “By this means . . . the best geniusses will be raked from the rubbish annually, and be instructed, at the public expense, so far as the grammar schools go.”
- After the sixth year, the best half of these go to college. “At the end of six years instruction, one half are to be discontinued (from among whom the grammar schools will probably be supplied with future masters); and the other half, who are to be chosen for the superiority of their parts and disposition, are to be sent and continued three years in the study of such sciences as they shall chuse, at William and Mary college.
Jefferson believed in selection by merit from an early age: “By that part of our plan which prescribes the selection of youths of genius from the classes of the poor, we hope to avail the state of those talents which nature has sown as liberally among the poor as the rich, but which perish without use, if not sought and cultivated.”
Related: Jefferson’s last letter, written on the 50th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.
Milwaukee Public School’s Spending Rush Questioned
As the end of its budget year approached last week, Milwaukee Public Schools had not spent more than $50 million slated to be used for the 2006-’07 school year.
Administrators say that if they hadn’t spent the money by June 30, it would have hurt MPS in the future because of state school aid rules – with Milwaukee property taxes rising as a result. So they unloaded some big payments at the last moment, including $37.8 million to prepay costs such as debt service expected in 2007-’08.
This was routine – and good – practice in the eyes of Superintendent William Andrekopoulos and Chief Financial Officer Michelle Nate.
But it set off alarms with others, particularly Michael Bonds, chairman of the School Board’s Finance Committee, who said board members were not given straight information from administrators and did not have a chance to deal with the issue effectively. Bonds wondered if there were ways the money could have been used to increase programs for children.
He said he met Sunday afternoon with Andrekopoulos and Nate to talk about the issue, but he refused to accept what he called “a party line document” that suggested to board members what they should say to anyone who asked them about what was going on.
New Hampshire Begins to Define an “Adequate Education”
New Hampshire will be responsible to pay for more than the three Rs under a new law defining a constitutionally adequate education but taxpayers won’t get the bill for months.
Gov. John Lynch signed the law yesterday, the first step in the state’s effort to answer a court ruling that it define its responsibility for education and pay for it.
“With this new law, we are fulfilling our responsibility to define an adequate education,” said Lynch. “The broad educational opportunities outlined in this law will ensure our children have the skills and knowledge they need to compete in today’s world.”
Lynch noted that the definition includes kindergarten — not currently mandated in New Hampshire.
The next step facing lawmakers is to put a price to the broadly worded definition, then craft a new aid distribution system. Lawmakers have insisted for months they won’t wait to do that.
AN ACT relative to the specific criteria and substantive educational program that define an adequate education, the resources required to provide an adequate education, and the establishment of a timetable for costing an adequate education.
A More Global Approach to Education
Two of the world’s most buccaneering education entrepreneurs have teamed up to build 60 multimillion-dollar schools in big cities across the world.
The network of high-end international schools will cater to the children of bankers, diplomats and executives who have to regularly uproot their families.
With annual fees between $15,000 and $40,000, depending on the city, the plan marks a serious departure for Chris Whittle, famous for starting the Edison Schools company, which runs facilities in some of America’s most deprived areas.
His new venture, Nations Academy, has been set up with Sunny Varkey, chairman of Dubai-based Global Education Management Systems, which runs private schools around the world.
Patrons’ Sway Leads to Friction in Charter School
The Beginning With Children Charter School, housed in a former factory in Brooklyn, landed on the state’s list of high-performing schools this year, thanks to rising English and math test scores among black and Hispanic students.
But its founders and wealthy patrons, Joseph H. and Carol F. Reich, who have poured hundreds of thousands of dollars into the school, think it could be better. “It’s above average,” said Mr. Reich, 72, “but considering the effort and the capability and the resources, we don’t feel we’re getting the best we can.”
So last month, the couple — threatening to cut ties, including financial support — forced most of the school’s trustees to resign in a push for wide management changes, and better student achievement.
The new school year
Madison School Board President Arlene Silveira:
This is the first in a series of articles focusing on the Madison School Board. The purpose is to familiarize you with who we are, how we do our work, and how we can work together to keep the Madison Metropolitan School District strong.
—
July 1 marks the start of the 2007-08 fiscal school year. For the Madison School Board, this will be a year filled with many challenges and tremendous opportunities. We are coming off several rocky months.
State-imposed revenue caps forced us to make budget cuts that will affect every school and student in the District. Special interest groups lobbied for specific schools and programs for their children and sometimes found themselves pitted against other groups. Decisions had to be made where there were no good choices. In addition, the public was divided on the naming of a new school. As a community we were fragmented in actions yet united in our belief that quality schools are vital for the future of our children and society.
A new year provides us with an opportunity to look ahead and make plans to move the District forward. As a Board, we are committed to working hard to make this happen. We have set our Board priorities for the year, all integral to the success of our District and our community.
Our single most important priority is to hire a new Superintendent to lead our District. This will be an exciting process, directed by the Board, that will involve staff and the community in developing a leadership profile for the new Superintendent and the future of our District. Ways in which you can participate in this effort will soon be announced.
In other priorities, we will evaluate the need and weigh the options for going to another referendum in order to eliminate painful budget cuts again next year. We will consider revisions to the Board’s equity policy and the development of guidelines to implement this policy. We will develop specific, measurable goals to evaluate student progress and success. We will study and address the issues that affect educational environment and student achievement such as attendance, dropouts, truancy, expulsions and bullying.
One class, many incredible journeys
The Daily News spent two months tracking down the 23 kindergarteners who enrolled at Harlem’s PS 36 in 1994. Their journeys illuminate hardships students face in earning their high school degree.
They were smart children who tested into a gifted kindergarten at Harlem’s Public School 36 in 1994, but Lance Patterson and Ronnie Rodriguez would each fall in with the wrong crowd.
Lance would be arrested. Ronnie would join a gang.
Their challenges were similar, but they’ve ended up in very different places. One has a mother who will watch him don a cap and gown this week. The other has a mom who blames herself.
“I should have kept a closer eye on him,” Sandra Lugo said of her son, Ronnie. “I should have been on him maybe a little harder, been a little stricter.”
KIPP’s Mysterious Tale of Three Cities
Houston, where KIPP was born in 1994, and New Orleans, the site of a preliminary KIPP program before Katrina hit in September 2005, have been welcoming KIPP’s attempts to find more space for families who want a challenging public education for their children. The children who enrolled in KIPP NOW, all of them low-income and 99 percent of them African American, showed what good teaching and longer days could do, even in less than ideal conditions.
I am going to cite scores from nationally standardized tests, many of them given by KIPP teachers to diagnose students’ learning problems without oversight from state officials. These results have to be treated cautiously, but they are similar to KIPP results in dozens of other schools around the country and look legitimate to me. In their first year in Houston, KIPP NOW students did very well. For instance, first graders jumped from the 18th to the 43rd percentile in reading, sixth graders from the 19th to the 66th percentile in math and eighth graders from the 21st to the 40th percentile in reading.
Birth Order and Intelligence
Petter Kristensen and Tor Bjerkedal:
Negative associations between birth order and intelligence level have been found in numerous studies. The explanation for this relation is not clear, and several hypotheses have been suggested. One family of hypotheses suggests that the relation is due to more-favorable family interaction and stimulation of low-birth-order children, whereas others claim that the effect is caused by prenatal gestational factors. We show that intelligence quotient (IQ) score levels among nearly 250,000 military conscripts were dependent on social rank in the family and not on birth order as such, providing support for a family interaction explanation.
The average difference in I.Q. was slight — three points higher in the eldest child than in the closest sibling — but significant, the researchers said. And they said the results made it clear that it was due to family dynamics, not to biological factors like prenatal environment.
Researchers have long had evidence that firstborns tended to be more dutiful and cautious than their siblings, and some previous studies found significant I.Q. differences. But critics said those reports were not conclusive, because they did not take into account the vast differences in upbringing among families.
Three points on an I.Q. test may not sound like much. But experts say it can be a tipping point for some people — the difference between a high B average and a low A, for instance. That, in turn, can have a cumulative effect that could mean the difference between admission to an elite private liberal-arts college and a less exclusive public one.
Dr. Trapnell compared this process to the so-called jigsaw approach used in classrooms, in which complex projects are divided up and each child becomes an expert in a particular task and instructs the others.
Younger siblings often have something more to pass on than the tricks of their favorite hobby, or the philosophy behind their social charm. Evidence suggests that younger siblings are more likely than older ones to take risks based on their knowledge and instincts.
Mainstreaming” Trend Tests Classroom Goals
The strategy backfired. One morning, Andrea swept an arm along the teacher’s desk, scattering framed photos of Ms. McDermott’s family across the classroom. A glass frame shattered, and another hit a student in the arm. Though no one was hurt, Ms. McDermott says she lost hours of instruction time getting the children to settle down after the disruption.
From the first weeks of school, Ms. McDermott found Andrea’s plight heartbreaking. “No! No! No!” she remembers her student screaming at times. “Want Mommy! Want Mommy!”
“She looked at me, like she was saying, ‘Help me,’ and I couldn’t. How could I possibly give Andrea what she needs?”
Years ago, students like Andrea would have been taught in separate classrooms. Today, a national movement to “mainstream” special-education students has integrated many of them into the general student body. As a result, regular teachers are instructing more children with severe disabilities — often without extra training or support.
This year, Ms. McDermott counted 19 students in her class at Whittier Elementary School. Five had disabilities, including attention deficit disorder and delays in reading and math. The teacher worried that she was failing all her students — especially Andrea. “It used to be a joy to go to work,” she says. “Now all I want to do is run away.”
In Scranton and elsewhere, the rush to mainstream disabled students is alienating teachers and driving some of the best from the profession. It has become a little-noticed but key factor behind teacher turnover, which experts say largely accounts for a shortage of qualified teachers in the U.S.
More on mainstreaming.
Background: Special Education Legal history and a few charts/graphs.
Schools Pinched in Hiring
“It’s not that you don’t have some terrifically talented people going into teaching. You do,” said Richard J. Murnane, an economist at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Education. “The issue is that you don’t have enough. And many are the most likely to leave teaching, because they have lots of other opportunities.”
A study co-written by Murnane and published this year reports that minorities and poor children are most likely to be taught by teachers with weak academic backgrounds or little preparation. Overall, the proportion of women who pursue teaching after college, as well as the caliber of recruits, has declined significantly since the 1960s.
A Graduate of Stanford by Way of a Transfer
The bridge between past and present, the ligament connecting her five years as an undergraduate, was a scholarship from the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation, one specifically intended for students like Ms. Alcazar who make the leap from a community college to an elite university. In its seven years of operation, the foundation has given $10 million to 249 such recipients.
These students are often immigrants or the children of immigrants, and the first in their families to attend college. Most have gone to community college not because they lack the academic talent for a four-year institution, but because they lack the money. And by the time they would enter a college or university, generally as a junior, much of the available financial-aid money would have been spent enticing incoming freshman to enroll.
Autism Debate Strains a Family and Its Charity
The Wrights’ venture was also an effort to end the internecine warfare in the world of autism — where some are convinced that the disorder is genetic and best treated with intensive therapy, and others blame preservatives in vaccinations and swear by supplements and diet to cleanse the body of heavy metals.
With its high-powered board, world-class scientific advisers and celebrity fund-raisers like Jerry Seinfeld and Paul Simon, the charity was a powerful voice, especially in Washington. It also made strides toward its goal of unity by merging with three existing autism organizations and raising millions of dollars for research into all potential causes and treatments. The Wrights call it the “big tent” approach.
But now the fissures in the autism community have made their way into the Wright family, where father and daughter are not speaking after a public battle over themes familiar to thousands of families with autistic children.
School Choice Strategy
The flattened borders of the 21st century have made networking faster, global trade freer and competition more rigorous — meaning the premium we place on educating future generations is higher than ever before. Yet the nation’s monopolistic approach to education remains a millstone around our children’s necks, with America consistently lagging behind its industrialized peers in academic achievement.
The late Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman understood the central role school choice must play in revitalizing American education. “Empowering parents would generate a competitive education market, which would lead to a burst of innovation and improvement, as competition has done in so many other areas,” he said in December 2005. “There’s nothing that would do so much to ensure a skilled and educated work force.”
By any objective measure, Friedman was right. The success of school choice as a method of empowering parents, raising student achievement and improving public education systems in those markets where it has been implemented is indisputable. The question now becomes how to achieve meaningful school choice for the benefit of all parents, not just a select few?
After this year’s compelling school-choice victory in Utah, the methodology for successfully advancing parental options against the well-funded phalanxes of institutional opposition is crystallizing. Specifically, Utah’s success has proven the efficacy of advocating universal choice initiatives as opposed to limited, means-tested pilot program
How to Measure Class Gap in Reading?
The potential benefits to citing the questionable numbers are clear: Raise awareness and rally support. The downsides are more subtle. Boiling down research into misleading soundbites risks credibility of the larger argument advocating early reading, and it obscures other indicators that have equal or greater impact on a child’s intellectual development.
Todd Risley, professor emeritus of psychology at the University of Alaska and longtime children’s development researcher, argues that the amount and quality of parents’ talking to their young children is more significant.
“In even the ‘best’ of families, ‘shared reading time’ occupies very little of a child’s time,” he says. And income is a weak predictor of parental-child chatter, he adds, “so any statements about middle class and low income might be a little too glib.”
What is the price of a good education?
AMONG the most commercial of cities, Hong Kong follows many markets; but none more intently than the trade in debentures tied to admissions to the city’s international primary and secondary schools. These non-interest-bearing bonds are typically issued to pay for construction or other costs. Bought by parents anxious to do the best by their children, or by employers anxious to attract the best staff, they are then traded at prices set by the city’s volatile economic fluctuations.
Recently, slots in international schools have become precious. The economy is booming in China’s tailwind, attracting well-paid expatriates. Prosperous local residents, meanwhile, are deserting local schools because of what is seen as deterioration in English-language teaching since the reversion to Chinese sovereignty in 1997. It is not just the very rich who are worried: early this month a small group of not very well-off South Asian residents marched through central Hong Kong, demanding more schooling in English, arguing their children were suffering from having to attend classes conducted in Chinese.
MMSD and MTI reach tentative contract agreement
Madison Metropolitan School District:
The Madison Metropolitan School District and Madison Teachers Incorporated reached a tentative agreement yesterday on the terms and conditions of a new two-year collective bargaining agreement for MTI’s 2,400 member teacher bargaining unit.
The contract, for the period from July 1, 2007 to June 30, 2009, needs ratification from both the Board of Education and MTI. MTI will hold a ratification meeting on Thursday, June 14 at 7:00 p.m. at the Alliant Energy Center, Dane County Forum. The Board of Education will take up the proposal in a special meeting on Monday, June 18 at 5:00 p.m. The MTI meeting is closed to the public, while the Board’s meeting is open.
Terms of the contract include:
2007-08
Base Salary Raise: 1.00%
Total Raise incl. Benefits: 4.00%
2008-09
Base Salary Raise: 1.00%
Total Raise incl. Benefits: 4.00%
Related Links:
- Concessions before negotiations.
- TJ Mertz comments on the agreement.
- Channel3000
- WKOWTV:
Taxpayers will continue to pay 100% of the health care premiums for half of the teachers who choose Group Health, and 90% of the premiums for the other half of teachers who join WPS. WPS teachers pay $190 a month for a family and $72 a month for an individual.
The union says those costs are too high.
The district said it tried to introduce two new HMO plans to lower costs, but the union rejected them.
Public Ed 101
Here’s a good question for you: Why have public schools at all?
O.K., cue the marching music. We need public schools because blah blah blah and yada yada yada. We could say blah is common culture and yada is the government’s interest in promoting the general welfare. Or that children are the future. And a mind is a terrible thing to waste. Because we can’t leave any child behind.
The problem with all these bromides is that they leave out the simple fact that one of the surest ways to leave a kid “behind” is to hand him over to the government. Americans want universal education, just as they want universally safe food. But nobody believes that the government should run 90 percent of the restaurants, farms, and supermarkets. Why should it run 90 percent of the schools — particularly when it gets terrible results?
Finding a Good Preschool
And then we come to preschools. They have always struck me as beyond any sensible rating system, which is why I was stunned to find a new Web site, www.savvysource.com, trying to prove me wrong.
I know how my wife and I, and our friends, found preschools when we had children that age. We asked each other if we knew of any good ones. That was not, obviously, a very intelligent approach to the problem. But what else could we do? There wasn’t, and there still isn’t, much information out there, other than the yellow pages. And who has time to call or visit a long list of preschools until you find one you like?
The Savvy Source founder, Stacey Boyd, and her team of mostly young mothers like herself think the Internet could be the solution if they plug into it enough worthwhile information — particularly the views of parents who have had children in the preschools being rated. They are supplying parents and school directors with their survey forms and rating schools on philosophy, teaching quality, discipline, safety, tuition and several other factors.
Omaha-Area Districts to Share Revenue, Programs
The new law retains the previous measure’s concept of creating a “learning community” of the 11 districts, located in Douglas and Salpy counties, which educate about 100,000 children.
The goal is for each school to have 35 percent students who are of low socioeconomic status. Students would be able to transfer freely between schools that have space for them, regardless of the district where they live. A paid, 18-member board will oversee specific issues that do not relate to the operations of the individual districts for the learning community.
The state will levy a common tax on the two counties that will be distributed to districts based on enrollment and other needs. Districts will be able to levy their own tax, and another, smaller tax levy will pay for an areawide school construction program.
The plan calls for the creation of “focus schools,” with programs intended to attract students from more than one district. The construction of those boundaryless schools will be part of the duties of the new learning-community board.
An Interesting Report on the Financial Condition and Position of the Milwaukee Public Schools
Wisconsin Taxpayers Alliance and the Metropolitan Milwaukee Association of Commerce [330K PDF]:
As will be seen, MPS already has many challenges:
- Declining student numbers and a host of viable options for K12 students and their families;
- Rising and, in some cases, difficult to control costs. Though MPS’s finances are similar to other large, diverse districts, its salaries relative to staff experience and its benefit expenditures are relatively high. The size of middle management within schools is also atypical.
- Highly aided by both the state and federal governments, the Milwaukee district is unusually vulnerable to political decisions and policy made elsewhere. An anticipated decline in federal monies will directly impact MPS’s bottom line. And, any slowdown or reduction in state aid, has a direct property-tax impact in a high-tax city.
WISTAX projections show the future to be even more difficult. All these factors combine to suggest a future where revenue growth will be modest, at best, while costs will grow inexorably. If no further budget adjustments are made—and some have already been implemented—the Milwaukee school district faces a recurring and growing gap between slowing revenues and growing expenditures.
Needless to say, MPS has difficult years in its immediate future. From our work, we know that district, MMAC, and community leaders are passionate about improving education for all Milwaukee’s children. We wish them only the very best.
A study from the Wisconsin Taxpayers Alliance includes figures from 2005 placing Milwaukee Public Schools in perspective with statewide figures and with seven districts judged to be closest to comparable to MPS (Beloit, Green Bay, Kenosha, Madison, Racine, Superior, Wausau).
- Teacher salaries
$35,439 average in MPS
$43,038 median statewide- Fringe benefits
$21,439 average in MPS
$20,324 median statewide- Assistant principals per student
1:541 in MPS
1:1,177 average for comparable districts listed aboveIn the report, Berry writes, “The combined effect of lost market share, district spending choices (particularly in the fringe benefit area), tightening state revenue controls and uncertain federal funding means that the expenditure demands MPS faces will grow faster than available revenues. Annual rounds of budget retrenchment are inevitable.”
Even as spending per student has increased significantly in MPS, the impact of financial belt-tightening has increased, the report says. Rising health care costs and costs for retirees are major reasons.
Education spending has increased annually at the federal, state and local level. Clearly, something different than the usual “same service” or “cost to continue” approach is warranted.
Jay Bullock’s notes and links.
Mission Creep: How Large School Districts Lose Sight of the Objective — Student Learning
The growth of education bureaucracy constitutes what former Education Secretary William Bennett once called “the education ‘blob.’”
A 1998 study by the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution defines “the blob” as nearly 40 Washington-based organizations, with more than 3,000 employees and combined budgets of more than $700 million. They have inter-locking directors, share staffs that move between groups and in and out of the revolving door of government, and generally stand united on every major education issue.
But while this national education establishment is often the subject of critical commentary, left undiscussed is the growth of smaller “mini-blobs” at the local, district level. With class size reduction and school size reduction on the public’s mind, educators are coming to the realization that bigger is not always better – but school district size has not yet made it onto the education policy agenda.
In 1937, there were 119,001 school districts. By 1970, that number had dropped to 17,995. In 1996, there were only 14,841. For decades, Americans have accepted the premise that a large city requires one mammoth school district. But evidence suggests that the larger a school district gets, the more resources it devotes to secondary or even non-essential activities. Schools provide transportation, counseling, meals, child care, health services, security, and soon these “support” functions require support of their own.
In sum, large school districts engage in “mission creep,” building support activities which rapidly lose any connection to the original goal of educating children.
On Parochial School Busing
I want to clarify the facts about the Madison School Board’s decision on private school busing.
This is a financial budget change with no hidden agenda. This is not about “us versus them.” This is not about Madison schools being “afraid of diversity.” We embrace diversity. Visit any of our schools and see for yourself. This is not about the board wanting the private school children to bring in $13,000 of additional funds per child (an inaccurate number, by the way). In our deliberations, the School Board never discussed any of these topics.
This is, sadly, a matter of a state budget system that does not allow school districts in Wisconsin to provide adequately for their students … across the board.
Madison Students Participate in an International Origami Exhibit
There are plenty of pages to turn in a library, though usually it’s between book covers. At the Pinney Branch Library, carefully arranged and locked behind glass, stand adventures in paper of a much different sort: “Origami By Children,” a traveling exhibit of tiny, ingeniously folded works selected in an international competition by the group OrigamiUSA.
Two Madison students have works in the exhibit, which was first assembled in 2005 but only now has arrived in Madison. Each creation is deceptively simple: many are made from a single sheet of paper, yet turned into a fanciful creature or sharp-edged geometric shape by the skilled, young hands of their creators.
“Origami is a very different art than arts that are based on expression, like painting,” says Natalya Thompson, a Madison West High School sophomore whose interlocking paper “Bow-Tie Motif,” made from 48 squares of three-inch-by-three-inch paper, is featured in the exhibit. Most pieces in the small show are based on designs created by published origami masters.
An elite education should be open to all who can benefit, not just those who can pay
NO exam question is as perplexing as how to organise schools to suit the huge variety of pupils they serve: rich and poor, clever and dim, early developers and late starters. Every country does it differently. Some try to spot talent early. Others winnow out the academic-minded only at 18. Some believe in parent-power. Others trust the state. Finland has state-run uniform comprehensives; Sweden, another good performer, has vouchers and lots of private schools.
The British system produces some world-class high-flyers, mainly in its private schools and the 164 selective state “grammar” schools that survived the cull in the 1960s and 1970s when the country moved to a non-selective system. But it serves neither its poor children nor its most troublesome ones well. The best state schools, especially the grammar schools, are colonised by the middle classes, and the whole system is disfigured by a long straggling tail of non-achievers.
Law lacks direction for gifted students
What the law doesn’t mandate is how students such as Adam will be educated – even though state legislators have identified programming for students with gifts and talents as one of 20 essential components of public education. The result? A mixed bag of approaches for how Wisconsin students identified as gifted are educated. Some are taught in regular classes with alternative activities to help speed them through lessons. Others are pulled out of class for about an hour a week of special instruction. Some may find a spot in a magnet program with other gifted students. And others get no special instruction at all.
These inconsistencies have led parents and others to sound alarms about the state of gifted education, invoking some of the same civil-rights arguments that spurred landmark legislation in the 1970s for students with disabilities.
They say gifted kids need special attention and programs, too.
Racine Jefferson Lighthouse School’s Gifted Programs:
Jefferson Lighthouse School has the largest pupil-teacher ratio of any public elementary school in Racine.
Parts of its building are more than 100 years old. Its technology is nearly non-existent. Its librarian works half time.
And every year, parents of about 10 times as many children as the school plans to admit in the fall line up in the hallway, hoping for a chance at enrollment.
“It’s like a lottery ticket to get in here,” said Principal Soren Gajewski.
What makes Jefferson Lighthouse desirable to so many parents living in Racine, those connected to it say, is its commitment to teaching students with intellectual gifts and the perception that it has few behavioral problems.
The school is able to meet the needs of many of the district’s gifted students, as well as siblings and others lucky enough to get in on the lottery, without added expense. In fact, given that the school has the second-lowest per-pupil costs of the Racine Unified School District, parents say such a program is a cost-effective way to ensure that gifted pupils get needed attention while the school remains open to educating non-gifted students as well.
Bullied girl alone no more
She finds comfort in letters from hundreds of strangers, a campaign begun by Mill Valley sisters
Sitting in her living room amid stacks of handwritten letters from all over the nation and the world, 14-year-old Olivia Gardner of Novato said she no longer feels alone.
A victim of extreme bullying that spanned two years and three schools, Olivia said she has been pulled from the depths of depression by a letter-writing campaign started by two sisters at Tamalpais High in Marin County after they read in The Chronicle in March about Olivia’s ordeal.
At least 1,000 strangers have sent her letters and e-mails of support, and there’s talk of a book deal, Web sites and letter campaigns for other children who are bullied, and the three girls have received countless interview requests.
Whether Olivia likes it or not, she helped bring attention to the widespread and tenacious problem of bullying in school hallways, on cell phones and in cyberspace.
Call for Study of Access to Arts Education
Dodd, Alexander Call for Study of Access to Arts Education
Introduce Resolution in Recognition of Music Education
May 8, 2007
Today Senator Chris Dodd (D-CT) and Senator Lamar Alexander (R-TN) sent a letter to David Walker, the Comptroller General of the Government Accountability Office (GAO), requesting that the GAO conduct a study on access to music and arts education in the American public school system since passage of the No Child Left Behind Act. This week, Senators Dodd and Alexander also introduced a resolution recognizing the benefits and importance of school-based music education. Senators Dodd and Alexander are members of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP), and are Chairman and Ranking Member of its Subcommittee on Children and Families.
“No child should be deprived of the chance to explore his or her creativity in a nurturing educational environment,” said Dodd. “Picking up a musical instrument, a paint brush, or a script can allow a child to discover a hidden talent and can serve as a much-needed positive influence in the midst of the many difficult decisions that young people face today. I am hopeful that the GAO will act quickly to deliver findings about the current condition of arts education in American public schools so that we can seek to improve it during the reauthorization of the No Child Left Behind Act.”
Added Alexander: “Music Education is important. I had some great teachers, but my piano teacher, Miss Lennis Tedford was the best. From age five until my high school senior recital, I spent thirty minutes with her each week. ‘Don’t play that monkey business,’ she would say, as she could always tell when I’d been playing too much Jerry Lee Lewis. From Miss Tedford I learned more than music. She taught me the discipline of Czerny and the metronome, the logic of Bach, the clean joy of Mozart. She encouraged me to let my emotions run with Chopin and Rachmaninoff. She made sure I was ready for the annual piano competition, and that I performed completely under control. I still thank her for the discipline and love of music she gave me each time I sit at the piano today.”
A companion resolution – introduced by Reps. Jim Cooper (D-TN) and Jon Porter (R-NV) – passed the House of Representatives on April 26 by unanimous consent.
The full text of the letter is below:
Wisconsin State Student Test Scores Released
Wisconsin students’ performances improved in math and held steady in reading, language arts, science and social studies, according to annual test data released today.
Dane County students generally matched or exceeded state averages and paralleled the state’s rising math scores, although test results in Madison slipped slightly on some measures of reading, language arts and science.
Madison educators touted the overall performance of their students, noting that the portion of students scoring proficient or advanced — the two highest of four grading levels — has grown or held steady over the past seven years on reading and math exams even as the district’s populations of students with limited English skills and low-income backgrounds have increased.
Limited English proficiency and poverty are two of the strongest predictors of poor academic performance in Madison and schools across the nation.
Improved scores in math led state and local school officials to put generally positive faces on the picture painted by student test results being made public today by the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction.
Higher percentages of students in every grade from third through eighth were rated as “proficient” or “advanced” in math in this year’s round of statewide testing than in the previous year. The 10th-grade figure remained the same.
In reading, the statewide percentage of proficient or better students was steady or slightly improved at every grade level.
“We are on the right track,” Elizabeth Burmaster, state superintendent of public instruction, said in a statement. “Despite increased poverty in Wisconsin, we saw gains at nearly every grade level in mathematics and rising or stable scores for reading.”
Overall, better than 4 out of 5 fourth-graders in Wisconsin were proficient or advanced in reading, and about 3 out of 4 met those standards in math. For 10th-graders, 3 out of 4 were proficient in reading, and 7 out of 10 in math.
Madison schools’ improved math scores might seem to defy some of the laws of logic or probability.
The Madison district, like its counterparts across the state, saw a generally positive trend on math scores, according to data released today regarding scores from the Wisconsin Knowledge and Concepts Examinations that students took last November.
“Our students continue to perform well despite a number of challenges that would normally predict falling scores. We’re pleased, of course, but not surprised that has not been the case here,” Superintendent Art Rainwater noted in an interview this morning.
Rainwater said that changing demographics that include increasing numbers of children from low-income families and those who have limited proficiency in English generally go hand-in-hand with falling scores, but that has not been true in Madison, where test results in reading generally have been holding steady, or in mathematics, where almost all grade levels have improved.
Related:
- MMSD: Despite Changes and Cuts, Madison Students Test Well.
- Wisconsin’s “Broad interpretation of how NCLB progress can be “met” through the WKCE”
- Alan Borsuk’s followup article, including DPI comments.
- UW Math Professor Dick Askey’s comments on “Madison and Wisconsin Math Data, 8th Grade”.
- Fordham Foundation: Wisconsin DPI Academic Standards = D-
- Sandy Cullen: State Test Scores Adjusted to Match Last Year: State Officials Realized They Had Made The Test Too Hard And Lowered Passing Scores.
- A discussion of NAEP (National Assessment of Academic Progress) scores in Wisconsin and Minnesota along with school finance issues.
Supreme Court Rules in Special Education Lawsuit
The Supreme Court ruled today that parents of children with disabilities need not hire lawyers if they want to sue public school districts over their children’s special-education needs.
In a case of interest to parents and educators across the country, the justices ruled in favor of a couple from the Cleveland suburb of Parma who were unhappy with the school district’s proposal to meet the special needs of their autistic son.
Jeff and Sandee Winkelman were unable to afford a lawyer to sue the Parma City School District over the program designed for the youngest of their five children, Jacob, who was 6 when the lawsuit begin about four years ago.
In general, federal law allows people to represent themselves in court. But most federal courts have barred parents of children with disabilities from appearing without a lawyer in cases filed under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, or IDEA, which guarantees all children a “free appropriate public education.”
2007 Challenge Index: Ranking America’s High Schools
Memorial is the only Madison High School in the top 1200 (1084), while Verona ranked 738th.
Washington Post:
The 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 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 27, 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.
Milwaukee’s Rufus King is Ranked 259th. Marshfield High is ranked 348th. Whitefish Bay is ranked 514th, Shorewood 520th. New Berlin West 604th. Brookfield Central is 616th. Hartland Arrowhead is 706th. Nicolet is 723rd. Verona is 738th. Grafton 810th. Nathan Hale (West Allis) is 854th. Brookfield East is 865th. Greendale is 959th. Riverside University School (Milwaukee) is 959th. Madison Memorial is ranked 1084th. Salem’s Westosha Central is 1113rd. West Bend West is 1172nd while West Bend East is 1184th.
Jay Matthews:
The Challenge Index list of America’s best high schools, this year with a record 1,258 names, began as a tale of just two schools. They were Garfield High School, full of children of Hispanic immigrants in East Los Angeles, and Mamaroneck High School, a much smaller campus serving very affluent families in Westchester County, N.Y. I had written a book about Garfield, and the success of its teachers like Jaime Escalante in giving low-income students the encouragement and extra time they needed to master college-level Advanced Placement courses and tests.
I was finishing a book about Mamaroneck, and was stunned to find it was barring from AP many middle-class students who were much better prepared for those classes than the impoverished students who were welcomed into AP at Garfield. That turns out to be the rule in most U.S. schools — average students are considered not ready for, or not deserving of, AP, even though many studies show that they need the challenge and that success in AP can lead to success in college.
Nearly everyone I met in New York thought Mamaroneck was a terrific school because its parents were rich and its state scores high, even though its building was in bad shape and its policy of reserving AP only for students with top grades made no sense. Nearly everyone I met in Los Angeles thought Garfield was a terrible school because its parents were poor and its state scores low, even though it was doing much more to prepare average and below-average students for college than any other school I knew. It was like rating restaurants not by the quality of their food, but by the bank accounts of their customers.
I was covering Wall Street for The Washington Post at that time, and not liking the job much. My life was ruled by indexes¿the Dow Jones, the Standard & Poor’s. I decided to create my own index to measure something I thought was more important –which schools were giving their students the most value. This would help me show why Garfield, in a neighborhood full of auto-body shops and fast-food joints, was at least as good a school as Mamaroneck, in a town of mansions and country clubs.
Matthews participated in an online chat regarding the Challenge Index. A transcript is available here.
Related: MMSD High School Redesign Committee and West’s English 10 and Bruce King’s Report on West’s SLC (Small Learning Community) Project. Joanne Jacobs on Palo Alto High School’s non-participation.
An Update
The Studio School Charter School:
In a couple of years I hope to take another try at leading a charter school initiative. I continue to read so much educational research and literature that strongly supports The Studio School concepts. As you know, we spent some time looking into ways to create TSS as a private school but just couldn’t see how it could be affordable to everyone and be sustainable. Even as a sliding-scale-tuition cooperative, there would have to be some tuition paid and that leaves out so many children. It still looks as though a charter school is the best alternative. So maybe there will be some changes in our school district and administrators/ board members will become more actively supportive of charter schools, innovation, and the Studio School concept. Am I overly optimistic?
Programs in my home:
Currently, I’m working with some people to piece together a rather eclectic “menu” of educational programs (art, Spanish, yoga, tutoring, early childhood, etc.) in my home that is licensed for child care for ages 4 – 17. The programs being offered are philosophically aligned with the Reggio Approach – experiential, child-centered, multi-modal learning. I don’t have a final name for this yet but the concept is that of a “learning studio” that offers a variety of enriching programs that will provide children with a variety of “languages” for learning and expressing their ideas. (This summer I am offering an Art & Architecture program for 5-8 year old children on Wednesday mornings and we will be working with recycled materials.) If the “eclectic” studio concept is successful, the plan is to move the program out of my house into a public space in the next year or so. I recently met with someone involved in the Hilldale Mall redevelopment project and a location there might be a possibility down the road. And/or it could be offered through community centers or other neighborhood organizations. It’s also my hope that if I could somehow provide real life examples of the Reggio Approach to teaching and learning, people might be better able to envision the amazing positive impact it could have in an elementary school.
Community Partnerships:
I intend to continue meeting with people who are interested in new educational initiatives and who might want to work together to create programs and schools that include the arts & technology for all Madison children. So I want to keep reaching out to neighborhood groups and community members. Please let me know if you run into any folks who might be interested in talking with me about this and I will be happy to contact them. Thanks
Nancy Donahue
ndonahue@tds.net
Offered healthy food by servers, school kids take the bait.
You know how hard it can be to say no.
But our tendency to accept what we’re offered may have positive value when it comes to encouraging children to choose — and eat — healthier food at school. A new report suggests that there’s a simple, low-cost approach: Just offer it to them.
That’s the conclusion of a pilot program in Guilford, Conn., where school cafeteria servers were trained to ask elementary school students, “Would you like fruit or juice with your lunch?” Ninety percent of the children said yes. What’s more, 80% then consumed the fruit or juice that they put on their trays.
Compare those numbers with students at a nearby school who also participated in the study. At lunch, the same fruit and juice was available, but it wasn’t personally offered to the kids. The difference? Just 60% of these students reached for fruit or juice on their own.
These findings “have pretty significant implications,” says the pilot program’s designer, Marlene Schwartz, director of research and school programs at Yale University’s Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity. They suggest, she says, that if the National School Lunch Program were to modify its regulations and had servers actually encourage children to eat fruits and vegetables, their consumption might increase.
Denver’s Attempt to Address Their “Enrollment Gap”
Superintendent Michael Bennet and the Denver School Board:
The Rocky Mountain News series, “Leaving to Learn [Denver Public Schools Enrollment Gap],” tells a painful and accurate story about the state of our school district. It is hard to admit, but it is abundantly clear that we will fail the vast majority of children in Denver if we try to run our schools the same old way. The evidence in Denver and from big-city school districts across the country is undeniable. Operating an urban school district in the 21st century based on a century-old configuration will result in failure for too many children. It is long past time to admit this. As a district and a community, we must gather strength and have the courage to make change, knowing that the changes we face are much, much less perilous than the status quo.
Many believe that our system is intractable and impossible to fix. They look at our high dropout rate, our low achievement rate, and decades of failed reform efforts in Denver and around this country, and conclude it cannot be done.
This answer is obviously intolerable for the 72,000 children in our school district, and for the tens of thousands of children who will receive a public education in Denver over the next decade. We must refuse to accept that this is the best we can do for the next generation, or, worse, that this is all we can expect of them.
In view of the current discussions in Denver about whether to close schools after years of declining enrollment and shifting demographics, now is the time to re-examine how our system works. No matter how compelling the arguments for school consolidation, school closures create pain and upset expectations about daily life. In the shadow of this potential dislocation, we are obligated to reconsider the way we do business to ensure that our schools and our students will succeed. In the coming months and years, we must renew and rejuvenate the educational opportunities available to all of Denver’s children.
Cities all across the country face dramatic change sooner or later. For a variety of reasons, we think Denver is in a position to create the first 21st century urban school district in the United States. Not the least of these reasons is our tremendous faith in the committed people who work for DPS and in the citizens of Denver. We must not make the easy, but terrible mistake of confusing a lack of confidence in the system with a lack of confidence in ourselves or our children.
Related; Barb Schrank’s “Where have all the Students Gone?“. Joanne Jacobs has more.
School choice has saved $444 million
Friedman Foundation; Dr. Susan L. Aud:
A landmark new study finds that school choice programs throughout the country generated nearly $444 million in net savings to state and local budgets from 1990 to 2006. Contrary to opponents’ predictions, the analysis also finds that instructional spending per student has consistently gone up in all affected public school districts and states.
“School choice saves. It saves children, and now we have empirical evidence that it saves money,” said Robert Enlow, executive director and COO of the Milton and Rose D. Friedman Foundation. “In the face of $444 million in savings, another excuse to deny children a quality education has vanished before our eyes.”
Released by the Friedman Foundation, “Education by the Numbers: The Fiscal Effect of School Choice Programs, 1990-2006” provides the first comprehensive analysis of how the nation’s school choice programs have affected state and public school districts. Of the 12 voucher and tax-credit scholarship programs that began operations before 2006, every program is at least fiscally neutral, and most produce substantial savings. Seven more programs have been created since 2006.
Pre-K in the South
The Southern Education Foundation [2.3MB Report]:
Over the last 140 years, Southern states have made significant progress in catching up with the nation in education and income, but in recent decades the South’s gains have virtually flattened as the world economy continues to elevate the critical role of education in innovation, productivity and income. Today, most Southern states remain where they were in the early 1980s, closer to the national average than they were decades ago, but still at or near the bottom of the nation’s major rankings in education, income and well-being.
There is an all-important exception to this pattern of Southern underperformance: high-quality, early childhood education – pre-kindergarten (Pre-K). Several Southern states have become the nation’s leaders in Pre-K over the last 10 years. As a result, the South in 2007 leads the nation in offering state-funded Pre-K to three- and four-year-old children:19% of three- and four-year-olds in the South are in state-funded Pre-K, more than double the rate in non-South states.
Police calls for Madison schools – September through December 2006
Madison Parents’ School Safety Site:
The charts below (click on each thumbnail to enlarge) summarize Madison Police Department calls for service to MMSD schools from September 1 through December 31, 2006. The data is summarized by school below the fold.
Data like this provides a starting point for getting a sense of the type and levels of incidents that affect safety in our children’s schools, and it’ll be useful to compare these numbers from time to time against like categories of data going forward. Context that we need, but don’t have, is information on the number and types of violent or disruptive incidents occurring in the schools as a whole (not just those resulting in police calls), and to what extent policies on summoning law enforcement in response to a violent or disruptive incident vary from school to school (in which case call data alone may be an unreliable index of the school’s relative safety).
Vang Pao Elementary School: Remarks to the Madison School Board on May 7, 2007
The decision to name the new school after General Vang Pao was necessary and proper, although difficult.
The board did its job well. Remember that when you evaluate the reactions of some parts of the community.
The reactions are not about the process. Three months of notice and opportunities to comment was sufficient process.
They are not about “localness”. Many of our schools are named after non-local figures.
They are not about new information. Professor McCoy’s allegations about Vang Pao are old news, 2002 news.
They are not about the persuasiveness of Professor McCoy’s allegations. He spent a short time in Laos. His evidence is thin.
In contrast, Dr. Jane Hamilton Merritt spent many years in Laos and interviewed more than a thousand people. She has concluded that McCoy’s allegations are baseless. She has also been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize and the Pulitizer Prize for her human rights reporting from Laos. The weight of the evidence is on Dr. Jane’s side.
And you have the testimony of Hmong people from our community and state who contradict Professor McCoy.
Instead, I believe that the reaction is an expression of the deep discomfort that many of us feel when forced to remember the Vietnam War and it is about our denial.
We want to remember the anti-war movement.
We do not want to remember the government lies, assassinations, covert wars, use of napalm and Agent Orange or the loss of so many, many lives. It was a shameful war, one that we’d like to forget.
However, we owe it to our children to learn the lessons of that war and we must tell them how and why Hmong people became part of our community.
Forgetting is not an option for the Hmong. They are here now, living productive lives. They owe much to General Vang Pao for their survival and better fortunes. He gave them the unit and the strength that they needed during the covert war and after our government abandoned them to the repressive Laotian regime after the fall of Saigon.
And we owe the Hmong—just as surely as we owe our own Vietnam War veterans—recognition and inclusion at long last.
Please stay the course on this decision.
Troller, schools reporter, wins 2007 Allegretti Award
Members of The Capital Times nonsupervisory staff have chosen reporter Susan Troller as the winner of the 2007 Allegretti Award.
They judged Troller’s work as best carrying on the legacy of former Capital Times reporter and editorial writer Dan Allegretti in exposing injustices in the community.
Troller’s colleagues honored her coverage of Madison’s K-12 schools. The nomination said Troller “has worked tirelessly to bring the human face, the child’s face, to the messy bureaucracy that is our school system.”
Since being assigned to the schools beat in 2006, Troller has consistently brought readers into the classroom as well as chronicling the operations of the district administration and the School Board. Not only has she used words to describe children’s learning experiences, but she was the first staff member to delve into the multimedia world for the paper, creating an audio slideshow to accompany a portrait of the successes of high-poverty Mendota Elementary School.
Props to Susan!
Milwaukee Public Schools Violence Intensifying
An 18-year-old punches his school’s football coach and grabs his genitals. • Two middle-school age sisters jump a police officer called to calm a disturbance. • A grandmother charges a group of students at an elementary school, and then strikes the principal. • A boy tries to sell a gun to his friend in elementary school.
Violence in Milwaukee Public Schools has intensified, and calls to police have become daily occurrences in some of the city’s schools.
Teachers and staff trained to bring knowledge to children in a safe setting are instead struggling to keep the hostility of the streets from seeping into classrooms and hallways.
A Journal Sentinel investigation found:
- Dozens of teachers, administrators and staff are getting attacked. In the first semester of this school year alone, at least 127 MPS employees reported being physically assaulted by students or outsiders coming to campus.
- Elementary school teachers are falling victim to physical or verbal assaults nearly as much as those in high schools. Close to half the teachers assaulted this year work at elementary or K-8 schools.
- Far more Milwaukee students were expelled for bringing firearms to school last year than in all of the Chicago Public Schools, a district more than four times the size of MPS. In Chicago, unlike Milwaukee, high school students walk through weapons scanners every day, and handguns have virtually disappeared from the schools.
- The number of students expelled and suspended for drugs, violence and weaponshas nearly doubled in the past five years, and many are simply transferred to other schools. Total MPS expulsions have tripled in the past 15 years.
- Police are called routinely to break up fights or deal with other disturbances. Staff at each of the district’s 11 large high schools called police about twice a school day on average in the past six months.
At MPS, time to go extreme
Ho, hum. Another sunny morning, another cup of coffee, another disgusting story about the Milwaukee Public Schools. How’s this for an idea? Shut down MPS because it sure doesn’t seem to be working.
Initiate a 13-year plan (pardon the negative connotation) to eliminate grade levels, beginning next year with kindergarten. That way, students (or are they “combatants”?) are free to find other educational solutions from the beginning. No kindergarten means no first grade the next year and so on as the children pass through (or drop out).
Parents will be responsible for vying for precious space in private schools, which don’t seem to have the level of problems that MPS does, probably because they can remove disruptive thugs. Or try home schooling. Let parents sit home with their unruly kids and see how they like it.
Good teachers will have time to look for other employment. There surely will be more entrepreneurs opening schools to replace the MPS holding tanks. Just think – no more guns, no more weapons, no more crowd control. Just lessons, homework and appropriate discussions about grades.
Teachers have been shifted from being educators to baby sitters to interim parole officers. A couple of e-mails I received noted the situation at MPS is much worse than we even know. Worse than a week with two lockdowns, a fight resulting in a staff member being knocked unconscious and a seventh-grader with a gun and ammunition? Those are only the reported incidents.
Lapham Marquette Statement
There has been bitterness, surprise and resentment over my vote with respect to the Lapham/Marquette consolidation. I would like to let people know why I voted to move the alternative programs to Marquette. I have a mix of emotions several days after the storm and hope you find it helpful to understand the process from my perspective.
I made this decision in the most thoughtful and respectful manner possible. Unfortunately, the process of getting to this vote is more complicated than the moment in time when the board makes a single vote. I hope those of you most affected by this can see how this transpired.
In the past three weeks, Beth Moss and I, as newly elected members of the Board of Education, have met with the staff of MMSD to get up to speed with our current programs. This process takes many, many hours. We have also spoken with teachers, visited schools, gone to public forums, taken calls, studied data, looked at programs with a critical eye and visited with many constituents.
An open letter to the School Board of Madison Metropolitan Schools
It’s about time that this community approached the budget process with the honesty and integrity that we homeowners are required to do. For the past several years, the Superintendent and his associates have made a projected budget by increasing all categories of the budget by a certain percentage (about 5%) whether costs in that area are going up or not. (This is a “cost-plus” approach for those econ majors among you.) Each year, the projected budget comes up short of what is available and the games begin. Cuts are made to beloved programs or high profile student services; the community is upset and the board calls for a referendum or reform of the state funding scheme.
How about budgeting the way I have to? My house, my car, my medical costs and my insurance eat up the majority of the household income. So it is with the district. Teacher’s salaries and benefits use up 85% of the budget and go up 4.7% each year. This is essentially a fixed cost that isn?t going to change much. We can complain about rising medical insurance costs or cut a few teachers from beloved “extras” like Strings, but those actions simply raise the ire of the community. I don?’t like that car costs jump up significantly over the several years that pass between purchases. My partner can complain about the mortgage, but we’re not moving out of the house.
The reality is that the remaining 15% of the budget IS where the cuts need to be made. When the pocket money in our household drops down during lean times, the morning latte and pastry are replaced by home-perked coffee and a 30-cent bagel. When the muffler blew at the same time as the back tire, we replaced them both and began setting aside money for a new car. How can it be that during the “lean years” of state-imposed constraints, we have had a computer program for budgeting written by consultants who over-ran their budget by hundreds of thousands of dollars? How did the Doyle building get re-furbished from floor tile to light fixture with nary a cough at the timing of it? Where did the money come from to install a district-wide phone system that will likely be outpaced by cellular technology within two or three years? How do we manage to come up with the funds to pay non-union electricians for work when our own full-time employees sit idle (and therefore on target for the chopping block)?
How is it that our district has a 20% “better” child to administrator ratio, (195 children/administrator in Madison vs. 242 children/administrator statewide) and yet we’ve only let a handful of positions go unfilled? How did Roger Price manage to OVERSPEND his consultant budget by a million dollars, but in his next breath recommend cutting $300,000 for Strings for little kids?
These kinds of budgetary abuses continue despite their being easily defined differences between “student contact” budgetary items (teachers, books, Strings, etc.) and non-student contact items (computer consultants, budgeting programs, etc.). In those years when things like building maintenance costs didn’t go up, or the need for consultants is not proven, why can’t those non-student contact items be subjected to a freeze?. As a board, I’m sure that your task of managing the “little things” is as difficult for you as it is for me to convince my partner of the virtues of DVD rentals over a night out on the town. But, when the pocket money for the week is frozen at $20, and the credit card is hidden, home-popped corn smells extra good. Perhaps it is time that you send the current budget recommendations back to Mr. Rainwater and Mr. Price with notification that all non-student contact budgetary items will be frozen for the coming year. I’m sure they can work out the details from there.
Thanks for supporting our children first.
Why It Is NOT Harder to Get Into Top Colleges
“From a student’s perspective, the odds of getting into college are a function of two things: the number of qualified students who apply, and the number of slots that colleges make available. It’s true that the number of prospective college students is growing, as The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal all noted in nearly identical articles published recently. Driven by the baby-boom echo, the number of high school graduates jumped from 2.9 million in 2002 to 3.1 million in 2006, an increase of 8.4 percent.
“But the number of spaces in elite colleges is increasing too, at a nearly identical rate. According to U.S. Department of Education statistics, the 60-odd colleges and universities rated ‘Most Competitive” by Barron’s Guide to Colleges sent out 199,821 acceptance letters in 2002. In 2006, the number of ‘fat envelopes’ had increased to 215,738, an 8.0 percent jump. As the nation has grown, its elite colleges have grown along with it.
“Why, then, the high anxiety? Because college admissions scare stories aren’t based on the overall ratio of admissions to applicants. They’re based on the ratio of admissions to applications, as reported by individual colleges. And the number of applications to elite schools is skyrocketing, increasing 18.9 percent from 2002 to 2006.”
Every spring, the media send a bolt of fear into the heart of the upper middle class. The message is clear: “Your children are never getting into a good college.”
As Ivy League universities report — once again — that admissions rates have fallen to record lows, newspapers rush to publish stories documenting the increasingly “frenzied” (variants: “frantic,” “brutal”) competition among students vying for a coveted slot in an elite school. The stock characters include the tearful student — dreams crushed under an avalanche of rejection letters — the angry parent, the frenzied guidance counselor, and the college admissions official or other expert who notes with grateful wonder, “If I had to apply to my alma mater today, I couldn’t get in.”
There’s just one problem: it’s not true. The declining odds of getting into an elite college are mostly a statistical mirage, caused by confusion between college applicants and college applications.
2007 / 2008 Budget Approved: School Board keeps Lindbergh open
Board members tussled over dozens of suggestions to try to find money to return various programs and services to the district that had been cut by the administration in an effort to balance the $339.6 million budget.
The administration had originally proposed about $8 million in cuts, including $2 million from special education aimed at helping students with speech or language problems, increased class size at the elementary level and closing Lindbergh Elementary and Black Hawk Middle School, and consolidating Marquette and Lapham.
The board also approved a district proposal to eliminate busing for five Catholic schools in the district, and offer parents a $450 subsidy to transport their children themselves, to save about $230,000. State statutes require that public schools provide transportation for all students in their district. Parents of students at other area private schools take the subsidy in lieu of busing.
Board member Lucy Mathiak and Superintendent Art Rainwater had several testy exchanges as Mathiak grilled administrators on their programs and expenses.
“I’m trying to understand why our district requires so many more people in teaching and learning than other districts,” Mathiak said.
“Our priorities since I’ve been superintendent are highly trained, highly skilled teachers in a small class. After that, we believe in highly trained, highly skilled teachers in front of a large class. We don’t believe in poorly trained teachers in small classes,” Rainwater said sharply as he defended the Madison district’s focus on professional development.
Board members also disagreed on how aggressively to use projected salary savings, an accounting method that predicts how many teachers will leave the district. Any shortfall would have to come out of the district’s equity fund, which some board members feel is dangerously low.
In a six-plus-hour meeting punctuated by flaring tempers, the board also found ways to stave off most proposed increases in elementary class sizes by raising fees and increasing projected savings in salaries for the 2007-08 school year.
The board also spared the district’s fifth-grade strings program from elimination.
The moves came as the board balanced the district’s $339.6 million budget by cutting $7.9 million from existing services and programs.
The budget finally was approved just after midnight on a 6-1 vote. Lucy Mathiak was the lone dissenter.
Board members voted 4-3 to consolidate Marquette and Lapham at Lapham, 1045 E. Dayton St., into a kindergarten through fifth-grade school, while rejecting a proposal from Superintendent Art Rainwater to close Lindbergh, 4500 Kennedy Road. Currently, Lapham hosts K-2 students while Marquette hosts grades three through five.
Rainwater also had proposed consolidating Black Hawk Middle School into Sherman and O’Keeffe middle schools, but that proposal wasn’t adopted.
Voting for the consolidation of Marquette and Lapham, to save $522,000, were Lawrie Kobza, Arlene Silveira, Beth Moss and Maya Cole. Opposing the measure were Johnny Winston Jr., Carol Carstensen and Mathiak.
The Madison school board approved the consolidation of Marquette and Lapham elementary schools under next year’s budget. The two schools will combine under Lapham’s roof, reported WISC-TV.
Under the budget, Marquette will be used for alternative education programs.
The school board also approved combining all high school boys golf teams into two and elminated bussing to Wright and Spring Harbor charter schools.
The moves are all a part of cutting the budget by more than $7 million.
Many of those linked to affected schools have loudly spoken out in opposition to the closings, and Monday was no exception. Parents and students put their concerns in writing outside the Doyle Administration Building — children writing in chalk on the ground — hoping to catch the eye of board members before the meeting inside.
Brenda Konkel, TJ Mertz and Paul Soglin have more. Paul mentioned:
“From the debate, the motions and the votes, it seems that all of the rancor over ideological splits in the Madison Metropolitan School Board is irrelevant” given the vote to consolidate Marquette and Lapham schools
I think the current diversity of viewpoints on the Madison School Board is healthy. Rewind the clock three years and imagine how some of these issues might have played out. Would there have been a public discussion? Would the vote have been 6 – 1, or ? One of the reasons the “spending gap” in the MMSD’s $339.6M+ budget was larger this year is due to the Board and Administration’s public recognition of the structural deficit. The MMSD’s “equity” has declined by half over the past 7 years. More from Channel3000.com.
With Edline Online, The Report Card Goes 24/7 and Every Test Is An Open Book
: Edline — and other programs like it, such as SchoolFusion and School Center — provide students, teachers and parents with an online meeting place to discuss day-to-day assignments, tests and grades. But it also enables parents to keep track of a kid’s academic progress — or lack of progress — in a heretofore unthinkably micromanagerial way. Parents can know everything; children have no wiggle room. Gone is the fudge factor, the white lie. A student makes a D on a quiz, a D shows up on Edline. No matter that a student leads a discussion in class or puts forth a cogent point. Or has the possibility to retake the quiz, make up the poor grade or do extra credit work over the weekend.
This swift knowledge of success or failure can drive a wedge into families.
The Madison School District has invested in a new student information system. It will be interesting to see how this plays out, given the recent report card reductions in some schools. More here.
Cherokee principal to receive equal opportunity award
A press release from the Urban League:
Media Release
April 26, 2007
Contact: Scott Gray
(608) 251-8550
sgray@ulgm.org
Cherokee Middle School Principal to Receive the 2007 Whitney M. Young, Jr. Equal Opportunity Award
Madison, WI: The Urban League of Greater Madison recently announced that it will present Cherokee Heights Middle School Principal Karen Seno with the Whitney M. Young, Jr. Equal Opportunity Award.
The award is given annually by Boards of Directors of Urban League affiliates from across the country in memory of the great civil rights leader and former head of the National Urban League. Young was one of America’s most charismatic, courageous and influential civil rights pioneers. He worked tirelessly to gain access for blacks to good jobs, education, housing, health care and social services.
Teachers Must be Up for Count
Via a reader’s email; Solomon Friedberg:
Mathematics is crucial in the modern world. It is the foundation of modern science and engineering, and the prerequisite to any number of careers. Children’s formal learning of mathematics occurs throughout elementary school, and their success or failure at this level will have an impact on the entire rest of their lives.
Thus it is vital that elementary teachers be well-prepared to teach mathematics.
You would think that all elementary teachers know elementary math. After all, they are college graduates. Unfortunately, you’d be wrong. For example, mathematics educator Liping Ma, a senior scholar at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, reports that only 43 percent of a group of “above average” U.S. elementary teachers chosen for their interest in math could carry out a simple calculation involving division of fractions.
Moreover, teaching elementary school math requires more than simply knowing how to do elementary school math. Teachers must be able to present mathematics as a coherent body of knowledge rather than a bunch of arbitrary rules, to recognize and address a range of misconceptions, to encourage mathematical thinking and develop student self-confidence. They need to know elementary math well enough to teach it in all its subtlety.
In Ma’s study, only 4 percent of U.S. teachers were able to write a story problem that corresponded to the division of fractions problem. If that’s the case, how can they teach this subject well?
Two protests over school closings
1. Kennedy Heights Community Center with the support of many other individuals and groups is organizing a walk from Kennedy Heights Community Center to Gompers Elementary School to raise awareness about the potential closings of Lindbergh Elementary School and Black Hawk middle school. Neighborhood Schools are a community resource for the children and families in Kennedy Heights and the northside; closing the schools would negatively impact our neighborhood, our community center, and the families that live here. Please come and walk with us to keep northside schools open.
The walk will start at the Kennedy Heights Community Center at 4:00 PM on Monday April 23rd – we will walk together from Kennedy Heights to Gompers Elementary school about 1.3 miles. At Gompers their will be a brief discussion and Popsicles for kids. All are welcome please distribute widely.
PS I know that school board members have a meeting at 5:00 PM, but I hope you can join us
for the beginning of our walk.
2. Join a grassoots rally: “An Hour For Marquette” – On Friday, April 27, from 1:30 – 2:30 come to Marquette and pull your Marquette student from class to protest the proposed consolidation (All concerned parents, students, and other community members are welcome to join in). We will rally at the school. Bring a sign that expresses your feeling about Marquette. We will be working to get press coverage and a visit from the Mayor. If you are interested in attending the rally e-mail Dea Larsen Converse at dealarsen@yahoo.com or Maria Moreno at mcmoreno@tds.net so we can give a head count to the papers.
(Note that this is not a PTG sponsored event)
It’s not over yet! Let’s keep the pressure on!
Milwaukee School Panel Approves Handcuff Use
After hours of emotional debate, a Milwaukee School Board panel approved a measure Tuesday night that would allow safety aides to use flexible handcuffs to restrain students who demonstrate threatening behavior.
“We’ve been in situations where we’ve had to restrain students for 30 minutes, 40 minutes, an hour,” said Shawn Buford, a safety aide at Custer High School. Buford said he has been out of school three times this school year after being assaulted by students.
But Raphiel Cole called use of handcuffs “a form of pre-institution that you are doing for our kids.”
Cole, who has nieces and nephews in Milwaukee Public Schools, added: “Anything but these handcuffs. You are going to have holding cells for the children, what’s next?”
Grade 5 Strings – How you can help
Grade 5 elementary string students need your help. There are ways you can support the hundreds of ten-year olds who are in Grade 5 strings and this year’s Grade 4 students who would like the chance to take the course next year:
A. Bring your child to play his/her instrument at Thursday’s Budget Hearing – April 19th at 6:00 p.m., Memorial High School Auditorium.
If your child would like to “play” in support of Grade 5 strings, there will be an opportunity to do this at Thursday’s budget hearing to be held in the auditorium at Memorial High School ( http://www.mmsd.org/145.htm). Students from grades 5-12 are welcome. There will be adults present to help coordinate the playing of a few songs from the strings festival. If you want to play, please come at 6 p.m., so we can organize the students.
B. Email the School Board – comments@madison.k12.wi.us – let them know:
1. you support the program for all children,
2. what this course has meant to your child if your child is/has
taken elementary strings,
3. you would like the newly formed school board community task
force on fine arts to have a chance to do it’s work, which
includes:
a. identifying the community’s fine arts education values and
goals,
b. identifying ways to increase low-income/minority
participation in the arts (45% elementary string students
are minority, 35% are low income), and
c. identifying funding priorities for the School Board
C. Speak at the Budget Hearings – 6:30 p.m. – Tuesday, April 17th at La Follette High School Auditorium and Thursday, April 19th at Memorial High School Auditorium:
There are two public hearings next week on the budget – Tuesday, April 17th, 6:30 p.m. at La Follette High School and Thursday, April 19th, 6:30 p.m. at Memorial High School – both public hearings are in the school’s auditoriums. If you come, you need to sign if you want to speak. You can sign in and not speak but say you support the program. Each person who speaks is given 3 minutes.
For nearly 40 years, MMSD has had an elementary strings program. Two years ago, elementary string instruction was cut in half. Last year, Grade 4 strings was cut entirely. This year, Superintendent Rainwater is proposing to cut Grade 5 strings, which would eliminate all string instruction during the school day.
Thank you for your support of Grade 5 strings and a strong fine arts education for our children.
Grade 5 Strings – Letter to School Board
Please write the School Board about what is important to you and your state legislature about funding our public schools. Following is a copy of my letter to the school board on Grade 5 strings:
Dear School Board Members (comments@madison.k12.wi.us),
I am happy to serve as a member of the newly created Fine Arts Task Force for the next year. The second charge to the committee is: ” Recommend up to five ways to increase minority student participation and participation of low income students in Fine Arts at elementary, middle and high school levels.”
I noticed in the Grade 5 strings report you received last week there was no information on low-income and minority student enrollment. Our task force received this specific demographic information at our March 26th meeting along with additional information, so I would like to share it with you, because I think it is important. As the program has been cut in the past two years, the low-income and minority student enrollment (numbers and percentage) has remained strong [but the cuts have affected hundreds of low-income students as the numbers show]. For this school year, 44% of the string students are minority students (47% of all Grade 5 students are minority students), and 35% of the string students are low income (44% of Grade 5 students are low income students). This information is captured in the attached Chart for the this year and the previous two years when the program was offered to students in Grades 4 and 5. I’ve also included information on special education student enrollment. I was not able to access ELL information for the previous years.
Decreasing academic opportunities to develop skills at a younger age is more likely to hurt participation at higher grades for low income and minority students who often lack support outside school to strengthen and reinforce what is learned in school either at home or through additional, private opportunities.
I hope you make the decision to give the Fine Arts Task Force an opportunity to complete its charge before making additional cuts to courses, because these cuts may prove to be more harmful to those students we want to reach than we realize. Also, if changes are made, I hope they are done equitably and with time for transitions. I’m asking this not only for arts education but also for other programs and activities Madison values in its public education. Eliminating elementary strings entirely would be the third year of major cuts in either funds or instruction time for students in this program. This seems to me to be overly harsh, especially when you consider that no extracurricular sports have been cut (nor would I support that).
Elementary strings is one arts course, but it has taught up to 2,000+ children in one year and is valued highly by parents and the community. I have 500+ signatures on a petition, which I will share with the board next week that says: “Madison Community Asks the MMSD School Board: Don’t Cut, Work with the Community to Strengthen and Grow Madison’s Elementary String Program. I have many emails with these signatures, and I’m planning to ask folks to write you about what this program means to them, so you hear their words and not only my words.
As I stated when I spoke before you earlier this year, there are those activities where a mix of public and private funding along with fees and grants might work for the arts and for extracurricular sports, for example. Please consider support of this and please consider helping with transitions toward different approaches.
Thank you for your hard work and support for public education.
Barbara Schrank
P.s. – note, I am speaking as an individual and not on behalf of the fine arts task force.
I would also like to add for SIS readers – I know due to the current financing scheme, the state is not funding public schools adequately nor fairly and is placing a huge burden on personal income and property taxes. I also know there have been cuts in previous years to the arts, increases in class sizes, fewer SAGE classes, etc. Just so you know, that is not the point of this letter. I see the need to work both locally and at the state. I also feel we need to be doing something more than referendums at the local level, and I don’t mean cut or referendum. I think in the areas of extracurricular sports, some of the arts, we may be able to put in place a financial package of public, private, fees, grants – but this takes time and planning and commitment by our school board following public discussions on the topic.
Not all minority children are low income, but by far, the majority of low income children are minority. By not working with the community on funding for this high demand, highly valued program, several hundred fewer low income students are receiving skill-based training on an instrument, which scientific research is showing more and more has a positive effect on other areas of academics.
No where else in this city do so many low-income children have the opportunity to learn how to play an instrument and to do so as inexpensively per student. This is a program where “thinking outside the box” for the School Board could come in handy, so we can continue this academic program as part of the school day for so many children.
Lindbergh Parents Vow To Fight For Their School
The largest cuts in the superintendent’s budget are through the consolidation of some schools.
Lindbergh parents were surprised on Monday night to hear the superintendent is backing a plan that would close their school.
They had anticipated their school being taken off the district’s chopping block.
Many of the parents have been fighting to keep up with the information coming from the board, and now they’re hoping the board will listen to their concerns.
Parent Jeffrey Lewis has had three children go to Lindbergh Elementary, but with a budget plan calling for the close of the school, he’s worried about how it would affect all of the students there.
“The district has looked at this from a monetary standpoint, but never have they addressed how this is going to impact equity,” said Lewis. “How will they maintain the opportunity that kids currently have in small schools?
How much would the state spend to fund education adequately?
The school advocates who rightfully point to the state’s inadequate funding of education want the legislature to adopt Assembly Joint Resolution 35 or the identical Senate Joint Resolution 27. The resolutions call for the following:
1. Funding levels based on the actual cost of what is needed to provide children with a sound education and to operate effective schools and classrooms rather than based on arbitrary per pupil spending levels;
2. State resources sufficient to satisfy state and federal mandates and to prepare all children, regardless of their circumstances, for citizenship and for post−secondary education, employment, or service to their country;
3. Additional resources and flexibility sufficient to meet special circumstances, including student circumstances such as non−English speaking students and students from low−income households, and district circumstances such as large geographic size, low population density, low family income, and significant changes in enrollment;
4. A combination of state funds and a reduced level of local property taxes, derived and distributed in a manner that treats all taxpayers equitably regardless of local property wealth and income . . .
I dug around briefly in various Web sites (WAES and IWF) on these or similar recommendations, and I cannot find a fiscal estimate of whether or how much these changes might increase state aids, how any increase might be funded, and whether property taxes for education would fall. Does anyone have some figures?
If better funding requires the state to raise more money, the legislature should look at the falling proportion of state tax collections from the corporate income tax, raise the corporate income tax to a generate a fairer proportion of state revenue, and put the money into education.
Thank you from Marj
From Marj Passman’s Web site:
Thank you Madison voters:
This campaign began, in my mind, for the children of Madison. ALL the children. It wasn’t about the parents – let me repeat – it was about our young people. Every single person who came on board and worked their hearts out did it for the same reason. We needed to bring education back to its educators – to its teachers, curriculum designers, staff developers – back to its supporters – the people who care about every child.
This is called Public Education – not partnership with some ethereal, intangible, nether world of ill defined private saviors who aren’t exactly knocking down the doors at Doyle with offers of pots of gold for our struggling school system. It is about us – all of us – working with parents, not against them, working with teachers, not against them, working with administrators and not against them, working with the city, state and federal government not to just get back some money into our striggling schools BUT for what is our right, for PUBLIC EDUCATION. This money is our due- it is owed us – it is not a generous luxury.
We “pay taxes to support the role public education plays in civilizing and enriching our society.” What does that mean? Public education means what is best for all of us – not some of us – it means opportunity, it means mobility, it means our schools must be the “great equalizer” in our country. We cannot and should not educate some of children over others – our schools must be there for every child – for the voiceless and well as the angry few – for the children of poverty – for the children struggling with just the moment to moment functions of daily life. If we lose sight of the hungry, struggling children we lose our souls.
I believe we define ourselves by how we treat those less fortunate than ourselves and that the way we educate ALL of our children will determine what kind of city, community, democracy we have tomorrow.
To all of the caring, decent, humane people who supported my campaign You all mean so much to me – you have added so much to my life . I thank you so much. I wouldn’t have missed this for anything.
Marjorie Passman
April 5, 2007
No Child Left Behind testing eased for more students
The Bush administration is letting more children with disabilities take simplified tests under the No Child Left Behind education law.
The change, outlined in final regulations Wednesday, would triple the number of children who can take tests that are easier than those given to most students under the 2002 law.
Roughly 10% of special education students – those with the most serious cognitive disabilities – currently can take simplified, alternative tests and have the results count toward a school’s annual progress goals.
Under the new rules, about an additional 20% of children with disabilities could take alternative tests and have those count toward a school’s progress goals.
An open letter to the Superintendent of Madison Metropolitan Schools
Dear Mr. Rainwater:
I just found out from the principal at my school that you cut the allocations for SAGE teachers and Strings teachers, but the budget hasn’t even been approved. Will you please stop playing politics with our children education? It?s time to think about your legacy.
As you step up to the chopping block for your last whack at the budget, please think carefully about how your tenure as our superintendent will be viewed a little more than a year from now when your position is filled by a forward-thinking problem-solver. (Our district will settle for no less.)
Do you want to be remembered as the Superintendent who increased class size as a first step when the budget got tight? Small class size repeatedly rises to the top as the best way to enhance student achievement at the elementary level. Why would you take away one of best protections against federal funding cuts mandated by the No Child Left Behind Act? Rather than increase pupil to teacher ratios, have you checked to see if the pupil to administrative staff ratio has been brought closer to the state-wide average? (In 2002, Madison Metropolitan schools were at 195 children per administrator; the rest of the state averaged 242 children per administrator.) Have the few administrative openings you?ve left unfilled over the past few years actually brought us into line with the rest of the state?
Some interesting insight into another district’s budgeting process, knowledge, and challenges.
There are those who like to work with numbers, and then there are those who figure school budgets. They’re not necessarily the same person.
School finance consists of a labyrinth of property values, student enrollment totals, federal aid, and state aid. Only two people in Chetek claim to understand the funding formula from top to bottom: Superintendent Al Brown and business manager Tammy Lenbom.
A couple times of year their budgetary work catches the public’s eye – once in September when it comes time to pass the budget at the annual meeting, and once about this time of year when Brown and Lenbom propose that budget for next fall.
The budget proposal period is more visible, because that is when we find out how those financial decisions will affect people’s lives – teachers who may be forced to look for new jobs, or students who might have their favorite class offering taken away from them.
While it takes a professional to explain a school budget line item by line item, this article is an attempt to at least summarize how school administrators and the school board reach their budgetary decisions, as well as detailing some of the struggles they face.
The timetable
Nancy Donahue: Cole not “beholden”
Nancy Donahue, one of the organizers of The Studio School, sent this message to SIS:
I have had the opportunity to talk with Maya Cole twice in the past two weeks and I am convinced that she would be an excellent addition to our school board …someone who can see the big picture and incorporate it into a vision for our schools and our community. A change agent? Moreover, Maya is unfettered by the MTI machinery and political agenda so I can trust that her votes are guided by her own judgment. I am also supporting Rick Thomas for many of the same reasons.
I think that it is imperative that we make every effort to ensure that the people we elect are not “beholden” to any large organization to support their campaigns. MTI’s questionnaire flagrantly and publicly advertises that candidates must comply with the MTI agenda if they want MTI political support (which would be difficult to pass up). But the campaigns are just the beginning of an insidious political relationship. Along with MTI support comes the continual threat of repercussions (i.e., public criticism and withdrawal of support) if, once elected, a candidate should muster the personal integrity to cast a vote that runs counter to the MTI position. I prefer that our school board members feel free to cast votes based on information rather than intimidation.
They’ll Do It Themselves, Thanks
By MICHAEL WINERIP
Published: March 11, 2007
The New York Times
I LIKE it!” said Yaniv Gorodischer. “What a night!”
It was a big, big night at the group home. The three residents Mr.
Gorodischer, 29, Jason Kingsley, 32, and Raymond Frost Jr., 28 along with an entourage that included their group home supervisor, Ernest Daniels, and their parents, were going to the Town Board meeting to present a petition to get a sidewalk for their busy street, Chatterton Parkway.
All three had put on neckties. “For Town Hall I want to look decent,” Mr.Frost said. “Handsome and decent.” He’d practiced his speech six times. “I’m going to say, ‘My name is Raymond Frost Jr.’ And I’ll say that we got our neighbors to sign the petition, and 28 signed and 2 didn’t want to.”
And Mr. Gorodischer said: “First off, I’ll say, ‘My name is Yaniv
Gorodischer.’ And I can remember, I remember … shoot, I forgot.”
For that reason, Emily Kingsley, Jason’s mother, had written a speech for them to read. “Just in case,” she said, handing it to her son.
“We won’t need it,” he said. “We know how to say it.”
Several weeks before, Ms. Kingsley had drawn up the petition and
accompanied her son and his two roommates door to door. All three men have Down syndrome and cannot drive, but they are striving to be as independent as possible, and that means walking to their jobs along this street with its steep hill, its blind curve and cars that whiz by.
Ms. Kingsley, 67, had stood in the driveways while the three men knocked on doors, collecting signatures. “Most people were very nice,” she said. “When one man refused, they got confused. They couldn’t understand someone would say no to them. He was an old guy and said if he had a sidewalk he’d have to shovel snow. They said, ‘We’ll shovel it for you.’ And he says, ‘No, you won’t.’ And they say, ‘Yes, we will.’ ”
Since the group home opened in September 2002, the three have worked hard to be good neighbors. “Tell the story how you called me about baking a cake for your new neighbors,” Ms. Kingsley said.
“I don’t know that story,” her son said.
“Yes, you do.”
“It’s coming back,” the son said. “We asked to bake a cake for the new neighbors across the street. That was nice of us, to give them a little treat.” “And you called me for help with the cake,” the mother said. “And I said, “All three of you are on a diet.’ ”
“Not for us,” her son said. “For the neighbors.”
“Chocolate cake,” Mr. Frost said.
“We all helped,” Mr. Gorodischer said.
“Three Musketeers,” Mr. Frost said. “Now four beautiful years living in this house.” “Almost five beautiful years,” Mr. Kingsley said.
“A very big environment,” Mr. Gorodischer said.
“Because we all three guys looked out for each other,” Mr. Frost said.
“And what is the meaning of brotherhood?” Mr. Gorodischer said. “We can stand tall and be united. Meaning we can win over Town Hall!”
Then someone said it was time, and the three piled out the door and down the stairs and squeezed into Ms. Kingsley’s sedan, heading for Town Hall to see if they could get themselves a sidewalk.
WHEN Jason Kingsley was born, on June 27, 1974, the doctors told Ms.
Kingsley and her husband, Charles, to put him in an institution. “They told me he wouldn’t be able to distinguish us from other adults,” she recalled.
“They said, ‘Never see him again, and tell your friends and family that he died in childbirth.’ They were so sure I would institutionalize him, they gave me pills to dry up my milk.’ ”
Ms. Kingsley couldn’t have known it then, but her son was born right at the great divide between the dark years, when the mentally retarded were hidden away in state institutions, and modern times, when most of those institutions have been shuttered and the developmentally disabled live among us, in supervised group homes and apartment programs.
Two years before Jason’s birth, in January 1972,
into state-financed community housing. Decades later, Mr. Carey would say it was the one thing he’d done as governor that he could really hold on to.
At the time, there were 26,000 people living in 20 state institutions for the retarded in New York and just 1,570 in state-financed group homes.
Today there are 32,722 developmentally disabled New Yorkers in community residences, and fewer than a thousand the most severely disabled in a handful of institutions. In 1980, New Jersey had just 471 community beds; Connecticut had 963. Today New Jersey has 7,173, Connecticut 5,313. They are paid for by the states, and most are run by nonprofit agencies.
In 1974, the Kingsleys started on what was then a new parenting approach for children with disabilities called early intervention, which today has become standard practice. The infant is exposed to high levels of stimulus and physical therapy. Ms. Kingsley did Jason’s room in bright colors; she made a quilt for him with every patch a different material. “We surrounded him with motion and music, and we’d talk and talk to him,” she says. To “wake up his senses,” she filled a tub with Jell-O, and plopped him in.
“I had people tell me that he wouldn’t be able to read,” she recalled. “He started reading at age 4. It was so exciting. Everything they said he wouldn’t do, he was doing.”
Jason’s parents would take him to Broadway musicals, and he would memorize all the songs. To this day, if Ms. Kingsley challenges her son to adapt a show tune for his roommates, he’ll burst into a verse of “Singing in the Raymond” or “Some Enchanted Yaniving.”
The Kingsleys lectured at medical schools about the untapped potential of children with Down syndrome. “Doctors needed to see the old stereotypes didn’t apply,” she said. Ms. Kingsley is a veteran writer for “Sesame Street” she has won 17 Emmys and she pushed to have Jason on the air, so the public, too, would see. Jason appeared a dozen times, starting at 15 months (sitting on Buffy Sainte-Marie’s lap as she sang). At age 6 he did skits with Ernie, at 8 with Forgetful Jones.
Being pioneers, Ms. Kingsley and her husband (who died nine years ago) had no sense where the limits were, and it was hard when they learned. “I thought he was so smart, I thought I had fixed it,” she said. “But between 6 and 8 all the typical kids caught up and passed by. Typical kids got sophisticated and streetwise, picked up nuances about relationships that he could not.
“Jason was great at parlor tricks, he could count to 10 in 12 languages,” she said. But when she put him in a youth soccer league, he too often ran the wrong way. He mastered the mechanics of reading but struggled with comprehension. “He learned, but took longer than regular kids.” Regular kids would say, “Do we have to have him on our team?”
“I realized this was in fact a child with D.S.,” she said, “and as hard as I worked, it would not go away.”
Thanks to his mother’s background in television, the son had opportunitiesmost never get. At 10 he appeared on the TV show “The Fall Guy”; at 19, on “touched by an Angel.” With his mother’s help, he and his friend Mitchell Levitz wrote a book about Down syndrome, “Count Us In,” published by Harcourt in 1994.
But when Mr. Kingsley was no longer young and cuddly, things were harder. Having mingled with the stars, he grew impatient with mundane work. He had a job shelving videos at a library, and came up with his own system for reorganizing the collection. “It made perfect sense to him,” his mother says, “but nobody could find anything.” He now delivers mail in an office building, though he still lists his career goal as “directing animated feature films for the Disney corporation.” His roommate Mr. Gorodischer works in the mailroom of a law office. Mr. Frost is a clerk at Petco, specializing in fish and small animals.
The Kingsleys set their son up in his own apartment in the late 1990s, but over time, he became isolated, the apartment grew messy, and he stopped shaving and bathing regularly. “We were too optimistic,” Ms. Kingsley said. “He needed more structure.” The group home, which is run by Westchester Arc, a nonprofit agency, has counselors on duty from 4 p.m. to 8 a.m. to provide both oversight and routine. It’s a comfort for the mother, who will not live forever.
AS they walked into Town Hall, Mr. Gorodischer lagged behind, and Mr. Frost yelled, “Yaniv, move up, you’re with us.”
Inside, Channel 12 was waiting. “How long have you been fighting for this?” the reporter asked.
“This is our first time,” Mr. Frost said.
“But you have petitions?” the reporter said.
“We hope to win over Town Hall,” Mr. Frost said.
They launched into a “Three Musketeers” cheer all for one and one for all! that caught Channel 12 off guard. “Hold on, we missed that,” the reporter said. “Let’s do it again. Quiet … action.”
Before the meeting, Paul J. Feiner, the town supervisor, told the men he supported the sidewalk and credited them with forcing the Town Board to develop a sidewalk policy, but said it could be two years before there was any action.
They were first on the agenda, and it must have been more nerve-racking than they had expected, because, after a few hems and haws, Mr. Kingsley pulled out the speech his mother had written, and each of them read a few sentences.
“You should go home tonight feeling very, very proud,” Mr. Feiner said. “You’ve already accomplished a lot, and I’ll work hard to make your dream of sidewalks a reality.”
The whole thing took about three minutes, and soon the entourage was back at the group home with everyone gathered around the dining room table eating cake. While the guests chatted away, Mr. Frost and Mr. Kingsley slipped upstairs. It was getting late, and they had work in the morning.
A Longer School Day?
States and school districts nationwide are moving to lengthen the day at struggling schools, spurred by grim test results suggesting that more than 10,000 schools are likely to be declared failing under federal law next year.
In Massachusetts, in the forefront of the movement, Gov. Deval L. Patrick is allocating $6.5 million this year for longer days and can barely keep pace with demand: 84 schools have expressed interest.
Gov. Eliot Spitzer of New York has proposed an extended day as one of five options for his state’s troubled schools, part of a $7 billion increase in spending on education over the next four years — apart from the 37 minutes of extra tutoring that children in some city schools already receive four times a week.
And Gov. M. Jodi Rell of Connecticut is proposing to lengthen the day at persistently failing schools as part of a push to raise state spending on education by $1 billion.
“In 15 years, I’d be very surprised if the old school calendar still dominates in urban settings,” said Mark Roosevelt, superintendent of schools in Pittsburgh, which has added 45 minutes a day at eight of its lowest-performing schools and 10 more days to their academic year.
The Hobart Shakespeareans
PBS:
Imagine the sight and sound of American nine- and eleven-year-old children performing Shakespeare’s Hamlet or Henry V — and understanding every word they recite. Imagine them performing well enough to elicit praise from such accomplished Shakespearean actors as Ian McKellen and Michael York, and to be invited to perform with the Royal Shakespeare Company in England. Such a spectacle would be highly impressive in the toniest of America’s private schools. But what if the kids were the children of recent Latino and Asian immigrants attending a large Los Angeles inner-city public school in one of America’s toughest neighborhoods?
That is the astonishing story told by the new documentary “The Hobart Shakespeareans,” which discovers how one man’s uncommon commitment and resourcefulness have opened up worlds of opportunity for his “disadvantaged” students — and perhaps have demonstrated a way forward for America’s beleaguered public education system.
The Latino- and Asian-American children crowding Los Angeles’ sprawling Hobart Boulevard Elementary face daunting odds. Their neighborhood in the heart of Central Los Angeles is better known for crime than for opportunity. They grow up in low-income households. Their school, typically for public education in poor districts, is under-funded and overcrowded. Most of their parents do not speak English. No one is giving these kids educational perks, like class trips and intensive tutoring. And no one is expecting any but the smartest and luckiest to rise beyond the limitations of their environment. No one, that is, except Rafe Esquith.
“Cooking the Numbers” – Madison’s Reading Program
From the Fayetteville, NC Observer:
Superintendent Art Rainwater loves to discuss the Madison Metropolitan School District’s success in eliminating the racial achievement gap.
But he won’t consult with educators from other communities until they are ready to confront the issue head on.
“I’m willing to talk,” Rainwater tells people seeking his advice, “when you are willing to stand up and admit the problem, to say our minority children do not perform as well as our white students.”Only then will Rainwater reveal the methods Madison used to level the academic playing field for minority students.
This is an odd statement. The racial achievement gap is accepted as an uncomfortable fact everywhere; it is much discussed. No superintendent in the U.S. — except for Rainwater — claims to have eliminated the gap.Today, Rainwater said, no statistical achievement gap exists between the 25,000 white and minority students in Madison’s schools.
Impressive, but untrue, writes Right Wing Prof, who looked at Madison reading scores across all grades.I found a graph comparing Madison to five similar districts in Wisconsin, all of which do much better than Madison on fourth-grade reading.
Joanne was in Milwaukee and Madison recently to discuss her book, “Our School“.
Related Links:
- Diana Jean Schemo’s article: Madison’s Reading Battle Makes the NYT: In War Over Teaching Reading, a U.S.-Local Clash
- Jason Shephard: Reading Between the Lines: Madison Was Right to Reject Compromised Program
- Mark Seidenberg on Reading First
- Joanne Jacobs on Reading War II
- Third Grade Reading Scores by Ed Blume
- Mark Seidenberg’s informal talk on reading education
- “There’s something deeply wrong here” and here
“No, My Son Doesn’t ‘Act Black.’ There’s No Such Thing.”
This powerful first-person account by Aleta Payne first appeared in the Washington Post earlier this month. It brought tears to my eyes as I read it in our own Cap Times last night. The piece drives home the multifaceted nature of the achievement gap, underscoring the fact that the search for a single solution is seriously misguided and that we must each do our part.
Sam came home from the overnighter visibly crushed. He curled around his hurt as though he’d been punched in the gut, and he refused to say what had happened. My husband and I fought panic as all the horrible things that might happen to a 14-year-old away from home pounded through our brains. We cajoled and interrogated as he tried to disappear into the living room sofa, until finally, enough of the story emerged to reassure us that our oldest son hadn’t been physically injured. But his suffering was still real.
His friends had asked him why he didn’t act black.
Pay Schools for Better Results
But it is not true that these kids are simply genetic train wrecks who we should be prepared to write off. Disadvantaged kids can be taught to read, write, and perform basic mathematical operations, and they can be taught to behave if their parents have neglected that task. In our system, however, any school that manages to do so achieves this feat only through heroic efforts to overcome the institutional barriers put in the way. For various reasons, this is not happening. I have a novel approach to solving this problem: I propose we . . . pay schools on the basis of their ability to educate these children. I plan to call this system something nifty and new-economy, like . . . a market. That has an edgy, new-millenial kind of feel, doesn’t it? I think it’s the juxtaposition of the hard-edged k and t sounds with the soft, sensuous labials of the first syllable.
Can the school system overcome all the handicaps that disadvantaged kids are born with? I doubt it. But it could certainly do better . . . and it could hardly do worse than many urban school districts.
Galt has more on schools here.
Madison’s Fund 80 & Elections
In this morning’s Wisconsin State Journal there is a story that again misrepresents the place of Madison School Community Recreation and Fund 80 in the district and the community.
The chart comparing Fund 80 levies in Madison to those in other districts ignores the fact that most or all of those locales have municipal recreation programs paid for by municipal taxes. Due to a historical quirk, Madison has very little in the way of a municipal recreation department and programs and services that other locales fund via municipal or county taxes are funded and governed by the school district via Fund 80. In order to get a realistic comparison of Madison’s spending on recreational and community education programming one must look at total levies devoted to this. The last time I did this (early 2006) I found that the combined spending on MSCR and the Madison Parks Department was about $20 million. De Moines, IA (about the same size) has a parks and recreation budget of about $20 million. Ann Arbor, MI is about half the size of Madison and has a Parks and Recreation budget of $12 million. Green Bay, also about half the size has a Parks and Recreation Budget of $8 million. In other words, the spending in these areas is very much in line with what others spend.
There’s been no shortage of discussion on Fund 80 here. 2006 / 2007 Madison School District $333M+ Citizen’s Budget.
Related:
- Amy Hetzner: Community Service Levies Climbed Since Revenue Caps Lifted:
But once the Legislature removed the caps on the community service levies for the 2000-’01 school year and gave school districts an opportunity to keep their recreational activities from conflicting with educational programs, more took advantage of it.
“I think – when you look at districts across the state – that’s really what caused the jump,” said Art Rainwater, superintendent of the Madison Metropolitan School District, which in 2005-’06 had the largest community service levy in the state.
Like some of the bigger community service funds, Madison’s supports a full recreation department with adult and youth programming. But it also helps pay for television production activities, after-school activities, a gay and lesbian community program coordinator and part of a social worker’s time to work with low-income families, Rainwater said.
The School District’s community service levy is expected to grow to $10.5 million in the coming school year. In contrast, the same levy for Milwaukee Public Schools – which serves nearly four times as many children in its educational programs – is expected to reach $9.3 million, said Michelle Nate, the district’s director of finance.
Although the state Department of Public Instruction has issued guidelines to school districts on how they should use their community service levies, it leaves it up to local residents to decide whether their school boards do so wisely and legally. - Carol Carstensen: Fund 80 is Worth our Support.
- Lucy Mathiak: Community Service Fund 80, Can We talk?
- Ruth Robarts: A Tale of Two Budgets: the Operating Budget for Madison Schools versus its Budget for Community Programs and Services
- A look at the City of Madison’s parcel count growth.
The charts are from Lucy Mathiak’s post:
East Side school plan opposed
East Side school plan opposed
DEBORAH ZIFF
608-252-6120
March 19, 2007
Waving bright signs and chanting, dozens of parents, kids, and teachers converged at a School Board meeting Monday night to protest proposed budget cuts that could consolidate elementary and middle schools on the East Side.
Earlier this month, Madison school officials proposed addressing a projected $10.5 million shortfall in next year’s budget by moving Marquette Elementary students to Lapham Elementary and splitting Sherman Middle School students between O’Keeffe and Black Hawk middle school. The move would save about $800,000.
School Board members are still wrangling with at least five options to deal with the budget deficit and were presented with an alternative consolidation plan at Monday’s meeting.
But many affected students, parents and teachers came to the meeting angry about the administration’s recommendation to take students out of Marquette and Sherman, arguing it would eliminate neighborhood schools, force kids who currently walk to school to take buses, and increase class sizes.
“I really don’t want to go to Lapham,” said Kalley Rittman, a Marquette fourth-grader who was at the rally with her parents. “All the kids are going to be squished in one place.”
Currently, Kalley and her sister in third grade, Hannah, walk to Marquette, said their mother, Kit. They would have to be bused to Lapham.
Kalley was also clutching an envelope with letters from other students and teachers at Marquette, and later spoke in front of the board, telling them she created a video on the school for them to watch.
Faye Kubly said her 11-year-old son had trouble in elementary schools before he transferred to Marquette, where teachers developed a system for him to learn successfully. She and other parents called the middle school proposal a “mega middle school” and called on the state to change its funding guidelines.
Fixing Dixie’s tricksy schools
The hard lessons of segregation
WAYNE CLOUGH, the president of the Georgia Institute of Technology, has just moved into a new office. The workmen are still in the corridors outside, generating noise and dust. A few years ago the site, in Atlanta, was full of drug addicts and prostitutes. The hotel across the street was boarded up and inhabited by vagrants. Now Georgia Tech is building a “sustainable, energy-efficient campus” with white roofs, recycled building materials and a system for catching and using rainwater. It is a bit more expensive, says Mr Clough, but “if you plan to be around for a while, you’ll recapture the costs eventually.”
Georgia Tech has a global reputation. Its 16,000 students will mostly go on to careers in engineering, medicine or some other tough and lucrative field. But Mr Clough does have some worries. Southern universities got into the research game later than their northern rivals, so the region is behind the curve in attracting high-tech industries, he says. From time to time, fundamentalists try to teach creationism as science in southern public schools, which “reinforces the backward image”. But his biggest worry is that not enough young southerners are mastering science and maths.
“Brother Dave” Gardner, a stand-up comic from Tennessee, greeted the 1954 Supreme Court order to end segregated schools with the quip: “Let ’em go to school, beloved. We went, and we didn’t learn nothin’.” That was harsh, but partly grounded in fact. The point of school segregation was to keep blacks down and whites separate. When it ended, many white parents moved their children from newly integrated public schools to private schools whose chief selling point was whiteness, not academic rigour.
Testimony asks for three commitments
Thank you for your service and thank you for your request to hear from the community.
My name is Shari Entenmann and I’m here as a parent of 3 young children entrusting you with their school experience.
As you move forward with the budget process there are three things I’d like you to commit to:
1. Our downtown schools need to be vital, they are the heart of our city and why many of us moved here – myself included. Let’s not unravel what’s been built and what we can accomplish in the future. We want our schools to be vibrant and attractive so others choose to live here like I did.
2. Consider the details carefully – often it’s the details that matter:a. What about the TEP program. My understanding from parents directly involved in bringing TEP to Lapham that part of what’s needed to make the program a success is the SAGE class sizes.
• Will Lapham still have TEP
• If TEP then SAGE, if SAGE is there room to consolidate?
• If not TEP, where will it go, back to Emerson – but wasn’t there concern about it being too much for one school?
• When making these decisions you have to consider this vulnerable population in this TEP program.b. What about the alternatives program. Steve Hartley gave a very inspiring presentation last year at Marquette (when we were going through this exercise) and it was clear to me and others that the keystone to the success of the program is separating the kids from their age-group peers. Are you sure the proposal to move the program to Sherman has considered this, I didn’t see that consideration in the presentation to the board a few weeks ago.
c. Is the proposed larger middle school too big? I hear the comparison to Hamilton as a reference that it’s not. However, I don’t believe that’s an appropriate comparison. This is a very different population and I’ve heard concern from many teachers, and educators that’s it’s too big for this population, particularly with our resource restrictions.3. An open process that allows all things to be discussed and considered with community involvement. We’ve heard several times that there’s nothing else to cut but things that effect the classroom and so everything must be on the table, even this drastic change that saves less than 700,000. However in all the discussion that’s lead to this point I haven’t heard any discussion on the following:
a. I’ve heard there may be more funds coming in the next few months – is this the time to propose such drastic changes – especially when these changes aren’t part of an overall plan but are part of the annual ad hoc widdling away process.
b. Extra-curriculars
c. Sports
Please consider what I’ve said. I believe it’s necessary to be successful because we live in a passionate community that strongly supports public education. Everyone needs to be involved.
Very sincerely, again, thank you for your service.
Shari Entemann
Budget Impacts at Franklin-Randall–Don’t Get Mad, Get Active!!
(This letter is being distributed to parents of Franklin-Randall students, but should concern everyone in the MMSD and Regent Neighborhood)
SCHOOL FUNDING CRISIS:
Don’t get mad, get active!!
March 16, 2007
The School Board recently announced sweeping budget cuts for the coming school year that will have a severe impact on Franklin-Randall, as well as other schools in the district. Following Tuesday’s PTO meeting, parents in attendance agreed that we must act QUICKLY to address this crisis. Below, we have summarized the funding crisis, and how cuts to our and other schools will affect our children’s education and safety. Most importantly, we conclude with specific ideas that we can all implement, to positively address this crisis.
Brief overview of the FUNDING CRISIS: Wisconsin has placed an indefinite “Budget Cap” on all additional funding towards schools. Every year there are increased costs to our schools to cover teacher salaries, increased student numbers, and increased maintenance costs. Without intervention and change, Madison’s reputation for excellence in education is going to change significantly, and with that, so will the diversity, appeal, and attraction of our city.
How will current district recommendations directly affect the education and safety of your children in the Franklin-Randall community?
*As a result of the “SAGE” program being cut from our schools, Franklin-Randall class sizes will rise from 15 to 22 for Kindergarten and First grade, and from 15 to 24 for Second and Third grades this Fall.
*Franklin will lose 5.1 teacher allocations; this most likely means that 3 classroom teachers will be laid-off, and there will be reductions throughout Art, Music, PE, and Reach.
*Randall will lose 1.6 teacher allocations.
*Randall will lose the 5th grade strings program (last year 4th grade strings was cut).
How will cuts at OTHER schools affect the education and safety of your children?
All of our city’s elementary school children come together in middle and high schools; sub-standard education in any one of these schools will therefore affect all students eventually: a loss for one school will become a loss for all.
What can I do NOW?
1. Talk to people at your bus stop, in your neighborhood, and in the hallways at school when you’re there– work together to come up with at least one idea to present at the Rescue Our Schools brainstorm session. This meeting will follow the monthly PTO meeting (Tuesday, April 10th at 6:30) in the Randall Library.
2. Talk to grandparents, aunts, uncles, and neighbors who DON’T have children about how these changes to our schools will affect them. One key point to address is that our city is only as appealing as its future, and our children are the future. Everyone, with or without kids, will be affected. Wisconsin has a history of valuing education and performance; if this changes, we are giving up a source of identity and pride!
3. Attend the Information and Advocacy Session at the Doyle Administration Building, Thursday, March 29th at 6:30pm
4. Form shared child-care groups with friends and neighbors to allow for more parental presence in the schools. Make it a goal to do this in some capacity weekly. These cooperatives will allow you to watch or volunteer at more school functions, participate in school trips, or attend school board meetings. Education research definitively shows, that the more YOU are involved, the more success your child will have in school!
5. As you are able, contribute with time or money to the PTO! $100 can buy a violin that will last 10 years! Commit to a half-hour stint helping on the playground weekly — this equates to invaluable community-building, camaraderie, injury prevention, as well as much-needed breaks for our teachers.
6. Attend the MMSD School Board Meetings, held on Mondays at the Doyle Administration Bldg at 545 W. Dayton St, next door to the Kohl Center. Beginning at 7:15, any person or group can make a “Public Appearance” (up to three minutes each) to deliver opinions / make arguments about any school-related topic. To find out more, go to www.madison.k12.wi.us : under “District Information” click on “Board of Education”, then under “Meetings”, click on “Board of Education Calendar”.
7. Become active in the you school PTO!!! Sign up to be on the Franklin-Randall List-Serve — This is a fast, easy and inexpensive way for people to notify each other about F-R events and news. Simply send an email to: F-R_pto-subscribe@yahoogroups.com, with “subscribe” in the subject line. To find out about all the up-coming meetings and events, go to the F-R PTO website. Site address is www.franklinrandallpto.org
8. Don’t forget to VOTE on Tues, April 3rd, during Spring break–And if you’re not in town, vote ABSENTEE! To vote absentee, go anytime within one week before the election, to the City-County Building at 210 Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd, Rm. 103. 8-4:30pm. Alternatively, by calling 266-4601, you may ask the city to mail you a ballot (English, Spanish or Hmong), or simply go online: www.cityofmadison.com/clerk/voterabsentee.cfm (also downloadable in English, Spanish or Hmong)
What can I do long-term?
Ultimately, we have to address long-term changes to school funding at the State and National level. Through grassroots organizing directed at raising awareness of the issues, we can make a change. We must reach out to like-minded groups (other PTO’s, PTA etc.), and legislators around the state. To this end, following April’s PTO meeting, we will meet to collect ideas, and organize our strategies —
*PLEASE come to the PTO Meeting, April 10th at 6:30pm (Randall Library)!! *
Thank you for taking the time to read this, and for taking action in whatever way you can!
Concerned Franklin-Randall Parents
For further information, please contact any of us:
Sari Judge 233-1754, Megan Brown 250-0552, Kate Zirbel 661-9090,
Mollie Kane 232-1809, Erika Kluetmeier, 238-6209
MPIE and MUAE Update
As some of you may recall, back in December, I posted a few questions to the members of Madison Partners for Inclusive Education. As a result of that posting, several members of each group have met a couple of times in order to try and make personal connections and identify areas of shared concern and potential joint advocacy. It is too early to say how that effort is going. I, personally, am ever hopeful that we can find the patience and persistence needed to build a foundation of mutual understanding and trust, a foundation upon which we can ultimately work together for all children.
I would like to share a recent exchange from the MUAE list serve (where MPIE members have been welcome since the get-go — in fact, more than one are longtime MUAE list serve members). In response to a post about one of the BOE candidates, an MPIE member wrote the following:
I would like to clarify something that was misstated in a recent post. Madison Partners for Inclusive Education (MPIE) does NOT promote or endorse COMPLETELY heterogeneous classrooms ALL the time. The group does not think completely heterogeneous classrooms all of the time is in the best interest of children with disabilities. Their website goes on to explain their philosophy: http://www.madisonpartnersforinclusion.org/whatisinclusion.html Thank you for understanding this and clarifying in future posts.
I then replied:
Thanks for the clarification, though I really think we are in agreement on this point. Certainly the inclusion decision for students with disabilities should be a flexible one, based on the specific nature of the disabilities, the specific educational needs, and the family’s preference for their child. Most of us know, for example, about IDEA and the K-12 IEP process. We know, too, that our high schools offer alternative classes and other learning options for those students with disabilities for whom the “regular” classes are not appropriate.
I am sure we get sloppy with our language, at times; but our language errors are surely inadvertent, mostly because — like all parents — we are simply thinking about our own children, whether or not they are thriving, and whether or not their needs are being well met by our schools. We are guilty of being good parents. Nevertheless, we apologize.
The fact is, we do not want much of anything to change for students with disabilities. (We would like to see the state and federal governments pay a larger portion of the tab for special education — can we encourage your group to take the lead on that issue at the local level?). We support all of the flexibility, all of the options, and all of the tailoring of educational programming that goes on for them during their years in the MMSD. MUAE stands absolutely with MPIE on that, as I see it (though obviously I really can’t speak for everyone). We are your partners there.
We ask the same of you.
I wonder, will you be our partners in getting our children’s educational needs met in the same way that the needs of students with disabilities are met? Just as you do not think placement in completely heterogeneous classrooms all of the time is in the best interest of children with disabilities, so do we think such placement is inappropriate for our children. Full days spent in “regular” classrooms does not necessarily meet our children’s educational needs any better than it does your children’s needs. We are told the District is committed to giving each student the appropriate “next level of challenge.” And yet too many of us know (or have) “formerly bright” students who have become turned off to school as a result of too many years of insufficient challenge and chronic boredom. They are miserable. They are in pain. They are not growing well at all. Meanwhile, our advocacy efforts on our children’s behalf are too often met with disdain, deception and complete stonewalling. We do not yet have the same legal foundation on which to stand as you do.
We at MUAE are simply asking for the same flexibility — in thinking, in approach, in educational opportunity and in classroom placement — for the District’s highest potential, highest performing students that students with disabilities experience. Nothing more; nothing less.
Can you and the other MPIE members support us in that position as wholeheartedly as MUAE members support you in yours? (That’s really the question I was asking of you in my SIS post a while back.)
I hope so.
“A Free and Appropriate Education”
Federal law states that in the U.S. every child has a right to a free and appropriate education no matter if the child is gifted & talented, average, or below average. Some children will cost more to educate than others.
There is an illusion that kids come with their abilities and needs stamped on their foreheads. As you have stated, we educate students with a huge range of intellectual, emotional, physical, linguistic, and economic needs. In special education, these needs are defined by arbitrary cut-offs and definitions. The premise is that these categories can be used as predictors of education costs to be incurred by specific disability and need.
Reading Recovery: More chipping and shredding in Fargo!
What makes this article from Fargo interesting is how it almost exactly mirrors the findings in my home district, Hortonville, and the recent analysis of Reading Recovery done in Madison. That being, a 50% success rate for RR students. From the article:
“However, West Fargo student data over time, as presented by Director of Knowledge Management Holly Budzinski Monday night, show that while this is happening in the short term, it?s not something the students sustain in the long run. The Administration has been scrutinizing the Reading Recovery program since two days after Budzinski arrived in West Fargo last January, and she has found that the majority of students served by Reading Recovery gradually lose their abilities to meet the class average by the time they reach sixth grade.”
On Math Reform
If one could make a case against the perpetrators of reform math—complete with arrests and jail time—showing that such programs are a form of child abuse, the math wars would cease in a matter of days. As it is, however, reasoned arguments from those who oppose the reform programs haven’t seemed to carry much weight, as the programs seem to proliferate in school after school across the U.S. And in a recent Education Week column, Mr. T.C. O’Brien seems quite content to skewer those who criticize the reform programs, resorting at times to borderline name-calling, and laying blame in large part on mathematicians. It seems that mathematicians’ call for math to be in math textbooks and that such math be is an artifact of purism and backwards thinking.
Ordinarily I would ignore such a diatribe. But I believe there have been too few rebuttals to this type of editorial which Education Week seems only too happy to publish. Take for example this statement: “The National Mathematics Advisory Panel, established by the Bush administration in April of last year, has been meeting to discuss the improvement of achievement in mathematics in the schools. A good portion of its members have no experience in mathematics, no experience teaching children, or both.”
Phonics is necessary but not sufficient
This post came from a listserve on reading:
This is in response to the NY Times article about Madison’s reading program. Of course a quick response is often inadequate. But here goes.
The simple fact is that correct decoding is necessary but not sufficient to comprehend what one is reading. Necessary but not sufficient appears to be a concept that escapes most of the field of education. What’s so hard about it, I wonder? You have to have water to stay alive, but that’s not sufficient to keep you alive. You have to have air to stay alive, but that’s not sufficient to keep you alive. Look at that dead person there. We gave him water and he still died. That must prove that water kills you!
Reaction to Waukesha School Budget Cutbacks & State Financial Aid
About 500 parents, students and spectators packed a school auditorium Monday night, pleading for help from local legislators in dealing with a financial situation that some predicted would devastate the School District.
“If we can pay for a stadium for a bunch of overpaid baseball players, we can certainly pay for an education for all of our children,” Heyer Elementary School parent Cheryl Gimignani told the six legislators participating in the forum in North High School’s auditorium.
The event came just two days before the School Board is set to approve $3.4 million worth of program and service cuts to balance its 2007-’08 budget.
Administrators have recommended eliminating the equivalent of 62 full-time staff positions, which would raise class sizes, delay band and orchestra instruction and nearly eliminate elementary guidance, elementary library and gifted programs in the district.
They blame the school system’s financial woes on perennial discrepancies between what the state allows the district to raise under revenue caps and its actual expenses. A separate law, the qualified economic offer, virtually guarantees teachers annual compensation increases of 3.8% while revenue grows by about 2%.
But the legislators offered little hope that much will change, at least in the near future, and said the school system would be better off looking for cost savings than expecting more money from Madison. Any change to the state funding system for schools likely would not benefit residents in Waukesha County, who already pay more in taxes than they receive back in aid from the state, they said.
“I do not want to change the formula,” said state Sen. Mary Lazich (R-New Berlin), “because if we tamper and change the formula, the school districts that I represent will lose, not gain.”
Lazich’s comments illustrate the unlikely nature of significant state K-12 finance changes that would benefit property rich school districts like Madison and Waukesha.
Superintendent’s March Message
Smart and successful
March, 2007
By Superintendent Art Rainwater
For children growing up today, becoming a successful adult requires much more than mastering reading, writing and arithmetic. The requirements for success are very different in an era when work on a single project may involve several countries, languages and cultures. Success requires much more than “book learning.” Success means having the “basic skills” to interact productively and have positive relationships with people who come from many different backgrounds.
The ability of today’s students to play a vital role in this changing world requires us to think differently about what constitutes a “basic” education. For many years we lived by the credo that students must primarily have the basic skills of reading, writing and arithmetic. No one disputes the essential nature of these skills. There are people who still believe that these are the only essential skills needed for success. In a world that brings together a truly diverse group of people every day in the workplace and society, being successful means much more than the advanced application of reading, writing and arithmetic.
Madison’s Reading Battle Makes the NYT: In War Over Teaching Reading, a U.S.-Local Clash
Diana Jean Schemo has been at this article for awhile:
The program, which gives $1 billion a year in grants to states, was supposed to end the so-called reading wars — the battle over the best method of teaching reading — but has instead opened a new and bitter front in the fight.
According to interviews with school officials and a string of federal audits and e-mail messages made public in recent months, federal officials and contractors used the program to pressure schools to adopt approaches that emphasize phonics, focusing on the mechanics of sounding out syllables, and to discard methods drawn from whole language that play down these mechanics and use cues like pictures or context to teach.
Federal officials who ran Reading First maintain that only curriculums including regular, systematic phonics lessons had the backing of “scientifically based reading research” required by the program.
Madison officials say that a year after Wisconsin joined Reading First, in 2004, contractors pressured them to drop their approach, which blends some phonics with whole language in a program called Balanced Literacy. Instead, they gave up the money — about $2 million, according to officials here, who say their program raised reading scores.
“We had data demonstrating that our children were learning at the rate that Reading First was aiming for, and they could not produce a single ounce of data to show the success rates of the program they were proposing,” said Art Rainwater, Madison’s superintendent of schools.
Much more on Reading First and Madison, here.
Notes & Links:
- UW Psychology Professor Mark Seidenberg:
Whole Language was a massive, uncontrolled experiment, with millions of children as unwitting subjects.
How it’s done: Someone gets an idea- Often a Guru. Many Gurus in reading instruction.
- Guru has brilliant insight about how children learn, how to teach reading – Their own personal theory
- The idea may be personally promoted by the guru, with direct appeals to teachers
- The idea is implemented on a vast scale, based on intuitions that it is good.
- Ruth Robarts on Madison Schools’ Reading Progress.
- Mark Seidenberg: Madison Schools Distort Reading Data.
UPDATE: Joanne Jacobs:
In part one of his response, Ken DeRosa of D-Ed Reckoning provides a reading passage altered to force readers to guess the meaning from context. Struggling this way does not inspire love of reading.
In part two, DeRosa analyzes the statistics to argue Madison students aren’t doing better in reading compared to other Wisconsin students; if anything, they’ve slipped a bit. Because the state reading test was made easier and the cut score for proficiency was lowered, all Wisconsin students look better. However, there was no progress in fourth-grade reading on the federal NAEP test.
With help from Rory of Parentalcation, who’s great at finding data, Ken shows that claims of fantastic progress by black students are illusory. Their scores improved on the easier test at a slightly slower rate than white students. It looks like to me as though blacks nearly caught up in basic skills but remain far behind at the proficient and advanced level. Perhaps someone who knows more statistics than I do — lots of you do — can find flaws in Ken’s analysis.
NYT Letters to the editor. Finally, others have raised questions about the MMSD’s analysis and publication of test score data.
Andrew Rotherham:
Diana Schemo’s NYT story on Reading First is not surprisingly sparking a lot of pushback and outraged emails, especially from the phonicshajeen. But, they have a point. There are problems with Reading First, but this may not be the best example of them at all…but, while you’re there, don’t miss the buried lede in graf eight…it’s almost like Schemo got snowed by all sides at once on this one…
Another gem from Bill Keys and AMPS
Since Advocates for Madison Public Schools doesn’t allow access to the archived posts of its listserve, I post the following to illustrate the contempt these people feel toward anyone who isn’t in lock-step with their point of view:
To: advocatesformadisonpublicschools@yahoogroups.com
Subject: [advocatesformadisonpublicschools] Summer Exercise for “Advocates”
Date: Mon, 24 Jul 2006 23:51:45 -0000
Here’s an interesting post from a local blog:I wil be moving to the madison area soon and need to find schools that
realize “gifted” children do have special needs. I can not waist anymore time trying to get this point accross to educators because meanwhile my cildren suffer. Where is the the best public school for gifted children in the Madison area? I will purchase a home right next door and hopfully I can stop fighting to get my children a proper educationAnd so “advocates”…how would you answer if she ran into you at the
grocery store?
Education, Education, Education
It’s an article of faith that the key to success in real estate is location, location, location.
For young black boys looking ahead to a difficult walk in life, the mantra should be education, education, education.
We’ve watched for decades — watched in horror, actually — as the lives of so many young blacks, men and boys especially, have been consumed by drugs, crime, poverty, ignorance, racial prejudice, misguided social pressures, and so on.
At the same time, millions of blacks have thrived, building strong families and successful careers at rates previously unseen. By far, the most important difference between these two very large groups has been educational attainment.
If anything, the role that education plays in the life prospects of black Americans is even more dramatic than in the population as a whole. It’s the closest thing to a magic potion for black people that I can think of. For boys and men, it is very often the antidote to prison or an early grave.
March Madison BOE Progress Report
March Madness is approaching! On the board level, madness can be characterized by the large assortments of topics and decisions that have been or will need to be made such as the superintendent search, budget, and other serious issues that require time, analysis and public discussion. I would like to give you a brief report on some of those topics.
No Child Left Behind’s Effect on the States
FOR as long as there have been maths tests, there have been cheats. But whereas a schoolboy caught furtively copying his neighbour’s answers can expect a zero and an angry letter home, states that rig exam results are showered with federal cash. This is one reason why the No Child Left Behind Act, a noble attempt to impose discipline on American schools, needs revision before it merits an A grade.
The premise behind the law was sensible enough. Before it was passed in 2002, state education bureaucrats were reluctant to collect and publish the kind of data that would have allowed parents to make comparisons between schools, or to tell if a school was improving over time. Good schools received few rewards; bad ones had little incentive to improve. President George Bush sought to change that.
Under No Child Left Behind, students must be tested on maths and reading every year between the ages of eight and 13, and once in high school. Test results must be published and broken down by race. Schools that fail to show “adequate yearly progress” face penalties. Parents of children at consistently failing schools must be allowed to move them to better ones.
All good stuff. But there are catches. Federal subsidies to the states depend on students meeting standards that the states themselves set. States thus have a multi-billion-dollar incentive to game the system. In Arizona, for example, only one-fifth of eighth-graders were rated “proficient” at maths after taking the state test in 2003. Two years later, that proportion had magically tripled. Does this mean that the test got easier to pass? “Yes,” says Janet Napolitano, Arizona’s plain-talking governor.
Wisconsin’s academic standards have been criticized by the Fordham Foundation:
The report being released today by the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation in Washington uses harsh terms in critiquing the standards that are intended to guide instruction in Wisconsin schools. “Depth is nowhere to be found,” it said of the science standards. “This document has no structure or method,” it said of the world history standards. “Skimpy content and vague wording,” it said in describing the math standards.
In June, a different group ranked Wisconsin No. 1 in the country in frustrating the goals of the federal No Child Left Behind law. Also in June, a third organization focused on Milwaukee and Wisconsin as examples of places where more inexperienced – and therefore, less proficient – teachers are disproportionately assigned to high-needs schools. And two weeks ago, the U.S. Department of Education rejected as inadequate Wisconsin’s plans for dealing with federal requirements that every student have a “highly qualified” teacher.
along with Kevin Carey: “Hot Air: How States Inflate Their Educational Progress Under NCLB “
Critics on both the Left and the Right have charged that the No Child Left Behind Act tramples states’ rights by imposing a federally mandated, one-size-fits-all accountability system on the nation’s diverse states and schools.
In truth, No Child Left Behind (NCLB) gives states wide discretion to define what students must learn, how that knowledge should be tested, and what test scores constitute “proficiency”—the key elements of any educational accountability system. States also set standards for high school graduation rates, teacher qualifications, school safety and many other aspects of school performance. As a result, states are largely free to define the terms of their own educational success.
The Pangloss Index ranks Wisconsin as the most optimistic state in the nation. Wisconsin scores well on some educational measures, like the SAT, but lags behind in others, such as achievement gaps for minority students. But according to the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction, the state is a modern-day educational utopia where a large majority of students meet academic standards, high school graduation rates are high, every school is safe and nearly all teachers are highly qualified. School districts around the nation are struggling to make Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP), the primary standard of school and district success under NCLB. Yet 99.8 percent of Wisconsin districts—425 out of 426—made AYP in 2004–05.
How is that possible? As Table 2 shows, some states have identified the large majority of districts as not making AYP. The answer lies with the way Wisconsin has chosen to define the AYP standard.
Education Report Card
The United States in the 21st century faces unprecedented economic and social challenges, ranging from the forces of global competition to the impending retirement of 77 million baby boomers. Succeeding in this new era will require our children to be prepared for the intellectual demands of the modern workplace and a far more complex society. Yet the evidence indicates that our country is not ready. Despite decades of reform efforts and many trillions of dollars in public investment, U.S. schools are not equipping our children with the skills and knowledge they-and the nation-so badly need.
It has been nearly a quarter century since the seminal report A Nation at Risk was issued in 1983. Since that time, a knowledge-based economy has emerged, the Internet has reshaped commerce and communication, exemplars of creative commerce like Microsoft, eBay, and Southwest Airlines have revolutionized the way we live, and the global economy has undergone wrenching change. Throughout that period, education spending has steadily increased and rafts of well-intentioned school reforms have come and gone. But student achievement has remained stagnant, and our K-12 schools have stayed remarkably unchanged-preserving, as if in amber, the routines, culture, and operations of an obsolete 1930s manufacturing plant.
Moving For Schools
“No place is perfect, but I wanted the place that was the most perfect for us and them,” says Ms. O’Gorman, 44. “To me, it’s better than leaving them a house or my 401k.”
Across the country, a small but growing number of parents like the O’Gormans are dramatically altering their families’ lives to pursue the perfect private school for their children. While past generations of parents might have shifted addresses within a town to be near a particular school, or shipped junior off to boarding school, these parents are choosing school first, location second. “I hear about it all the time,” says Patrick Bassett, president of the National Association of Independent Schools, or NAIS, in Washington, D.C.
Germantown Friends School in Philadelphia says four families have moved to the area in the past two years so their children can attend the school. Hathaway Brown School, an all-girls school in Shaker Heights, Ohio, reports five such families, four of which moved in the past few years. “It’s been a little more frequent in the last two or three years,” says Sally Jeanne McKenna, admissions director at Polytechnic School of Pasadena, Calif.
Locally, the well known Waisman Center has brought families to the Madison area.
Concessions Made in Advance of MTI Negotiations by a Majority of the Madison School Board
It will be interesting to see how voters on February 20 and April 3 view this decision by a majority of the Madison School Board: Should the Board and Administration continue to give away their ability to negotiate health care benefits ($43.5M of the 2006/2007 budge) before MTI union bargaining begins? Read the 2005 MMSD/MTI Voluntary Impasse Agreement [1.1MB PDF; see paragraph’s 2, 10 and 11]. The 2007 version, alluded to in Andy Hall’s article below, will be posted when it sees the light of day.
This is an important issue for all of us, given the MMSD’s challenge of balancing their growing $331M+ budget, while expenses – mostly salaries and benefits – continue to increase at a faster rate. Mix in the recent public disclosure of the district’s $5.9M 7 year structural deficit and I doubt that this is the best approach for our children.
Recently, the Sun Prairie School District and its teachers’ union successfully bargained with DeanCare to bring down future costs for employee health insurance.
Andy Hall, writing in the Wisconsin State Journal asks some useful questions:
But with the Madison School Board facing a $10.5 million budget shortfall, is the board giving away too much with its promises to retain teachers’ increasingly pricey health insurance and to discard its legal mechanism for limiting teachers’ total compensation increase to 3.8 percent?
Yes, School Board Vice President Lawrie Kobza said Saturday, “I feel very strongly that this was a mistake,” said Kobza, who acknowledged that most board members endorse the agreement with Madison Teachers Inc., the teachers union.
State law allows districts to avoid arbitration by making a so-called qualified economic offer, or QEO, by boosting salaries and benefits a combined 3.8 percenter a year.
“To agree before a negotiation starts that we’re not going to impose the QEO and negotiate health care weakens the district’s position,” Kobza said. She contended the district’s rising health-care costs are harming its ability to raise starting teachers’ salaries enough to remain competitive.
The “voluntary impasse resolution” agreements, which are public records, are used in only a handful of Wisconsin’s 425 school districts, according to the Wisconsin Employment Relations Commission.
Four of the 7 current Madison School Board Members were backed by MTI during their campaigns (Arlene Silveira, Carol Carstensen, Shwaw Vang and Johnny Winston, Jr.). Those four votes can continue this practice. Independent School Board members Lawrie Kobza and Ruth Robarts have spoken publicly against the concessions made in advance of negotiations. If you support or oppose this approach, let the board know via email (comments@madison.k12.wi.us), or phone.
Related links, media and transcripts:
- What’s the MTI Political Endorsement about?:
In 2006-07 the Madison School district will spend $43.5M on health insurance for its employees, the majority of the money paying for insurance for teachers represented by Madison Teachers, Inc. (MTI) That is 17% of the operating budget under the revenue limits.
In June of 2007, the two-year contract between the district and MTI ends. The parties are now beginning negotiations for the 2007-09 contract.
The Sun Prairie School district and its teachers union recently saved substantial dollars on health insurance. They used the savings to improve teacher wages. The parties joined together openly and publicly to produce a statement of the employees health needs. Then they negotiated a health insurance package with a local HMO that met their needs. - The MMSD Custodians recently agreed to a new health care plan where 85% of the cost savings went to salaries and 15% to the MMSD.
- Ruth Robarts discussed concessions in advance of negotiations, health care costs and the upcoming elections with Vicki McKenna recently. [6.5MB MP3 Audio | Transcript]
- What a Sham(e) by Jason Shephard:
Last week, Madison Teachers Inc. announced it would not reopen contract negotiations following a hollow attempt to study health insurance alternatives.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but anyone who suggests the Joint Committee on Health Insurance Issues conducted a fair or comprehensive review needs to get checked out by a doctor.
The task force’s inaction is a victory for John Matthews, MTI’s executive director and board member Wisconsin Physicians Service.
Losers include open government, school officials, taxpayers and young teachers in need of a raise.
From its start, the task force, comprised of three members each from MTI and the district, seemed to dodge not only its mission but scrutiny.
Teachers Reclaiming Assessment Through Rethinking Accountability
Chris Gallagher
THE EDUCATION report card for my home state of Nebraska in the spring of 1999 was mixed, according to Education Week. While children in the state ranked among the top 10 nationally in most academic categories, Nebraska nonetheless garnered only a C. Why? Largely because it does not administer statewide, standardized assessments and so is “lagging behind” in accountability. Both those reporting this verdict and most of the state and local officials receiving it seem to be resigned to it as a sure but unsurprising sign that we have more work to do to “catch up” with the rest of the country. It does not seem to strike most observers as odd that, although students’ performance is high, the state’s marks are only average. Until Nebraska develops statewide tests, it will continue to receive low grades, irrespective of what our students are doing. This kind of press may well propel the state to abandon its long-held commitment to local assessment and fall in line with the national movement toward state standardized tests.
This report and its handling demonstrate the extent to which educational tests have become “common sense.” To use a term proposed by Italian philosopher Antonio Gramsci, educational testing is “hegemonic” — that is, it manufactures consent by presenting itself (or being represented as) “obvious.” Although standardized tests came under intense fire for a short time in the 1970s, we have returned to this practice with a fervor perhaps greater than at any other time since schools in the United States began making extensive use of standardized tests in the 1930s. Even many educators who have long understood the limitations and outright injustices of standardized testing and the testing industry claim that the time has passed when resistance to testing is useful.
I think it is dangerous to be too sanguine about the prospects for reforming the assessment community and disrupting the commonsense script for education reform, in which schools are cast as damsels in distress, remote experts are cast as heroic saviors, and teachers are written out of the production altogether. We need to confront the fact that, finally, the persistence of the “crisis in education” is attributable in large part to two factors: the profit margins of the testing industry that maintains the crisis and the cultural distrust of teachers that the testing industry, along with the political and education establishments, endorses.
But the testing industry has been able to secure a spot in our cultural imagination and our stock exchanges not only because of the business acumen of its leaders (though that is part of it), but also because it plays to and plays up our cultural distrust of teachers. The corporate establishment, led by the political Right, works hard to create a “public” of concerned taxpayers: those who want to be sure that their “investments” in children pay off. Neoconservative columnists play to this audience constantly, stoking the fires of educational crisis and inspiring suspicions about the competence of our public school teachers…. This distrust is carefully nurtured to keep the present educational power structure intact: remote “experts” (the capitalists) develop educational tests and prepackaged curricula and send them off to school administrators (the managers), who then ensure that teachers (the workers) faithfully execute those plans. Students (the products) are thus shaped to the specifications of experts whom they will never meet and who may never have set foot in a classroom.
In other words, whatever the gains of movements like the one for authentic assessment, the prevailing wisdom about education reform has it that reform must be top down, not inside out. Underlying our embrace of the assessment industry and our cultural distrust of teachers is a fundamental belief that what’s missing in education today is “efficiency” and that the best way to ensure efficiency is to set up a corporate structure in which teachers are held accountable to corporate CEOs. What’s good for General Motors . . .
Parenting vs. Poverty
In football, a quarterback’s blind side is the side of the field opposite his throwing arm—the left side of the field for a right-handed quarterback, for instance. One shouldn’t confuse the blind side with a blind spot, which is what our policy-makers and media often have when discussing American poverty: it is a product of our unjust economic system, they say, and we should fight it with redistributive government programs. These experts would do well to read Michael Lewis’s wonderful new football book, The Blind Side. Though the book’s publisher pitches it as a sports story, it’s more notable as a portrait of the social dysfunction that shapes much of America’s inner-city poverty and, by extension, of the reasons that so many government efforts to alleviate that poverty have come to naught.
At the heart of The Blind Side—in fact, occupying more pages than its ostensible subject, the evolution of college and professional football—is the astonishing life story of National Football League–bound Michael Oher. Oher is born into horrific circumstances that give him little chance at succeeding in our society: his mother is a drug addict who, though unable to care for children, has 13 kids by various men, none her husband. Each of these children fends for himself on the mean streets of West Memphis. Oher’s mother collects her welfare check on the first of the month and disappears for ten days or so, stranding the kids without provisions or supervision. Oher recalls going days with nothing to eat or drink except water, begging food from neighbors, and sleeping outdoors.
Pam Cross-Leone Seat 3 Madison Board of Education
Since 1992, Pam Cross-Leone has quietly, effectively and tirelessly worked as a parent volunteer in the Madison schools. Pam welcomed the homeless children at Emerson Elementary, working to make them part of the school in every way. When Sherman Middle School and East High School experienced the problems that come with rapid changes in students and too frequent changes in principals, Pam did her part to help steady the schools and keep expectations high for all children. She should have a life-time service award from East High for unending service to its Booster Club for athletics.
Problem-solving and concern for workable, inclusive decisions are the hallmarks of Pam’s years of service to her union at MGE. The same is true of her work with United Way of Dane County as a “loaned executive.” Always on task, always open to better ideas, always focused on ways to increase support for the group’s decision.
The representatives elected to the Madison School Board in 2007 will make decisions that will affect the future of our schools in critical ways. The next board will choose a new superintendent. It will determine whether parents and public should have a greater role in evaluating the curriculum for our children. It must develop new financial partnerships between the schools and local businesses. It must address the legitimate desire of employees for high quality health insurance by making competition among insurance providers work to reduce future costs.
I support Pam Cross-Leone because I know that I can trust her judgment. I can expect openness to all ideas. I can expect concern for every child. I can expect her to work toward solutions that merit wide community support. Pam has done the work that makes her the best choice in her race since 1992.
Notes on School Violence
Violence in our schools is preventable, but we don’t seem to understand how to do that. Our first response is to blame the Milwaukee Public Schools: If something goes wrong, it’s the fault of the school system.
I wonder how many of us who hold MPS responsible have visited a school and seen for ourselves how difficult life there can be.
What we don’t see from the outside are talented and devoted teachers and staff who make it their duty every day to educate and support our kids. What we don’t know is how many disadvantaged youth have no hope for the future, give up and become part of the problem. And what we don’t feel is the anxiety of thousands of parents for the safety and well-being of their children in a public school.
My Thoughts on Lapham-Marquette
Over the past week, I have had several heartfelt e-mails from residents of the Lapham-Marquette neighborhood, urging me and other board members to oppose closing Lapham School. To put the e-mails in context, let us all remember that there are MANY proposals out there because EVERYTHING is on the table thanks to the $10 million structural deficit that the district faces.
For those of you who are unaware of my background, let me share with you that I have lived in the Marquette neighborhood since 1978, first as a renter and now as a home owner. My membership # at Willy St. is 10. Yes, ten. My roots go deep, as does my memory of community history. After all, I chose to live there when we had to step over drunks to get to the laundromat, and anyone could get a good dose of grease and indigestion at Dolly’s. I moved in when there were crack houses around the corner, and stayed because it was a values choice.
So where do I stand on “don’t close Lapham?” This is the gist of what I am replying to the e-mails:
I have lived in the Marquette neighborhood since 1978 and was engaged in the vigorous and divisive neighborhood debate over whether to reopen Lapham. Having opposed reopening Lapham at the time because the optimistic demographic projections seemed unsupportable, and having predicted that we would end up at exactly this point, I am now disinterested in closing it so that we can debate the issue once more in ten years. I would note that the majority of children in Lapham are still being bused from the Marquette side of the isthmus; after all these years, the school as family magnet argument has not lived up to predictions.
That said, there is a brutal bugetary reality before the district. $10 million in structural – ongoing – deficit is going to mean change for all of our schools. For that reason, I will be supporting a review of staffing levels for the current population and demographics. (I urge everyone considering the debate to look at the demographics http://www.madison.k12.wi.us/topics/stats/2006/byincome.htm for ALL of our elementary schools and understand that as a progressive I must be concerned for the schools that are functioning with high levels of poverty and inadequate staffing.)
I urge the people who are so passionate about not closing Lapham or combining the pair to be proactive about proposals that can make keeping the school open easier to support. This means finding ways to use the space for some segment of district administration or renting space to community groups or finding some other use that goes beyond the current structure. E.g., the district used to rent space to the Tenney Lapham nursery school.
This time around, it is going to take a lot more than rhetoric or advocacy for referenda to address the very real shortage of resources that we face.
