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How Safe Is Your Child’s School Bus?
Despite Recent Accidents, It’s the Safest Way to Go

Yesterday, a school bus collided with a truck in Brampton, Ontario, critically injuring a 10-year-old boy and seriously harming another child. It was the latest in a series of dramatic crashes that have heightened many parents’ fears about the safety of the yellow buses their kids ride on every day.
In Atlanta last month, an accident involving a motor coach killed six college-baseball-team members, and in Huntsville, Ala., in November, a school-bus crash killed four teenage girls.
Some parents, such as Gwen MacMillan, a Leawood, Kan., mother of three, opt to drive their kids themselves rather than entrust them to a school bus. “I really don’t understand why the buses don’t have seat belts, because it seems like they would make them safer,” says Ms. MacMillan, echoing many parents’ concerns.
Yet accident data and interviews with transportation experts suggest school buses are actually far safer than other forms of school transport, including the family car. Indeed, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, school buses are by far the safest passenger vehicles on the road.
School-bus makers have made several upgrades in the past few years to address everything from driver visibility to handing, maneuverability and comfort. Space-age adhesives replace spot welds and rivets in certain body and chassis parts, and some new buses have Global Positioning Systems and computerized controls that function like the “black box” recorders found in aircraft. Many of the new models represent the first significant changes to school-bus design since the most recent federal safety standard for school buses took effect in 1977.

Waukesha School District Budget Notes and Links

The Waukesha School District’s 2006-2007 Budget ($165,388,112 for 13,063 students = $12,660 – similar per student spending to the Madison Schools. Wisconsin’s average per student spending is just under $10,000.) [1.1MB PDF]
Amy Hetzner:

Only a month after voting to eliminate the equivalent of 62 full-time staff positions to avoid a budget shortfall in the coming school year, the School Board began discussions Wednesday about ways to broach nearly $3.7 million in reductions for 2008-’09.

Waukesha Taxpayer League’s Teacher Salary Study
Mark Belling:

In no school district in Wisconsin is the school tax situation more disgusting than Waukesha. In that community, a demagogic school board and superintendent are threatening draconian cuts including the elimination of all high school sports. Their tactic is anything but subtle. They’re laying the groundwork for a tax increase proposal.
In fact, the Waukesha School District is awash in cash. It has been raising school taxes for decades and is spending thousands more per student than it did only a few years ago. I can solve its budget “crisis” now.

Workshop on green charter schools

From the Wisconsin Charter Schools Association:

You’re invited to join educators, environmentalists and others at the Environmental Charter Schools Workshop.
Date: May 2, 2007, Wednesday
Time: 9:00am to 2:30pm
Site: MADISON, UW Arboretum
Workshop Program: Unique features of “green” charter schools, integrated environmental curriculum, standards and accountability, charter partners supporting sustainable schools, and implementing a green charter school. Learn more at Green Charter Schools.
Presenters, Partners & Discussion Leaders: JIM McGRATH, founder and former principal of Oshkosh Environmental Charter School; VICTORIA RYDBERG, Teacher, River Crossing Charter School; JULIE SPALDING, Educator, Fox River Academy, and INGRID BEAMSLEY, WCSA Deputy Director
Registration: The registration fee is only $20, which covers the conference, lunch and materials. Send registrant’s name and email address, along with a $20 check payable to the WCSA, to: Wisconsin Charter Schools Association, PO Box 1704, Madison, WI 53701-1704 . Questions? Contact the WCSA at: Tel: 608-661-6946 or Email: info@wicharterschools.org or FAX: 608-258-3413
Links to 40 “GREEN” charter schools.
Read about “Green Charter Schools” in Wisconsin Trails magazine.

Public Schools Lack a Competitive Spirit

35 Year Michigan Teacher Ken Feneley:

Brendan Miniter’s description of “how school choice was defeated in South Carolina” (“Cross Country: A Day Late,” op-ed, March 31) perfectly describes the power created by a combination of teacher unions and politicians they help elect to office. What gets lost is what’s best for the kids. In this case, it seems, the paranoid worries about the impact of losing students to schools of choice has outweighed possible benefits that might, just might, happen for 200,000 kids in South Carolina.
There is no apparent competitive spirit among the public school establishment types that is leading them to say what I would have: “Go ahead with school choice and I’ll prove you wrong. Just tell me what I need to do and watch what happens. I’ll change, if needed, and soon you will wish you had had left your kids in my school.”
I would not worry about some lean times while my public school made adjustments. I’d tighten my belt, suck up my pride, take two deep breaths and get to work. I, while teaching for 35 years, fully recognized that the union, the Michigan Education Association, could not have cared less about whether I was a good teacher or not. Its only concern was that I not have more than one prep period per day, did not exceed more than the contracted student numbers per class, that I did not do anything the contract prohibited, that I was paid the same as the teacher down the hall regardless of merit, that teaching and other positions were guaranteed regardless, that as many grievances be filed as possible, and, oh boy, that dues were such that the upper level union employees could be paid better than any contracted teacher in a local school.
Instead, we have this perpetual paranoid promotion of the idea that public schools will decline because of competition. And unionists and unions really do have something to fear, I guess, because if that paranoia dissipates, the teachers union loses its reason for existence: the endless promotion of teacher jobs at union pay rates that support the South Carolina Education Association and the National Education Association infrastructure through union dues. They can’t get along without them.
Notice that student education concerns through my subject matter delivery skills was not mentioned once. Unions don’t care. Obviously, neither do South Carolina politicians.

No Child Left Behind Renewal Discussion

Sam Dillon:

Now, as the president and the same Democrats push to renew the landmark law, which has reshaped the face of American education with its mandates for annual testing, discontent with it in many states is threatening to undermine the effort in both parties.
Arizona and Virginia are battling the federal government over rules for testing children with limited English. Utah is fighting over whether rural teachers there pass muster under the law. And Connecticut is two years into a lawsuit arguing that No Child Left Behind has failed to provide states federal financing to meet its requirements.
Reacting to such disputes in state after state, dozens of Republicans in Congress are sponsoring legislation that would water down the law by allowing states to opt out of its testing requirements yet still receive federal money.
On the other side of the political spectrum, 10 Democratic senators signed a letter last month saying that based on feedback from constituents, they consider the law’s testing mandates to be “unsustainable” and want an overhaul.
“It’s going to be a brawl,” said Jack Jennings, a Democrat who as president of the Center on Education Policy has studied how the law has been set up in the 50 states. “The law is drawing opposition from the right because they are opposed to federal interference and from the left because of too much testing.”

Ruth Robarts Deserves a Medal

Ruth Robarts’ roller coaster
DOUG ERICKSON 608-252-6149
derickson@madison.com
Ruth Robarts steps down April 23 after 10 years on the Madison School Board, and, no, she’s not expecting a cake from her colleagues.
Although Robarts first ran as a facilitator – “That didn’t work out so well,” she says now with a guffaw – she became known more as a budget hawk and contrarian.
Along the way, she’s been praised as a straight-shooting maverick and criticized as an obstructionist who just likes to carp.
She chose not to seek re- election. Her replacement – Maya Cole or Marjorie Passman – will be elected Tuesday.
Robarts’ legacy differs markedly, depending on who’s talking, but most agree she traveled an interesting route from a team player to an outsider to a can’t-be-ignored-because-the- voters-like-her force.
She finishes her board service less lonely due to the elections in recent years of like- minded colleagues Lawrie Kobza and Lucy Mathiak. But Robarts cautions that in the last decade, it has become more difficult for candidates not endorsed by the teachers union or tied to the board majority to get elected.

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An open letter to the Superintendent of Madison Metropolitan Schools

Dear Mr. Rainwater:
I just found out from the principal at my school that you cut the allocations for SAGE teachers and Strings teachers, but the budget hasn’t even been approved. Will you please stop playing politics with our children education? It?s time to think about your legacy.
As you step up to the chopping block for your last whack at the budget, please think carefully about how your tenure as our superintendent will be viewed a little more than a year from now when your position is filled by a forward-thinking problem-solver. (Our district will settle for no less.)
Do you want to be remembered as the Superintendent who increased class size as a first step when the budget got tight? Small class size repeatedly rises to the top as the best way to enhance student achievement at the elementary level. Why would you take away one of best protections against federal funding cuts mandated by the No Child Left Behind Act? Rather than increase pupil to teacher ratios, have you checked to see if the pupil to administrative staff ratio has been brought closer to the state-wide average? (In 2002, Madison Metropolitan schools were at 195 children per administrator; the rest of the state averaged 242 children per administrator.) Have the few administrative openings you?ve left unfilled over the past few years actually brought us into line with the rest of the state?

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They’ll Do It Themselves, Thanks

By MICHAEL WINERIP
Published: March 11, 2007
The New York Times
I LIKE it!” said Yaniv Gorodischer. “What a night!”
It was a big, big night at the group home. The three residents Mr.
Gorodischer, 29, Jason Kingsley, 32, and Raymond Frost Jr., 28 along with an entourage that included their group home supervisor, Ernest Daniels, and their parents, were going to the Town Board meeting to present a petition to get a sidewalk for their busy street, Chatterton Parkway.
All three had put on neckties. “For Town Hall I want to look decent,” Mr.Frost said. “Handsome and decent.” He’d practiced his speech six times. “I’m going to say, ‘My name is Raymond Frost Jr.’ And I’ll say that we got our neighbors to sign the petition, and 28 signed and 2 didn’t want to.”
And Mr. Gorodischer said: “First off, I’ll say, ‘My name is Yaniv
Gorodischer.’ And I can remember, I remember … shoot, I forgot.”
For that reason, Emily Kingsley, Jason’s mother, had written a speech for them to read. “Just in case,” she said, handing it to her son.
“We won’t need it,” he said. “We know how to say it.”
Several weeks before, Ms. Kingsley had drawn up the petition and
accompanied her son and his two roommates door to door. All three men have Down syndrome and cannot drive, but they are striving to be as independent as possible, and that means walking to their jobs along this street with its steep hill, its blind curve and cars that whiz by.
Ms. Kingsley, 67, had stood in the driveways while the three men knocked on doors, collecting signatures. “Most people were very nice,” she said. “When one man refused, they got confused. They couldn’t understand someone would say no to them. He was an old guy and said if he had a sidewalk he’d have to shovel snow. They said, ‘We’ll shovel it for you.’ And he says, ‘No, you won’t.’ And they say, ‘Yes, we will.’ ”
Since the group home opened in September 2002, the three have worked hard to be good neighbors. “Tell the story how you called me about baking a cake for your new neighbors,” Ms. Kingsley said.
“I don’t know that story,” her son said.
“Yes, you do.”
“It’s coming back,” the son said. “We asked to bake a cake for the new neighbors across the street. That was nice of us, to give them a little treat.” “And you called me for help with the cake,” the mother said. “And I said, “All three of you are on a diet.’ ”
“Not for us,” her son said. “For the neighbors.”
“Chocolate cake,” Mr. Frost said.
“We all helped,” Mr. Gorodischer said.
“Three Musketeers,” Mr. Frost said. “Now four beautiful years living in this house.” “Almost five beautiful years,” Mr. Kingsley said.
“A very big environment,” Mr. Gorodischer said.
“Because we all three guys looked out for each other,” Mr. Frost said.
“And what is the meaning of brotherhood?” Mr. Gorodischer said. “We can stand tall and be united. Meaning we can win over Town Hall!”
Then someone said it was time, and the three piled out the door and down the stairs and squeezed into Ms. Kingsley’s sedan, heading for Town Hall to see if they could get themselves a sidewalk.
WHEN Jason Kingsley was born, on June 27, 1974, the doctors told Ms.
Kingsley and her husband, Charles, to put him in an institution. “They told me he wouldn’t be able to distinguish us from other adults,” she recalled.
“They said, ‘Never see him again, and tell your friends and family that he died in childbirth.’ They were so sure I would institutionalize him, they gave me pills to dry up my milk.’ ”
Ms. Kingsley couldn’t have known it then, but her son was born right at the great divide between the dark years, when the mentally retarded were hidden away in state institutions, and modern times, when most of those institutions have been shuttered and the developmentally disabled live among us, in supervised group homes and apartment programs.
Two years before Jason’s birth, in January 1972,
Geraldo Rivera had sneaked into Willowbrook, a snake pit of an institution on Staten Island that was home to 5,400 mentally retarded people. He filmed a ward of 60 emaciated children, many naked, some in straitjackets, surrounded by walls smeared with feces and supervised by a single attendant. His televised exposé led to a federal class-action lawsuit, which Gov. Hugh L. Carey could have settled by promising to improve Willowbrook. Instead, Mr. Carey set off a social revolution. In a 1975 consent decree, he pledged to move the residents out of Willowbrook and
into state-financed community housing. Decades later, Mr. Carey would say it was the one thing he’d done as governor that he could really hold on to.
At the time, there were 26,000 people living in 20 state institutions for the retarded in New York and just 1,570 in state-financed group homes.
Today there are 32,722 developmentally disabled New Yorkers in community residences, and fewer than a thousand the most severely disabled in a handful of institutions. In 1980, New Jersey had just 471 community beds; Connecticut had 963. Today New Jersey has 7,173, Connecticut 5,313. They are paid for by the states, and most are run by nonprofit agencies.
In 1974, the Kingsleys started on what was then a new parenting approach for children with disabilities called early intervention, which today has become standard practice. The infant is exposed to high levels of stimulus and physical therapy. Ms. Kingsley did Jason’s room in bright colors; she made a quilt for him with every patch a different material. “We surrounded him with motion and music, and we’d talk and talk to him,” she says. To “wake up his senses,” she filled a tub with Jell-O, and plopped him in.
“I had people tell me that he wouldn’t be able to read,” she recalled. “He started reading at age 4. It was so exciting. Everything they said he wouldn’t do, he was doing.”
Jason’s parents would take him to Broadway musicals, and he would memorize all the songs. To this day, if Ms. Kingsley challenges her son to adapt a show tune for his roommates, he’ll burst into a verse of “Singing in the Raymond” or “Some Enchanted Yaniving.”
The Kingsleys lectured at medical schools about the untapped potential of children with Down syndrome. “Doctors needed to see the old stereotypes didn’t apply,” she said. Ms. Kingsley is a veteran writer for “Sesame Street” she has won 17 Emmys and she pushed to have Jason on the air, so the public, too, would see. Jason appeared a dozen times, starting at 15 months (sitting on Buffy Sainte-Marie’s lap as she sang). At age 6 he did skits with Ernie, at 8 with Forgetful Jones.
Being pioneers, Ms. Kingsley and her husband (who died nine years ago) had no sense where the limits were, and it was hard when they learned. “I thought he was so smart, I thought I had fixed it,” she said. “But between 6 and 8 all the typical kids caught up and passed by. Typical kids got sophisticated and streetwise, picked up nuances about relationships that he could not.
“Jason was great at parlor tricks, he could count to 10 in 12 languages,” she said. But when she put him in a youth soccer league, he too often ran the wrong way. He mastered the mechanics of reading but struggled with comprehension. “He learned, but took longer than regular kids.” Regular kids would say, “Do we have to have him on our team?”
“I realized this was in fact a child with D.S.,” she said, “and as hard as I worked, it would not go away.”
Thanks to his mother’s background in television, the son had opportunitiesmost never get. At 10 he appeared on the TV show “The Fall Guy”; at 19, on “touched by an Angel.” With his mother’s help, he and his friend Mitchell Levitz wrote a book about Down syndrome, “Count Us In,” published by Harcourt in 1994.
But when Mr. Kingsley was no longer young and cuddly, things were harder. Having mingled with the stars, he grew impatient with mundane work. He had a job shelving videos at a library, and came up with his own system for reorganizing the collection. “It made perfect sense to him,” his mother says, “but nobody could find anything.” He now delivers mail in an office building, though he still lists his career goal as “directing animated feature films for the Disney corporation.” His roommate Mr. Gorodischer works in the mailroom of a law office. Mr. Frost is a clerk at Petco, specializing in fish and small animals.
The Kingsleys set their son up in his own apartment in the late 1990s, but over time, he became isolated, the apartment grew messy, and he stopped shaving and bathing regularly. “We were too optimistic,” Ms. Kingsley said. “He needed more structure.” The group home, which is run by Westchester Arc, a nonprofit agency, has counselors on duty from 4 p.m. to 8 a.m. to provide both oversight and routine. It’s a comfort for the mother, who will not live forever.
AS they walked into Town Hall, Mr. Gorodischer lagged behind, and Mr. Frost yelled, “Yaniv, move up, you’re with us.”
Inside, Channel 12 was waiting. “How long have you been fighting for this?” the reporter asked.
“This is our first time,” Mr. Frost said.
“But you have petitions?” the reporter said.
“We hope to win over Town Hall,” Mr. Frost said.
They launched into a “Three Musketeers” cheer all for one and one for all! that caught Channel 12 off guard. “Hold on, we missed that,” the reporter said. “Let’s do it again. Quiet … action.”
Before the meeting, Paul J. Feiner, the town supervisor, told the men he supported the sidewalk and credited them with forcing the Town Board to develop a sidewalk policy, but said it could be two years before there was any action.
They were first on the agenda, and it must have been more nerve-racking than they had expected, because, after a few hems and haws, Mr. Kingsley pulled out the speech his mother had written, and each of them read a few sentences.
“You should go home tonight feeling very, very proud,” Mr. Feiner said. “You’ve already accomplished a lot, and I’ll work hard to make your dream of sidewalks a reality.”
The whole thing took about three minutes, and soon the entourage was back at the group home with everyone gathered around the dining room table eating cake. While the guests chatted away, Mr. Frost and Mr. Kingsley slipped upstairs. It was getting late, and they had work in the morning.

“Cooking the Numbers” – Madison’s Reading Program

Joanne Jacobs:

From the Fayetteville, NC Observer:

Superintendent Art Rainwater loves to discuss the Madison Metropolitan School District’s success in eliminating the racial achievement gap.
But he won’t consult with educators from other communities until they are ready to confront the issue head on.
“I’m willing to talk,” Rainwater tells people seeking his advice, “when you are willing to stand up and admit the problem, to say our minority children do not perform as well as our white students.”

Only then will Rainwater reveal the methods Madison used to level the academic playing field for minority students.
This is an odd statement. The racial achievement gap is accepted as an uncomfortable fact everywhere; it is much discussed. No superintendent in the U.S. — except for Rainwater — claims to have eliminated the gap.

Today, Rainwater said, no statistical achievement gap exists between the 25,000 white and minority students in Madison’s schools.
Impressive, but untrue, writes Right Wing Prof, who looked at Madison reading scores across all grades.

I found a graph comparing Madison to five similar districts in Wisconsin, all of which do much better than Madison on fourth-grade reading.

Joanne was in Milwaukee and Madison recently to discuss her book, “Our School“.
Related Links:

Diana Jean Schemo’s article: Madison’s Reading Battle Makes the NYT: In War Over Teaching Reading, a U.S.-Local Clash
Jason Shephard: Reading Between the Lines: Madison Was Right to Reject Compromised Program
Mark Seidenberg on Reading First
Joanne Jacobs on Reading War II
Third Grade Reading Scores by Ed Blume
Mark Seidenberg’s informal talk on reading education
“There’s something deeply wrong here” and here

How can we help poor students achieve more?

Jason Shephard:

As a teacher-centered lesson ended the other morning at Midvale Elementary School, about 15 first-graders jumped up from their places on the carpeted rug and dashed to their personal bins of books.
Most students quickly settled into two assigned groups. One read a story about a fox in a henhouse with the classroom teacher, and another group, headed by a UW-Madison student teacher, read a more challenging nonfiction book about a grandmother who, as one child excitedly noted, lived to be 101.
In addition to this guided reading lesson, one boy sat at a computer wearing headphones, clicking on the screen that displayed the words as a story was read aloud to him, to build word recognition and reading stamina. Two other boys read silently from more advanced books. Another boy received one-on-one help from a literacy coach conducting a Reading Recovery lesson with him.
“I think what’s so important is that this program truly meets the needs of a variety of students, from those who are struggling to those who are accelerated,” says Principal John Burkholder.

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The Co-op Model’s Relevance Today

Nancy L Zimpher:

Cooperative education is now more than 100 years old. The co-op approach, in which students alternate time in the classroom with professionally paid work directly related to their majors, was founded at the University of Cincinnati by Dean Herman Schneider in 1906. There are co-op programs today at 500 institutions in the United States.
The centennial marks a good time to take stock. How effective is co-op? What has been its impact on its three fundamental partners — students, employers, and institutions of higher education? Is co-op still relevant? Still viable? What role should co-op play in 21st century education?
I see empirical evidence of co-op’s value every day at the University of Cincinnati. We have 3,800 students in 44 disciplines participating in co-op opportunities at more than 1,500 employers in 34 states and 9 foreign countries. At graduation, UC co-op students have an enviable head-start in their careers by virtue of their on-the-job work experience (an average of one-and-a-half years for UC students), marketable skills, impressive credentials, and networking connections. Many are hired immediately by the companies where they completed their co-ops.

Madison’s Fund 80 & Elections

TJ Mertz:

In this morning’s Wisconsin State Journal there is a story that again misrepresents the place of Madison School Community Recreation and Fund 80 in the district and the community.
The chart comparing Fund 80 levies in Madison to those in other districts ignores the fact that most or all of those locales have municipal recreation programs paid for by municipal taxes. Due to a historical quirk, Madison has very little in the way of a municipal recreation department and programs and services that other locales fund via municipal or county taxes are funded and governed by the school district via Fund 80. In order to get a realistic comparison of Madison’s spending on recreational and community education programming one must look at total levies devoted to this. The last time I did this (early 2006) I found that the combined spending on MSCR and the Madison Parks Department was about $20 million. De Moines, IA (about the same size) has a parks and recreation budget of about $20 million. Ann Arbor, MI is about half the size of Madison and has a Parks and Recreation budget of $12 million. Green Bay, also about half the size has a Parks and Recreation Budget of $8 million. In other words, the spending in these areas is very much in line with what others spend.

There’s been no shortage of discussion on Fund 80 here. 2006 / 2007 Madison School District $333M+ Citizen’s Budget.
Related:

Amy Hetzner: Community Service Levies Climbed Since Revenue Caps Lifted:

But once the Legislature removed the caps on the community service levies for the 2000-’01 school year and gave school districts an opportunity to keep their recreational activities from conflicting with educational programs, more took advantage of it.
“I think – when you look at districts across the state – that’s really what caused the jump,” said Art Rainwater, superintendent of the Madison Metropolitan School District, which in 2005-’06 had the largest community service levy in the state.
Like some of the bigger community service funds, Madison’s supports a full recreation department with adult and youth programming. But it also helps pay for television production activities, after-school activities, a gay and lesbian community program coordinator and part of a social worker’s time to work with low-income families, Rainwater said.
The School District’s community service levy is expected to grow to $10.5 million in the coming school year. In contrast, the same levy for Milwaukee Public Schools – which serves nearly four times as many children in its educational programs – is expected to reach $9.3 million, said Michelle Nate, the district’s director of finance.
Although the state Department of Public Instruction has issued guidelines to school districts on how they should use their community service levies, it leaves it up to local residents to decide whether their school boards do so wisely and legally.
Carol Carstensen: Fund 80 is Worth our Support.
Lucy Mathiak: Community Service Fund 80, Can We talk?
Ruth Robarts: A Tale of Two Budgets: the Operating Budget for Madison Schools versus its Budget for Community Programs and Services
A look at the City of Madison’s parcel count growth.

The charts are from Lucy Mathiak’s post:

More on Madison’s Reading First Rejection and Reading Recovery

Joanne Jacobs:

Reading War II is still raging as reading experts attack a New York Times story on Madison’s decision to reject federal Reading First funds in order to continue a reading program that the Times claims is effective. Education News prints as-yet unpublished letters to the Times from Reid Lyons, Robert Sweet, Louisa Moats, Linnea Ehri and Joanna Williams, Timothy Shanahan and Mark Seidenberg. Professor Moats, formerly co-investigator of the NICHD Early Interventions Project, a five-year, federally funded study of reading instruction in high-poverty schools, points out that the Office of Management and Budget “recently gave the Reading First program its highest (and unusual) rating of effectiveness.”

Joanne will be speaking in Milwaukee on March 23, 2007. More: Reading First and Reading Recovery.

Reading Recovery: More chipping and shredding in Fargo!

What makes this article from Fargo interesting is how it almost exactly mirrors the findings in my home district, Hortonville, and the recent analysis of Reading Recovery done in Madison. That being, a 50% success rate for RR students. From the article:

“However, West Fargo student data over time, as presented by Director of Knowledge Management Holly Budzinski Monday night, show that while this is happening in the short term, it?s not something the students sustain in the long run. The Administration has been scrutinizing the Reading Recovery program since two days after Budzinski arrived in West Fargo last January, and she has found that the majority of students served by Reading Recovery gradually lose their abilities to meet the class average by the time they reach sixth grade.”

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Limits of Law-Based School Reform

Mike Antonucci:

There’s an excellent book from 1997 called The Limits of Law-Based School Reform that I think everyone – especially lawmakers and public policy experts – should read. But the title alone should be enough for all of us who think passing a law to address a perceived education problem is sufficient to solve it.
It’s only human nature after winning a tough legislative battle to want to declare victory and go home. I’m sure the 186 Republicans and 197 Democrats in the U.S. House who voted for the No Child Left Behind Act in 2001 didn’t think they would still be debating it five years later. The pattern is repeating itself in Utah.

Modern-Day 3 R’s: Rules, Rules, Rules

Ian Shapira:

A culture of control has Washington area campuses in an ever-tightening grip, many students say, extending beyond the long-standing restrictions on provocative clothing, cellphone use and class-time bathroom visits. Akin to the omnipresent “helicopter parents,” these students say, are helicopter administrators who home in on their smallest moves, no matter how guileless or mundane.
Some administrators acknowledge that the list of rules meant to ban, limit or deter potentially inappropriate or dangerous actions is steadily growing.
“Where to start? It’s getting huge,” said Linda Wanner, a Blair assistant principal. “The word of the day is prevention. We’re on high alert all the time.” It’s a result, experts say, of the many pressures on those who lead a modern campus with anywhere from 1,000 to 3,000 teenagers and the potential for violence or a lawsuit around every hallway corner.

“Bitter Medicine for Madison Schools”:
07/08 budget grows 3.6% from 333M (06/07) to $345M with Reductions in the Increase

Doug Erickson on the 2007/2008 $345M budget (up from $333M in 2006/2007) for 24,342 students):

As feared by some parents, the recommendations also included a plan to consolidate schools on the city’s East Side. Marquette Elementary students would move to Lapham Elementary and Sherman Middle School students would be split between O’Keeffe and Black Hawk middle schools.
No school buildings would actually close – O’Keeffe would expand into the space it currently shares with Marquette, and the district’s alternative programs would move to Sherman Middle School from leased space.
District officials sought to convince people Friday that the consolidation plan would have some educational benefits, but those officials saw no silver lining in having to increase class sizes at several elementary schools.
Friday’s announcement has become part of an annual ritual in which Madison – and most other state districts – must reduce programs and services because overhead is rising faster than state-allowed revenue increases. A state law caps property-tax income for districts based on enrollment and other factors.
The Madison School District will have more money to spend next year – about $345 million, up from $332 million – but not enough to keep doing everything it does this year.
School Board members ultimately will decide which cuts to make by late May or June, but typically they stick closely to the administration’s recommendations. Last year, out of $6.8 million in reductions, board members altered less than $500,000 of Rainwater’s proposal.
Board President Johnny Winston Jr. called the cuts “draconian” but said the district has little choice. Asked if the School Board will consider a referendum to head off the cuts, he said members “will discuss everything.”
But board Vice President Lawrie Kobza said she thinks it’s too early to ask the community for more money. Voters approved a $23 million referendum last November that included money for a new elementary school on the city’s Far West Side.
“I don’t see a referendum passing,” she said.

Links: Wisconsin K-12 spending. The 10.5M reductions in the increase plus the planned budget growth of $12M yields a “desired” increase of 7.5%. In other words, current Administration spending growth requires a 7.5% increase in tax receipts from property, sales, income, fees and other taxes (maybe less – see Susan Troller’s article below). The proposed 07/08 budget grows 3.6% from 333M+ (06/07) to $345M (07/08). Madison’s per student spending has grown an average of 5.25% since 1987 – details here.
UPDATE: A reader emails:

The spectre of central city school closings was what prompted some of us to resist the far-west side school referendum. Given the looming energy crisis, we should be encouraging folks to live in town, not at the fringes, strengthen our city neighborhoods. Plus, along with the need to overhaul the way we fund schools, we need a law requiring developers to provide a school or at least the land as a condition to development.

UPDATE 2: Susan Troller pegs the reduction in the increase at $7.2M:

Proposed reductions totaled almost $7.2 million and include increases in elementary school class sizes, changes in special education allocations and school consolidations on the near east side.
Other recommendations include increased hockey fees, the elimination of the elementary strings program and increased student-to-staff ratios at the high school and middle school levels.

UPDATE 3: Roger Price kindly emailed the total planned 07/08 budget: $339,139,282

Madison Superintendent’s 2007-2008 Proposed Budget Changes

Art Rainwater on the reductions in increases to the proposed 2007-2008 MMSD Budget [1.4MB PDF]:

Dear Board of Education,
The attached is my recommendation for the service reductions required to balance the budget for 2007-2008. They are provided to you for review in advance of my Recommended Balanced Budget for 2007-2008 which will be available on April 12, 2007. You requested that the service reductions be presented to you in advance to provide sufficient time for your study and analysis.
After 14 years of continuous reductions in our services for children there are no good choices. While these service reductions are not good for children or the health of the school district they represent our best professional judgment of the least harmful alternatives.
The process that we used to study, analyze, consider and finally recommend the items presented was done over a period of weeks. We first reviewed each department and division of the district and listed anything that could be reduced or eliminated legally or contractually. We narrowed that list to those items which we believed would do the least harm to:

Our academic programs,
The health and safety of our schools,
The opportunities for student involvement,
Our ability to complete our legal and fiscal requirements

The document presented to you today is the result of those discussions. The items are broken into four categories:

Reductions to balance the budget ( Impact Statements provided)
Reductions analyzed, discussed and not included (Impact statements provided)
Reductions reviewed and not advanced
Possible revenues dependent on legislative action

The administration is prepared to provide you further analysis and respond to questions as we continue to work to approve a final working budget in May.

2006/2007 Citizen’s Budget ($333M+) for 24,342 students. I did not quickly notice a total proposed 2007/2008 spending number in this document.
UPDATE: Overall spending will grow about 3.4% from $333M to $345M per Doug Erickson’s article.
Links: NBC15 | Channel3000

Homeschooling and Socialization

Richard Medlin:

Shyers (1992a, 1992b), in the most thorough study of home-schooled children’s social behavior to date, tested 70 children who had been entirely home-schooled and 70 children who had always attended traditional schools. The two groups were matched in age (all were 8-10 years old), race, gender, family size, socioeconomic status, and number and frequency of extracurricular activities. Shyers measured self-concept and assertiveness and found no significant differences between the two groups.
The observers used the Direct Observation Form of the Child Behavior Checklist . . . , a checklist of 97 problem behaviors such as argues, brags or boasts, doesn’t pay attention long, cries, disturbs other children, isolates self from others, shy or timimd, and shows off. The results were striking — the mean problem behavior score for children attending conventional schools was more than eight times higher than that of the home-schooled group.

via Joanne.

Madison’s Reading Battle Makes the NYT: In War Over Teaching Reading, a U.S.-Local Clash

Diana Jean Schemo has been at this article for awhile:

The program, which gives $1 billion a year in grants to states, was supposed to end the so-called reading wars — the battle over the best method of teaching reading — but has instead opened a new and bitter front in the fight.
According to interviews with school officials and a string of federal audits and e-mail messages made public in recent months, federal officials and contractors used the program to pressure schools to adopt approaches that emphasize phonics, focusing on the mechanics of sounding out syllables, and to discard methods drawn from whole language that play down these mechanics and use cues like pictures or context to teach.
Federal officials who ran Reading First maintain that only curriculums including regular, systematic phonics lessons had the backing of “scientifically based reading research” required by the program.
Madison officials say that a year after Wisconsin joined Reading First, in 2004, contractors pressured them to drop their approach, which blends some phonics with whole language in a program called Balanced Literacy. Instead, they gave up the money — about $2 million, according to officials here, who say their program raised reading scores.
“We had data demonstrating that our children were learning at the rate that Reading First was aiming for, and they could not produce a single ounce of data to show the success rates of the program they were proposing,” said Art Rainwater, Madison’s superintendent of schools.

Much more on Reading First and Madison, here.
Notes & Links:

UW Psychology Professor Mark Seidenberg:
Whole Language was a massive, uncontrolled experiment, with millions of children as unwitting subjects.
How it’s done: Someone gets an idea

Often a Guru. Many Gurus in reading instruction.
Guru has brilliant insight about how children learn, how to teach reading – Their own personal theory
The idea may be personally promoted by the guru, with direct appeals to teachers
The idea is implemented on a vast scale, based on intuitions that it is good.
Ruth Robarts on Madison Schools’ Reading Progress.
Mark Seidenberg: Madison Schools Distort Reading Data.

UPDATE: Joanne Jacobs:

In part one of his response, Ken DeRosa of D-Ed Reckoning provides a reading passage altered to force readers to guess the meaning from context. Struggling this way does not inspire love of reading.
In part two, DeRosa analyzes the statistics to argue Madison students aren’t doing better in reading compared to other Wisconsin students; if anything, they’ve slipped a bit. Because the state reading test was made easier and the cut score for proficiency was lowered, all Wisconsin students look better. However, there was no progress in fourth-grade reading on the federal NAEP test.
With help from Rory of Parentalcation, who’s great at finding data, Ken shows that claims of fantastic progress by black students are illusory. Their scores improved on the easier test at a slightly slower rate than white students. It looks like to me as though blacks nearly caught up in basic skills but remain far behind at the proficient and advanced level. Perhaps someone who knows more statistics than I do — lots of you do — can find flaws in Ken’s analysis.

NYT Letters to the editor. Finally, others have raised questions about the MMSD’s analysis and publication of test score data.
Andrew Rotherham:

Diana Schemo’s NYT story on Reading First is not surprisingly sparking a lot of pushback and outraged emails, especially from the phonicshajeen. But, they have a point. There are problems with Reading First, but this may not be the best example of them at all…but, while you’re there, don’t miss the buried lede in graf eight…it’s almost like Schemo got snowed by all sides at once on this one…

We Energies offers great scholarships to CA energy conferences

The We Energies Renewable Energy Development Program
“2007 Wind and Solar Scholarship Program”
Request for Applications
March 5, 2007
Program Description
We Energies supports the development of renewable energy technologies as part of a long-term strategy for providing low-cost, environmentally sound energy options to its customers. To help in furthering this objective, the “2007 Wind and Solar Scholarship Program” will provide grant funds to faculty members at secondary schools, colleges, technical colleges, and universities located within the We Energies electric service territory for purposes of attending one of two conferences. The conferences include:
1. Windpower 2007, Los Angeles, June 3 – 6, 2007
The Windpower conference will include over 200 speakers, 150 poster presentations, and 50 sessions on leading wind energy topics organized into tracks with policy, business, and technical focuses. The conference anticipates 6,000 visitors. www.eshow2000.com/awea/
2. Solar Power 2007, Long Beach, Sept. 24 – 27, 2007
This annual conference has become America’s largest solar energy event. Solar Power will feature 175 exhibitors, 125 speakers and networking opportunities. The conference anticipates 10,000 visitors. www.solarpowerconference.com

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18 Year Old Madison Resident Wins National Vocabulary Championship

James Barron:

Rich Cronin, the president and chief executive of GSN, said he was not just thrilled to watch the competition, he was euphoric. “One person will be the ‘American Idol’ of vocabulary,” he said. (In the end, after an afternoon with its share of technical difficulties and dashed hopes, the winner was Robert Marsland, 18, of Madison, Wis. He will receive $40,000 toward college tuition. The winners in the finals and in the earlier citywide competitions held nationwide divided more than $80,000 in tuition money. The Princeton Review, a tutoring and test preparation service, came up with the questions. )
Off camera, it took Joel Chiodi, GSN’s vice president for marketing, a moment to remember a word he had learned from listening to contestants around the country.

Susan Troller:

Madison’s Robert Marsland, 18, took first place at the inaugural National Vocabulary Championship Monday in New York City, nabbing a trophy and a $40,000 scholarship prize. Last year, he nailed a perfect 36 on his ACT college entrance exam, and in 2003 he represented Wisconsin in the National Spelling Bee.
He is a student at the tiny St. Ambrose Academy on Madison’s west side, where he studies both Greek and Latin.

3/5/2007 Madison School Board Candidate Forum: West High School

The Madison West High School PTSO held a school board candidate forum Monday night. Topics included:

Madison High School Comparison
A candidate’s ability to listen, interact and work successfully with other board members
Past and future referenda support
Candidate views on the $333M+ budget for our 24,000 students
Extensive conversations on the part of Marj and Johnny to lobby the state and federal governments for more money. Maya wondered how successful that strategy might be given that our own State Senator Fred Risser failed to sign on to the Pope-Roberts/Breske resolution and that there are many school districts much poorer than Madison who will likely obtain benefits first, if new state tax funds are available. Maya also mentioned her experience at the state level via the concealed carry battles.
The challenge of supporting all students, including those with special needs. Several candidates noted that there is white flight from the MMSD (enrollment has been flat for years, while local population continues to grow)
Mandatory classroom grouping (heterogeneous) was also discussed

I applaud the West PTSO for holding this event. I also liked the way that they handled questions: all were moderated, which prevents a candidate supporter from sandbagging the opposition. I attended a forum last year where supporters posed questions before local parents had the opportunity.
Video and mp3 audio clips are available below. Make sure you have the latest version of Quicktime as the video clips use a new, more efficient compression technique.

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Notes from UW-Madison and Madison West High on AP Standards

Danielle Repshas:

“Still, there is not an absolute guarantee that a course [called] one thing someplace has the same rigor somewhere else,” Reason said.
Part of the challenge is judging the standards of one AP class from another at different high schools, and Reason said the level of trust colleges and secondary schools have with one another is one way colleges try to establish relationships with high schools. But Reason said he is concerned about the competition level at high schools in terms of coursework because schools in some areas do not have the same rigor in their coursework with respect to others.

The article includes a comment regarding Madison West High School’s limited approach:

In fact, there are only a handful of AP classes at Madison West, and most students aren’t interested in them. They’d rather take more stimulating and challenging classes.

Marcia Gevelinger Bastian touched on the issue of West’s limited number of AP classes here.

Keys and Casteneda sing same song

After listening to Phony Tony Casteneda’s ludicruous charaterizations of those who post on this blog, I remembered a post by Bill Keys on a listserve sponsored by Advocates for Madison Public Schools. Bill and Phony Tony used nearly the same language and divisiveness. Here’s Bill’s rant:

FACTS? FACTS? FACTS?
Do you really believe that those who criticize public education are the least bit interested in INFORMATION?????
You shoulda been with us while campaigning for the referenda in 2005.
You’d know by now.
They are the Neo-cons and fascists who got us into Iraq, who support
amendments banning same sex marriage, who are opposed to sick leave for workers and living wages and health benefits as well, and who want to stop Mexican immigration even while eating the food that Mexican-Americans grow and harvest?
FACT?
They are not at all interested. A FACT never changed any of these folks’ minds.
‘Course that’s assuming they have any.
Bill

Not a single one of the Advocates for Madison Public Schools called Bill on this abrasiveness or questioned his assertions.
Remember, these are the people who advise and support Marj Passman. Do the comments of Bill and Phony Tony reflect Marj’s feelings? Apparently, we’ll never know. She’s mum to e-mails and requests for her to explain her positions.

March Madison BOE Progress Report

March Madness is approaching! On the board level, madness can be characterized by the large assortments of topics and decisions that have been or will need to be made such as the superintendent search, budget, and other serious issues that require time, analysis and public discussion. I would like to give you a brief report on some of those topics.

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Sparks Fly as the Madison Studio Charter School is Voted Down

The Madison School Board voted down the proposed Studio Charter School Monday night in a 4-2 vote (Against: Carstensen, Kobza, Silveira and Winston; For Mathiak and Robarts with Vang away).
Sparks flew when Lucy Mathiak asked Nancy Donahue about their interaction with the attempts to talk with principals and teachers about the proposed charter school [12 minute video.] Watch the complete discussion here.
Susan Troller has more:

There is disagreement among Madison School Board members over what put the nails in the coffin of a proposal to create a new fine arts and technology-focused charter school.
The Studio School suffered from being the wrong proposal at the wrong time, said board President Johnny Winston Jr., who joined board members Carol Carstensen, Arlene Silveira and Lawrie Kobza in voting against the plan at Monday night’s School Board meeting.
But board member Lucy Mathiak says that the vote was wrapped up in School Board and labor politics, and that the Studio School suffered from disapproval from Madison Teachers Inc., the district’s union.
But Mathiak, who along with board member Ruth Robarts voted in favor of what would have been Madison’s third charter school, said she felt the proposal was primarily doomed by disapproval from MTI.
She noted that the MTI’s School Board candidate questionnaire asks whether candidates support charter schools, and added that there was a MTI representative at Monday night’s meeting.
“There is definitely the feeling that the union does not look favorably on charter schools, although they are public schools, staffed by district teachers,” Mathiak said.
“I find it ironic that the same people who voted for a voluntary impasse resolution agreement regarding teachers’ contract negotiations are now saying that developing a charter school is something we can’t afford. We should keep all of our options open in the bargaining process … the potential for cost savings are very significant,” she said.
Mathiak is referring to a vote taken by School Board members in preparation for negotiations with the teachers’ union next month that included concessions from the district on bargaining over health care insurance.

Much more on the Studio School here along with some discussion at The Daily Page.

Making Safety a Piece of the Pie

Teacher Voices:

In Philadelphia last week a teacher named Frank Burd, wound up in the hospital after two students assaulted him, apparently because he had confiscated an iPod during class. After class, according to a report on NBC news, the two students were waiting for Burd. One punched him and the other pushed him. As of Friday night (February 23), he was still in intensive care with two broken bones in his neck.
Mr. Burd’s experience may seem like an aberration, but actually, it is only a slightly more extreme example of the kind of violence, crime, and general incivility that teachers and students confront in schools all over the nation. Here in NY, for example, Mayor Bloomberg’s Preliminary Management Report showed a 21-percent increase in felony crimes committed in the city’s schools between July and October 2006 compared with the same period the previous year. And according a February 23 article in The Chief, “Major crimes rose from 287 to 348, other criminal reports increased from 820 to 983, and additional safety incidents climbed from 1,614 to 1,926, according to the Mayor’s report.

Going to the Mat for WPS

Jason Shephard:

Suzanne Fatupaito, a nurse’s assistant in Madison schools, is fed up with Wisconsin Physicians Service, the preferred health insurance provider of Madison Teachers Inc.
“MTI uses scare tactics” to maintain teacher support for WPS, Fatupaito recently wrote to the school board. “If members knew that another insurance [plan] would offer similar services to WPS and was less expensive — it would be a no-brainer.”
WPS, with a monthly price tag of $1,720 for family coverage, is one of two health coverage options available to the district’s teachers. The other is Group Health Cooperative, costing $920 monthly for a family plan.
During the past year, the Madison school board has reached agreements with other employee groups to switch from WPS to HMO plans, with most of the savings going to boost pay.
In December, the board held a secret vote in closed session to give up its right to seek health insurance changes should negotiations on the 2007-09 teachers contract go into binding arbitration. (The board can seek voluntary insurance changes during negotations.)
“What we’ve done is taken away a huge bargaining chip,” says board member Lucy Mathiak. “Every other major industry and public sector has had to deal with health-insurance changes, and we’ve got a very real $10 million deficit.”
MTI Executive Director John Matthews says other employee unions “made a big mistake” in switching to HMO plans. Matthews has long maintained that WPS provides superior coverage, despite its higher costs and disproportionate number of complaints. And he defends the paycheck he collects from WPS as a member of its board, saying he’s better able to lobby for his teachers.

Much more on this issue, including links, audio and a transcript, here.

Concessions Made in Advance of MTI Negotiations by a Majority of the Madison School Board

It will be interesting to see how voters on February 20 and April 3 view this decision by a majority of the Madison School Board: Should the Board and Administration continue to give away their ability to negotiate health care benefits ($43.5M of the 2006/2007 budge) before MTI union bargaining begins? Read the 2005 MMSD/MTI Voluntary Impasse Agreement [1.1MB PDF; see paragraph’s 2, 10 and 11]. The 2007 version, alluded to in Andy Hall’s article below, will be posted when it sees the light of day.
This is an important issue for all of us, given the MMSD’s challenge of balancing their growing $331M+ budget, while expenses – mostly salaries and benefits – continue to increase at a faster rate. Mix in the recent public disclosure of the district’s $5.9M 7 year structural deficit and I doubt that this is the best approach for our children.
Recently, the Sun Prairie School District and its teachers’ union successfully bargained with DeanCare to bring down future costs for employee health insurance.

Andy Hall, writing in the Wisconsin State Journal asks some useful questions:

But with the Madison School Board facing a $10.5 million budget shortfall, is the board giving away too much with its promises to retain teachers’ increasingly pricey health insurance and to discard its legal mechanism for limiting teachers’ total compensation increase to 3.8 percent?

Yes, School Board Vice President Lawrie Kobza said Saturday, “I feel very strongly that this was a mistake,” said Kobza, who acknowledged that most board members endorse the agreement with Madison Teachers Inc., the teachers union.

State law allows districts to avoid arbitration by making a so-called qualified economic offer, or QEO, by boosting salaries and benefits a combined 3.8 percenter a year.

“To agree before a negotiation starts that we’re not going to impose the QEO and negotiate health care weakens the district’s position,” Kobza said. She contended the district’s rising health-care costs are harming its ability to raise starting teachers’ salaries enough to remain competitive.

The “voluntary impasse resolution” agreements, which are public records, are used in only a handful of Wisconsin’s 425 school districts, according to the Wisconsin Employment Relations Commission.

Four of the 7 current Madison School Board Members were backed by MTI during their campaigns (Arlene Silveira, Carol Carstensen, Shwaw Vang and Johnny Winston, Jr.). Those four votes can continue this practice. Independent School Board members Lawrie Kobza and Ruth Robarts have spoken publicly against the concessions made in advance of negotiations. If you support or oppose this approach, let the board know via email (comments@madison.k12.wi.us), or phone.

Teachers Reclaiming Assessment Through Rethinking Accountability

Chris Gallagher
THE EDUCATION report card for my home state of Nebraska in the spring of 1999 was mixed, according to Education Week. While children in the state ranked among the top 10 nationally in most academic categories, Nebraska nonetheless garnered only a C. Why? Largely because it does not administer statewide, standardized assessments and so is “lagging behind” in accountability. Both those reporting this verdict and most of the state and local officials receiving it seem to be resigned to it as a sure but unsurprising sign that we have more work to do to “catch up” with the rest of the country. It does not seem to strike most observers as odd that, although students’ performance is high, the state’s marks are only average. Until Nebraska develops statewide tests, it will continue to receive low grades, irrespective of what our students are doing. This kind of press may well propel the state to abandon its long-held commitment to local assessment and fall in line with the national movement toward state standardized tests.
This report and its handling demonstrate the extent to which educational tests have become “common sense.” To use a term proposed by Italian philosopher Antonio Gramsci, educational testing is “hegemonic” — that is, it manufactures consent by presenting itself (or being represented as) “obvious.” Although standardized tests came under intense fire for a short time in the 1970s, we have returned to this practice with a fervor perhaps greater than at any other time since schools in the United States began making extensive use of standardized tests in the 1930s. Even many educators who have long understood the limitations and outright injustices of standardized testing and the testing industry claim that the time has passed when resistance to testing is useful.
I think it is dangerous to be too sanguine about the prospects for reforming the assessment community and disrupting the commonsense script for education reform, in which schools are cast as damsels in distress, remote experts are cast as heroic saviors, and teachers are written out of the production altogether. We need to confront the fact that, finally, the persistence of the “crisis in education” is attributable in large part to two factors: the profit margins of the testing industry that maintains the crisis and the cultural distrust of teachers that the testing industry, along with the political and education establishments, endorses.
But the testing industry has been able to secure a spot in our cultural imagination and our stock exchanges not only because of the business acumen of its leaders (though that is part of it), but also because it plays to and plays up our cultural distrust of teachers. The corporate establishment, led by the political Right, works hard to create a “public” of concerned taxpayers: those who want to be sure that their “investments” in children pay off. Neoconservative columnists play to this audience constantly, stoking the fires of educational crisis and inspiring suspicions about the competence of our public school teachers…. This distrust is carefully nurtured to keep the present educational power structure intact: remote “experts” (the capitalists) develop educational tests and prepackaged curricula and send them off to school administrators (the managers), who then ensure that teachers (the workers) faithfully execute those plans. Students (the products) are thus shaped to the specifications of experts whom they will never meet and who may never have set foot in a classroom.
In other words, whatever the gains of movements like the one for authentic assessment, the prevailing wisdom about education reform has it that reform must be top down, not inside out. Underlying our embrace of the assessment industry and our cultural distrust of teachers is a fundamental belief that what’s missing in education today is “efficiency” and that the best way to ensure efficiency is to set up a corporate structure in which teachers are held accountable to corporate CEOs. What’s good for General Motors . . .

America’s Perfect Storm

Educational Testing Service:

A report from ETS’s Policy Information Center, America’s Perfect Storm: Three Forces Changing Our Nation’s Future, looks at the convergence of three powerful sociological and economical forces that are changing our nation’s future:

substantial disparities in skill levels (reading and math)
seismic economic changes (widening wage gaps)
sweeping demographic shifts (less education, lower skills)

There is little chance that economic opportunities will improve among key segments of our population if we follow our current path. To date, educational reform has not been sufficient to solve the problem. National test results show no evidence of improvement over the last 20 years. Scores are flat and achievement gaps persist. Hope for a better life — with decent jobs and livable wages — will vanish unless we act now.

2.4MB PDF Report.

Parenting vs. Poverty

Steven Malanga:

In football, a quarterback’s blind side is the side of the field opposite his throwing arm—the left side of the field for a right-handed quarterback, for instance. One shouldn’t confuse the blind side with a blind spot, which is what our policy-makers and media often have when discussing American poverty: it is a product of our unjust economic system, they say, and we should fight it with redistributive government programs. These experts would do well to read Michael Lewis’s wonderful new football book, The Blind Side. Though the book’s publisher pitches it as a sports story, it’s more notable as a portrait of the social dysfunction that shapes much of America’s inner-city poverty and, by extension, of the reasons that so many government efforts to alleviate that poverty have come to naught.
At the heart of The Blind Side—in fact, occupying more pages than its ostensible subject, the evolution of college and professional football—is the astonishing life story of National Football League–bound Michael Oher. Oher is born into horrific circumstances that give him little chance at succeeding in our society: his mother is a drug addict who, though unable to care for children, has 13 kids by various men, none her husband. Each of these children fends for himself on the mean streets of West Memphis. Oher’s mother collects her welfare check on the first of the month and disappears for ten days or so, stranding the kids without provisions or supervision. Oher recalls going days with nothing to eat or drink except water, begging food from neighbors, and sleeping outdoors.

My Life and Times With the Madison Public Schools

Up close, the author finds that politics obscure key educational issues
Marc Eisen:

Where’s the challenge?
I’m no different. I want my kids pushed, prodded, inspired, and challenged in school. Too often—in the name of equity, or progressive education, or union protectionism, or just plain cheapness—that isn’t happening in the Madison schools.
Advanced classes are being choked off, while one-size-fits-all classes (“heterogeneous groupings”) are created for more and more students. The TAG staff has been slashed nearly in half (one staffer is now assigned to six elementary schools), and even outside groups promoting educational excellence are treated coolly if not with hostility (this is the fate of the most excellent Wisconsin Center For Academically Talented Youth [WCATY]). And arts programs are demeaned and orphaned.
This is not Tom Friedman’s recipe for student success in the 21st century. Sure, many factors can be blamed for this declining state of affairs, notably the howlingly bad way in which K-12 education is financed and structured in Wisconsin. But much of the problem also derives from the district’s own efforts to deal with “the achievement gap.”
That gap is the euphemism used for the uncomfortable fact that, as a group, white students perform better academically than do black and Hispanic students. For example, 46% of Madison’s black students score below grade level on the state’s 3rd grade reading test compared to 9% of white students.
At East, the state’s 10th grade knowledge-and-concepts test show widely disparate results by race. With reading, 81% of white kids are proficient or advanced versus 43% for black students. The achievement gap is even larger in math, science, social studies, and language arts. No wonder TAG classes are disproportionately white.
Reality is that the push for heterogeneous class grouping becomes, among other things, a convenient cover for reducing the number of advanced classes that are too white and unrepresentative of the district’s minority demographics.

How Not to Talk to Your Kids: The Inverse Power of Praise

Po Bronson:

But as Thomas has progressed through school, this self-awareness that he’s smart hasn’t always translated into fearless confidence when attacking his schoolwork. In fact, Thomas’s father noticed just the opposite. “Thomas didn’t want to try things he wouldn’t be successful at,” his father says. “Some things came very quickly to him, but when they didn’t, he gave up almost immediately, concluding, ‘I’m not good at this.’ ” With no more than a glance, Thomas was dividing the world into two—things he was naturally good at and things he wasn’t.
For instance, in the early grades, Thomas wasn’t very good at spelling, so he simply demurred from spelling out loud. When Thomas took his first look at fractions, he balked. The biggest hurdle came in third grade. He was supposed to learn cursive penmanship, but he wouldn’t even try for weeks. By then, his teacher was demanding homework be completed in cursive. Rather than play catch-up on his penmanship, Thomas refused outright. Thomas’s father tried to reason with him. “Look, just because you’re smart doesn’t mean you don’t have to put out some effort.” (Eventually, he mastered cursive, but not without a lot of cajoling from his father.)
Why does this child, who is measurably at the very top of the charts, lack confidence about his ability to tackle routine school challenges?
Thomas is not alone. For a few decades, it’s been noted that a large percentage of all gifted students (those who score in the top 10 percent on aptitude tests) severely underestimate their own abilities. Those afflicted with this lack of perceived competence adopt lower standards for success and expect less of themselves. They underrate the importance of effort, and they overrate how much help they need from a parent.

Tom Ashbrook talked with Bronson, Carol Dweck and Bob Younglove. Listen here.

Mayors and Schools

John Nichols noted that Madison’s Mayoral challengers have not raised substantive questions of the incumbent Mayor’s (Dave Cieslewicz) record, including schools:

No. 2, he has failed to offer much in the way of a vision for how this rapidly changing city should approach the future. How green should it be? Where does mass transit fit in? How do we diversify the economy? How do we make sure that the schools remain strong and popular with all the city’s residents? The mayor thinks about all these issues. He works on them in incremental ways and, frankly, he’s done so ably. Unfortunately, he has not communicated in a particularly bold or effective manner with regard to them. Once again, the vulnerability remains.
In politics, an incumbent’s vulnerabilities are meaningless if they are not exploited by his or her challengers. Ray Allen and Peter Munoz have failed, so far, to put a dent in Cieslewicz. One of them will survive the primary, and that candidate will have a chance to mount a more serious challenge. With the first critical test just days away, however, Allen and Munoz give every sign of having boarded the wrong trolley.

I’ve been surprised at the lack of Mayoral involvement in our K-12 climate. The Madison school district’s enrollment has been flat for years, while surrounding schools have grown significantly. Continued growth of our edge cities, business migration (Epic systems move to Verona), a growing budget, safety concerns and curriculum questions provide plenty of issues relevant to the health of our community. Around the country, as Jill Tucker notes in San Francisco, many mayors are active for obvious reasons on K-12 issues.
Why have the Mayor (and challengers) been quiet on substantive school issues?
Perhaps in Madison, where a local elected official recently remarked to me that “we don’t have a democracy” (think about that), the endorsement merry go round (maybe the deal with schools is that a candidate gets ground and monetary support, or help with a holiday party, if they stay out of K-12), the “remain silent” requirements of some and the fact that political upside in K-12 is difficult leads to the present situation. Or just indifference?
What do we, as a community, give up when candidates who have cut deals and agree to remain silent on certain issues are elected? What sort of example does this leave for future generations?

Spring 2007 Madison School Board Election Update

I’ve updated the election page with the following information:

January, 2007 campaign finance filings which show that retired Madison Teacher and seat 5 candidate Marj Passman (who faces Maya Cole – $135.00) has raised $5,530, far ahead of the rest. Beth Moss is next at $822.00 (Moss faces Pam Cross-Leone – $75.00 and Rick Thomas – $100.00 in the February 20, 2007 primary.)
Isthmus Take Home Test; Week 5, on Curriculum governance and an extra-curricular activities: Pam Cross-Leone, Beth Moss and Rick Thomas, Seat 3, Tom Brew and Johnny Winston, Jr.Seat 4, Maya Cole and Marj Passman, Seat 5

School Closings & the Long-Term Outlook

School closings need to be considered in light of the long-term (5-10 years or more) outlook – a 3-5 year outlook, yet alone 1-2 years, is not nearly long enough when considering a measure whose impact lasts for many years, at a student/family level, as well as financial.
What muddies this school closing picture is the outlook for continued enrollment increases on the east side of town, not just the far west and southwest sides. I’ve heard the district is considering purchase of land not far from the interstate with an eye to building an elementary school there one day. It’s hard to imagine building a new school for $10+ million, when other schools less than five miles away have recently been closed. I believe the combination of continued growth on the east side, combined with the continuing increasing birth rate (births have been up every year here for the past ten years, which is a significant explanatory factor for why there is increasing enrollment pressures on almost all our city schools) will render school closures quite unnecessary.
However, the picture gets further complicated when we recognize that the MMSD budget will be $40 million smaller (in real terms) over the next five years (give or take). The only way to find that kind of money is to increase class sizes. The only questions are how, where, when, and by how much. (Which again is why I think a 5-year plan is needed, to ensure these painful adjustments are done in a way that least harms the quality of education.)
Ultimately, the appropriateness and wisdom of closing any school, from a strictly financial perspective, rests on what the long-term picture looks like. This picture needs to combine long-term enrollment projections (at a neighborhood/school level) with a variety of realistic scenarios as to how class sizes may change as the long-term budget situation continues to deteriorate. Without such projections, the district runs a serious risk of doing the wrong thing: by either closing schools when it later proves unnecessary, or by leaving them open when it later proves we would have done better to close them.
Peter Gascoyne
GascoyneP@aol.com
608-256-9680

My Thoughts on Lapham-Marquette

Over the past week, I have had several heartfelt e-mails from residents of the Lapham-Marquette neighborhood, urging me and other board members to oppose closing Lapham School. To put the e-mails in context, let us all remember that there are MANY proposals out there because EVERYTHING is on the table thanks to the $10 million structural deficit that the district faces.
For those of you who are unaware of my background, let me share with you that I have lived in the Marquette neighborhood since 1978, first as a renter and now as a home owner. My membership # at Willy St. is 10. Yes, ten. My roots go deep, as does my memory of community history. After all, I chose to live there when we had to step over drunks to get to the laundromat, and anyone could get a good dose of grease and indigestion at Dolly’s. I moved in when there were crack houses around the corner, and stayed because it was a values choice.
So where do I stand on “don’t close Lapham?” This is the gist of what I am replying to the e-mails:
I have lived in the Marquette neighborhood since 1978 and was engaged in the vigorous and divisive neighborhood debate over whether to reopen Lapham. Having opposed reopening Lapham at the time because the optimistic demographic projections seemed unsupportable, and having predicted that we would end up at exactly this point, I am now disinterested in closing it so that we can debate the issue once more in ten years. I would note that the majority of children in Lapham are still being bused from the Marquette side of the isthmus; after all these years, the school as family magnet argument has not lived up to predictions.
That said, there is a brutal bugetary reality before the district. $10 million in structural – ongoing – deficit is going to mean change for all of our schools. For that reason, I will be supporting a review of staffing levels for the current population and demographics. (I urge everyone considering the debate to look at the demographics http://www.madison.k12.wi.us/topics/stats/2006/byincome.htm for ALL of our elementary schools and understand that as a progressive I must be concerned for the schools that are functioning with high levels of poverty and inadequate staffing.)
I urge the people who are so passionate about not closing Lapham or combining the pair to be proactive about proposals that can make keeping the school open easier to support. This means finding ways to use the space for some segment of district administration or renting space to community groups or finding some other use that goes beyond the current structure. E.g., the district used to rent space to the Tenney Lapham nursery school.
This time around, it is going to take a lot more than rhetoric or advocacy for referenda to address the very real shortage of resources that we face.

This Bush Education Reform Really Works

A story by Sol Stern posted on City Journal highlights the success of Reading First and includes striking parallels to our superintendent’s response to the program:

Reading First, though much maligned, succeeds in teaching kids to read. . . .
A comprehensive study by an outside evaluator will appear in 2007, measuring Reading First’s influence on student achievement nationally. But some states and districts are already seeing significant improvement. When the relevant congressional committees hold hearings on NCLB reauthorization, they might start by looking to neighboring Virginia, where they’ll discover a dramatic example of Reading First’s power. With apologies to Dickens, we might call it a tale of two school districts—one welcoming Reading First, the other disdaining it.

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Notes on Washington DC’s School Climate

Marc Fisher:

Somehow, when good, bright people get serious about the fact that thousands of children emerge from this city’s schools year after year without knowing how to read well enough to get a decent job, those good people end up busying themselves with little boxes on a piece of paper.
Both say the schools alone can’t make the fix; the city must intercede in the lives of dysfunctional families before children are born. Both agree the District has to knock down the walls that separate the agencies that deal with family pathologies — agencies focused on prenatal care, child abuse, substance problems, street crime, absentee parents, unemployment, adult illiteracy, and on and on must finally coordinate how myriad arms of the city deal with a single child.
Both Reinoso and Bobb can and do catalogue the failures of the school board, the impossibility of getting stuff done in the labyrinth of the school bureaucracy and the fact that there is precious little reason for parents to send their kids to D.C. schools if they have any choice.

“No Need to Worry About Math Education”

From a reader involved in these issues, by Kerry Hill: Demystifying math: UW-Madison scholars maintain focus on effective teaching, learning

Tuesday, January 30, 2007 – By Kerry Hill
New generation of Math Ed
Many people still see mathematics as a difficult subject that only a select group of students with special abilities can master. Learning math, they believe, consists of memorizing facts and mastering the application of complicated concepts and procedures.
“That’s simply not true,” says Thomas Carpenter, who has plenty of research to justify his succinct rebuttal.
A pioneering cohort of education researchers at UW-Madison – led by Carpenter, Thomas Romberg, and Elizabeth Fennema, all emeriti professors in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction – have shown, for instance, that children of all abilities enter school with an informal base of mathematical knowledge that enables them to learn more substantive material than traditionally taught.

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Why Johnny can’t read very well and what to do about it

Teacher Thomas Biel:

Juan/Sean/John doesn’t read too well because we don’t teach him how very well. Results from the 2005-’06 Wisconsin Knowledge and Concepts Examinations show that 55% of Milwaukee Public Schools 10th-graders do not read at a proficient level. The majority of our kids have reading problems.
Leaders in the school district, in the Legislature and at the federal level need to take a stand and do something practical, like earmarking funds for literacy wherever literacy is a problem.
We need to go way beyond literacy coaches and in-content-area reading programs to try to solve this problem.
Reading should be made a department in every high school just as math, science and English are, and reading classes should become a part of every high school curriculum.
I’m not saying that we don’t teach reading in the high schools. But, primarily, we teach reading to students who already can read. Those who can’t, or who can’t read well, struggle, and many fail. If they aren’t designated special education or a special needs learner, these students disappear into the cracks of the system.
Typically, the struggling reader who has fallen behind somewhere in his education gets to high school and is expected to take the same English, history, science and math classes as the proficient reader.
The student in junior-year English who reads at a third-grade level but is studying the essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson or “The Fall of the House of Usher” will drown in language he doesn’t understand. The textbooks he has to read for history, science and math will be eight grades beyond his reading level.

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School Finance: K-12 Tax & Spending Climate

School spending has always been a puzzle, both from a state and federal government perspective as well as local property taxpayers. In an effort to shed some light on the vagaries of K-12 finance, I’ve summarized below a number of local, state and federal articles and links.
The 2007 Statistical Abstract offers a great deal of information about education and many other topics. A few tidbits:

	1980	1990	2000	2001	2002	2003	2004
US K-12 Enrollment [.xls file]	40,878,000	41,216,000	47,203,000	47,671,000	48,183,000	48,540,000	NA
US K-12 Deflated Public K-12 Spending – Billions [.xls file]	$230B	311.8B	$419.7B	$436.6B	$454.6B	$464.8B	$475.5B
Avg. Per Student Spending	$5,627	$7,565	$8,892	$9,159	$9,436	$9,576	NA
US Defense Spending (constant yr2000 billion dollars) [.xls file]	$267.1B	$382.7B	$294.5B	$297.2B	$329.4B	$365.3B	$397.3B
US Health Care Spending (Billions of non-adjusted dollars) [.xls file]	$255B	$717B	$1,359B	$1,474B	$1,608B	$1,741B	$1,878B
US Gross Domestic Product – Billions [.xls file]	5,161	7,112	9,817	9,890	10,048	10,320	10,755

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NY Governor Spitzer to Tie Increased School Funds to Performance

Maria Newman:

Gov. Eliot Spitzer of New York said today that he would allocate more money to the state’s public education system in his 2008 budget proposal, but he said the increased spending would be tied to better results from schools, educators and students.
“There will be no more excuses for failure,” Mr. Spitzer said. “The debate will no longer be about money, but about performance.”
The governor, in office for less than a month, did not tip his hand today on how much the public school system will get in the budget that he will submit to the state Legislature on Wednesday. But in an address to school leaders and legislators, he said that every school district that receives at least $15 million more this year in his new budget, or 10 percent more than in the previous year, would be subject to a new “contract for excellence” that will dictate how they can spend those funds.
Schools that do not perform well, he said, would be shut down. Educators who do not meet performance goals would be dismissed. A new accountability system would monitor how schools are performing academically and whether they are making the best use of their money, he said. Also, the schools will be judged on whether their academic programming is helping students perform better.
“We should be ready to close more schools that fail — perhaps as many as 5 percent of all the schools in the state if we have to,” he said.

Spitzer’s Speech, “A Contract for Excellence” is available here.
Jonathan Mandell comments.

Studies Find Benefits to Advanced Placement Courses

Jay Matthews:

In the midst of a national debate over whether Advanced Placement courses place too much pressure on U.S. high school students, a team of Texas researchers has concluded that the difficult courses and three-hour exams are worth it.
In the largest study ever of the impact of AP on college success, which looked at 222,289 students from all backgrounds attending a wide range of Texas universities, the researchers said they found “strong evidence of benefits to students who participate in both AP courses and exams in terms of higher GPAs, credit hours earned and four-year graduation rates.”
A separate University of Texas study of 24,941 students said those who used their AP credits to take more advanced courses in college had better grades in those courses than similar students who first took college introductory courses instead of AP in 10 subjects.

Madison United for Acadmic Excellence has a useful comparison of AP and other “advanced” course offerings across the four traditional Madison high schools. Much more on local AP classes here.
Wisconsin Advanced Placement Distance Learning Consortium.
Verona High School Course Prospectus, including AP.
Middleton High School Course List.
Monona Grove High School Course Catalog [320K PDF]
Sun Prairie High School Courses.
Waunakee High School Course Index.
McFarland High School Course Guide.
Edgewood High School.
Jay Matthews has more in a later article.

Madison’s Mendota Elementary School beats the odds

What does it take to truly create a school where no child is left behind?
That question defines what is probably the most pressing issue facing American public education, and a high-poverty school on Madison’s north side west of Warner Park seems to have figured out some of the answers.
Mendota Elementary is among a small handful of schools in Madison where the percentage of children from low-income families hovers above 70 percent. But contrary to what most research would predict, Mendota’s standardized test scores meet or beat Madison’s generally high district averages, as well as test scores from throughout the state, on the annual Wisconsin Knowledge and Concepts Exam.
In fact, Mendota’s test scores even exceed those of many other local schools where the majority of students come from more affluent homes with a wealth of resources to devote to child raising, including both time and money.
From “Successful schools, successful students” by reporter Susan Troller, The Capital Times, January 26, 2007.

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Late January School Board Progress Report

The Madison Board of Education is faced with several great challenges over the next few months. One of the biggest is the announcement that Superintendent Art Rainwater will retire at the end of the June 2008. The board will be working with a consultant to assist in hiring the next superintendent. Another board challenge is the budget shortfall of $10.5 million dollars. Lack of state and federal funding, unfunded and under funded mandates, revenue limits and the qualified economic offer, all contribute to the annual budget woes. While addressing these issues the Board continues its discussion and analysis on positive student behavior in our schools. These changes will lead from a punitive approach to a preventive and restorative justice methodology. This model will increase school safety and lead to changes in the student Code of Conduct and Board policy that can be applied fairly to all students.

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The Baltimore Algebra Project

Sherrilyn Ifill:

was recently trying to list the 10 most encouraging initiatives by black people in 2006 and I thought I’d share one with you. It’s the Baltimore Algebra Project, a group of African American inner-city teens who’ve evolved from tutors to activists in an effort to force change in the failing Baltimore City School system. The Algebra Project, many of you may know, was created by the brilliant soft-spoken civil rights activist and organizer Robert Moses, who left the U.S. to live in Africa, in the 1960s. When Moses returned to the U.S., he became convinced that the abysmal performance of African American students in math and science are a major barrier to full citizenship and empowerment. He created a program designed to help African American students excel in math in science. There are Algebra Projects in several U.S. cities. The Baltimore Algebra Project began as a tutoring program, but the young people in the project – students at many of the city’s struggling schools – have become increasingly more activist over the past 3 years. Finally, frustrated at continuing inequities in the school system, the Project announced the launch of “Freedom Fall” [fascinating – more at Clusty] this past September. They marched on the headquarters of the school board, and in a stroke of courage and brilliance created an alternative school board, called the Freedom Board.

Parents Sound Off on Detroit School Plan

Mark Hicks:

The reorganization is part of the district’s controversial plan to shutter 47 schools this summer and five more during summer 2008 in a bid to save $19 million.
The struggling district lost nearly 12,600 students last fall after a teachers strike, and more than 50,000 have left in the last eight years. The district lists an enrollment of 116,800 students.
At Monday’s forum, representatives from the district’s consolidation team cited declining birth rates, competition from charter schools and the city’s population loss as factors.
The decreases represent a natural phenomenon, said DPS’s Jeffery Jones. “This is not unique to Detroit.”

Classroom Distinctions

Tom Moore:

IN the past year or so I have seen Matthew Perry drink 30 cartons of milk, Ted Danson explain the difference between a rook and a pawn, and Hilary Swank remind us that white teachers still can’t dance or jive talk. In other words, I have been confronted by distorted images of my own profession — teaching. Teaching the post-desegregation urban poor, to be precise.
Although my friends and family (who should all know better) continue to ask me whether my job is similar to these movies, I find it hard to recognize myself or my students in them.
So what are these films really about? And what do they teach us about teachers? Are we heroes, villains, bullies, fools? The time has come to set the class record straight.
At the beginning of Ms. Swank’s new movie, “Freedom Writers,” her character, a teacher named Erin Gruwell, walks into her Long Beach, Calif., classroom, and the camera pans across the room to show us what we are supposed to believe is a terribly shabby learning environment. Any experienced educator will have already noted that not only does she have the right key to get into the room but, unlike the seventh-grade science teacher in my current school, she has a door to put the key into. The worst thing about Ms. Gruwell’s classroom seems to be graffiti on the desks, and crooked blinds.

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Education & Intelligence Series

Charles Murray posted three articles this week on Education and Intelligence, a series that generated some conversation around the net:

Intelligence in the Classroom:

Our ability to improve the academic accomplishment of students in the lower half of the distribution of intelligence is severely limited. It is a matter of ceilings. Suppose a girl in the 99th percentile of intelligence, corresponding to an IQ of 135, is getting a C in English. She is underachieving, and someone who sets out to raise her performance might be able to get a spectacular result. Now suppose the boy sitting behind her is getting a D, but his IQ is a bit below 100, at the 49th percentile.
We can hope to raise his grade. But teaching him more vocabulary words or drilling him on the parts of speech will not open up new vistas for him. It is not within his power to learn to follow an exposition written beyond a limited level of complexity, any more than it is within my power to follow a proof in the American Journal of Mathematics. In both cases, the problem is not that we have not been taught enough, but that we are not smart enough.
What’s Wrong with Vocational School?

Begin with those barely into the top half, those with average intelligence. To have an IQ of 100 means that a tough high-school course pushes you about as far as your academic talents will take you. If you are average in math ability, you may struggle with algebra and probably fail a calculus course. If you are average in verbal skills, you often misinterpret complex text and make errors in logic.
These are not devastating shortcomings. You are smart enough to engage in any of hundreds of occupations. You can acquire more knowledge if it is presented in a format commensurate with your intellectual skills. But a genuine college education in the arts and sciences begins where your skills leave off.
In engineering and most of the natural sciences, the demarcation between high-school material and college-level material is brutally obvious. If you cannot handle the math, you cannot pass the courses. In the humanities and social sciences, the demarcation is fuzzier. It is possible for someone with an IQ of 100 to sit in the lectures of Economics 1, read the textbook, and write answers in an examination book. But students who cannot follow complex arguments accurately are not really learning economics. They are taking away a mishmash of half-understood information and outright misunderstandings that probably leave them under the illusion that they know something they do not. (A depressing research literature documents one’s inability to recognize one’s own incompetence.) Traditionally and properly understood, a four-year college education teaches advanced analytic skills and information at a level that exceeds the intellectual capacity of most people.
Aztecs vs. Greeks:

How assiduously does our federal government work to see that this precious raw material is properly developed? In 2006, the Department of Education spent about $84 billion. The only program to improve the education of the gifted got $9.6 million, one-hundredth of 1% of expenditures. In the 2007 budget, President Bush zeroed it out.
But never mind. A large proportion of gifted children are born to parents who value their children’s talent and do their best to see that it is realized. Most gifted children without such parents are recognized by someone somewhere along the educational line and pointed toward college. No evidence indicates that the nation has many children with IQs above 120 who are not given an opportunity for higher education. The university system has also become efficient in shipping large numbers of the most talented high-school graduates to the most prestigious schools. The allocation of this human capital can be criticized–it would probably be better for the nation if more of the gifted went into the sciences and fewer into the law. But if the issue is amount of education, then the nation is doing fine with its next generation of gifted children. The problem with the education of the gifted involves not their professional training, but their training as citizens.
We live in an age when it is unfashionable to talk about the special responsibility of being gifted, because to do so acknowledges inequality of ability, which is elitist, and inequality of responsibilities, which is also elitist. And so children who know they are smarter than the other kids tend, in a most human reaction, to think of themselves as superior to them. Because giftedness is not to be talked about, no one tells high-IQ children explicitly, forcefully and repeatedly that their intellectual talent is a gift. That they are not superior human beings, but lucky ones. That the gift brings with it obligations to be worthy of it. That among those obligations, the most important and most difficult is to aim not just at academic accomplishment, but at wisdom.

Joanne has notes [more], along with Nicholas Lehmann, who comments on Murray’s The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life. Technorati search. Clusty Search on Charles Murray. Brad DeLong posts his thoughts as well.

Education and Educational Research in an Era of Accountability: Insights and Blind Spots

I am pleased to invite you to a conference on “Education and Educational Research in an Era of Accountability: Insights and Blind Spots“, to be held on February 7-8, 2007, at the Pyle Center [map], near the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus. Attendance is free, and we very much hope that members of the local educational community will be able to attend. The conference is sponsored by the Department of Educational Policy Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. A schedule detailing the presentations is attached.
The conference will examine the impact on schools of the increased accountability, rationalization, and standardization of education symbolized and accelerated by the No Child Left Behind Act. It will also look at recent shifts in educational research that are associated with these trends, out of which a new emphasis on, and a new definition of, “scientific research” have emerged.
The conference will start Wednesday evening, February 7th, with a keynote address by Professor Richard F. Elmore, who is the Gregory R. Anrig Professor of Educational Leadership at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and Co-Director of the Consortium of Policy Research in Education. Professor Elmore will be introduced by Dean Julie Underwood of the UW School of Education. He is particularly interested in complex efforts at the school level to improve the quality of instruction. He seeks to understand how current state and federal accountability systems can work to support those efforts, as well as how these systems may unintentionally work at cross purposes with school and district level efforts. His recent works include School Reform from the Inside Out and the co-edited Redesigning Accountability Systems for Education.

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Community Members Petition for Joe Gothard to be Named LaFollette High School Principal

Channel3000.com:

Some Madison community members are circulating a petition to put forward a candidate to be La Follette High School’s next principal.
That name is Joe Gothard, who is the former dean of students at La Follette and currently serves as principal at Akira Toki Middle School, WISC-TV reported.
Questions about who would lead the school began to swirl after former principal John Broome stepped down last month after only six months on the job. Loren Rathert, a Madison Metropolitan School District veteran has stepped in to serve as interim principal for the remainder of the school year.
Some of those behind the petition said that Gothard is “exactly what La Follette needs” and is “tough, intelligent, and personable,” WISC-TV reported.

Much more on LaFollette High School here.

Financially Support Madison Schools’ Math Festival

Ted Widerski:

The Talented and Gifted Division of MMSD is busy organizing ‘MathFests’ for strong math students in grades 4 – 8. These events are planned to provide an opportunity for students to interact with other students across the city who share a passion for challenging mathematics. Many of these students study math either online, with a tutor, by traveling to another school, or in a class with significantly older students.
These events will be hosted by Cuna Mutual Insurance and American Family Insurance. Students will have an opportunity to learn math in several ways: a lecture by a math professor, group learning of a new concept, and individual and small group math contests. Over 300 students from 38 schools will be invited to participate.
The funding for this project is challenging as there are no significant MMSD funds available. A plea for funding in the last several weeks has resulted in gifts totaling about $1000. Those gifts will guarantee that the middle school Mathfest will be held on Wednesday, February 21st.
In order to hold the Elementary MathFests on each side of Madison would require additional donations. Gifts totaling $1600 would provide the necessary support to provide 200 students with a very special experience. If anyone or any group would like to contribute, it would be most appreciated. Please contact me: Ted Widerski, TAG Resource Teacher at: twiderski@madison.k12.wi.us
Thank you for supporting this math event.

A judge says Preston Hollow Elementary segregated white kids to please parents. The reality is deeper and maybe more troubling.

On a sunny September morning in 2005 Preston Hollow Elementary School hosted Bike to School Day. Dozens of grinning children with fair skin played and talked outside in the courtyard, relaxing happily after rides through their North Dallas neighborhood of garish mansions and stately brick homes. Parents shared tea and fruit, capturing the smiles of their kids with digital cameras. A police officer gave the group a friendly lecture on bicycle safety. Inside the classrooms surrounding the courtyard, other children watched glumly. Many of them lived in the modest apartment complexes off Central Expressway, separated from their school by busy roads and shopping centers. Those kids, nearly all them Hispanic and black, took the bus to school.
As their classmates parked their bikes and snacked on fruit and juice the other children waited in English as a second language (ESL) classes. A federal judge would later rule that many of them shouldn’t have been there. Their language skills were good enough to be in the same classes as the kids who rode their bikes to Preston Hollow.

From Dallas Observer, January 11, 2007.

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Madison Superintendent Rainwater Tells MTI about Resignation Plans Before He Tells the School Board?

In a guest editorial in The Capital Times on January 10, 2007, MTI leader John Matthews explains that Madison school superintendent Art Rainwater unveiled his plan to resign at the end of 2007-08 to the teachers union leader long before he told the Madison Board of Education in an executive session on Monday, January 8, 2007.

“When Madison Superintendent of Schools Art Rainwater announced on Monday that he will retire in June of 2008, the news did not catch me by surprise for two reasons.
First, he proclaimed when he was appointed superintendent in 1999 that he would serve for 10 years, the duration of his contract. He said then that he and his wife, a teacher in Verona, planned to retire in 2008.
Secondly, he told me at our regular weekly meeting during the week of Dec. 18 that he would advise the School Board of his resignation when school resumed in January.

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Notes and Links on the Madison K-12 Climate and Superintendent Hires Since 1992

Madison Superintendent Art Rainwater’s recent public announcement that he plans to retire in 2008 presents an opportunity to look back at previous searches as well as the K-12 climate during those events. Fortunately, thanks to Tim Berners-Lee’s World Wide Web, we can quickly lookup information from the recent past.
The Madison School District’s two most recent Superintendent hires were Cheryl Wilhoyte [Clusty] and Art Rainwater [Clusty]. Art came to Madison from Kansas City, a district which, under court order, dramatically increased spending by “throwing money at their schools”, according to Paul Ciotti:

In 1985 a federal district judge took partial control over the troubled Kansas City, Missouri, School District (KCMSD) on the grounds that it was an unconstitutionally segregated district with dilapidated facilities and students who performed poorly. In an effort to bring the district into compliance with his liberal interpretation of federal law, the judge ordered the state and district to spend nearly $2 billion over the next 12 years to build new schools, integrate classrooms, and bring student test scores up to national norms.
It didn’t work. When the judge, in March 1997, finally agreed to let the state stop making desegregation payments to the district after 1999, there was little to show for all the money spent. Although the students enjoyed perhaps the best school facilities in the country, the percentage of black students in the largely black district had continued to increase, black students’ achievement hadn’t improved at all, and the black-white achievement gap was unchanged.(1)
The situation in Kansas City was both a major embarrassment and an ideological setback for supporters of increased funding for public schools. From the beginning, the designers of the district’s desegregation and education plan openly touted it as a controlled experiment that, once and for all, would test two radically different philosophies of education. For decades critics of public schools had been saying, “You can’t solve educational problems by throwing money at them.” Educators and advocates of public schools, on the other hand, had always responded by saying, “No one’s ever tried.”

Cheryl Wilhoyte was hired, with the support of the two local dailies (Wisconsin State Journal, 9/30/1992: Search No Further & Cap Times Editorial, 9/21/1992: Wilhoyte Fits Madison) by a school board 4-3 vote. The District’s budget in 1992-1993 was $180,400,000 with local property taxes generating $151,200,00 of that amount. 14 years later, despite the 1993 imposition of state imposed annual school spending increase limits (“Revenue Caps“), the 2006 budget is $331,000,000. Dehli’s article mentions that the 1992-1993 School Board approved a 12.9% school property tax increase for that budget. An August, 1996 Capital Times editorial expressed puzzlement over terms of Cheryl Wilhoyte’s contract extension.
Art, the only applicant, was promoted from Acting Superintendent to Superintendent in January, 1999. Chris Murphy’s January, 1999 article includes this:

Since Wilhoyte’s departure, Rainwater has emerged as a popular interim successor. Late last year, School Board members received a set of surveys revealing broad support for a local superintendent as opposed to one hired from outside the district. More than 100 of the 661 respondents recommended hiring Rainwater.

Art was hired on a 7-0 vote but his contract was not as popular – approved on a 5-2 vote (Carol Carstensen, Calvin Williams, Deb Lawson, Joanne Elder and Juan Jose Lopez voted for it while Ray Allen and Ruth Robarts voted no). The contract was and is controversial, as Ruth Robarts wrote in September, 2004.
A February, 2004 Doug Erickson summary of Madison School Board member views of Art Rainwater’s tenure to date.
Quickly reading through a few of these articles, I found that the more things change, the more they stay the same:

Pamela Cotant, in a September, 1992 article:

Hanson said the shortfall is partly due to about $1 million in underestimated expenditures. The largest of these are health, dental and othertypes of insurance costs that came in $300,000 over estimates; extended employment and extra duty costs, $300,000; and teacher salaries, $250,000.
In addition, the district did not receive as much as expected in areas suchas disabled tuition, Chapter I aid, food service income and interest income.
Pam Cotant, writing in a May, 1991 article:

School board President Nan Brien also said the board and district are in a tough spot because so many programs have been cut to bring the budget proposal ($149M) under the cap.
“The cuts he made are going to give the board some real difficult times,”Brien said.
Brien said she was satisfied that Travis appeared to make his cuts across the board rather than in one area of the budget.
Travis cut $2.3 million in staff requests. Cuts include a phasing out of the birth to age 2 program for children with special needs and $86,000 in funding to the Bootstrap program for students at risk of not graduating.
Other cuts include 11 regular teachers and seven special education teachers, four positions in health services and about 10 custodial positions. Reductions also include $157,000 for a new child care program that would have helped students in the district’s School-Age Parenting Program, more than $35,000 for staff training and professional improvement, and $33,000 for an after-school program (AIMS) for minority students.
December, 1992: Citizen / School Board call-in to discuss the then $180M budget by Gail Perry.
April, 1999: Budget Cuts Likely for Madison Schools: Declining Enrollment and Special Ed Costs Blamed by Doug Erickson.
Capital Times & Wisconsin State Journal archive searches (many articles):
- Cheryl Wilhoyte
- Art Rainwater
April, 1999 Wisconsin State Journal Editorial: Rainwater will Face Tough Choices
October, 1992; Joyce Dehli’s Wisconsin State Journal article: Travis, Matthews: Schools’ New Boss Must Create Unity
October 1994 Wisconsin State Journal Editorial: Either Back Wilhoyte or Fire Her
School safety and spending were the topics of this September, 1992 article
SIS comments on Art’s public retirement announcement

Fascinating. Perhaps someone will conduct a much more detailed review of the record, which would be rather useful over the next year or two.

A Call for an Honest State Budget

Wisconsin State Journal Editorial:

Wisconsin’s state government ended the past fiscal year with a giant deficit of $2.15 billion, according to the accounting methods used by most businesses.
But the state’s books show a cozy balance of $49.2 million.
The discrepancy results from years of Wisconsin governors and legislators manipulating the accounting process to hide irresponsible budget decisions.
Those accounting tricks must stop. Wisconsin should begin to hold itself to the more business-like accounting methods used by Wall Street and by 16 other states the Generally Accepted Accounting Principles, known as GAAP.

Wisconsin’s fiscal situation makes it unlikely that there will be substantial changes in state funding for K-12 schools, particularly for rich districts like Madison that spend 23% ($333,000,000 for 24,576 students) more per student than the state average. Current state law penalizes districts that increase local school spending (property taxes) via referendum via reduced state aids. This means that for every $1.00 of new local spending above state revenue growth caps, Madison taxpayers must pay $1.61.
The 2/20/2007 and 04/03/2007 school board election presents an interesting contrast between candidates who believe that the best interests of our children are served by advocating for larger state spending beyond the typical 3.5%+ annual increases in the District’s budget and those who view the likelihood of substantial state changes for rich districts, like Madison as remote and therefore advocate more efficient management of the extraordinary resources we currently have. Health care costs present a useful example of this issue: Inaction [What a Sham(e)] vs discussion and some changes (in this example, 85% of the health care cost savings went to salaries).]

Local School Budget Tea Leaves

The Madison School Board Communication Committee’s upcoming meeting includes an interesting 2007-2009 legislative agenda for state education finance changes that would increase District annual spending (current budget is $333,000,000) at a higher than normal rate (typically in the 3.8% range):

4. 2007-09 Legislative Agenda
a. Work to create a school finance system that defines that resources are necessary to provide students with a “sound basic education.” Using Wisconsin’s Academic Standards (which is the standard of achievement set by the Legislature), coupled with proven research that lays out what is necessary to achieve those standards, will more clearly define what programs and services are required for students to attain success.
b. Support thorough legislative review of Wisconsin’s tax system; examining all taxing.
c. Provide revenue limit relief to school districts for uncontrollable costs (utilities, transportation). [ed: This shifts the risk to local property taxpayers, which has its pros and cons. The definition of “uncontrollable” would be interesting to read.]
d. Allow a local board of education to exceed the revenue limits by up to 2% of the district’s total budget without having to go to referendum. [ed: $6,660,000 above the typical 3.8% annual spending growth: $333,000,000 2006/2007 budget + 3.8% (12,654,000) + 2% (6,660,000) = $19,314,000 increase, or 5.8%]
e. Allow school districts to exceed the revenue limits for security-related expenses by up to $100 per pupil enrolled in the district. [ed: about $2,400,000]
f. Modify the school aid formula so negative tertiary school district (Madison) taxpayers aren’t penalized when the district borrows. (Madison Schools’ taxpayers have to pay $1.61 for every dollar borrowed.) [ed: This will cost other districts money]
g. Improve Medicaid reimbursement from state to school districts (current law allows the state to “skim” 40% of the federal Medicaid reimbursement dollars for school-based services).
h. Support state aid reimbursement for 4-year old kindergarten programs, similar to the reimbursement for 4-year old kindergarten in Milwaukee choice and charter schools.
i. Support increasing state aid for public school transportation costs.
j. Support allowing a declining enrollment school district to use the highest enrollment in a 5-year period for purposes of calculating its revenue limit. [ed: I wonder if the MMSD perceives itself as a growing or declining district, given the attendance projections used to support new schools over the past several years? Perhaps this item is the answer? The current state funding scheme rewards growing districts. Barb Schrank noted the enrollment changes in surrounding districts last fall.]
k. Support additional resources for mandated special education and English as a Second Language programs, currently reimbursed at 28% and 12%, respectively (when revenue limits began, the reimbursement was 45% and 33% respectively).
l. Maintain current law for disbursement of resources from the Common School Fund for public school libraries.
m. Support increase in per meal reimbursement for school breakfast programs.

There are some good ideas here, including a thorough review of Wisconsin’s tax system. Many of these items, if enabled by the state, would result in higher property taxes (Wisconsin is #1 in property taxes as a percentage of the home’s value) for those living in the Madison School District. Any of these changes would likely help address the District’s $5.9M structural deficit.
I trust that there are some additional budget scenarios in play rather than simply hoping the state will change school finance to help the Madison School District (unlikely, given several recent conversations with state political players). Madison already spends 23% more per student than the state average.
Related:

A 5 Year Approach to the Madison School District’s Budget Challenges; or what is the best quality of education that can be purchased for our district for $280 million a year?
2007/2008 Madison School District Budget Outlook: Half Empty or Half Full?
Budget notes and links
Sarah Kidd’s historical charts on District staffing, attendance and spending.
Italian Minister of Economy & Finance Tommaso Padoa-Schioppa:

I now come to the last and conclusive theme of my argument. Controlling expenditure always has to balance technical arguments and constraints, with the legitimate and competing claims (often drawing on very different ideological Weltanschauungen) on the resources managed, directly and indirectly, through the political processes. Balancing the two elements is a difficult exercise, as I experience on a daily basis.
Political economists have blamed the difficulty on the fact that the time-horizon of a typical political cycle is shorter than the one relevant on average for the society as a whole, in turn leading the legislature to attribute a smaller weight to the long-run implications of public expenditure policies than it would be socially desirable. Empirical evidence shows that discretionary public expenditure tends to rise before the elections irrespective of the political orientation of the incumbent government, and also in spite of the weak evidence of a relation between the size of pre-election spending and the election outcomes. The politicians’ short horizons and the long lag between reforms and their beneficial effects gives rise to a pervasive tension in expenditure control.
For Faust, the lure of Mephistopheles’ services is greatly enhanced by the fact that the price – albeit a terrible one – is to be paid later. For politicians, the lure of the support obtained through public expenditure is similarly enhanced by the fact that public debt will be paid (o reneged) by next generations, often well after the end of one’s political career. As to myself, having inherited a public debt larger than GDP, and having committed myself and my government to comply with sound fiscal principles, I scarcely can afford even to contemplate the possibility of accepting Mephistopheles’ services.

Tea Leaves.
Update: I recently learned that the MMSD’s Joe Quick wrote this list, which was not voted on by the Madison School Board.

Schools Seek and Find Gifted Students

Daniel de Vise:

Not every student at Bannockburn is above average. But 70 percent of the third-grade class has been identified as gifted, based on tests and other academic indicators. The school serves one of the largest concentrations in the region of students capable of working beyond their assigned grade, sometimes well beyond.
“We’re constantly trying to find things to pique their interest,” said Peterson, whose students have lately practiced dividing numbers into 32nds in their heads.
The bumper crop of gifted children at Bannockburn is a result not of some exclusive magnet program but of Montgomery County’s aggressive policy on identifying academic talent. The county screens every second-grader for extraordinary ability. In most other school systems, it’s left to parents or teachers to initiate the process. Also, Montgomery’s criteria for “giftedness” are unusually broad, covering not just intelligence data but also classroom performance and the impressions of teachers and parents.
That approach drives up the numbers — 40 percent of Montgomery’s 139,000 students carry the label — and creates a gifted majority at schools such as Bannockburn, which serves an affluent, highly educated neighborhood.

Montessori Goes Mainstream

Jay Matthews:

The American Montessori Society, based in New York, reported 7 percent membership growth in just the past year, and many of the schools are getting ready to celebrate the centennial of the Montessori beachhead.
Once considered a maverick experiment that appealed only to middle-class white families in the States, Montessori schools have become popular with some black professionals and are getting results in low-income public schools with the kind of children on which Montessori first tested her ideas.
The stubborn Italian physician and her contemporary, U.S. philosopher and psychologist John Dewey — who believed that learning should be active — are considered perhaps the most influential progressive thinkers in the modern history of education.

Madison has at least two Montessori schools, here and here.

NCLB and the Stress Between “Bringing up the Bottom and Supporting High End Kids”

A reader involved in these issues emailed this article by Andrew Rotherham:

Second, the story highlights my colleague Tom Toch’s criticism that a lot of tests states are using under NCLB are pretty basic. That’s exactly right. I’m all for better tests, but isn’t that, you know, an indictment of schools that can’t even get kids over a pretty low bar rather than an indictment of the law? In other words, excepting some fine-grained issues around special populations, NCLB can’t be wildly unrealistic in what it demands of schools and really basic at the same time, can it? The story doesn’t sift through that in detail but would be nice if some journo would.* The reality is that we don’t deliver a very powerful instructional program in a lot of schools, and that’s not the fault of NCLB.
……
*Related, there is a tension between high-performing students and low-performing ones in terms of where to put resources and attention. Not completely binary, and plenty of students falling behind today could be high performers in better schools. But still there and mostly talked about in code words rather than forthrightly: Are we as a nation better off really focusing on the millions of kids at the wrong end of the achievement gap even if its suboptimal for kids on the high end? And spare me the rhetoric about how you can easily do both. You can to some extent but constrained resources, carrots and sticks in policy, and time constraints all make tradeoffs a reality.

A few other readers have mentioned that this is a conversation Madison needs to have.

Reading Between the Lines: Madison Was Right to Reject Compromised Program

Jason Shephard:

From the beginning, Mary Watson Peterson had doubts about the motivations of those in charge of implementing federal education grants known as Reading First. As the Madison district’s coordinator of language arts and reading, she spent hundreds of hours working on Madison’s Reading First grant proposal.
“Right away,” she says, “I recognized a big philosophical difference” between Madison’s reading instruction and the prescriptive, commercially produced lessons advocated by Reading First officials. “The exchange of ideas with the technical adviser ran very counter to what we believe are best practices in teaching.”
The final straw was when the district was required to draft daily lesson plans to be followed by all teachers at the same time.
“We’ve got 25,000 kids who are in 25,000 different places,” says Superintendent Art Rainwater. The program’s insistence on uniformity “fundamentally violated everything we believe about teaching children.”
In October 2004, Rainwater withdrew Madison from the federal grant program, losing potentially $3.2 million even as the district was cutting personnel and programs to balance its budget. Rainwater’s decision, made without input from the school board, drew intense criticism and became an issue in last year’s board elections.

From a public policy perspective, the School Board should have discussed the $3.2M, particularly given the annual agony over very small changes in the District’s $333M+ budget.
The further concern over a one size fits all Reading First requirement (“We’ve got 25,000 kids who are in 25,000 different places,” says Superintendent Art Rainwater.) is ironic, given the push toward just that across the District (West’s English 10 [Bruce King’s English 9 report] and the recently proposed changes at East High School).
Barb Williams noted that other “blessed by the District” curriculum are as scripted as Reading First in a December, 2004 letter to Isthmus. More here via Ed Blume and here via Ruth Robarts.
It will be interesting to see what Diana Schemo has to say about Reading First.

Wisconsin School Boards Evaluate Governance Focus

Amy Hetzner:

Under the model, used by a number of school boards in the state, the board develops a set of expectations and then holds its administrators accountable to achieve those goals and report on progress.
The result is a more focused board that has more objective criteria for evaluating the performance of the school superintendent, said Sue Kutz, president of the Racine Unified School Board, which began using policy governance this year.
Monthly monitoring reports and a review of the board’s goals are used to evaluate the superintendent’s performance, she said, rather than a subjective evaluation that focuses on “the last great fiasco that happened.”
Boards are also spared the details and decision-making on issues for which they have little expertise.
“As a way of doing business, it seems to make so much more sense than the old way,” Kutz said.

Interesting. Serving on a school board is perhaps one of the most difficult public service positions “available” today. The recently revealed $6M Madison School District structural deficit (in place for 7 years) along with ongoing curriculum questions and a recent lack of oversight obligations such as reviewing the Superintendent requires a vigilant, active board.

2007 – 2008 Madison School District Budget Discussions Underway

Watch Monday evening’s school board discussion [Video | Download] of the upcoming larger than usual reductions in revenue cap limited increases in the District’s 2007 – 2008 budget (they are larger than normal due to the recently disclosed 7 year structural budget deficit). The 2006 / 2007 budget is $333M+ (it was $245M in 98/99 while enrollment has remained flat, though the student composition continues to change).

Why Not Walk to School Today?

Brian Lee and Jared Cunningham:

By applying GIS analysis, University of Kentucky undergraduate landscape architecture students have found ways to make it safer and easier for children to walk to school. Concerns with the growing childhood obesity epidemic, increased costs in driving children to school, and fostering the perception that it is more normal to drive rather than to walk to destinations have made walking to school an issue. With ArcView 9.1 and the ArcGIS Spatial Analyst extension, these students identified dangerous walking and bicycling areas, proposed design safety solutions, and evaluated alternatives for improving adverse conditions.
The immediate safety, as well as the long-term health, of children walking to and from schools has become an important topic of discussion in communities. The doubling of the childhood obesity rate over the past 30 years has raised concerns about short- and long-term health costs. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Dietary Guidelines for Americans 2005 recommend that children and adolescents frequently participate in at least 60 minutes of moderate-intensity physical activity, preferably on a daily basis. A short recess period during school does not provide enough physical activity for a growing child. One way to increase physical activity is to incorporate it into the child’s daily school commute. However, neighborhoods have often been designed with the automobile exclusively in mind. Consequently, children walking or bicycling to school is not always a safe alternative to the car or school bus.

2007/2008 Madison School District Budget Outlook: Half Empty or Half Full?

Susan Troller’s piece today on the larger than usual reduction in “revenue cap limited” increases (say that quickly) in the Madison School District’s $332M+ 2007/2008 budget is interesting, from my perspective, due to what is left unsaid:

The District has been running a “structural deficit for years, revealed only recently after school board Vice President Lawrie Kobza spent considerable time seeking an answer to the question:

“Why did our equity go down this past year since we, the board, passed a balanced budget in 2005/2006? Why did it go down by $2.8M (about a 1% variance in last year’s $319M+ budget)?

Superintendent Art Rainwater responded:

“The way we have attempted to deal with maintaining the quality of education as long as we could was to budget very, very aggressively, realizing that we had an out of fund balance ($5.9M in 2006/2007). We made the decision 7 years ago or so to budget aggressively and try to manage to that budget believing that we would use less fund equity over time than if we set aside a set amount. So that’s been our approach. That fund equity has now come down to the point that we believe we can’t do that any more and we will not bring you a balanced budget that is aggressive particularly where it gets into aggressive on the revenue side in how much efficiency we believe we can budget. So, what the effect of that is to increase the amount you have to pay.
I’ve not seen a published figure on how much the District’s equity has declined during this “7 year aggressive” budget posture. The District’s operating budget in 1998/1999 was approximately $245M. The current year’s budget is $332M. Enrollment has remained flat during this time.
Madison is a “rich” district, spending 23% more per student than the state average. Madison is also a property tax rich district, with an average property value per student of $775,000 (Appleton is $411K, Milwaukee $267K, Verona 526K and Middleton-Cross Plains $779K) – via SchoolFacts 2006. George Lighbourn’s recent WPRI school finance article is, in my view correct:

Even the most vocal proponents of change understand the reality that big changes are not in the offing. They know that they are up against the most formidable impediment to change, the printout, that age-old tabulation showing how much money each school district will get out of Madison. Any change that shows dozens of school districts will see a decline in state aid has almost no chance of succeeding.
All of this points to the importance of managing the $332M+ budget well, choosing the most effective curriculum and building public confidence for future referendums. I wonder when the public might have learned of the structural deficits (and the District’s dwindling cash equity) had elections gone a different way the past few years (reformers vs old guard)? Learn more about the April, 2007 School Board election.
Notes/links:
- Parent Peter Gascoyne posted a new approach to the District’s budget challenges last spring.
- Local Tax Climate
- March, 2006 Budget Forum

School finance is a mess. However, the Madison School District’s $332M+ budget provides resources far beyond most public school systems. Throwing up our arms and blaming the state or feds, or ? will not solve anything and certainly does not put our children’s interests first. Transparency, responsibility, creativity, local control (be careful what we wish for with respect to state and federal school finance updates) and wise investments are key to maintaining the community’s remarkable financial and voluntary public education support.

A Study of Core-Plus Students Attending Michigan State University

Janet Mertz recently mentioned (along with UW Placement’s James Wollack recently) this paper by Richard Hill & Thomas Parker [750K PDF]:

The latest, December 2006 issue of the American Mathematical Monthly, an official publication of the Mathematical Association of America, contains an 18-page article entitled “A study of Core-Plus students attending Michigan State University” by Richard Hill and Thomas Parker, professors at MSU who teach pre-service high school math teachers.
They state that, “as the implementation progressed, from 1996 to 1999, Core-Plus students placed into, and enrolled in, increasingly lower level courses; this downward trend is statistically robust (p<.0005). The percentages of students who (eventually) passed a technical calculus course show a statistically significant (p<.005) decline averaging 27 percent a year; this trend is accompanied by an obvious and statistically significant increase in percentages of students who placed into low-level and remedial algebra courses. The grades the Core-Plus students earned in their university mathematics courses are also below average, except for a small group of top students. ACT scores suggest the existence but not the severity of these trends."

Core-Plus is used in some Madison High Schools. Much more on math here.

Comments on BOE Progress Report for December

Madison School Board President Johnny Winston, Jr. (thanks!) posted a rather remarkable summary of recent activity today. I thought it would be useful to recall recent Board Majority inaction when reviewing Johnny’s words:
It’s remarkable to consider that just a few short years ago, substantive issues were simply not discussed by the School Board, such as the Superintendent’s rejection of the $2M in Federal Reading First Funds (regardless of the merits, $2M is material and there should have been a public discussion).
Reductions in the District’s annual ($332M+ this year) spending increases were thinly discussed (May, 2004).
Today, we know that the School District has been running a structural deficit for years, something previous Board Majority’s were apparently unaware of or certainly never discussed publicly.

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BOE Progress Report for December

Happy Holidays to everyone! Despite the cold weather, the Madison Board of Education continues its work.

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The Supreme Court & Race in Schools

Adam Liptak:

But, as an extraordinary two-hour Supreme Court argument last week demonstrated, the meaning and legacy of Brown remain up for grabs. The court was considering whether school systems in Seattle and Louisville, Ky., could take account of students’ races to ensure racial balance.
During the argument, two sets of justices managed, with equal vehemence, to invoke Brown — while understanding it to require precisely opposite things.
One side relied on the logic of the case: Brown, these justices said, forbids racial classifications by the government, period, even when the goal has changed from segregation to integration.
The other side relied on its music, saying that the real point of Brown was to achieve and maintain integrated public schools, whether through social progress or through government action that takes account of race.

The Economist:

AMERICA’S public schools are unfair. Their quality varies widely and many are lousy, so some unlucky kids get a shoddy education. Rich children live in areas with more property taxes, more education spending and better schools. They also tend to be white. So is it fair to keep some white children out of good schools, and give black children their places?
That incendiary question is among those at the heart of two cases the Supreme Court heard on December 4th. In two districts that deliberately balance each school’s racial mix (Jefferson County, Kentucky and Seattle, Washington) some white children complain that, because of their skin colour, they cannot get a fair shot at admission into the public schools they want. Both sides claim to have on their side the constitution’s 14th amendment, which was ratified after slavery ended, and grants everyone equal protection under the law.

A few questions for MPIE members …

I have a few questions for Barb and the other members of MPIE. I hope one or more of them will take the time to answer.
As I look over the course catalogs for the four high schools, I see that each school has both a Special Education Department and an English as a Second Language Department (although they may not be called exactly that at each school). Each of these departments in each of the four high schools offers an extensive range of courses for students who qualify and need the specialized educational experiences offered within these departments. Many of the courses offered by these departments fulfill graduation requirements and so can be used as curriculum replacement for the “regular” courses.
Here are my questions:

Does MPIE advocate having the District dismantle the Special Education and English as a Second Language Departments in our high schools? (I assume the answer is “no.”)
Does MPIE advocate having the District deny high school graduation credit for any and all courses offered within these departments, so that truly ALL students will be required to take 9th (and — at West — 10th) grade core courses at our high schools? (Again, I assume the answer is “no.”)
If MPIE advocates full inclusion, why aren’t the answers to the above two questions “yes — absolutely, yes”?
Does MPIE advocate getting rid of all advanced, honors, accelerated, TAG and Advanced Placement classes at our four high schools? In 9th grade? In 10th grade? In all four grades? What is your vision with regard to advanced and accelerated classes?
Please help me understand the logic that says it’s O.K. to have entire departments within each high school devoted to the specialized educational needs of some groups of students (not to mention adjustments to high school graduation requirements designed to meet those students’ needs), but it is not O.K. to have even a few sections of classes aimed at meeting the specialized educational needs of other students? (IMHO, this way of thinking is really best described as a belief in “selective inclusion.”)
Can you see the inherent illogic, inequity and unfairness of that position?
How do you decide which groups of students with specialized educational needs get to have their educational needs met and which groups of students do not?
It seems to me that a big part of the answer to that question should come from the research done from the perspective of the group of students under consideration. Do you agree or disagree with that premise?
Are you aware of the consistency (of findings, of conclusions, of recommendations) within the literature on how best to meet the needs of high performing students (a.k.a. “best practices”)?
Why does MPIE prefer the policy of getting rid of advanced high school classes over the policy of working with all K-8 students (and their families) in such a way as to increase the diversity of the students in those classes?
What do some middle and upper middle class parents of children with special education needs find so threatening about the thought of having their schools meet the educational needs of high ability, high performing, even academically talented students with the same thoughtfulness and commitment that they meet the needs of students with other special educational needs?
Are you aware that MMSD and national data indicate that approximately 20-25% of high school dropouts are academically gifted and have a demonstrated history of high academic performance? (In our District, that number is significantly higher at West HS than at the other three high schools and a disproportionate number of the “high performing” dropouts throughout the District are poor and minority students.) How do you understand those data and what do you think should be done about the situation?
Have you read this American Psychologist article on “the two tails of the normal curve,” co-authored by nationally recognized experts on the educational needs of students in each of the two “tails”? http://psych.wisc.edu/henriques/papers/two_tails.pdf If so, what do you think of it?

Would any of you would be willing to meet over coffee to talk about how we can work together on these issues and to see if we can find common ground?

High School Redesign Notes

As Arlene has reached out to the community for suggestions about the Redesign of the high schools, let me share a couple of thoughts:

It’s too late. The students that are behind in 5th grade rarely catch up. The 2/3 combinations are by far the worst academic combination for elementary students, yet we continue this practice to save money, and to save SAGE. I understand the pull out combination system is a great way to deal with cost and transient students….but does it really help? Can’t we negotiate with the Union to allow 4 year kindergarten? This is really annoying that we have to bow to the Union for the sacrifice of the lower income students.
The middle school years has a great resource of teachers. My children have had teachers that felt students are undergoing hormonal warfare and felt they should teach less so as not to upset the students. As I quote a teacher my child had in a “Charlie Brown teachers voice”, “Less is more and as long as they learn a couple of concepts during the year I feel I have done my job”. This fortunately is not the normal approach my children have received. Most of the Jr. High teachers have been focused on preparing the students for Memorial. I wonder if this is the model for most of the Jr. High Schools throughout the district?
The district currently has the highest number of National Merit Scholar graduates in the state, I would assume we send hundred of students to college each year and those that are from higher income families do well. I wonder if the problem is less racial gap and not more economic gap. Please follow the link to the following Newsweek article released by the North Carolina Democratic Party….http://ncdp.org/node/1081. This is an article about how North Carolina kept their struggling students, drop out prone students and low income students engaged in high school by offering them an option to attend a local community college (MATC) and receive not only their HS diploma upon graduation but also an associate degree in an area of interest so that staying in school had meaning….and graduating means getting a real job. Currently all we can offer students that graduate from high school is they will have a diploma and they can essentially get the same jobs in this area with or without that diploma….with an associates degree they can make more than their teachers in computer repair, Xerox repair, IT, health associate degrees and others. Please think about raising the standards and the options for the struggling students, not lowering the standards for the top tier students. This IDEA and a proven method could benefit the entire community and raise the standard of living for lower income families. Please read this article.

Tax Climate Notes & Links

The arrival of local property tax bills signal the onset of tax season. Accordingly, there has been a number of recent articles on Wisconsin’s tax climate:

Barbara Miner: More than 16,000 private properties in Wisconsin pay no property taxes. As a result, everyone else pays more. Why?

In Milwaukee, for instance, almost 20 percent of the city’s non-governmental property value is exempt from taxes, a big jump from almost 10 percent six years ago. Add in government-owned property such as public schools, fire stations and parks, and the exempt total is more than 33 percent. Figures are similar for many other cities and suburbs in the area.
Todd Berry has been president of the Wisconsin Taxpayers Alliance since 1994. Berry’s group has done many studies of Wisconsin’s taxes but has never looked at the impact of nonprofit tax exemptions.
As Berry sheepishly admits, his group is itself exempt and doesn’t pay property taxes on the building it owns in Madison, valued at about $500,000 on its federal tax return. Thus, a group that often does studies exposing high taxes helps add to the tax level for others with its own exemption.
Institute for Wisconsin’s Future:

Contrary to the claims of corporate lobbyists that the state has unreasonably high business taxes, Wisconsin is already a low-tax state for large firms.
And this means the corporate sector is not making a fair contribution to the cost of maintaining public structures of state and local government, from schools to roads to public safety to the environment.
To back up these statements, the Institute for Wisconsin’s Future released a mass of data on December 4, 2006, detailing that more than thirty states have higher taxes on corporations and that over 60% of the biggest companies operating in the state paid zero corporate income tax in 2003.
Wistax:

After a drop of 0.5% in December 2005, school taxes this year will rise 5.4% to $3.79 billion. The increase is less than in 2003-04 (7.2%) but over the 1990-2005 median (4.9%) Increased property values helped drop the average tax rate from $8.62 per $1,000 to $8.31. Growth in another state tax credit will help offset the school tax hike.

Inevitably, tax favors are available for certain folks and are often inserted into bills late in the process. The Miller Park exemption is classic:

Restaurants pay taxes but not Friday’s Front Row Sports Grill at Miller Park because everything inside the stadium grounds is exempt.
The exemption for Friday’s particularly galls city officials, not only because another property leaves the tax rolls but because they see it as unfair to other competitors. While the Miller Park restaurant is tax-free, the TGIFriday’s in Greenfield pays property taxes of about $45,000.

Last fall, both Russ Feingold and Herb Kohl voted for a massive, one year large corporate tax giveaway: a 5% tax rate on offshore earnings. What a mess.

Superintendent’s letter misleads

Superintendent Rainwater and I engaged in a lengthy series of e-mails when I questioned the truth of a statment in a letter he wrote to Wisconsin congressmen to seek their help in reinstating the MMSD’s eligibility for funds from Reading First.
In his letter the superintendent said that the MMSD was told “we had to use one of the preferred reading packages authorized by USDOE.”
At first the superintendent denied that he said such a thing and asked me to retract the quote from the letter.
After I sent him a link to his letter, he kindly wrote:

I apologize. I did not recall the wording of the letter to our congressional delegation and the fact that we simplified the process in writing them. You are correct that this letter does not accurately reflect everything that happened during the process. Although it was made clear throughout the process that we could opt for one of the pre-approved programs and move ahead the choice was never presented that we had to do that. The final choice that we were faced with was to make the final changes that they required to our program, accept one of the pre-approved programs or reject the grant. Art

As I always say, take nothing from the MMSD at face value.

Swaying Seattle’s School Assignments (Boundaries)

Daniel Golden:

In 2004, after the district scrapped race as a factor in assignments because of the legal threat, another group of white parents from the same neighborhood got upset when their children were passed over at the same majority-white school, Ballard High. They were left out not because of race, but because they didn’t live near enough.
This time, the school district quietly backed down when the parents started sending their children to private or suburban schools instead of the struggling, majority-black school to which they’d been assigned. Ballard and other supposedly full schools together took about 100 extra students, most of them white.
Even as parents challenge a government action making room for minorities in highly-regarded schools, the later events in Seattle show another side of the picture: the ways that school-assignment practices can work to the benefit of whites. In Seattle as in other parts of the country, schools sometimes accommodate middle-class parents who push to get their children into coveted schools. When these middle-class parents are predominantly white, as in Seattle, the lobbying can tend to sort more white children into the most desirable schools.

One Small Step in the Right Direction at West HS …

In light of recent events regarding curriculum and other issues in our high schools, there has been a small step in the right direction at West HS. Superintendent Rainwater announced at our 11/29 MUAE meeting that he has been in discussion with West HS Principal Ed Holmes about providing West 9th and 10th graders who are advanced in language arts the opportunity to skip over English 9 and/or English 10. Advanced placement decisions will be based on grades, teacher recommendation, writing samples, WKCE scores, and ACT/SAT scores. Details will be worked out by Mr. Holmes, the West English Department and District TAG staff.
This small — but important — change brings West more in line with Memorial, the only other high school that has a core English 9 curriculum delivered in completely heterogeneous classes. Every year, four or five academically advanced Memorial freshmen are allowed to go into English 10 — specifically, English 10 Honors. (FYI: Unlike West, Memorial has honors classes in 10th grade; as well, 10th graders can take some of Memorial’s 17 AP classes.) East and LaFollette, of course, have two or three levels of ability/interest-grouped classes for freshman (and sophomore) English — called regular, advanced and TAG at East and regular and advanced at LaFollette — and will continue to have them for at least the next two years.
If you are the parent of a West area 8th or 9th grader who is advanced and highly motivated in English, you might want to consider having your student take either the ACT or SAT through the Midwest Academic Talent Search (MATS) in order to support a request for single subject acceleration. There is still time to register for the MATS online: http://www.ctd.northwestern.edu/mats/index.html
IMPORTANT NOTE: As I see it, this development does not in any way mean we should slow down our lobbying efforts vis a vis the BOE and Administration to get them to make West more like the other high schools — in terms of course offerings and other oportunities for academically advanced students — during the two years of the high school redesign study introduced by Superintendent Rainwater at the 11/27 BOE meeting.

Additional Notes on “What it Takes to Make a Student”

Joanne Jacobs:

Last night at the Hunt Institute retreat for North Carolina legislators, the former governor, Jim Hunt, handed out copies he’d underlined to everyone there, urging the legislators to “read every word.”
Schools like KIPP and Amistad [Clusty on Amistad] that succeed in educating low-income students tend to do three things well, Education Gadfly points out.

Students are required to be in school longer-much longer-than their peers in traditional public schools.
Pupils are tested, and re-tested, to measure achievement. Lesson plans, teaching strategies, even whole curricula are adjusted based on how well, or poorly, students are learning what they should. Moreover, teachers are closely monitored and constantly working to improve their skills.
Students’ behavior and values are aggressively shaped by school leaders and instructors.
What is complicated, however, is implementing these changes within today’s rule-bound, bureaucratic system, with its collective bargaining constraints, bureaucratic regulations, and the inertia of 100-plus years of public education. It’s no coincidence that all of Tough’s profiled schools are charters, and as such have the freedom to do things differently and take control of their own destinies. In turn, this greater autonomy allows them to attract many top-notch, talented, and energetic teachers who are willing to work long hours for mediocre pay because they yearn for a results-oriented, break-the-rules environment. Replicating this atmosphere in the traditional system would be hard-maybe even impossible. But expanding charter schools–and getting more good ones-is no easy feat, either.

Dennis Doyle adds a few thoughts.

Effect of Ritalin on Preschoolers Examined

National Institute of Mental Health:

The first long-term, large-scale study designed to determine the safety and effectiveness of treating preschoolers who have attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) with methylphenidate (Ritalin) has found that overall, low doses of this medication are effective and safe. However, the study found that children this age are more sensitive than older children to the medication’s side effects and therefore should be closely monitored. The 70-week, six-site study was funded by the National Institutes of Health’s National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) and was described in several articles in the November 2006 issue of the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry.
“The Preschool ADHD Treatment Study, or PATS, provides us with the best information to date about treating very young children diagnosed with ADHD,” said NIMH Director Thomas R. Insel, MD. “The results show that preschoolers may benefit from low doses of medication when it is closely monitored, but the positive effects are less evident and side-effects are somewhat greater than previous reports in older children.”

Education and Entrepreneurship: More Differentiation

Arnold Kling:

The incumbent policy is more of the same. Both parties in Washington champion more government involvement in primary education and more subsidies for existing colleges and universities.
The innovative policy is to support any alternative to our current education system. Ultimately, we would trust consumers to keep the best alternatives and discard the rest.
…….
While politicians champion more homogeneity in education (national standards; send everyone to college), my guess is that what we need is more differentiation. Students are heterogeneous in terms of their abilities, learning styles, and rates of maturation. Putting every student on the same track is sub-optimal for large numbers of young people.
Some students — probably more than we realize — are autodidacts, meaning that they teach themselves at their own pace. One of the brightest students in my high school statistics class simply cannot handle the structure of a school day. He is motivated to learn on his own (he was curious to read my book on health care and asked me for a copy), but he is demotivated by most of his classes.
Some students are not suited for academic study. We speak of the proverbial auto mechanic, but in fact the best career path for many of these students in today’s economy would be in the allied health fields. Unfortunately, this career path is blocked by occupational licensing requirements, which prevent many otherwise capable students from pursuing careers in dental hygiene, physical therapy, or similar professions. If we had the equivalent credentialism at work in auto repair, you would need four years of college plus two or three years of post-graduate education just to work on a car.

Kling website and blog.
Interesting timing. I spoke recently with a Madison parent (pre-K child) who agrees with this sentiment (balancing education power with parents via greater local choice).

Revamping the high schools

Isthmus’ Jason Shepard covers the story:
Curriculum changes halted as district eyes study group
JStanding in front of a giant projection screen with his wireless remote control and clip-on microphone, Madison School Superintendent Art Rainwater on Monday unveiled his grand vision for Madison’s four major high schools. But the real backdrop for his presentation before the Madison school board was the criticism of changes implemented last year at West High and proposed this year at East. Both involved reducing course offerings in favor of a core curriculum for all students, from gifted to struggling.
Rainwater stressed his intention to start from scratch in overhauling all aspects of the education provided at West, East, Memorial and La Follette, whose combined enrollment tops 7,600 students. The move follows consolidation of practices in the city’s elementary and middle schools. But it may prove more challenging, since the high schools have a longstanding tradition of independence.
Over the next two years, Rainwater would like a steering committee of experts to study best practices in high school education. Everything, Rainwater stresses, is on the table: “It’s important we don’t have preconceived notions of what it should be.”
Heterogeneous classes, which until last week were the district’s preferred direction for high school changes, are, said Rainwater, “only one piece” of the redesign. But curriculum changes are clearly going to happen.
“It’s not acceptable anymore to lecture four days a week and give a test on Friday,” Rainwater declared. Teachers must learn how to teach students, rather than teach content.
The 50 parents and teachers in the audience reacted coolly, judging from the comments muttered among themselves during the presentation and the nearly two-hour discussion that followed.
Tellingly, the biggest applause came when board member Ruth Robarts said it was “high time we as a board start talking about high school curriculum.” Robarts chastised Rainwater for not including teachers and parents on the steering committee, which will “reinforce a perception that is not in our favor.” She said the district was giving critics only two options: accept the changes or “come down and protest.”
On Nov. 16, East Principal Alan Harris unveiled plans to eliminate several courses in favor of core classes in ninth and 10th grades. Attendees said the plan was presented as a “done deal.” In e-mails to the board, parents called the plan “short-sighted and misguided,” and one teacher warned: “Don’t do it.”
Rainwater, apparently recognizing the damage to parent and teacher relations, sent a memo to principals last week.
“I am asking you to cease any significant programmatic changes at each of your schools as this community dialogue progresses,” he wrote. “We need a tabula rasa mentality that will allow for a free flow of ideas, an opportunity to solidify trust in our expertise, and a chance at a solid, exciting product at the end.”
The four high schools will remain under their current programs until the steering committee gets to work. Chaired by Pam Nash, deputy superintendent of secondary schools, it will include several district administrators as well as experts from the UW-Madison, Edgewood College and MATC.
Rainwater sought to assure board and audience members that teachers and parents will have ample opportunity for input. His plan calls for three separate periods of public comment, after which subcommittees will make revisions. The school board will then vote on the recommendations after additional hearings and debate.
“You get better input if people have something to react to,” Rainwater said, adding that involving teachers in all stages would be impractical, because it would be difficult to cover their teaching assignments. That comment drew a collective groan from teachers in the audience.
Rainwater’s call for a revamping of the city’s high schools suggests the current approach isn’t working. And that poses a dilemma for school officials. The district likes to tout its record number of National Merit semifinalists and state-leading ACT scores as proof that its high schools are successful. Many parents worry that those high-end benchmarks are under attack.
But Madison’s schools continue to fail countless kids — mostly low-income and minority students. This is a profound challenge hardly unique to Madison, but one that deserves more attention from policymakers.
Research in education, the starting point for Rainwater’s steering committee, offers promising solutions. But the district risks much in excluding teachers from the start, since inevitably they will be on the front lines of any change. And excluding parents could heighten the alienation that has already prompted some middle- and upper-class families to abandon the public schools.
While struggling over details, most board members conceptually support the study. During their discussion Monday, Lawrie Kobza cut to the chase.
“What is the problem we’re trying to solve?” she asked. “And is this how we solve this problem?” Kobza professed not to know the answer. But these are the right questions to ask.
http://www.thedailypage.com/isthmus/article.php?article=4919

Does Closing the Minority Achievement Gap Require a Downward Rush to the Middle

The prime motivator for taking MMSD’s high schools from an academically rich curriculum to the one-room schoolhouse model has been to close the minority achievement gap. Thus, I read with interest the following NYTimes letters:
A Racial Gap, or an Income Gap? (7 Letters)
Published: November 24, 2006
To the Editor:
In emphasizing race-based achievement gaps, “Schools Slow in Closing Gaps Between Races” (front page, Nov. 20) pays insufficient attention to the significant role of socioeconomic inequalities in explaining these gaps.
For social scientists studying the No Child Left Behind law, the slow progress comes as no surprise. The education researcher David Berliner has noted that “poverty is the 600-pound guerilla in the classroom.”
As long as proponents of No Child Left Behind continue to dismiss the examination of the economic backgrounds of students as an example of what President Bush has called the “soft bigotry of low expectations” or as an excuse for low achievement by low-income students, standards-based reforms like No Child Left Behind will have limited effects.
It is time for policy makers to place as much emphasis on reducing poverty as they do on improving the schools attended by poor children. Both are necessary, but are alone insufficient to reduce the achievement gap.
Alan R. Sadovnik
New York, Nov. 20, 2006
The writer is a professor of education, sociology and public affairs at Rutgers University in Newark.
•
To the Editor:
Yes, the achievement gaps remain persistent. But perplexing? Come on.
Having 10 years’ experience teaching in low-income, largely black districts, and also having raised three middle-class white children, I consider it a no-brainer why my children achieve well in school while many of my students do not: I am one mother to three kids, but a teacher to 25.
Aside from the socioeconomic differences between my kids and my students (a separate, undoubtedly more important perspective on achievement disparities), my children get more of my attention, period.
I want to give all of my students the same advantages I’ve given my own kids, but how can I possibly meet 25 individual needs with as much sensitivity and precision?
Why does this discussion always ignore class size as a contributing factor?
Why not lower the teacher-student ratio to 1 to 10 for a few years and then study the outcomes? The obvious answer is cost. But perhaps over the years this would be offset by the savings built from a better-educated and more productive group of graduates.
Mary Scheffler
Ocean, N.J., Nov. 20, 2006
•
To the Editor:
No Child Left Behind, signed into law by President Bush in January 2002, has not closed the achievement gap between minority and white students, but it has had a major effect on education in America.
The law has had a major impact on the privatization of education. With financing now available from school vouchers, increasing numbers of both minority and white families are placing their children in private and religious schools.
In addition, American schools are increasingly becoming racially segregated as white parents remove their children from public education.
Martin Gittelman
New York, Nov. 20, 2006
•
To the Editor:
All the tests in the world will not close the achievement gap. When politicians and business leaders stop blaming the schools and start focusing on the real reasons for the achievement gap — the economic gap, the health care gap and the racial gap — poor and minority students may have a fighting chance.
Until then, the more than $2 billion testing industry will continue to reap a bonanza as our nation falls further and further into the educational abyss.
Judy Rabinowitz
Ocean, N.J., Nov. 20, 2006
•
To the Editor:
How can you discuss the test-score gaps between minority and white students without attributing some of the problem to the child poverty rate of almost 18 percent, the child hunger rate of 17 percent and the 19 percent uninsured rate for poor children, when African-Americans and Hispanics bear the brunt of those disadvantages?
Yet the education experts quoted in your article speak as if poverty and hunger, and the illnesses associated with them, had no effect on children’s school attendance and capacity to learn.
That’s not the way the principal of a school that narrowed the gap between black and white students saw it. You write that he “credited a prekindergarten program and a school health clinic that helped keep poor students from missing class.”
No Child Left Behind is big on testing and promises. But it does far too little to address the social and economic needs of black, Hispanic and poor white children — needs that are inextricably linked to school achievement.
Milton Schwebel
New Brunswick, N.J., Nov. 20, 2006
The writer is the emeritus dean of the Graduate School of Education, Rutgers University.
•
To the Editor:
Standardized tests may be relatively efficient to administer, but they do not provide the information educators need to understand and work to close the achievement gap. Teachers need detailed information about their students’ strengths and areas of need. All they get from a standardized test is a number.
If we want to make greater progress toward the goal of leaving no child behind, let’s shelve those standardized tests and work together to truly understand the nature of the achievement gap and the academic, social and economic factors that contribute to it.
Howard Miller
Dobbs Ferry, N.Y., Nov. 20, 2006
The writer is an associate professor of literacy education at Mercy College.
•
To the Editor:
A new approach to closing the education gaps between races is needed.
Instead of looking at the performance of unsuccessful schools, unsuccessful teachers and poorly performing minority students, why not look for the factors that underlie success?
A study of the successful Asian students who outperform whites and other minority students might yield some interesting insights that could be effectively applied to solving the problem of those “left behind.”
Lynn Garon
New York, Nov. 20, 2006

Thanksgiving

Wikipedia | US Census Bureau
A quick note to thank the Madison School Board (Johnny Winston, Jr., President; Lawrie Kobza, Vice President; Carol Carstensen, Treasurer; Shwaw Vang, Clerk; Lucy Mathiak, Ruth Robarts and Arlene Silveira) for publicly discussing and addressing a number of issues this year:

The Superintendent’s Review (something that was not done for a number of years until a few incumbents lost their seats).
Implementing a substantive review of the District’s Math Program (see also this open letter and the recent Math Forum)
Taking a substantive look at healthcare costs.
Diving deep into the District’s $332M+ budget.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Superintendent Rainwater: “We need to dramatically change our high schools.”

On Monday, November 27, the Madison School Board will begin to address rumors about major changes coming to our high schools. There are some realities behind the rumors.
For example, West High School substantially reduced the English courses for tenth graders this year. The principal at East High School met with parents last week. He delivered a message that many parents understood as an explanation that decisions on curriculum changes at EHS have already been made and would be carried out. Period. He has since said that he welcomes student and parent viewpoints. End of Gifted Class Drawing Protest And last month there was–to say the least–confusion and misinformation about when students can opt to take college courses for high school credit.
However, the main source of community comment and concerns may be Superintendent Rainwater’s October editorial announcing his commitment to redesign of the high schools. Changing our high schools The editorial that went sent to homes across the district via student backpacks is long on generalities and short on specifics, giving rise to the kinds of questions that I have been hearing at work.
In my opinion, now is the right time for the school board to set parameters and goals for changes in the high schools. That’s our role. We should hear the ideas coming from the schools and their communities as well as those coming from central administration before any process to redesign the schools goes forward.
I welcome both an on-going board discussion and community public discussion of possible changes to our high schools, particularly changes that could raise academic goals for all students and ensure a wide range of academic challenging courses and activities.

Keep an eye on math, board tells Rainwater

The Madison School Board has given Superintendent Art Rainwater a set of specific orders to accomplish in the coming year, including several directives to take an in-depth look at the district’s entire math curriculum.
In the past several years, area math educators have expressed concern about the effectiveness of the Madison district’s reliance on a reform math curriculum, which emphasizes word-based problem-solving.
Another goal board members mandated for the superintendent for next year is that he collaborate with them and other advisers on a plan to tell community members why parents and guardians should send their children to Madison public schools.
In addition, the board will evaluate the administration on providing information in a clear, accurate, concise and timely manner.
By Susan Troller, The Capital Times, November 21, 2006

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Board of Education meeting of 30-Oct-2006

The October 30, 2006 Board of Education met to discuss a series of resolutions, and approve the final 2006-07 MMSD Budget, and approve the AFSCME Local 60 contract.

The video of the meeting is 210MB, and 2 hours and 30 minutes long. Click on the image at left to watch the video. The video contains chapter headings which allow quick navigation to sections of the meeting. The video will play immediately, while the file continues to download.
Public Appearances
There was a public appearance by Barbara Lewis who expressed concern over the apparent change in policy of MMSD in granting high school credit for courses taken at the University of Wisconsin Madison. Both Superintendent Art Rainwater and Director of Alternative Programs Steve Hartley discussed the issues with the Board and clarified that the policy statement which Ms. Lewis had received, and which apparently was being misinterpreted by some high school staff referred only to Independent Study. The Board, noting confusion of parents, school staff and themselves, requested that these issues be placed on the Board agenda as soon as possible.
Agenda Item #4
Resolution supporting expenditures for school security be placed outside the revenue caps.
Agenda Item #5
Resolution supporting language by the Superintendent and other superintendents that the State adopt the Adequacy Model for school funding.
Agenda Item #6 – Discussion and Approval of 2006-2007 Budget
This portion of the meeting begins at approximately 20 minutes into the meeting and continues until the Board votes to approve the tax levy amount at 2 hours into the meeting. Final approval of the full budget is rescheduled for a later meeting. The discussions included issues of fund equity, the fund reserve, the unexpected decrease of State support, liquidation of earnings on Chavez building funds, changes in the budget necessary to offset decrease in State support, and the minimum decisions the Board needed to make to meet budget deadline.
Agenda Item #7
Approval of the AFSCME Local 60 contract, in which the District and Union agree to a health care package containing only HMOs, saving the District significant healthcare costs, in exchange for a generous wage increase.

Academic Blend: A Thoreau Fundraiser

Academic Blend: A Thoreau School Fundraiser

Academic Blend, a 100% Fair Trade Coffee. An insurgent fundraising idea from Thoreau Elementary School’s activist parents. 4 flavors (check out the eyes), $10/pound. Email Rosana Ellman (rellmann@charter.net) to order.

Add your interesting fund raising ideas to this post via the comments. The recently revealed Madison School District’s $6M structural deficit (slightly less than 2% of its $332M budget) places a premium on creative fund raising and expense reduction. The 2007/2008 budget will feature larger than normal reductions in the District’s spending increases, due to the structural deficit.

New Glarus Parent Files Request for Summary Judgement On Behalf of Gifted Education in Wisconsin

State gifted education advocate and Madison attorney Todd Palmer recently filed a request for a judicial “summary judgement” in the matter of “Todd Palmer v. The State of Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction and Elizabeth Burmaster.” As he explained it to me in layperson’s terms, a summary judgment “is a procedure wherein a party (me) asks the judge to render a decision based on the record. I am essentially arguing that the factual issues here are undisputed, therefore the judge can render a decision without a trial. I have every expectation that this motion will decide all relevant issues (one way or the other) and therefore we will avoid a trial. The state (DPI) must respond to my motion on or before 12/1/06.” Todd expects a decision from Judge Nowakowski sometime in January, 2007.
The complete document has been posted on the Madison United for Academic Excellence (MUAE) website — http://madisonunited.org/documents/pld_061101_brief_in_supp_MSJ1.pdf
Here is the Introduction:

This case is about a state agency purposely ignoring statutory mandates that require educational opportunities to be provided to an entire class of underserved and at-risk children — specifically those labeled as “gifted and talented.”
At their core, the issues before this Court are straightforward: Can a state agency ignore a legislative directive to promulgate rules governing this underserved class of children? Alternatively, can a state agency unilaterally transfer this rulemaking responsibility to local units of government in contradiction of a clear legislative directive? The clear answer to both issues is no.

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2 West High Students Face Charges In Connection With Bomb Threat

Channel3000:

Two Madison West High School students have been suspended and are facing criminal charges after allegedly creating a bomb scare twice — once on Monday and on Halloween.
A 17-year-old boy and a 16-year-old girl allegedly just wanted to play a practical joke, but the school’s officials said they don’t think it’s a laughing matter and are sending a strong message.
“We can’t have students making those kinds of threats. We will have to take those kinds of threats very seriously. There will be consequences both from the school district and from the criminal justice system,” said Ed Holmes, principal at West High School. “One student not wanting to go to class shouldn’t impact on over 2,000 people in a school community.”

“Too Little Math in Math?”

Lynn Thompson:

But they strongly believe that their math textbooks should include actual math.
Donald’s “Connected Mathematics” book at Harbour Pointe Middle School in Mukilteo asks him to arrange a list of 20 cities in order of their populations, all in the tens of millions.
Yes, he concedes, he must recognize differences among numbers, but it’s a pretty low-level task for a bright sixth-grader, about as challenging as alphabetizing words.
But check out the next activity: Locate the cities on a map.
“That’s not math,” Donald protests. “That’s geography.”
The Chacon-Taylor children and their parents, Hugh Taylor and Monique Chacon-Taylor, are among Snohomish County families raising questions about the effectiveness of widely used math textbooks that encourage discovery and writing about math, but de-emphasize basics such as multiplication and long division.
They’ve joined other Washington parents in an organization called Where’s the Math? that’s calling on the state Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction (OSPI) to rewrite its K-12 math standards, select more effective textbooks and re-examine the math content of the Washington Assessment of Student Learning (WASL)
The calls for rethinking the state’s math education come amid signs that the present system is failing large numbers of students. Just 51 percent of 10th-graders and 59 percent of fourth-graders passed the math section of the WASL in the spring. About 29,000 juniors haven’t passed the WASL math test, which they must do to graduate in spring 2008..

The Madison School District uses Connected Math in middle school. Many links and notes on math, including the recent Math Forum audio/video.

Gates: U.S. Education System Needs Work

Donna Gordon Blankinship:

Gates said the experience of being a parent of three kids – ages 10, 7 and 4 – has led him to spend more time thinking about schools. Specifically, he said the U.S. education system needs higher standards, clear accountability, flexible personnel practices and innovation.
Gates, whose children are in private schools, said every state should require students to take three or four years of math and science to graduate from high school – 25 states currently have such requirements. He wants states to have the power to intervene at low-performing schools.
“Real accountability means more than having goals; it also means having clear consequences for not meeting the goals,” he said in a speech earlier Monday to Washington state educators who came to hear the results of an education task force.
Gates said schools should also be able to pay the best teachers better and offer incentives to attract people with rare abilities.
“It’s astonishing to me to have a system that doesn’t allow us to pay more for someone with scarce abilities, that doesn’t allow us to pay more to reward strong performance,” he said. “That is tantamount to saying teacher talent and performance don’t matter and that’s basically saying students don’t matter.”

Tax rates don’t tell the whole story

Dan Benson:

The proposed tax rate, however, is $1.83 per $1,000 of equalized value, down from $1.97 this year. That means the owner of a $250,000 house would save about $35 on the tax bill from the previous year.
“(Vrakas) is calling it a tax decrease because the impact on some homeowners is that their tax bill may go down a couple bucks,” said Christine Lufter, president of the Waukesha Taxpayers League.
Focusing on tax rates is “the most deceptive way of selling a budget. It’s not an indicator of government efficiency,” she said.
Instead, she and Todd Berry, president of the Wisconsin Taxpayers Association, say taxpayers should focus on the entire budget picture.
“Taxpayers should not pay attention to the tax rate. It’s a function of both taxes and (property) values. And in the last 10 to 15 years, when values have been going up at a pretty rapid clip, it becomes almost a no-brainer to drop the tax rate,” Berry said. “Playing games with the tax rate is my No. 1 pet peeve.”

Boundary changes for Lake View & Chavez?

A story by Susan Troller in the Cap Times reports:

Two elementary schools at opposite ends of the Madison Metropolitan School District are bursting at the seams and may face boundary changes next year to deal with crowding.
Lake View Elementary on the northeast side of the city and Chavez Elementary on the southwest side are both well over their intended capacities, with Lake View at 116 percent and Chavez at 108 percent.
Lake View has an enrollment of 309 students, but is designed for 266. Chavez, with an intended capacity of 602 students, has an enrollment this year of 652 students.

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Is Science Education Failing Students?

Susan Black:

In many classrooms, science textbooks add to children’s misconceptions.
William Beaty, an engineer who designed an electricity exhibit for the Boston Museum of Science, discovered “a morass of misconceptions, mistakes, and misinformation” in grade school science textbooks. In fact, he couldn’t find a single book that explained basic electricity correctly.
North Carolina State University physics professor John Hubisz found similar problems in a two-year study of middle-school science textbooks. All told, he compiled 500 pages of errors in 12 textbooks, including mix-ups between fission and fusion, incorrect definitions of absolute zero, and a map showing the equator running through the southern states.
Reporting on the ways science textbooks are developed and sold to schools, Forbes writer David McClintick says many companies “churn out rubbish” with countless errors. One widely adopted text, for instance, claims the earth rotates around the sun, when it actually revolves around the sun and rotates on its axis.

School math books, nonsense, and the National Science Foundation

David Klein:

Problem: Find the slope and y-intercept of the equation 10 = x – 2.5.
Solution: The equation 10 = x – 2.5 is a specific case of the equation y = x – 2.5, which has a slope of 1 and a y-intercept of –2.5.
This problem comes from a 7th grade math quiz that accompanies a widely used textbook series for grades 6 to 8 called Connected Mathematics Program or CMP.[1] The solution appears in the CMP Teacher’s Guide and is supported by a discussion of sample student work.
Richard Askey, a mathematician at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, reported, “I was told about this problem by a parent whose child took this quiz. The marking was exactly as in the text.”[2] Students instructed and graded in this way learn incorrect mathematics, and teachers who know better may be undermined by their less informed peers, armed with the “solution.” This example is far from the only failing of CMP. Among other shortcomings, there is no instruction on division of fractions in the entire three year CMP series, and the other parts of fraction arithmetic are treated poorly.[3]
Is CMP just an anomaly? Unfortunately not. CMP is only one of more than a dozen defective K-12 math programs funded by the National Science Foundation. More specifically, the NSF programs were created and distributed through grants from the Education and Human Resources (EHR) Division within the NSF. In contrast to the NSF’s admirable and important role in supporting fundamental scientific research, the EHR has caused, and continues to cause, damage to K-12 mathematics education.

Notes and links on math curriculum. Audio / Video from the recent math forum.
Connected Math is widely used within the Madison School District resulting in no small amount of supplementing by teachers, students and parents.

Madison School District Virtual Learning

Jason Shephard:

One of the better-kept secrets in Madison is that the school district currently offers more than 100 online courses for city high school students. The program is called the Madison Virtual Campus.
“It turns out Madison is a leader in this technology,” says Johnny Winston Jr., the school board president. “My first question was, ‘Why don’t people know about this?’” He thinks virtual schools could help keep students who might leave for other options.
“As the second-largest school district in the state, we should be leading the way,” Winston says. “And to find out that yeah, we’re already doing this but nobody knows about it, I’m like, c’mon, let’s make this happen.”
But officials have purposely kept the program under wraps as they’ve fine-tuned it. There’s no mention of the program on the district’s Web site, and most parents have never heard of it. The district has spent five years building infrastructure, training staff and convincing stakeholders of the growing demand for virtual learning.
“We’re close to crossing a threshold in this district,” says Kelly Pochop, the district’s online learning facilitator. “Keep your ears open. We’re actively exploring options with our administrative team.”
The big question is how fast the district wants its students to take advantage of the Madison Virtual Campus. Currently, only eight high school students are taking online courses for credit. Another 14 middle school students are taking an online geometry course through the Kiel school district, with a Madison teacher providing support, to meet demands by the local teachers union.

Madison BOE Progress Report for November 8th

I would like to thank our community for their passage of the referendum on November 7th. This referendum will build a new school in Linden Park, finance the cafeteria and remodeling of Leopold Elementary and refinance existing debt…

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Memorial High School Taser Incident Notes

From a reader:

Address 201 South Gammon Road (Memorial High School)
Arrested person/suspect 1. Jacquelyn L. Lightfoot, 37-year-old female of Madison (Charges –Disorderly Conduct 947.01, Resisting/Obstructing A Police Officer 946.41)
2. 14-year-old female (10th grade Memorial HS Student) of Madison
(Charges – Disorderly Conduct 947.01, Resisting/Obstructing A Police Officer 946.41)
3. 15-year-old female (9th grade Memorial HS Student) of Madison (Charges – Disorderly Conduct 947.01, Resisting/Obstructing A Police Officer 946.41)
Victim/Injuries Jacquelyn L. Lightfoot was evaluated at local hospital for treatment related to injuries sustained prior to this incident.
Details On 11/08/06 at approximately 11:29am, Educational Resource Officer (ERO) requested emergency backup at Memorial High School reference a belligerent parent that was out of control.
Upon arrival, it was determined that a 17-year-old male subject, who was not a student of the school, had been taken into custody by the ERO and was being cited/released on a municipal violation of possessing tobacco products.
Jacquelyn L. Lightfoot (parent of the 17-year-old male) was made aware of the arrest scenario and responded to Memorial High School. Lightfoot made her way to the office of the ERO and began to verbally attack the officer for the police action he was involved in concerning the 17-year-old male.
Lightfoot continually escalated her actions towards the officer and was told many times to calm down and cease her physical approach; as she demanded her son be released from custody immediately. The ERO was then surrounded by Lightfoot and her two daughters in a confined area, and deeming Lightfoot the greatest threat, a Taser was utilized by the ERO to deescalate this threat to a manageable level.
It should be noted that the officer verbalized and used a physical separation technique before using the Taser as his last resort.
Jacquelyn L. Lightfoot and her two daughters were all arrested on charges of Disorderly Conduct and Resisting/Obstructing A Police Officer. The situation that occurred was an isolated event that did not place the school in any harm at any time. School officials were quick to act in this scenario, and it was resolved quickly after police arrived on scene.
It is understandable that parents would be concerned about the welfare of their children, but school officials and police would expect that parents would be appropriate in utilizing the correct mode of conflict resolution. This is a case that all involved parties did not envision, but concerns by any interested person must be dealt with in an appropriate manner if the educational environment is to remain conducive to that of learning.

WKOW-TV interviews Lightfoot.

A Discussion of AP/IB High School Classes

Jay Matthews:

I am collecting the Challenge Index data now. The early returns indicate our local schools will set a record for the number of AP and IB tests being given. In fact, there appears to be no other region in the country that has as high a level of participation in college-level courses and tests.
That, I think, is a good thing. The Washington area is going to look good on most educational measures because it has some of the highest levels of parental income and education. All the research shows that students who come from affluent families with parents who went to college do better in school than students without those factors. But most of our school districts have done something most other U.S. districts have not done. Our districts have opened these challenging courses to all students, not just to those with affluent, well-educated parents. And they have prepared many students from disadvantaged homes so well that they are passing these college-level tests and not only earning college credit but also getting a useful sense of how to handle the heavy reading lists and long final exams that make college, for many students, such a difficult adjustment.
Two large studies in California and Texas have shown that good grades on the three-hour AP tests correlate with higher graduation rates in college. I have interviewed hundreds of AP and IB teachers and students over the past 20 years. They almost all say that the courses and tests are the best academic experiences their high schools have to offer, and they recommend that more high schools use them.

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