4 brave souls have submitted nomination papers to run for the 3 seats in this spring's election. They are:
Lionel Norton - currently a Citizen Member of Personel and Policy Committee
Jason McCutchin - long time Citizen Member of the Business Services Committee
Jessica Ace - current co-president of the Monona Elementary PTO
Mike Duplayee - current Board Member
Jason has forwarded a link to his campaign blog, it can be found here.
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16 comments:
Looks like a good bunch. I am particularly happy to see that folks who have served on School Board committees are running-- they already have a good sense of the time and energy it takes and the politics of it all. With McDade and Kitslaar leaving, we certainly need folks with some experience.
I hope they all get blogs or websites up- it is a great way to get to know them.
How could anyone vote for a guy who doesn't read books and can't spell the word magazine??
Well, we voted for a guy who can't spell the word glutton either. He's a darn fine school board member and is probably the most skilled board member of the seven I know a lot of avid book readers who are complete flakes.
Would you believe that a "gluton" is the fundamental particle of glue and that is what I meant to say?
I thought maybe it was someone from the Planet Glut.
Seriously, if the guy wants to be taken seriously as a school board candidate, he should probably attempt to appear as though he has at least a high school education, no matter what his resume says. Come on! Magazine? I think we expect our students to be able to spell that by about sixth grade!
I have a few magazines for you to read....Try Harpers or Science...then tell me reading these sorts of periodical is not an intellectual persuit. There are other magazines out there besides People! And there are a lot of books that are lightweight gack. Why are you trying to go after this guy? Me thinks you have an ulterior motive. Seriously.
I read "Scientific American" (geeky huh?), and "Practical Sailor" cover to cover in print forms. I also read "Slate" and some of "Salon" on-line. For news I like to go to the Christian Science Monitor (www.csmonitor.com)- they have more of an international focus and an excellent reputation for quality reporting. They have also been the leader in internet access and content for quite some time.
I don't have as much time for books as I would like and I decided years ago to be very selective. I am currently in the middle of David McCullough's "John Adams".
What are you reading?
NYTimes-which led me to the following information that I found interesting-and you may as well:
Kindergarten Redshirting is Bad in Many Ways
The practice of holding young children back from kindergarten in order to increase their odds of success in school has long worried educational observers. A paper published this summer by the economists David Deming, of Harvard’s Kennedy School, and Susan Dynarski, of the University of Michigan, found that so-called redshirting affects more children than previously thought — and the trend is accelerating. The “lengthening of childhood” also has negative consequences that other analysts have neglected, including economic ripple effects that could affect the long-term solvency of Social Security.
From 1968 to 1995, the authors found, the proportion of American 6-year-olds enrolled in first grade (or higher) dropped from 96.5
• percent to 91 percent. From 1995 to 2005, the proportion of 6-year-olds in first grade (or higher) proceeded to plummet to 84.5 percent. One in six American children now has a delayed entry into school. Many schools are even mandating something called “late entry” to keep pace with redshirting.
While other academics have debated how the broader age ranges at each grade level affect academic performance gaps, Deming and Dynarski spotlight two negative outcomes. The first stems from the American tradition of setting a minimum school dropout age. (Some European countries mandate a minimum number of years in the classroom instead.) Disadvantaged students are more likely to drop out as soon as they can, therefore disproportionately decreasing the amount of education they complete. If they also started school late, these students lose time at the start of their education and at the end.
• Meanwhile, other redshirted children delay their entry into the work force. They’re in high school when their parents were in college — since 1968, the proportion of 17-year-olds in college has dropped by half — and in college when their parents had jobs. The long-term ramifications of this demographic shift may be significant. Consider that Congress increased the Social Security retirement age from 65 to 67, on the logic that retirees would be supported by more workers. But with late school entry shrinking the size of the work force, that reform “will partially be undone,” Deming and Dynarski conclude — by the lengthening of the American childhood.
"T wo-Tier Teacher Contract, The
One of the big debates in education today is over teacher quality: how do you reward successful teachers, get rid of unsuccessful ones and attract more high-performing applicants? Michelle Rhee, the young, controversial new chancellor of the Washington, D.C., public schools, thinks she has the answer.
Last July, Rhee presented the membership of the city’s teachers’ union with a proposal for a
• new and very different contract. The basic deal: surrender some job security in exchange for the potential to earn a much higher salary. Under the proposed contract, each Washington teacher would choose between two alternatives. The red tier, the more cautious option, would require teachers to give up a few seniority protections in exchange for a considerable pay increase. Teachers choosing the riskier green tier would lose even more tenure and seniority rights. They would spend the first year of the new contract on probation, at the end of which they could be fired. But if they were good enough to survive, they would receive huge raises, before long earning as much as $131,000 a year in salary and performance bonuses, more than twice the average salary for an American public-school teacher.
• Rhee’s proposal is based on recent research that suggests that teacher quality has a huge impact on the success of students, especially poor and minority students who lag behind their peers academically. And yet in most school systems, teacher pay is tied only to length of tenure and the accumulation of professional credentials, neither of which has much correlation with student success. (The Washington union’s leadership, so far, has declined to put the new contract to a vote.)
Rhee isn’t the only administrator experimenting this year with the idea of elevated teacher pay. Zeke M. Vanderhoek, the founding principal of the Equity Project Charter School, opening next fall in the Washington Heights neighborhood of Manhattan, says he wants to attract “highly qualified individuals” to teach at his school. To be hired, according to the school’s Web site,
• you need to be able to prove you have “expert subject-area knowledge,” present a “portfolio of achievement of past students” and score above 90 percent on the verbal section of a graduate-school entrance test. In exchange, every teacher gets a starting salary of $125,000, plus an initial annual bonus of up to $25,000: high pay for high expectations.
"
Interesting, eh?
but then we digress....
The Alchemist
It is usually hyper-involved parents who redshirt because they are very invested in their kid's education. Those are hardly likely to be the the demographic that ultimately drops out. I have always been told the research regarding individual students' academic achievement does not support redshirting - kids are redshirted don't do any better academically than those who aren't.
I've read a study in texas where school districts were holding back students in 9th grade because the district was judged by its 10th grade test scores. NCLB, by testing by grade and not age, discourages districts from promoting talented students even though the research shows this is one of the most effective ways of improving achievement.
I should have mentioned the NY Times above - they seem to have the most extensive education reporting of any major paper.
You read a study while you were in Texas? Or you read a study that was performed in Texas? Was it in a magazine?
sheesh, Peter Studied in Texas- for his Associates degree-get it right people.
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