Sunday, June 6, 2010

Editorial: Achieving our education goals requires a lot more work | - MLive.com

Editorial: Achieving our education goals requires a lot more work

By Kalamazoo Gazette Editorial Board

June 06, 2010, 7:00AM

With all that’s at stake, communities can’t be willing to settle

Some might be tempted to view Monday’s visit by President Barack Obama as the culmination of tremendous effort to improve education in our community.

But don’t, because it’s not the culmination.

No, the appearance by the president of the United States to call attention to Kalamazoo Central High School and its achievements is just one step in a long journey toward excellence in education for our entire region.

Certainly, we all can be proud that KCHS was selected as winner of the president’s Race to the Top High School Commencement Challenge, and we can celebrate that it therefore has the honor of having the nation’s chief executive address its graduates on Monday.

But we also can — and should — be proud when any one of our schools produces great results. That includes improving test scores, winning awards, excelling in contests or simply graduating a high percentage of students and sending a large number of graduates to university, if that’s their dream.

There’s a lot of talk about education across our collective communities these days. We can’t find a single district that’s content with everything it’s doing. We don’t see many parents willing to accept mediocrity. And we aren’t aware of any community ready to accept the status quo as good enough.

In fact, what we see happening in schools here is worth shining a spotlight on. Despite all the challenges we face as a community, as a state and a nation, the accomplishments of the students and teachers in our schools

When children leave Dallas schools, do they find a better education? | News for Dallas, Texas | Dallas Morning News | News: Education

When children leave Dallas schools, do they find a better education?

11:06 PM CDT on Saturday, June 5, 2010

By HOLLY K. HACKER / The Dallas Morning News
hhacker@dallasnews.com

With thousands of black families bypassing Dallas ISD, a big question emerges: Are their children getting a better education?

Also Online

'Black flight' changing the makeup of Dallas ISD

Chat: Discuss these stories with the reporters at 11:30 a.m. Tuesday

Full coverage: Dallas ISD

Blog: Dallas ISD

Blog: The Education Front

More education news

For starters, parents can consider school district ratings under the state's accountability system. Dallas is rated "acceptable," just likeCedar Hill, DeSoto ,Duncanville, Mesquiteand Mansfield – all districts that have added thousands of black students in recent years. But Lancaster ISD is rated "unacceptable."

TAKS scores tell more. For instance, Mansfield and Mesquite school districts have higher percentages of students passing or scoring commended on the TAKS test across all subjects. But DISD also has a greater share of students who are poor or learning English – challenges that can lower overall passage rates. Meanwhile, Lancaster ISD has lower TAKS scores than Dallas ISD almost across the board.

But looking at district-level information can mask big differences between campuses within the same school district. Dallas ISD has campuses rated from "exemplary" at the top to "unacceptable" at the bottom. Again, it's also important to look at the demographics each school serves, because that varies widely and can help explain achievement.

Many parents are also choosing charter schools. Overall, they are more likely to be rated "unacceptable" statewide – though most of those low-rated campuses serve former or potential dropouts. Several charter schools have also had financial problems in recent years, based on TEA reports. The area also has some top-rated charter schools, including St. Anthony Academy and Richland Collegiate High School, both in Dallas.

Beyond state data, parents can weigh factors that don't appear on

RN-T.com - State studying national education standards

State studying national education standards

by Staff reports

1 day 11 hrs ago | 462 views | 1

| 9

A new set of education benchmarks released this week aims to make sure all American children are learning the same sort of information at the same time. Those standards, called theCommon Core State Standards, are aimed at replacing a hodgepodge of educational goals varying wildly from state to state with a uniform set of expectations for students.

It’s the first time states have joined together to establish what students should know by the time they graduate high school, and local school chiefs support the idea.

“Here is a case when you clearly have the best minds in education in America coming together to create a good set of standards,” said Gayland Cooper, superintendent of Rome City Schools. “It’s all good. I’m very much in favor of it.”

Cooper said Georgia has been working for several years to stiffen standards for its students, but other states may have to step up their requirements to get on board. If they do, he said, students all across America stand to benefit. He also said the standards are really just a guideline, and schools will need rich curriculums and strong teaching to make sure the Common Core State Standards are successful.

Floyd County Superintendent Lynn Plunkett agreed with Cooper, saying she thinks Georgia teachers will be able to adjust more easily than the teachers in states in which there has not been a foundation already in place for standards-based instruction, such as the Georgia Performance Standards.

“The movement toward a national curriculum would have a tremendous impact on education in our country, both positive and negative. I like the idea that proficiency in math, for example, is the

George F. Will - Why should education be exempt from recession budgeting?

Why should education be exempt from recession budgeting?

By George F. Will

Sunday, June 6, 2010

Jay Gould, a 19th-century railroad tycoon and unrepentant rapscallion, said he was a Democrat when in Democratic districts and a Republican when in Republican districts but that he was always for the Erie Railroad. Gould, emblematic of Gilded Age rapaciousness, was called a robber baron. What should we call people whose defining constancy is that they are always for unionized public employees? Call them Democrats.

This week, when Congress returns from its Memorial Day recess, many Democrats, having gone an eternity -- more than a week -- without spending billions of their constituents' money, will try to make up for lost time by sending another $23 billion to states to prevent teachers from being laid off. The alternative to this "desperately" needed bailout, says Education Secretary Arne Duncan, is "catastrophe." Amazing. Just 16 months ago, in the stimulus legislation, Congress shoveled about $100 billion to education, including

Education is a worthwhile federal investment

By David S. Broder

Sunday, June 6, 2010

While the nation remains preoccupied by the drama of the oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico, which consumes an inordinate portion of time and attention in the media, a struggle of potentially greater consequence for most American families is taking place with far less publicity.

I am referring to the scenarios being enacted in legislatures across the land as the final strokes are being applied to state budgets and the fate of thousands of teachers and pupils is being decided.
As noted here more than once, the arguments over taxes and borrowing that have become louder and more pointed in Washington are nothing compared with the fiscal mayhem in capitals from Sacramento to Boston. State economies have barely begun to recover from the wreckage of the Great Recession. And since taxes are mostly collected retroactively, after individual incomes are earned and spent, it will be well into 2011

The Kansas City School District works to erase a tragic history - KansasCity.com

The Kansas City School District works to erase a tragic history

By RICK MONTGOMERY

The Kansas City Star

Shane Keyser

Superintendent John Covington’s conference room — the “war room,” his staff calls it — is ringed by 14 white boards, covered with grids, drawn in black marker, that track some 200 tasks under way in the school system’s transformation effort.

I t’s 1991 and Stanley Peeples II has entered a new world. Central High School — the core of Kansas City. He can’t believe this.

Stanley and his classmates are looking at a row of desks with robotic arms stretching out, able to pick up blocks. Downstairs there is an Olympic-size pool with underwater windows. It’s the first day at this $32 million school, Stanley can choose either the “Classical Greek” or “Computers Unlimited” track, and the front foyer alone — man, fresh! Marble floor and Greek columns.

Back in sixth grade, Stanley shivered in class for a month because the boiler broke. In junior high, Nancy Reagan made a visit to address the plight of drug-infested, gang-haunted schools.

But this place — yeah, tight!

It’s too bad, in this magnificent magnet school, that test scores and graduation rates will never climb out of the dumps.

•••

He is only 30, but Airick Leonard West knows the tragic history of the school district he wants to help save.

He knows the saga of the lawsuit that took flight before he was born. How it led to the most ambitious school-desegregation plan a court ever crafted. How $2 billion in taxes, imposed by a judge, produced lavish new buildings across the Kansas City School District, yet never turned around lowly achievement.

He knows, as we all do now, that money doesn’t teach

Board member defends controversial social studies curriculum | Houston & Texas News | Chron.com - Houston Chronicle

Board member defends social studies curriculum

By MATT WOOLBRIGHT
HOUSTON CHRONICLE

June 5, 2010, 10:30PM

Jay Janner Austin American-Statesman

Ken Mercer, who serves on the State Board of Education, defends the changes made in school curriculum.

Ken Mercer is the vice-chair of the State Board of Education's instruction committee and played a significant role in the adopting of a new curriculum for Texas textbooks. A software engineer in San Antonio, Mercer served in the Texas House of Representatives and joined the Board of Education in 2006. The new social studies curriculum, championed by Mercer and the rest of the board's conservative majority, was the subject of tremendous national scrutiny and debate. Mercer discussed the controversial curriculum issue recently with Chronicle reporter Matt Woolbright.

Q: Why do you think the Texas textbook battle got so much national attention?

A: Texas has 4.8 million kids in public school. We have more kids in school than many states have in total population. So people know that oftentimes, the books that Texas publishes will become the books throughout much of the United States.

Wave of school closings is biggest since early 1980s | StarTribune.com

Wave of school closings is biggest since early 1980s

With enrollments down and funds tight, at least 20 Twin Cities schools won't reopen next fall. The shutdowns are due to demographic and economic forces, as well as a greater choice of schools.

By ALLIE SHAH and EMILY JOHNS, Star Tribune

Last update: June 5, 2010 - 10:01 PM

Not since the early 1980s has the end of the school year brought such a large wave of schools in the Twin Cities area that will not reopen next fall.

This week thousands of students and teachers in at least 20 schools are packing up their desks and their memories and heading to new buildings next fall. Two of the state's largest districts -- Anoka-Hennepin and St. Paul -- are experiencing their largest downsizing ever.
The shutdowns are due to a combination of demographic and economic forces, and a greater choice of schools.
Most acutely affected are those two big districts and Minneapolis, where fewer students have created "excess space" in some buildings. That slack, coupled with the bleakest education funding forecast in a generation, has left districts with little choice

Glenn Reynolds: Higher education's bubble is about to burst | Washington Examiner

Glenn Reynolds: Higher education's bubble is about to burst

SUNDAY REFLECTIONS CONTRIBUTOR — It's a story of an industry that may sound familiar.

The buyers think what they're buying will appreciate in value, making them rich in the future. The product grows more and more elaborate, and more and more expensive, but the expense is offset by cheap credit provided by sellers eager to encourage buyers to buy.

Buyers see that everyone else is taking on mounds of debt, and so are more comfortable when they do so themselves; besides, for a generation, the value of what they're buying has gone up steadily. What could go wrong? Everything continues smoothly until, at some point, it doesn't.

Yes, this sounds like the housing bubble, but I'm afraid it's also sounding a lot like a still-inflating higher education bubble. And despite (or because of) the fact that my day job involves higher education, I think it's better for us to face up to what's going on before the bubble bursts messily.

College has gotten a lot more expensive. A recent Money magazine report notes: "After adjusting for financial aid, the amount families pay for college has

Sunday, June 6, 2010