School Information System

There’s more to education than tests

Autumn R. Campau:

In response to a recent letter received by the parents of the Rome School District, the New York State Education Department notified the district that Rome Free Academy has recently received the status of “in need of improvement” for the academic year 2010-2011. The improvement derives from the assessment results of the 2009-1010 academic year. While the district met the requirements for all students, those students with disabilities did not meet graduation requirements. This forced the group to lose Safe Harbor status, which has ultimately caused the improvement status for Rome Free Academy.
Within this letter, the district stated that due to the No Child Left Behind guidelines within the current status, parents may request their child to be transferred to another high school within the district — yet for these parents, there is no other option.
While currently administrators and teachers are receiving collaborative instructional practice from trained literacy coaches, the graduation rate has not been positively affected by the curriculum. So the question is what is the district really trying to work on?

Confusing Jargon

Charlie Mas:

There sure are a lot of words used at Seattle Public Schools that have a special or specific meaning within the context of public K-12 education. The jargon of education. The professionals often use this jargon among themselves to speak precisely. At Seattle Public Schools the professionals often use this jargon to confuse or intimidate the public. The staff of Seattle Public Schools particularly like to MIS-use this jargon to confuse the public, or to tempt the public into mis-using the jargon to make them appear ignorant.
Of late, this trick has been practiced more by Dr. Cathy Thompson and Kathleen Vasquez than any other member of the staff.

A Box? Or a Spaceship? What Makes Kids Creative

Sue Shellenbarger:

When art teacher Kandy Dea recently assigned fourth-graders in her Walnut, Iowa, classroom to create a board game to play with a friend, she was shocked by one little boy’s response: He froze.
While his classmates let their imaginations run wild making up colorful characters and fantasy worlds, the little boy said repeatedly, “I can’t think of anything,” Ms. Dea says. Although she reassured him that nothing he did would be judged “wrong,” he tried to copy another student’s game, then asked if he could make a work sheet instead. She finally gave him permission to make flash cards with right-and-wrong answers.
Americans’ scores on a commonly used creativity test fell steadily from 1990 to 2008, especially in the kindergarten through sixth-grade age group, says Kyung Hee Kim, an assistant professor of educational psychology at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Va. The finding is based on a study of 300,000 Americans’ scores from 1966 to 2008 on the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking, a standardized test that’s considered a benchmark for creative thinking. (Dr. Kim’s results are currently undergoing peer review to determine whether they will be published in a scholarly journal.)

Serious Mental Health Needs Seen Growing at Colleges

Trip Gabriel:

Rushing a student to a psychiatric emergency room is never routine, but when Stony Brook University logged three trips in three days, it did not surprise Jenny Hwang, the director of counseling.
It was deep into the fall semester, a time of mounting stress with finals looming and the holiday break not far off, an anxiety all its own.
On a Thursday afternoon, a freshman who had been scraping bottom academically posted thoughts about suicide on Facebook. If I were gone, he wrote, would anybody notice? An alarmed student told staff members in the dorm, who called Dr. Hwang after hours, who contacted the campus police. Officers escorted the student to the county psychiatric hospital.

Sweating Bullets at the GAO

Frederick M. Hess and Andrew P. Kelly :

The authors of the Government Accountability Office’s for-profit secret shopper investigation pulled off a statistically impressive feat in August. Let’s set aside for the moment that on Nov. 30, the government watchdog quietly revealed that its influential testimony on for-profit colleges was riddled with errors, with 16 of the 28 findings requiring revisions. More interesting is the fact that all 16 of the errors run in the same direction — casting for-profits in the worst possible light. The odds of all 16 pointing in the same direction by chance? A cool 1 in 65,536.
Even the most fastidious make the occasional mistake. But the GAO, the $570 million-a- year organization responsible for ensuring that Congress gets clean audits, unbiased accounting, and avowedly objective policy analysis, is expected to adhere to a more scrupulous standard. This makes such a string of errors particularly disconcerting.
In fact, the GAO is constituted precisely to avoid such miscues. Its report-vetting process entails GAO employees who are not involved with the project conducting a sentence-by-sentence review of the draft report, checking the factual foundation for each claim against the appropriate primary source. While the research is compiled and proofed, legislators who requested the investigation may keep in routine contact with the GAO to stay apprised of the inquiry.

An Unequal Burden

Dan Berrett

Students from families with divorced or remarried parents pay twice the share of their college education as compared to their peers whose parents remain married to each other, according to recent research published online by the Journal of Family Issues.
“Divorced or separated parents contributed significantly less than married parents — in absolute dollars, as a proportion of their income, and as a proportion of their children’s financial need,” Ruth N. López Turley, associate professor of sociology at Rice University, and Matthew Desmond, a junior fellow at Harvard University, say in their article, “Contributions to College Costs by Married, Divorced, and Remarried Parents.”

On School Board Public Engagement

Woodward Family:

This fall, work demands have put a serious crimp in my school meeting schedule — and (to be honest) in my willingness to bang my head against the wall known as “public engagement” at Seattle Public Schools. But last Monday I decided it was time to get back into the ring — or at least into the loop — so after dinner (and a prophylactic rum cocktail) I headed down to South Lake High School to hear what Southeast Director Michael Tolley had to say about the District’s recently released School Reports.
These reports represent the District’s effort to track each school’s progress on a variety of measures, from test scores to student absences to the teachers’ feelings about their school’s leadership. The schools have had annual reports before — they’re available online going back to 1998 — but these new ones go into considerably more detail. They also include a one-page Improvement Plan for each school — goals to raise achievement, or attendance, or whatever — and a description of what the school is doing in order to reach those goals: instructional coaches, individual tutoring, more collaborative staff time, and so on. And every school has now been ranked on a five-point scale based on overall student performance and improvement on standardized tests, and the achievement gap between poor kids (those who qualify for free and reduced-price lunches) and everyone else.

“Education is a powerful weapon”

Centcom

U.S. Army Capt. David Brown knows education of Afghans is critical to the future of the country.
“We see it as stronger than guns and bombs. Schools and education are the foundation for the future of Afghanistan,” the Connecticut native told a class of 50 Afghan youth at a graduation ceremony after they completed an eight-week course on computer skills and English. “Education is a powerful weapon.”
It’s so powerful that the Taliban have been actively working against it, even spraying acid on school girls that’s blinded at least two girls. The Taliban have forced the closure of 75 out of 228 schools in one province alone after assassinating teachers and students and destroying school buildings. Just last month, they burned a girls’ school in eastern Afghanistan with 850 Qurans inside. CARE International, a non-profit organization working in Afghanistan, documented 670-education related attacks in 2008.

All eyes on Eden Prairie school boundary vote

Kelly Smith:

An Eden Prairie school board vote on attendance zones may have broad impact on desegregation and neighborhood schools.
When Eden Prairie’s seven school board members convene Tuesday night, the controversial decision they are set to make about redrawing school boundary lines will be of keen interest throughout the metro area.
Will they back a plan that will move 1,100 elementary students next fall to new schools, largely to reduce segregation in schools? Or will they scale back in response to a huge parental outcry and make fewer changes or nix the plan altogether?
Bloomington and other metro-area suburban school districts, which also face increasingly diverse student demographics, are watching Eden Prairie’s move. Bloomington’s school board chair attended Eden Prairie meetings to watch how feedback was handled.

In Africa, the Laureate’s Curse

Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani:

THE Nobel Prize in Literature was presented to Mario Vargas Llosa at an awards ceremony on Friday in Oslo. This reawakened the disappointment felt by many fans of African literature, who had hoped that this would be the year for the Kenyan writer Ngugi wa Thiong’o. But there’s actually reason to celebrate Mr. Ngugi’s loss. African literature is better off without another Nobel … at least for now.
A Nigerian publisher once told me that of the manuscripts she reads from aspiring writers, half echo Chinua Achebe and half try to adopt Wole Soyinka’s style. Mr. Achebe and Mr. Soyinka, who won the continent’s first Nobel in literature in 1986, are arguably the most celebrated black African writers, especially in terms of Western accolades. But their dominance causes problems in a region where the common attitude is, “If it already works, why bother to improve on it?”

Expecting a Baby, But Not the Pain

Anne Marie Chaker:

When she gave birth to her daughter last July, Cassie Friesen, of Broomfield, Colo., imagined she was inside a bubble and repeated the word “peace” with each contraction.
The 25-year-old former nanny learned these relaxation and visualization techniques in a hypnotherapy course she took in hopes of minimizing the pain of childbirth. “It’s so corny-sounding,” she says, and yet it worked. She describes her daughter Aster’s July 7 arrival as “fun–even enjoyable,” words not many other mothers use when describing the experience.

Which States Manage Household Finances Best?

Now you can go to a new website, and see just how good or bad citizens in your state are at managing household finances.
Here’s a small spoiler: if you aren’t a citizen of New York, New Jersey or New Hampshire, you are less likely to be among the most financially adept individuals. Those three states were among the top five in at least three of five measures of financial capability, according to a survey of more than 28,000 people.
The interactive, clickable map of the U.S. is based on the State-by-State Financial Capability Survey released Wednesday that was developed in consultation with the Treasury Department and the President’s Advisory Council on Financial Literacy. Find the full data here.

8th Grade 1895 Test from Salina, Kansas

The Salina Journal:

8th Grade Final Exam: Salina, KS – 1895
Grammar (Time, one hour)
1. Give nine rules for the use of Capital Letters.
2. Name the Parts of Speech and define those that have no modifications.
3. Define Verse, Stanza and Paragraph.
4. What are the Principal Parts of a verb? Give Principal Parts of do, lie, lay and run.
5. Define Case, Illustrate each Case.
6. What is Punctuation? Give rules for principal marks of Punctuation.
7 – 10. Write a composition of about 150 words and show therein that you understand the practical use of the rules of grammar.
Arithmetic (Time, 1.25 hours)
1. Name and define the Fundamental Rules of Arithmetic.
2. A wagon box is 2 ft. deep, 10 feet long, and 3 ft. wide. How many bushels of wheat will it hold?
3. If a load of wheat weighs 3942 lbs., what is it worth at 50 cts. per bu., deducting 1050 lbs. for tare?
4. District No. 33 has a valuation of $35,000. What is the necessary levy to carry on a school seven months at $50 per month, and have $104 for incidentals?
5. Find cost of 6720 lbs. coal at $6.00 per ton.
6. Find the interest of $512.60 for 8 months and 18 days at 7 percent.
7. What is the cost of 40 boards 12 inches wide and 16 ft. long at $20 per m?
8. Find bank discount on $300 for 90 days (no grace) at 10 percent.
9. What is the cost of a square farm at $15 per are, the distance around which is 640 rods?
10. Write a Bank Check, a Promissory Note, and a Receipt.

Save the Children Breaks With Soda Tax Effort

William Neuman:

Over the last year, Save the Children emerged as a leader in the push to tax sweetened soft drinks as a way to combat childhood obesity. The nonprofit group supported soda tax campaigns in Mississippi, New Mexico, Washington State, Philadelphia and the District of Columbia.
At the same time, executives at Save the Children were seeking a major grant from Coca-Cola to help finance the health and education programs that the charity conducts here and abroad, including its work on childhood obesity.
The talks with Coke are still going on. But the soda tax work has been stopped. In October, Save the Children surprised activists around the country with an e-mail message announcing that it would no longer support efforts to tax soft drinks.
In interviews this month, Carolyn Miles, chief operating officer of Save the Children, said there was no connection between the group’s about-face on soda taxes and the discussions with Coke. A $5 million grant from PepsiCo also had no influence on the decision, she said. Both companies fiercely oppose soda taxes.

Room to improve at Wisconsin’s two medical schools

John Fauber

Wisconsin two medical schools failed to improve their conflict of interest policies – one actually dropped a grade – according to the latest rankings by the American Medical Student Association.
The University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health dropped from a B to a C, while the Medical College of Wisconsin maintained a B grade.
The association’s PharmFree Scorecard is a national report on 152 medical schools, looking at a variety of measures, including gifts and meals from industry to doctors, paid promotional speaking for drug and device companies, acceptance of free drug samples, interaction with sales reps and drug company-funded education.
This is what AMSA said about UW:

L.A. teachers union won’t accept pay cuts, ‘value-added’ evaluations

Howard Blume

UTLA leaders dispute criticisms from the mayor and others, but reiterate their firm opposition to furloughs, larger classes and use of students’ test scores to evaluate teachers’ performance.
The state’s largest teachers union Wednesday fired an early salvo in contract negotiations, serving notice that it wouldn’t accept pay cuts easily and that it won’t consider linking teacher evaluations to student test scores in the Los Angeles Unified School District.
The afternoon news conference, at union headquarters in Koreatown, was a familiar exercise in rallying the rank and file. But it also marked a renewed effort to lead the public debate over school reform, coming shortly after L.A. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa labeled United Teachers Los Angeles the primary obstacle to improving schools.

Patronage as a U.S. force multiplier

Rahul Bedi:

From scholarships and training programmes for officers to promises of Green Cards and jobs for family members, America is doing whatever it takes to build a lobby for itself in India.
The loquacious charm employed by United States President Barack Obama during his India trip is merely one of the many force multipliers exercised by an economically beleaguered Washington seeking to sell New Delhi varied military equipment for billions of dollars, and affirming bilateral strategic ties as a hedge against a resurgent China.
The other more protracted and consequently effective inducements are the raft of scholarships to American universities handed out to the offspring of top Indian politicians, civil servants and defence and intelligence officers, and the patronage extended to Service officers under the long established Military Education and Training (IMET) programme.
So blatant, widespread and generous is Washington’s largesse to the students — facilitating and financing, as it does, their pursuit of eclectic disciplines like the liberal arts, English literature and, even, art and history in leading U.S. institutions — that it is worth asking to what extent Indian policy on a range of issues of interest to America remains ‘hostage’ to the children of a growing number of Delhi’s powerful decision-makers. The scholarship recipients’ list is embarrassingly revelatory.

Education in Wisconsin

Bob and Jean Dohnal

Our family is very proud of the fact that five of the seven of us has graduated from the University of Wisconsin System and the other two attended for some time. We all attended public schools in our youth. We are very pro-education. Jean was a teacher for many years.
But, times have changed in the last 20 years or so. Spending on education has skyrocketed. Quality has gone down. Kids are forced to mortgage half of their lives to graduate from college and it takes five years. MPS is a total disaster with only a small number of kids being able to read in the 10th grade. Many businessmen consider high school degrees worthless.
School budgets are bloated with administrators as salaries and benefits far exceed what the average taxpayer makes. The unions have little interest beyond themselves. If left to their own, kids would continue to come out dumber per national average than when they went into the system. All of the advertising during Green Bay Packer games will not change that.

A Box? Or a Spaceship? What Makes Kids Creative

Sue Shellenbarger:

When art teacher Kandy Dea recently assigned fourth-graders in her Walnut, Iowa, classroom to create a board game to play with a friend, she was shocked by one little boy’s response: He froze.
While his classmates let their imaginations run wild making up colorful characters and fantasy worlds, the little boy said repeatedly, “I can’t think of anything,” Ms. Dea says. Although she reassured him that nothing he did would be judged “wrong,” he tried to copy another student’s game, then asked if he could make a work sheet instead. She finally gave him permission to make flash cards with right-and-wrong answers.
Americans’ scores on a commonly used creativity test fell steadily from 1990 to 2008, especially in the kindergarten through sixth-grade age group, says Kyung Hee Kim, an assistant professor of educational psychology at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Va. The finding is based on a study of 300,000 Americans’ scores from 1966 to 2008 on the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking, a standardized test that’s considered a benchmark for creative thinking. (Dr. Kim’s results are currently undergoing peer review to determine whether they will be published in a scholarly journal.)

Study finds little difference in achievement between independent charters and Milwaukee Public Schools

Becky Vevea:

The test scores of students at independent charter schools in Milwaukee and those of MPS students are relatively equal in the areas of reading and math, a study released Thursday says.
The report, released by the School Choice Demonstration Project conducted by researchers at the University of Wisconsin and the University of Arkansas, compared the 2006-2007 reading and math scores of 2,295 students attending 10 of the 14 independent charter schools in grades 3-8 to a carefully matched sample of 2,295 students from MPS.
When controlling for factors such as switching schools, the scores from students at independent charter schools score the same in reading and math as their counterparts in MPS.

It Isn’t the Culture, Stupid

The news last week that Shanghai students achieved the top scores in math on the international PISA exam was for some of us not exactly a wake-up call (as Secretary of Education Arne Duncan characterized it) or a Sputnik moment (as President Obama called it).
We’ve seen this result before. We’ve seen the reactions and the theories and the excuses that purport to explain why the US does so poorly in math. In fact, there are three main variations used to explain why Chinese/Asian students do so well in international exams:

• Version 1: They are taught using rote learning and then regurgitate the results on exams that test how well they memorize the procedures of how to solve specific problems.
• Version 2: They are taught using the reform methods of a “problem based approach” that doesn’t rely on drills, and instills critical thinking and higher order thinking skills
• Version 3: The teacher or the culture produces the proper conditions for learning.

Florida School Voucher Plan Threatens the Viability of Public Education

Dennis Maley:

On Rick Scott’s recent pre-take-office tour, Floridians got a peek at what issues his administration’s agenda will be likely to favor. The results ranged from confusing to frightening, especially since the opposition party will be virtually powerless to stop him. Provided Scott’s initiatives are supported by the Republican majority in the legislature, he will have the opportunity to make broad and sweeping changes and seems intent to do just that.
Among Scott’s most troubling assertions was an idea he floated about giving school vouchers to practically any student that wanted one. No governor has ever publicly contemplated such widespread use of vouchers and such a move would be a change to the very foundation of how we view and deliver public education.
As with any political movement, I tend to look at who is pushing it, how it fits into their core ideology and what stands to be gained. In this spirit, the most troubling part about vouchers is that they seem to be most strongly favored by those who do not really believe in government funding of education in the first place. That’s not to say that all supporters of such programs wish to abolish public education. Nonetheless, I still think that it is instructive to examine why those who do wish public education to suffer such a fate view vouchers as a vehicle toward that end.

Pell Grant Program Faces $5.7 Billion Gap

Mary Pilon:

Add this to Congress’s year-end to-do list: Dealing with a potential $5.7 billion gap in grants for low-income students.
Federal Pell grants are a form of need-based aid typically given to low-income students. As part of student loan legislation passed in March, the amount of money that students can receive from a Pell grant maxes out at $5,550 for the 2010-2011 school year, and was scheduled to be the same amount for 2011-2012.
There’s usually little political wrangling around funding for the Pell grant, but this year, lawmakers underestimated the surge in students going to college — and their financial need — helping to create the gap. Congress would need to authorize the additional billions to fully fund the program for all students who qualify for the aid. They’ve done so in the past, but the gap hasn’t ever been this large and comes in the midst of a tense political climate.
“When need-based aid like Pell grants doesn’t increase,” says Mark Kantrowitz, publisher of FinAid.org, “the gap between low income students and everyone else increases faster. It has a big impact.”

Reaching out to gifted students

“It’s really about the realization that one size doesn’t fit all and for a highly gifted student, a specialized environment is the best,”

Report: Strong link between test scores and teachers

Lisa Gartner:

A new report from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation says students’ gains in test scores is one of the strongest predictors of teacher effectiveness, apparently validating D.C.’s controversial teacher evaluation tool and drawing fire from union critics.
The preliminary findings of the Measures of Effective Teaching Project say that teachers’ past ability to raise student performance on state exams is one of the biggest predictors that the teacher would continue to oversee big test gains, and is “among the strongest predictors of his or her students’ achievement growth in other classes and academic years.”
Teachers with these high “value-added scores” — named for increasing a student’s achievement level
— were also more likely to increase students’ grasp of math concepts and reading comprehension through writing practices.

Report: Only 1 percent of ‘bad’ schools turn around

Amanda Paulson:

A lot of attention is being given to the idea of school “turnarounds” lately – the concept of taking a poorly performing school and drastically changing the staff, curricula, or other elements in an effort to make it much better.
But a study out Tuesday underlines just how hard it is to actually turn around a failing school.
The study, “Are Bad Schools Immortal?,” examined more than 2,000 of the worst-performing district and charter schools in 10 states over five years. It found that very few of them closed, and even fewer – about 1 percent – truly “turned around.”

The Achievement Recession

Tom Vander Ark

Given middle of the pack reading levels on PISA results, the National Journal asked the rediculous question, “what’s so awful about being average?” They seem to ignore that US math and science results are much worse and lag most of the developed world. As dumb as the prompt was, it got a few of us to write a response. Here’s mine.

Twenty years of prompting, investing, threatening and reforming have largely failed to dramatically improve education in American. There are pockets of excellence, but results from American schools are flatlined. While unions and school boards argue about contract minutes, the rest of the developed world passed us by in achievement, high school graduation and college completion rates.

Money Matters

Andy Rotherham:

Last week’s TIME column about the prospects for school spending occasioned some interesting responses. A common one, though, was the idea that the public is just clamoring to spend more on schools. You hear this a lot. Unfortunately, there are three problems with this argument:

Structural: The money just isn’t there (and annual increases are largely spoken for). The current trajectory of spending is simply not sustainable unless we’re prepared to made radical changes in policies, for example, affecting health care, senior citizens, or prisons. Whether or not we should make those changes is debatable. In many states all senior citizens get a break on property taxes, which are a key revenue source for schools. As the population ages this will ripple through public education budgets. Should these measures be means-tested for ability to pay? Perhaps. Given how politics works are they likely to be? Doubtful. Likewise, our correctional policies are a mess but most politicians are not lining up to fix them. So sure, today’s fiscal choices are just that, choices, but the implications of those decisions and prospects for change must be considered with an eye toward political and other realities realities. A second, related, structural constraint is how little discretionary money there is annually because of how much is tacked down for ongoing obligations. In practice this means that there are annual increases (excepting the last few years where in some places you’ve seen genuine reductions), which consume new money.

Shanghai PISA scores

Steve Hsu:

The Shanghai math (+1 SD) and science (+.75 SD) scores are almost a full SD above the OECD average of 500 (SD = 100). The top 10 percent of Shanghai math students are all above the 99th percentile for the US. See earlier post for links to Rindermann’s work relating school achievement tests like TIMSS and PISA to national IQ estimates, and see here for earlier SD estimates using 2006 PISA data. (Finland has an anomalously low SD in the earlier data. A quick look at the 2009 data shows the following math SDs: Finland 82, USA 91, Korea 89, Japan 94, Germany 98, Shanghai 103, Singapore 104.)

Although Shanghai and Beijing are the richest cities in China, incomes are still quite low compared to the US. Average income in Shanghai is about $10k USD per annum, even PPP adjusted this is about $20k. People live very modestly by the standards of developed countries.

As noted in the comments, there are other places in China that score *higher* than Shanghai on college entrance exams or in math and science competitions. So while Shanghai is probably above the average in China, it isn’t as exceptional as is perhaps implied in the Times article.

Taiwan has been moving to an American-style, less test-centric, educational system in the last decade. Educators and government officials (according to local media reports in the last 12 hours) are very concerned about the “low scores” achieved in the most recent PISA 🙂

To see how individual states or ethnicities in the US score on PISA, see here and here.

NYTimes: … PISA scores are on a scale, with 500 as the average. Two-thirds of students in participating countries score between 400 and 600. On the math test last year, students in Shanghai scored 600, in Singapore 562, in Germany 513, and in the United States 487.

In reading, Shanghai students scored 556, ahead of second-place Korea with 539. The United States scored 500 and came in 17th, putting it on par with students in the Netherlands, Belgium, Norway, Germany, France, the United Kingdom and several other countries.

In science, Shanghai students scored 575. In second place was Finland, where the average score was 554. The United States scored 502 — in 23rd place — with a performance indistinguishable from Poland, Ireland, Norway, France and several other countries.

The testing in Shanghai was carried out by an international contractor, working with Chinese authorities, and overseen by the Australian Council for Educational Research, a nonprofit testing group, said Andreas Schleicher, who directs the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development’s international educational testing program.

Mark Schneider, a commissioner of the Department of Education’s research arm in the George W. Bush administration, who returned from an educational research visit to China on Friday, said he had been skeptical about some PISA results in the past. But Mr. Schneider said he considered the accuracy of these results to be unassailable.

St. Andrew’s School Blazing iPad Tablet Trail in the U.S.

Eric Lai:

I only know of two K-12 schools that have come close to doing full 1-1 rollouts of iPads to their students. One is the Cedars School of Excellence outside of Glasgow, Scotland, whose 105-student deployment has captured most of the publicity due to the eloquence of its head of IT, Fraser Speirs. The one that gets less publicity is actually much more ambitious in many ways.
Saint Andrews School is a private school in Savannah, Georgia. It has deployed a total of 480 iPads to students, including one to all 440 students in the grades 1-12, and classroom sets for kindergarten and pre-kindergarten (so technically not 1:1, but pretty close).

NEA’s Independent Teaching Commission Not So Independent

Mike Antonucci

At the union’s convention last July in New Orleans, NEA President Dennis Van Roekel announced the creation of a Commission on Effective Teachers and Teaching, which would study teacher effectiveness and report its findings to the delegates of the 2011 convention.
“Let’s demand to be the ones in charge,” Van Roekel said, adding, “Imagine going beyond ‘being at the table’ to running the meeting.”
He asked, rhetorically, “What would the profession look like if we – the union of practitioners – actually controlled teacher training, induction and licensure, evaluation and professional development?”
Today, NEA announced the 21 members of that commission, and while the press release described them as “diverse” and “independent,” they seem committed to Van Roekel’s goals – union control of teacher training, induction, licensure, evaluation and professional development.

Rahm Emanuel Announces Education Plans, Gery Chico Responds

Fox Chicago News

In the race to replace Mayor Daley, Rahm Emanuel would like voters to be thinking about something other than those challenges to his residency, and he’s talking about schools.
Sunday, he unveiled his plans for improving education in Chicago, includind giving principals more power over their individual schools, doubling the number of teacher training academies and getting parents more involved.
Emanuel wants parents to sign a contract with their child’s teacher pledging to encourage learning at home.
“Our teachers simply cannot succeed without parents as partners. While government must do its part, it’s no substitute for a committed parent,” Emanuel said.
Monday, it’s back to the residency challenge, when Emanuel and other witnesses will be called to testify at a Board of Elections hearing.

Middleton Cross Plains Professional Development Plan

Middleton Cross Plains School District 60K PDF:

In a more concerted effort to enhance the manner in which our students are taught to become contributing members of a global society, we would like our schools to emphasize:

• The interconnectedness of the world’s cultures, politics, and economics.
• Recognizing, analyzing, and evaluating trends in global relationships.
• Creative problem solving, critical thinking, and innovative thought processes.
• Understanding issues from cultural perspectives other than our own.
• Encouraging study and travel abroad.
• Technical competence and the critical impact that technology has had in our world.
• Technological innovation that can expand curriculum, opportunity, and our students’ world view.
• Outreach to the community for resources and expertise to further global awareness.
• The role of world languages in preparing students for an international environment. Consideration of Chinese as a new curricular offering.

It is our hope that all students are touched by this initiative, in all courses and at all levels of our curriculum. We appreciate any innovation that can be brought to our students to achieve this goal.

Educator Is Said to Have Rejected Chancellor Job

Javier Hernandez:

In defending his selection for schools chancellor, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg has called Cathleen P. Black, a publishing executive with no education experience, “exactly the right person for the job” and suggested that her skills as a manager were unrivaled.
Ms. Black, however, was not the first person the mayor asked to take the position. Mr. Bloomberg tried to persuade Geoffrey Canada, the prominent Harlem education leader and a friend of the mayor, to be chancellor, but Mr. Canada turned it down, according to two people with direct knowledge of the discussions.
The two people did not want to be identified because Mr. Bloomberg has sought to keep the process private.
Mr. Bloomberg has repeatedly declined to offer details about whom he consulted during the search process, or how he ultimately settled on Ms. Black, the chairwoman of Hearst Magazines.

Candidates dwindling for Madison School Board races

Matthew DeFour:

One suggestion Severson offered that hasn’t gained much traction in the past is to have board members represent geographic areas rather than the entire city, more like the Milwaukee School Board.
Ruth Robarts, who served on the board for 10 years, said a consequence of at-large seats like those in Madison is that races are more expensive — hers cost $20,000 — and it becomes impossible to campaign door-to-door.
That means candidates rely on the endorsements of Madison Teachers Inc., which Robarts said has “almost overwhelming influence” on local board elections, and other groups, which then tout candidates’ qualifications and get members out to vote.
“However, the big unknown in my mind is whether School Board campaigns would become much more parochial,” she added, referring to district-based elections. “If so, would that lead to good trade-offs needing to happen to get things done or would it lead to political gridlock at this very local level?”

No High School Scholars Need Apply

Today, The Boston Globe published the latest in a long series of special “All-Scholastics” 14-page (12×22-inch) supplements on good local high school athletes from a variety of sports. These celebrations are produced three times a year (42 pages) with lots of pictures and little bios and lists of all-stars from the Boston area.
Again this Fall, there was no room for any mention by The Boston Globe of any noteworthy academic achievement by local students at the high school level. Christiane Henrich of Marblehead HS, in Marblehead, Massachusetts, wrote a 7,360-word Emerson-prize-winning history research paper on the quality (good for the day) of U.S. Civil War medicine. It was published in the only journal in the world for the academic papers of secondary students…No room in The Boston Globe for that to be mentioned. She is now at Stanford and doesn’t mind, but I mind about all the Boston-area students who are fed a constant diet of praise for athletic achievement by their peers and at the same time are starved of any and all news of the academic achievements of their peers.
In fact, over the years I have published a good number of exemplary history papers by high school students from the Boston area and they did not and do not get mentioned in The Boston Globe, nor do the academic achievements of our high school students in foreign languages (e.g. National Latin Exam, etc.), AP subject tests in Calculus, Chemistry, European history or in any other field, receive any notice from the Globe.
International competitions reveal that we are below average in Reading, Math and Science. Perhaps we should just explain that we don’t care about that stuff as much as we do about swimming, soccer, cross-country, football, golf, field hockey, and volleyball, because achievement by our high school students in those efforts are what we really like to pay attention to, (not that academic stuff), at least when it comes to The Boston Globe.
The Boston Globe (and its subscribers) are, in this way, sending a constant stream of clear messages (42 pages at a time in supplements, not to mention regular daily columns on HS sports) that in Boston (The Athens of America) what we care about is kids doing well in sports. If they do well in academics we don’t think that is worth mentioning. Sick, sad, and self-destructive, but there we are.
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Madison School Board to reconsider ag charter school: Badger Rock

Matthew DeFour:

As the Madison School Board prepares to take a second shot Monday at approving an agriculture-themed charter school on Madison’s South Side, board members remain divided on what was once thought to be a slam-dunk proposal.
“I’m sold on the concept; I’m not sold on the budget,” board member Lucy Mathiak said Friday. “I don’t see anyone being jolly about spending $700,000 a year for 50 kids.”
Badger Rock Middle School, expected to open next fall with 50 sixth-graders mostly from the Sennett Middle School attendance area, has a projected budget shortfall of $43,000 for 2011-12, with a projected budget of $668,600. The gap is projected to grow to $134,000 in the charter school’s third year, when it has 150 sixth-, seventh- and eighth-graders and is expected to cost $1.37 million to run.

Madison Superintendent Dan Nerad 1.3MB PDF::

On February 16,2010, MMSD received BRMS’s Planning
Grant and Executive Summary of its proposed charter school. On August 16, 2010, the DPI approved the Planning Grant and provided BRMS with an award of $200,000.
(Please see communication from DPI attached as Appendix A).
The proposed charter school will be located on 4 acres of property on the grounds of the
Badger Resilience Center in South Madison. The designated site is adjacent to a 7 acre
Madison park that will also be used to foster BRMS’ philosophy of cultural and
environmental sustainability. The site also currently has a working farm, a community
center, a cafe and a gardening and sustainability operation run by Growing Power.
In addition to the previously referenced planning grant, funding for BRMS, including a
school endowment, is being spearheaded by the Center for Resilient Cities. BRMS
reports that “close to a million dollars” has been committed to the project and these, and
future, funds are being provided by private contributors.
BRMS notes that the research-based instructional strategies upon which their pedagogy
will be established are Environmental-Based Education (EBE) and Place -Based
Education (PBE). As noted in BRMS Executive Summary, both EBE and PBE have
been subject to numerous research efforts and have demonstrated positive results for
involved students, and in particular, students at the middle school level. EBE in
particular is also consistent with PI 8.01 which mandates that “environmental education
objectives and activities shall be integrated into the kindergarten through grade 12
sequential curriculum plans.” BRMS also proposes a “year-round” school which would
not increase the number of instructional days, but would lessen the traditional threemonth
summer break.
BRMS has established numerous partnerships with community agencies. These
agencies are detailed in the Executive Summary and Detailed Proposal (See
Appendices B and D)

Much more on the proposed Badger Rock Middle School Charter initiative here.

Educator Is Said to Have Rejected Chancellor Job

Javier Hernandez

In defending his selection for schools chancellor, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg has called Cathleen P. Black, a publishing executive with no education experience, “exactly the right person for the job” and suggested that her skills as a manager were unrivaled.
Ms. Black, however, was not the first person the mayor asked to take the position. Mr. Bloomberg tried to persuade Geoffrey Canada, the prominent Harlem education leader and a friend of the mayor, to be chancellor, but Mr. Canada turned it down, according to two people with direct knowledge of the discussions.
The two people did not want to be identified because Mr. Bloomberg has sought to keep the process private.
Mr. Bloomberg has repeatedly declined to offer details about whom he consulted during the search process, or how he ultimately settled on Ms. Black, the chairwoman of Hearst Magazines.

Monona Grove School Board Update

Peter Sobol:

In the public appearances section of the meeting MGEA representative Kevin Mikelbank noted that in consideration of the status of the ongoing negotiations the teacher’s union has suspended their “work to the contract” job action, and that teachers would now participate in activities such as writing student letters of recommendation.
After the remaining preliminaries, the board heard first from PMA financial consultants who perform a 5 year budget forcast for the district each year. This year’s preliminary model assumes zero enrollment growth and $200/year increase in the revenue cap – in all likelyhood we will see a smaller increase. Even so, the preliminary projections show a deficit that increases $700K to $1M each of the next five years, and unless a miracle occurs in the state budget process it will quite probably be worse. Ugh.

Interested Observers

In a Newsweek article for November 28, 2010, Jonathan Alter, in the process of calling educational historian Diane Ravitch “jaundiced,” and “the Whittaker Chambers of school reform,” praises Bill Gates for his broad-minded views of the best way to evaluate teachers, including “student feedback,” which Alter observes parenthetically, is “(surprisingly predictive of success in the classroom)…”
Now, who is it that could be surprised that students might be able to predict which teachers would be successful in the classroom, Mr. Alter? How could it be, he must assume, that young students, after their thousands of hours of classroom observations, might know something about what makes an effective teacher and who might do well at the job?
I find the combination of hubris, ignorance and condescension revealed by that parenthetical aside to be truly astonishing.
Recently Randi Weintgarten told Jay Mathews in an interview that in considering school reform it was important to start from the bottom up, that is with teachers.
Hasn’t a single Edupundit or Union Leader noticed that “below” the teachers, if we want to start from the bottom up, are the students? You know, the ones who have always been there, observing and learning a lot about teachers, who they are, what they can do, and what it would take to make classrooms and schools do their job better. As John Shepard has pointed out to me: “Can we not–using W.C. Field’s paraphrase–see the handwriting on the floor?”
But perhaps someone has indeed thought of asking them. Tony Wagner at Harvard conducted a focus group of recent graduates for a suburban high school and was quite surprised by much of what he learned, but when I asked him how many high schools he knew of which did conduct such inquiries to learn how they could improve, he said he only knew of three in the country.
We are not asking students, so they are not telling us, no surprise there. But perhaps we are not asking them because, don’t you know, they are just kids. I know something about those kids because I was a teacher for ten years and for the last 23 I have been seeking out and publishing their serious academic expository writing. I know that some of my authors have graduated summa cum laude from Harvard, Princeton and Yale, that some of them have become Rhodes Scholars, Marshall Scholars, and doctors, lawyers, and chiefs of various kinds. Why is it so easy for us to forget that every Nobel Prize winner was once a high school student sitting there as an interested observer, learning about teachers, classrooms and schools?
But we don’t think to ask them. We don’t benefit from their years of experience studying the education we are offering them. This stupidity on our part has resulted in hundreds of billions of dollars and centuries of person-years deployed on education reform without making use of any of the knowledge students regularly accumulate about what we are trying to reform. What a sad thoughtless waste of money and time!
Japanese car makers had the sense to allow workers on the assembly line to stop the line if they saw a defect that needed correction, and they have led the world in quality work.
While it is no doubt impossible for us even to imagine giving students the power to stop a teacher who was doing a terrible job, why don’t we at least give some thought, with all our heavy thinkers and all our research budgets, to trying to discover at least
a tiny bit of what some of our more thoughtful students have observed over their decades in our schools?
We could actually consider asking for and even taking some small bit of their advice on how to educate them and their peers better. After all, we landed on the Moon within a decade, didn’t we? And brought the astronauts safely home…surely we could ask a few students a few questions, and listen to the answers, couldn’t we?

iPods, iPads, cell phones welcome in Green Bay area schools

Patti Zarling

Green Bay-area school districts are beginning to change long-standing bans on handheld technology, such as cell phones and iPods, after realizing they are increasingly part of students’ everyday lives.
The Pulaski School District, for example, now encourages middle and high school students to bring their cell phones to class. They’re also welcome to carry other electronic gadgets such as netbooks, which are a bit smaller than laptop computers; iPads, handheld tablet computers; or electronic-book readers.
Pulaski school leaders said they decided to drop a ban on cell phone use because it wasn’t practical. Students own the gadgets, administrators say, so why not use them as classroom tools?

School District Financial Efficiency: Houston School District gets average score

Ericka Mellon:

The Houston Independent School District is making above-average gains in student performance but isn’t spending its money as efficiently as other districts, according to a new study released today by Texas Comptroller Susan Combs.
The first-of-its-kind analysis, ordered by the Texas Legislature, rates the financial efficiency compared with students’ academic progress for every district and school. Those boasting gains in student test scores and spending little money per pupil get the highest marks (5 stars in the rating system).
Houston ISD, the state’s largest district, earned three stars. Dallas ISD, the second-largest district and the most comparable to Houston’s, received two stars.
Statewide, 43 districts and charter school operators earned five stars. The list included Angleton, Clear Creek, Conroe, Cypress-Fairbanks, Friendswood, Katy and Pearland.

Financial Allocation Study for Texas

The Comptroller’s office is leading the Financial Allocation Study for Texas (FAST) to examine how our school districts and campuses spend their money – and how this spending translates into student achievement. Our study is intended to identify cost-effective practices that promote academic progress.
In addition to presenting the FAST study findings, this website also allows you to run your own custom reports on school district finances and results. We hope that policymakers and the public alike will use this resource to see how our education dollars are working to prepare the next generation.

More on Madison’s Response to DPI Complaint

Great Madison Schools.org

In its response to the Department of Public Instruction’s request for information on its talented and gifted services, the Madison School District points out that the National Association for Gifted Children (NAGC) has recently updated its standards for TAG programming. Now, the District argues, the NAGC standards “actually serve as validation of the District’s current practices,” including West High School’s claim that it meets the needs of talented and gifted students through differentiation within regular classrooms. We disagree.
The NAGC issued its revised standards in September, around the same time West High School area parents filed a complaint against the Madison School District for allowing West High to deny appropriate programming to academically gifted students. West has refused for years to provide alternatives to its regular core curriculum for 9th and 10th graders who demonstrate high performance capabilities in language arts and social studies.
The District writes:

Lots of related links:

• “Stand Up Against the MMSD High School Reform”
• Madison school district to consider alternatives to traditional public schools
• Advanced Placement, Gifted Education & A Hometown Debate
• On the Gifted & Talented Complaint Against the Madison School District
• Madison School District 2010-2011 Enrollment Report, Including Outbound Open Enrollment (3.11%)
• Complaint Filed Against Madison Schools
• English 10
• District Small Learning Community Grant – Examining the Data From Earlier Grants, pt. 2

New York Chancellor From Different World Visits Classrooms

Cathleen P. Black, the schools chancellor designee, is not a gusher. She is not an over-talker. She is a firm shaker of hands, a professional-grade eye-contact-maker and active listener. During an hourlong visit to Public School 33 in Chelsea on Monday morning, Ms. Black missed no opportunity to smile and say hello to school employees, from the office assistants to the person she later called the safety adviser (safety officer, but O.K., she is still new). Making the classroom rounds, she chatted with the children about pyramids and pets and greeted, but did not exactly bowl over, the teachers.
“Teachers need good knees,” she observed about midway through the visit, rising from the crouch she had been in while listening to some students talk about why they liked “Diary of a Wimpy Kid.”
It is all new to Cathie Black: the knees, the numbers, the needs of the nation’s largest school system, where two-thirds of the students are poor enough to qualify for free meals. The current chancellor, Joel I. Klein, grew up in a housing project; Ms. Black, the chairwoman of Hearst Magazines, acknowledged Monday that she had never set foot in one. She and her children attended private schools.

Youth Sports May Not Offer Enough Exercise

Jennifer Corbett Dooren

The majority of children participating in organized team-sports don’t meet the federal recommendation of one hour a day of moderate-to-vigorous exercise, according to a study released Monday.
Federal-government guidelines recommend children and teens get at least 60 minutes of moderate-to-vigorous activity each day. It is estimated that fewer than half of children and only about 10% of teenagers meet that goal.
Many parents might believe if their children participate in team sports, then they must be getting enough exercise. Researchers at San Diego State and the University of California, San Diego, showed that isn’t necessarily the case.
The researchers looked at sports practices involving 200 children ranging in age from 7 to 14 years old, who were participants on a soccer, baseball or softball team in San Diego County. The study, funded by the National Institutes of Health, was published online Monday in the Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine.

Top Test Scores From Shanghai Stun Educators

Sam Dillon

With China’s debut in international standardized testing, students in Shanghai have surprised experts by outscoring their counterparts in dozens of other countries, in reading as well as in math and science, according to the results of a respected exam.
American officials and Europeans involved in administering the test in about 65 countries acknowledged that the scores from Shanghai — an industrial powerhouse with some 20 million residents and scores of modern universities that is a magnet for the best students in the country — are by no means representative of all of China.
About 5,100 15-year-olds in Shanghai were chosen as a representative cross-section of students in that city. In the United States, a similar number of students from across the country were selected as a representative sample for the test.
Experts noted the obvious difficulty of using a standardized test to compare countries and cities of vastly different sizes. Even so, they said the stellar academic performance of students in Shanghai was noteworthy, and another sign of China’s rapid modernization.
The results also appeared to reflect the culture of education there, including greater emphasis on teacher training and more time spent on studying rather than extracurricular activities like sports.

Teachers can make their case about reform to policymakers

In the Nov. 28 Star, Matthew Tully contributed an insightful piece highlighting a significant disconnect between education reformers and those who will perhaps be most affected by reforms — teachers (“Teachers hear something else in reform debate”). The article begs us to contemplate the forces underlying educators’ distrust of state-directed education reforms. Teachers will be instrumental in implementation of these reforms. As such, the fracture between policymakers and practitioners demands our attention.
Tully captured the gestalt of the problem when noting that many good teachers think those of us pushing for education reform blame them for their schools’ failures. We’re not. We’re actually making the opposite case: Good and great teachers are responsible for their schools’ successes.

Honolulu Charter school stands accused of nepotism

Susan Essoyan

Principal Diana Oshiro of Myron B. Thompson Academy Public Charter School says she values “blind loyalty” and has hired several relatives — including her sister and three nephews — because she can count on them to do what she says.
Three out of four administrators at Thompson, one of the state’s largest charter schools, are part of Oshiro’s family. Her sister oversees the elementary school as vice principal and also works as a flight attendant.
Oshiro’s nephew is the athletic director, although the school had no sports teams last year or this year, and he doesn’t teach PE. He and his brother, the film teacher, were hired with just high school degrees, although public school teachers are supposed to have bachelor’s degrees and teaching licenses.
A veteran educator, Oshiro was blunt when asked about her hiring practices at the online school, which has 517 students in kindergarten through 12th grade.

The Madison School District’s “Phoenix Program”: An “Alternative to Expulsion”

The Madison School District Administration

On June 14, 2010, the Board was presented with a Document entitled Disciplinary Alternatives: Phoenix Program.
That Document outlined the foundation for the current Phoenix Program, an alternative to expulsion that allows a student’s expulsion recommendation to be held in abeyance while the student participates in a half-day program tailored to the student’s academic, emotional and behavioral needs. At the time of presentation, the Board voted to implement the Phoenix Program.
The June 14, 2010 document did not provide all the details related to the Phoenix Program and contemplated that further details would be provided to the Board as the Program was implemented. This memo is intended to advise the Board of the current state of the Phoenix Program, provide further details of its operation and advise the Board of changes to prior practices that have been made in the process of implementing the Phoenix Program.
For ease of reference, this Update will follow the structure of the June 14, 2010 Document. Also for !he Board’s reference the following documents are attached to this Update: Phoenix Program Participation Agreement, the “Knowledge” analysis form, and a chart that compares and contrasts the old practices versus the new practices.
Introduction
As the Board will recall, the Phoenix Program was recommended and adopted in order to provide an alternative toexpulsionforstudentswhocommittedcertainexpellableoffenses. Theintentoftheprogramistoprovide academic, social and emotional interventions to students who engage in certain behavior in order for students to remain connected to the school environment and improve their prosocial skills and not repeat the same or similar behavior.

Hold the brownies! Bill could limit bake sales

Mary Clare Jalonick

A child nutrition bill on its way to President Barack Obama — and championed by the first lady — gives the government power to limit school bake sales and other fundraisers that health advocates say sometimes replace wholesome meals in the lunchroom.
Republicans, notably Sarah Palin, and public school organizations decry the bill as an unnecessary intrusion on a common practice often used to raise money.
“This could be a real train wreck for school districts,” Lucy Gettman of the National School Boards Association said Friday, a day after the House cleared the bill. “The federal government should not be in the business of regulating this kind of activity at the local level.”

The College Debt Bubble: Is It Ready to Explode?

Hans Bader

Is the College Debt Bubble Ready to Explode?,” asks Laura Rowley at Yahoo! Finance. College tuition has skyrocketed much more than housing did during the housing bubble, in percentage terms. One hundred colleges charge $50,000 or more a year, compared to just 5 in 2008-09. College tuition has surged along with federal financial-aid spending, which effectively rewards colleges for increasing tuition. College financial-aid policies punish thrifty families, so that “parents who scrimp and save to come up with the tuition are in effect subsidizing the others.”
“University administrators are the equivalent of subprime mortgage brokers,” notes Facebook investor Peter Thiel, “selling you a story that you should go into debt massively, that it’s not a consumption decision, it’s an investment decision. Actually, no, it’s a bad consumption decision. Most colleges are four-year parties,” he says, an assessment shared by prominent law professor Glenn Reynolds.
My wife is French. She spent twice as much time in class at her second-tier French university as I did in my flagship American university (the University of Virginia), and more time studying, too (even though I was studious by American standards, and as a result, later went on to attend Harvard Law School). France spends less per student on higher education than we do, to produce a more literate and knowledgeable citizenry.

Initial Thoughts on the Madison Prep Proposal

Madison School Board Member Ed Hughes:

Thanks to the Kaleem Caire his Urban League team for shining a spotlight on the very troubling issue of the lack of success experienced by so many of our students of color. Thanks even more for proposing a charter school intended to help address this problem. I want the proposal to succeed. But I need to know more about the legality of the proposal’s single-gender approach, a lot more about the projected finances for the school and the extent of the School District’s expected contribution, and more about how the school intends to remain true to its vision of serving Madison’s disadvantaged African-American boys before my sympathetic disposition can grow into active support.

Much more on the proposed IB Charter: Madison Preparatory Academy, here.

Britain’s students: the revolution will be along later

The Economist

“YOU ARE the backbone of a new movement. This is a movement that is capable of changing Britain, Europe and the world,” bellowed the student representative from University College, London (UCL), standing on the plinth at the base of Nelson’s Column in Trafalgar Square this afternoon. His claim was manifestly false.
I am sure he believed it, as a megaphone carried his words into a horizontal-sleet-laden wind. I suspect many of the crowd of a few hundred freezing young protestors gathered below wanted to believe it. They clutched placards denouncing plans by the Coalition government to raise a cap on student tuition fees to abour £9000 a year, and they were genuinely, sincerely angry. Today’s day of action was the third major demonstration by students in central London, and the foul weather had not deterred a good number of students from showing up, though they were outnumbered by chilly-looking police.
There were signs of troublemaking here and there: hairy, middle-aged Trots handing out tracts called things like Proletarian Struggle or words to that effect. Lots of ready-made signs distributed by the Socialist Workers’ Party, a hardline outfit. A few gaggles of scary youths in hooded tops with scarves over their faces, roaming the crowd in search of trouble. An Iranian television news crew filming the scene.

Intense Parenting Comes at High Cost

Sue Shellenbarger

A surprising trend among working parents in recent years has been that they are actually spending more time with their kids. But this intense parenting comes with a cost.
Since 1965, married fathers’ time caring for children nearly tripled to an average 7.0 hours a week from 2.5; married moms’ child-care time also rose, by 36%-to 13.9 hours from 10.2 hours, based on research released at a conference Tuesday in Washington, D.C. The child-care hours include only the time parents were focused mainly on the child, such as feeding, clothing, bathing, playing with or reading to the child. It excludes time spent with children present when the parent’s primary focus was something else, such as cooking dinner or watching TV.
Parents are paying for the increase in other realms of life, says the author, Suzanne Bianchi, a sociology professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. Married mothers spend less time on grooming – 8.2 hours a week, down from 10.1 hours in 1965, her data show; moms are also doing less housework.

Court: Parents can sue if schools skimp on P.E.

Jill Tucker

Parents can take their children’s public schools to court to force educators to provide the minimum amount of physical education required by state law, the California Court of Appeal ruled in Sacramento on Tuesday, which could spell trouble for a lot of state schools.
California’s education code requires elementary schools to offer 200 minutes of physical education every 10 days, an amount that rises to 400 minutes in middle or high schools, not including lunch or recess. A small-scale survey of state schools a few years ago found more than half failed to provide the required minutes of physical activity.

K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: Report of the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility

REPORT OF THE NATIONAL COMMISSION ON FISCAL RESPONSIBILITY AND REFORM

Throughout our nation’s history, Americans have found the courage to do right by our children’s future. Deep down, every American knows we face a moment of truth once again. We cannot play games or put off hard choices any longer. Without regard to party, we have a patriotic duty to keep the promise of America to give our children and grandchildren a better life.
Our challenge is clear and inescapable: America cannot be great if we go broke. Our businesses will not be able to grow and create jobs, and our workers will not be able to compete successfully for the jobs of the future without a plan to get this crushing debt burden off our backs.
Ever since the economic downturn, families across the country have huddled around kitchen tables, making tough choices about what they hold most dear and what they can learn to live without. They expect and deserve their leaders to do the same. The American people are counting on us to put politics aside, pull together not pull apart, and agree on a plan to live within our means and make America strong for the long haul.
As members of the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, we spent the past eight months studying the same cold, hard facts. Together, we have reached these unavoidable conclusions: The problem is real. The solution will be painful. There is no easy way out. Everything must be on the table. And Washington must lead.
We come from different backgrounds, represent different regions, and belong to different parties, but we share a common belief that America’s long-term fiscal gap is unsustainable and, if left unchecked, will see our children and grandchildren living in a poorer, weaker nation. In the words of Senator Tom Coburn, “We keep kicking the can down the road, and splashing the soup all over our grandchildren.” Every modest sacrifice we refuse to make today only forces far greater sacrifices of hope and opportunity upon the next generation.
Over the course of our deliberations, the urgency of our mission has become all the more apparent. The contagion of debt that began in Greece and continues to sweep through Europe shows us clearly that no economy will be immune. If the U.S. does not put its house in order, the reckoning will be sure and the devastation severe.
The President and the leaders of both parties in both chambers of Congress asked us to address the nation’s fiscal challenges in this decade and beyond. We have worked to offer an aggressive, fair, balanced, and bipartisan proposal – a proposal as serious as the problems we face. None of us likes every element of our plan, and each of us had to tolerate provisions we previously or presently oppose in order to reach a principled compromise. We were willing to put our differences aside to forge a plan because our nation will certainly be lost without one.
We do not pretend to have all the answers. We offer our plan as the starting point for a serious national conversation in which every citizen has an interest and all should have a say. Our leaders have a responsibility to level with Americans about the choices we face, and to enlist the ingenuity and determination of the American people in rising to the challenge.

Surprisingly Predictive (you moron!): “…student feedback (surprisingly predictive of success in the classroom)”

Jonathan Alter

Bill Gates is raising his arm, bent at the elbow, in the direction of the ceiling. The point he’s making is so important that he wants me and the pair of Gates Foundation staffers sitting in the hotel conference room in Louisville, Ky., to recognize the space between this thought and every lower-ranking argument. “If there’s one thing that can be done for the country, one thing,” Gates says, his normally modulated voice rising, “improving education rises so far above everything else!” He doesn’t say what the “else” is–deficit reduction? containing Iran? free trade?–but they’re way down toward the floor compared with the arm above that multibillion-dollar head. With the U.S. tumbling since 1995 from second in the world to 16th in college-graduation rates and to 24th place in math (for 15-year-olds), it was hard to argue the point. Our economic destiny is at stake.
Gates had just finished giving a speech to the Council of Chief State School Officers in which he tried to explain how administrators could hope to raise student achievement in the face of tight budgets. The Microsoft founder went through what he sees as false solutions–furloughs, sharing textbooks–before focusing on the true “cost drivers”: seniority-based pay and benefits for teachers rising faster than state revenues.
Seniority is the two-headed monster of education–it’s expensive and harmful. Like master’s degrees for teachers and smaller class sizes, seniority pay, Gates says, has “little correlation to student achievement.” After exhaustive study, the Gates Foundation and other experts have learned that the only in-school factor that fully correlates is quality teaching, which seniority hardly guarantees. It’s a moral issue. Who can defend a system where top teachers are laid off in a budget crunch for no other reason than that they’re young?
In most states, pay and promotion of teachers are connected 100 percent to seniority. This is contrary to everything the world’s second-richest man believes about business: “Is there any other part of the economy where someone says, ‘Hey, how long have you been mowing lawns? … I want to pay you more for that reason alone.’ ” Gates favors a system where pay and promotion are determined not just by improvement in student test scores (an idea savaged by teachers’ unions) but by peer surveys, student feedback (surprisingly predictive of success in the classroom), video reviews, and evaluation by superiors. In this approach, seniority could be a factor, but not the only factor.
President Obama knows that guaranteed tenure and rigid seniority systems are a problem, but he’s not yet willing to speak out against them. Even so, Gates gives Obama an A on education. The Race to the Top program, Gates says, is “more catalytic than anyone expected it to be” in spurring accountability and higher standards.
Gates hardly has all the answers: he spent $2 billion a decade ago breaking up big high schools into smaller ones and didn’t get the results he’d hoped for. Today, he’s too enamored of handheld devices for tracking student performance. They could end up as just another expensive, high-tech gimmick. But you’ve got to give Gates credit for devoting so much of his brain and fortune to this challenge. [BIG BIAS ALERT HERE!] His biggest adversary now is Diane Ravitch, a jaundiced former Education Department official under George H.W. Bush, who changed sides in the debate and now attacks Gates-funded programs in books and articles. Ravitch, the Whittaker Chambers of school reform, gives intellectual heft to the National Education Association’s campaign to discredit even superb charter schools and trash intriguing reform ideas that may threaten its power. When I asked Gates about Ravitch, you could see the Micro-hard hombre who once steamrolled software competitors: “Does she like the status quo? Is she sticking up for decline? Does she really like 400-page [union] contracts? Does she think all those ‘dropout factories’ are lonely? If there’s some other magic way to reduce the dropout rate, we’re all ears.” Gates understands that charters aren’t a silver bullet, and that many don’t perform. But he doesn’t have patience for critics who spend their days tearing down KIPP schools and other models that produce results.
There’s a backlash against the rich taking on school reform as a cause. Some liberals figure they must have an angle and are scapegoating teachers. But most of the wealthy people underwriting this long-delayed social movement for better performance are on the right track. [BIG BIAS ALERT HERE!] Like the rest of us, they know that if we don’t fix education, we can kiss our future goodbye.
Jonathan Alter is also the author of The Promise: President Obama, Year One and The Defining Moment: FDR’s Hundred Days and the Triumph of Hope.

Stephanie Findley learned the hard way that while the public favors school reform, the political system is rigged to kill it.

Mike Nichols

Stephanie Findley was not just some carpetbagger looking for a job when she decided to run for the Assembly earlier this year.
She had a job — a few of them, actually. She worked as an office manager for Milwaukee District Council 48, a large and politically active labor group. She owned a small business, Fast & Accurate Business Solutions. She taught classes at the Spanish Center in Milwaukee and at Bryant & Stratton College.
A single mother who says she was already pregnant when she walked across the stage to get her Milwaukee Public High School degree some 20 years ago, Findley had overcome poverty and earned a master’s degree from Cardinal Stritch. She was also active in the Democratic Party, was head of the City of Milwaukee’s Election Commission and volunteered for too many organizations to count.
She was a 20-year resident of the 10th Assembly District, which has long been the province of retiring lawmaker Annette Polly Williams — a woman many still call “the mother of school choice” — when she decided to run for the seat herself. Findley, after all, had many of the same struggles and worries her neighbors did — including the high cost of health care, taxes, and the quality of MPS schools.

Madison Preparatory Academy for Young Men: Initial Proposal to Establish a Charter School

1.1MB PDF; via a Kaleem Caire email:

Based on current education and social conditions, the fate of boys of color is uncertain.
African American and Latino boys are grossly over-represented among youth failing to achieve academic success, are at grave risk of dropping out of school before they reach 10th grade, are disproportionately represented among adjudicated and incarcerated youth, and are far less likely than their peers in other subgroups to achieve to their dreams and aspirations. Likewise, boys in general lag behind girls in most indicators of student achievement.
Research indicates that although boys of color have high aspirations for academic and career success, their underperformance in school and lack of educational attainment undermine their career pursuits and the success they desire. This misalignment of aspirations and achievement is fueled by and perpetuates a set of social conditions wherein men of color find themselves disproportionately represented among the unemployed and incarcerated. Without meaningful, targeted, and sustainable interventions and support systems, hundreds of thousands of young men of color will never realize their true potential and the cycle of high unemployment, fatherless homes, overcrowded jails, incarcerated talent, deferred dreams, and high rates of school failure will continue.
Madison Preparatory Academy for Young Men (Madison Prep) will be established to serve as a catalyst for change and opportunity among young men, particularly young men of color and those who desire a nurturing educational experience for young men.
Madison Prep’s founders understand that poverty, isolation, structural discrimination, lack of access to positive male role models and achievement-oriented peer groups, limited exposure to opportunity and culture outside their neighborhood or city, and a general lack of understanding – and in some cases fear – of Black and Latino boys among adults are major contributing factors to why so many young men are failing to achieve to their full potential. However, the Urban League of Greater Madison – the “founders” of Madison Prep – also understand that these issues can be addressed by directly countering each issue with a positive, exciting, engaging, enriching, challenging, affirming and structured learning community designed to exclusively benefit boys.
Madison Prep will be a non-instrumentality charter school – authorized by the Madison Metropolitan School District Board of Education – that serves an all-male student body in grades 6-12. It will be open to all males residing in Dane County who apply, regardless of previous academic performance. The school will provide a world class secondary education for young men that prepares them for leadership, service, and success at a four-year college or university.
Madison Prep will employ seven Educational Strategies to achieve this mission: an all-male student body, the International Baccalaureate curriculum, a College Preparatory educational program, Harkness Teaching, an extended school day and year, mentoring and community support, and the “Prep Year.”
Madison Prep will also use four key Operational Strategies in order to support the educational strategies: adequate staffing, target student population, appropriate facilities/location, and sufficient funding.
Eight Core Values and Four Leadership Dimensions will additionally serve as underpinnings for the success of Madison Prep and Madison Prep students. These Core Values – Excellence & Achievement, Accountability, Teamwork, Innovation, Global Perspective, Perseverance, Leading with Purpose, and Serving Others – will also root Madison Prep in the Educational Framework of the Madison Metropolitan School District. The Four Leadership Dimensions – Personal, Team, Thought, and Results Leadership – will serve as criteria for student and staff evaluations.
Madison Prep’s educational program will be bolstered by partnerships with businesses, government agencies, professional and membership associations, colleges and universities, and scholarship-providing organizations that have the capacity to bring talent, expertise and resources into the school community to benefit Madison Prep students, faculty, staff, and parents. Madison Prep will also host special activities to engage parents, family members, and the community in the education of their young men. Invitations will be extended to parents, community leaders, and experts to join young men at the Harkness Table to add to their learning and to learn with them.
Seed funding for the establishment of Madison Prep will come from public and private sources, including planning and implementation grants from charter school investment funds, charitable foundations, government agencies, and individuals. Ideally, Madison Prep will be located in a business or higher education environment with access to quality classroom, athletic and laboratory facilities or the ability to create such facilities.
The Urban League of Greater Madison (ULGM or Urban League) will submit a Detailed Proposal for Madison Prep in 2011 to the Madison Metropolitan School District (MMSD) Board of Education to receive approval to open the school in 2012. If approved, the school will open in August 2012 serving 90 boys in grades 6 and 7. The school will grow by one grade level each year until it offers a full complement of secondary grades (6 -12). At maturity, Madison Prep will serve 315 students and graduate its first class of seniors in 2017-18.

Links: Madison Preparatory Academy and Kaleem Caire (interview).
This plan will be presented at the 12/6/2010 Madison School Board meeting.
In many ways, the outcome of this initiative will be a defining moment for our local public schools, particularly in terms of diffused governance, choice, a different curricular approach (potentially a movement away from the one size fits all model), economics and community engagement. If it does not happen in Madison, I suspect it will with a neighboring district.
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The Madison Prep Difference
Although it is clear that Madison Prep can and will support MMSD objectives, there is no doubt that Madison Prep will be unique. Madison Prep will be the only all-male public school option in Dane County serving young men when it opens in 2012. Furthermore, the school will be the only IB school in the city offering the full continuum of the IB Programme at the secondary level. Young men enrolled in Madison Prep in 6th grade will begin their education in the IB Middle Years Programme and continue in the curriculum until they move into the rigorous two- year Diploma Programme beginning in 11th grade, thereby increasing their likeliness of success. Finally, while MMSD offers after school activities and care, no school in the district offers a significant amount of additional instructional time through an extended school day and extended school year, as Madison Prep will.

Classroom Collaboration Supports Mathematical Generalizations

Amy Ellis

In mathematics classrooms, generalization is an important part of the curriculum.
When students know how to generalize they can identify commonality across cases, extend their reasoning beyond the range in which it originated, and derive broader results from particular cases. But generalization remains difficult for students to do, and for teachers to support.
UW-Madison education professor Amy Ellis studies the processes that support students’ productive generalizing in their math classrooms. She considers generalization a dynamic social process as well as an individual cognitive activity.
In a recent study she studied an 8th-grade math class during a 3-week unit on quadratic growth. The class sessions focused on relationships between the height and area of growing rectangles (see illustration). As they grew, the rectangles retained the same height-to-length ratio.

Boston-area Catholic schools, hit by shrinking enrollment, find a surging demand for classes for 3- and 4-year-olds

Lisa Wangsness

Enrollment in local Catholic preschool classes this year is up nearly 14 percent over last year and 22 percent over five years ago, as elementary schools in the Boston Archdiocese have added programs for 3- and 4-year-olds and freestanding Catholic preschools have sprung up in response to surging demand.
Principals and administrators say the preschools are attracting working parents, including many non-Catholics, by providing high-quality programs for a lower price than full-time day care, which can easily run more than $10,000 a year.
“For working parents, there is going to be a cost, regardless of whether it’s an academic program or a child-care program,” said Russ W. Wilson, regional director of Pope John Paul II Catholic Academy, which offers prekindergarten through eighth grade at multiple campuses in Dorchester and Mattapan. “So parents are doing some simple math and realizing that, for an affordable price, they are able to send their child to . . . a full day of academics, socialization, computer skills.”

Predicting Heart Health in Children

Ron Winslow

Has your kid had a checkup for heart disease lately?
The vast majority of heart attacks happen to people well past middle age, so a potential problem a half-century away may not be high on your list of child health-care worries. But it is well-established that heart disease begins to develop in childhood. Now, two new studies add to a burgeoning body of evidence that developing heart-healthy habits as a youngster or adolescent may have lasting benefits in adulthood.
One of the reports, based on a pooling of data from four major studies that tracked people from early childhood into their 30s and 40s, suggests that the presence of such risk factors as high blood pressure and abnormal cholesterol by about age 9 strongly predicts a thickening of the walls in the carotid or neck arteries in early adulthood. Experts consider this condition, called carotid intima media thickness, a precursor to heart attacks and strokes.

How to Give Children the Gift of Investing

Jonnelle Marte

What present can you give a kid that will outlast the latest must-have toy or gadget? How about some stock in the company that makes it.
You can jump-start a young person’s finances by giving him or her the gift of investing with stocks, bonds and mutual funds. Throw in some lessons on how the markets work — and the common pitfalls investors face — and you could end up giving them some financial savviness as well.
Getting kids investing early “allows them to accumulate knowledge over time on what can be a complex topic,” says June Walbert, a certified financial planner based in San Antonio with financial-services firm USAA.
Individual Stocks. Does your 10-year-old nephew spend most of his free time playing videogames? Harness that interest by giving him stock in the videogame maker. A kid might be more interested in following a company’s stock if it’s linked to a brand he or she is familiar with, such as the company behind a favorite activity, toy, restaurant or snack food.

Mom, Dad, Can I Borrow $140,000?

The Wall Street Journal

Business is booming at the Bank of Mom and Dad.
As banks have tightened lending standards, growing numbers of families are stepping into the breach. But while intrafamily loans can yield significant financial rewards for lenders and borrowers, families must carefully assess the risks.
While many families handle the process in informal oral agreements, advisers urge clients to document such loans in written contracts, just as a bank would. This can also make it easier for families to comply with tax rules that require lenders to pay income tax on the interest they receive and allow borrowers with mortgages to deduct the interest payments they pay.
Some families choose to go through websites like Prosper and Lending Club, which match lenders and borrowers online–though they also set minimum interest rates.

College Best Values in Private Colleges Our top 200 schools deliver a high-quality education at an affordable price

Kiplingers

Incensed at the price of a private-college education? On the face of it, you have every reason to be. The average cost of a year at a four-year private school has lately run about $36,000, compared with $21,000 a decade ago, according to the College Board. Over the same ten-year period, family incomes have mostly stagnated. Many parents wonder whether a private-school education is attainable at all, much less worth the price.
Don’t grab the pitchforks yet, folks. Although the sticker price charged by private colleges may seem more suited to the Ancien Régime than to recession-weary families, the net price — the cost after financial aid — puts the total out-of-pocket cost, on average, closer to $22,000. And if you consider only tuition and fees, the net price (in inflation-adjusted dollars) is actually a bit less than it was a decade ago.

The ‘highly qualified’ gap No Child Left Behind mandates such teachers in all U.S. schools. A new study shows that little progress has been made in meeting that requirement.

Los Angeles Times

While states and school districts hotly debate the issue of whether student test scores should be used to evaluate teachers, the nation has been virtually ignoring a more basic question: whether those teachers are even qualified in the first place. Too many of them aren’t.
The No Child Left Behind Act mandated that all students be taught by “highly qualified” teachers. And although we disagree with many elements of that 2001 federal school reform act — its rigidity, its use of the wrong measurements to assess student progress — this provision always made more sense.
Among other things, a highly qualified teacher in the secondary schools is supposed to have expertise in the subject he or she teaches, whether that means having majored in the subject in college or having a credential to teach it. Ample research has found that students learn better when their teachers have such formal expertise. Yet a new report by the Education Trust, a nonprofit organization devoted to improving the educational lot of poor and minority students, shows that the problem is widespread and that little progress has been made.

Superintendent/Student Ratios

Everyone’s talking about superintendent salary caps. The Record reports that the New Jersey Association of School Administrators filed a motion in State Superior Court claiming that just because Gov. Christie has proposed caps doesn’t mean he can enforce them right now. The association also argues that Acting Commissioner Rochelle Hendricks “broke the law” by advising our 21 Executive County Superintendents to veto any contracts above the caps.
In other litigation, the Parsippany-Troy Hills School Board filed suit in the appellate division of Superior Court regarding the Morris County Executive County Superintendent’s refusal to approve the new contract for Superintendent Le Roy Seitz, which will pay him $234,065 by the fifth year of the 5-year contract.

Make college cost more

Shirley V. Svorny

Recent decisions by the California State University Board of Trustees and the University of California regents to increase student fees have been attacked by critics who insist that higher education subsidies are critical for California’s economic growth and prosperity.
This is not true; the state’s prosperity rests on public policies that encourage economic activity, not on heavy subsidies to higher education.
Moreover, artificially low fees attract some students to higher education who simply aren’t suited to the academic rigors of a university. Ultimately, the presence of these lower-achieving students hurts those who are more academically inclined, as they end up in watered-down courses in which professors have to focus on bringing the low achievers along.

K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: Poll shows misperceptions about Wisconsin budget

Karen Herzog

Four out of 10 Wisconsin residents want state aid to elementary and secondary schools to be protected from spending cuts, but most don’t realize school aid is the biggest expense in the state budget, according to a new poll.
The Wisconsin Policy Research Institute telephone survey of 615 randomly selected Wisconsin adults last Monday through Wednesday revealed misperceptions about the state budget, which officials may need to correct as they grapple with the upcoming two-year budget, said George Lightbourn, president of the conservative think tank.
Thirty percent of those polled said they thought Medicaid insurance for lower income households was the top expense in the state budget; it actually ranks second by a large margin. Twenty-one percent picked the correct answer: aid for elementary and secondary schools.
Others who guessed the top expense incorrectly included 13% who picked transportation, 12% who picked aid to local government (shared revenue), and 10% who guessed higher education, all of which are considerably less expensive than aid to elementary and secondary schools.
The state faces a projected deficit of at least $2.2 billion in its upcoming two-year budget, assuming Governor-elect Scott Walker and lawmakers make spending cuts that have yet to happen – two more years of state employee furloughs, no pay raises, a virtual hiring freeze and belt tightening in state health programs, the Journal Sentinel reported Saturday.
Without that $1.1 billion in savings, the shortfall is projected at $3.3 billion.

Strife strains Atlanta school board

Kristina Torres and Heather Vogell


Atlanta schools Superintendent Beverly Hall’s announcement that she will step aside when her contract ends June 30 comes at a time when the district is facing uncertainty on multiple fronts.
Feuding among city school board members, in which one faction of the board has sued the other over leadership changes, has caused the system’s accrediting agency to say the board’s capacity to govern is “in serious jeopardy.”
The two sides have a court date Tuesday.
The system also faces two inquiries — one by federal prosecutors, the other by special investigators appointed by Gov. Sonny Perdue — into test cheating allegations that could bring criminal charges against school officials.
As the result of a related investigation, local officials reported more than 100 city educators to the state teacher certification body, although their cases are on hold until state investigators wrap up their work. That is expected to happen early next year.

West Bend Charter school proposal at crossroads

A publicly funded school proposed by a Baptist pastor has gained support among School Board members despite objections by the district’s administrators over the school’s use of “a standard parochial curriculum with evangelical leanings.”
The School Board is scheduled to vote Monday on whether to enter into contract negotiations with First Baptist Church Pastor Bruce Dunford over his plans to open Crossroads Academy as a charter school next school year.
The school would teach a traditional curriculum that includes more classical readings and would have a more structured discipline system than other public schools, Dunford said. The school also would support the values of a majority of the West Bend community, he said, in response to concerns that he’s heard about bullying and a lack of modesty and morality in the public schools.
He said the school would be operated separately and not on the grounds of his church, where West Bend School Board member Tim Stepanski is a deacon. Unlike most charter schools in which staff is employed by the chartering district, Crossroads would be a so-called non-instrumentality charter school – one that employs its own staff and has more independence from the School Board on its curriculum and how it runs its day-to-day operations.
“I just simply believe the taxpayers, the parents of the community, should have options available to them,” Dunford said. “There should be a quality education that conforms to the value standards, convictions, whatever you want to call it, of a large part of our community.”

Teaching for America

Melissa Westbrook

Three countries that outperform us — Singapore, South Korea, Finland — don’t let anyone teach who doesn’t come from the top third of their graduating class. And in South Korea, they refer to their teachers as ‘nation builders.’ ”
Duncan’s view is that challenging teachers to rise to new levels — by using student achievement data in calculating salaries, by increasing competition through innovation and charters — is not anti-teacher. It’s taking the profession much more seriously and elevating it to where it should be. There are 3.2 million active teachers in America today. In the next decade, half (the baby boomers) will retire. How we recruit, train, support, evaluate and compensate their successors “is going to shape public education for the next 30 years,” said Duncan. We have to get this right.
BUT he ends saying we also need…better parents. Turn off the tv, restrict the video and the phone and most important “elevate learning as the most important life skill.” It’s funny because some people might say teaching children empathy or kindness or honesty is more important but really those all relate to learning.

Tom Friedman:

Tony Wagner, the Harvard-based education expert and author of “The Global Achievement Gap,” explains it this way. There are three basic skills that students need if they want to thrive in a knowledge economy: the ability to do critical thinking and problem-solving; the ability to communicate effectively; and the ability to collaborate.
If you look at the countries leading the pack in the tests that measure these skills (like Finland and Denmark), one thing stands out: they insist that their teachers come from the top one-third of their college graduating classes. As Wagner put it, “They took teaching from an assembly-line job to a knowledge-worker’s job. They have invested massively in how they recruit, train and support teachers, to attract and retain the best.”
Duncan disputes the notion that teachers’ unions will always resist such changes. He points to the new “breakthrough” contracts in Washington, D.C., New Haven and Hillsborough County, Fla., where teachers have embraced higher performance standards in return for higher pay for the best performers.
“We have to reward excellence,” he said. “We’ve been scared in education to talk about excellence. We treated everyone like interchangeable widgets. Just throw a kid in a class and throw a teacher in a class.” This ignored the variation between teachers who were changing students’ lives, and those who were not. “If you’re doing a great job with students,” he said, “we can’t pay you enough.”

School districts evaluate merits of merit pay

They call it the War Room.
It looks like any other classroom inside Carrick High School, a sprawling structure that towers like a stone fortress over this working-class neighborhood on the city’s south side. It’s still dark out as 16 teachers and counselors – some clutching coffee or energy bars – sit in a circle, dissecting with brutal candor their students’ performance.
In addition to their classroom duties, these teachers serve as advisers to every ninth- and 10th-grader in the school, and they show up 45 minutes before school starts each day to talk about where their students need to be. No punches are pulled; no feelings are spared.
As part of the Promise Readiness Corps, these teachers are eligible for financial bonuses.
In Pittsburgh, the Corps is one element of a new plan that overhauls the way the district hires, trains, evaluates, pays and dismisses teachers. Under a new performance-pay system, incoming district teachers whose students learn, on average, at 1.3 times their grade level can earn $100,000 a year within seven years of being hired.
Raising the quality of teaching in America has been a priority of President Barack Obama’s administration, and reforms receiving the most attention right now include stronger teacher evaluation systems and financial incentives to attract, reward and retain quality educators.

Dissecting change in Milwaukee School enrollments

Alan Borsuk

Like a glacier in a warming world, Milwaukee Public Schools keeps melting bit by bit.
But this year, don’t blame the private school voucher program as the reason MPS lost another notch when it comes to attendance.
In fact, for the first time since 1997, the number of voucher students in the city is down from a year ago, although only by a small amount.
Look to charter schools not staffed by MPS teachers and to public schools in the suburbs if you want to find the growth markets for Milwaukee students getting publicly funded educations this year.
Milwaukee is one of the places in the nation where the definition of public education is getting reshaped the most. The voucher program, which allows more than 20,000 students to attend private schools, the vast majority of them religious, remains the biggest cause.

Teen Accused Of Sexual Assault At Madison’s East High School

A Madison East High School student has been arrested and charged on suspicion of sexually assaulting another student on school grounds this week.
Madison police said the 15-year-old boy was arrested on a charge of first-degree sexual assault on Thursday after a 15-year-old girl reported the incident.
Dan Nerad, superintendent of the Madison Metropolitan School District, said while these cases are rare, they happen and it forces district officials to take a step back and look how this could have been prevented. Officials sent a letter home to parents to explain the incident and the district’s next steps.
“We’re going to work real hard to deal with it, we’re going to work real hard to learn from it. We’re going to work real hard to make any necessary changes after we have a change to review what all of these facts and circumstances are,” Nerad said.
Nerad said that while there are things the district can do to prevent such incidents, he believes much more help is needed from the community. He said the fact that this type of activity has entered the school door should be a wake up call to society.

Related: Gangs & School Violence Forum Audio & Video and police calls near Madison high schools 1996-2006.

Rhode Island’s 3-tiered high school diploma system described

Jennifer Jordan, via a kind reader’s email:

State education officials appear ready to move forward with their plan to establish a three-tier high school diploma system tied to student performance on state tests, and will start drafting changes to the regulations.
At a well-attended work session Thursday, the Board of Regents for Elementary and Secondary Education discussed the details of the plan, which differs significantly from the regulations the Regents approved in 2008.
Regent Colleen Callahan expressed concerns with the proposal, saying it places too much weight on the standardized tests, which were not designed to be high-stakes or to determine what kind of diploma a student receives.
“I’m worried about tests being the determining factor, as opposed to other parts of the system,” Callahan said, a reference to grades and student portfolios or projects.