A Greater Milwaukee Foundation report looks at what happens when school districts are run by mayors or appointed boards.
The Foundation report – School District Governance Reform: The Devil is in the Details – was researched by the Public Policy Forum.
The Foundation report does not draw conclusions about whether or not other forms of school governance are an option for Milwaukee. “That is an issue that requires input from the entire community,” stated Foundation Board president Judy Jorgensen. “We hope the report will prompt a wider, more in-depth examination of the issue.”
The report does, however, note several major findings based on the experience of five communities similar to Milwaukee:
• School governance reform happens over years and may occur in several incarnations;
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• If a mayor takes over a school district, his/her ability to achieve improvements is dependent on outside factors, such as state policy and labor contracts;
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• Governance reform does not happen in a vacuum and is impacted by political conditions, other educational reforms and larger policy initiatives;
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• There are nearly as many models as there are districts that have attempted governance reform;
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• The impact of governance change on a district’s fiscal stability are positive to mixed; and
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• Governance change can result in some improvements in student performance, but not across the board.
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Full report:
http://www.greatermilwaukeefoundation.org/file/pdf/CP/SchoolGovernanceReport.pdf
Assisting Students Struggling with Reading: Response to Intervention (RtI) and Multi-Tier Intervention in the Primary Grades
The National Center for Education Evaluation and Regional Assistance within the Institute of Education Sciences has released a new What Works Clearinghouse (http://ies.ed.gov/ncee/wwc/) practice guide.
The guide formulates five specific recommendations to help educators identify students in need of intervention and implement evidence-based interventions that promote reading achievement. The guide also describes how to carry out each recommendation, including how to address potential roadblocks to implementation.
Full report:
http://ies.ed.gov/ncee/wwc/pdf/practiceguides/rti_reading_pg_021809.pdf
Effectiveness of Reading and Mathematics Software Products: Findings from Two Student Cohorts
This is a report on the impacts on student achievement of a second year of use of selected software programs in first-grade reading, fourth-grade reading, sixth-grade math, and algebra I. The evaluation found no significant difference in student achievement between the classrooms that used the technology products and the classrooms that did not use the technology products, in any of the four groups, in either the first or second year of use by teachers. Only one product, Leap Track in fourth-grade, had a statistically significant positive effect on student achievement.
Full report:
http://ies.ed.gov/ncee/pubs/20094041/pdf/20094041_1.pdf
Public School Teacher Retirement Costs Significantly Higher than in Private Sector
Analysis of new data from the U.S. Department of Labor shows that employer contributions to retirement benefits for public school teachers in 2008 were substantially higher than for private professionals, a group that includes lawyers, physicians, financial managers, engineers, computer programmers, and others. According to new research by economists Robert Costrell of the University of Arkansas and Michael Podgursky from the University of Missouri-Columbia, employer contributions to teacher pensions grew from under 12 percent of earnings in 2004 to well over 14 percent in 2008, while pension costs for private sector professionals remained essentially unchanged.
Costrell’s and Podgursky’s research, published in the new issue of Education Next (Spring 2009), reveals that employer contributions to public school teachers’ retirement benefits, as a percent of earnings, were more than 4 percentage points higher than in the private sector, up from less than 2 points higher in 2004 -- a gap that has more than doubled in the past four years.
Costrell and Podgursky found that when compared with the private sector, total employer contributions are higher for teachers whether or not they are also covered by Social Security. In states with employer contribution to social security benefits for teachers, the total average contribution to pensions is over 15 percent of earnings; in states without, the average is just over 11 percent of earnings. In both cases, teachers benefit from greater average employer contributions than those received by private sector employees, which run just over 10 percent of earnings.
The authors note that their estimate of the gap in retirement benefits favoring teachers is underestimated since the U.S. Department of Labor survey data on which they rely does not include retiree health insurance, a benefit that has all but disappeared in the private sector.
According to the most recent data from the U.S. Department of Education, the nation’s public schools spent $59 billion in benefits for instructional personnel, adding about 32 percent to salaries. The vast majority of teacher pension plans are not fully funded. This means that contributions include both the “normal cost” of pension liabilities accruing to current employees and the legacy costs of amortizing unfunded liabilities accrued previously. The sharp downturn in the economy has contributed to a precipitous fall in the market value of pension funds. Barring a major market recovery, teacher pension funds across the country will have significantly larger unfunded liabilities, and the gap in pension benefit costs is likely to widen further. This will be a further burden for K-12 school districts in coming years.
Read the full study here:
http://media.hoover.org/documents/ednext_20092_58_unabridged.pdf
Teaching science: Is discovery better than telling?
Western Michigan University researchers have discovered that in the academic debate over whether young science students learn more through experimenting or direct instruction, there's little difference.
Neither teaching approach provides a significant advantage for middle school science students, according to research by three Western Michigan University faculty.
Drs. William Cobern, David Schuster and Renee Schwartz, who hold joint appointments in the departments of physics and biological sciences, studied middle school instruction during two-week summer programs over several years. In comparing the two methods of instruction, they found there actually was no significant difference in learning by students. More important, they say, was having a positive attitude toward science, a well-designed curriculum and good teachers.
"The data, while marginally favoring inquiry, really show that as long as the instruction is good either way, the two approaches lead to no significant difference--at least as far as science content understanding is concerned," says Cobern.
Evolution education for K-12 teachers needs beefing up, says CU-Boulder professor
A failure to grasp the fundamentals of biological systems may be leaving K-12 teachers and students vulnerable to claims by intelligent design creationists, new-age homeopaths and other "hucksters," according to a University of Colorado at Boulder biology professor.
On the 150th anniversary of Charles Darwin's classic book "The Origin of Species" that first described natural selection in detail, polls still show that only about one third of Americans believe evolution is supported by scientific evidence, said Professor Mike Klymkowsky of CU-Boulder's molecular, cellular and developmental biology department. "The questions we are asking ourselves as scientists and educators is what the problem is here, and what are the objections to evolution," he said.
Klymkowsky said the disconnect is due in part to the inability of students and the public to understand the evidence for and the mechanisms behind the evolutionary process. There is difficulty in grasping the idea that random biochemical events can produce novel and useful adaptations, he said, and an inability to understand how such random events take place at the molecular and cellular level to generate evolutionary change.
"We can't leave students with mysteries about how biochemical processes work, because that's when nonscientific information sneaks in," he said. Klymkowsky gave two presentations on innovative science education programs at the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting held Feb. 12-15 in Chicago.
Klymkowsky and CU-Boulder Research Associate Kathy Garvin-Doxas co-developed the Biology Concept Inventory at CU-Boulder, which includes online surveys to measure undergraduate understanding of fundamental biological concepts. The inventory is especially useful when it is administered to students prior to course instruction to allow professors to better understand the needs of students in particular courses, he said.
The BCI effort also includes obtaining short essays from thousands of students regarding their understanding of evolution and natural selection, genes and traits, including the notion of dominant and recessive genes, he said. Such essays have helped to identify commonly held misconceptions of biochemical processes, he said. As part of BCI, Klymkowsky and his colleagues also surveyed campus science faculty in different disciplines to assess which key concepts and ideas in fundamental biology they felt should be covered.
Klymkowsky and Clemson University chemistry Professor Melanie Cooper were recently awarded a $500,000 grant from the National Science Foundation for a three-year project titled Chemistry, Life, the Universe and Everything, or CLUE. The project includes developing a general chemistry curriculum using the emergence and evolution of life as a springboard to introduce and explain related chemistry concepts, Klymkowsky said.
Klymkowsky also is involved in the national Science Technology Engineering and Mathematics program at CU-Boulder, designed to improve introductory science and math courses and to recruit and train future K-12 science teachers. CU's STEM program includes CU-Teach, an undergraduate program found on the Web at http://www.colorado.edu/cuteach that leads to a math or science degree and a secondary education teaching license in four years.
"A staggering percentage of the American public, ranging from plumbers to presidential candidates, fail to accept, at least in part because they don't understand, the evidence for and mechanisms behind evolutionary processes," said Klymkowsky. "Understanding the nuts and bolts of biological systems is important for all students, and particularly critical for those planning to become biology teachers or general science teachers."
College science requirements keep US ahead of world, MSU researcher argues
Science literacy researcher finds a silver lining
Despite frequent warnings of the inadequacy of education in the United States, citizens here are still among the world's most scientifically literate, a Michigan State University researcher said.
You can thank those general education requirements that force English majors to sit through biology classes and budding engineers to read Hemingway, Jon Miller said.
Miller, the John A. Hannah Professor of integrative studies and director of the International Center for the Advancement of Scientific Literacy at MSU, for many years has conducted social research on scientific literacy around the world. He summarized his findings at the American Association for the Advancement of Science annual meeting in Chicago at a C.P. Snow retrospective symposium today.
Fifty years after English novelist and physicist C.P. Snow warned of a disturbing lack of scientific literacy among the cultural elite and a parallel literary void among Britain's scientists and technologists, little has changed in most of the world, Miller argued. And that's part of what keeps the U.S. at the forefront of scientific endeavor and technological innovation.
"What makes the American market and society different," he said, "is that we have more science- and technology-receptive citizens and consumers, and as a society we're willing to spend money for basic science and have been doing that for years."
Americans as a group tend to be more open-minded about innovations such as genetically modified food, he said. Scientific reasoning also works its way into such disciplines as law, he noted, where facts are routinely marshaled to support or disprove theories. And faith in scientific progress might even make people more optimistic overall, with effects spilling over into politics and other realms.
That being said, Miller's research over the years has revealed what he describes as a general lack of scientific knowledge overall. Most adults in the United States and Europe, he said, don't have a sufficient understanding of important issues facing society, issues such as stem cell research. Americans, he found in 2006, are less likely to accept evolution than Europeans – a third of U.S. citizens surveyed reject the concept.
Snow sparked debate in a 1959 lecture, "The Two Cultures," a discussion that continues today. As post-war technological advances took greater prominence in society, he lamented the divide between the leading lights of British science and the humanities. It's an issue with pronounced relevance overseas, Miller said, given the relatively narrow educational paths afforded by higher education there.
"An engineer in Europe is an engineer, and that's all they know," he asserted. "That's all you study."
The general education requirements common to most American colleges and universities, in contrast, add a year of broader education to the curriculum. That, he added, is a critical patch to what he describes as a woefully underperforming high school educational system and an increasingly complex world.
"If you don't have a clue about how the solar system or universe is organized, the 21st century is going to be very strange to you," he said.
At MSU, science requirements for nonmajors aren't the only manifestation of the Snow critique. The university's science residential college curriculum embodies the principle.
"Briggs was founded explicitly to bridge the gap that C.P. Snow identified," said Lyman Briggs College Professor Robert T. Pennock, a noted science advocate. "We really believe that our students will be better scientists to the extent that they also become fluent in the humanities."
"Our courses in science and mathematics not only introduce the topics and methods of a particular field, but also demonstrate the interrelation of the various scientific disciplines: how chemical principles underpin biological processes, how mathematical models can make sense of physical behaviors," said Briggs Dean Elizabeth Simmons. "At the same time, our courses in the history, philosophy and sociology of science draw students into analyzing the way scientists think about questions in their own disciplines, and how academics from other fields evaluate the methods and conclusions of science."
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