Housekeeping Notes--But They Are Really Interesting, I Promise

How Can You Follow This Blog? Let Me Count the Ways

My friend asks me, "How do I know when you've posted?"

Follow, follow, follow, follow, follow, 

follow, follow, follow, follow. 

[With apologies to The Fantasticks.]

Seriously, there are many ways that you can find out when I've posted.

1. Visit here--a lot! (I usually post 2-4 times/week, but not on a schedule. So you have to check back to find out. Some people think that is a pain. Therefore, there are some easier (painless :)) ways to follow me.

2. Subscribe to the blog by email. I have now made this very easy by setting up a link that shows up at the bottom of every new blog post. [Thanks to Jenna Bacolor of the Ann Arbor Schools Rec & Ed blog--when she did it on her blog I realized there must be a way for me to do it too. And there is!] So just scroll to the bottom of this post, click on the link, and put in your email.

3. Follow me on twitter. My "handle" is @schoolsmuse, and can be found at twitter.com/schoolsmuse. I now (finally) have the blog set up to auto-post to twitter so every post gets tweeted. Just be warned though, that although I don't use twitter every day, I use it a few times a week, and I re-tweet things that catch my eye. Some of those things are about education, but I also will retweet local events, public health news, environmental news, news from the Middle East, and other things that catch my interest. 

4. Join the Ann Arbor Schools Musings Facebook group, which I started to have some more informal discussions--and allow people to post things that interest them about local education as well. You can find the group here: 

• https://www.facebook.com/groups/annarborschoolsmusings/

I usually--but not always--put my posts up there. Sometimes I forget, and sometimes it just seems like too much self-promotion.

5. Follow me on an RSS feed. That is a way of looking at a lot of blogs, or web pages, all at once. I used to use Google Reader, but Google closed that down, and I now follow myself--and many other blogs--on feedly.com. There's a link to feedly on the right hand side of the blog. I think it will work, also, to click the links with the orange rainbow on the top right-hand side of my blog. There are other options too: Newsblur, Inoreader, Digg... Readers, feel free to make suggestions about these in the comments.

Commenting Guidelines

1. I love comments. Really, I do. Please comment. On the one hand, I dream of having a comments section that is as robust as Mark Maynard or Dov Bear. On the other hand, I think they have more tolerance for rudeness and snarkiness than I do. (Is that a guy blogger thing?) So having said that, I think my commenting guidelines are very modest, but it's worth mentioning them.

Comments policy: All are welcome to comment, but please be respectful, and assume that everyone wants the best for the schools.

2. Also, I don't mind anonymous comments. Really. I was an anonymous blogger for a while so it would be a little hypocritical to say no to anonymous comments. But the other day, looking at this post (which got 19 comments! maybe a personal record!), my husband said to me, "The same person had all those different opinions?" He was confused. I explained to him that "anonymous" was actually several different anonymi (is that a word?).  If you comment occasionally, even if you log in as anonymous, consider typing a name that you will use consistently every time you comment here. You can put it in the text, as does--for instance--someone who posts as Ypsi Anon. That way, I can (and readers can) separate out multiple opinions.

Help!

People are really enthusiastic about this blog, and I really do appreciate that. But I would love some help, in two ways.

1. Want to guest blog about something you know about and are passionate about? I would love informants from local schools and different districts (Ypsilanti, in particular). I would love to have some one write regularly, or occasionally, about their experiences with special education services. I would love to have a teacher or two write about how Common Core and other new legislation is affecting them. Those are just a few ideas. No fortune from this, and not much fame either--but you'll get the thanks of a lot of people in the community who are hungering for more news about local schools and education. [And my thanks to Ypsi Anon, Julie Roth, and Steve Norton who have each stepped up and written things for me over the past year or so.] If you are at all interested, send me an email to rlk234 [at] gmail.com.

2. Don't want to write, but like doing research? One of my most-visited posts, on the Broad Foundation, was easy for me to write because Sharon Simonton had done most of the research for me. I have lots of ideas for things to research that I don't have time to do.

Some of the things I'm interested in:
--local schools history--there is a lot of it, and some of it is very relevant to today!
--Title IX--how are local schools doing with compliance?
--teacher work conditions, union bustings
--effects of testing
--race and class disparities
--language learning
--charter schools--funding, who is going there, work conditions...
--online learning--
--legislative intrigue
and more

If YOU are interested in researching something and have a specific idea, let me know and I'll tell you if I think I might be interested. If you like research but don't have any ideas, I have more than enough for both of us.

See? Housekeeping. Who knew it could be so interesting!

Consider subscribing to Ann Arbor Schools Musings by Email!

Six Solstice Friday Notes

Not that these notes really have anything to do with the solstice. . .

1. The legislature adjourned today without the Senate voting on Medicaid expansion. I was soooo disappointed. Sen. Randy Richardville (majority leader) does in fact represent a small portion of Washtenaw County, and he refused to bring it forward for a vote--despite Governor Snyder's support (and Snyder is another resident of Washtenaw County). I haven't quite given up hope yet. I think you'd be surprised how much Medicaid money comes into schools; and in my day job the Medicaid expansion is super important. It will provide health coverage to many thousands of Washtenaw County residents.

2. The legislature also adjourned without supporting funding for the implementation of Common Core. Americans for Prosperity (a tea party group) touted this as a great thing. Don't get me wrong, I've got issues with Common Core. But--and this is a big but--the state has committed itself, and its schools, to implementing Common Core. So if the state is committed to something, but doesn't give money for it, guess what that means? Yes, another unfunded mandate for the schools. Meanwhile the legislature did manage to support the dissolution of school districts (Inkster and Buena Vista) in a really poorly-considered piece of legislation. Read about that here.

3. I was at one of the Superintendent Forums for the Ann Arbor Schools on Wednesday. I'm guessing that most of you weren't there, because the turnout at the first three of them was quite low. (I went to #3 so I heard a little about #1 and #2, but I'm not sure what happened at #4.) I believe Deb Mexicotte that they were still useful for the board, because we were able to have an in-depth discussion about what was important. (At the forum I went to, board members Deb Mexicotte, Susan Baskett and Glenn Nelson were there.) For me, a few things that are important include: site visits; giving local candidates (at least Michigan, preferably southeast Michigan) a chance; getting an understanding of how the candidates approach decision making; finding people with an open communication style who want to set out a vision and get some buy-in; people who embrace what it means to be working under the microscope that is Ann Arbor. You might have your own list of important things. Remember that we will never see the 90% of the candidates who don't make it to the semifinal stage (which will be decided, I believe, June 26th). That's because only the semifinalists and finalist names will be made public. I think it's important to share with the board what your "essential" things are. You can do that by emailing them at boe@aaps.k12.mi.us, or calling them. Contact information is here.

4. While at the Superintendent Forum, before we got started, I asked about the decision to charge for seventh hour. Glenn Nelson expressed something that (at least one of) the board members had expressed at the last board meeting, which was that a) he felt that 7th hour needed to be self-supporting and that b) charging $100 this year was a way to "try out" charging money and "work the kinks out" in the expectation that the following year they will charge $350 to $400 per semester. Now, leave aside for a minute the fact that the ACLU believes that this practice is illegal; and leave aside for a minute the fact that Michigan Department of Education rules also appear to prohibit charging for seventh hour. I also have to think that there are a lot of people who might be able to afford  $100/semester for a child but not $350 or $400 per semester. And I wonder what kind of projections the district has done to try and figure out who would opt in and opt out. My guess is that they haven't done those projections. The whole idea that rather than thinking something through in advance we'll just feel our way along through the next year and "see" if or how it works doesn't sit very well with me. And (now paying attention to the points about whether this is legal) I'm concerned that the district would walk knowingly into the expenses of a lawsuit even though there is a way to avoid it.

And I bring this up, why? Well, I bring this up because today's annarbor.com had an article in which it says "Some 'cleanup' is needed on approved Ann Arbor Public Schools budget for fall." So, cleanup is needed? Let's clean this up. Cut out the fees for 7th hour; try and address this issue over the coming year; and if we need to bring back the billboards to do that, then--so be it.

Again, you can contact the board with your own ideas for "cleanup."

5. You might have read about the Michigan ACLU's "right to read" lawsuit in Highland Park. Well, now the State of Michigan is trying to say that they have no responsibility for literacy in school districts like Highland Park, in which there is an emergency manager, and that because of the emergency manager law the state gets "broad immunity." Also, the ACLU has been documenting the alleged falsification of records by employees of the charter company hired to run the high school. Read more here.

6. Over on the right side of my blog I have a blogroll, and for the last several years I've listed the blog Foster Parenting Adventures there. I've been following the tale of Tikun Olam (not her real name) and her family for several years, from when they first decided to be trained as a foster family to when they finally got their first fostering assignment. And Friday, June 21st, 2013 is, in fact, Adoption Day for CD, who has been with them for several years! Mazal Tov to Tikun Olam  and family. If you have a moment, take a look at her blog.

This Week's Observations: Banned Books, Technology, and Charters

Plymouth-Canton Schools (which actually do draw a small number of students from Washtenaw County have banned two books from an AP English class. The books? Toni Morrison's Beloved, which won a Pulitzer Prize, and which the New York Times called ""the single best work of American fiction published in the last 25 years." The second book is Graham Swift's Waterland, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize.
This whole kerfuffle came about because a couple of parents complained about the books. It's unclear to me whether proper procedure was followed. Did the interim superintendent follow procedure? Is there procedure? (I don't know the details though, so I can't say for sure about that. I understand that some of the school board members are very conservative.) In any case. . . speculation aside. . . the ACLU of Michigan has written the district a letter. According to the ACLU's press release,

the ACLU of Michigan reminded the district that although schools have broad discretion in setting curriculum, the U.S. Supreme Court has held repeatedly that banning books because they offend some runs afoul of the First Amendment. While parents have the right to guide their own child’s education, that right does not extend to restricting other students’ educational opportunities. (Emphasis added.)

In addition, I'll just note the tremendous irony of banning books in a high school AP class because of "mature subjects." I mean, AP classes are supposed to be like college. College is all about reading books that challenge us! In case you're wondering about the reasons that we shouldn't be trying to create colleges out of high schools, I think you just saw one reason in action--it makes some parents too uncomfortable.

Christine Stead, Ann Arbor school board member, has started a blog of her own. I'm planning to link to it in my blogroll, and you should take a minute to check it out at k12christinestead.com. She tells me she's new at blogging, so if you have ideas of subjects that you hope she will cover, or reflections about what she writes, feel free to let her know in the comments. (Bloggers love comments. :)  By the way, do I think it is competition? No. I'm a parent, not a school board member. It's more like have several restaurants on the same street--the more the merrier--that way you can choose if you want Chinese or Italian. There are, by the way, a gazillion education blogs out in the world. I've only linked to a few of them on my blogroll.

The Ann Arbor schools have joined the twitterverse! Follow them at @a2schools. Follow Saline schools at @salineschools. Follow Dexter schools at @dexterschools. And follow Ypsilanti schools at @ypsischools. Saline schools also have several sub-twitter feeds (the high school principal, the athletics department, etc.) Oh, and follow me at @schoolsmuse.

Some interesting things have been going on at the first charter school I ever profiled, Ann Arbor Learning Community, and they illuminate some of the issues around charter schools, even for schools that are locally organized, non-profit charters. Annarbor.com has an article, Parents fight for reinstatement of teacher at Ann Arbor Learning Community, which describes how a well-liked teacher was put on administrative leave. In examining this issue, let's leave aside the question of whether the administrative leave was the right decision--I don't know anything about their personnel matters.
The first thing that struck me has to do with teacher turnover--something that is often mentioned in critiques of charter schools. Not only has the "dean" of the school, Ticheal Jones, just left (in the middle of the school year!) for "personal" reasons, but according to the article, "Parents say the teacher’s forced absence is the third instance of this nature that the school has experienced in less than a year."
The second thing that struck me has to do with control of hiring and firing. In a typical public school district, the ultimate authority for hiring and firing would reside with the superintendent's office, but there would generally be a human resources department. And really, what is more important than the personnel you have teaching and working with the students? Here, it turns out, the hiring and firing is done by a group called Michigan Educational Personnel Services.

Carlie Lockwood, the vice president of human resources for MEP stressed that MEP works very closely with the dean, who is responsible for conducting teacher evaluations. But wait. . . didn't the dean just leave? I'm not sure why, or where that leaves things. There is an interim dean, and he was also recruited by MEP.

According to the article,

While AALC is a self-managed charter school, it contracts with Brighton-based MEP for its teachers and staff, said Malverne Winborne, director of Eastern Michigan University’s Charter Schools Office.
“MEP hires and places the employees,” Winborne said.
EMU is the authorizer of AALC, a K-8 school that was founded in 1997.

This is a typical arrangement for charter schools, particularly smaller charter schools--the schools hire someone else to do the hiring and firing of teachers (the teachers aren't really working for AALC, they are working for MEP) because the school (board) doesn't believe they have the skills or resources to do the hiring themselves. And by outsourcing this critical role, the school board gives up much of the local control that they ostensibly wanted in the first place.

And what does EMU's Charter Schools Office have to say about this? Not much, at least not publicly.

As much as we complain about the "transparency" issues with our local public district school boards, next to the charter schools they look crystal clear, and the charter school boards' transparency looks very muddy. In fact, that may be because as it turns out, those local charter school boards have precious little power or control. At least, right now, that's the way it seems to me.

Ann Arbor School Board Election Information

My questionnaire responses have started coming in! I will be posting them over the next week. I have also sent questionnaires to the Ypsilanti school board members, and if I get responses I will post those as well (as their own post).

In any case, each candidates' responses will be their own post, but I will also post a link below to their questionnaires (as they are posted, which is in the order they were returned to me).  My thanks, again, to the candidates, for taking time to respond--I am finding their responses to be quite interesting.

If I know they have a twitter account I have also listed it below--just in case you want to follow them.

One more thing: there is contact information for the candidates from all the districts on Washtenaw County's elections website. Find addresses, phone numbers, and in some cases email addresses here.

These candidates have responded to the questionnaire:

Andy Thomas' Questionnaire
Andy Thomas' Website

Ahmar Iqbal's Questionnaire
Ahmar Iqbal's Website


Patrick Leonard's Questionnaire
Patrick Leonard's Website
Follow Patrick on twitter: @PatrickL2012

Larry Murphy's Questionnaire
Larry Murphy's Website

Simone Lightfoot's Questionnaire
Simone Lightfoot's Website


I am still waiting for this candidate's response to the questionnaire:

Albert Howard's Website
Albert Howard's Questionnaire
(Yes, I know it says he is running for President; I guess you can run for school board and President at the same time. It is the same person, I checked.)
Follow Albert on twitter: @AlbertHowardUSA

When is retraction the right decision?

Yesterday, I wrote a post criticizing our new superintendent for saying that she didn't have a position on school prayer. This was based on a summary of a meeting that I read in the Ann Arbor Journal. The idea that a person with years in educational administration didn't have a position on school prayer seemed so unlikely that I actually titled the post, "Did she really say that?"

Then I got an email from Liz Margolis, AAPS Communications Director, saying that the summary was incorrect. I updated the post with Liz Margolis' comments.

Later that night, I got a comment on the post from Ahmar Iqbal, one of the school board candidates, saying that the summary was incorrect, and essentially affirming what Liz Margolis had said.

At this point, I started wondering--should I pull this post? I'm not really sure about the protocols here, because I'm relatively new to blogging. I think it's one thing to leave a post up if you make a mistake that has a small bearing on the post--but if the main point is completely incorrect, then it seems to me it should be completely retracted.

(I admit that I was a little saddened by the idea of retracting a post--especially since I had put in some great vocabulary words! Words like obsequious and crestfallen! But just because I think I wrote something intelligent and funny doesn't mean that it shouldn't be retracted.)

Although some news organizations seem to have taken the point of view that once a post is posted, it can never be retracted, it can only be "corrected," not everyone agrees. In the science world, retractions from scientific journals happen frequently enough that there is now a blog, Retraction Watch, dedicated to identifying how and why scientific papers get retracted. Common reasons for retraction include falsification of data, plagiarism, and mistaken analysis of data. In fact, Retraction Watch just made it onto one of my favorite NPR shows, On the Media. You can find the link to that discussion here.

Obviously, my posts are not scientific papers, but at this point I had begun thinking that what had happened was akin to "mistaken analysis" and should be retracted. After all: was it my fault for relying on a secondary source (a news report) and not a primary source (being there)?

And then, this morning, I got on the computer and saw another comment. This comment is from Albert Howard, another school board candidate, and--in fact--the one who asked the question. And his recollection supports (more or less) the version in the Ann Arbor Journal. [The Journal, by the way, has not--as yet--posted a correction.]

So at this point, I think the conversation embedded in the original post itself is interesting. It brings up a lot of issues around recollection and reportage, or--as my husband said to me--the nuance of the conversation. I wasn't at the meeting, so I can't give you my first-person memory.

Recently, in the Ann Arbor Chronicle, Dave Askins wrote about conflicting memories of another meeting (Column: Video Replay Review for City Council). He wrote:

At issue is whether two seasons ago, back in February 2009, city of Ann Arbor CFO Tom Crawford recommended to the Ann Arbor Downtown Development Authority that the DDA have a policy to maintain a minimum fund balance as a reserve, and specifically, whether a minimum reserve amount was specified. . . 
The remarks made by Crawford – which everyone seems to recall (albeit differently) – took place in plain view on the public field of play, at the Feb. 17, 2009 city council meeting. (Emphasis added.)

Askins argues that--just as we do in many sports--we should go to the video replay for a definitive account. Since in the business of blogging about the schools, I surely am an armchair quarterback, I absolutely agree.

I'm quite sure this "orientation" meeting wasn't videotaped--it wasn't a school board meeting (although regular school board meetings are.) So we now have four accounts of the same discussion. I honestly think the discussion of what happened is at least as interesting as what actually happened, so I've decided that I'm not going to retract the original post (for now--new evidence could arise!). Instead, I invite you to read it with the understanding that several people can be in the same meeting and hear different things. What does that mean for our process? I also invite you to comment on this post, or the other one.

Let's also not forget: this meeting, to provide necessary background to new school board candidates, was a good idea on the part of the school district, and I hope they continue it any time there is a contested election.

Great Stuff!

Here are some things I heard about and liked over the past few weeks. You might like them too.

Diane Ravitch was on Fresh Air with Terry Gross Thursday 4/28, and you can listen to it here.

Dusty Diary, an Ypsilanti-area historian, would like information from you if you know anything at all about the Thorn(e) School on Textile Road--which was active at the turn of the last century. Read more here, including how to contact Dusty Diary.  And if you are interested, here are some old pictures of Woodruff School, Ypsilanti.

Also on Thursday 4/28, there was a terrific interview by Dick Gordon of The Story with some teenage students who are into robotics competitions. Really fun! Listen to it here. Yes, we've got lots of robotics teams locally. Below is a picture from the robotics team at Forsythe Middle School in Ann Arbor.

Forsythe Middle School teacher and robotics club coach Ami Snapke works with two club members who are researching their topic for next fall. From AAPS News.

Did you know that Michigan Parents for Schools has a Legislative Action Center where you can write the governor and your legislators without having to look up any email addresses or anything--it figures out who they are for you and you can customize your letter. So it takes all the work out of letter writing and now you have no excuses! Try it out here. There's lots of other information on their web site too.

************

I've added a few blogs to my blog roll:

School Finance 101, Bruce Baker's blog on "Data and thoughts on public and private school funding in the U.S." If you want to know where to start, try these two pieces: one about private schooling (no, it's not anti-private schooling) and one about including poverty/SES in data analysis about schools.

A Fuller Look at Education Issues, Dr. Ed Fuller's blog. If you like data, you should like this (although there are a lot of Texas acronyms). Try this post on for size, about characteristics of students who enroll at high performing charter schools.

And then there is Schools Matter, a blog that "explores issues in public education policy," and "advocates for a commitment to and a re-examination of the democratic purposes of schools." Today's timely post? Rick Snyder Targets 23 Michigan School Districts for Privatization.

Public Workers Are...

...the people in your neighborhood!

I made plans a couple of months ago to come to Madison, Wisconsin for a bar mitzvah, never expecting to be caught up in some amazing, peaceful protests at the Capitol. These photos don't really do the event justice, but it was amazing. There were TONS of teachers there. I don't know if the teachers' union (WEAC) or AFSCME (the main public workers' union in the state) is bigger, but both were well-represented. The night before the bar mitzvah, at the out-of-towners' Shabbat dinner, there were 12 adults. Over half of them were public workers: a city attorney, a reading teacher, a county employee, two state employees, two federal employees. All have advanced degrees.

It made me wonder: do you know who the public workers in your neighborhood are?

It's not about the money. The Wisconsin bill is an anti-union bill that would strip workers of collective bargaining rights, and he tried to push this through in less than a week--I guess he thought, "Why use democratic process if you don't have to?" The great irony to me is that speakers were holding up Michigan's Republican governor as a model of a governor who wasn't taking on the unions.Yet what does Gov. Snyder's budget proposal actually mean? Nothing good for public workers, civil servants, that's for sure.

This is a view of the Firefighters for Labor marching through the inside of the Capitol. It's significant because Gov. Walker proposed to exempt firefighters and police officers from the collective bargaining provisions of the law. Apparently, WEAC opposed Scott Walker in the election. The police and firefighters unions didn't. But the police and firefighters are supportive of the activists at the Capitol--and the activists were very appreciative of their presence. (You can't hear the cheering in the photo.)  Right now there's only ONE Republican Senator in the Wisconsin Senate who is willing to say, out loud, that he believes in collective bargaining. Do they know who their public workers are?

My friend said to me, "My kids' schools have been closed for three days. But the kids have been down at the Capitol and it's been a great civics lesson."

Which brings us back to Michigan.
Mark Maynard has a lovely post on the impact of Rick Snyder's budget on Ypsilanti and cities like it.

Here's what Glen S. has to say in that post:

Rick Snyder really IS a political genius, I suddenly realized yesterday.

Unlike Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker — who has ignited a national firestorm over his strident and quite overt efforts to bust unions, slash pensions and other benefits, and generally dismantle what’s left of any opportunity for Wisconsin’s public sector workers to enjoy a modest, middle-class lifestyle — Snyder has a smarter, but much more insidious plan.
By dramatically slashing revenue-sharing, per-pupil student aid, and other forms of basic support for Michigan’s struggling cities, school districts, etc., to such a degree that unprecedented restructuring clearly will be necessary, Snyder is, in effect, “outsourcing” the dirty work of breaking unions, reneging on promised pension benefits, etc., to locally-elected city councils, school boards, county commissions, etc.
This way, over the next two years — while hundreds of individual Michigan cities, townships, counties and school districts are all busy fighting their own individual battles with their own individual workers and unions — Snyder will appear to be keeping his hands clean from all of the local budget “unpleasantness,” — while he continues to promote himself as as a genial, and business-minded “one tough nerd,” whose only agenda is promoting “shared sacrifice.”

The Object Lesson for me is that the real enemy of the public worker is not any particular governor. The real enemy is Apathy. How many public, unionized workers, voted for anti-union candidates? How many failed to vote? How many workers--private or public--don't realize that their weekends off, their 40-hour workweek, their environmental safeguards--are due to unions?

This is the civics lesson that we need.

Some Things to Read

National Heritage Academies and Prep Net want to open charter schools in Ypsilanti Township. It's controversial. What do you think?

Did you watch the State of the Union talk last night? I liked most of what President Obama had to say, but not--unfortunately--the part of the speech about education. In the blogroll to the right, I've added a blog (not a new blog, but new to me) called Schools Matter, and I liked most of these two pieces (below) on the State of the Union speech.

See Jim Horn's Obama Offers Same Tired Bromides on Education with Fewer Specifics

and

Valerie Strauss Exposes Obama's Faulty Education Logic.

What is happening at the New Tech High School?

Ypsilanti's Turnaround Problem

Now that you've read about Detroit, let's turn our attention to Ypsilanti. Ypsilanti has two interrelated problems. One problem is their deficit. The other problem is that their high school has not achieved adequate yearly progress in the last few years--giving it the dubious distinction of being a "failing" school. [And having said that, I also have to say that I know several people who have been very satisfied with their children's education at YHS.]

Their high school turnaround plan has been accepted by the state, and there is a lot of discussion going on about their deficit elimination plan--which includes the systematic dismantling of custodial and food service staff as district employees, as well as making YHS into a grade 7-12 school.

In Kyle Feldscher's annarbor.com article, trustee Andy Fanta is quoted as saying this:

“We’re not asking the right kinds of questions when addressing this budget,” he said. “We’re focusing on cutting, cutting, cutting. We’re not focusing on what we’re doing and what kind of district we want, and we’re not answering the parents who are asking those type of questions.”

There is some excellent analysis in Mark Maynard's post:

More school consolidation in Ypsilanti, and its long term ramifications 

Mark has been blogging for a long time about Ypsilanti, and he puts something interesting up at markmaynard.com almost every day, sometimes more often than that. Oh, and by the way--if you want to see the actual documents, you can find the submitted deficit elimination plan on the YPS financial page (scroll down). And here is the approved YHS turnaround plan.

PS I neglected this piece from the annarbor.com article: 

Trustees asked Houle to present another version of the plan at a board district operations committee meeting at 5:30 p.m. Jan. 17 at the East Middle School building. The meeting is open to the public.
The district has to turn a plan over to the state by Jan. 25.

Career Choices

There is a fascinating post over at Teacher, Revised about prostitution and high-stakes testing.

The Proof of the Pudding...

Is in the Eating.

That is the traditional text of the proverb that you may have heard shortened into, "The proof is in the pudding."

But either way, you probably could have figured out that what it means is that:

Results Matter.

And in the same way that one might try to improve pudding, we should be working to evaluate our school programs with an aim toward improving them.

Seriously, people DO work to improve their puddings! Just today I was reading the blog Kitchen Sin Carne, which has this little gem (no, we did not coordinate. . . and I even thought of the proverb before I saw the post!):

I've had various attempts this week on making vegan pudding. That's right. So first I tried chocolate pudding...FAIL. I tried it again, even more of a fail! Today I tried pumpkin pudding, and the first time it was so runny, and I tried to reduce it more and little pearls formed of like, cornstarch. I was really confused. Now in the fridge I have a little pumpkin 'pudding' but its more of a weird custard. Whatever. I'll try again!! I know I can do this!!

 So...where am I going with this? This is not really a food post. No, it's about language learning.

A couple of years ago, with big fanfare, the Ann Arbor schools announced that they would be working with U of M to get some Spanish language lessons into all of the third and fourth grade elementary school classes. To be specific, UM would provide the students to teach two 30-minute lessons a week to the third and fourth grades. Here is an annarbor.com article about the program launch. Here is the UM web site about the Ann Arbor Languages Partnership. 

At the time, I didn't say anything about this. I sort of thought it was a dumb idea because there is plenty of evidence that 60-minutes a week of a language, in isolation, is not going to teach anyone a language. Other countries actually teach kids languages by using daily instruction. On the other hand, I understood that the Burns Park PTO (a powerhouse fundraising group) was raising money to pay a foreign language teacher, which made some of the other schools want some foreign language lessons as well. So there was some internal pressure. I also thought that maybe any step forward in promoting second language acquisition could be a good thing.

Side note: the way second languages are taught in the Ann Arbor middle schools (6th-8th grade) has not been at all consistent from school to school, and it hasn't consistently promoted language learning either. In some schools, a program that gives you a "taste" of several languages has been promoted. How many languages can you count in, or say "pencil," "desk," and "teacher?" In others, it is "pick a language and stick with it."

Well, now this program has been in existence for a year. It is time to evaluate the program publicly.
"The proof of the pudding..."
Did the students learn a lot of Spanish? My guess is "no."
Did the UM students learn a lot? My guess is "yes."
Were parents satisfied?
I can't speak for all parents, but I do know that some parents were very satisfied...very happy...that their kids were getting some lessons in a second language. And guess what? NOW, they are pissed!

Q: What happens to Spanish language learning in fifth grade?
A: Nothing.

I don't know why 3d and 4th grade were chosen, but we have now instituted a program where students learn Spanish in 3d and 4th grade, nothing (second-language related) in 5th grade, and then in 6th grade either get some kind of exploratory language program or start taking a language which may or may not be Spanish. Does that make any sense at all? Not to me.

So let's look back now: why are we doing this? What outcomes would constitute success? Cui bono? Who benefits?

I don't know, because I haven't done or seen an evaluation (has one been done?), but I will conjecture that the beneficiaries, in this case, are the UM students--not the AAPS students.
It's not bad, by the way, for UM students to benefit. They just cannot be the only ones.
If in fact that is the case, then we [by "we" I mean AAPS parents, students, and taxpayers] need to be extra careful, in considering a "lab school" partnership, to make sure that the AAPS students benefit.

Thinking About News: Part I

It's been about a year since the Ann Arbor News closed. In its last few years, the News had been the subject of much disinvestment, and the paper was in a sorry state, as far as I am concerned. This post does not (directly) compare the News to the .com. Rather, it (tries to) ask and answer the questions:

Parts I and II:

What do I think about the evolution of annarbor.com? (And yes, this gets review-y.)
Part III:

What have I learned about my own relationship to news and information?
What are the implications for the community?

This is Part I of Thinking About News. Find Part II here. Find Part III here.

A year of annarbor.com: What do I think so far?

This does get rather critical. So I want to state, at the outset, that I am not critiquing the work of the reporters (or "digital journalists," gag, gag). Seriously, I think that on balance their work has ranged from good to excellent. It's just that there are not enough of them. Really, what did we expect? I see that annarbor.com advertises something like 35 journalists, but my count is a little different (and based on their Contact Us web page). Eight news reporters (local, business, entertainment) and five sports reporters. With the number of changes going on in education alone, Washtenaw County should probably have several education reporters. Given that the University of Michigan and Eastern Michigan University are huge economic engines for this county, having one higher education reporter is not enough. I'm not even sure that there are enough sports writers--but at least the balance is a little bit closer. Every time someone goes on vacation, or there is a "special report" (for instance, David Jesse and Tina Reed did one on poverty in Washtenaw County), they get pulled off their regular beats to do that--and there are not enough general reporters to cover--or to do those special reports. Juliana Keeping, the higher education reporter, got pulled to write a story about the Washtenaw County Road Commission just the other day.

Yes, I realize that there are some "producers," "copy editors,"  "community staff" and others that do some writing, but they are not  primarily reporting. Nor should they be. Editors have different jobs.
One of the great lacks of annarbor.com is in copy editing. If I read another article where the person's name is wrong (or different in two places), where Ypsilanti is spelled wrong, where a location is misplaced...and the correction is pointed out by a commenter...what is wrong with that picture? It is completely sloppy work. That is the job of a copy editor! I sometimes wonder--does everything get copy-edited before it gets posted? (I don't think the answer is yes. But--if the answer is yes, then my opinion is that it's not done very well.)

The name and the acorn are just poor choices. I thought I would get over it, but quite honestly, I haven't. Well, logos can change over time. But the name... here is my problem. Our town, Ann Arbor, is comprised of two words, with two capital letters. There is a space between the first word and the second. Web sites typically run words all together without capitals. When you get the print version of the paper, they print it as Ann Arbor.com (yes, space, capitals). On the web site, it says ANN ARBOR.com but that won't get you to the url, which is: annarbor.com. If you should happen to find it at the end of an article, it looks like this annarborcom. 

And I noticed that when they post a link, they write it as AnnArbor.com, as in this sentence lifted from their web site:

Ryan J. Stanton covers government and politics for AnnArbor.com. Reach him at...

As an editor and an English teacher, and (I guess) as a blogger, I find this stylistically confusing and wrong.  I will quote that slim classic, EB White's Elements of Style, here:

It is an old observation that the best writers sometimes disregard the  rules of rhetoric. When they do so, however, the reader will usually  find in the sentence some compensating merit, attained at the cost of  the violation. Unless he is certain of doing as well, he will probably  do best to follow the rules. After he has learned, by their guidance, to  write plain English adequate for everyday uses, let him look, for the  secrets of style, to the study of the masters of literature. (Emphases added.)

My point is this: choose a style that makes sense (even if it violates the rules of rhetoric) and stick with it.  I know this could be hard, because the .com at the end of Ann Arbor didn't really make sense as a name from the start.

Regarding the "hyperlocal" focus: That's all well and good, but my interests don't stop at the borders of the city. In particular, I feel keenly the loss of Michigan news. When the state's legislators are discussing education funding, I want to know what they are saying. Why should I have to visit the Lansing State Journal web site to find out?  If something important happens in Grand Rapids, might that be of interest to me? Isn't annarbor.com affiliated with MLive and Booth newspapers? Since MLive has reporters that actually cover the Capitol (including the outstanding commentator Peter Luke), and reporters that cover Grand Rapids, why not make it easy to link to their feeds?

What about the annarbor.com blogging?
I think this has been a partial success, and the part of the paper where it seems like evolution has made sense. I see that the bloggers are now a smaller part of the paper, and that's good. Some of the bloggers are very good. In addition to "lead blogger" Ed Vielmetti (from whom I have learned a lot about the FOIA process and the possibilities of blogging), I have loved reading educators Jeff Kass and Scott Dzanc Beal (who works with Dzanc Books--talk about my own need for copy editing!), and I recently linked to excellent articles by Annie Zirkel and Frances Kai-Hwa Wang. They are not the only good bloggers by any means.

I have two complaints about the blogging. First, they suffer from the same problem as some of the reporting: not enough copy-editing. Some of the bloggers are excellent writers...others are not. Copy editing (and general editing) would make a big difference. Second, if you look at the "Contact Us" page, there are many bloggers who have not blogged in months. In fact, there are bloggers still on the list who have publicly stated on their own (home) blogs that they are not going to continue contributing to annarbor.com as a blogger. That's fine--but why does annarbor.com persist in listing them? I think it is probably to make the staff list look larger. I would encourage annarbor.com to make it an accurate list of current bloggers.

How long should articles be?
My ninth grade English teacher introduced me to the (somewhat sexist) explanation, when asked that question about a required essay, "Like a woman's skirt. Long enough to cover the subject, short enough to make it interesting."  So in case you are wondering, if you have read this far into this post, we are at somewhere between 1100 and 1200 words. And you are still reading. Annarbor.com may or may not have told their reporters that they had to keep their articles short (my money is on yes, although publicly annarbor.com has said no, they haven't), but I tested a few articles out, and most of them are 300-400 words.  Articles on the Free Press web site, by comparison, tend to range from 300-600 words or more, and it's easy to go to the related articles because they are listed clearly.

On annarbor.com, that is not so true. The search function is terrible. The site now holds a large volume of material, but try to find it. Is there a way (for a non-tech savvy person, a "regular Joe") to find articles that were written within a certain date? How about for a certain subject? With a particular "tag?" Want to find related articles? For instance, suppose you know about a certain crime and you want to know if there was a follow-up article written--can you find the article? There are people who organize things like this. They are called librarians, and many of them are trained in digital media organization. If you are going to an all-digital format, that doesn't mean you don't need organized archives. You need them more than ever.

Sure, there's more to critique. I would like to see more photographs. I would like to be able get an overview of the articles that there are to read when I glance at the front page (see freep.com or nytimes.com for examples). I don't really care what the journalists look like but I would like to know if it's really just a link to an AP article, another news source, or homegrown writing. (That's still not always clear.) As far as layout, I assume it's a design that is driven by trying to sell ads, but I don't find the ads very attractive and I know I miss articles I would like to read because they are not "featured." When it comes to layout, especially, I assume that there is going to continue to be evolution. I'm told that it's still a Work In Progress.


In Part II, I am going to give specific examples about why the length of articles, the search function, and the capacity (aka the numbers) of the reporters are all related. I'm going to use education articles for my examples, but please don't take that as a critique of David Jesse's work. I could have used other subjects (government, business...) but this is, after all, an education blog.

Warren Buffet, You're A Cool Man

This is a great letter explaining why Warren Buffett is donating 99% of his wealth.

Hat-tip to Mark Maynard, another cool man. (And cool blogger.)

Saturday Night's Fun: Skyline Soccer, MHSAA, and Title IX

 My Saturday Night

The Skyline women's soccer team made it to the District 2 regionals and I went to see my daughter's friend play. Saturday night, at Trenton High School, this group of 9th and 10th graders played a Livonia Ladywood team (grades 9-12) that included at least one all-stater. Skyline lost, 1-0. Their best chances to score came in the last 15 minutes.  Read all about it here (with video). 
(The team runs the field--out to the bleachers and back--at the end of the game.)

Watching the game sent me down Memory Lane. I was in high school in the years post-Title IX.
 

Title IX is a law passed in 1972 that requires gender equity for boys and girls in every educational program that receives federal funding.
Many people have never heard of Title IX.  Most people who know about Title IX think it applies only to sports, but athletics is only one of 10 key areas addressed by the law. These areas are: Access to Higher Education, Career Education, Education for Pregnant and Parenting Students, Employment, Learning Environment, Math and Science, Sexual Harassment, Standardized Testing and Technology. (From TitleIX.info)

From a Sports Perspective
What a difference a few years make! When I was in middle school, all the girls (grades 7-12--the middle school was separate, but attached to the high school) were consigned to the small gym. All the boys (grades 7-12) got the big and beautiful gym. By the time I got to high school, the powers-that-be were beginning to implement Title IX (it took them a few years). By 1976, the middle school students got the small gym, and the high school students got the big gym. Did that mean more juggling of space? You bet. And with physical education four days a week, for four years, space got tight. That is, actually, how I learned to juggle--in the wrestling room. They made it work though, and juggling space just seemed normal.
In retrospect, the physical education department at my high school seemed to want to make Title IX work--but they had a lot of catch-up to do. There were hardly any girls' after-school sports at the time. And that's probably why, when my friends Denise and Anne lobbied for a girls' soccer team (we weren't called "women's" soccer), they let us form one. So as a senior, I was on the first girls' soccer team for our high school.
Then and Now
Here are a couple of differences between then and now: the skill level of the Skyline players is vastly vastly better, and the women's game is much more physical. It was fun to watch.

Another thing that was different--and completely, totally, outstandingly cool? The men's soccer team showed up as the cheer section--with face paint and school colors. And they brought the mascot!

If we had made it to regionals back in 1980, I think we would have gotten the parents. But the boys' team? No way! (Yes, of course the parents were there Saturday night. My favorite parent line was from a parent who didn't think the ref was being fair: "Ref, you're missing a great game here!") Digression: Did you know that the chant "Go Blue" works for Skyline as well as UM?

MHSAA: Dumb Decisions, and Where Does My Money Go?
The game cost $5 per ticket to get in (I spent $15), and the tickets are stamped MHSAA: Michigan High School Athletic Association. MHSAA is, essentially, the statewide high school sports organization. I believe all of the local schools that field sports teams are members, and I'm including private, parochial, and charter schools (e.g., Greenhills, Gabriel Richard, and Central Academy).

If you want, you can think of it as a monopoly. On the one hand, maybe a monopoly makes sense for coordination purposes.
On the other hand, MHSAA spent the last ten-or-so years strenuously fighting a Title IX challenge. Remember, school districts around the state support MHSAA with their dollars (our tax dollars), and I certainly didn't support the MHSAA fight. So I started thinking about the lawsuit.

CFE v. MHSAA
Here is the very quick summary:
Communities for Equity, a Grand-Rapids-based group, sued MHSAA over the placement of sports seasons. It's not illegal to have (for instance) one season of basketball in the fall or spring, and a different season in the winter--and obviously that makes it easier to schedule gym time. However, in Michigan, the "worse" or non-traditional season was always given to the women's sports season. Under Title IX, the discriminatory practice--always giving women the less desirable season--is illegal. So--Communities for Equity sued, and won. MHSAA appealed, and lost. Appealed, and lost. . . The lawsuit went on for nine years (!). In the end, the US Supreme Court refused to hear the case.
During those nine years (that is nine graduating classes), other states' high school athletic associations had the same issue. But instead of pursuing ongoing legal action, and racking up millions of dollars in legal fees, those states' athletic associations changed their practice. In the end: Michigan had to align their seasons the same way that 49 other states had already done. (That's right, we were LAST to adopt a practice everyone else had already done.) As far as I'm concerned, that was the right thing to do--but it would have been the right thing to do many years earlier. Hey people, you were a little late to the party!
Further--if it were up to me, I would have changed the MHSAA leadership a long time ago. What were they thinking, fighting this for so many years? What's more, they are still whining about the change. Want some cheese with that whine?

From a Detroit News article written 2/25/2010,

 "I don't think people are much happier about it today then they were when the court ruling was made," said John "Jack" Roberts, executive director of the MHSAA, which opposed changes to the seasons.

WAIT A SECOND. Who is "people?" I'm people. And I am VERY HAPPY about the change.

Then the article quotes Connie Engel:

Engel, who lives in Grand Rapids, is one of the founders of the Communities of Equity, the group that sued the MHSAA in 1998 for what it described as discriminatory scheduling practices at the convenience of boys sports.
"Looking through the eyes of Title IX, gate receipts can't be a persuasive factor," she said. "It isn't anything about the public, it's about the children's legal rights to be treated without discrimination. I just opened the newspaper Saturday morning and there were two big spreads on each side with boys and girls basketball."

RIGHT ON!
It was MHSAA's own damn fault that they ended up with a huge legal bill at the end. They didn't need to appeal all the way up to the Supreme Court. They could have changed their practice. After the final ruling stood, MHSAA started moaning and groaning. They said that they might need to file for bankruptcy. They said they might need to assess all of the high schools in the association a special (and very large) assessment.
So I wondered, after I noticed that my ticket money was going to MHSAA, what ever happened to that legal bill? It was hard to find out.
You know that iPhone commercial, "There's an app for that?" Well, it turns out that--almost whatever you are looking for--"There's a blog for that." In this case, title-ix.blogspot.com had the answer. (They have several posts on the case. If you are interested, click on the Michigan tag.)

In summary, instead of paying $7 million all at once, MHSAA is paying less and paying gradually, with final payments coming in 2014. And they can't get out of paying by filing for bankruptcy. The details of the agreement were originally covered by the Downriver News-Herald. (Which brings me back to the soccer game, I guess, since Trenton is Downriver.) What's surprising to me is how little news follow-up there was of this huge story that affects thousands of student-athletes--and all the Michigan high schools--every year.

In the Billie Jean King/Chris Evert/Martina Navratilova era, Virginia Slims supported the women's tennis tour, with the tag line "You've come a long way, baby."
We sure have. But we have a long way to go.
Read more about Title IX and athletics at TitleIX.info and at title-ix.blogspot.com.