schoolinfosystem.org
Although public schools are usually the biggest item in state and local budgets, spending figures provided by public school officials and reported in the media often leave out major costs of education and thus understate what is actually spent.
To document the phenomenon, this paper reviews district budgets and state records for the nation’s five largest metro areas and the District of Columbia. It reveals that, on average, per-pupil spending in these areas is 44 percent higher than officially reported.
Real spending per pupil ranges from a low of nearly $12,000 in the Phoenix area schools to a high of nearly $27,000 in the New York metro area. The gap between real and reported per-pupil spending ranges from a low of 23 percent in the Chicago area to a high of 90 percent in the Los Angeles metro region.
To put public school spending in perspective, we compare it to estimated total expenditures in local private schools. We find that, in the areas studied, public schools are spending 93 percent more than the estimated median private school.Madison spends $15,241.30 per student, according to the 2009-2010 Citizen’s Budget.
Education Secretary Arne Duncan said last week that the Obama Administration will ramp up investigations of civil rights infractions in school districts, which might sound well and good. What it means in practice, however, is that his Office of Civil Rights (OCR) will revert to the Clinton Administration policy of equating statistical disparity with discrimination, which is troubling.
OCR oversees Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which prohibits discrimination by race, color or national origin in public schools and colleges that receive federal funding. In a speech last week, Mr. Duncan said that “in the last decade”–that’s short for the Bush years–“the Office for Civil Rights has not been as vigilant as it should have been in combating racial and gender discrimination.” He cited statistics showing that white students are more likely than their black peers to take Advanced Placement classes and less likely to be expelled from school.
Therefore, Mr. Duncan said, OCR “will collect and monitor data on equity.” He added that the department will also conduct compliance reviews “to ensure that all students have equal access to educational opportunities” and to determine “whether districts and schools are disciplining students without regard to skin color.”
Some infants headed for a diagnosis of autism, or autism spectrum disorder as it’s officially known, can be reliably identified at 14 months old based on the presence of five key behavior problems, according to an ongoing long-term study described March 11 at the International Conference on Infant Studies.
These social, communication and motor difficulties broadly align with psychiatric criteria for diagnosing autism spectrum disorder in children at around age 3, said psychologist Rebecca Landa of the Kennedy Krieger Institute in Baltimore. In her investigation, the presence of all five behaviors at 14 months predicted an eventual diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder in 15 of 16 children.
“That’s much better than clinical judgment at predicting autism,” Landa noted.
Her five predictors of autism spectrum disorders among 14-month-olds at high risk for developing this condition include a lack of response to others’ attempts to engage them in play, infrequent attempts to initiate joint activities, few types of consonants produced when trying to communicate vocally, problems in responding to vocal requests and a keen interest in repetitive acts, such as staring at a toy while twirling it
One key to the successful small high schools, almost without exception, is that they grew from the ground up. They weren’t created by some order from above. The people involved in launching the school knew what they wanted, were willing to do the hugely demanding work of making the school a reality and committed to continually working on improving what they did.
Montessori High fits that description. A charter school staffed by MPS employees, it is led by three teachers with no conventional principal. It is one of just a handful of Montessori high school programs in the U.S., and an even smaller number that combine the Montessori style of learning, with emphasis on individual development, with rigorous International Baccalaureate courses.
The environment in the school is somewhat casual, but serious. For example, 10 couches set the atmosphere for Chip Johnston’s history class, where the lively discussion on a recent morning dealt with reacting to the statement, “Liberty means responsibility.” Overall at the school, there is a strong emphasis on arts, on projects involving real-world issues, and on working with partners or in small groups.
Featured speakers at the conference include Greg Richmond, President and founding board member of the National Association of Charter School Authorizers and establisher of the Chicago Public School District’s Charter Schools Office; Ursula Wright, the Chief Operating Officer for the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools; Sarah Archibald of the Consortium for Policy Research in Education at UW-Madison and the Value-Added Research Center; and Richard Halverson, an associate professor of Educational Leadership and Policy Analysis at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Also speaking at the Conference will be:
- State Senator John Lehman (D-Racine), Chair Senate Education Committee
- State Senator Luther Olsen (R-Berlin), Ranking Minority Member, Senate Education
- State Representative Sondy Pope-Roberts (D-Middleton), Chair, Assembly Education Committee
- State Representative Brett Davis (R-Oregon), Ranking Minority Member, Assembly Education
The Conference will feature interactive sessions; hands-on examples of innovative learning in classrooms; networking; a coaching room open throughout the conference; and keynote speakers that highlight the importance of quality in and around each classroom, and the impact that quality has on the learning of students everywhere. More details are attached.
Thank you for your consideration and your help in getting word out! If you would like to attend on a press pass, please let me know and I will have one in your name at the registration area.
President Obama outlined his own education vision Saturday, one that he hopes will replace the punitive elements of the sweeping No Child Left Behind Act and give schools more flexibility in bringing students up to speed. To convey the new focus, the law will get a new name, although it has not been announced. (I am sure a few of you will have some pithy suggestions.)
The president and Ed Secretary Arne Duncan have clearly heard the cries from the classrooms where teachers complained that they were teaching to the tests in a futile attempt to meet impossible and overly rigid standards. Details are few right now, but the president did outline a new direction that is supposed to be kinder, fairer and more realistic.
I am not sure that teachers will agree that the plan is more realistic and fairer as it still seems to have high expectations that schools will make strides with all students.President Barack Obama unveiled his plan for a sweeping overhaul of the nation’s school system Saturday, proposing changes he says would shift emphasis from teaching to the test to a more nuanced assessment of judging school and student progress.
On Monday, Obama will submit his blueprint for reauthorizing the No Child Left Behind law to Congress, and he’s given lawmakers a powerful incentive to take up the bill this year–his budget proposal includes a $1 billion bonus should new legislation land on his desk this year.
Obama’s proposal would toss out the core of the Bush-era law, which calls for across-the-board proficiency from all students in reading and math by 2014, and instead emphasize revamped assessment tools that link teacher evaluations to student progress, and a goal of having students career and college ready upon graduation.
To encourage high school students to tackle tougher academic classes, many schools assign bonus points to grades in Advanced Placement or honors courses. But schools’ policies on whether students should receive a grade-point boost and by how much are all over the map.
My local public school district, for instance, used to add an extra third of a grade-point to students’ AP course grades while the private high school on the other side of town would bump up students’ grades by a full letter grade.
Since students from both schools would be applying to many of the same colleges, and essentially competing with one another, it didn’t seem fair to me that the private school kids should get such a generous grade boost.
That’s why I was heartened to come across a new study by a Harvard University researcher that takes a more systematic look at the practice of high school grade-weighting.
He found that for every increasing level of rigor in high school science, students’ college course grades rose by an average of 2.4 points on a 100- point scale, where an A is 95 points and a B is worth 85 points and so on. In other words, the college grade for the former AP chemistry student would be expected to be 2.4 points higher than that of the typical student who took honors chemistry in high school. And the honors students’ college grade, in turn, would be 2.4 points higher than that of the student who took regular chemistry.
Translating those numbers, and some other calculations, to a typical high school 1-to-4-point grade scale, Sadler estimates that students taking an honors science class in high school ought to get an extra half a point for their trouble, and that a B in an AP science course ought to be counted as an A for the purpose of high school grade-point averages.
In Saturday’s address, Obama called for Congress to reauthorize the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, which in 2002 became known as the No Child Left Behind Act.
With a goal of having every child read at grade level by 2014, No Child Left Behind has been criticized by current Education Secretary Arne Duncan as “utopian” and as failing to properly reward schools for progress. One change under his proposed legislative blueprint, Obama said, would be that schools that perform well would be rewarded, while underperforming schools would face tough consequences.
A focus on education reform may be a politically astute move for the president and fellow Democrats in Congress, some of whom face difficult elections in the fall. Education reform, unlike financial regulatory reform or new environmental laws, is a kitchen-table issue that many Americans support.
“The announcement’s timing suggests Obama is looking beyond the health care proposal that still lingers in Congress, has delayed the president’s international trip next week, and threatens his party’s electoral prospects in November,” writes the Associated Press.
In his 2010 State of the Schools address, Houston Independent School District Superintendent Terry Grier commented on the district’s relationship with the public charter schools we founded more than a decade ago, YES Prep and KIPP. Grier referred to the relationship as a partnership as well as a competition, stating that HISD is ready to “get busy” in order to ensure parents are not leaving failing HISD schools to attend YES Prep, KIPP or other high-performing charters in Houston. We could not be more pleased to hear these comments from Grier. In fact, we’ve been hoping for many years that our existence would indeed result in this type of relationship with HISD and a superintendent ready to “get busy” and compete. The recent changes that Grier and the board have implemented regarding a longer calendar and focus on human capital show that they are committed to this idea.
YES Prep and KIPP were both born inside HISD in the mid-1990s when we were both classroom teachers in underserved communities in search of a better way to educate our students. We had a number of theories we wanted to test about what it would take to educate our students in a way that would allow them to compete with students from our city’s very best schools. What we learned in those early years was that for us to have the freedom to be experimental, nimble and fleet-footed, for us to be able to make sometimes unorthodox decisions in the best interest of our students, we would need to leave HISD’s political bureaucracy to operate as independent public charter schools.
Faced with a deficit and troubled school system, Kansas City’s Board of Education voted to close 28 out of 61 schools. Barbara Shelley, columnist for the Kansas City Star, talks with Kai Ryssdal about what led to the decision and its impact.
TEXT OF INTERVIEW
KAI RYSSDAL: The board of education in Kansas City, Mo., took a vote last night on how to save their city’s long-troubled school system. It was close. But by the end of the evening a plan to shut down 28 of the district’s 61 schools and lay off 700 people did pass. The vote was 5-4. The district says the plan should cut $50 million from the budget.
Barbara Shelley is a columnist for the Kansas City Star. She’s been writing about schools there and the city itself for quite a while. Barb, it’s good to have you with us.
BARBARA SHELLEY: Good to be here.
RYSSDAL: What’s the reaction in town today after this announcement?
SHELLEY: Well, I think you have two different reactions. You have the reaction from people that are going to be directly affected. And that’s the families and the teachers and the students. And there’s a lot of anguish in that group. You have another reaction from I would say business types and people that see this as a hope that a smaller, more streamlined school district will mean better performance and a better academic potential for the district.
Of President Obama’s three big takeovers–cap ‘n trade, health care, and higher ed–higher ed has garnered the least public attention. That may change now that the administration is attempting to impose its wishes by legislative trickery.
The health care bill that the Democrats hope to pass by “reconciliation” to avoid the normal Senatorial voting procedure is now being amended to include the administration’s Big Grab on federal student loans. If this works, we will have one bill in which the federal government not only takes primary control of American health care but also simultaneously takes practical control of American higher education.
Some background: last September, The Wall Street Journal (“The Quietest Trillion”) gave an early heads-up to the administration’s then-plan to move the Department of Education from a 20 percent to an 80 percent share of the student loan market. A bill passed the House that month that would have eliminated private lenders from the federally guaranteed student loan market by July 1, 2010. It came with a promise that taxpayers would save some $87 billion from substituting a government-run service for the rough-and-tumble of private lenders. In October, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan sent a letter to colleges and universities across the country advising them to get their institutions ready for a 2010 implementation of the new rules, dubbed “Direct Lending.” College officials, some House Democrats, and a few Republicans expressed their uneasiness at the new plan.
Fifteen special interest groups including casino operators, drug firms and unions for teachers and public employees spent more than $1 billion during the last decade trying to influence California public officials and voters, the state’s watchdog agency reported today.
The money went for lobbying, campaign contributions to state politicians and ballot measure campaigns to get voters to advance the groups’ agendas, according to the report by the state Fair Political Practices Commission.
“This tsunami of special interest spending drowns out the voices of average voters, and intimidates political opponents and elected officials alike,” said Commission Chairman Ross Johnson, a former state senator.The Wisconsin Education Association Council also tops the Badger State’s lobbying expenditures.
If you are a parent in cities such as Bellevue, Issaquah or Seattle, your kids are being short-changed–being provided an inferior math education that could cripple their future aspirations–and you need to act. This blog will tell the story of an unresponsive and wrong-headed educational bureaucracies that are dead set on continuing in the current direction. And it will tell the story of how this disaster can be turned around. Parent or not, your future depends on dealing with the problem.
Let me provide you with a view from the battlefield of the math “wars”, including some information that is generally not known publicly, or has been actively suppressed by the educational establishment. Of lawsuits and locking parents out of decision making.
I know that some of you would rather that I only talk about weather, but the future of my discipline and of our highly technological society depends on mathematically literate students. Increasingly, I am finding bright students unable to complete a major in atmospheric sciences. All their lives they wanted to be a meteorologist and problems with math had ended their dreams. Most of them had excellent math grades in high school. I have talked in the past about problems with reform or discovery math; an unproven ideology-based instructional approach in vogue among the educational establishment. An approach based on student’s “discovering” math principles, group learning, heavy use of calculators, lack of practice and skills building, and heavy use of superficial “spiraling” of subject matter. As I have noted before in this blog, there is no competent research that shows that this approach works and plenty to show that it doesn’t. But I have covered much of this already in earlier blogs.Related: Math Forum audio / video.
Starting as early as this fall, every Hillsborough County schoolteacher will be subject to ratings by his or her peers.
The School Board on Tuesday unanimously approved the move as part of a reform effort under way to improve schools through the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
The board’s vote dedicates $360,000 to an online training course for the peer evaluation system that, by 2013, will help determine whether teachers qualify for tenure or merit pay.
Within a month or so, teachers will be able to see how the system works in real life. The optional six-hour course by national teacher evaluation expert Charlotte Danielson includes an overview and video clips from actual classrooms where similar evaluations have been used.
Shopping blues: Top tax 12%. Chicago’s 10.25% highest big-city rate. More Internet tax fights loom.
While President Obama’s push to raise federal income taxes for the wealthy gets lots of attention, the continuing upward creep in the sales tax rates imposed by state and local governments has gotten less notice.
But Vertex Inc., which calculates sales tax for Internet sellers, reports that the average general sales tax rate nationwide reached 8.629% at the end of 2009, the highest since the Berwyn, Pa., company started tracking data in 1982. That was up a nickel on a taxable $100 purchase from a year earlier and up nearly 40 cents for the decade. The highest sales tax rate in the country now stands at 12%.
During 2009 seven states and the District of Columbia raised sales tax rates, with one jurisdiction–North Carolina–actually doing it twice. Only four states hiked rates in 2008 and only one in 2007. Given state budget problems, the 2009 state sales tax increases aren’t surprising. States have also been raising income tax rates on the wealthy and on corporations and boosting excise taxes on alcohol and tobacco. With states now facing record budget shortfalls, more tax increases seem likely.There has been discussion regarding the shift of school additional school spending to the sales tax.
Related: Federal Withholding Tax Revenues.
Architects and designers pick the most attractive schools.
Slideshow
National Governors Association Center for Best Practices and Council of Chief State School Officers:
As part of the Common Core State Standards Initiative (CCSSI), the draft K-12 standards are now available for public comment. These draft standards, developed in collaboration with teachers, school administrators, and experts, seek to provide a clear and consistent framework to prepare our children for college and the workforce.
Governors and state commissioners of education from 48 states, 2 territories and the District of Columbia committed to developing a common core of state standards in English-language arts and mathematics for grades K-12. This is a state-led effort coordinated by the National Governors Association Center for Best Practices (NGA Center) and the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO).
The NGA Center and CCSSO have received feedback from national organizations representing, but not limited to teachers, postsecondary education (including community colleges), civil rights groups, English language learners, and students with disabilities. These standards are now open for public comment until Friday, April 2.
The nation’s governors and state school chiefs will propose standards Wednesday for what students should learn in English and math, from kindergarten through high school, a crucial step in President Obama’s campaign to raise academic standards across the country.
The blueprint aims to replace a hodgepodge of state benchmarks with common standards. The president has aggressively encouraged the states’ action as a key to improving troubled schools and keeping the nation competitive. Instituting new academic standards would reverberate in textbooks, curriculum, teacher training and student learning from coast to coast.
Fourth-graders, for example, would be expected to explain major differences between poetry and prose and to refer to such elements as stanza, verse, rhythm and meter when writing or speaking about a poem. Eighth-graders would be expected to use linear equations to solve for an unknown and explain a proof of the Pythagorean theorem on properties of a right triangle — cornerstones of algebra and geometry.
“It’s hugely significant,” said Michael Cohen, a former Clinton education official, who is president of the standards advocacy organization Achieve. “The states recognize they ought to have very consistent expectations for what their students should learn.”
Rafaela Espinal held her first poolside chat last summer, offering cheese, crackers and apple cider to draw people to hear her pitch.
She keeps a handful of brochures in her purse, and also gives a few to her daughter before she leaves for school each morning. She painted signs on the windows of her Chrysler minivan, turning it into a mobile advertisement.
It is all an effort to build awareness for her product, which is not new, but is in need of an image makeover: a public school in Harlem.
As charter schools have grown around the country, both in number and in popularity, public school principals like Ms. Espinal are being forced to compete for bodies or risk having their schools closed. So among their many challenges, some of these principals, who had never given much thought to attracting students, have been spending considerable time toiling over ways to market their schools. They are revamping school logos, encouraging students and teachers to wear T-shirts emblazoned with the new designs. They emphasize their after-school programs as an alternative to the extended days at many charter schools. A few have worked with professional marketing firms to create sophisticated Web sites and blogs.
A small but growing number of school districts across the country are moving to a four-day week, in a shift they hope will help close gaping budget holes and stave off teacher layoffs, but that critics fear could hurt students’ education.
State legislators and local school boards are giving administrators greater flexibility to set their academic calendars, making the four-day slate possible. But education experts say little research exists to show the impact of shortened weeks on learning. The missed hours are typically made up by lengthening remaining school days.
Of the nearly 15,000-plus districts nationwide, more than 100 in at least 17 states currently use the four-day system, according to data culled from the Education Commission of the States. Dozens of other districts are contemplating making the change in the next year–a shift that is apt to create new challenges for working parents as well as thousands of school employees.
The heightened interest in an abbreviated school week comes as the Obama administration prepares to plow $4.35 billion in extra federal funds into underperforming schools. The administration has been advocating for a stronger school system in a bid to make the U.S. more academically competitive on a global basis.
Carl Dorvil started Group Excellence in his SMU dorm room. The son of Haitian immigrants, Carl never took his education for granted. He was the first African American president of his high school and balanced four jobs while completing a triple major and starting a business as an undergraduate.
Some good advice from the founder of Macaroni Grill led Carl to pursue an MBA. But when his professor saw the revenue projection for Group Excellence, he suggested a semester off to work on the business.
Carl finished his MBA in 2008, but the break allowed him to build a great business. Today Group Excellence (GE) employs 500 people in four cities and serves over 10,000 Texas students. GE provides tutoring services to struggling low-income students. Dorvil says, “The knowledge that I gained from business school propelled GE into becoming one of the most respected tutoring companies under the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act.”
In one Dallas middle school, math scores shot up from 12% to more than 60% passing the state test only 8 months after activating the GE program.
For football fans, the indelible image of last month’s Super Bowl might have been quarterback Drew Brees’ fourth-quarter touchdown pass that put the New Orleans Saints ahead for good. But for audiologists around the nation, the highlight came after the game – when Brees, in a shower of confetti, held aloft his 1-year-old son, Baylen.
The boy was wearing what looked like the headphones worn by his father’s coaches on the sideline, but they were actually low-cost, low-tech earmuffs meant to protect his hearing from the stadium’s roar.
Specialists say such safeguards are critical for young ears in a deafening world. Hearing loss from exposure to loud noises is cumulative and irreversible; if such exposure starts in infancy, children can live “half their lives with hearing loss,” said Brian Fligor, director of diagnostic audiology at Children’s Hospital Boston.
Dan has been working hard snooping around in the RCW. It’s pretty amazing what you can find in there if you look.
Here’s what he found: RCW 28A.320.015School boards of directors — Powers — Notice of adoption of policy.
(1) The board of directors of each school district may exercise the following:
(a) The broad discretionary power to determine and adopt written policies not in conflict with other law that provide for the development and implementation of programs, activities, services, or practices that the board determines will:
(i) Promote the education and daily physical activity of kindergarten through twelfth grade students in the public schools; or
(ii) Promote the effective, efficient, or safe management and operation of the school district;
(b) Such powers as are expressly authorized by law; and
(c) Such powers as are necessarily or fairly implied in the powers expressly authorized by law.
(2) Before adopting a policy under subsection (1)(a) of this section, the school district board of directors shall comply with the notice requirements of the open public meetings act, chapter 42.30 RCW, and shall in addition include in that notice a statement that sets forth or reasonably describes the proposed policy. The board of directors shall provide a reasonable opportunity for public written and oral comment and consideration of the comment by the board of directors.
The state’s largest teachers union ripped into a proposed overhaul of teacher contracts Monday, saying the bill represented an effort to score political points instead of serious education reform.
“It attacks the very people who work in our school system each and every day as opposed to giving them the resources that are needed to succeed,” said Andy Ford, president of the Florida Education Association, at a news conference called to slam the proposal from Sen. John Thrasher, R-St. Augustine.
Thrasher’s bill, filed last week, would base half of a teacher’s salary on student performance while extending to five years the period during which a new teacher can be fired at the end of each school year without cause.
It would also dismantle teacher tenure in the three counties, including Duval County, where it exists as well as other employment protections in other parts of the state. In most parts of the state, teachers can obtain a “professional service contract” after three or four years and can only be fired for cause.
SINCE “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” was published, in 1865, scholars have noted how its characters are based on real people in the life of its author, Charles Dodgson, who wrote under the name Lewis Carroll. Alice is Alice Pleasance Liddell, the daughter of an Oxford dean; the Lory and Eaglet are Alice’s sisters Lorina and Edith; Dodgson himself, a stutterer, is the Dodo (“Do-Do-Dodgson”).
But Alice’s adventures with the Caterpillar, the Mad Hatter, the Cheshire Cat and so on have often been assumed to be based purely on wild imagination. Just fantastical tales for children — and, as such, ideal material for the fanciful movie director Tim Burton, whose “Alice in Wonderland” opened on Friday.
Yet Dodgson most likely had real models for the strange happenings in Wonderland, too. He was a tutor in mathematics at Christ Church, Oxford, and Alice’s search for a beautiful garden can be neatly interpreted as a mishmash of satire directed at the advances taking place in Dodgson’s field.
In the mid-19th century, mathematics was rapidly blossoming into what it is today: a finely honed language for describing the conceptual relations between things. Dodgson found the radical new math illogical and lacking in intellectual rigor. In “Alice,” he attacked some of the new ideas as nonsense — using a technique familiar from Euclid’s proofs, reductio ad absurdum, where the validity of an idea is tested by taking its premises to their logical extreme.
The state of science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) education in the United States has seen some unflattering appraisals in recent years, and deservedly so. In early February, the House of Representatives heard testimony on undergraduate and graduate education. The message from the panel, which included experts from academia, STEM-based industries, and the National Science Foundation (NSF), was clear: the problems in STEM education are well-known, and it’s time to take action.
Both the hearing’s charter and its chair, Daniel Lipinski (D-IL), pointed out the obvious problem in higher education: students start out interested, but the STEM programs are driving them away. As the National Academies described in its 2005 report Rising Above the Gathering Storm, successful STEM education is not just an academic pursuit–it’s a necessity for competing in the knowledge-based economy that the United States had a key role in creating.
The potential for action comes thanks to the fact that the America COMPETES Act of 2007 is up for reauthorization. Its initial focus was on STEM education at the K-12 levels, but efforts at the undergraduate and graduate levels are needed to retain students to fill the jobs left vacant as baby boomers retire.
I read this comment on Crosscut and I just have to share it.
Here is a link to the original article. It was about the (lack of a) Republican party alternative to the state budget.
The comment came from Stuka at 8:44pm on Thursday, March 4. I won’t quote all of it, but I absolutely want to share this part:The fundamental problem with the public sector is not lack of taxes but lack of performance monitoring and improvement over time. Witness the public school system for evidence of the failure to monitor the quality of teachers, of teaching performance, of student performance, and of school performance. Same with the criminal-justice system: who is monitoring the quality of inmates produced by our prisons? The quality of justice by our judges and prosecutors? and the quality of policing by our police departments?
Unfortunately, we don’t pay for outcomes, but for staffing levels at fixed salary levels. A secondary effect of good government seems to be sometimes adequate government. Maybe we ought to reward for performance instead. That will happen only when compensation is tied to performance and not taking up space in a bureaucracy until the bureaucrat can collect a pension for enduring the bureaucracy, a feat that may be quite difficult and challenging, but in and of itself, produces no output that citizens value.
I highly value the services that government intends to provide (unlike many Republicans), but am unwilling to pay (unlike many Democrats) for monopolistic and ineffective government bureaucracies that have no handle on how to be effective and efficient in what they’re doing. This leaves me in a quandry since the demand for services is unceasing and the inertia of ineffective government is entrenched. Mostly I try to vote for anything that smacks of actual reward for performance, and vote against anything that looks like hoggish behavior (as in pigs get fat, hogs get slaughtered).
ON A WINTER DAY five years ago, Doug Lemov realized he had a problem. After a successful career as a teacher, a principal and a charter-school founder, he was working as a consultant, hired by troubled schools eager — desperate, in some cases — for Lemov to tell them what to do to get better. There was no shortage of prescriptions at the time for how to cure the poor performance that plagued so many American schools. Proponents of No Child Left Behind saw standardized testing as a solution. President Bush also championed a billion-dollar program to encourage schools to adopt reading curriculums with an emphasis on phonics. Others argued for smaller classes or more parental involvement or more state financing.
Lemov himself pushed for data-driven programs that would diagnose individual students’ strengths and weaknesses. But as he went from school to school that winter, he was getting the sinking feeling that there was something deeper he wasn’t reaching. On that particular day, he made a depressing visit to a school in Syracuse, N.Y., that was like so many he’d seen before: “a dispiriting exercise in good people failing,” as he described it to me recently. Sometimes Lemov could diagnose problems as soon as he walked in the door. But not here. Student test scores had dipped so low that administrators worried the state might close down the school. But the teachers seemed to care about their students. They sat down with them on the floor to read and picked activities that should have engaged them. The classes were small. The school had rigorous academic standards and state-of-the-art curriculums and used a software program to analyze test results for each student, pinpointing which skills she still needed to work on.
But when it came to actual teaching, the daily task of getting students to learn, the school floundered. Students disobeyed teachers’ instructions, and class discussions veered away from the lesson plans. In one class Lemov observed, the teacher spent several minutes debating a student about why he didn’t have a pencil. Another divided her students into two groups to practice multiplication together, only to watch them turn to the more interesting work of chatting. A single quiet student soldiered on with the problems. As Lemov drove from Syracuse back to his home in Albany, he tried to figure out what he could do to help. He knew how to advise schools to adopt a better curriculum or raise standards or develop better communication channels between teachers and principals. But he realized that he had no clue how to advise schools about their main event: how to teach.
Zina McGowan-Thomas, the energetic public information officer for St. Mary’s County public schools, sends me many announcements and news releases that I am tempted to delete, as I do most e-mails from local school districts. I know this is a bad idea, because sometimes you will find, in the smallest bulletin, something astonishing, like such as the e-mail she sent me a few weeks ago about the Chesapeake Public Charter School.
She told me and her long list of contacts that the school was about to have an open house. Ho-hum. All schools have open houses. Wait a minute: McGowan-Thomas works for a public school district with 27 schools and 17,000 students. Her job is to spread information about them, not a charter school. To most public school employees in the United States, charter schools are the enemy. Finding McGowan-Thomas promoting a charter school event is like seeing your local post office displaying a FedEx poster.
Charter schools are independent public schools that use tax dollars but do not have to follow a lot of school district rules. They can have different hours, different textbooks, different teaching methods and whatever else appeals to the teachers and parents who have gotten permission to set them up.
Teachers call for engaging curriculum, supportive leadership, clear standards common across states in survey by Scholastic Inc. and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
Scholastic Inc. and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation today released Primary Sources: America’s Teachers on America’s Schools, a landmark report presenting the results of a national survey of more than 40,000 public school teachers in grades pre-K to 12. The survey reveals that, while teachers have high expectations for their students, they overwhelmingly agree that too many students are leaving unprepared for success beyond high school. Primary Sources reveals teachers’ thoughtful, nuanced views on issues at the heart of education reform – from performance pay and standardized tests to academic standards and teacher evaluation. Teacher responses reveal five powerful solutions to raise student achievement.
“Teachers are a critical part of preparing our children for the future, and their voices are an essential addition to the national debate on education,” said Margery Mayer, Executive Vice President and President, Scholastic Education. “At Scholastic, we work daily with teachers and we know that they have powerful ideas on how best to tackle the challenges facing our schools. Since teachers are the frontline of delivering education in the classroom, the reform movement will not succeed without their active support. Primary Sources is a step in ensuring that teachers’ voices are a part of this important conversation.”Jay Matthews has more.
Steven Greenhouse & Sam Dillon:
A Rhode Island school board’s decision to fire the entire faculty of a poorly performing school, and President Obama’s endorsement of the action, has stirred a storm of reaction nationwide, with teachers condemning it as an insult and conservatives hailing it as a watershed moment of school accountability.
The decision by school authorities in Central Falls to fire the 93 teachers and staff members has assumed special significance because hundreds of other school districts across the nation could face similarly hard choices in coming weeks, as a $3.5 billion federal school turnaround program kicks into gear.
While there is fierce disagreement over whether the firings were good or bad, there is widespread agreement that the decision would have lasting ripples on the nation’s education debate — especially because Mr. Obama seized on the move to show his eagerness to take bold action to improve failing schools filled with poor students.
“This is the first example of tough love under the Obama regime, and that’s what makes it significant,” said Michael J. Petrilli, a vice president at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute in Washington, an educational research and advocacy organization.
Los Angeles schools did not undergo the transformation we had expected from the Public School Choice initiative, which in its first year opened more than 30 new or underperforming public schools to outside management. Top-notch charter operators applied for relatively few schools and then were removed from the running at the last minute. The school board once again mired itself in political maneuvers instead of putting students first.
What transformation there was came, more surprisingly, from the teachers. They agreed to allow and create more pilot schools, which are similar to charter schools but employ district personnel. They formed partnerships and, with the help of their union, United Teachers Los Angeles, drew up their own, often strong applications for revamping schools. It would be wrong to underestimate the effort and skills needed to pull this off. The time frame was short and the list of requirements long. Unlike charter operators, which submit such applications as a matter of course, the teachers had no particular background for this work. They met with parents who have long fumed that the schools discourage their participation. They listened. They responded.
This is a tremendous step in a school district where, too often, teachers and their union have not been the agents of change but impediments to it. In fact, had the process worked as it was supposed to, the reform initiative would have served as a much stronger application for federal Race to the Top funds than anything the Legislature came up with.
President Barack Obama’s budget will lead to deficits averaging nearly $1 trillion over the next decade, the CBO estimated Friday.
The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) said President Barack Obama’s budget would lead to annual deficits averaging nearly $1 trillion for the next decade.
The estimates are for larger deficits than the budget shortfalls expected by the White House.
Annual deficits under Obama’s budget plan would be about $976 billion from 2011 through 2020, according to a CBO analysis of Obama’s plan released Friday.Madison school ‘budget gap’ really a tax gap
Try “tax gap” or “revenue problem.” These are terms that Superintendent Dan Nerad — who is slated to offer his budget recommendations to the School Board on March 8 — and other school district players are starting to use to describe the financial troubles the district is facing.
What’s commonly been defined as the district’s budget gap in the past — the difference between the cost to continue existing programs and salaries and what the district is allowed to tax under state revenue caps — is actually $1.2 million. That’s the amount the district would still have to cut if the board were willing to tax to the maximum amount allowed under the state revenue limits. (And in past years, Madison and almost every other district in the state have taxed to the limit.) But if you add in the drop in revenue from the state — about $17 million for the 2010-2011 budget — the gap grows to $18.2 million.
It’s fair to ask then, what makes up the other $11.6 million that the administration calls the $29.8 million 2010-2011 budget gap? In a rather unorthodox manner, Nerad and company are including two other figures: $4 million in levying authority the district was granted through the 2008 referendum and $7.6 million in levying authority within the revenue limit formula.
Confused? You’re not alone. It’s got many folks scratching their heads. But the bottom line is this: Although the district has the authority to raise property taxes up to $312 on an average $250,000 home, it’s unlikely the board would want to reap that amount of revenue ($11.6 million) from increased taxes. Large property tax hikes — never popular — are particularly painful in the current economy.The Madison School District has yet to release consistent total spending numbers for the current 2009/2010 budget or a total budget number for 2010-2011. Continuing to look at and emphasize in terms of public relations, only one part of the puzzle: property taxes seems ill advised.
The Madison School District Administration has posted 2010-2011 “Budget Gap” notes and links here, largely related to the property tax, again. only one part of the picture. For reference, here’s a link to the now defunct 2007-2008 Citizen’s Budget.
Doug Erickson has more:Madison school administrators laid out a grim list of possible cuts big and small Friday that School Board members can use as a starting point to solve a nearly $30 million hole in next year’s budget.
The options range from the politically painless — restructuring debt, cutting postage costs — to the always explosive teacher layoffs and school closings.
But the school-closing option, which would close Lake View, Lindbergh and Mendota elementary schools on the city’s North Side as part of a consolidation plan, already appears to be a nonstarter. A majority of board members said they won’t go there.
“It’s dead in the water for me,” said Lucy Mathiak, board vice president.
President Arlene Silveira said the option is not on the table for her, either. Ditto for board members Marj Passman and Maya Cole, who said she immediately crossed out the option with a red pen.
Board members could decide to raise taxes enough to cover almost all of the $30 million, or they could opt to not raise taxes at all and cut $30 million. Neither option is considered palatable to board members or most residents, so some combination of the two is expected.
Has the time come for parents to pull the plug on mobile media?
A recent study completed by the Kaiser Family Foundation brought little in the way of surprises for those who work with children. But just to set the record straight, the foundation found that daily media use among children and teens is up dramatically even when compared to just five years ago.
With mobile devices providing nonstop internet availability, it is easy to see that entertainment media has never been more accessible than it is right now. The results of the Kaiser survey reveals that children, particularly minority youth, are taking advantage of that access.
But for parents and educators, the key question should not be simply how much time is actually spent with media. Instead, the issue should center upon what effect such consumption has on the mental, emotional and academic development of our youngsters.
More than a dozen states have formed an alliance to battle dismal college completion rates and figure out how to get more students to follow through and earn their diplomas.
Stan Jones, Indiana’s former commissioner for higher education, is leading the effort with about $12 million in startup money from several national nonprofits including the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
About one in every two Americans who start college never finish, said Jones, who founded Complete College America, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit, last year.
The U.S. has focused on access to higher education for the past several decades, and states need to turn their focus toward how many students actually graduate after they get in, even if it means using a funding structure that is based on degree completion instead of attendance, Jones said Tuesday.
A national survey of more than 40,000 public school teachers suggests that while higher salaries are far more likely than performance pay to help keep top talent in the classroom, supportive leadership trumps financial incentives.
The survey, funded by a philanthropy active in education reform, also shows that teachers have mixed feelings about proposals for new academic standards: Slightly more than half think that establishing common standards across all states would have a strong or very strong impact on student achievement, but two-thirds believe the rigor of standards in their own state is “about right.”
The survey, to be released Wednesday, was sponsored by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in collaboration with the publisher Scholastic Inc. Harris Interactive canvassed the teachers via telephone and online questionnaires from March 2009 to June 2009, as the Obama administration was developing strategies to promote higher standards and more sophisticated use of test data to improve achievement and reward effective teachers.
I spent part of the last two weekends reading Diane Ravitch’s new book, The Death and Life of the Great American School System. It’s part polemic and part confessional.
Ravitch, once an ardent supporter of charter schools, accountability and other market-based reforms, has done a dramatic, highly public 180-degree turn. She now says these approaches will destroy public education if allowed to continue unfettered.
A former federal education official (under Bush I and Clinton) and an influential writer and thinker on education, Ravitch’s change of heart is attracting national notice, and with good reason.
Her book, while exhibiting some of the new convert’s zeal and bombast, contains thought-provoking stuff. While I don’t agree with some of her conclusions, and though she paints some people as villains who don’t deserve the abuse, she also makes some compelling arguments that those of us pushing some of the reforms she now abhors would be wise to ponder.
I visited my college-freshman son last week, and over pizza we talked about drinking. Part of pledging a fraternity means being the sober designated driver, I learned, and I was relieved that the the idea had become ingrained in college culture. Kids get it that driving while drinking is dangerous, right? Not exactly, he corrected. What they get is that a single D.U.I. means expulsion, and that’s a concept students respect.
So schools have the tools to stop students from drinking altogether, at least those who are under-age and breaking the law, I suggested. Just throw the book at anyone who gets caught?
He didn’t think that sounded like a good idea.
As a teacher for 20 years, I can tell parents that with their support children can flourish anywhere
The agony of waiting is over. Yesterday was national offer day, when parents learnt if their children had got into their favoured secondary schools. Unfortunately, as many as 100,000 children and their families have been bitterly disappointed.
As a teacher who has taught at various comprehensives for 20 years, I know that means a lot of tears and pain. I have seen parents who hit the bottle and come raging on to the school premises, demanding that the school takes their child; parents who do nothing but pester the school secretaries on the phone or by email; and parents who have just given up in despair, despite the fact that they have good grounds to appeal.
The main things parents should remember is not to descend into a great panic, and to review their situation dispassionately. What many don’t grasp is that if they fail to meet the admissions criteria of a school, children won’t get in, no matter how wonderful. The government has a strict admissions code that means schools have little room for manoeuvre: they can no longer just pick pupils they like the look of.
The Obama administration will inform most states on Thursday that they didn’t make the grade to receive billions of dollars in education funding.
Forty states, plus the District of Columbia, submitted applications in January to compete in the $4.35 billion Race to the Top program, which President Barack Obama describes as central to his push to improve local education standards.
The idea is to reward states that show the greatest willingness to push innovation through tough testing standards, data collection, teacher training and plans to overhaul failing schools.
The Department of Education turned to a panel of outside judges to help pick finalists and winners according to an elaborate scoring system, and on Thursday, Education Secretary Arne Duncan will announce finalists for the first of two rounds of funding. Administration officials declined to comment, but people familiar with the deliberations said as few as five states could actually qualify when the first round of winners is announced in April.
Knewton, an online test prep company that uses adaptive learning to boost scores on standardized tests, announced today the launch of its new SAT prep course. The company already provides prep courses for the GMAT and LSAT, and now hopes to tap the market of high-pressure parents and overachieving high school students.
The SAT prep course will include live instructors, educational videos and real-time feedback on students’ performance in specific SAT concepts. Overbearing parents can also track their children’s progress with a set of tools designed for them. The course costs $490, (there’s a $290 intro offer).
The courses use adaptive learning technology–a method that serves up questions and resources according to students’ needs based on their past performance. The concept is taken from adaptive learning tests, which serve questions that get harder or easier, depending on a student’s answers. In fact, Knewton’s two chief test designers, Len Swanson and Robert McKinley, helped design those tests: Swanson wrote the scoring algorithms for the adaptive learning tests used by the Educational Testing Service (ETS), which administers the SAT, GRE, and AP tests, and McKinley wrote the algorithms for the ACT.
A startling ebb tide has been building in recent days across the Milwaukee Public Schools system, as principals and school councils make plans for next year.
Schools losing two teachers. Six teachers. A dozen teachers. More cuts in music, gym and art teachers, as well as librarians. Class sizes increasing – some principals say they are facing 25 or 30 in first-grade classes, with no aides for the teachers. High school classes that could reach 50 or more in some high schools. (“That’s not a classroom, that’s a lecture hall,” one principal said.)
Here’s one important part of that tide: New Leaders for New Schools will not launch a new class this summer to be trained as principals in MPS.
New Leaders is one of the hot acts in American education. Like Teach for America, the New Teacher Project and a few similar efforts, it is a hard-driving effort to bring talent into administrative and teaching positions in urban schools across the country.
Across the nation, districts are only enduring the first phase of what is likely a several-year stretch of tough budgets. Why? First, property taxes account for so much of school spending, residential real estate prices are only now bottoming, commercial properties will be falling into 2011, and states adjust valuation on a rolling basis. This means the impact of the real estate bubble likely won’t fully play out until 2014 or so. Second, thus far, districts have been cushioned by more than $100 billion in stimulus funds. Third, going forward, K-12 is going to be competing with demands for Medicaid, transportation, public safety, and higher education–all of which have been squeezed and will be hungry for fresh dollars when the economy recovers. And, fourth, massively underfunded state and local pension plans will require states to redirect dollars from operations. All of this means that the funding “cliff” looming in 2010 to 2011 is steeper and likely to be with us longer than most district leaders have publicly acknowledged.
Early responses to this situation have been inadequate, to put it mildly. Districts first took out the scalpel and turned up thermostats, delayed textbook purchases, and reduced maintenance. Now they’re boosting class sizes, raising fees, and zeroing out support staff and freshmen athletics. It’s going to take a lot more for districts to thrive in their new fiscal reality. It would behoove them to take a page from the playbook of new Kansas City Superintendent John Covington.
‘Who do you think made the first stone spear?” asks Temple Grandin. “That wasn’t the yakkity yaks sitting around the campfire. It was some Asperger sitting in the back of a cave figuring out how to chip rocks into spearheads. Without some autistic traits you wouldn’t even have a recording device to record this conversation on.”
As many as one in 110 American children are affected by autism spectrum disorders, according to the Centers for Disease Control. Boys are four times more likely to be diagnosed than girls. But what causes this developmental disorder, characterized by severe social disconnection and communication impairment, remains a mystery.
Nevertheless, with aggressive early intervention and tremendous discipline many people with autism can lead productive, even remarkable, lives. And Ms. Grandin–doctor of animal science, ground-breaking cattle expert, easily the most famous autistic woman in the world–is one of them.
Earlier this month, HBO released a film about her to critical acclaim. Claire Danes captures her with such precision that Ms. Grandin tells me watching the movie feels like “a weird time machine” to the 1960s and ’70s and that it shows “exactly how my mind works.”
When Rosemarie Wilson moved her family to a wealthy suburb of Raleigh a couple of years ago, the biggest attraction was the prestige of the local public schools. Then she started talking to neighbors.
Don’t believe the hype, they warned. Many were considering private schools. All pointed to an unusual desegregation policy, begun in 2000, in which some children from wealthy neighborhoods were bused to schools in poorer areas, and vice versa, to create economically diverse classrooms.
“Children from the 450 houses in our subdivision were being bused all across the city,” said Ms. Wilson, for whom the final affront was a proposal by the Wake County Board of Education to send her two daughters to schools 17 miles from home.
So she vented her anger at the polls, helping elect four new Republican-backed education board members last fall. Now in the majority, those board members are trying to make good on campaign promises to end Wake’s nationally recognized income-based busing policy.
National Council on Teacher Quality:
In September of 2009, Washington, DC, schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee laid off nearly 400 teachers, citing a serious shortfall in funds for the DC school system. The move, coming as it did after Washington hired more than 900 new teachers in the summer of 2009, made jaws drop — some in outrage, some in awe. But the controversy was due only partly to the fact that Rhee axed jobs so close on the heels of a hiring spree; she also took full advantage of a clause in DC regulation that made “school needs,” not seniority, the determining factor in who would be laid off.
Approve of Rhee’s move or not, the highly scrutinized and controversial layoffs spotlight an important question: what factors should be considered when school districts must decide who will stay and who will go?
In the past year, cash-strapped districts have been handing out pink slips by the hundreds, and some, by the thousands. The Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that nearly 60,000 teachers were laid off in 2009. State budget gaps and deficit projections, with federal stimulus funding already spent, suggest more of the same for 2010. Some observers expect current cuts to come faster even than those of the 1970s, when the baby boom generation waned, emptying out schools across the country.
“Dictionaries are like watches, the worst is better than none, and the best cannot be expected to go quite true.” So said Samuel Johnson, according to James Boswell–and if any man can get away with making a pithy, slightly nonsensical, yet somehow illuminating statement about the merits of dictionaries, repositories of our language, it is Johnson.
Watches and other kinds of clocks may not “go quite true” yet, but they have managed to attain such a degree of exactness that the point is largely moot. The most accurate form of timekeeper available today, a cesium fountain atomic clock, is expected to become inaccurate by no more than a single second over the next fifty-plus million years (although it is by no means clear what other clock might be used to judge the world’s most accurate timekeeper).
What of dictionaries? Have they been improved to the same extent as clocks? Is there somewhere a dictionary that is expected to be wrong by only one word in the next fifty million years?
Madison School District Superintendent Dan Nerad 292K PDF:
In November of 2008 the district was given voter approval for a three year operating referendum: $5 million in 2009-2010, $4 million in 2010-2011, and $4 million in 2011-2012, The approved operating referendum has a shared cost plan between property tax payers and the district.
During the fall adoption of the 2009-2010 budget the Board of Education worked to reduce the impact for property tax payers by eliminating costs, implementing new revenues, and utilizing fund balance (see Appendix A). The Wisconsin State 2009-2011 budget impacted the district funding significantly in the fall of2009-2010 and will again have an impact on the 2010-2011 projections.
The district and PMA Financial Network, Inc, have worked to prepare a five year financial forecast beginning with the 2010-2011 budget year, which is attached in pgs 1-2.
2010-2011 Projection Assumptions:
The following items are included in the Budget Projection:
1. The budget holds resources in place and maintains programs and services.
2. October enrollment projections
3. Salary and Benefits – Teacher salary projections are based on their current settlement, and all other units are at a projected increase consistent with recent contract settlements.
4. Supplies & Materials – A 1% (~$275,000) projection was applied to supply and material budgets each year
5. Revenues – The district utilized revenue limit and equalization aid calculations based on the 2009-2011 State Budget. All other revenues remained constant.
6. Grants – Only Entitlement Grants are included in the forecasted budget. Example ARRA funds are not included as they are· not sustainable funds.
7. Debt – The forecast includes a projection for the WRS refinancing as of January 26th Attached on pgs 3-4 is a current Debt Schedule for the District which includes thecurrently restructured debt and the estimated WRS refinanced debt.
8. The 4-k program revenues, expenditures and enrollment have been added to the
projections beginning in 2011-2012.Much more on the budget, including some total budget numbers via a Board Member’s (Ed Hughes) comment. The recent State of The District presentation lacked total budget numbers (it presented property taxes, which are certainly important, but not the whole story). There has not been a 2009-2010 citizen’s budget, nor have I seen a proposed 2010-2011 version. This should be part of all tax and spending discussions.
Introduction and Overview
1. Background and Overview Daniel A. Nerad, Superintendent of Schools
Prior to the fall of 2008, MMSD high schools functioned as four separate autonomous high schools, with minimal focus on working collaboratively across the district to address student educational needs.
In 2008 MMSD received a Federal Smaller Learning Communities for $5.3 million dollars over a five year period. The purpose of that grant is to support the large changes necessary to:
- Increase student achievement for all students.
- Increase and improve student to student relationships and student to adult relationships.
- Improve post-secondary outcomes for all students.
District administration, along with school leadership and school staff, have examined the research that shows that fundamental change in education can only be accomplished by creating the opportunity for teachers to talk with one another regarding their instructional practice. The central theme and approach for REaL has been to improve and enhance instructional practice through collaboration in order to increase stndent achievement. Special attention has been paid to ensure the work is done in a cross – district, interdepartmental and collaborative manner. Central to the work, are district and school based discussions focused on what skills and knowledge students need to know and be able to do, in order to be prepared for post-secondary education and work. Systemized discussions regarding curriculum aligll1nent, course offerings, assessment systems, behavioral expectations and 21 st century skills are occurring across all four high schools and at the district level.
Collaborative professional development has been established to ensure that the work capitalizes on the expertise of current staff, furthers best practices that are already occurring within the MMSD high school classrooms, and enhances the skills of individuals at all levels from administration to classroom teachers needed. Our work to date has laid the foundation for further and more in-depth work to occur.
While we are at the formative stages of our work, evidence shows that success is occurring at the school level. Feedback from principals indicates that district meetings, school buildings and classrooms are feeling more collaborative and positive, there is increased participation by teachers in school based decisions, and school climate has improved as evidenced by a significant reduction in behavior referrals.
This report provides a summary of the REaL Grant since fall of2008 and includes:
1. Work completed across all four high schools.
2. School specific work completed.
3. District work completed.
4. REaL evaluation
5. Future implications
In addition the following attachments are included:
1. Individual REaL School Action Plans for 09-10
2. REaL District Action for 09-10
3. ACT EP AS Overview and Implementation Plan
4. AVID Overview
5. Templates used for curriculum and course alignment
6. Individual Learning Plan summary and implementation plan
7. National Student Clearninghouse StudentTracker System
8. Student Action Research example questions
2. Presenters
- Pam Nash, Assistant Superintendent of Secondary Schools
- Darwin Hernandez, East High School AVID Student
- Jaquise Gardner, La Follette High School AVID Student
- Mary Kelley, East High School
- Joe Gothard, La Follette High School
- Bruce Dahmen, Memorial High School
- Ed Holmes, West High School
- Melody Marpohl, West High School ESL Teacher
3. Action requested of the BOE
The report is an update, providing information on progress of MMSD High Schools and district initiatives in meeting grant goals and outlines future directions for MMSD High schools and district initiatives based on work completed to date.MMSD has contracted with an outside evaluator, Bruce King, UW-Madison. Below are the initial observations submitted by Mr. King:
The REaL evaluation will ultimately report on the extent of progress toward the three main grant goals. Yearly work focuses on major REaL activities at or across the high schools through both qualitative and quantitative methods and provides schools and the district with formative evaluation and feedback. During the first two years ofthe project, the evaluation is also collecting baseline data to inform summative reports in later years of the grant. We can make several observations about implementation ofthe grant goals across the district.
These include:
Observation 1: Professional development experiences have been goal oriented and focused. On a recent survey of the staff at the four high schools, 80% of responding teachers reported that their professional development experiences in 2009-10 were closely connected to the schools’ improvement plans. In addition, the focus of these efforts is similar to the kinds of experiences that have led to changes in student achievement at other highly successful schools (e.g., Universal Design, instructional leadership, and literacy across the curriculum).
Observation 2: Teacher collaboration is a focal point for REaL grant professional development. However, teachers don’t have enough time to meet together, and Professional Collaboration Time (PCT) will be an important structure to help sustain professional development over time.
Observation 3: School and district facilitators have increased their capacity to lead collaborative, site-based professional development. In order for teachers to collaborate better, skills in facilitation and group processes should continue to be enhanced.
Observation 4: Implementing EP AS is a positive step for increasing post-secondary access and creating a common assessment program for all students.
Observation 5: There has been improved attention to and focus on key initiatives. Over two- thirds ofteachers completing the survey believed that the focus of their current initiatives addresses the needs of students in their classroom. At the same time, a persisting dilemma is prioritizing and doing a few things well rather than implementing too many initiatives at once.
Observation 6: One of the important focus areas is building capacity for instructional leadership, work carried out in conjunction with the Wallace project’s UW Educational Leadership faculty. Progress on this front has varied across the four schools.
Observation 7: District offices are working together more collaboratively than in the past, both with each other and the high schools, in support of the grant goals.
Is it likely that the four high schools will be significantly different in four more years?
Given the focus on cultivating teacher leadership that has guided the grant from the outset, the likelihood is strong that staff will embrace the work energetically as their capacity increases. At the same time, the ultimate success ofthe grant will depend on whether teachers, administrators, anddistrict personnel continue to focus on improving instruction and assessment practices to deliver a rigorous core curriculum for all and on nurturing truly smaller environments where students are known well.Related:
- Bruce King’s 2005 evaluation of the Small Learning Communities project at Madison West High School.
- 2007 Madison School District Small Learning Community Grant Application
- Jeff Henriques: Examining the Data from Earlier Small Learning Community Grants, Part 2 Part 3
- Notes and links on the 2008 Small Learning Community Grant Award
Five months after we are conceived, music begins to capture our attention and wire our brains for a lifetime of aural experience. At the other end of life, musical memories can be imprinted on the brain so indelibly that they can be retrieved, perfectly intact, from the depths of a mind ravaged by Alzheimer’s disease.
In between, music can puncture stress, dissipate anger and comfort us in sadness.
As if all that weren’t enough, for years parents have been seduced by even loftier promises from an industry hawking the recorded music of Mozart and other classical composers as a means to ensure brilliant babies.
But for all its beauty, power and capacity to move, researchers have concluded that music is little more than ear candy for the brain if it is consumed only passively. If you want music to sharpen your senses, boost your ability to focus and perhaps even improve your memory, the latest word from science is you’ll need more than hype and a loaded iPod.
In April 2008, The Orange County Register published a bombshell of an investigation about a license plate program for California government workers and their families. Drivers of nearly 1 million cars and light trucks–out of a total 22 million vehicles registered statewide–were protected by a “shield” in the state records system between their license plate numbers and their home addresses. There were, the newspaper found, great practical benefits to this secrecy.
“Vehicles with protected license plates can run through dozens of intersections controlled by red light cameras with impunity,” the Register’s Jennifer Muir reported. “Parking citations issued to vehicles with protected plates are often dismissed because the process necessary to pierce the shield is too cumbersome. Some patrol officers let drivers with protected plates off with a warning because the plates signal that drivers are ‘one of their own’ or related to someone who is.”
The plate program started in 1978 with the seemingly unobjectionable purpose of protecting the personal addresses of officials who deal directly with criminals. Police argued that the bad guys could call the Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV), get addresses for officers, and use the information to harm them or their family members. There was no rash of such incidents, only the possibility that they could take place.
Superintendent Dan Nerad 2.1MB PDF:
The Board of Education has shown concern with current levels of participation among staff, parents, and students in the use of the Infinite Campus student information system. This concern comes despite many efforts to engage the stakeholders with various professional development opportunities and promotional campaigns over the past three years. In December 2009, the Board was provided a summary from a staff survey conducted on the topic explaining why staff had been reluctant to use the teacher tools. That report is found as an attachment to this report (see Attachment 1).
A survey of Wisconsin school districts was completed to determine the standards for teacher use of student information system technologies in the state. The survey gathered information about the use of grade book, lesson planners, and parent and student portals. Responses were collected and analyzed from over 20 Wisconsin districts. Nearly all responding districts report either a requirement for online grade book use, or have close to 100 percent participation. (See Attachment 2).
Describe the action requested of the BOE
The administration is requesting that the Board of Education take action in support of the proposed action steps to enhance the overall use of the teacher and portal tools among our stakeholders.
The proposed time line for full teacher use of grade level appropriate Infinite Campus teacher tools is: High school teachers – 2011-2012 End of 4th Quarter, Middle school teachers – 2010-2011 End of 4th Quarter, Elementary school teachers – End of 4th Quarter, 2011-2012 (calendar feature only)Fascinating tone. I support the Board’s efforts to substantially increase usage of this system. If it cannot be used across all teachers, the system should be abandoned as the District, parents and stakeholders end up paying at least twice in terms of cost and time due to duplicate processes and systems.
If they hadn’t been mostly shut out of bids to run a slew of new L.A. Unified campuses, the groups might have demonstrated how they handle students with challenging needs.
Los Angeles school officials lost a chance this week to test whether the booming charter movement can take on all the problems of the district’s traditional, and often troubled, schools.
On Tuesday, the Board of Education denied proposals from three major charter organizations that had sought to run newly built neighborhood schools, which would have included substantial numbers of limited-English speakers, special education students, foster children and low-income families.
That is exactly the population that charter schools have been criticized for not sufficiently reaching.
Charters are independently managed and exempt from some rules that govern traditional schools. They’re also schools of choice — campuses that parents seek and select. And researchers have found that charters enroll fewer students with more challenging, and often more expensive, needs.
Josephine Norwood, a Bronzeville mother of three Chicago public school students, has rebounded from two rounds of school closings that displaced her children from their schools. As she watched the Board of Education approve another set of schools for closing or turnaround last week, Mrs. Norwood had a simple question: Can Chicago Public Schools officials promise that the new schools will be better?
“If this process could guarantee the child the best and they would benefit from the school closing, then maybe it is a positive thing,” Mrs. Norwood said. But she spoke out last week, along with many others, about the need for more transparency and proof that the disruptions are warranted.
As the public schools system entered its annual process of selecting schools for closing or turnarounds, parents, teachers and community groups leveled criticism at school officials for the lack of communication with the communities involved and questioned data from the central office that does not match the reality in the schools. Some also pleaded for the district to delay any action until the corrective measures taken at the lowest-performing schools — the wholesale turnover of administrators and teachers — could be better evaluated and a comprehensive plan for school facilities could be developed by a new task force.
Superintendent Dan Nerad, via an Arlene Silveira email 1.4MB PDF:
Processes of the Administration
The following administrative processes are currently being utilized to provide administrative leadership within the district:
- Superintendent’s Management Team Comprised of the Superintendent and department administrators, this team meets weekly and serves as the major decision making body of the administration.
- Strategic Plan Monitoring and Support
The Superintendent meets monthly with administrators with lead responsibility for the five priority strategies within the Strategic Plan.- Superintendents-Assistant Superintendents, Chief of Staff and Executive Director, Human Resources
The Superintendent meets weekly with the Assistant Superintendents, Chief of Staff and Executive Director of Human Resources to discuss key operational issues.- Board Liaison Team
The Board Liaison Team, consisting of designated administrators, meets three times a month to coordinate Board agenda planning and preparation. District Learning Council The District Learning Council consists of curriculum, instruction and assessment related administrators and teacher leaders. This council meets bi-weekly to discuss major instructional issues in the district and provides coordination across related departments.- Department Meetings Administrators assigned to each department meet as needed.
- Principal Meetings Assistant Superintendents meet minimally one time per month with all principals
- Committee Meetings
There are numerous administrative/staff committees that meet as specific tasks require.General Strengths of the Current Administrative Structure
The strengths of the current administrative structure within the district are as follows:
- The basic structure of our district has been in place for many years. As a result, the current department structure is known by many and has predictable ways of operating.
There exist needed checks and balances within the current system, given the relative equal status of the departments, with each department leader along with the Assistant Superintendents and Chief of Staff directly reporting to the Superintendent of Schools.
General Weaknesses of the Current Administrative Structure
The weaknesses of the current administrative structure within the district are as follows:
- The degree to which the mission-work of the district, teaching and learning, is central to the function of administration is of concern especially in the way professional development is addressed without a departmental focus.
- Traditional organizational structures, while having a degree of predictability, can become bureaucratically laden and can lack inventiveness and the means to encourage participation in decision making.
Organizational Principles
In addition to the mission, belief statements and parameters, the following organizational principles serve as a guide for reviewing and defining the administrative structure and administrative processes within the district.
- The district will be organized in a manner to best serve the mission of the district .and to support key district strategies to accomplish the mission.
- Leadership decisions will be filtered through the lens of our mission.
- Central service functions will be organized to support teaching and learning at the schools and should foster supportive relationships between schools and central service functions.
- The district’s organizational structure must have coherence on a preK-12 basis and must address the successful transition of students within the district.
- The district will be structured to maximize inter-division and intra-division collaboration and cooperation.
- The district’s organizational structure must have an orientation toward being of service to stakeholders, internally and externally.
- The district must be organized in a manner that allows for ongoing public engagement
and stakeholder input.- To meet the district’s mission, the district will embrace the principles of learning organizations, effective schools, participative and distributive leadership and teamwork.
- The district will make better use of data for decision making, analyzing issues, improving district operations, developing improvement plans and evaluating district efforts.
- The need for continuous improvement will be emphasized in our leadership work.
- Ongoing development and annual evaluation of district leaders is essential.
Leadership Needs
Given these organizational principles, as well as a review of the current administrative structure and administrative processes within the district, the following needs exist. In addition, in the development of this plan, input was sought from all administrators during the annual leadership retreat, individual Management Team members and individual members of the Board of Education. These needs were specifically referenced in identifying the recommended changes in our administrative structure and related administrative processes that are found in this report.
- There is a need to better align the administrative structure to the district’s mission and Strategic Plan and to place greater priority on the mission-work of our organization (improved achievement for all students and the elimination of achievement gaps).
- From an administrative perspective, the mission-work of our district is mainly delivered through teaching and learning and leadership work being done in our schools. Central service functions must act in support of this work. In addition, central service functions are needed to ensure constancy of focus and direction for the district.
- New processes are needed to allow for stakeholder engagement and input and to create greater inter-department and division collaboration and cooperation
- The mission of the district must be central to decisions made in the district.
- The organizational structure must support PreK -12 articulation and coordination needs within the district.
- Leadership work must embody principles of contemporary learning organizations, effective school practices, participative and distributive leadership and teamwork. Included in this will be a focus on the purposeful use ofteacher leadership, support for our schools and a focus on positive culture within the district.
- There must be an enhanced focus on the use of data in our improvement and related accountability efforts.
- There is a need to unifonnly implement school and department improvement plans and to change administrative supervision and evaluation plans based on research in the field and on the need for continuous improvement of all schools, departments and all individual administrators.
In addition, as this plan was constructed there was a focus on ensuring, over the next couple of years, that the plan was sustainable from a financial point of view.
Will Fitzhugh
The Concord Review
26 February 2010
The Kaiser Foundation, in its January 2010 report on the use of electronic entertainment media by U.S. students, aged 8-18, found that, on average, these young people are spending more than seven hours a day (53 hours a week) with such (digital) amusements.
For some, this would call into question whether students have time to read the nonfiction books and to write the research papers they will need to work on to get themselves ready for college and careers, not to mention the homework for their other courses.
For the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, however, the problem appears to be that we are not paying enough attention to the possible present and future connections between digital media and learning, so they have decided to invest $50,000,000 in grants to explore that relationship.
One recent two-year grant, “for $650,000 to study the effect of digital media on young people’s ethical development and to develop curricula for parents and teachers,” went to the Harvard Education School, which has distinguished itself for, among other things, seeming to have no one on its faculty with any research or teaching interest in the actual academic work of high school students, for example in chemistry, history, economics, physics, foreign languages, calculus, and the like.
The Harvard Ed School faculty do show real interest in poverty, disability, psychological problems, race, gender, ethnicity, and the development of moral character, so they may take to this idea of studying the relation between electronic media and student ethics. A visit to the Harvard Ed School website, and a review of the research interests of the faculty would prove enlightening to anyone who thought, for some odd reason, that they might be paying attention to the academic work of students in the schools.
Whether Harvard will conclude that seven hours a day doesn’t help much with the ethical development of students or not, one could certainly wish that they would discover that spending a lot of their time on digital media does very little for student preparation for college academic work that is at all demanding, not to mention the actual work of their careers, unless they are in the digital entertainment fields, of course.
The National Writing Project, which regularly has received $26,000,000 each year in federal grants for many years to help thousands of teachers feel more comfortable writing about themselves, has now received $1.1 million in grants from the MacArthur Foundation, presumably so that they may now direct some of their efforts to helping students use digital media to write about themselves as well.
Perhaps someone should point out, to MacArthur, the National Writing Project, the Harvard Ed School, and anyone else involved in this egregious folly and waste of money, that our students already spend a great deal of their time each and every day writing and talking about themselves with their friends, using a variety of electronic media.
In fact, it is generally the case that the students (without any grants) are already instructing any of their teachers who are interested in the use of a variety of electronic media.
But like folks in any other self-sustaining educational enterprise, those conversing on the uses of digital media in learning about digital media need a chance to talk about what they are doing, whether it is harmful to serious academic progress for our students or not, so MacArthur has also granted to “the Monterey Institute for Technology and Education (in Monterey, California) $2,140,000 to build the field of Digital Media and Learning through a new journal, conferences, and convenings (over five years).”
The MacArthur Foundation website has a list of scores more large grants for these projects in digital media studies and digital learning (it is not clear, of course, what “digital learning” actually means, if anything).
This very expensive and time-consuming distraction from any effort to advance respectable common standards for the actual academic work of students in our nation’s schools must be enjoyable, both for those giving out the $50 million, and, I suppose, for those receiving it, but the chances are good that their efforts will only help to make the college and career readiness of our high school students an even more distant goal.
“Teach by Example”
Will Fitzhugh [founder]
Consortium for Varsity Academics® [2007]
The Concord Review [1987]
Ralph Waldo Emerson Prizes [1995]
National Writing Board [1998]
TCR Institute [2002]
730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24
Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776-3371 USA
978-443-0022; 800-331-5007
www.tcr.org; fitzhugh@tcr.org
Varsity Academics®
www.tcr.org/blog
ne of the most firmly entrenched academic practices centers upon the use of textbooks as the fundamental drivers of curricula. Ultra-expensive, these items represent one of the largest costs for public school systems as well as those attending college.
As the digital age continues to work its way into the stuffy world of academics, there are clear indications that textbooks are gradually being phased out in many areas of the country. The sheer volume of resources available on the net is leading many school districts to create and share their own materials.
Macmillan, considered one of the largest players in that old, conservative world, apparently has now also seen the “handwriting on the wall.” The company recently announced it will offer academics an entirely new format: DynamicBooks.
In some quarters I’m viewed as a lawyer with a professional identity problem: I’ve spent half of my time representing students and professors struggling with administrators over issues like free speech, academic freedom, due process and fair disciplinary procedures. The other half I’ve spent representing individuals (and on occasion organizations and companies) in the criminal justice system.
These two seemingly disparate halves of my professional life are, in fact, quite closely related: The respective cultures of the college campus and of the federal government have each thrived on the notion that language is meant not to express one’s true thoughts, intentions and expectations, but, instead, to cover them up. As a result, the tyrannies that I began to encounter in the mid-1980s in both academia and the federal criminal courts shared this major characteristic: It was impossible to know when one was transgressing the rules, because the rules were suddenly being expressed in language that no one could understand.
In his 1946 linguistic critique, Politics and the English Language, George Orwell wrote that one must “let meaning choose the word, not the other way around.” By largely ignoring this truism, administrators and legislators who craft imprecise regulations have given their particular enforcement arms—campus disciplinary staff and federal government prosecutors—enormous and grotesquely unfair power.
In education, there’s a lot up in the air right now: standards, testing, employment practices, budgets, student technology, online learning, and federal policy. It’s conceivable that if we took advantage of the uncertainty, a few places could emerge with a better and cheaper education system. Here’s three pivot points that could anchor next generation systems:
1. Merit Badges: the goal of college and career readiness and development Common Core standards will require most states, district to make lots of course and curriculum. States could use the opportunity to replace the 100 year old seat time and credit system with a new merit badge system–a bundle of assessments would be used to demonstrate learning of a bundle of competencies. Take ratios and fractions as an example; a merit badge would describe what students need to know and a combination of ways they can show it including content-embedded assessment (e.g., game score), performance assessment (e.g., project), adaptive assessment (e.g., online quiz), and an end of unit test. Mastery-based learning and merit badge evidence would replace grades and courses as the primary mechanism to mark student progress.
Education Secretary Arne Duncan faced unusually sharp questioning from House Democrats Thursday over the Obama administration’s proposals to eliminate a grant for the Teach for America program and hold the line on new funding for many other education programs.
The House Budget Committee hearing on the $50.7 billion education budget proposed for the fiscal year that begins in October provided an early glimpse at congressional reaction to the Obama administration’s plan to put more emphasis on competitions for federal funding, including its signature Race to the Top initiative that will reward states and school districts whose education policies are in line with Obama’s.
For decades, education programs have been driven by formulas that spread money across the country based on population, poverty levels and other factors, as well as targeted grants to benefit specific organizations. Those formulas mean that all 535 members of Congress can point to federal funding flowing to schools in their states and districts.
n January 2010, a 9-year old boy named Montana Lance hung himself in a bathroom at the Texas elementary school he attended. Although certainly shocking, such acts are unfortunately becoming less and less unusual. In fact, the suicide of Montana Lance is very reminiscent of what happened in April 2009 when two 11-year-old boys, one in Massachusetts and one in Georgia, likewise committed suicide just days apart. What would cause these children to end their lives? The answer in each case is the same: all three suffered extreme levels of victimization at the hands of school bullies–bullying that others have described as involving “relentless homophobic taunts.” And, as we can see from the fate of these three little boys, this form of harassment was obviously very traumatic.
In this article, I look at the growing problem of school bullying in America today. Now, almost all children are teased and most will even face at least some form of bullying during their childhood. However, studies reveal that some children will unfortunately become chronic victims of school bullying. Chief among that group are those children whose gender expression is at odds with what society considers “appropriate.” As my article explores, the gender stereotypes that exist within our society are frequently to blame for the more extreme levels of bullying currently being carried out in our nation’s schools. And the impact this bullying has on its victims is staggering. Earlier I mentioned three children who took their own lives as a result of bullying. These are but three examples of those who have lost their lives to gender-based bullying. However, there are countless other victims who, although not paying with their lives, are nonetheless paying dearly in other ways. Specifically, the psychological literature on the emotional impacts that befall these chronic victims of bullying reveals a whole host of resulting problems–debilitating consequences that can last a lifetime.
The NYTimes ran a story with this misleading headline and byline:
A Vote to Fire All Teachers at a Failing High School
CENTRAL FALLS, R.I. — A plan to dismiss the entire faculty and staff of the only public high school in this small city just west of the Massachusetts border was approved Tuesday night at an emotional public meeting of the school board.When the teachers failed to adopt a ‘transformation’ plan that included a modest lengthening of the day, the superintendent shifted to Plan B, what federal School Improvement Grants (SIG) call Turnaround, which requires that at least 50% of the staff be replaced. Under Rhode Island law, teachers must be notified of the potential for nonrenewal by March 20, hence the board vote and notices. All the teachers will have the opportunity to reapply, up to half will be rehired.
The hysteria is now reverberating on CNN and papers around the country. Central Falls may be an early example but there are thousands to come. As I began reporting in October, SIG will cause widespread urban disruption. But we’ll all need to be cautious to use language carefully and differentiate between ‘firing all the teachers’ and notifying them of the requirement to reapply for their positions.Related: Ripon Superintendent Richard Zimman’s speech to the Madison Rotary:
Last Wednesday, Ripon Superintendent Richard Zimman spoke to the Madison Rotary Club on “What Wisconsin’s Public Education Model Needs to Learn from General Motors Before it is too late.” 7MB mp3 audio (the audio quality is not great, but you can hear the talk if you turn up the volume!).
Zimman’s talk ranged far and wide. He discussed Wisconsin’s K-12 funding formula (it is important to remember that school spending increases annually (from 1987 to 2005, spending grew by 5.10% annually in Wisconsin and 5.25% in the Madison School District), though perhaps not in areas some would prefer.
“Beware of legacy practices (most of what we do every day is the maintenance of the status quo), @12:40 minutes into the talk – the very public institutions intended for student learning has become focused instead on adult employment. I say that as an employee. Adult practices and attitudes have become embedded in organizational culture governed by strict regulations and union contracts that dictate most of what occurs inside schools today. Any impetus to change direction or structure is met with swift and stiff resistance. It’s as if we are stuck in a time warp keeping a 19th century school model on life support in an attempt to meet 21st century demands.” Zimman went on to discuss the Wisconsin DPI’s vigorous enforcement of teacher licensing practices and provided some unfortunate math & science teacher examples (including the “impossibility” of meeting the demand for such teachers (about 14 minutes)). He further cited exploding teacher salary, benefit and retiree costs eating instructional dollars (“Similar to GM”; “worry” about the children given this situation).
Elmore Leonard, Diana Athill, Margaret Atwood, Roddy Doyle, Helen Dunmore, Geoff Dyer, Anne Enright, Richard Ford, Jonathan Franzen, Esther Freud, Neil Gaiman, David Hare, PD James, AL Kennedy:
Get an accountant, abstain from sex and similes, cut, rewrite, then cut and rewrite again – if all else fails, pray. Inspired by Elmore Leonard’s 10 Rules of Writing, we asked authors for their personal dos and don’ts
Elmore Leonard: Using adverbs is a mortal sin
1 Never open a book with weather. If it’s only to create atmosphere, and not a charac ter’s reaction to the weather, you don’t want to go on too long. The reader is apt to leaf ahead look ing for people. There are exceptions. If you happen to be Barry Lopez, who has more ways than an Eskimo to describe ice and snow in his book Arctic Dreams, you can do all the weather reporting you want.
2 Avoid prologues: they can be annoying, especially a prologue following an introduction that comes after a foreword. But these are ordinarily found in non-fiction. A prologue in a novel is backstory, and you can drop it in anywhere you want. There is a prologue in John Steinbeck’s Sweet Thursday, but it’s OK because a character in the book makes the point of what my rules are all about. He says: “I like a lot of talk in a book and I don’t like to have nobody tell me what the guy that’s talking looks like. I want to figure out what he looks like from the way he talks.”
Wisconsin State Journal Editorial:
Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce is often maligned for throwing its weight around at the state Capitol.
But it was the big state teachers union (WEAC) that spent – by far – more money on lobbying last year than any other special interest group.
It helps explain why the teachers got precisely what they wanted from the Democratic-run Legislature and governor’s office in the last state budget: repeal of state limits on teacher compensation.
It also shows why reforming public education – to require more accountability and innovation – won’t be easy. The teachers union has resisted pay for performance, something commonplace in most professions, and frowned on innovative charter schools. State leaders will need to stand up to the union if public education is to be transformed.
I would like to discuss a book which helps to inform educators and parents about gifted education in other countries from developmental, family and international perspectives. It is an excellent example of the increasing worldwide interest in studying and educating the most advanced students. By using the case study research method, Hanna David, Ph.D. and Echo Wu, Ph.D. have written fascinating accounts of Israeli and Chinese students who have demonstrated giftedness in public school classrooms and at the university level. David is a professor of education at Ben Gurion University in Eliat, Israel and Echo Wu is now teaching at the Hong Kong Institute of Education. Their book, Understanding Giftedness: A Chinese-Israeli Casebook (Pearson, 2010, ISBN 981-06-8300-6), contains such research topics as a study of five gifted boys in one classroom, parental influences of three Chinese-American families on talent development, case study of a visually disabled young boy (seven years), conversation with a Chinese Nobel Laureate (chemistry), and case study of a gifted family emigrating from Russia to Israel. All of these studies are a clear demonstration of the forcefulness of gifted characteristics and behavior under sometimes severe pressures from cultural influences and learning disabilities. The book also serves as an inspiration to researchers who use the case study method for studying giftedness. In this sense, David and Wu follow the traditions of Piaget and other masters of child development who grounded their work in making systematic observations and carefully recording the individual child’s intellectual development. I highly recommend that Understanding Giftedness be used as a model for further studies of the gifted mind.
He tells the National Governors Assn. that states will be required to help students be ‘college- and career-ready.’
Reporting from Washington – Decrying shortcomings of the No Child Left Behind Act, President Obama on Monday pledged to make American students more competitive in the global economy by encouraging higher state standards for primary and secondary education.
Students in the United States lag by several crucial measures, Obama told a gathering of the nation’s governors at the White House, with eighth-graders ranking ninth in the world in math and 11th in science.
“In response to assessments like these, some states have upped their game,” Obama said, pointing to Massachusetts, where eighth-graders are tied for first in science around the world. “Some states have actually done the opposite, and between 2005 and 2007, under No Child Left Behind, 11 states actually lowered their standards in math.”
Two computer security experts, Aaron Rhodes and a man known by his pseudonym Stryde Hax, put together an eye-opening and well-researched attack on both the Lower Merion High School that’s been accused of spying on students and the software that was used to do it. In the process, they reveal some disturbing school policies regarding the use of the laptops, and the unnerving nature of the software itself.
The writers scoured forum activity, blog posts, and publicity videos made by one Mike Perbix, the Harriton High School technical security staffer who was in charge of the use of LANRev, the software in question. They also hunted down comments from some of the more tech-savvy members of the student body, who revealed some pretty startling policies regarding the laptops.
The main points: the school-supplied (and monitored) MacBooks were required for certain classes; the included Webcams could not be disabled; the laptops could not be “jailbroken” to circumvent the security measures (and any attempt could result in expulsion); and possession of a personal computer, meaning one other than the school-supplied MacBook, was forbidden and subject to confiscation. One example, from a student:More here.
When Utah state Sen. Chris Buttars unveiled a cost-cutting measure this month that would have made the high school senior year optional, perhaps no one in the state Capitol Building was more surprised than 18-year-old Jake Trimble, who already opted out of the second half of senior year just weeks earlier.
He has spent the past month working at the Capitol as an unpaid intern for the state Democratic Party’s communications team, designing posters and writing scripts for legislators’ robocalls. Trimble graduated in January, one semester early, from the nearby Academy of Math Engineering and Science (AMES).
“I’m very happy to not be in high school anymore,” says Trimble, who proudly reports that he’s “not rotting in my parents’ basement.” Actually, when the legislative session ends next month, he’ll move on to another internship (this one paid) as a lab assistant at the University of Utah’s Orthopedic Center.
Trimble is part of a small but growing group of students — most of them academically advanced and, as a result, a tad restless — who are tinkering with their senior year. A few observers say the quiet experiment has the potential to reinvent high school altogether.
A math class for students with intellectual disabilities at Paul VI Catholic High School in Fairfax practiced naming dates on a calendar one recent morning and deciphering what time it is when the big hand is on the 10 and the little hand is on the 11. But first, the teacher led them in a prayer.
Father in heaven, we offer you this class and all that we may accomplish today,” they said together.
Federal law requires that public schools offer a free, appropriate education for students with disabilities, and federal and state governments subsidize the higher costs of smaller classes and extra resources. Catholic schools have no such legal mandate, and financial constraints have historically made it difficult for them to offer similar specialized services.
That is starting to change.
The next time Lower Merion school administrators want to talk to students and parents about their laptop-camera controversy, they will have to get a lawyer’s blessing.
Not from their own lawyers, but the ones suing them on behalf of a Harriton High sophomore who claims the school invaded his home and his privacy by remotely snapping his image with the camera on his school-provided laptop.
The unusual order, signed by a federal judge yesterday, means those running the elite Lower Merion School District can’t say a word about the laptop cameras or any other issues in the suit without giving the other side a copy of what they want to say – plus six hours’ notice.
Such communication limits are commonplace in class-action litigation, but rare in the context of a school district at the center of what’s become a nationwide controversy.
Amazingly enough, tomorrow will mark the one-year anniversary of the start of Rough Type’s Realtime Chronicles. Time flies, and realtime flies like a bat out of hell.
Since I began writing the series, I have received innumerable emails and texts from panicked parents worried that they may be failing in what has become the central challenge of modern parenting: ensuring that children grow up to be well adapted to the realtime environment. These parents are concerned – and rightly so – that their kids will be at a disadvantage in the realtime milieu in which we all increasingly live, work, love, and compete for the small bits of attention that, in the aggregate, define the success, or failure, of our days. If maladapted to realtime existence, these parents understand, their progeny will end up socially ostracized, with few friends and even fewer followers. “Can we even be said to be alive,” one agitated young mother wrote me, “if our status updates go unread?” The answer, of course, is no. In the realtime environment, the absence of interactive stimuli, even for brief periods of “time,” may result in a state of reflective passivity indistinguishable from nonexistence. On a more practical level, a lack of realtime skills is sure to constrain a young person’s long-term job prospects. At best, he or she will be fated to spend his or her days involved in some form of manual labor, possibly even working out of doors with severely limited access to screens. At worst, he or she will have to find a non-tenure-track position in academia.
In Wisconsin, we have always been proud of our strong education system. New demands and technology are changing the way we prepare our children to enter the 21st century workforce. We must ensure that our state’s education system remains a national leader by providing our children with the skills that are needed to compete in a global economy.
It has been proven that not every child learns the same way. In fact, some students learn best outside of the traditional bricks-and-mortar school setting. For these children, virtual schools have come to fill an educational need. Virtual schools involve long-distance learning that use computers and Internet connections. These schools employ vigorous and challenging curricula along with regular interaction with state-certified teachers.
However, virtual schools were nearly wiped out in 2007 due to a court challenge by WEAC, the state’s teachers union.
In response, in the last legislative session I led the charge to ensure that virtual schools remain an option for Wisconsin’s parents and children. A bipartisan compromise was reached to keep the schools open but included a cap of 5,250 students requested by critics until a legislative audit could be conducted.
Senior House Republicans and Democrats recently announced a new bi-partisan effort to re-authorize the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. It’s a good sign for some real progress, both for education specifically and Washington in general, but there’s been no word on whether the Senate is so inclined. The “proposals” put forward so far by the Department of Education and at yesterday’s announcement are light on details, so this post is my attempt at rectifying some of the major issues around No Child Left Behind.
No More Pass/ Fail
One of the more frequent criticisms of the law concerns its binary pass/ fail system. If a school fails to meet a single academic benchmarks in a single grade in a single subject by a single sub-group of students, it is said to not meet “adequate yearly progress,” or AYP. If it does not meet AYP for multiple years in a row, the school is subject to a series of consequences that become more punitive the more years it misses targets.
The strengths of this arrangement came from protecting under-served populations. Because a school would be held accountable for all groups of students, it focused much more attention on achievement gaps and did not let a school hide its problems educating important sub-groups behind school-wide averages.
Milwaukee School Board member Bruce Thompson:
For Milwaukee Public Schools, the financial crisis that many of us have been warning about is here. As principals get their initial budgets, they are faced with cutting teachers; larger class sizes; the loss of specialty teachers such as those in art, music, physical education; and the lost of librarians. Perversely, schools that have the best student achievement are often the hardest hit, since the middle-class students attracted to these schools bring less aid with them.
While many other school systems (and other government units) are also facing cuts brought on by exploding health care costs and the weak economy, MPS has been particularly hard hit. And much of the MPS pain is self-inflicted. Next year, MPS is facing a 77% fringe benefit rate, meaning that the cost to the district of an employee is 77% more than that employee’s pay. If the unfunded liability for retiree benefits were correctly included, the fringe benefit rate would rise to almost 104%, meaning that the cost to the school district of an employee is more than twice that employee’s pay.
The biggest factor in the exploding benefits cost is the cost of health care. MPS offers two plans, one of which costs MPS twice as much per employee as the other. Yet because MPS pays the full cost of the plans, there is no incentive for employees to pick the less-expensive plan. Employees can retire at age 55 and continue to have MPS pay for their health insurance at the rate it did when they retired. Pensions have an employer and an employee contribution, but MPS pays both parts.
Wisconsin Government Accountability Board [22K PDF]:
The Wisconsin Education Association spent $1.5 million in 2009 lobbying state lawmakers, nearly twice as much as the next-largest spender, according to a report from the Government Accountability Board.
Overall, lobbying organizations reported spending $36.2 million in 2009, a 5.2 percent increase from the first half of the previous legislative session.
The 2009 report analyzes the activities of 746 lobbying principals and 750 registered lobbyists.
“Not only is Wisconsin’s lobbying law strong, but information about lobbying activities is easy to use online,” said Kevin J. Kennedy, director and general counsel of the G.A.B. “The law requires disclosure and prohibits gifts to lawmakers. The Board’s Eye on Lobbying online database allows the public to keep track of lobbying activities at the Capitol without leaving home.”
The most lobbied bill in 2009 was the AB 138, regarding appointment of the secretary of the Natural Resources Board. Organizations reported spending 2,923 hours attempting to influence legislators on that bill.
hicago Public Schools’ controversial process of closing, consolidating and turning around schools will receive new scrutiny this week.
The City Council’s Education Committee will hold a hearing Monday on a resolution to impose a one-year moratorium on any such changes, and the Chicago Board of Education is scheduled to vote Wednesday on proposals to close two schools, consolidate two others, turn around five and phase out one. Turnarounds involve replacing new teachers, principals, and other staff while the student body remains intact.
“The process — from recommendation to the Board of Education vote — is probably no more than a month,” said Alderman Pat Dowell (3rd Ward), who co-sponsored the resolution in response to complaints of too little community involvement. “That’s unfair.”
Today’s idea: Since written language is merely a technology for storing and transferring information, it’s likely to be replaced by a newer technology that performs the same function more effectively, a futurist says.
E Reader on empty bookshelf. This image has been manipulated using Photoshop.
The Britannica Blog has a series of posts called Learning and Literacy in the Digital Age, including this one by Patrick Tucker, senior editor of The Futurist. He speculates that text could be rendered obsolete not by the “culture of the image” — that threat is so last century — but by the so-called “information age” itself:… Research into cyber-telepathy has direct ramifications for the written word and its survivability. Electronic circuits mapped out in the same pattern as human neurons could, in decades ahead, reproduce the electrical activity that occurs when our natural transmitters activate. Theoretically, such circuits could allow parts of our brain to communicate with one another at greater levels of efficiency, possibly allowing humans to access data from the Web without looking it up or reading it.
Teachers and staff members in the Stowe School District have set an example for the rest of the state by agreeing to go without a pay increase built into their contract to help preserve programs and positions threatened by tough economic times.
The teachers and staff agreed to forgo a 5.25 percent raise, shaving about $240,000 from the proposed $9.7 million budget. That was enough to save a list of athletic and academic programs, as well as save jobs in the school district.
People tasked with balancing a public budget in the midst of the worst economic downturnin a generation often talk about making difficult decisions. Those who feel the impact of reduced budgets often are quick to argue why their interests deserve to be spared. This is a phenomenon seen from the halls of the Statehouse to budgets meetings in communities throughout the state.
The Stowe teachers took a different tack, choosing to give something up so their colleagues could keep their jobs, and students could keep their classes and teams.
Which brings us to this next item, one with twist and turns not completely understandable at this point, but certainly not held up by people like myself as a model of how to “get the job properly done” — to use Herbert’s words.
Diane Ravitch, an intellectual on education policy, difficult to pigeonhole politically (appointed to public office by both G.H.W. Bush and Clinton), but best described as an independent, co-writes a blog with Deborah Meier that some of our readers may be familiar with called “Bridging Differences.” This past week she highlighted a possibly disturbing development in the Race to the Top competition program of the Department of Education, that dangles $4.3 billion to the states with a possible $1.3 billion to follow. Ravitch’s critique suggests that this competition is not run by pragmatists, but rather by ideologues who are led by the Bill Gates Foundation.If this election had been held five years ago, the department would be insisting on small schools, but because Gates has already tried and discarded that approach, the department is promoting the new Gates remedies: charter schools, privatization, and evaluating teachers by student test scores.
Two of the top lieutenants of the Gates Foundation were placed in charge of the competition by Secretary Arne Duncan. Both have backgrounds as leaders in organisations dedicated to creating privately managed schools that operate with public money.
None of this is terribly surprising (See the Sunlight Foundation’s excellent work on the Obama Administration’s insider dealings with PhRMA). Jeff Henriques did a lot of work looking at the Madison School District’s foray into Small Learning Communities.
Is it possible to change the current K-12 bureacracy from within? Ripon Superintendent Richard Zimman spoke about the “adult employment” focus of the K-12 world:“Beware of legacy practices (most of what we do every day is the maintenance of the status quo), @12:40 minutes into the talk – the very public institutions intended for student learning has become focused instead on adult employment. I say that as an employee. Adult practices and attitudes have become embedded in organizational culture governed by strict regulations and union contracts that dictate most of what occurs inside schools today. Any impetus to change direction or structure is met with swift and stiff resistance. It’s as if we are stuck in a time warp keeping a 19th century school model on life support in an attempt to meet 21st century demands.” Zimman went on to discuss the Wisconsin DPI’s vigorous enforcement of teacher licensing practices and provided some unfortunate math & science teacher examples (including the “impossibility” of meeting the demand for such teachers (about 14 minutes)). He further cited exploding teacher salary, benefit and retiree costs eating instructional dollars (“Similar to GM”; “worry” about the children given this situation).
I suspect that Duncan and many others are trying to significantly change the adult to student process, rather than simply pumping more money into the current K-12 monopoly structures.
They are to be commended for this.
Will there be waste, fraud and abuse? Certainly. Will there be waste fraud and abuse if the funds are spent on traditional K-12 District organizations? Of course. John Stossel notes that when one puts together the numbers, Washington, DC’s schools spend $26,000 per student, while they provide $7,500 to the voucher schools…..
We’re better off with diffused governance across the board. Milwaukee despite its many travails, is developing a rich K-12 environment.
The Verona school board narrowly approved a new Mandarin immersion charter school on a 4-3 vote recently These citizen initiatives offer some hope for new opportunities for our children. I hope we see more of this.
Finally, all of this presents an interesting contrast to what appears to be the Madison School District Administration’s ongoing “same service” governance approach.
Madison School Board member Ed Hughes sent me an e-mail pointing out another vexing problem with Wisconsin’s school funding system and how it penalizes the Madison district, which I’ve written about in the past. Hughes notes in his e-mail “This particular wrinkle of the state school financing system is truly nuts.”
Hughes is incensed that the IQ Academy, a virtual school operated by the Waukesha district, gets over $6000 in state aid for poaching students from the Madison district while total state aid for educating a student in a real school here at home is $3400. Waukesha makes a profit of about $500 per student at the expense of taxpayers here, Hughes says. And that’s including profits going to the national corporate IQ Academy that supplies the school’s programming.The complete text of Ed Hughes letter to Senator Risser:
Sen. Risser:
As if we needed one, here is another reason to be outraged by our state school financing system:
This week’s issue of Isthmus carries a full page ad on page 2. It is sponsored by “IQ Academy Wisconsin,” which is described as a “tuition-free, online middle and high school program of the School District of Waukesha, WI.” The ad invites our Madison students to open-enroll in their “thriving learning community.”
What’s in it for Waukesha? A report on virtual charter schools by the State Fiscal Bureau, released this week, sheds some light on this. The Madison school district gets a little more than $2,000 in general state aid for each of our students. If you include categorical aids and everything else from the state, the amount goes up to about $3,400/student.
However, if Waukesha (or any other school district) is successful in poaching one of our students, it will qualify for an additional $6,007 in state aid. (That was actually the amount for the 2007-08 school year, that last year for which data was available for the Fiscal Bureau report.) As it was explained to me by the author of the Fiscal Bureau report, this $6,007 figure is made up of some combination of additional state aid and a transfer of property taxes paid by our district residents to Waukesha.
So the state financing system will provide nearly double the amount of aid to a virtual charter school associated with another school district to educate a Madison student than it will provide to the Madison school district to educate the same student in an actual school, with you know, bricks and mortar and a gym and cafeteria and the rest.
The report also states that the Waukesha virtual school spends about $5,500 per student. So for each additional student it enrolls, the Waukesha district makes at least a $500 profit. (It’s actually more than that, since the incremental cost of educating one additional student is less than the average cost for the district.) This does not count the profit earned by the private corporation that sells the on-line programming to Waukesha.
The legislature has created a system that sets up very strong incentives for a school district to contract with some corporate on-line operation, open up a virtual charter school, and set about trying to poach other districts’ students. Grantsburg, for example, has a virtual charter school that serves not a single resident of the Grantsburg school district. What a great policy.
By the way, Waukesha claims in its Isthmus ad that “Since 2004, IQ Academy Wisconsin students have consistently out-performed state-wide and district averages on the WKCE and ACT tests.” I didn’t check the WKCE scores, but last year 29.3% of the IQ Academy 12th graders took the ACT test and had an average composite score of 22.9. In the Madison school district, 56.6% of 12th graders took the test and the district average composite score was 24.0.
I understand that you are probably tired of hearing from local school board members complaining about the state’s school funding system. But the enormous disparity between what the state will provide to a virtual charter school for enrolling a student living in Madison, as compared to what it will provide the Madison school district to educate the same student, is so utterly wrong-headed as to be almost beyond belief.
Ed Hughes
Madison School BoardAmy Hetzner noted this post on her blog:
An interesting side note: the Madison Metropolitan School District’s current business manager, Erik Kass, was instrumental to helping to keep Waukesha’s virtual high school open and collecting a surplus when he was the business manager for that district.
I found the following comments interesting:
An interesting note is that the complainers never talked about which system more effectively taught students.
Then again, it has never really been about the students.Madison is spending $418,415,780 to educate 24,295 students ($17,222 each).
Related: Madison School District 2010-2011 Budget: Comments in a Vacuum? and a few comments on the recent “State of the Madison School District” presentation.
The “Great Recession” has pushed many organizations to seek more effective methods of accomplishing their goals. It would seem that virtual learning and cooperation with nearby higher education institutions would be ideal methods to provide more adult to student services at reduced cost, rather than emphasizing growing adult to adult spending.
Finally Richard Zimman’s recent Madison Rotary talk is well worth revisiting with respect to the K-12 focus on adult employment.
Fascinating.
“What’s a court doing making a decision on math textbooks and curriculum?” This question and its associated harrumphs on various education blogs and online newspapers came in reaction to the February 4, 2010 ruling from the Superior court of King County that the Seattle school board’s adoption of a discovery type math curriculum for high school was “arbitrary and capricious”.
In fact, the court did not rule on the textbook or curriculum. Rather, it ruled on the school board’s process of decision making–more accurately, the lack thereof. The court ordered the school board to revisit the decision. Judge Julie Spector found that the school board ignored key evidence–like the declaration from the state’s Board of Education that the discovery math series under consideration was “mathematically unsound”, the state Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction not recommending the curriculum and last but not least, information given to the board by citizens in public testimony.
The decision is an important one because it highlights what parents have known for a long time: School boards generally do what they want to do, evidence be damned. Discovery type math programs are adopted despite parent protests, despite evidence of experts and–judging by the case in Seattle–despite findings from the State Board of Education and the Superintendent of Public Instruction.
I have been exchanging emails with Gabe Rose, communications director of something called the Parent Revolution in my home state, California. Rose and his organization are part of a movement that has, to my open-mouthed amazement, persuaded the state government to give parents the power to close or change the leadership of low-performing public schools.
It sounds great. It has many parents excited. It could shake up the state educational establishment, including the education department, school boards and teacher unions. They could use some shaking up.
Yet I can’t shake my feeling it is a bad idea, a confusing distraction that will bring parents more frustration, not less, and do little to improve their children’s educations.
A fresh, educational reform is sweeping the U.S. and leaving Vermont in the Jurassic period of traditional public schools. What is this reform and why haven’t many MMU students heard of this?
The terms public school and private school are terms that are familiar to all of us. There is nothing foreign to us about the concept (or the practice) of public schools. Something that is not so familiar is the idea of a charter school. Many MMU teens have no idea what a charter school even is. An interviewed sophomore asked if charter schools were “private schools that public people went to,” that student was by far closer than most MMU students. There has been a fast-paced change in education over the past several years and while many states have jumped on the bandwagon, Vermont hasn’t even come close. That change is the development of charter schools.
The U.S .Charter Schools website defines charter schools as “innovative public schools providing choices for families and greater accountability for results.” In other words, they are schools that have been granted a charter exempting themselves from selective state or local rules, while still adhering to the basic educational laws. Their purpose is to build strong communities, to focus on the kids and their needs as well as the make sure each child has the access to a quality education.
After years of complaints from parents, the San Francisco Unified School District has just taken a serious step toward revamping its well-meaning but labyrinthine student-assignment system, which decides the educational homes for tens of thousands of children.
The current system — designed to meet the terms of a settlement in a long-fought federal desegregation case — involves a complicated computer algorithm that creates student “profiles,” using various economic and educational factors, with the aim of sending students of different backgrounds to the same schools.
It has resulted instead in more segregation and has aggravated parents to a point where efforts to manipulate the system have become endemic.
This month, the school district rolled out a new plan. It is designed to more closely consider proximity between a student’s home and classroom. It is to be applied to every child headed for kindergarten.
The government-school establishment has said the same thing for decades: Education is too important to leave to the competitive market. If we really want to help our kids, we must focus more resources on the government schools.
But despite this mantra, the focus is on something other than the kids. When The Washington Post asked George Parker, head of the Washington, D.C., teachers union, about the voucher program there, he said: “Parents are voting with their feet. … As kids continue leaving the system, we will lose teachers. Our very survival depends on having kids in D.C. schools so we’ll have teachers to represent.”
How revealing is that?
Since 1980, government spending on education, adjusted for inflation, has nearly doubled. But test scores have been flat for decades.
Today we spend a stunning $11,000 a year per student — more than $200,000 per classroom. It’s not working. So when will we permit competition and choice, which works great with everything else? I’ll explore those questions on my Fox Business program tomorrow night at 8 and 11 p.m. Eastern time (and again Friday at 10 p.m.).
The people who test students internationally told us that two factors predict a country’s educational success: Do the schools have the autonomy to experiment, and do parents have a choice?Locally, the Madison School District has 24,295 students and a 2009/2010 budget of $418,415,780. $17,222 per student.
Nick Anderson & Michael Birnbaum:
The lure of $4 billion in federal funding at a time of fiscal peril has driven state after state toward school reforms long considered politically unlikely, undoable or unthinkable. This week, Maryland provided the latest surprise: Gov. Martin O’Malley, who is seeking union support for reelection, proposed tighter rules for teachers to qualify for tenure and opened the door to broader use of test scores to evaluate them.
Many teachers view such policies with deep skepticism despite a national movement to overhaul public education’s seniority system. Until recently, there was no reason to think Maryland would join the movement because the state has high-performing public schools and strong unions. O’Malley (D) initially hesitated to propose any changes. But the governor shifted course, hoping to boost Maryland’s chances at snaring as much as $250 million in President Obama’s Race to the Top competition.
“Who fights money?” asked Clara Floyd, president of the Maryland State Education Association, a teachers union.
The contest has catalyzed action from coast to coast to expand charter schools, lay the groundwork for teacher performance pay, revise employee evaluation methods and even consider the first common academic standards. Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R), also seeking reelection, said it added up to too much federal intrusion in local affairs and pulled his state out of the competition. But O’Malley aims for Maryland to apply in June.
Deborah Gist & Pamela Reinsel Cotter:
Deborah Gist: Chasm: Seniority is no longer a way in which teachers will be selected and assigned in our state. I sent a letter to all superintendents last fall to remind them that the Basic Education Program Regulation in going in effect this summer, and seniority policies would be inconsistent with that regulation. Unfortunately, state statute requires that layoffs be done on a “first in, first out” policy. Legislation would be required to change that, and I would wholeheartedly support it if it were introduced. I will do whatever is necessary to ensure that the very highest quality teacher is in every classroom in our state.
Deborah Gist: I can’t imagine how any district or school leader could interpret my words or actions to be anything other than ensuring the top quality, so “change for change’s sake” would be contradictory to that.
Bob: Please run for governor. I love your go getter attitude!
Deborah Gist: I appreciate your support very much. Make sure to keep watching and hold me accountable for results!
Parent: As a parent of 2 children, I know how crucial parent involvement is. Has anyone looked at educating the parents of the kids of these failing schools? You can replace the teachers….and you can give new teachers incentives to change things around. But this is a band aid. Teachers are blamed for too many problems. They can’t be expected to solve the problems of society. Teachers have many many challenges these days- more so than 25 years ago. Kis and parents need to take responsibility for on education. Just look at math grades around the state. Kids don’t know how to deal with fractions because they don’t know how to tell time on an analgoue clock. But the teachers are blamed. Let’s take a look at the real problems. Educate the kids – the parents- look around the country at other programs. Please don’t make this mistake.
Deborah Gist: Parent involvement is important, and supportive, engaged parents are important partners in a child’s education. Fortunately, we know that great teaching can overcome those instances when children have parents who are unable to provide that level of support. I don’t blame teachers, but I do hold them accountable for results. I also hold myself and everyone on my team accountable.
Matt: Will you apologize for repeatedly saying that “we recruit the majority of our teachers from the bottom third of high school students going to college”? The studies that you cite do not back this up.
Deborah Gist: Matt: As a traditionally trained teacher, I know this is difficult to hear. I don’t like it either. Unfortunately, it is true. While there are many extraordinarily intelligent educators throughout Rhode Island and our country, the US–unlike other high performing countries–recruits our teachers from the lowest performers in our secondary schools based on SAT scores and other performance data.
Deborah Gist: If you have a source that shows otherwise, I’d love to see that. I’m always open to learning new resources. So, I’d be happy for you to share that.Clusty Search: Deborah Gist. Deborah Gist’s website and Twitter account.
A must read.
According to the filings in Blake J Robbins v Lower Merion School District (PA) et al, the laptops issued to high-school students in the well-heeled Philly suburb have webcams that can be covertly activated by the schools’ administrators, who have used this facility to spy on students and even their families. The issue came to light when the Robbins’s child was disciplined for “improper behavior in his home” and the Vice Principal used a photo taken by the webcam as evidence. The suit is a class action, brought on behalf of all students issued with these machines.
If true, these allegations are about as creepy as they come. I don’t know about you, but I often have the laptop in the room while I’m getting dressed, having private discussions with my family, and so on. The idea that a school district would not only spy on its students’ clickstreams and emails (bad enough), but also use these machines as AV bugs is purely horrifying.
Less than half of California school districts and only about a quarter of teacher unions have promised to make key education reforms required for the state to win $700 million in competitive federal grants, officials said Wednesday.
Only 41 percent of school districts and 60 percent of eligible charter schools signed on for changes needed to participate in the Obama administration’s Race to the Top contest in which states can win extra federal funding to ease the impact of steep budget cuts.
Still, state education officials were hopeful California would be among the states chosen in April to share about $4.35 billion. Officials note that districts agreeing to the reforms represent 58 percent of the state’s public school students and almost 61 percent of students from low-income families.
“We’re very pleased with the turnout,” said Hilary McLean, spokeswoman for the California Department of Education. “We think we have a very strong application. We’re competitive.”
In recent years, the Hamilton Township School District has set about silently taking in relatives of board of education members and high-ranking administrators, with the district serving as a paying home-away-from-home-until-retirement home. There, kin can gently labor beneath a motto borrowing on the formula E=mc², “Everything is Relative,” and bond with one another in an exclusive patronage pool. A family welfare system is in the making.
Privately, I have wanted this stealth project to fail. My mindset is not entirely propriety-driven; like a lot of people, I am tempted to bend principle to become principal. Other forces at work are envy and money. I am unrelated to any board member or administrator, so I can’t enjoy the relative benefits. I am also a taxpayer in the district and have to shoulder its costs. I am a double loser — no money coming into my pocket all the while money is being emptied from it.
Nevertheless, I feel compelled to express publicly my admiration of the district’s ability to engineer its version of relativity into a family support system . A greater utopia I am hard-pressed to imagine. Let me offer supporting facts. In 2003, only one of the nine members of the board had any relatives working in the district. He had three, so he might be regarded as a pioneer of the project. By 2008, five members were relative-on-board, with a total of seven employed in the district. In 2009, while the number of members with family in-district dropped to four, the total of employed relatives remained at six. Meanwhile, the superintendent and two assistants were also nurturing the value of paid family togetherness. In 2003, they contributed five relatives to the district; by 2009, the number had doubled to 10.More from New Jersey Left Behind.
Governor Bob Wise & Robert Rothman340K PDF:
In his blockbuster best-selling book, writer Malcolm Gladwell identified a phenomenon called ―the tipping point.‖ This point marks the level at which the momentum for change becomes unstoppable and something happens that, in either large or small measure, turns the world on its axis. For those who have been working to improve education, it appears that the tipping point may have finally arrived.
Currently, K-12 education in the United States is dealing with three major crises, each of which on its own is capable of wreaking havoc on schools and communities around the nation, but together are an all-out perfect storm. Simultaneously, the U.S. education system is facing
- global skill demands vs. educational attainment;
- the funding cliff;
- and a looming teacher shortage.
These three factors have brought our education system to a point where the need for change and innovation is no longer something to be researched and discussed. We must do what people have done for centuries and turn crisis into opportunity, somehow making progress in the face of enormous challenges.
Via the Alliance for Excellent Education.
Ed Inghrim, Director, Saucon Valley School Board Lower Saucon Township:
Recently New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie announced a freeze on spending and said pensions and benefits are the major driver of spending increases at all levels of government. He citied two examples of retired public employees. A 49-year-old retiree, who paid $124,000 toward retirement pension and health benefits, will get $3.3 million in pension payments and nearly $500,000 for health care benefits — $3.8 million on a $120,000 investment. A retired teacher who paid $62,000 toward her pension and nothing for full family medical, dental and vision coverage, will collect $1.4 million in pension and $215,000 in health care benefit premiums over her lifetime.
I decided to check his math using the Saucon Valley School District teacher contract as a model. I assumed a teacher hired at age 24 at $40,000 would work 30 years and get an average pay increase of 4 percent a year (quite conservative) and contribute 7.5 percent of salary to the state retirement system. Retiring at 54, the teacher’s total pension contribution would be $168,255. Assuming the teacher lived to 85 and got health benefits until Medicare eligible, he or she would collect about $3.4 million after retiring. Not a bad return. If the annual raise were 5 percent, the teacher would get a return of $4.2 million on an investment of $199,317.Saucon Valley School District 2009-2010 budget document (PDF).
Daniel Mitchell at Cato says school choice “is better than government-imposed monopolies” and also that “[t]he evidence about the school-choice systems in Sweden, Chile, and the Netherlands is particularly impressive.”
I think the buyer needs to beware when he hears libertarian touting school choice concepts. Choice can add a lot of value to education, or it can be destructive. The details actually matter a great deal. Bentley MacLeod and Miguel Urquiola did a paper, “Anti-Lemons: School Reputation and Educational Quality” which sheds important light on this issue:Friedman (1962) argued that a free market in which schools compete based upon their reputation would lead to an efficient supply of educational services. This paper explores this issue by building a tractable model in which rational individuals go to school and accumulate skill valued in a perfectly competitive labor market. To this it adds one ingredient: school reputation in the spirit of Holmstrom (1982). The first result is that if schools cannot select students based upon their ability, then a free market is indeed efficient and encourages entry by high productivity schools. However, if schools are allowed to select on ability, then competition leads to stratification by parental income, increased transmission of income inequality, and reduced student effort–in some cases lowering the accumulation of skill. The model accounts for several (sometimes puzzling) findings in the educational literature, and implies that national standardized testing can play a key role in enhancing learning.
From Dennis to Eric:
State Sen. James T. Meeks, D-Chicago, one of the most influential voices in the city’s black community, recently stood before a group of mostly white, free-market conservatives to passionately plead for their support.
It was an unlikely meeting of the minds at an Illinois Policy Institute lunch session, but when Meeks was finished, he had his audience cheering. Might this be the launch of a political alliance that would unshackle Chicago kids from the tyranny, dangers and incompetence of Chicago Public Schools?
Meeks, pastor of Salem Baptist Church, was pitching Senate Bill 2494, his proposed Illinois School Choice Program Act that would give vouchers to students in the worst public schools to attend non-public schools of their choice.
Meeks, a recent voucher convert, came to talk political reality: Legislation that would free children from their bondage would be hard for African-American lawmakers to oppose. Combined with the support of Republican voucher supporters, they might be able to create a coalition that could make vouchers available for the first time in Illinois.
A nasal spray containing a hormone that makes women more maternal and men less shy apparently can help those with autism make eye contact and interact better with others, according to a provocative study released Monday.
The study involving 13 adults with autism found that when they inhaled the hormone oxytocin they scored significantly better on a test that involved recognizing faces and performed much better in a game that involved tossing a ball with other people.
Although more research is needed to confirm and explore the findings, the results are the latest in a growing body of evidence indicating that the hormone could lead to ways to help people with the often devastating brain disorder function better.
A Clayton State University education professor says the recipe has been in place for a while for CRCT cheating with the main ingredient being the pressure on schools to reach artificial and questionable goals.
Here is an opinion piece by Mari Ann Roberts, assistant professor in Clayton State University’s department of teacher education:I like to cook so I’m going to share a recipe with you.
- Take one flawed underfunded federal education improvement act, like NCLB,
- add increasing pressure on individual schools to meet “Adequate Yearly Progress,”
- include some inane expectations that teachers can work miracles,
- sprinkle liberally with furlough days, suspended raises, and budget cuts dating back to 2003 that will total more than $2.8 billion through the fiscal year ending next June.
And what do you get? Whatever it is, it can’t be good.
As Default Rates on Borrowing for Higher Education Rise, Some Borrowers See No Way Out; ‘This Is Just Outrageous Now’
When Michelle Bisutti, a 41-year-old family practitioner in Columbus, Ohio, finished medical school in 2003, her student-loan debt amounted to roughly $250,000. Since then, it has ballooned to $555,000.
It is the result of her deferring loan payments while she completed her residency, default charges and relentlessly compounding interest rates. Among the charges: a single $53,870 fee for when her loan was turned over to a collection agency.
“Maybe half of it was my fault because I didn’t look at the fine print,” Dr. Bisutti says. “But this is just outrageous now.”
First lady Michelle Obama’s new campaign against childhood obesity, dubbed “Let’s Move,” puts improvements to school food at the top of the agenda. Some 31 million children participate in federal school meal programs, Obama noted in announcing her initiative last week, “and what we don’t want is a situation where parents are taking all the right steps at home — and then their kids undo all that work with salty, fatty food in the school cafeteria,” she explained. “So let’s move to get healthier food into our nation’s schools.”
Last month I had a chance to see up close what all the school food fuss was about when I spent a week in the kitchen of my 10-year-old daughter’s public school, H.D. Cooke Elementary, in Northwest D.C. Chartwells, the company contracted by the city to provide meals to the District’s schools, had switched in the fall from serving warm-up meals prepackaged in a factory to food it called “fresh cooked,” and I couldn’t wait to chronicle in my food blog how my daughter’s school meals were being prepared from scratch.
Anthony J. Tata was an Army brigadier general in northeast Afghanistan’s Kunar Province in April 2006 when a Taliban rocket slammed into a primary school in Asadabad, killing seven children and wounding 34.
The vicious attack and others like it by the Taliban left him with a thought: “It struck me at the time that if the enemy of my enemy is education, then perhaps that’s a second act for me.”
Three years later, Tata began his second act by accepting Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee’s offer to become chief operating officer for D.C. public schools, a newly created post that places him in charge of purchasing, food service, technology and other support areas.
After a 28-year career that took him to Kosovo, Macedonia, Panama, the Philippines and the international agency charged with thwarting improvised explosive devices, Tata’s mission is to help bring the District’s notorious school bureaucracy to heel.Brent Elementary principal Cheryl Wilhoyte was mentioned in this article. Wilhoyte is a former Superintendent of the Madison School District.
Los Angeles schools Supt. Ramon C. Cortines proposed Friday cutting six days from the school year to help reduce an estimated $640-million deficit and avoid the need for widespread layoffs in the nation’s second-largest school system.
The move, announced by news release Friday evening, would save the district $90 million and could spare up to 5,000 jobs, Cortines said. The alternative to this drastic action, he said, would be to let the district go bankrupt.
“Do I think [this] is good education policy? No,” he said. “But we are in a real crisis.”
Cortines has repeatedly said that he did not want to shorten the school year. This is the first time in recent history that a Los Angeles school superintendent has made such a suggestion.