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“Big Mother & Kids Lunches”
While programs like these have a solid premise, we envision kids making friends for more than just social reasons as middle-school cafeterias turn into fast-paced trading blocks to circumvent the system as connector children smuggle in junk food from the outside world. Or maybe we’re just letting our imaginations get away with ourselves again.
Acting White
Donna Ford, Ph.D., and Gilman Whiting, Ph.D., both of Vanderbilt University, are two leading African American education scholars who have dedicated their professional lives to the issue of minority achievement. Professor Ford is a nationally recognized expert in gifted education, multicultural education, and the recruitment and retention of diverse students in gifted education. Professor Whiting is a nationally recognized expert in African American male achievement and under-achievement. Professors Ford and Whiting made a two-part visit to the MMSD earlier this year, the result of an invitation from Diane Crear, recently retired MMSD Special Assistant to the Superintendent for Parent-Community Relations. As part of their program for minority parents, Professors Ford and Whiting talked about the research that attests so clearly to the importance of books in the home, reading to our children, talking with our children in intellectually stimulating ways, and taking an active interest in our children’s educational experience. They also showed the following segment from a June, 1999, episode of ABC’s “20/20.” The segment is entitled “Acting White” and was filmed at our own Madison East High School. It is thought-provoking, to say the least, and generated a lot of discussion amongst those in the audience last March when it was shown. We offer it to SIS readers for their thoughtful consideration.
For more on the work of Drs. Ford and Whiting, here are two recent papers:
Ford, D. Y. & Whiting, G. W. (2006). Under-Representation of Diverse Students in Gifted Education: Recommendations for Nondiscriminatory Assessment (Part 1). Gifted Education Press Quarterly, 20(2), 2-6.
Moore, J. L., Ford, D. Y., & Milner, R. (2005). Recruitment Is Not Enough: Retaining African American Students in Gifted Education. Gifted Child Quarterly, 49, 51-67.
Not to Worry: Neal Gleason Responds to Marc Eisen’s “Brave New World”
Neal Gleason in a letter to the Isthmus Editor:
I have long admired Marc Eisen’s thoughtful prose. But his recent struggle to come to grips with a mutli-ethnic world vvers from xenophobia to hysteria (“Brave New World”, 6/23/06). His “unsettling” contact with “stylish” Chinese and “turbaned Sikhs” at a summer program for gifted children precipitated first worry (are my kids prepared to compete?), And then a villain (incompetent public schools).
Although he proclaims himself “a fan” of Madison public schools, he launches a fusillade of complaints: doubting that academic excellence is high on the list of school district pirorities and lamentin tis “dubious maht and reading pedagogy.” The accuracy of these concerns is hard to assess, because he offers no evidence.
His main target is heterogeneous (mixed-ability) classes. He speculates that Madison schools, having failed to improve the skills of black and Hispanic kids, are now jeopardizing the education of academically promising kids (read: his kids) for the sake of politically correct equality. The edict from school district headquarters: “Embrace heterogeneous classrooms. Reject tracking of brighter kids. Suppress dissent in the ranks.” Whew, that is one serious rant for a fan of public schools.
Community service levies climb since cap lifted
Five years after state legislators released them from state-imposed revenue caps, school districts’ community service tax levies have nearly tripled, reaching $49 million this year.
The rampant growth in these property taxes – earmarked for community-based activities – took place as the total levies for schools statewide rose by 22.7%.
That has raised concerns about school districts skating around revenue limits and has prompted one lawmaker to request an audit of the program.
State Rep. Debi Towns (R-Janesville) said she is curious why property taxes that pay for recreational and community activities offered by school districts have grown so much since the 2000-’01 school year. In that time, the number of school districts raising taxes for such services has doubled to 240.
“I’m not saying anyone’s misspending. I’m just saying the fund has grown tremendously, and the purpose never changed,” said Towns, chairman of the Assembly Education Committee. In November, Towns called for the Legislative Audit Bureau to study how select school districts use their community service levies.
“So that, of course, leads to a natural questioning of what are they doing differently now than they were doing before,” she said.
The growth in the community service levies is expected to continue next year.
Arts, police, pools
Already, Milwaukee Public Schools has launched a arts education program through its recreation centers that it expects to fund with $1 million in community service funds. The Mukwonago School District plans to keep a police officer in its high school, despite the recent loss of a grant, with a $60,000 boost in property taxes from its community service levy.
The Menomonee Falls School District, which has not raised its levy for recreation and community activities in more than a decade, is counting on a $180,000, or 63%, increase next school year to continue operating one of its two pools.
School administrators say they have a simple explanation for why they are turning to their community service levies more now than they did when they were capped – it didn’t matter before. Because both the general and community service funds were restricted by revenue caps and eligible for state aid, it was simply an accounting preference whether a district paid for it from one fund or the other.
Athletics or academics?
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.
In the Greendale School District, which at $990,000 had the sixth-largest community service levy in the state last school year, business manager Erin Gauthier-Green acknowledges that her school system has gotten good use out of the fund.
But she also said the School District plans to reduce the property taxes it levies for community services by $300,000 next year now that it has completed some repair projects and before taxpayers complain.
“We know it can be a hot-button issue,” Gauthier-Green said.
By AMY HETZNER
ahetzner@journalsentinel.com
July 22, 2006
ED.Gov: New Report Shows Progress in Reading First Implementation and Changes in Reading Instruction
Children in Reading First classrooms receive significantly more reading instruction and schools participating in the program are much more likely to have a reading coach, according to the Reading First Implementation Evaluation: Interim Report, released today by the U.S. Department of Education. The report shows significant differences between what Reading First teachers report about their instructional practices and the responses of teachers in non-Reading First Title I schools, which are demographically similar to the Reading First schools.
“The goal of Reading First is to help teachers translate scientific insights into practical tools they can use in their classrooms,” Secretary Spellings said. “The program is helping millions of children and providing teachers with high-quality, research-based support. As we push towards our ultimate goal of every child reading and doing math on grade level by 2014, Reading First is a valuable help to our efforts.”
The report shows Reading First schools appear to be implementing the major elements of the program as intended by the No Child Left Behind legislation. Reading First respondents reported that they made substantial changes to their reading materials and that the instruction is more likely to be aligned with scientifically based reading research; they are more likely to have scheduled reading blocks and spend more time teaching reading; they are more likely to apply assessment results for instructional purposes, and they receive professional development focused on helping struggling readers more often than non-Reading First Title I schools in the evaluation.
Reading First funds, subject to some controversy, were rejected by the Madison School District a few years ago. UW’s Mark Seidenberg wrote a letter to Isthmus addressing reading last year (.doc file). More on Seidenberg.
Madison School Board Superintendent Art Rainwater wrote an email responding to a Wisconsin State Journal’s Editorial.
Learnings Per Share
If education is funded without measuring results decisions are based on impulse and sentiment, a risky business that. Yet if education is to be funded on results we need a high degree of social consensus on what results are desirable (and measurable).
As it happens, this sentiment does not respect party lines. Former Minnesota DFL Senator John Brandle famously said – more than 20 years ago – “there will be more dollars for education when there is more education for the dollar.”
Conceptually, the task is straightforward: identify what value schooling adds and measure it. While most people associate the value add of schooling with academic progress, there is also a social dimension, ranging from socialization to custodial care. These too can be measured.
Take year ‘round schooling as an example. Students who attend 240 days (rather than the typical US 180-day year) are likely to escape “summer learning loss.” While preliminary evidence suggests that with poor children in particular, summer learning loss is diminished significantly with year ‘round schooling, it is an empirical question. Risk-taking school districts could offer year ‘round schooling on a pilot basis and measure what happens – who enrolls, how popular is the program, and what are the results? (One prediction: working parents will love it.)
Alternately, 13 180-day years equals 2,340 days from K to graduation. Taken in 240 day installments, a typical student could graduate in 10 rather than 13 years. This too is an empirical question. Are there answers? Certainly Japanese experience suggests that there is. The Japanese school year is 240 days long and the typical graduate (after 13 years) is reputed to have completed the equivalent of two years of a good American college.
What business or industry would close for one-third of the year? What other human capital intensive activity — health care facility, for example — would shut its doors one-third of the year?
Public vs. Private School
The national education reform effort has long suffered from magical thinking about what it takes to improve children’s chances of learning. Instead of homing in on teacher training and high standards, things that distinguish effective schools from poor ones, many reformers have embraced the view that the public schools are irreparably broken and that students of all kinds need to be given vouchers to attend private or religious schools at public expense.
This belief, though widespread, has not held up to careful scrutiny. A growing body of work has shown that the quality of education offered to students varies widely within all school categories. The public, private, charter and religious realms all contain schools that range from good to not so good to downright horrendous.
What the emerging data show most of all is that public, private, charter and religious schools all suffer from the wide fluctuations in quality and effectiveness. Instead of arguing about the alleged superiority of one category over another, the country should stay focused on the overarching problem: on average, American schoolchildren are performing at mediocre levels in reading, math and science — wherever they attend school.
Parents Want Tougher Policy on Sex Offenses
Nancy Greenwald, an attorney and one of the parents involved in the complaint, urged the board to accept Superintendent Art Rainwater’s recommendation that Vazquez be fired and to turn over all relevant files to the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction, which has begun an investigation that could lead to the revocation of Vazquez’s teaching license.
In addition, Greenwald said, “We need you to do more. We urge you to step in and turn this administration around. From the beginning, the administration tried to push this complaint under the rug.”
Kelly Fitzgerald, PTO president at Jefferson, said in an interview after the meeting: “It has been arduous and painstaking. That it took this long for the administration to recommend removing this teacher is obscene.”
Board member Lucy Mathiak, chair of the district’s Partnerships Committee, said that supporting and enhancing relationships with parents would be a priority for her committee.
Later, she added: “I think one of the fundamental questions facing our district is whether we treat parents as resources or problems. Any parent who is concerned about safety, discipline or academic issues needs to feel confident that their concerns are going to be heard. We have to court the parents. The future of our schools depends on their confidence that we are working as partners with them.”
Parent Nancy Greenwald is still troubled about what it took to get Vazquez out of the classroom.
“We found the system seriously flawed.”
Greenwald and other parents say school investigators originally failed to connect the dots of Vazquez’s alleged pattern of sexual harassment.
“The recommendation finally reached after 13 months included an independent investigation and an evaluation by a psychotherapist who was asked to determine whether or not Mr. Vazquez poses a danger to our children,” Greenwald said, adding that if the psychotherapist’s evaluation “is one reason for the superintendent’s recommendation, as we believe it is, then the initial dismissal of our concerns by the administration was not only wrong, it was dangerously wrong.”
“It should not take the yearlong efforts of a large group of parents that happens to include two attorneys to get the administration to do the right thing,” Greenwald said. “Students who are the victims of sexual harassment are often vulnerable, needy children with little support at home. Who’s going to protect them?”
Summer leisure and Drop-out Students
My 13 year old son was complaining the other day about how “hard” it was he had to get up and swim at 7 a.m. for his local swim club. (7 is a little early when it’s cold but…) He then complained about umpiring a Little League game because a coach yelled at him.
As a calm and understanding parent I lost my temper, “They created summer for farm children to get up at sun rise and pick corn, cotton, etc… and all you have to do is play sports and relax. I had to haul hay and clean rental homes for my dad, you need to work more that is your problem!” Which of course, as a parent I am completely guilty of making this life too easy for my children, and I will be correcting that problem next summer…my motto now is if they are bored give them a chore…….
Which reminded me of an idea I had when I was in high school, and again when I was teaching high school, and again when I recently read an article in Newsweek…
In North Carolina there are several school districts that have an agreement with their local community colleges (MATC) that allows Junior and Senior students in high school to receive credits for both a skill and high school. When these students graduate they have a degree from High School and an associates degree in whatever interest them. WOW! That was my idea 20 year ago. I noticed when I was in high school that many of my friends and myself left school at 3:00 and went to work. Some were so interested in work and the skills they learned they left school to make money and pursue a more interesting skill.
We could reduce the drop out rate if we arranged a similar association with MATC for our students not bound for college. They would be ready for a job, have a diploma, and excited about their future. If they changed their mind they still have a H.S. degree and could go to college. 16 and 17 year olds get into trouble because they are bored….and they are bored because we wait until they are 18 to treat them as participants in society. We assume they are all interested in calculus and becoming lawyers, of course that is not true. Most other industrialized countries realize this and have created “prep” schools for those that will attend college. The great part about the N.C. plan is they will have a degree and can change their direction or mind to attend college, because 16 is a young age to decide your future, but at least they would have a skill to fall back on.
I remember how busy I was the last two years of high school, not studying but doing all kinds of activities, taking college courses, working a couple of jobs, and I was not even away from home yet. We need to advance these capable students forward to an area that interests them. Utilize their endless energy. Let’s look at this model and see if this would help resolve our gap, dropout rate and problem students for MMSD. We have the community college right here and plenty of educators…..this is an issue that should be discussed.
Revenue Caps Affect Middleton
Budget Hangs On Enrollment Middleton Watching Numbers
The Capital Times Tuesday, July 11, 2006
By Christopher Michaels
Increased enrollment in the weeks preceding the start of the school year could mean more state aid for the Middleton-Cross Plains School District. It also could mean an easing of planned staff reductions of special concern to one of the district’s elementary schools.
Teachers and parents from Park Elementary School in Cross Plains are asking the School Board to do what it can to avoid staff cuts at their school, which has a number of special needs students.
In a preliminary 2006-07 district budget approved by the School Board Monday, the tax rate remains unchanged from the 2005-06 school year. However, state revenue limits mean the district has had to reduce its budget by about $1.4 million compared to last year.
That reduction is taking its toll on programs and staffing with about 15 positions districtwide being eliminated, said Superintendent Bill Reis. Some of those positions, including two teachers and available hours for educational assistants, are at Park.
“Who’s Standing in the Schoolhouse Door, Now?”
It is well beyond time for people of color to challenge vehemently the educational policies of the Democratic leadership that have failed our children for decades. Too many Democrats would prefer to deny poor folk the opportunity to make educational decisions for themselves – notwithstanding these Democrats wouldn’t permit their own children to be educated in city schools. At the same time, Democrats, by and large, continue to lord over urban school systems that have consigned generation after generation of children of color to an educational genocide that threatens the very survival of the Black community.
Education Action
Posted on Edwonk
FROM JONATHAN KOZOL:
An Update, Bulletin, and Manifesto to the Education Activists who have asked me: Where do we go next?
June 16, 2006
Dear
This is to report that, at long last, the network of activists in education that I’ve been assembling from the thousands of teachers and advocates for children who turned out for massive rallies while I was on that grueling six-month book-tour for The Shame of the Nation as well as the many local groups of teachers organized to fight racism and inequality and the murderous impact of the NCLB legislation is now up and running.
We’re using the name Education Action and will soon set up a website but, for now, I hope that you’ll feel free to contact us at our e-mail, EducationActionInfo@gmail.com
By the start of August, we’ll be operating out of a house we’ve purchased for this purpose (16 Lowell St, Cambridge, MA 02138) in which we hope to gather groups of teachers, activists, especially the leaders of these groups, for strategy sessions in which we can link our efforts with the goal of mobilizing educators to resist the testing mania and directly challenge Congress, possibly by a march on Washington, at the time when NCLB comes up for reauthorization in 2007.
We are already in contact with our close friends at Rethinking Schools, with dozens of local action groups like Teachers for Social Justice in San Francisco, with dynamic African-American religious groups that share our goals, with activist white denominations, and with some of the NEA and AFT affiliates in particular, the activist caucuses within both unions such as those in Oakland, Miami, and Los Angeles. But we want to extend these contacts rapidly in order to create what one of our friends who is the leader of a major union local calls a massive wave of noncompliance.
My close co-worker, Nayad Abrahamian, who is based in Cambridge, will be the contact person for this mobilizing effort, along with Rachel Becker, Erin Osborne, and a group of other activists and educators who are determined that we turn the growing, but too often muted and frustrated discontent with NCLB and the racist policies and privatizing forces that are threatening the very soul of public education into a series of national actions that are explicitly political in the same tradition as the civil rights upheavals of the early 1960s.
We want to pull in youth affiliates as well and are working with high school kids and countless college groups that are burning with a sense of shame and indignation at the stupid and destructive education policies of state and federal autocrats. We want the passionate voices of these young folks to be heard. College students tell us they are tired of so many feel-good conferences where everyone wrings their hands about injustice but offers them nothing more than risk-free service projects? that cannot affect the sources of injustice. They’ve asked us for a mobilizing focus that can unify their isolated efforts. We are writing to you now to ask for your suggestions as to how we ought to give a realistic answer to these students.
IMPORTANT: When I say we’re ‘up and running,’ I mean that Education Action, as a framework and an organizing structure for our efforts, is in place. I do not mean that our goals and strategies are set in stone. We are still wide-open to proposals from you, and other organizational leaders we’re in touch with, to rethink our plans according to your own experience and judgment. We’d also like to broaden our initial organizing structure by asking if you’ll serve, to the degree that’s possible for you, as part of our national board of organizers and advisors. We don’t want to duplicate the efforts strong groups are already making. And the last thing on our minds is to compete with any group already in existence.? (Political struggles ever since the 1960s have been plagued with problems based on turf mentality. We want to be certain to avoid this.)
Tell us how you feel about our plans and how you think they ought to be expanded or improved. How closely can we link our efforts with your own? Do you believe that NCLB can be stopped, or at least dramatically contested, by the methods we propose?
Let us hear from you! We want to be in touch.
In the struggle,
Jonathan Kozol for Education Action
No More Teacher Ed?
Peter Wood (Provost of New York City’s Kings College):
By 2036, the forms of teacher preparation that currently prevail in Western nations will have sunk into oblivion. We will have discarded schools of education, the pedagogies they teach, and the certification apparatus that they serve. Such schools, pedagogies, and certifications have clung to life stubbornly for the better part of a century despite ample evidence of their unsuitability. Why predict that in the next 30 years they will finally follow the giant ground sloth into the La Brea tar pit of history?
In an era when jobs that require a high level of trained intelligence flow easily to India and other countries, Western countries are awakening to the awkward reality that we are not very good at basic schooling.
Mediocre teaching isn’t the only reason we aren’t very good at basic schooling. A distressingly large and growing percentage of children grow up semi-parentless; increasingly children are lost in the buzz of electronic distractions; and we preoccupy kids with group grievances at the expense of learning. Every few years our governments launch ambitious new programs of school reform, each of which seems to create a maelstrom of new kinds of educational misfeasance.
But after we have sifted and weighed all these contributory maladies, the main problem remains that we just don’t do a very good job at encouraging talented people to become teachers and equipping them along the way with the right kind of preparation. The single biggest cause of the deficiencies in our schools is the risible system by which we train teachers.
Joanne has more.
For School Equality, Try Mobility
DUMB liberal ideas in education are a dime a dozen, and during my time as superintendent of Houston’s schools and as the United States secretary of education I battled against all sorts of progressivist lunacy, from whole-language reading to fuzzy math to lifetime teacher tenure. Today, however, one of the worst ideas in education is coming from conservatives: the so-called 65 percent solution.
This movement, bankrolled largely by Patrick Byrne, the founder of Overstock.com, wants states to mandate that 65 percent of school dollars be spent “in the classroom.” Budget items like teacher salaries would count; librarians, transportation costs and upkeep of buildings would not.
Proponents argue that this will counter wasteful spending and runaway school “overhead,” and they have convinced many voters — a Harris poll last fall put national support at more than 70 percent. Four states — Georgia, Kansas, Louisiana and Texas — have adopted 65 percent mandates and at least six more are seriously considering them.
The only drawback is that such laws won’t actually make schools any better, and could make them worse. Yes, it’s true that education financing is a mess and that billions are wasted every year. But the 65 percent solution won’t help. The most likely outcome is that school officials will learn the art of creative accounting in order to increase the percentage of money that can be deemed “classroom” expenses.
An op-ed by Rod Paige in today’s NYT kicks off a new round of debate about student finance. Paige makes some good points, criticizes the 65 percent solution, and touts a new ecumenical manifesto about school finance organized by the Fordham Foundation and signed by a wide range of people including former Clinton WH Chief of Staff John Podesta and former NC Governor Jim Hunt. But, because the manifesto is bipartisan, or really non-partisan, it’s a shame Paige’s op-ed doesn’t have a dual byline to better frame the issue. Incidentally, hard to miss that while a few years ago few on the left wanted much to do with Fordham, that’s really changed. Sign of the changing edupolitics. (Disc. I signed.) It’s also hard to miss the enormous impact Commodore Marguerite Roza is having on this debate.
Chinese Medicine for American Schools
Nicholas Kristof follows up Marc Eisen’s recent words on a world of competition for our children:
But the investments in China’s modernization that are most impressive of all are in human capital. The blunt fact is that many young Chinese in cities like Shanghai or Beijing get a better elementary and high school education than Americans do. That’s a reality that should embarrass us and stir us to seek lessons from China.
On this trip I brought with me a specialist on American third-grade education — my third-grade daughter. Together we sat in on third-grade classes in urban Shanghai and in a rural village near the Great Wall. In math, science and foreign languages, the Chinese students were far ahead.
My daughter was mortified when I showed a group of Shanghai teachers some of the homework she had brought along. Their verdict: first-grade level at a Shanghai school.
Granted, China’s education system has lots of problems. Universities are mostly awful, and in rural areas it’s normally impossible to hold even a primitive conversation in English with an English teacher. But kids in the good schools in Chinese cities are leaving our children in the dust.
The Schools Scam
I realize that some of the legal frameworks differ but think that this serves as a good remider that TIFs have an impact on school funding everywhere.
From the Chicago Reader See also: Epoch TimesTJM
By Ben Joravsky
The Schools Scam
Under the TIF system millions of dollars in property taxes are being diverted from education to development.
By Ben Joravsky June 23, 2006
On June 15 Mayor Daley brought public school officials and aldermen to a south-side grammar school for a revival meeting of sorts. The ostensible purpose of the press conference was to announce the mayor’s plans to spend $1 billion over the next six years to build 24 new schools in neighborhoods across Chicago. But Daley and the other officials made a point of reminding people of the economic development plan that makes this possible: the tax increment financing program.
“This is a creative use of existing dollars which have accrued from our successful TIF program and will not require any property tax increase by the city of Chicago to fund,” Daley said in his remarks.
Even as public pronouncements go, this was a whopper. Of course building new schools requires an increase in property taxes. It’s just that in this case the deed’s been done: TIFs have been jacking up property tax bills for almost 23 years. Rest assured they’ll continue to—the city shows no sign of abandoning them. On the contrary, City Hall insiders tell me that the mayor’s press conference was part of a move to win public approval for the extension of the Central Loop TIF, the city’s oldest and largest, which is set to expire next year.
But as a public relations maneuver the announcement was brilliant. In one fell swoop, Daley managed to tweak the state for not paying more in education funds and look like the heroic protector of the city’s schoolchildren, using the promise of new schools to camouflage the diversion by TIFs of millions from public education coffers.
According to the city, as much as $600 million, or 60 percent, of the new construction costs will come from various TIFs, districts created by the City Council that put a rough cap on the amount of property taxes that go to the schools, the parks, and the county for a period of 23 years. Additional property taxes generated in these districts through rising assessments and new development flow into TIF accounts, which function as virtually unmonitored slush funds.
Originally TIFs weren’t intended to build tax-exempt properties like schools: they were supposed to subsidize economic development in blighted communities with the goal of even-tually increasing property tax revenue. But as the TIF program has expanded and evolved—the city’s created more than 100 districts in the last ten years—Mayor Daley and the City Council have drawn on them to subsidize projects from upscale condos in trendy neighborhoods to Millennium Park to a rehab of of the lake-shore campus of tax-exempt Loyola University.
Daley says he’s repaying the public. “Our taxpayers have been generous beyond words,” he said at the press conference. “Today we’re giving back to those taxpayers something real and meaningful—something they will see and touch and feel and know that their dollars are being invested carefully and appropriately.”
That’s a noble aspiration, and Lord knows there are neighborhoods that desperately need new classrooms. But even with the new construction, the Chicago Public Schools won’t come close to retrieving the property tax revenue it’s lost to TIFs. According to CPS officials, the city has already spent about $280 million in TIF funds building or rehabbing schools. By 2012, when the proposed construction program is completed, that amount will have gone up to about $880 million. Since TIFs operate without budgets, the other side of the ledger is more difficult to calculate. But based on the annual statements provided by the county clerk’s office, TIFs have diverted about $621 million in property taxes over the last two years. Since roughly half of this would have gone to the schools, the money diverted from the schools to TIFs amounts to about $310 million in the last two years alone. As TIFs continually grow, this means that by a conservative estimate they will have diverted well over $1 billion from the schools by 2012, when the new construction is completed—a shortfall of $120 million or so.
Inequality and the American Dream
That said, government should not be looking for ways to haul the rich down. Rather, it should help others, especially the extremely poor, to climb up—and that must mean education. Parts of the American system are still magnificent, such as its community colleges. But as countless international league tables show, its schools are not. Education is a political football, tossed about between Republicans who refuse to reform a locally based funding system that starves schools in poor districts, and Democrats who will never dare offend their paymasters in the teachers’ unions.
The other challenge is to create a social-welfare system that matches a global business world of fast-changing careers. No country has done this well. But the answer has to be broader than just “trade-adjustment” assistance or tax breaks for hard-hit areas. Health care, for instance, needs reform. America’s traditional way of providing it through companies is crumbling. The public pension system, too, needs an overhaul.
YearlyKos Education Panel
Much good stuff here but I’ll just point to the “Blueberry Story,” which encapsulates how public education differs from business.
Click the title link for a version with comments
TJM
The Yearlykos Education Panel – a review / reflection
by teacherken
Sat Jun 17, 2006 at 03:19:37 AM PDT
NOTE also crossposted at MyLeftWing
I had the honor and pleasure of chairing the Yearlykos Education Panel discussion on Saturday Morning, June 10. After soliciting ideas from a number of people, I had finally wound up with a principal speaker, Jamie Vollmer, a responder, Gov. Tom Vilsack of Iowa, and a moderator / commenter – me. I will in this diary attempt to cover as much as I can from my notes of what occurred. I did not take detailed notes during the 15-20 minutes of questions, although I may be able to reconstruct at least some of it.
I hope after you read it you will realize why many who attended considered this one of the best panels of the get-together. Perhaps now you will be sorry you slept in after the wonderful parties sponsored by Mark Warner and Maryscott. But if you got up for Howard Dean, you really should have walked over to Room 1 for our session. See you below the fold.
teacherken’s diary :: ::
We started a few minutes late. I began the panel by explaining that we would not be discussing NCLB but talking about education far more broadly. I introduced our two panelists and explained the format — that since people already knew much of what I thought about education I would not talk much until questions. Jamie Vollmer a former business executive who had come to realize that education is not like business would address us for about 20 minutes, then Tom Vilsack who as governor of Iowa had a real commitment to public education would respond for 10-12 minutes, and then we would take questions. I then mentioned that I had a diary with a list of online resources on education (which you can still see here). I then called Jamie up.
Jamie began by making a small correction. I had described him as CEO of the Great American Ice Cream Company and as he said it was not that broad – it was the Great Midwest Ice Cream Company, based in Iowa. He explained that in 1984 Dr. William Lepley, then head of the Iowa schools, invited him to sit on a business and education roundtable, which is what began his involvement with public education. As he got more an more involved he came to three basic assumptions which he said were reinforced by the other businessmen on the roundtable:
1) Public education was badly flawed and in need of change
2) the people in the system were the problem
3) the solution was to run education more like a business.
For several years he continued along this path until he received his comeuppance while presenting at an inservice. He recounted a brief version of the Blueberry story, which can be read here from Jamie’s website and which I used as the basis of my diary BLUEBERRIES – our wrong national education policy, which got over 170 comments, a similar number of recommendations and stayed visible for quite some time.
Back to the panel – as a result of the experience he described Jamie began to examine education more closely. He came to realize that there were four main building blocks of preK-12 public education:
1) curriculum
2) attempting to get around our national obsession with testing
3) going after instruction
4) the school calendar.
Jamie went through each of three key assumptions with which he had started, and explained how his misbelief in each was stripped away. He also bluntly said the No Child Left Behind might be filled with good intentions but it was taking our educational system straight to Hell. He pointed out that we needed authentic assessment of real world tasks and not tests in isolation.
Jamie came to realize that our schools cannot be all things to all people. He quickly came to realize that the people in the system were not the problem. He asked us who actually held the status quo of American schools in place, and his answer was they we did, our neighbors did, because we are the ones who elect the school board members and the legislators and council members who make the policies that maintain the status quo.
He said that we were afflicted with the TTSP hormone — “this too shall pass” – and that people resisted change. He reminded us of Pogo overlooking the swamp — that when it comes to public schools “we have met the enemy and he is us.” He pointed people at the work of organizational thinker Peter Senge (here’s a google search which will give you some access to his ideas).
Jamie emphasized that we needed to change our mental model of the educational system. As it currently exists, everyone inside the system is there to sort people into two groups. He offered us some statistics to explain.
For those alive in 1967 who had graduated high school, 77% of the workforce worked in unskilled or low skilled labor, and the school system was designed to sort people between that group and the far smaller group who went on for further education and more skilled employment. And yet today on 13% of the workforce is the unskilled or low skilled labor, and by 2010 it will be down to 5%. Yet our model of schooling has not changed, for all our rhetoric about how important schooling is. Vollmer said of such people
If they believed it was a high priority they would put their money where their mouth is and fully fund education.
He went on to outline what he saw as the prerequisites for educational success:
– build understanding We need to help each other understand . he does not see why it needs to be difficult. Most of educational decision making should, he believes, be left at the local district level, with state and national guidelines, not mandates. He said that every mile the decision making is removed from the school increases the stupidity of the decision.
– rebuild trust he talked about how we have spent over 20 years since A Nation at Risk tearing support away from public schools. Given that less than 1/3 of taxpayers have children in public schools this is a problem. it has lead to a decline social capital, the elements we have seen in schools and elsewhere towards privatization.
– get permission to do things differently We need to allow experimentation of doing things differently than we currently do. In order to achieve this, we need to encourage involvement of people in the community including the business community, but first they need to be informed. We need the informed support of the entire community.
– stop badmouthing one another in public and emphasize the positive if all people here about schools is what is wrong, with constant attempts to affix blame to one another, there will be no opportunity to fix what needs to be fixed. There are good things happening in most of our schools, and we have to stop being reluctant to talk about them. This will help rebuild the trust that we will need to make the changes that will make a difference.
Jamie forcefully reminded the audience that while this might be a national problem, the solution would have to be from the bottom up. We need to reclaim and renew our schools, one community at a time. This was a message that clearly connected with an audience of netroots activists.
Jamie could have gone on for much longer, but I gently urged him to bring things to an end, and then Governor Vilsack took over. He said that there are two man challenges facing this nation, and that are the economic challenge and the issues of safety and security. To address these require smart, innovative and creative people. He said we don’t need to create a nation of successful test takers, which is all the NCLB is giving us, which is one reason we need to replace it. He slightly disagreed with Vollmer when he said that he felt the principal responsibility for our current situation in public education belongs with those political leaders who have chosen to manipulate our feelings about schools for political advantage without providing the resources necessary to make our schools successful.
He told an anecdote of when he visited China and met with the principal of a school. He learned that Chinese children were learning their second foreign language in elementary school. That didn’t scare him. They were beginning physics in 7th grade. That didn’t upset him. But then the principal told him they were trying to teach the children how to be creative. Vilsack’s first reaction was that you couldn’t teach someone to be creative, and his second was that if the Chinese have figured out how to do that we are in real trouble.
My notes end at this point. I have memories of Tom talking about the resources they have put into public education in Iowa, that 97% of their communities have access to high speed internet connections. He remarked about his wife being a long-time classroom teacher and the respect that causes him to have for teachers. He knew that there was some concern that he had sign off on a bill that included tuition tax credits for elementary and secondary education, and explained that he was dealing with a Republican controlled legislature and that was part of the deal necessary to get increases in teacher pay and other important needs in education to be met.
I made few remarks during the main part of the session, but we all shared equally during the Q&A. There was a question on charters, here were questions about the loss of instructional time for subjects not tested under NCLB, it was moving fast, and there was little time for me to take notes.
Were I to summarize the session, I would say it met the goals i set for it, with guidance from Gina. We wanted the session to give the people something concrete they could take back with them. I feel that jamie Vollmer’s truly inspirational presentation helped with that. I have had several people communicate in different ways that they plan to explore running for school board in order to make a difference, others who said they would be come active in PTAs or other home-school or community-school associations. The other goal Gina had was to highlight the abilities and skills of our blogging community, and raise their visibility with policy makers and politicians. I think the relationships I have developed over the months with Tom Vilsack, and the obvious mutual respect we share on the key issue of education fulfilled that part of the mandate.
Of greater importance, almost all of the feedback on the session has been positive. Here I will exclude the snarky and inaccurate article in The New Republic by Ryan Lizza – that has been discussed in great detail in the dailykos community in a variety of diaries, both by Tom Vilsack and by me. I have noted remarks in diaries posted here by others, in postings at other websites, in offline electronic messages I have received, and in the words i heard while I was still at the Riviera, and from those with whom I traveled to McCarran Airport.
I believe that American public education is at serious risk. So do Jamie and Tom. I believe that we cannot make the kinds of changes we have to make until we can develop a broad commitment to the idea of public education. Jamie talked about that, and Tom addressed some of the things he has done, and why. I believe that unless and until we organize and build connections at the grass-roots level, we will not be able to have the influence on the policy makers that is necessary if we are going to preserve and improve public education as a public good, as something that is a right for all residents of this great nation. It is my belief that the panel session on education helped move us in that direction, something that is appropriate for the netroots, because we must do it one community at a time.
I look forward to the comments of others. I know there are many attendees of that panel whom will able to contribute more than my memory and my notes can sustain — I was at times distracted by my responsibilities as moderator and timekeeper, and at others by thoughts of what I wanted to say in response to questions or to the remarks of my co-panelists.
I look forward to any additions or corrections that others may offer. I also encourage further dialog on this topic. I will, to the best of my ability, try to monitor the diary for any comments posted, especially should the community deem this diary worthy of elevation to a higher visibility in the recommended box. As always, what happens to this diary at dailykos (it will be cross-posted elsewhere) is subject to the judgment of the community as a whole, a judgment to which I am happy to submit this posting.
UPDATE Look for the comment by Chun Yang for some good info on the Q&A for which I did not have notes, but which I can assure you is quite accurate.
How Schools Pay a (Very High) Price for Failing to Teach Reading Properly
Imagine yourself the parent of an otherwise bright and engaging child who has reached the fourth grade without learning to read. After battling the public school bureaucracy for what seems like a lifetime, you enroll your child in a specialized private school for struggling readers. Over the next few years, you watch in grateful amazement as a child once viewed as uneducable begins to read and experiences his first successes at school.
Most parents are so relieved to find help for their children that they never look back at the public schools that failed them. But a growing number of families are no longer willing to let bygones be bygones. They have hired special education lawyers and asserted their rights under the federal Individuals With Disabilities Education Act, which allows disabled children whom the public schools have failed to receive private educations at public expense.
Federal disability law offers public school systems a stark choice: The schools can properly educate learning-disabled children — or they can fork over the money to let private schools do the job.
More on Brent Staples.
2006 Condition of Education Statistics
National Center for Education Statistics:
This website is an integrated collection of the indicators and analyses published in The Condition of Education 2000–2006. Some indicators may have been updated since they appeared in print
Chester Finn has more:
–A huge fraction of U.S. school children now attend “schools of choice”: more than half of K-12 parents reported in 2003 that they had the “opportunity” to send their kids to a “chosen public school.” It appears that 15 percent actually sent them to a “chosen” public school (including charter schools), to which must be added the 10 to 11 percent in private schools, the 1 to 2 percent who are home schooled, and what seems to be 24 percent who moved into their current neighborhood because of the schools. Though there is some duplication in those numbers, it looks to me like a third to a half of U.S. schoolchildren’s families are exercising school choice of some sort.
–Class-size data are elusive but it’s easy to calculate the student/teacher ratio in U.S. public schools, which has been below 17 to 1 since 1998. Even allowing for special ed, AP physics, and 4th year language classes with 5 kids in them, one may fairly ask why a country with fewer than 17 kids per public-school teacher remains obsessed with class-size reduction. (When I was in fifth grade, the national ratio was about 27:1.)
–Total expenditures per pupil in U.S. public schools reached $9,630 in 2003—up 23 percent in constant dollars over the previous 7 years. At 17 kids per teacher, that translates to almost $164,000 per teacher. Why, then, are teachers not terribly well paid? Because (using the NCES categories) the U.S. spends barely half of its school dollars on “instruction.”
Joanne does as well.
Making the Grade: Madison High Schools & No Child Left Behind Requirements
Don’t assume that a school is bad just because it’s not making adequate yearly progress under the federal No Child Left Behind law. That comment came today from Madison School Board member Lucy Mathiak, whose children attend or have attended East High School.
East and three other Madison public high schools were cited for not making the necessary progress outlined by No Child Left Behind legislation, which requires that all students be proficient in reading and math by 2014. In addition to being cited for not making adequate yearly progress, East was also rapped for not having made sufficient progress for two straight years.
La Follette High School, which was on the list last year for not making progress two years in a row, was removed from that list this year. However, there were other areas this year where La Follette did not meet the required proficiency levels for some groups of students.
“I’m not saying I’m thrilled to see the results,” Mathiak said. “But it’s not as if all schools have equal populations of students facing huge challenges in their lives, chief among them issues of poverty.”
Art Rainwater, superintendent of the Madison School District, said the preliminary list of schools that didn’t make adequate yearly progress, which the Department of Public Instruction released Tuesday, “didn’t tell us anything we didn’t know.”
“Sooner or later, between now and 2013, every school in America is going to be on the list,” Rainwater said.
Rainwater said there are students at all schools who aren’t learning at the level they should be, and that the district has been working hard to address the needs of those students.
It’s a list no school wants to land on. In Wisconsin, the number of schools not meeting federal guidelines more than doubled, from 45 last year to 92 in 2005-06. The lists can be seen here. One list contains schools not making adequate yearly progress (AYP) for one year. Schools in need of improvement are schools who have failed to meet AYP for two or more years in a row.
Of the 92 schools were the four main Madison high schools, though Superintendent Art Rainwater cautioned against reading too much into it.
At many local schools this past school year, only one or two segments of students failed to score high enough on state tests.
In Madison, East, La Follette, West, and Memorial high schools all did not make enough yearly progress. The state department of public instruction cited low reading scores at three of those four.
Superintendent Art Rainwater said those lower scores came from special needs and low-income students. “Certainly this in a very public way points out issues, but the fact that they didn’t do well on this test is secondary to the fact that we have children who are in the district who aren’t successful,” said Rainwater.
Staff at Memorial and LaFollette were already working on changes to those schools’ Read 180 programs, including adding special education teachers.
DPI’s press release.
DPI Schools Identified for Improvement website.
Much more from Sarah Carr:
The list has “broken some barriers relative to different parts of the state,” Deputy State Superintendent Tony Evers said. Still, the majority of schools on the list are from urban districts such as Milwaukee, Madison and Racine.
Teaching Inequality
Heather G. Peske and Kati Haycock for Edtrust [PDF Report]:
Next month, for the first time, leaders in every state must deliver to the Secretary of Education their plans for ensuring that low-income and minority students in their states are not taught disproportionately by inexperienced, out-of-field, or uncertified teachers.
For many, this process will be the first step in helping the citizens of their states to understand a fundamental, but painful truth: Poor and minority children don’t underachieve in school just because they often enter behind; but, also because the schools that are supposed to serve them actually shortchange them in the one resource they most need to reach their potential – high-quality teachers. Research has shown that when it comes to the distribution of the best teachers, poor and minority students do not get their fair share.
The report also offers some key findings of soon-to-be released research in three states – Ohio, Illinois and Wisconsin – and major school systems within them. Funded by The Joyce Foundation and conducted with policymakers and researchers on the ground, the research project reveals that schools in these states and districts with high percentages of low-income and minority students are more likely to have teachers who are inexperienced, have lower basic academic skills or are not highly qualified — reflecting troublesome national teacher distribution patterns.
Edspresso has more
A Look at the Midvale / Lincoln Elementary Pair
The parents at Midvale Elementary School have heard it all:
It’s a school no ambitious parent wants. The bus rides are long and unpleasant as children are sent far from their homes along the hazardous Beltline. After more than 20 years, the pairing of Midvale and Lincoln elementary schools, developed as part of an effort to desegregate two south side Madison schools, is a failed experiment.
“The misperceptions about our school are so frustrating, and so wrong,” sighed Dave Verban, who is part of a group of Midvale-Lincoln parents that has joined forces to try to tell what they say is the real story of their school community.
The Midvale Lincoln pair was much discussed earlier this year as the Madison School Board and the Memorial/West Area Attendance Task Force contemplated options for Leopold Elementary school. One of the options discussed was changing boundaries and moving some children from Leopold to Lincoln Elementary. Some of Fitchburg’s Swan Creek residents objected and petitioned to leave the Madison School District. More here. Task force insight.
Maps: Midvale | Lincoln | Distance between the two paired schools (roughly 5 miles).
UPDATE: Susan continues her article with a visit to Lincoln Elementary.
The Challenge of Educating for the Future
Madison Schools Superintendent Art Rainwater:
This fall we will welcome over 2,000 kindergarten children to their first day of school. What an exciting and scary day for them. They will come from many cultures, they will be many colors and they will each begin their thirteen year journey with different skills, attitudes and backgrounds.
Our community must ensure, through our schools, that despite their different starting points they leave in 2019 with two important things in common. They must have the knowledge and skills to have a family supporting career and actively participate in our society. Therein lays the challenge.
Those eager five year olds will still be in the workforce 53 years from now. Who knows what skills, both academic and personal, will be needed then. There are jobs today that we never dreamed of 40 years ago and there are jobs that we thought were forever that have been lost to time. The pace of that change seems to speed up.
Appleton’s schools models for health
APPLETON (AP) – Lunch hour at two local schools became the subject for a film crew as part of a federal agency’s plan to show how the Appleton district is trying to promote healthy lifestyles and fight the epidemic of childhood obesity.
The media crew also filmed fitness programs at Edison Elementary School and West High School and interviewed staff members, including Superintendent Tom Scullen, for the footage due to be aired June 20 as part of a national talk show on child health and nutrition.
Private Tutors & Homeschooling
In what is an elite tweak on home schooling — and a throwback to the gilded days of education by governess or tutor — growing numbers of families are choosing the ultimate in private school: hiring teachers to educate their children in their own homes.
Unlike the more familiar home-schoolers of recent years, these families are not trying to get more religion into their children’s lives, or escape what some consider the tyranny of the government’s hand in schools. In fact, many say they have no argument with ordinary education — it just does not fit their lifestyles.
Public school students take up a tougher course
But the experience — eight-hour school days, tiny classes with demanding teachers, and Saturday sessions — was more trying than any of them expected. The students, who delayed high school a year to attend Beacon, have emerged with a sense of how satisfying a tough school can be, but also of how unchallenging their public school experiences had been.
“In the beginning, I felt like it was way too much work times two,” said Dennishia Bell, 14, a former honor roll student at the Umana Barnes Middle School in East Boston. “I didn’t realize that I wasn’t really being challenged in school until I came to Beacon Academy. If I stuck to the Boston Public Schools, I almost feel like they were cheating me out of my education.”
A group of educators and entrepreneurs, including former prep school teachers and administrators, established Beacon last summer because of the concern that too few bright, motivated urban public school students could pass the entrance exams and meet the academic standards required for competitive prep schools and the city’s exam schools, said Marsha Feinberg, one of the founders. The goal was to prepare students for the academic rigors, as well as the social environment, of prep schools, often filled with children of the rich and famous.
Kobza, Mathiak, Robarts and Vang Vote Yes to Support Elementary Strings: Carstensen, Silveira and Winston Vote No And Support Cutting Elementary Strings
Thank you to students, parents and community members who wrote to and spoke before the School Board in support of elementary strings. It may seem, at times, that your letters or statements fall on deaf ears, but that is not the case. Each and every letter and each and every statement of support is critical to communicating to the School Board how much the community values this course. There are Board members who listen and understand what you’re saying.
Last night MMSD School Board members Lawrie Kobza, Lucy Mathiak, Ruth Robarts and Shwaw Vang voted to restore Grade 5 elementary strings classes to twice weekly. Also, these same four Board members voted in favor of a pilot elementary string course at one or more schools that would provide 4th and 5th grade students with the option to select either General Music or Elementary Strings as their music class. My thanks for their votes of support for elementary strings and a strong music education and opportunities for all our children.
Johnny Winston Jr. (Board President), Carol Carstensen and Arlene Silveira voted against this option, electing to support cutting elementary strings. These three board members did not support elementary strings and supported the Superintendent’s proposal, which would cut Grade 4 elementary strings next year and would have cut Grade 5 elementary strings the following year, eliminating elementary strings for about 543 low-income children, 1610 elementary children in all, within two years.
The elementary string program, even with an additional class in Grade 5 was cut in Grade 4 and the budget was reduced about 13% on top of a 50% cut the previously year. (In comparison, the budget for extracurricular sports increased 25%.)
The board majority who voted for 2 classes per week in Grade 5 and a pilot want to learn more about what option(s), instructionally, administratively, and financially would work best in the future, so elementary string instruction remains part of music education. I appreciate their efforts.
Elementary strings is less than 0.09% of the District’s $330+ million budget, taught 1610 (543 low income) Grade 4 and Grade 5 children this year, is a heterogenous, diverse course.
LA’s Superintendent Selection Process
By the end of this column I will have selected the next superintendent of the Los Angeles Unified School District. Because I believe that the children, parents, teachers and citizens of Los Angeles are entitled to transparency in such deliberations, I invite you to join me as I work my way toward a decision.
Let’s start in a classroom at North Hollywood High School, where, in a scene reminiscent of “Blackboard Jungle,” 28 young toughs have school board President Marlene Canter backed up against a projector screen.
These aren’t physical toughs. They’re intellectual toughs. But if I were Canter, I’d take the sneering, tattooed kind any day.
Push for changes in school financing
A letter to the editor
Dear Editor: I appreciated Susan Troller’s recent article where she examined the impact of eroding budgets on schools and classrooms throughout Madison. Unfortunately, this situation is not unique to Madison schools.
The repeated cutting of school budgets is strongly affecting classrooms, teachers and students in scores of school districts throughout Wisconsin. I feel confident that Madison schools, and many other school districts, are years past cutting the “frills” from their budgets school boards and administrators are now forced to make cuts that truly affect the quality of education that our children are receiving.
These current cuts, and inevitable future cuts, are a direct result of statewide school finance restrictions that have been placed on local communities by our state Legislature since the mid-1990s. School funding is extremely complicated, and I won’t begin to try to explain it here. What I will do, however, is invite readers to educate themselves on this very important issue. A good place to begin is the Web site of the Wisconsin Alliance for Excellent Schools, www.excellentschools.org.
After we better educate ourselves, we need to have conversations with our neighbors, our friends, our school personnel and our policy makers. School financing, as it currently exists, is not going to change unless we help to make it change. And if our current school financing system does not change, then our schools will cease to be the national leaders that they still are today. And the ones who truly will lose out are our children.
I encourage readers to learn about school financing and to engage in positive dialogue with others so that we can quickly find creative solutions.
Barbara Katz
Madison
Published: May 26, 2006
The Capital Times
Links and Notes on Parent Involvement and Student Education
Here’s a brief list of the research (you can find it here) about parent involvement related to student achievement. Enjoy.
Ann Shaver and Richard Walls (1998) looked at the impact of school-based parent workshops on the achievement of 335 Title I students in nine schools in a West Virginia district . . . . The researchers found that students with more highly involved parents were more likely to gain in both reading and math than children with less involved parents. This finding held across all income and education levels.
Notes on SAT Scores
Colleges across the country are reporting a drop in SAT scores this year. I’ve been tutoring students in New York City for the SAT since 1989, and I have watched the numbers rise and fall. This year, though, the scores of my best students dropped about 50 points total in the math and verbal portions of the test (each on a scale of 200 to 800). Colleges and parents are wondering: Is there something wrong with the new test? Or are our children not being taught what they should know?
Before 1994, the verbal section of the SAT was about 65% vocabulary (55 out of 85 questions) and 35% reading comprehension. Then the Educational Testing Service shortened and reworked the test, devoting half of the 78 questions to each area. Last year ETS changed the test again, and now it is heavily skewed toward reading: 49 of the 68 items require students to read, synthesize and answer questions.
In such a way, ETS has increased the penalty for not reading throughout one’s school years. Studying vocabulary lists before the test–a long-favored shortcut to lifting scores–just won’t cut it anymore. Students who read widely and often throughout their elementary and high-school years develop the kinds of reading skills measured by the new SAT. Students who avoid reading don’t–and can’t develop them in a cram course.
Unlikely Allies (“against” NCLB)
Let the Dialogue Begin
Bridging Differences A Dialogue Between Deborah Meier and Diane Ravitch
May 24, 2006
By Deborah Meier & Diane Ravitch
In the course of the last 30 years, the two of us have been at odds on any number of issues – on our judgments about progressive education, on the relative importance of curriculum content (what students are taught) vs. habits of mind (how students come to know what they are taught), and most recently in our views of the risks involved in nationalizing aspects of education policy.
Meeting recently to prepare for a debate on the federal No Child Left Behind Act, however, we found ourselves agreeing about the mess that has been generated by local and state testing. Both of us agreed that the public needs far better information about both inputs and outcomes, without which the public is woefully uninformed and too easily manipulated. As we discussed what the next policy steps should be, Diane preferred a national response, and Deborah preferred a local one.
As we talked further, we were surprised to discover that we shared a similar reaction to many of the things that are happening in education today, especially in our nation’s urban school districts. Recent trends and events seem to be confirming our mutual fears and jeopardizing our common hopes about what schooling might accomplish for the nation’s children. We might, we agreed, be getting the worst of both our perspectives.
Unlike Deborah, Diane has long supported an explicit, prescribed curriculum, one that would consume about half the school day, on which national examinations would be based. Diane believes in the value of a common, knowledge-based curriculum, such as the Core Knowledge curriculum, that ensures that all children study history, literature, mathematics, science, art, music, and foreign language; such a curriculum, she thinks, would support rather than undermine teachers’ work. Deborah, while strongly agreeing on the need for a broad liberal arts curriculum, doubts that anyone can ensure what children will really understand and usefully make sense of, even through the best imposed curriculum, especially if it is designed by people who are far from the actual school communities and classrooms.
Yet both of us are appalled by the relentless “test prep” activities that have displaced good instruction in far too many urban classrooms, and that narrow the curriculum to nothing but math and reading. We are furthermore distressed by unwarranted claims from many cities and states about “historic gains” that are based on dumbed-down tests, even occasionally on downright dishonest scoring by purposeful exclusion of low-scoring students.What unites us above all is our conviction that low-income children who live in urban centers are getting the worst of both of our approaches.
Baraboo Board Member Stirs Controversy
Board member stirs controversy
Baraboo News Republic
Thursday May 25, 2006
By Christina Beam
BARABOO – New Baraboo School Board member Kevin Bartol
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“There are some people in this country that cannot be educated,” Bartol said to the board. “They may have their eyes open, but there’s no one awake upstairs.”
His comments Monday came as part of the board’s review of district
policies, including one for “Programs for Students with Disabilities.” The first sentence of that policy reads that the board “shall provide a free and appropriate public education in the least restrictive environment for students with disabilities who reside within the district.”
Bartol proposed the board add a modifier before the word student, such as “educable,” so that if a child who “can’t be taught” wants to enter or stay in a Baraboo public school the district is not required to serve him or her.
“Every child can be taught,” said Director of Special Ed Gwynne Peterson said, who added the district is under federal obligation -as well as moral and ethical – to teach every student.
“I don’t think that’s true,” Bartol said. “What if you teach them for two or three years and they haven’t learned anything?”
High School Principal Machell Schwarz responded, “Then we work with them and try everything we possibly can.” Bartol requested the board look into the legalities of modifying the disability policy.
By Tuesday word of the exchange had spread around the district, District Administrator Lance Alwin said, and he had received feedback from community members troubled by Bartol’s comments.
“Any family that has a child with special needs would be very disconcerted to know we were thinking about defining the type of child we intend to work with,” Alwin said. “All children shall be served. Until I’m told differently, I have no intention of beginning to socially exclude any child that shows up at our doorstep.”
In an interview Wednesday Bartol did not back down from his statements but said he was misunderstood by administrators and other board members who took offense to his comments.
“To my knowledge, all the students that are attending the Baraboo School District fall into the category of being able to be educated,” he said. “But it is feasible and it has occurred in other school districts where students that because of some type of brain damage were not be able to be educated and yet they were allowed to go to school.”
In a statement from Wisconsin Association of School Boards Wednesday,
attorney Nancy Dorman advised the district state and federal laws entitle all children to an education, and the district’s obligation to provide it cannot be waived through local policy.
It’s possible those state and federal laws implied that “students” were children capable of being educated, Bartol said. He said ideally the district would have a team of experts determine if children with severe cognitive disabilities were making progress in the public school setting. If after a year or two they hadn’t improved, he said, they could go elsewhere.
“Public school systems are not a baby-sitting service or a nurse care
service for children such as those,” he said. “They’re a place to educate students.”
Peterson, who also investigates discrimination and harassment complaints in the district, said she was outraged by Bartol’s “discriminatory and prejudicial” remarks.
“It’s frightening to me that someone in a position making decisions on the education of the students in our community believes these kinds of things,” she said.
Education for severely cognitively disabled students is adapted and
individualized to the children’s needs, Peterson said, but it still
qualifies as education. Special ed teachers may work with a student to
learn to hold his head up, she said, freeing the student to be more
independent and spend his energies learning new tasks and concepts.
“We have had very young students with developmental disabilities who you might look at and just by appearance decide this student can’t learn,” she said. “I’ve seen those kids, and I’ve seen how far they do come.”
The district’s policy for students with disabilities borrows heavily from state and federal legislation, such as the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, which defines disabilities and schools’ obligations to serve students.
Bartol said the whole issue is probably moot if the board is unable to make any policy changes. “I’m not going to be upset about it one way or another,” he said, “and hopefully no one else gets upset about it one way or another.”
Bartol was elected to the board after a recount of the April 4 election had him winning by a three-vote margin over write-in candidate Doug Mering. Bartol, who was on the same ticket as a five-year, $7.5-million referendum, ran on an anti-referendum platform.
Lapham Students Run to Build Library for African Orphans
In an effort to build community, enhance self-esteem and inspire the
spirit of giving among its students, Lapham Elementary School has
organized a very special service-learning project. The “Lapham to
Lubasi Run-a-thon”, held Wednesday May 10th, was led by one of the
school’s second grade classes to raise awareness of poverty in Africa
and to collect books to build a library for the Lubasi Children’s
Home, an orphanage in Livingstone, Zambia.
Lubasi is a community-supported home for over sixty Zambian children
ranging in age from 5 to 15 years. As part of their Africa curriculum
this spring, a class of Lapham second graders made a connection with
this special home, and has been writing back and forth to learn more
about life in Africa. And learning about some of the challenges of
growing up in a poor country made the students eager to help.
Inspired by teacher Catherine McCollister’s passion for running and
fitness, they selected the run-a-thon as their way to support their
new friends, and they enlisted the entire school to help.
The event was a great success. The students had a collective goal of
832 laps around the field. With each lap representing 10 miles, this
goal would symbolically take the runners the 8,320 miles from Lapham
School all the way to the Lubasi Home for Children. Nearly 250
students ran the course in three waves. Parents and teachers cheered
the students on and everyone celebrated together as laps accumulated.
An old school bell was rung at every one hundred laps reached. By the
time the third wave had finished, the students had run over 1,200
laps.
The students also surpassed their goal for book donations. With a
goal of collecting at least 200 books, their efforts have raised over
450 beautiful new books so far, as well as several hundred dollars to
cover shipping and help Lubasi with library construction costs.
Next week Lapham students will write letters to their friends in
Zambia, and pack up their gift to send the 8,320 miles to Lubasi.
For more information, please contact:
Katherine Davey, (608) 770-9066 or katherine_davey@yahoo.com
“Lawmakers must give parents school choice”
I am committed to my home here in Camden. But that commitment is seriously being tested by the state of Camden’s public schools.
As a parent, I have done all I can do. Many of us find ourselves in the same boat. We have agitated for change, made phone calls and visited anyone who would listen. We have formed organizations, started scholarship funds, even taken to the streets. All this in an attempt to get those with position and influence to do something to improve the public school product and public school experience of our children.
We have been patient even as our schools floundered in academic rankings, failing to graduate our children and terrified us daily with horrific conditions no one should have to endure. We have begged for access to alternatives to these schools so our children will at least feel safe. But no matter what we do, we are unable to change the fundamental politics that hold our children as prisoners in a failing system.
Let them Eat Kale
Plans to improve school meals are causing havoc
JUST over a year ago, Jamie Oliver, a camera-friendly chef, called for a revolution in school kitchens. In a television series, he chronicled the decline in school lunches and showed that junk food-addicted children could be taught to tuck into what he calls “pukka nosh”. It proved a traumatic experience for the young gourmands, some of whom demonstrated for the return of chips and burgers. Mr Oliver’s antics have also tweaked the government, upset some dinner ladies and shaken the catering market.
“Jamie’s School Dinners” galvanised parents, who demanded that schools ditch grotesque inventions such as the Turkey Twizzler and adopt wholesome fare such as shepherd’s pie and lentil soup. Worried about a looming general election, the government hastily responded to Mr Oliver’s demands. Ruth Kelly, who was then the education secretary, promised to ban junk food in schools and asked a panel of experts to suggest nutritional guidelines.
Acting White
“Go into any inner-city neighborhood, and folks will tell you that government alone can’t teach kids to learn. They know that parents have to parent, that children can’t achieve unless we raise their expectations and turn off the television sets and eradicate the slander that says a black youth with a book is acting white.”
—Barack Obama, Keynote Address, Democratic National Convention, 2004
Acting white was once a label used by scholars, writing in obscure journals, to characterize academically inclined, but allegedly snobbish, minority students who were shunned by their peers.
Now that it has entered the national consciousness—perhaps even its conscience—the term has become a slippery, contentious phrase that is used to refer to a variety of unsavory social practices and attitudes and whose meaning is open to many interpretations, especially as to who is the perpetrator, who the victim.
I cannot, in the research presented here, disentangle all the elements in the dispute, but I can sort out some of its thicker threads. I can also be precise about what I mean by acting white: a set of social interactions in which minority adolescents who get good grades in school enjoy less social popularity than white students who do well academically.
The Model Students
From the New York Times a discussion of how Asian families value education and how those family values result in successful students.
The Model Students
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Why are Asian-Americans so good at school? Or, to put it another way, why is Xuan-Trang Ho so perfect?
Trang came to the United States in 1994 as an 11-year-old Vietnamese girl who spoke no English. Her parents, neither having more than a high school education, settled in Nebraska and found jobs as manual laborers.
The youngest of eight children, Trang learned English well enough that when she graduated from high school, she was valedictorian. Now she is a senior at Nebraska Wesleyan with a 3.99 average, a member of the USA Today All-USA College Academic Team and a new Rhodes Scholar.
Increasingly in America, stellar academic achievement has an Asian face. In 2005, Asian-Americans averaged a combined math-verbal SAT of 1091, compared with 1068 for whites, 982 for American Indians, 922 for Hispanics and 864 for blacks. Forty-four percent of Asian-American students take calculus in high school, compared with 28 percent of all students.
Speak Up For Fine Arts Education’s Future
I have been an outspoken advocate for elementary strings the past several years, because this course is a highly valued, high demand academic course that is part of the K-12 MMSD music curriculum but has been repeatedly put on the cut list without any meaningful curriculum planning taking place from year to year. However, I also strongly believe there has been a lack of long-term planning in all fine arts education since cuts began about 1999. Perhaps other academic areas have needed the administration’s attention, such as reading and math. That’s understandable, but the School Board missed yearly opportunities to put in place other structures to plan for the future of fine arts education in Madison – community committee is an example of one option they might have considered pursuing.
I was encouraged two weeks ago when the Performance and Achievement and Partnership Committee chairs indicated an interest in working on not only the cuts to elementary strings, but also other aspects of fine arts education. I hope a community-led fine arts education committee is formed from these two Board committees that will undertake long-term, strategic planning for fine arts education in Madison. I would like to see such planning include music, visual arts, dance, theater, etc. – all facets of the arts that bring joy and enrichment to the citizens in our community, growth to our city’s economy now and in the future and play an important academic role in the excellent education our children receive.
Again, School Board members can be emailed at: comments@madison.k12.wi.us
Speak Up For Strings – Thanks for Emailing the School Board: Keep The Emails Coming
MMSD’s School Board meets tonight to discuss the 2006-2007 school budget. There are no public appearances on tonight’s agenda, but the Madison community can continue to email the School Board in support of elementary strings at: comments@madison.k12.wi.us. Thank you to the parents and community who have attended the public hearing and who have sent emails to the School Board in support of elementary strings for Madison’s 9- and 10-year old students.
Cutting elementary strings will hurt low-income children! Keep the emails coming in support of about 550 low-income children who signed up for elementary strings – no other organization in Madison or Dane County offers an academic year long class that teaches this many children how to play an instrument. Madison School Board: Let’s work together to enhance this learning experience for our children; not tear it down and not tear it down before hearing from and working with the community.
I support restoring elementary strings to 2x per week, and I support forming a community task force on elementary strings and fine arts education to build fine arts education in Madison, not continue to tear it down. I reject late spring reports from the District administration that are clearly biased against this course and have not engaged teachers, music professionals, the community in the preceding 4 years! It’s not a administrative staffing issue, but it is poor, poor planning. We’ve had revenue caps since the early 1990s, and the Superintendent has been cutting fine arts since 1999 with no long-term plan in place, no community task force formed.
Call for an end to unfair cuts to elementary strings – cut 50% last year. No other high demand, highly valued course has been targeted in any year let alone year in and year out for cuts for 5 springs!
The state needs to take action on school financing; Madison needs the MMSD School Board to take action on elementary strings and fine arts educationl. Work with the community – please start now!
The Model Students
Why are Asian-Americans so good at school? Or, to put it another way, why is Xuan-Trang Ho so perfect?
Trang came to the United States in 1994 as an 11-year-old Vietnamese girl who spoke no English. Her parents, neither having more than a high school education, settled in Nebraska and found jobs as manual laborers.
The youngest of eight children, Trang learned English well enough that when she graduated from high school, she was valedictorian. Now she is a senior at Nebraska Wesleyan with a 3.99 average, a member of the USA Today All-USA College Academic Team and a new Rhodes Scholar.
Speak Up for Strings Tonight: Public Appearances at Board Public Hearing On the Budget – 6:30 p.m. Tuesday, May 9th at Memorial High School
Dear Madison Community,
Children and parents are encouraged to speak in support of elementary strings and to bring their instruments to tonight’s School Board public hearing on the budget if they would like to play. My husband, Fred Schrank, who is the principal bassist with the MSO and who teaches orchestra to elementary and middle school children in the district, will be there. I’ve asked him if he would accompany those children who might want to play for the School Board to show their support for the course. The public hearing begins 6:30 p.m at Memorial High School, 201 S. Gammon Road, Auditorium [map].
For your information – the School Board takes students who want to speak for 3 minutes (or play for 3 minutes) first. I also have signs and will have colored markers for students or others who want to make signs for the School Board to see.
The Superintendent’s proposal to cut Grade 4 strings is unacceptable, incomplete and would put in place a music curriculum planning process AFTER the cut is made to Grade 4 strings instruction. His conceptual idea is to plan to offer elementary children experiences with varied instruments in the 07-08 school year when Grade 5 strings would be cut and there would be no more elementary strings. That’s a curious idea. Why? Current General Music practice is to offer children experiences on different instruments – so the planning would not result in any meaningful curriculum change except the elimination of elementary stringed instrument instruction. What kind of plan would that be? No community planning took place this year for music education, which DPI recommends as best practice for standards based curriculum planning – include professionals and the community in the effort. The only plan is to cut Grade 4 strings, with planning for next steps to follow. Without good planning and good information – bad practice and bad decisions follow.
My question: Where’s the planning been for the past year, for the past 5 years? Our kids deserve better. Hundreds of children and community members have spoken in support of the elementary strings course over the years and emails and support for this course remain strong as demonstrated by the children once again this year through their enrollment in this course – over 1,700 children in September (550+ low income children who will be hurt the most by this cut).
After 5 springs of advocating for this course, I’m exasperated and annoyed; but when I listen to children and parents tell their stories about their hopes and dreams, I get reinvigorated as I was last night after listening and speaking. Last night, Ruth Robarts, Shwaw Vang and Lucy Mathiak spoke strongly in support of the program and in working on strings through the Performance and Achievement and the Partnership Committees. I think the idea to collaborate among board committees is novel and appropriate for Fine Arts – and may be for other areas. I feel involving the community – music and art professionals, parents, organizations in the process is critical to the long-term success of fine arts education in Madison, especially in tight financial times.
Also, Lawrie Kobza, School Board Vice President, reminded the Superintendent that the School Board had additional options to his proposal to consider – the Superintendent’s options plus keeping the course the same as this year or restoring the course to what it was two years ago (2x per week for 45 minutes).
So, please, if you have time tonight, come and Speak Up For Strings! Even if it’s only to stop in on your way to and from another event (it’s that crazy time of year with concerts, sporting games, dances and preparation for graduations taking up lots of time) and register with the Board in support of the course. I’ll be there to help with registering to speak in support, or simply registering your support. Each person’s presence makes a difference – individually and collectively!
Best,
Barbara Schrank
P.S and FYI – the Supt.’s proposed Grade 4 strings cut would not affect any current teachers and would be made through retirements and resignations. However, 1,700 children would lose something they dearly value that provides them with so much. I think, over time, our community will lose even more.
Why Does Elementary Stringed Instrument Instruction Matter? One Reason – Student Demand is Strong
I sent the following letter to the School Board last week after reviewing data and text on elementary strings sent to the School Board by the Fine Arts Coordinator. In late March, I spoke before the School Board about working together on strengthening strings and fine arts education and hoped that we would not see another spring of “surprise reports.” Shwaw Vang and others thought this was a good idea, but I guess the administration did not agree. Following my talk, the Superintendent sent a memo to the School Board with a proposal to eliminate elementary strings the end of next school year and offer General Music.
For the past five springs, in one form or another, reports on strings have been presented to the School Board, which present data and give reasons why not to teach strings. These reports are all prepared by top administrators with basically no input from or curriculum review by teachers, parents, students, the community. No other data are presented in the same manner and with as much detail as this course – none, which I find troubling. Courses are dropped for lack of enrollment, which is not the case with elementary strings. Also, no other academic course has come before the School Board year after year for cuts – not even open classroom, ropes, wrestling.
I have MMSD historical data on strings from when the course was first introduced. In spite of the administration’s best efforts to cut the course,
- demand from students remains strong and
- the community still values the course.
In a comment, Lucy Mathiak wrote: “As a board member, I do not see the issue as strings vs. math vs. athletics, which is how the annual budget pageant usually works. I see the issue as strings and math and athletics vs. cost overruns in building projects, growth in business services, and expenditures for contracted services that may or may not benefit our schools.
Attacking strings, or extracurriculars, or sports, will not put teachers, librarians, and other key staff into schools. Nor will it repair curricula that are of questionable efficacy. If we want good schools, the conversation starts with what is in the budget — ALL of the budget — and whether the budget supports the kind of programs that we value in our schools.” I strongly agree with her statement, because focusing on ALL of the budget keeps the focus on what’s important – student learning and achievement. An increasing body of research and experience shows studying an instrument positively affects student achievement. If so, why isn’t the School Board working with the community to strengthen fine arts education.
Dear School Board Members,
You recently received some statistical information from the District Fine Arts Coordinator on string instrumental enrollment for Grades 4-12 that was in response to a question from Ms. Carstensen on enrollment.
I feel the information presented could have been titled, “Reasons [the Administration Wants] to Cut Elementary Strings,” which, of course I found strange and inconsistent with data on this course and how other data are presented to the School Board [for issues/practices the administration supports].
I would like to provide you with some additional information that I believe provides a bigger picture and shows how this course has grown as the District has changed:
- Historical Enrollment:
[Please excuse me, I don’t know how to change the x axis to years. Year 1 is 1969 and the last year is 2005.] This data was kept in the Fine Arts Department by those overseeing the elementary strings enrollment. I have a copy of the original chart, which I would be happy to provide MMSD if they cannot find a copy of this information..
The dip around year 23 (1991) was due to a proposal to cut elementary strings and the later dip around year 29 was due to the inability to replace an FTE. You can see the strong growth in the course following a proposal to cut the course. During the 1990s enrollment grew, peaking in the early 2000s at 2,049. Even with the Superintendent’s proposals to cut the course, demand for instruction remains strong. During the same time period in the 1990s, low-income and minority enrollment in the elementary grades increased (while total enrollment in elementary school declined). Even with the proposed cuts to elementary strings since 2002, enrollment has stayed strong, consistently about 50% of 4th and 5th grade students participate. This course is a high demand, highly valued course as growth in enrollment continues to show. - Elementary Strings – Demographics and Over Time:
When you look at the statistics you received on elementary strings – I would recommend that you look at the entire course over time as well as student groups over time (cohorts). If you look at the course over time, you see increases in demographics at all grade levels as you see increases in low-income and minority in the total student population – that’s moving in the right direction and teachers deserve praise for this. In fact, if you look at the low-income (%) enrollment in Grade 4 strings this year – that percentage is 2.8% lower than the percentage of low-income students in the entire Grade 4 this year.
Also, when students go from Grades 5 to Grade 6, they have another choice of instrument to study – a band instrument. When you look at the historical enrollment in instrumental music from grades 5 to 6, you will see an increase in students opting to play an instrument in Grade 6. Elementary strings plays a role in preparing students to read music and to perform with other students in an ensemble. The curriculum is an instrumental curriculum from Grades 4-12. [Low income children have no other viable option to learn how to play an instrument – $2,000 per year for lessons and instrument rental.]
Marshmallows and Public Policy
A longtime reader emailed David Brooks most recent column:
Around 1970, Walter Mischel launched a classic experiment. He left a succession of 4-year-olds in a room with a bell and a marshmallow. If they rang the bell, he would come back and they could eat the marshmallow. If, however, they didn’t ring the bell and waited for him to come back on his own, they could then have two marshmallows.
In videos of the experiment, you can see the children squirming, kicking, hiding their eyes — desperately trying to exercise self-control so they can wait and get two marshmallows. Their performance varied widely. Some broke down and rang the bell within a minute. Others lasted 15 minutes.
The children who waited longer went on to get higher SAT scores. They got into better colleges and had, on average, better adult outcomes. The children who rang the bell quickest were more likely to become bullies. They received worse teacher and parental evaluations 10 years on and were more likely to have drug problems at age 32.
Lots of Mischel test links here. Sara has more on this at the Quick and the Ed.
Keep fighting for school success
Wisconsin State Journal editorial
Wednesday, May 3, 2006
Madison should take a bow and be proud of its decade-long effort to improve early reading skills and boost school achievement for all racial groups.
Yet the hard work isn’t over and may be getting harder.
UW-Madison education researchers hailed Madison this week for shrinking its racial achievement gap more than probably any urban area in the country. And at the same time, test scores for white students in Madison kept improving.
More young students of all backgrounds can read.
More older students of all backgrounds are graduating.
Madison’s formula for success, according to the researchers, is largely the result of three things:
One-to-one tutoring by trained volunteers.
The Wisconsin State Journal and WISC-TV (Ch. 3) helped launch a decade ago the Schools of Hope civil journalism project that stressed the recruitment and training of volunteer reading tutors. The United Way now oversees the effort and counts about 1,000 tutors working with 2,000 struggling students on reading and math in kindergarten through eighth grade.
Organizers say the effort will continue and possibly expand until at least 2011.
Small class sizes in the earliest grades.
The state is contributing millions to Madison schools for poor children to benefit from the extra attention smaller class sizes allow during kindergarten through third grade.
Better teacher training.
This might be the hardest element of Madison’s success to maintain, much less improve. With relatively flat school enrollment and high property values in Madison, the state steers a lower percentage of aid our way. And voters have shown they’re skeptical of approving higher operational spending than a state cap otherwise allows.
That means other areas of school spending should be cut before teacher training is reduced. Or perhaps the district can develop creative, lower-cost ways to train those teachers who most need it.
Madison just might become a national model for closing the racial achievement gap if existing trends continue. But that won’t be easy given financial constraints and a growing influx of students who lack English skills.
But hope is high. Volunteers are energetic. Educators passionately want students to succeed.
Let’s stay at it, Madison, and show the nation the way.
Better MMSD budget process? Maybe next year.
The National School Board Association argues that local school boards exist to translate the community’s educational goals for its children into programs and to hold staff accountable for the quality and effectiveness of the programs:
Your school board sets the standard for achievement in your district, incorporating the community’s view of what students should know and be able to do at each grade level. Your school board also is responsible for working with the superintendent to establish a valid process for measuring student success and, when necessary, shifting resources to ensure that the district’s goals are achieved.
Don’t expect to see that kind of process as the Madison School Board adopts a $383.7M budget for 2006-07.
On April 24, 2006, Superintendent Art Rainwater presented his proposed budget for 2006-07 to the school board. MMSD Proposed Balanced Budget for 2006-07 To the credit of the administration, the documents are better organized and provide more detail than in recent years.
Nonetheless, the board’s adoption of next year’s budget will likely be an unsatisfying process for parents and the community. I say this because the Madison board has again skipped the decision-making steps that are necessary for budget decisions to occur within a framework that we can all understand and support.
Long before the school board tries to evaluate a budget, the board should have translated the community’s vision for the education of its children into specific, measurable goals for student achievement. Key Work of School Boards
We don’t have such goals except for third grade reading, completion of algebra and geometry and attendance. What kind of budget commitment should we make to offering a comprehensive high school program? We don’t know, because we have set no standards for the “challenging, contemporary curriculum” that we claim is a strategic priority for the district. What funds should we commit to fine arts education? We don’t know, because we have no achievement goals in the arts or any other curriculum area. Should we cease funding a “Race and Equity” position at the $100,000 a year level? We don’t know because we don’t have objectives for the position to accomplish.
The board should also have developed a shared understanding of how data will be used to evaluate the district’s progress toward meeting its goals.
We don’t determine which data will be used in decisions about educational programs or any other aspect of the budget. Should we cease the “same service” approach to the teaching of reading? Should we continue to invest in “instructional coaches” who teach teachers how to present the Connected Math program? Again, we don’t know. The administration claims that its curriculum decisions are data-driven. However, the administration does not share the student achievement data behind our “same service” approach or proposed new programs nor has the board agreed to rely on whatever data that the administration may use in its internal analysis.
As the result of the April elections, the board has two new members: Lucy Mathiak and Arlene Silveira. Both promised to focus on standards and accountability during their campaigns. Maybe next year will be better. That’s important because the fuss that occurs each spring as the board struggles to “restore” programs or staff that the superintendent has cut should not occur. We should not be on the defensive–always having to create our own individual rationales for replacing cut items or changing programs. We should be on the offensive—judging the superintendent’s budget against the goals that we have set for our programs and the measurements of effectiveness that we have agreed on.
Please stay tuned.
Ruth Robarts
Member, Madison School Board
Speak Up For Strings – Starting May 9th
Please Help Save Elementary Strings!!!
How: Ask the New School Board –
Work with the Community to Build Fine Arts Education!
When: Starting May 9th
Other districts facing fiscal and academic achievement challenges have had successes maintaining and growing their fine arts education – through strategic planning, active engagement and real partnerships with their communities. School districts in Arizona, Chicago, New York, Texas and Minneapolis are looking for innovative ways to preserve and to grow fine arts education when facing tight budgets.
What does MMSD do?
For the 5th spring, elementary strings are at risk. Superintendent Rainwater is proposing to eliminate elementary strings – to cut Grade 4 strings next year and Grade 5 strings the following year. NO other high demand, highly valued academic course is targeted in next year’s budget – NONE.
Hundreds of students, parents, teachers and community members understand the value of this course for young children and have shown their public support for this course before the School Board each spring. We need to remind the new School Board, once again, of the value of this course – to our students’ growth and achievement, to our community.
Facts:
Enrollment Doubled – In the 1990s, course enrollment doubled to slightly more than 2,000 students – at the same time the low income and minority elementary student population increased. Approximately 50% of 4th and 5th graders elect to participate in elementary strings.
Low Income Enrollment Grew – Over time, low-income enrollment in elementary strings has grown. This year, the percentage of low-income children enrolled in Grade 4 strings is higher than the percentage of low-income children in that grade enrolled in the district. No other private/public organization in Madison teaches 550+ low-income children how to play an instrument at a higher level and to perform in ensembles.
You Can Help:
Speak to the School Board – bring signs, play your instrument
When: Tuesday, May 9, 2006 – 6:30 p.m., Memorial High School Auditorium [map]
Write to the School Board – comments@madison.k12.wi.us – and ask them
- to reject the Superintendent’s proposal as inadequate, and
- to work with Madison by forming a community fine arts committee to address fine arts educations issues, such as strings, so kids can get the personal and academic benefits of fine arts education.
Five years of targeting strings is unacceptable, short-sighted and goes against a) what the research shows strings does for children’s growth, development and academic achievement, b) what’s being done in other areas in MMSD, and b) what the community values for our children’s education.
For more information, email: savestrings@charter.net
Doyle Flunks Test on Virtual Schools
Governor Doyle recently vetoed Assembly Bill 1060 which would have reaffirmed and clarified the state’s commitment to virtual public schools in Wisconsin. Prior to his decision to veto the bill, WEAC (the teacher’s union) was making noise about the “outsourcing of education” to people who would not be qualified teachers, instructors or presenters to our children. In other words, parents! Governor Doyle reiterated the concerns of WEAC after vetoing the bill by stating, “Actual pupil instruction could be delivered by persons without a state-issued license or permit.”
Both WEAC and Governor Doyle misstate the intent of the bill to suit their own political agenda.
Interestingly enough, their take also ignores the reality of what goes on in public schools today. Currently in our public school system there are teacher aides, substitute teachers and guest presenters that instruct pupils on a daily basis. These individuals are not required to hold state-issued licenses or permits. In fact, state statutes and DPI administrative rules allow for the local school boards to determine the requirements for these persons.
West Bend Parent Owen Robinson calls the recent court decison on virtual schools “A Victory for Children“. Kristof’s recent article addresses this isue as well.
Fund 80 Is Worth Our Support
What is Fund 80, and why are people saying such awful things aboutit?
Fund 80 is the state accounting code for community services expenditures,the major portion of which is for Madison SchoolCarstensen Community Recreation (MSCR) and the district’s cable channel 10.The current budget for community services is $11 million. Of that $8 millionis from the tax levy; the remainder comes from fees and grants.
MSCR programs range from exercise programs for seniors to swim lessons forinfants and toddlers, from adult sport leagues to summer day camps forelementary students, plus art and dance classes for all ages.
The 2001-03 state budget allowed community services expenditures to bemoved out from under the revenue cap imposed on school districts. This wasdone so that adult softball leagues could be funded without reducing a schooldistrict’s core educational program for students.
Cieslewicz State of the City speech
Madison Mayor Dave Cieslewicz spoke at yesterday’s Rotary club meeting. His 3416 word state of the city speech included 159 directly related to our local public schools:
8. We need to work more seamlessly to maintain our excellent public school system.
Our public schools have recently been ranked the third best in the nation. Yet, they face unprecedented challenges as they work to educate more children that come from impoverished families and more children with special needs. I am very aware that we elect a school board to make these decisions and it is not my intent to overstep my authority, but I do recognize that good schools are vital ingredients in healthy neighborhoods. We will renew our efforts to work with the school district, with parents and teachers to make sure that city government and the schools are pulling together, not working at cross purposes. For instance, the decisions the City regarding new housing development has a significant impact on school attendance and boundary issues. Our recently-adopted Comprehensive Plan notes the importance of city and school planning staff working together.
Kristian Knutsen attended the speech.
Gap in teacher quality falls on income lines
Public school teachers in the nation’s wealthiest communities continue to be more qualified than those in the poorest despite a federal law designed to provide all children equal educational opportunity.
Preliminary data released by the Department of Education show that in 39 states, the chance of finding teachers who know their subjects are better in elementary schools where parents’ incomes are highest. The data show that’s also the case among middle and high schools in 43 states.
“Obviously, we have a long way to go,” says Rene Islas, who monitors teacher quality for the Department of Education. “Even if you have high numbers (of certified instructors) in the aggregate, there are pockets where students are being taught by teachers that are not highly qualified.”
Under the No Child Left Behind law President Bush signed in 2002, states are supposed to have “highly qualified teachers” for all core academic courses, such as math, English and science, by the end of this school year. States that don’t face a loss of federal funding.
The Madison Community – Students, Parents, Professionals, Citizens – Can Help Elementary Strings: Here’s How
The community CAN HELP elementary strings and fine arts education in MMSD. Please write the School Board – comments@madison.k12.wi.us – ask them a) to establish a community fine arts education advisory committee beginning with a small community working group to put together a plan for this, b) develop a multi-year strategic and education plan for fine arts education, c) work with the music professionals and community to address short-term issues facing elementary music education (other fine arts areas – dance, drama) that supports children’s learning and academic achievement. Until this is done, please write the School Board asking them not to accept (to reject) the Superintendent’s current K-5 music education proposal to eliminate elementary strings.
At this late date in the year, I feel a small community working group needs to be established that will develop a plan for moving forward with the community on fine arts education issues. I would be more than happy to volunteer my time to help coordinate this effort, which I see as a first step toward the establishment of a community fine arts education task force/advisory committee. However, what is key is the School Board’s support and the Superintendent’s leadership, and I would be honored to work with all members of the school board and with the Superintendent. I’m sure other people would be happy to help as well.
The issues with MMSD’s fine arts elementary music education is not solely a budget issue, but the administration’s lack of imagination and longer-term education planning in fine arts makes courses such as strings become budget issues because nothing is done from year to year to make it anything other than a budget issue.
Elementary strings is a high-demand course – this isn’t 50 kids across the district, it was 1,745 in September 2005. From 1969 to 2005, enrollment has tripled, increasing by 1,000 students from 1992 until 2002, at the same time that the number of low income and minority children increased in the elementary student population. Demand for the course is annually 50% of the total enrollment in 4th and 5th grade. Plus, minority and low income enrollment has increased over the years. This year there are about 550 low income children enrolled in the elementary class. More low income children enrolled to take the course, but did not because of the pull out nature, I’m assuming. There is nowhere else in the City that so many low-income children have the opportunity to study an instrument at a higher level and continuously as part of their daily education.
Concern about quality of 3rd quarter report cards (cont.)
Expressions of parent concern over the quality of third-quarter report cards for students in Madison’s elementary schools continue. Parents at Thoreau School joined parents from other schools who have wondered why their children make so little progress in the third quarter of the year in many subject areas that no information on progress can be provided to their families. Another Parent Concerned About Third-Quarter Report Cards and Can We Talk 3: 3rd Quarter Report Cards
Here is a letter from Thoreau parents to the Assistant Superintendent for Elementary Schools.
Fifth Verse – Same, Sorrowful Tune: Superintendent Proposes to Elminate Elementary Strings
Other districts facing fiscal and academic achievement challenges have had successes maintaining and growing their fine arts education – through strategic planning, active engagement and real partnerships with their communities. In Tuscon, AZ, with a large low income and hispanic population, test scores of this population have climbed measurably (independent evaluations confirmed this). This state has received more than $1 million in federal funding for their fine arts education work. School districts in Chicago, New York, Texas and Minneapolis have also done some remarkable work in this area.
In my opinion, the administration’s music education work products and planning efforts this year are unsatisfactory, unimaginative and incomplete. In spite of research that continues to demonstrate the positive effects on student achievement (especially for low income students) and the high value the Madison community places on fine arts, the administration continues to put forth incomplete proposals that will short change all students, especially our low-income students, and the administration does its work “behind closed doors.”
Three or four weeks ago, I spoke at a board meeting and said I thought we needed to do things differently this year – Shwaw Vang and other board members supported my idea of working together to solve issues surrounding elementary strings. Apparently, the administration saw things differently. Since my public appearance the Superintendent has issued two reports – one eliminating elementary strings replacing K-5 music with a “new, improved” idea for K-5 music and a second report with enrollment data presented incompletely with an anti-elementary strings bias. Teachers had no idea this proposal or data were forthcoming, saw no drafts, and they did not receive copies of statistics relevant to their field that was sent last week to the School Board. Neither did the public or the entire School Board know these reports were planned and underway. During the past 12 months, there were no lists of fine arts education priorities developed and shared, no plans to address priorities, processes, timelines, staff/community involvement, etc. String teachers received no curriculum support to adjust to teaching a two-year curriculum in 1/2 the instructional time even though they asked for this help from the Doyle building, and they never received information about the plans for recreating elementary strings in the future. None.
I don’t feel the Superintendent proceeded in the manner expressed to me by Mr. Vang nor as demonstrated by the School Board’s establishment of community task forces over this past year on a number of important issues to the community. Madison’s love of fine arts lends itself well to a community advisory committee. I hope other Board members support Mr. Vang’s community team approach, rejecting the Superintendent’s recent music proposal as incomplete and unacceptable.
In his fifth year of proposals to eliminate elementary strings, the Superintendent is proposing a “new and improved” K-5 music that is not planned for another year, but requires elimination of Grade 4 strings next year. The recent proposal, once again, was developed by administrators without any meaningful involvement of teachers and no involvement of the community. Elementary strings and fine arts education are important to the community. The Superintendent did not use a process that was transparent, well planned with a timeline, open and involved the community.
Music education, including elementary string instruction, is beneficial to a child’s developing, learning and engagement in school. However, music education, also directly supports and reinforces learning in math and reading. Instrument instruction does this at a higher level and that’s one of the reasons why MMSD’s music education curriculum introduces strings in Grade 4, following a sequence of increasing challenges in music education. In fact, all the points made in the Superintendent’s “new” K-5 music program, including multicultural experiences, exist in MMSD’s current music curriculum. The only thing “new” in the Superintendent’s proposal is the elimination of elementary strings.
It is not acceptable to say that we have to do something, because we have to cut money. Also, this is not about some folks being able to “yell” louder than others. To me, this is about five years that have been wasted – no planning, no community involvement, no shared visions. Our kids deserve better. Let’s get started on a new path working together now.
AP Poll: Teachers & Parents on No Child Left Behind
Teachers are far more pessimistic than parents about getting every student to succeed in reading and math as boldly promised by the No Child Left Behind Act. That’s left a huge expectations gap between the two main sets of adults in children’s lives.
An AP-AOL Learning Services Poll found nearly eight in 10 parents are confident their local schools will have students up to state standards by the 2013-14 school year target. Yet only half of teachers are confident the kids in their schools will meet that deadline.
The finding underscores a theme in the poll. Parents and teachers often disagree on daily aspects of education, from the state of discipline to the quality of high schools.
A major reason is that adults see the children differently. Parents tend to focus on their own children, while teachers work with dozens of students from different backgrounds.
Another Parent Concerned about Third-Quarter Report Cards
Recently, a parent expressed concern about the quality of third-quarter report cards at Crestwood Elementary School.
Can We Talk 3: Third-Quarter Report Cards
Today a parent of students at Elvejhem Elementary asked Madison School Board members why the teachers only reported on 10% of content areas. I have asked Superintendent Art Rainwater for a response to the parent’s concerns.
The New Push to Rate Schools Will Make Adults Perform and Help Kids Learn
Accountability is a constructive and increasingly powerful force in the education of New York City schoolchildren. It starts with report cards and runs far deeper.
Third-graders have to pass a basic skills test to be promoted to fourth grade. High school seniors cannot earn a Regents diploma without passing a series of exams. And, of course, students hoping to attend college need to take, and perform moderately well, on the SAT or ACT.
B ut while young people have been held increasingly accountable for results, adults who work in the schools have been largely shielded from such judgments. Whether students succeed or not has little or no effect on whether teachers or administrators continue to be employed or how much they are paid. Heroic educators who transform the lives of their students are not rewarded, nor are subpar educators who deprive students of future opportunities required to improve or punished.
Seattle’s Teaching of Math adds up to Much Confusion
Rick Burke remembers looking at his elementary-school daughter’s math homework and wondering where the math was.
Like many Seattle schools, his daughter’s school was teaching “reform” math, a style that encourages students to discover math principles and derive formulas themselves. Burke, an engineer, worried that his daughter wasn’t learning basic math skills.
“It was a lot of drawing pictures and playing games,” he said. “Her whole first-grade year was pretty much a lateral move.”
So for the past few years, Burke and his wife have been tutoring their three children after school — and this fall, they plan to switch them to North Beach Elementary, which uses a more traditional approach to math.
The biggest problem is that the teachers currently in service never learned enough math to begin with, and so can’t be expected to teach what they don’t already know. We only think our teachers know math because they know just as little math as we do. If you want to know how scarily ignorant of math our teachers are, I suggest reading Liping Ma’s Knowing and Teaching Elementary Mathematics for a start.
I’ve written about this on my own blog, and I’m not just talking out of my butt here. I’ve taught math to these potential teachers. They lack the prerequisite skills to pass a college algebra class. You can tell who in the class is in the Elementary Education program; they’re the ones sitting in the back row, getting a D on every exam because they have to use a calculator to do three times two (and they think this is normal). So when Bob Brandt of Bellevue says “How do you know three times two equals six? Any idiot knows that,” I would counter that an exceptional idiot must be teaching his kids math. We’ve raised an entire generation of teachers who don’t even know enough about math to know that they are ignorant of it.
D-Ed Reckoning touches on math as well.
The School Transformation Plan
A Strategy to Create Small, High-Performing College-Preparatory Schools in Every Neighborhood of Los Angeles
Green Dot Public Schools, Bain & Company [180K PDF]:
Public school reform has become the #1 issue for the City of Los Angeles. While most acknowledge the poor state of the public education system, the discussion to date has largely focused on governance issues, such as mayoral control and district break-up. This whitepaper is intended to refocus the debate on a future vision for public schools in Los Angeles about which all stakeholders will be enthusiastic. Simply put, every child in Los Angeles should have the opportunity to attend a small, safe, college-preparatory public school. This whitepaper also provides a strategy for how the City of Los Angeles can take advantage of its historic opportunity to make this vision a reality. With $19 billion in bond funding, the Los Angeles Unified School District has unparalleled resources to execute a dramatic transformation.
via Eduwonk.
Food Policy and Physical Education
To those concerned about the success of the Madison Schools,
I am writing to express my support for the positive changes proposed by the district with respect to food policy. It is exciting that the district has been proactive in including students, parents, health providers, educators, and policy makers. As a pediatrician working with childhood obesity and childhood diabetes, I believe our schools do- and can have an even more positive influence- on the health of our children.
We are all struggling with the epidemic of childhood obesity, its costs, ramifications, and its effect on children and their families. We need to address this problem though our families, through our communities, and definitely through our schools. We continue to “leave many children behind” when it comes to healthy nutrition and physical activity. The State of California has shown that children with greater fitness levels, also have greater academic levels. Supporting an environment for achieving this is imperative for our children.
Healthy food choices should always be offered even if it means different fund raising methods in our schools including removing soda, and other unhealthy food practices. It is time for the Board to look carefully at how they can help be part of the solution regarding this problem and the long-term health of our students.
States Help Schools Hide Minority Scores
Frank Bass, Nicole Ziegler Dizon and Ben Feller:
States are helping public schools escape potential penalties by skirting the No Child Left Behind law’s requirement that students of all races must show annual academic progress.
With the federal government’s permission, schools aren’t counting the test scores of nearly 2 million students when they report progress by racial groups, an Associated Press computer analysis found.
Minorities – who historically haven’t fared as well as whites in testing – make up the vast majority of students whose scores are being excluded, AP found. And the numbers have been rising.
“I can’t believe that my child is going through testing just like the person sitting next to him or her and she’s not being counted,” said Angela Smith, a single mother. Her daughter, Shunta’ Winston, was among two dozen black students whose test scores weren’t broken out by race at her suburban Kansas City, Mo., high school.
To calculate a nationwide estimate, AP analyzed the 2003-04 enrollment figures the government collected – the latest on record – and applied the current racial category exemptions the states use.
Overall, AP found that about 1.9 million students – or about 1 in every 14 test scores – aren’t being counted under the law’s racial categories. Minorities are seven times as likely to have their scores excluded as whites, the analysis showed.
Less than 2 percent of white children’s scores aren’t being counted as a separate category. In contrast, Hispanics and blacks have roughly 10 percent of their scores excluded. More than one-third of Asian scores and nearly half of American Indian scores aren’t broken out, AP found.
Citizens’ Commission on Civil Rights website.
Carrie Antifinger notes that the loophole snares 33% of Wisconsin minority students.
Andrew Rotherham:
First, a reader of some of the back and forth might end up thinking that the law requires some minimum subgroup or that the feds set the subgroup size. It doesn’t, they don’t. Here are the exact AYP regulations from the Federal Register (pdf) and here is Ed Trust’s explanatory piece. It’s left up to the states although the feds approve the state plans and consequently have approved the various sizes in effect now. Now they’re trying to figure out how to clean up (pdf) some of the mess they’ve created.
The heterogeneous debate: Some say best students get short shrift
Some parents say the Madison School District’s spending cuts, combined with its attempts to close the achievement gap, have reduced opportunities for higher-achieving students.
Jeff Henriques, a parent of two high-achieving students, said one of the potential consequences he sees is “bright flight” – families pulling students with higher abilities out of the district and going elsewhere because their needs aren’t being met.
One of the larger examples of this conflict is surfacing in the district’s move toward creating “heterogeneous” classes that include students of all achievement levels, eliminating classes that group students of similar achievement levels together.
Advocates of heterogeneous classes say students achieving at lower levels benefit from being in classes with their higher-achieving peers. But some parents of higher-achieving students are concerned their children won’t be fully challenged in such classes – at a time when the amount of resources going to talented and gifted, or TAG, programs is also diminishing.
Check out Part I and Part II of Cullen’s series.
Watch Professor Gamoran’s presentation, along with others related to the homogeneous / heterogeneous grouping debate here. Links and commentary and discussion on West’s English 10. Jason Shepherd took a look at these issues in his “Fate of the Schools” article.
Promises Betrayed
Five years ago we moved to Madison. A big factor in this decision was the expectation that we could rely on Madison public schools to educate our children. Our eldest went through West High School. To our delight the rigorous academic environment at West High transformed him into a better student, and he got accepted at several good public universities.
Now we are finding this promise betrayed for our younger children. Our elementary school appears to be sliding into disarray. Teachers and children are threatened, bullied, assaulted, and cursed at. Curricula are dumbed down to accommodate students who are unprepared for real school work. Cuts in special education are leaving the special needs kids adrift, and adding to the already impossible burdens of classroom teachers. To our disappointment we are forced to pull one child out of public school, simply to ensure her an orderly and safe learning environment.
Unless the School Board addresses these challenges forcefully and without obfuscation, I am afraid a historic mistake will be made. Madison schools will slip into a vicious cycle of middle class flight and steady decline. The very livability of our city might be at stake, not to mention our property values.
To me the necessary step is clear. The bottom five to ten percent of students, and especially all the aggressive kids, must be removed from regular classes. They should be concentrated in separate schools where they can receive the extra attention and intensive instruction they need, with an option to join regular classes if they are ready.
Madison Schools, New Population, New Challenges
Twenty-five years ago, less than 10 percent of the district’s students were minorities and relatively few lived in poverty. Today, there are almost as many minority students as white, and nearly 40 percent of all students are considered poor – many of them minority students. And the number of students who aren’t native English speakers has more than quadrupled.
“The school district looks a lot different from 1986 when I graduated,” said Madison School Board member Johnny Winston Jr.
The implications of this shift for the district and the city of Madison are huge, city and school officials say. Academic achievement levels of minority and low-income students continue to lag behind those of their peers. Dropout, suspension and expulsion rates also are higher for minority students.
“Generally speaking, children who grow up in poverty do not come to school with the same skills and background” that enable their wealthier peers to be successful, Superintendent Art Rainwater said. “I think there are certainly societal issues that are race-related that also affect the school environment.”
While the demographics of the district’s students have changed dramatically, the makeup of the district as a whole doesn’t match.
The overall population within the school district, which includes most of Madison along with parts of some surrounding municipalities, is predominantly white and far less likely to be poor. And most taxpayers in the district do not have school-age children, statistics show, a factor some suggest makes it harder to pass referendums to increase taxes when schools are seeking more money.
Forty-four percent of Madison public school students are minorities, while more than 80 percent of residents in the city are white, according to U.S. Census figures for 2000, the most recent year available. And since 1991, the percentage of district students who qualify for free or reduced-price lunches has nearly doubled to 39 percent; in 2000, only 15 percent of Madison’s residents were below the poverty level.
Although the city’s minority and low-income population has increased since the 2000 census, it’s “nowhere near what it is in the schools,” said Dan Veroff, director of the Applied Population Laboratory in UW- Madison’s department of rural sociology.
Barb Schrank asked “Where have all the Students Gone? in November, 2005: 
There’s a lot more at work in the MMSD’s flat or slightly declining enrollment than Cullen’s article discusses. These issues include:
- Parents leaving over core curriculum issues such as math, English 10, and the ongoing controversy over heterogeneous vs homogeneous class grouping
- “Why we may have to move…”
- More on CMP Math curriculum: more on math in general here
- “Families leaving West?“
Thoreau’s most recent PTO meeting, which included 50 parent and teacher participants, illustrates a few of the issues that I believe are driving some families to leave: growing math curriculum concerns and the recent imposition of mandatory playground grouping without any prior parent/PTO discussion.
Student losses, or the MMSD’s failure to capture local population growth directly affects the district’s ability to grow revenue (based on per student spending and annual budget increases under the state’s revenue caps).
The MMSD’s failure to address curriculum and govenance concerns will simply increase the brain flight and reduces the number of people supporting the necessary referendums. Jason Shepherd’s recent article is well worth reading for additional background.
Finally, Mary Kay Battaglia put together some of these numbers in December with her “This is not Your Grandchild’s Madison School District“.
Fairfax Success Masks Gaps for Black Students
Black students in Fairfax County are consistently scoring lower on state standardized tests than African American children in Richmond, Norfolk and other comparatively poor Virginia districts, surprising Fairfax educators and forcing one of the nation’s wealthiest school systems to acknowledge shortcomings that have been masked by its overall success.
Even within Fairfax schools, black elementary school students are outperformed on reading and math tests by whites and some other students, including Hispanics, poor children and immigrants learning English.
Well worth reading.
San Francisco Schools: Student Funding Follows Kids
San Francisco is one of a handful of public school districts across the nation that mimic an education market. In these districts, the money follows the children, parents have the right to choose their children’s public schools and leave underperforming schools, and school principals and communities have the right to spend their school budgets in ways that make their schools more desirable to parents.
Thanks to weighted funding, schools get more money for harder-to-educate students. Principals decide how to allocate funds.
In San Francisco the weighted student formula gives each school a foundation allocation that covers the cost of a principal’s salary and a clerk’s salary. The rest of each school’s budget is allocated on a per student basis. There is a base amount for the “average student,” with additional money assigned based on individual student characteristics: grade level, English language skills, socioeconomic status, and special education needs.
. . . The more students a school attracts, the bigger the school’s budget. So public schools in San Francisco now have an incentive to differentiate themselves from one another. Every parent can look through an online catalog of niche schools that include Chinese, Spanish, and Tagalog language immersion schools, college preparatory schools, performing arts schools that collaborate with an urban ballet and symphony, schools specializing in math and technology, traditional neighborhood schools, and a year-round school based on multiple-intelligence theory. Each San Francisco public school is unique. The number of students, the school hours, the teaching style, and the program choices vary from site to site
Via Joanne Jacobs
Schools Need Our Help in Preventing Medication Errors
Schools are under an incredible strain to simply educate children — let alone medicate them — so it’s hardly surprising that dispensing drugs at school leads to an alarming number of errors. The surprise is that parents and doctors don’t work harder to prevent them.
The laws requiring schools to dispense drugs were designed to protect children with medical problems, such as asthma and diabetes. Such kids wouldn’t be safe at school if their medications weren’t available.
ut a large, and growing, number of children are taking a wide variety of medications, including psychoactive drugs, that frequently have little to do with safety. Instead, the drugs are often prescribed — at least in part — to improve attentiveness and concentration and to enhance academic performance.
The resulting burden for schools is enormous. About 5% of children receive medication during a typical school day. Each year, the Los Angeles Unified School District dispenses about 450,000 doses of medications.
Virtual Schools, Real Innovation
A WISCONSIN court rejected a high-profile lawsuit by the state’s largest teachers’ union last month seeking to close a public charter school that offers all its courses online on the ground that it violated state law by depending on parents rather than on certified teachers to educate children. The case is part of a national trend that goes well beyond virtual schooling: teachers’ unions are turning to the courts to fight virtually any deviation from uniformity in public schools.
Unfortunately, this stance not only hinders efforts to provide more customized schooling for needy students, it is also relegating teachers to the sidelines of the national debate about expanding choice in public education.
Virtual charter schools grab headlines, but they are actually relatively minor players. The Center for Education Reform reports that there are 147 online-only charter schools in 18 states, with 65,354 students. In other words, virtual schools make up just 4 percent of the entire public charter school sector. And a third of them can be found in just one state, Ohio.
Still, they are valuable for many students. For example, a student in a rural community with few schooling options who finds the curriculum in her school too limiting might be better served through an online program that allows her to learn at her own pace. So, too, might a ninth grader who finds unbearable the jock-and-popularity culture that still largely prevails in our high schools. And some parents may want to be more involved in their child’s education than is possible in traditional public schools but don’t have the time or resources to do fully independent home schooling.
Andy Smarick has much more on this issue:
The article’s launching point is virtual schools, but there are three basic arguments here. First, the future of public education is more diversity and greater parental choice. Many of us hope this is the case and some of us actually believe it, but for it to be written so matter-of-factly and published on the pages of the old gray lady nearly gave me the vapors.
Program on Vouchers Draws Minority Support
Washington’s African-American mayor, Anthony A. Williams, joined Republicans in supporting the program, prompted in part by a concession from Congress that pumped more money into public and charter schools. In doing so, Mr. Williams ignored the ire of fellow Democrats, labor unions and advocates of public schools.
“As mayor, if I can’t get the city together, people move out,” said Mr. Williams, who attended Catholic schools as a child. “If I can’t get the schools together, why should there be a barrier programmatically to people exercising their choice and moving their children out?”
School-choice programs have fervent opponents, and here, public school officials worry that the voucher program will diminish the importance of the neighborhood school, though the program serves only a relative few of the district’s 58,000 students. National critics of school choice like Reg Weaver, president of the country’s largest teachers’ union, the National Education Association, accused voucher supporters of “exploiting the frustration of these minority parents to push for a political agenda” intended to undermine public schools.
Voting
I just voted. We like to bring our children to vote, so we waited till after preschool. My parents did the same thing.
I love voting. I love being part of a democracy. Usually, even when I think my candidates will lose, I leave the polling place with a little spring in my step. I especially love school board election, in part because I study school board elections. Today was different.
This was the first time I have decided who to vote for while in the booth. It is a strange election. On one hand I could rejoice that I can see good things about more than one candidate, but that’s not what I’m feeling. There has been too much bitterness and nastiness and the lines have been drawn boldly, but strangely. Some have called it the status quo vs. change, but I think even the status quo candidates think that MMSD can do better in a multitude of areas.
What has been called the “transparency” issue has loomed large. I prefer to think of this as being about how much deference should be given to the administration and how active a role should the board take. The3 budget and MTI negotiations are part of this, but it is bigger. This issue also presents problems. If you support expanded roles for the board (as I do), then the question of who fills these roles becomes very important. It isn’t enough to just support those who agree with you about the roles of the board, you have to look closely at what they (and their opponents) would do with that power.
An example of the strange ways the lines have been drawn is the ability grouping issue. Both ability grouping and mixed ability grouping are the status quo in MMSD. Neither has a whole lot to do with the deference issues that seemed so central to the races a few weeks ago, but the lines have been drawn and some of us are uncomfortable with the choices we now face.
Lastly there is the issue of supporters. It is a strange time when self-proclaimed conservatives actively support self-proclaimed progressives. I don’t even know what this means, except that perhaps true conservatives see no chance of electing one of their own (and whatever you think of Mathiak and Cole, they are not movement conservatives).
I also love the secret ballot, so I’m going to leave it at this. I’d love to hear from others who also struggled with these choices.
TJM
MATHIAK AND COLE WILL PROTECT PROGRAMS
I believe there has been enough ineffective communication on the school board and I am ready for decisions based on solid data and careful discussion. I believe that Maya Cole and Lucy Mathiak will both bring that to the board.
I am also certain that if we do not vote for them, we will endanger the strings programs, the TAG program and others that current board members deem unnecessary, even though they serve a diverse population of students.
We are a family looking for other educational options for our kids because we are tired of fighting to get our children’s needs met in the Madison Schools. We are tired of “being patient,” as one teacher told us. We are ready for our children to have access to challenges. Cole and Mathiak will serve the board well in examining the current school district agenda and exposing the truth.
– Elizabeth A. Dohrn, Madison
March 30, 2006 – WI State Journal
NEW IDEAS NEEDED TO KEEP QUALITY SCHOOLS – Mathiak and Cole
Madison public schools have been ranked among the best in the country. That is one of the reasons we moved here 16 years ago. Unfortunately, financial pressures from state-imposed caps, coupled with bad curriculum decisions, have our district moving in the wrong direction.
We need strong leadership from the school board, board members who will connect with the public and find solutions that meet the needs of all of our students, new ideas and fresh perspectives. That’s why I am voting for Maya Cole and Lucy Mathiak. We can do better for our children and our community. We must.
– Jane Doughty, Madison
March 30, 2006 WI State Journal
Mathiak and Cole Support Increased Educational Opportunities for All Students
Dear Editor,
I was glad to see the Capital Times’ endorsement of Lucy Mathiak for the Madison School Board. Mathiak will tackle the problems facing our school district with vigor and clarity, and she will demand accountability from administrators. Mathiak’s advocacy in our schools represents a wide range of needs and interests; she wants to ensure the best academic opportunities for all students.
Unfortunately, parents from Madison Partners for Inclusive Schools have mischaracterized Mathiak, as well as candidate Maya Cole, as wanting to limit students’ access to educational opportunity. Nothing could be further from the truth. Mathiak and Cole are skeptical of the District’s push toward compulsory heterogeneous classrooms precisely because this practice hobbles many students’ opportunities to learn. Administrators of our middle and high schools have eliminated course options in core subjects, reduced the choice of instructional levels, and prohibited motivated students from advancing with appropriate curriculum and learning peers.
Administrators have argued that advanced academic programs segregate students unfairly, since the advanced classes have been populated mainly by white, middle-class children. They think to address this injustice by doing away with the programs. This tactic reveals a prejudice of low expectations on their part: they apparently do not expect that low-income, minority students will ever qualify for advanced placement.
In fact, depriving gifted children of support and opportunity at school most hurts those gifted students from low-income families and traditionally marginalized groups. Families with money and connections can get educational enrichment for their children outside of school; families struggling to make ends meet cannot. The District’s own report on high school dropouts identifies 27% of them as having shown high ability as younger children; a large portion of these were minority students. Nurturing these students by identifying them early on, grouping them with learning peers, and pulling them into advanced, accelerated classes might have kept them engaged in school and fostered their potential.
Proponents of “equalizing” educational opportunity believe that filling classrooms with children of widely ranging abilities will help motivate students at risk. But, they have not evaluated the data to see if this is actually so. Administrators are moving ahead to expand the standard course/heterogeneous classroom initiative without studying whether or not it has helped struggling students to succeed. In contrast, supporters of Mathiak in the Madison TAG Parents group have compiled a long list of studies on the issue of heterogeneous classrooms vs. ability grouping. Jeff Henriques, a leader of the TAG Parents group, provided not only a summary of this research with citations and abstracts from some 60 articles, but also hard copies of approximately 40 papers to the School Board earlier this year. I myself have sent similar information, in smaller doses, to various school officials. Anyone looking for these sources can easily find them on the TAG Parents’ website.
Lucy Mathiak and Maya Cole will not endorse curriculum policy without taking a hard look at the data and carefully considering the complex issues involved. Our diverse student body has diverse learning needs. We need equal opportunity for every child, not the same education for all.
Sincerely,
Lorie Raihala
Madison
Wisconsin State Journal Endorses Maya Cole and Lucy Mathiak
The Madison School Board can no longer afford to do business as usual.
More to the point, families in the Madison School District can no longer afford a school board unwilling to take bolder action.
For that reason, voters should elect to the board on Tuesday two candidates promoting change: Maya Cole and Lucy Mathiak.
From Wisconsin State Journal, April 2, 2006
At stake is the School Board’s ability to pull the district’s budget out of quicksand, address shifting demographics, narrow the achievement gap between minority and white students and restore the public’s trust.
Cole, 43, is a stay-at-home mom with three sons from 6 to 9 years of age. She has been involved in a variety of school and political organizations, from the Franklin/Randall Parent Teacher Organization to Mothers Acting Up, a group encouraging mothers to be politically active on behalf of children.
Mathiak, 50, is an assistant dean at the University of Wisconsin’s College of Letters and Science. She has two teen-age sons, and her husband has two older daughters. She has been involved in several East High School organizations.
Cole and Mathiak come to the school board race from different backgrounds. But both believe that challenges closing in on the Madison schools demand action that the current majority on the School Board is failing to take.
They are right.
Their opponents, in contrast, are far too comfortable with the status quo. Running against Cole for Seat No. 1 on the board, being vacated by Bill Keys, is Arlene Silveira, 47, a marketing director for Promega Corp. of Fitchburg, and president of the Cherokee Middle School Parent-Teacher Organization. While Silveira would bring a welcome business perspective to the board, she lacks Cole’s drive to change the board approach.
Mathiak’s opponent for Seat No. 2 is incumbent Juan Lopez, a board member for 12 years who is too wedded to the way things have been done.
The Madison School Board is in an unenviable position. Outdated and unproductive state school financing rules have put school districts like Madison in a perpetual financial squeeze.
Meanwhile, the makeup of the district’s population has been shifting. Minorities compose a greater proportion of the student population, and the population is shifting from where the schools are to where they aren’t. In addition, the achievement gap between minority and white students continues to suggest that Madison’s schools are failing to deliver for too many students.
The board has cut, combined and conserved to hold costs down, and it has made some encouraging progress on closing the achievement gap. However, the board’s majority continues to shrink from new approaches, preferring to blame the state for a lack of money.
Yes, the Legislature should address school funding. But waiting for a magic solution from the Capitol only compounds the problem. Rather than looking to the state for answers, the board should look to itself.
The times require bold action. Between the two of them, Cole and Mathiak have some enlightened ideas, including plans to make the school budget process simpler, improve oversight of the budget and curriculums, reach minority students with more effective teaching and fairer discipline, challenge students with higher standards and consider the consolidation of administrative staff in the district’s central office.
A year ago the State Journal endorsed incumbents in two school board races on the belief that the board would continue to set priorities and address challenges. But since then, a lack of public trust in the board contributed to the failure of two out of three questions on a school referendum, and the board’s majority appeared to stick its head in the sand during the budget process.
It is obvious now that change is required.
Cole and Mathiak can supply new direction.
The real race and the real story
Lets face it. We all take sides whether in the school yard, the Board room or the School Board Race.
Already, we see the lines of division. The Mathiak/Cole group on one side, the Lopez/ Silveira group on the other. What is ultimately at stake is the best interests of our children.
What do we do? In the case of the School Board race, I believe it all comes down to Who gets to run the show. And blame is at the root of it all.
As I look over all the candidates, skills, commitment, ability to articulate, ability to form solid opinions and positions I know who I will vote for. But when I lift the covers and look underneath something smells very fishy to me, it looks like one of the factions in the School Board race wants to change Superintendents. The BLAME game. We hear statements like, “We got here because he is in bed with the Teachers Union”; or “He doesn’t make good fiscal decisions”; or “He is responsible for cutting this or that, that “I” want for my child!”
An opinion piece in the April 1 Wall Street Journal by the School Board President of the Glen Ridge Board of Education in Glen Ridge, NJ states the case very well. She says “…Anyone with even a passing familiarity with New Jersey’s property tax woes knows that the real problem is not superintendents’ contracts, but legislators’ unwillingness to fix a school funding system that is irretrievably broken…” She went on, “Superintendents are responsible to local boards and taxpayers and on call 24/7. They build budgets, negotiate contracts, meet with parents, serve as the ‘public face’ of their districts, deal with facilities and construction projects, hire, evaluate and mentor administrators, observe teachers, and much more.”
On April 4 we have decision to make. Do we start over, as Ms. Cole says, and tear down what we have? Or, as Ms. Silveira says, do we build from a strong foundation? Do we bring in new talent as urged by Ms. Mathiak who has no public service record, or go with a proven child advocate, namely Juan Jose Lopez, who has a solid track record in the district?
These are the questions we must ask ourselves. We need to remember; when challengers to the current system say that we are spending more than we take in, keep in mind who made that misleading claim since our own legislature has mandated spending caps and rules that FORCE us to spend more annually than we take in. Some $8 million more.
This is not the fault of the Board or the Superintendent. And, although candidates for “change” Cole and Mathiak — state that they want to review the budget for more effective ways to use existing funds, I doubt that the current School Board hasn’t already examined all the options. Ms. Cole wants some type of 5 year plan to deal with the $40 million budget. That still leaves $8 million less per year to run the public schools. Ms. Mathiak, who wants to sell the Doyle building, is essentially saying, ?OK, here are a few bucks for this year and a de-centralized administration for the future. This makes no sense at all. It is hard enough to find the right person in one building let alone the communication nightmares we will would encounter as the school staff tries to work together from disparate locations.
The only plan that will help the budget crisis that our schools are in is for us citizens to elect public officials, local and statewide, who will give us more realistic budgets for our schools!
What to do. I am biased. I want stability, I want representatives that know change comes not from wholesale “slaughter” of our current system during an ongoing fiscal crisis, but from within. I want representatives for MY CHILDREN and ALL THE CHILDREN of Madison. I will vote for stability and sanity. Please join me in voting for the best interests of our children and vote on April 4 for Juan Lopez and Arlene Silveira.
David Wandel,
Past PTO President, Midvale/Lincoln,
Commissioner, Community Services Commission and Community Activist
For The Record
Sunday 10 a.m., Channel 3’s For the Record will feature a debate among the four candidates for school board.
Here is my email to Neil Heinen regarding the station’s coverage including a discussion of some of the issues at stake in the race: To: Neil Heinen
Dear Neil,
A new post up on SIS (https://www.schoolinfosystem.org/) discusses a debate at East yesterday covered by your station. Thank you for this and for dedicating Sunday’s show to the race.
One point that I’m not sure was reported correctly however, is the assertion in your coverage that the current board has not said who they support. The five-member majority has clearly stated their support for Silveira and Lopez (who is of course part of that majority and a candidate) while Robarts and Kobza have stated their support for Mathiak and Cole.
This race truly is for control of the majority and will dictate how we go forward on matters of heterogeneous classrooms (the dismantling of honors and possibly AP at West is part of that), school boundary changes, the construction of new and closure of existing schools, budget concerns, how to responsibly provide teachers health insurance, etc.
The Silveira/Lopez line is that Mathiak and Cole are focused merely on “process”. This significantly minimizes what’s at stake. The board is currently divided and removed from community input. For instance, when a school board member can’t get an item on the agenda because she’s in the minority, or she can’t get information she has requested from the superintendent, we’ve got closed, dysfunctional governance. Mathiak and Cole may not always vote the same with each other or Kobza or Robarts, but the four of them are dedicated to transparency and public participation. With that, I believe the community will be better informed and more likely to support the hard decisions facing our district as we go forward into a land of $40 million more in budget cuts over the next five years.
But there’s an even bigger topic that might be coming up soon. I’d appreciate if you could ask the candidates what they’d look for in a new superintendent. Rainwater has made no secret of his plan to retire in the not too distant future and it’s no stretch to believe that the next board majority will determine whether we hire someone like Art or someone who is less, shall we say, autocratic/didactic, someone who takes his direction FROM the board on policy matters rather than dictating it TO them?
Let me close by focusing on hetergeneous classes. The trend everywhere else is to have more not less AP and honors classes. I met a woman recently who is an education professor at Marquette. She was shocked to learn of MMSD’s policy changes, pointing out that in Milwaukee even the most impoverished schools have AP, with the focus being how to increase participation by more students, especially minority students. Extending the K-8 model into high school is irresponsible. The data clearly indicate that this model is failing our students. Indeed, even at West, the internal data show that the one-size-fits-all English 9 and now English 10 doesn’t work as advertised. Our children attend Stanford and Macalester. Almost all their classmates have had the full range of AP courses in their high schools, even those coming from small towns. Especially in science and math, this is critical. Success after MMSD is a measure that doesn’t get much play, but it really should be the ultimate measure of our students’ success, not just those who go on to college and post-graduate careers, but all our students. Are they prepared to participate meaningfully in society. Do they have the skills they need to be good critical thinkers, to make informed decisions.
As our district grows increasingly more diverse ethnically, and as the disparity socieconomically widens, we have to ask whether we can meet all students’ needs with the little red school house approach, if that model ever worked in a town our size. More important, perhaps, will be how the community will perceive this—a posting a few months back on SIS looked at the district’s demographic data and demonstrated that brain flight has already happened out of the West HS district. Folks will be voting with their feet if they feel those setting policy don’t care about all the children.
How we see ourselves and whether Madison continues to draw new folks to our community depends heavily on the strength of our schools. Obviously I believe we need a fresh start, but however you come down on it, the stakes are high.
Best,
Joan
John Nichols: Maya Cole’s no closet conservative
Capital Times, March 30, 2006
By John Nichols
Paul Wellstone has been dead for a long three years, and yet there is rarely a national political debate that does not cause me to think: What would Wellstone do?
The late Minnesota senator was an epic political figure, who fought not just against right-wing Republicans but against those in his own Democratic Party who would warp it into a pale reflection of the GOP. Wellstone’s willingness to challenge the accepted political “wisdom” of the moment often put him at odds with folks he expected or at least hoped would be his supporters.
Madison School Board candidate Maya Cole, a graduate of “Camp Wellstone,” the candidate training program developed by the former senator’s family and friends to train a new generation of rabble-rousing contenders, knows that feeling. She’s a passionate progressive who has poured her energies into struggles to stop the war in Iraq, reduce gun violence, defend voting rights, challenge racism and reorder economic priorities so that society will be more just.
TODAY’S CAPITAL TIMES LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
Beth Swedeen: Silveira best pick for School Board
A letter to the editor
Dear Editor: Arlene Silveira is the best choice for Madison School Board. She has shown her commitment to the overall issues facing the district through activities such as the effort to support a referendum last year and tireless work on the boundary task force. Instead of flip-flopping on tough issues, like whether a new school should be built to alleviate Leopold crowding, she has taken consistent stands and done the research to support her positions.
She doesn’t use jargon like “transparency” as an excuse to put off hard decisions. She has listened with respect to many stakeholders: parents, community leaders, school staff and those whose voice isn’t always heard. Because she has an asset-based approach, she will work for constant improvement in the district, not just for the sake of change.
Beth Swedeen
Madison
Published: March 29, 2006
The Capital Times
Michael Maguire: No business as usual for Cole, Mathiak
A Letter to the Editor
Dear Editor: The recent years’ actions of our Madison School Board create a nice template for a new reality television series, “School Boards Behaving Badly!”
The passionate, yet appropriately measured, and get-things-done approaches of Ruth Robarts and Lawrie Kobza would be complemented quite well by Maya Cole and Lucy Mathiak.
Cole is a bright, out-of-the-box child advocate who has a very clear focus on short-, mid- and long-tem thinking about how to tackle the school district’s toughest, high-priority issues of budgeting and enrollment. She brings no baggage of influences created by long-term relationships with district personnel, the major point of contention I have with Arlene Silveira’s candidacy. I worked with Arlene on the Memorial/West Task Force and I know that she has some good ideas.
With Maya Cole, district stakeholders can be assured that there are no favors to be made in doing what’s best for our district’s children, their families and taxpayers.
Lucy Mathiak is simply the better candidate. To date, she’s only delivered a no-nonsense, non-emotional vision for good district planning that, like Cole, is not burdened with a “business-as-usual” approach often assumed by incumbent board members.
Let’s create a majority of transparent doers on the School Board! Vote Cole and Mathiak!
Michael Maguire
Madison
Published: March 29, 2006
The Capital Times
Ruth Robarts: Cole, Mathiak Offer Fresh Perspectives For School Board
From The Capital Times, Tuesday, March 28, 2006
Dear Editor: Old problems facing the Madison school district will continue and worsen unless the School Board opens its mind to new solutions.
We must raise public confidence in our decision-making, in order to gain support for the programs that our children need and the construction of new schools that is on the horizon. An open process that considers all the options would greatly increase confidence in our decisions, the likelihood of passing well-conceived referendums and business support.
I am supporting Maya Cole and Lucy Mathiak in the April 4 board election because both candidates bring new perspectives and independent thinking to the important public discussion of the future of our schools. Both worked their way through public schools and have children in our schools. Both volunteer in the schools. Both are committed to giving the public a bigger role in setting the course of the Madison schools. Both are aggressively looking for new approaches, and both understand that board members are the voice of the community when it comes to choosing curriculum to meet our children’s needs.
At the same time, Maya Cole and Lucy Mathiak are very much individuals. They offer different skills and work experiences. They think their own thoughts and communicate with a wide range of different friends, neighbors and colleagues. They are not clones of each other or anybody. They offer us a new synergy on the School Board.
Albert Einstein said, “We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.” He was talking to us. Let’s give his idea a serious try.
Michael Maguire: No business as usual for Cole, Mathiak
From The Capital Times, March 29, 2006
Dear Editor: The recent years’ actions of our Madison School Board create a nice template for a new reality television series, “School Boards Behaving Badly!”
The passionate, yet appropriately measured, and get-things-done approaches of Ruth Robarts and Lawrie Kobza would be complemented quite well by Maya Cole and Lucy Mathiak.
Cole is a bright, out-of-the-box child advocate who has a very clear focus on short-, mid- and long-tem thinking about how to tackle the school district’s toughest, high-priority issues of budgeting and enrollment. She brings no baggage of influences created by long-term relationships with district personnel, the major point of contention I have with Arlene Silveira’s candidacy. I worked with Arlene on the Memorial/West Task Force and I know that she has some good ideas.
With Maya Cole, district stakeholders can be assured that there are no favors to be made in doing what’s best for our district’s children, their families and taxpayers.
Lucy Mathiak is simply the better candidate. To date, she’s only delivered a no-nonsense, non-emotional vision for good district planning that, like Cole, is not burdened with a “business-as-usual” approach often assumed by incumbent board members.
Let’s create a majority of transparent doers on the School Board! Vote Cole and Mathiak!
Michael Maguire
Madison
Board of Ed Elections
The recent years’ actions of our MMSD Board of Ed create a nice template for a new reality television series, “School Boards Behaving Badly!”
The passionate, yet appropriately measured and get-things-done approaches of Ruth Robarts and Laurie Kobza would be complemented quite well by Maya Cole and Lucy Mathiak.
Cole is a bright, out-of-the-box child advocate who has a very clear focus on short-, mid- and long-term thinking about how to tackle MMSD’s toughest, high-priority issues of budgeting and enrollment. She brings no baggage of influences created by long-term relationships with MMSD personnel, the major point of contention I have with Arlene Siveira’s candidacy. I worked with Arlene on the Memorial/West Task Force and I know that she has some good ideas.
With Maya Cole, district stakeholders can be assured that there are no favors to be made in doing what’s best for our district’s children, their families, and taxpayers.
Lucy Mathiak is simply the better candidate. To date, she’s only delivered a no-nonsense, non-emotional vision for good district planning that, like Cole, is not burdened with a ‘business-as-usual’ approach often assumed by incumbent board members.
Let’s create a majority of transparent do-ers on the BOE! Vote Cole & Mathiak!
REFLECTIONS ON ISTHMUS ARTICLE, “THE FATE OF THE SCHOOLS” BY 22 PARENTS AND COMMUNITY MEMBERS
Last Thursday, the Isthmus newspaper published an extensive article by Jason Shepard entitled “The Fate of the Schools.” While the article covered many areas of interest regarding the school district and the upcoming school board elections, we have significant concerns about the way in which the article was written. These concerns include:
CONTEXT:
• The data in the article were used inappropriately. This story compares Madison’s schools with the small, suburban, middle-class districts surrounding it. A more comparable study would have looked at other districts with similar proportions of low-income students, such as Green Bay, LaCrosse, Racine and Milwaukee. The data also was not dis-aggregated. If it had been, it would have revealed that Madison’s white, non-poor children do as well as and even surpass both Dane County and larger districts in Wisconsin. Of that group, 96% of the “non-low-income” students scored proficient or advanced.
• Additionally, MMSD has 35% of the county’s 3rd graders – and 70% of the county’s low-income 3rd graders. On the math scores quoted in the article, it wasn’t pointed out that while Madison “only matches” the state average, Madison’s overall poverty rate is 30 percent higher. Madison continues to score above state and national averages on the ACT exam each year, despite the fact that more low-income and non-white students are taking the exam each year. MMSD had 69% of all the National Merit Semifinalists in the county this year (with only about 40% of the students).
SOURCES:
• The top sources of information listed in the article when talking about diminishing public support for MMSD and data on the schools come from two sources: talk radio and the SIS blog, neither of which are primary sources. Also, no grassroots parent groups or civic groups were interviewed other than SIS. And, no educational experts from curriculum and instruction at UW-Madison were interviewed, yet it is listed as the number one Graduate School of Curriculum and Instruction in the United States (U.S. News and World Report, 2006).
• We acknowledge that many families have opted-out of the district, for a variety of reasons. However, the overall trends for enrollment in and outside of Madison also reflect the growth and availability of new housing. It is very difficult to pull out whether the bulk of the enrollment choices were based on perceived educational quality of MMSD or for a larger house with more young families in the neighborhood. Just as anecdotal evidence from SIS and other sources indicate disengagement from MMSD, we could assert, with just as much authority that, based on our own experiences with people we know, families continue to move into MMSD for its breadth of instruction, diversity, and high quality teachers and staff.
ACCURACY:
• On the issue of equity, MMSD should not be blamed for segregated housing in Madison. And in fact, many of the board members have supported increased resources to schools with high poverty rates, not just Ruth Robarts and Lawrie Kobza. The formation of a new equity task force came from Carol Carstensen. Lawrie Kobza voted against its formation.
We raise these concerns in the interest of fairness, to give our fellow SIS readers a broader understanding of the issues covered in the article.
Submitted by: Francoise Davenport, Kirsten Engel, Jerry Eykholt, Kristina Grebener, Andrew Halada, Denise Halada, Molly Immendorf, Barbara Katz, Ed Kuharski, Jane Lambert, Randy Lambert, Beth Moss, Duncan Moss, Marge Passman, Lisa Pugh, Thomas Purnell, Fred Swanson, Beth Swedeen, Terry Tuschen, Barbara Wagner, Margaret Walters, and Andrea Wipperfurth.
Educational Flatline in Math and Reading Bedevils USA
Despite nearly 30 years of improvements in U.S. children’s overall quality of life, their basic academic skills have barely budged, according to research led by a Duke University sociologist.
The “educational flatline,” as measured by scores on math and reading exams, defies researchers’ expectations, because other quality-of-life measures, such as safety and family income, have improved steadily since 1975.
More recently, even areas that had worsened in the 1970s and 1980s, such as rates of teen suicide, have improved dramatically, so researchers had expected that education improvements would soon follow. They didn’t.
2006 Child Well-Being Results.
The Educational Flatline, Causes and Results:The Education Flatline: Causes and Solutions
- The Education Flatline: Overview , by Ron Haskins and Isabel Sawhill
- A Short History of School Reform , by David T. Gordon
- The Role of PreK-3 in Improving School Achievement , by Gene Maeroff
- Charter Schools and No Child Left Behind: An Oncoming Collision? , by Bruno Manno and Martin West
- The Case for National Curriculum, National Standards, and National Tests , by Diane Ravitch
- If Wishes Were Horses: The Reality behind Teacher Quality Findings , by Kate Walsh
Teaching Commission Final Report
The Teaching Commission, the non-profit advocacy organization founded by former IBM chairman and CEO Louis V. Gerstner, Jr., this morning released a final report urging state and local leaders to go “far further, far faster” in transforming the teaching profession. The message comes as the Commission ends its work on schedule, three years after its inception.
“If teaching remains a second-rate profession, America’s economy will be driven by second-rate skills,” said Gerstner. “We can wake up today-or we can have a rude awakening sooner than we think.”
In its final report, Teaching at Risk: Progress and Potholes [Complete PDF Report], the Commission cites significant progress since 2003-but, due to the urgency of the challenge of improving America’s skills in an increasingly competitive global economy, gives state, local and federal leaders disappointing grades for their work in four crucial areas:
….
Local districts. Superintendents and school boards should, among other things, “resist the pressure to continue paying teachers more money across the board without any meaningful changes in the way those increases are doled out,” and “much more attention needs to be paid to how teachers are hired, moving up timetables and eliminating transfer rights on the basis of seniority.”
They also published a companion report on state’s legislative activity [pdf report] in four areas:
- Compensation and Performance
- Skills and Preparation, and
- Leadership and Support
Wisconsin had no legislative activity in these areas during 2004-2005. I’ve seen a number of teachers go the extra mile (or more), whether it’s working after school hours with children who are far behind in math and reading, adding more children to a classroom to help another teacher or implementing a new curriculum better suited to student’s needs. I hope, over time, we as a society can create better compensation models for teachers. Paul Soglin has more on this.
Marjorie Passman’s words, in the comments below are well worth reading.
Task Forces Are an Important Mechanism for Bringing People With Different Perspectives Together to Work on Important Issues – What About Music and Art Education?
Tonight the School Board’s Performance and Achievement Committee will discuss a status report on the elementary strings class, which they received last Thursday.
This report describes the current course, but the report a) is not an assessment of the course and b) says nothing about the future of the course. (Mr. Rainwater told me the committee only asked for a status report.) I have been one of hundreds of advocates for this course over the past 5 springs, and I see the same thing unfolding again this year that I have in the 4 previous springs without any work from the preceding year on this academic course. This course is much loved by generations of people who live in Madison, many who do not have children in the schools but do vote.
Not included with the status report is a draft vision statement developed by a group of string teachers. It’s long, needs more discussion with string teachers and the community (all string teachers have seen this) but with this draft statement a) these teachers tried to come up with something meaningful, which top management asked them to do and b) these teachers have had less than two hours of group time to even discuss what the future could be and that ended abruptly in December with no further next steps. These same teachers were given no time to work together on what adjustments needed to be made to curriculum when class time is cut in half. In June, they asked the interim FAC, who forwarded this request to Supt. Rainwater. The meetings did not take place. I don’t feel this should happen, especially when drastic curriculum changes are being considered.
For five years, hundreds of students, parents, community members and community organizations have asked for your help – either restructuring the course of redesigning this course, but working with the community in some way to keep arts strong, because it’s so important for achievement.
I and others have been strong proponents of making the course work in our current financial situation. Over these five years, I feel we have lost opportunities to develop relationships which are important for acquiring funds, to assess and redesign the K-5 music education curriculum, to develop funding sources for small group lessons for children afterschool to further strengthen what they learn during the school day.
Last year the elementary strings course reached about 1,800 students in 27 schools. Nearly 600 children (42% of the low income children in Grades 4 & 5 participated in this course). This year the course is teaching 1,650 students. The status report does not say how many low income. I do know from conversations with the Fine Arts Coordinator and with teachers that more low income children indicated an interest in taking elementary strings than were in the class for many reasons, I am sure.
I think elementary strings is an example where there have been hundreds of advocates for keeping this course, but minimal positive response and support from the School Board to bring the professionals and advocates together to work on this and other music and art issues. We have task forces for boundary changes, afterschool, live animals in the classroom, equity, etc. Given the community’s love of the arts, such a task force seems right for the arts.
I’d like to see the dialogue change this year for elementary strings and for music and art education to one where we talk about how can we work together. I would like to see the School Board consider a community task force under the oversight of the Performance and Achievement and the Partnership Committees that would bring advocates for music and art education and professionals together to work on this issue. I would like to see such a committee work on short-term issues re the elementary strings course, but also develop a 5 year fine arts strategic community plan. I have spoken with teachers, music organizations, private music teachers, the Fine Arts Coordinator and the Superintendent about the need for this. I have heard positive responses from community members and teachers, interest from the Fine Arts Coordinator.
I feel such a committee needs to be led by well-known community leaders who support the arts and arts education in the schools, because developing relationships within the community will be important for partnerships and possible fundraising.
I also think such a committee is important for credibility and for continuity. Over 5 years, MMSD has had 3 fine arts coordinators with one year without a fine arts coordinator. In spring 2003, the last fine arts coordinator was getting up to speed, in the 04-05 school year a teaching team was to help with coordination when the fine arts coordinator position was cut but this group was not put in place, and now the district has a new fine arts coordinator, who is working hard, meeting the community, teachers, helping in many ways. I think this is a critical position on the district and an important member to be on a community fine arts education committee.
Lastly, without classes during the day for elementary strings, there is no way to reach as many low-income children as the course currently reaches. Also, the district loses something special. Hundreds of children have asked the Board for help. I hope they do.
I will commment on this at the School Board meeting tonight. I have taken to writing on the blog vs. speaking at School Board meetings, because, after 5 years, and personal attacks, it takes too much out of me.
Live Animal Discussions Important – It’s the Lack of Budget Discussion that Concerns Me and the Likely $8 Million in Cuts Going to Schools on Monday, April 3rd
Dear School Board Members:
When I looked at the School Board calendar for March, what jumped out at me was the lack of any Finance and Operations committee meetings on 06-07 budget issues even though a) allocations go to schools on April 3rd and b) tonight the School Board majority will likely vote to pay for the debt service on an addition to Leopold with what could amount to an additional $350,000 cut from the operating budget.
What I did see were meetings on Live Animals in the Classroom. My concern was not so much that I saw Live Animals in the Classroom on the agenda (although I wish this issue had been resolved positively and fairly when it first came up 1.5 years ago, I support and mean no disrespect to the members or the work of this committee) but that budget discussions were missing. Earlier this calendar year I was left with the impression that the Superintendent had informed the School Board that March would be filled with discussions about the budget.
I did see important issues such as the Equity Task Force meeting and board discussions about boundaries and schools, but I did not see any discussions about the budget scheduled, and I do not yet see any formal meetings re the budget on the School Board calendar as yet.
In her email to PTO Presidents, Carol Carstensen said the School Board decided not to consider cuts until after the School Board has the entire budget and they will have the document sooner this year rather than later this year, but not until the end of April, or thereabouts. I and others have made suggestion along these lines in previous years – you do want to discuss cuts in the context of the entire budget; however, the devil is in the details and that is where I have concerns.
The budget timeline the School Board is working from says the administration is going to send out allocations to schools on April 3rd. Straight forward administrative task – once again the devil is in the details. In his email to me, Superintendent Rainwater said that the timing of allocations is driven by the union contract deadlines for layoff notices (late May) and surplus notices (July 1 but MMSD gives them in mid-April). Also, Mr. Rainwater informed the School Board earlier this year that the District would be facing $8 million in cuts next year.
Now, as the Superintendent informed me, many things go into allocations. However, he will have $8 million less next year than he felt would be needed, so $8 million in cuts will have to be made. The question is when and how will these cuts be made? If the union deadlines drive the April 3rd date, then I would expect cuts will be included with the allocations that go out to schools on April 3rd as has been the case in preceeding years. If that is the same this year, I feel the School Board and the public needed to know what budget framework is being used to send out the allocations – class sizes, courses, etc. I feel there needed to be public discussions about this.
School Board members tell the public that final decisions about cuts are their decisions. That’s true, but in practice it is not. By the time allocations are determined in mid-May, there will be little opportunity for the public or the School Board to have much, if any discussion about the budget and the $8 million in cuts. I don’t agree with that. I think it is bad policy.
I believe live animals in the classroom are important. Re this issue, I only wish that more progress had been made by now – I looked up references to this as far back as Fall 2004. My daughter attended Franklin Elementary School and visited Mary Powell’s classroom – so did I! Re. live animals in the classroom, I think we need a board policy that makes this experience part of our children’s education. I guess I thought the existing policy, as Mary Powell pointed out in Fall 2004, addressed the issue.
Sincerely,
Barb Schrank
Longtime advocates for academic rigor and educational excellence back Mathiak and Cole
Recent post from the Madison United for Academic Excellence (MUAE) list serve:
Dear MUAE Friends,
When we volunteered to oversee a District-wide “TAG” parents email list back in 2002, it was in part to help out the District “TAG” staff and in part to make the list available for explicit “TAG” advocacy efforts. We never expected that it (or we) would become explicitly political; but then, never in million years did we expect to have the crystal clear choice in BOE candidates that we have before us this year.
As fellow members of this on-line community, we think you need to know that Juan Lopez — however laudable his other views and positions may be — has the most extreme and consistent anti-“TAG” voting record of any BOE member who has served on the Board in the ten years that we have been involved with the issues. Juan once actually said to Jeff in a budget-focused BOE meeting, when Jeff was arguing in support of “TAG” funding, something like “Jeff, why should I support this? It has nothing to do with minority students.” Not surprisingly, Juan has shown absolutely no interest whatsoever in the District dropout data that we have “put out there” many times in the past three years.
In very stark contrast, we first met Lucy Mathiak almost ten years ago, when we were still relatively new Franklin ES parents. We had attended a couple of District-wide “TAG” parent meetings and wanted to do some organizing and educating within the Franklin community. Someone gave us Lucy’s name as a very well-informed east side parent and excellent speaker. We invited her to a meeting; she came; she educated us about Standard t and how to influence our school’s SIP (“School Improvement Plan”); and she inspired us to greater things, as both parents and education advocates. In a word, we were thrilled last fall when we learned that Lucy had decided to run for School Board.
It is our firm belief that if the District’s academically talented and motivated students are to have a fighting chance at having their educational needs met in our schools, they need a strong voice and representation on the BOE. They need someone on the BOE who understands their lived experience; someone who understands the issues facing the District in a way that includes them. Lucy Mathiak thoroughly understands these students, their needs, and the issues, in part, because she has lived them as a parent. As we see it, Lucy has the experience, the knowledge, the commitment, and the deep confidence to make sure that the brightest students of all colors and backgrounds are well taken care of by the Madison schools. In our opinion, no one else even comes close. For voters who care about academic excellence for all, the choice couldn’t be more clear.
VOTE FOR LUCY MATHIAK FOR MADISON SCHOOL BOARD SEAT #2 ON TUESDAY, APRIL 4.
What about the race for Seat #1? The truth is, we do not know either Maya Cole or Arlene Silveira nearly as well as we feel we know Juan and Lucy. Nevertheless, we know who we are voting for.
Consider the following paragraph from an op ed piece of Arlene’s that appeared in the Wisconsin State Journal in January:
Racial and economic achievement gaps.
The School Board must address differences in proficiency levels and graduation rates between racial and ethnic groups. In addition to continuing efforts such as School of Hope, small class sizes and cultural competence training opportunities for teachers and support staff, we must develop partnerships with community groups and provide venues for parents to come together to help the district find ways to allow all children to succeed. With the high mobility rates of some students, we must look at ways to help stabilize students’ school experience. The board cannot be proud of the district’s progress until all groups of students achieve equal success in all academic disciplines throughout their school careers.
(bold added)
Frankly, that last line scares us. We have asked Arlene more than once what she means by it, but she has yet to respond. Arlene is openly pro-heterogeneous classrooms, we know that; but her vision sounds like Camazotz, the evil place in “A Wrinkle In Time.”
In contrast, we have spoken at length with Maya about her candidacy, her vision for the BOE and the District, and her own experiences as a parent. It is our very strong impression that she has started down the road that the rest of us are already on and that — like Lucy — she “gets it.” Maya is a courageous and independent thinker who will insist on data and documentation and who will not be cowed by bullies. She understands the need for increased transparency and increased accountability on the BOE and in the District administration. She does not support cookie-cutter curricula. She does not support heterogeneous classes. Like Lucy, she wants to find ways to increase minority participation in “high end” classes, not get rid of the classes according to some misguided notion of what constitutes educational equity. If you care enough about rigorous curricula and high academic standards to be on this list serve, then Maya Cole is the one for you.
VOTE FOR MAYA COLE FOR MADISON SCHOOL BOARD SEAT #1 ON TUESDAY, APRIL 4.
There is one more reason why we are voting for Lucy and Maya on April 4. As longtime observers of the Madison School Board, we are deeply concerned about the culture of bullying and secrecy that exists in the Doyle Building and on the BOE. We feel it has paralyzed the Board and rendered it completely ineffective. We are convinced that a change of BOE membership is the only way to bring back respectable and respectful behavior — not to mention increased transparency of operations and a thoroughgoing accountability to the public — to the task of educating our children.
Many thanks for your consideration,
Laurie Frost, Ph.D., and Jeff Henriques, Ph.D.
West HS and Hamilton MS Parents
Former Franklin-Randall ES parents
Former Franklin-Randall PTSO Board member (Diversity and Community-Building Committee Chair) (LF)
West HS PTSO Board Member (Treasurer) (JH)
Advisory Board Member, Wisconsin Center for Academically Talented Youth (WCATY) (LF)
Madison United for Academic Excellence
Madison Schools’ Proposed Comprehensive Food Policy
Madison Metropolitian School District News Release:
Community asked for feedback on proposals, Board will begin to consider next month
As the next step in developing a Madison School District comprehensive food policy, recommendations are being released today by a student work group for consideration by the Board of Education.
There’s been quite a bit of discussion on this topic here.
The fate of the schools
Will the Madison district sink or swim?
April 4th elections could prove pivotal
At the end of an especially divisive Madison school board meeting, Annette Montegomery took to the microphone and laid bare her frustrations with the seven elected citizens who govern Madison schools.
“I don’t understand why it takes so long to get anything accomplished with this board!” yelled Montgomery, a Fitchburg parent with two children in Madison’s Leopold Elementary School. She pegged board members as clueless about how they’ve compromised the trust of the district’s residents.
“You don’t think we’re already angry? What do we have to do to show you, to convince you, how angry we are? If I could, I’d impeach every single one of you and start over!”
Impeachment isn’t being seriously considered as solution to the Madison Metropolitan School District’s problems. But infighting and seemingly insurmountable budget problems have increasingly undercut the board’s ability to chart a positive course for Madison schools.
And that’s not good, given the challenges on the horizon for a district of 24,490 kids with a $319 million budget. These include declining enrollment of upper- and middle-class families; continuing increases in low-income families and racial minorities; an overall stagnant enrollment which limits state funding increases; and prolonged battles with parent groups over everything from boundary changes to curriculum choices.
By Jason Shepard, Isthmus, March 23, 2006
Candidates agree education is at crossroads
Madison School Board candidates Juan Jose Lopez and Lucy Mathiak look at what is happening in schools here in very different ways, but on at least one issue they are in complete agreement: Public education here and throughout the Badger State is at a critical crossroads.
But the two candidates vying for School Board Seat No. 2, which Lopez has held since 1994, have quite distinct notions about the nature of the challenges facing the Madison Metropolitan School District.
By Susan Troller, The Capital Times, March 21, 2006
When Ability Grouping Makes Good Sense
By James J. Gallagher
I am posting this article from 1992 given the recent debate on one size fits all classrooms. Professor Gallagher makes the point that the argument that homogeneous grouping hurts no one is clearly false: research consistently shows that high ability students do better when they are in classes with similarly able peers.
The recent educational literature has been filled with discussions of the effects of ability grouping, tracking, etc., and new virtues have been found in the concept of heterogeneous grouping of students. The homogeneous grouping of slow-learning children does not appear to be profitable, but the homogeneous grouping of bright students is a very different matter, and often ignored in these discussions. (See “Tracking Found To Hurt Prospects of Low Achievers,” Education Week, Sept. 16, 1992.)
The goal of heterogeneous grouping appears to be a social one, not an academic one.(emphasis added) The desirability of that goal needs to be argued on its own merits, which I believe to be considerable. The argument is clouded, however, by the insistence of the proponents that nothing is lost in academic performance by such grouping. This position is clearly false, in my judgment, as it applies to bright students. Apart from the meta-analyses which indicate substantial gains for gifted students grouped for ability, there is a small matter of common sense.
New Glarus Parent Files Gifted Ed Lawsuit Against DPI, DPI Superintendent Burmaster
New Glarus parent and Madison attorney Todd Palmer has filed a lawsuit against the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction and DPI Superintendent Elizabeth Burmaster for their failure to promulgate rules for the identification and appropriate education of Wisconsin’s 51,000 academically gifted students, as is required by Wisconsin state law. Here is the press release; a link to the lawsuit itself may be found at the end.
Todd will be joining us for the beginning portion of our Madison United for Academic Excellence meeting on Thursday, March 23, at 7:00 p.m. in Room 209 of the Doyle Administration Building. We will also be discussing the INSTEP process and the District’s new TAG education plan, currently under development. Come share your experiences and offer your input. All who care about rigorous curriculum and high educational standards are welcome.
In Defense of Big Schools
Gotham Gazette’s Reading NYC Book Club met with author Samuel Freedman, New York Times education columnist, and Jessica Siegel, the teacher who is one of the subjects of “Small Victories: The Real World of a Teacher, Her Students and Their High School.”An edited transcript is below:
The problem is that you have this tail of this big grant from the Gates Foundation wagging this policy dog at the Department of Ed. Because Gates has a big priority to start small schools, the Department of Education is jumpstarting 50 a year, year after year. It’s just impossible to have quality opening up schools in that kind of frenetic way. It also means a lot of these schools get opened up with these ultra-niche academic orientations – sports careers or architecture – that I think are really preposterous for a ninth grader. I think what they tend to do is serve the interests of community organizations that are sponsors. These may be perfectly well-intended sponsoring groups, but that doesn’t mean that the high school as a whole is going to work with a curriculum that is defined that narrowly, especially when there is a good reason to put more emphasis on language, science, math and a lot of the core subjects.
Joanne Jacobs has more, including this”
Gotham Gazette: Jonathan Kozol recently wrote an article for Gotham Gazette Segregated Schools: Shame Of The City, in which he argued that one issue that is being ignored is racial segregation. He said that until that is confronted, other reforms will not accomplish much. What is your perspective on that?
Jessica Siegel: What is the percentage of the public schools students that are children or color? Eighty-five percent? It’s not even relevant. That’s who is in the public schools. To me it’s not an issue of segregation so much as what kind of education you are going to give to the kids there.
Samuel Freedman: I completely agree with Jessica. Kozol espouses a point of view you pick up in education schools. But it is a high-minded excuse for paralysis.
. . . It’s part of educational suicide to say now, however well intentioned you are, that until you solve poverty or segregation nothing can happen in the schools. Something has to be able to happen in the schools.
Silveira is right choice for School Board
A letter to the editor
Dear Editor: For years I have been fairly passive about working on local campaigns, but this year the School Board election has me so alarmed that I feel I have to do more than just vote or put up a yard sign.
Anyone who has attended recent forums has seen Arlene Silveira continually giving superior answers to all questions because she is much more familiar with the issues schools face today. Arlene has gained her information through experience and study. She has put in her time supporting our schools and not attacking them.
While some think her opponent is a nice person, I have never seen any sense of depth on educational matters coming from her; in fact, most of her answers at forums are non-answers, attacks on school administrators or worse, naive and unrealistic proposals to save money.
I have not heard one positive statement about our schools made by those candidates endorsed by the people behind the “school info systems” blog.
We have one candidate who states that parents of younger children haven’t been “tainted” by our schools yet and who has called Fitchburg parents “whiners” because they didn’t get a school. A second candidate promises we can have all the programs we want if we just get rid of more administrators. Since these people have no trust in our schools and believe every bit of information given to them is flawed, how are we possibly going to get a positive dialogue going on the real, substantive issues facing our schools? Frankly, the incessant attacks on our schools are beginning to wear thin.
For honest answers to our problems I suggest going to two Web sites:
1) www.mmsd.org. Read under “Hot Topics – Recently Answered Questions” and discover, among other things, that school administrators have been reduced by 28.4 percent over the last six years with four more administrators up for elimination in next year’s budget. This means that the remaining administrators are doubling, tripling and even quadrupling their responsibilities.
2) www.arleneforschoolboard.com for a truly reasonable discussion of issues characterized by good judgment and sound thinking.
Personally, I don’t want angry, negative people running our schools, and so this is not an election to be neutral about. It is time for the press and our entire community to support a candidate who wants to take an already great school system and make it even better. It is Arlene Silveira’s confidence in our schools as well as her quiet dignity and intelligence that we need on our School Board.
Marjorie Passman
Madison
The Capital Times
Published: March 15, 2006
Virtual Public Schools a Great Option
I am the mother of 4 children who are excelling with Internet-based learning though a public school in Wisconsin. I am also the President of the Wisconsin Coalition of Virtual School Families.
Together with our fellow parents, families and friends, we strive to educate policy makers and others on why we chose a virtual public school for our children; how those schools work; about the close, working relationship we have with our teachers and administrators; and much, much more.
Our Coalition strongly support AB 1060, a bill authored by Representative Brett Davis and Senator Luther Olsen, which has passed both houses of the Legislature and is awaiting the Governor’s signature. While public schools do not require additional legislation in order to continue to operate, we appreciate the Legislature reaffirming its intent to keep virtual public education as an option before the parents of Wisconsin.
“Support for Candidates that Care about the Majority”
David Wandel emails:
I am glad that your group, as limited and as narrow as it is, has a forum. It is a shame that your beliefs about the “majority” of the current School Board are so militant and out of focus.
One of those School Board members is Juan Jose Lopez. Here is someone that has devoted 12 years to improving the life of the children of Madison. Without delving into the depth and detail to pose only the minute narrow issues that you seek to blow out of proportion I would like to suggest that instead of postulating on what is needed you need to do something positive. Help elect the candidates that will help solve the problems instead of making current situations worse.
Change your focus of vehemence toward those at the state level that set the budget for our school system. In doing so you will address the real issues.
Mr. Lopez has apparently offended your sensibilities by representing the greatest number of children in the most appropriate way instead of focusing on the narrow group of students you seem to represent only your own children.
In my case, I have 5 children. They range from a 15 year old fresh-person at West to a 31 year old lawyer in the Chicago area. Never, in all the years that I have represented my children in numerous school systems have I seen such an angry group. You seem like professionals. Act like them.
I personally find that our school system is the best I have come across so far. Perfect, no. Better than others yes. Likely to help my children succeed definitely.
Well, Im done. On April 4 I will vote. For the candidates that care about the majority. Candidates that represent youth in the most appropriate fashion. Candidates that are interested in finding solutions not complaining and hiding in a Blog. Not your candidates but candidates for the people of Madison, not the special interests. Juan and Arlene. Real people that will fight for all our children. Put away your swords and get with it.
Maya Cole endorses healthy Homegrown Lunches
The following commitment by Maya Cole seems particularly important to post given the lively discussion on healthy food:
I enthusiastically endorse the Wisconsin Homegrown Lunch Food Policy Recommendations, and I will work to win adoption of the recommendations if I have the opportunity to serve on the Board of Education of the Madison Metropolitan School District (MMSD).
Wisconsin Homegrown Lunch is a grassroots program whose goal is to enhance the Madison public schools’ existing meal programs by introducing fresh, nutritious, local and sustainably grown food to children, beginning in the city’s elementary schools. The program, like similar “farm-to-school” programs around the country, will provide an opportunity for children to reconnect with their natural world and will help establish a stable market for local farmers and processors.
It’s INSTEP Season
Are you concerned that your MMSD K-12 student is not being adequately challenged in one or more academic content areas? Perhaps s/he needs an INSTEP.
An INSTEP is an “Individualized Student Education Plan.” It’s like an IEP (“Individual Education Plan”), except that it’s for high performing students. (IEP’s are for students with special education needs.) For any given student, an INSTEP can be done in a single curricular area or in multiple curricular areas. Now is a good time to request an INSTEP because it will insure that no time will be lost in meeting your child’s educational needs next year.
It’s been said that the INSTEP is one of the District’s best kept secrets. Find out all there is to know at http://www.madison.k12.wi.us/tag/html/
To request an INSTEP — or to simply explore the possibility that your child may need one — all you have to do is contact the appropriate District TAG (“Talented and Gifted”) staff:
Rosy Bayuk — rbayuk@madison.k12.wi.us — 663-5230
(Emerson, Franklin, Leopold, Lincoln, Mendota, Midvale)
Kerry Berns — kberns@madison.k12.wi.us — 663-5230
(Elvehjem, Gompers, Hawthorne, Kennedy, Lakeview, Lindbergh)
Leah Creswell — lcreswell@madison.k12.wi.us — 663-5221
(Allis, Lowell, Nuestro Mundo, Orchard Ridge, Randall, Thoreau)
Rebecca Finnerud — rfinnerud@madison.k12.wi.us — 442-2152
(Glendale, Lapham, Marquette, Sandberg, Schenk)
Bettine Lipman — blipman@madison.k12.wi.us — 442-2153
(Chavez, Crestwood, Falk, Huegel, Muir, Stephens, Van Hise)
Ted Widerski — twiderski@madison.k12.wi.us — 663-5221
(all middle schools and all high schools)
Welda Simousek — wsimousek@madison.k12.wi.us — 663-5245
(District TAG Coordinator)
The TAG staff are an invaluable resource for the entire District. They are the only educational professionals in the District who are trained and experienced in both the appropriate assessment of advanced learners and in curriculum differentiation (theory and practice). They also know a lot about the social and emotional needs of academically talented children.
Uncomfortable with the word “gifted”? No need to be. No need to even use it. Just think of a performance distribution (one for each academic content area) and ask yourself if your child is in the top 15-20% of the distribution (the top 16% is one or more standard deviations above the mean). Ask yourself if they are advanced by two or more grade levels? Finally, ask yourself if you think your child is truly being challenged at school. Don’t forget to ask your child a few questions — Are they learning new material? Does the pace of learning feel about right for them? Are they regularly bored in class because they already know the material, it goes too slowly or there’s too much repetition? Etc.
Misleading School Budget Debate Led by Current Board Majority
In his blog titled Misleading School Budget Debate, Mr. Soglin says:
“…it is incumbent upon us to figure out where the additional revenue should come from and if we are going to cut, the consequences of those cuts.”[emphasis added]
I feel it is most definitely incumbent upon us to figure this out in order to keep Madison’s excellent public schools strong, and I feel that is NOT what the current school board majority has been doing. We do need to know, among other things:
- a) what education the community we live in expects and values,
- b) what that education will cost for all our children,
- c) what revenue can we expect,
- d) what options (referendum, other) do we need to pursue to meet the needs of our community’s schools, and
- e) what are the consequences of cuts and alternatives to cuts.
These important discussions need to take place throughout the year in an organized, cohesive manner that engages the Board and the community. There needs to be multiple local and statewide strategies for funding – increased sales tax might be one, what are others? We have gone far too long without needed vision, guidance and important discussions from the Madison School Board majority.
Something’s not right when more time appears to be spent in board meetings discussing pets in the classroom than framing and discussing issues affecting our wonderful school district’s future viability.
