Honored teacher added to MPS casualty list

This should make you sick...

But we do as we always do..no good deed goes unpunished.

In a urban school district you take away the good teachers and principals from the few schools that perform at or above what the 'burbs do..

Why? Because its not fair to the other schools..the ones with the kids who come from homes that are hard up on their luck..

No, we don't care about high achieving kids from good homes and parents who care..

We will continue to force out any kid who has any chance of going to college or being successful, we need to give all our attention on the schools where you have less than 10% of the parents come to parent-teacher conferences..where the kids never get above a 4th grade reading level (average reading level of a HS freshman)

Of course you need to do everything you can to help the kids who get none from anywhere else, but do we always have to keep dumping on the best schools, the highest achieving kids...can we help them out a little?

And you wonder why things are the way they are...

Best lines of the article:

Here's one principle I would suggest for beginning the discussion in Milwaukee: If the goal is to increase the number of high-quality schools, the first thing to do is to not mess up the top-performing schools we already have. You don't build quality by going backward. Does it sound right to reward academic success with a financial punch in the nose?

The kind of days you want kids to have in school - rigorous, warm, filled with a wide range of subjects, well-shaped and well-directed, led by adults who are talented and skilled and present in appropriate numbers - are becoming rarer, not just in Milwaukee, but across Wisconsin.

The middle class - especially white families - moved from Milwaukee in huge numbers in the 1970s and 1980s. There isn't much middle class left in the city. Situations such as the one at Garland could well be another motivator for those who are left to either move or find schools outside MPS.

Senate passes education reforms to win stimulus dollars

If anyone wants to start a debate about the pros and cons of merit pay for teachers I'll throw my two cents in...
you start...

Doyle: Mayoral control of MPS key to getting stimulus money

Please, someone tell me what will improve by having the mayor of a big city in charge of the public school system.
Let's get a real dialog going...
List the pro's and con's....

Just 3 new voucher schools approved

good, since these schools are the new scam for many people.
A very small percentage of these schools offer a quality education or have certified teachers.
This is one area I am okay having the govt regulate something..
The program is good if schools can prove they are offering a quality education.
The question is, how and who decides that...and that seems to be the controversy.

State schools chief wants more from Milwaukee

I'm sorry, but as I read this all I can think about is that no one ever wants to address the actual problem. If you can not change the communities attitude toward education, teen parenting, personal responsibility and hard work, nothing you do in schools is going to make a big impact. However, no one wants to or knows how to address the actual problem, so we spend millions, even billions making very small gains.

The only way MPS or any other urban public school will ever get to an acceptable level is to change the attitude and environment the students come from.

MPS graduation rates rise, but not test scores

So kids are going to school less, getting lower test scores, and graduating at a higher rate...
Lets see, why is that?

1. The kids are simply being allowed to graduate with less skills. The quality of the MPS workforce continues to decline, and what is considered acceptable keeps declining as well.
2. Test scores are going down partially because more kids are coming to school (sometimes), and these are not the honors students who will raise test scores. So, part of the reason test scores keep going down is because kids who don't come to school enough to learn anything are coming to school just long enough to take a test. I bet if you only counted the tests of kids who attended school over 90% of the time, the scores would be better, and going up.

I just love how the paper and society in general continues to deal with these problems as if they were normal situations. Some kids don't come to school for weeks. Many kids keep changing schools because they have to move ever few months to avoid paying bills.

MPS offers uniquely generous fringe benefits, report says

I'm just going to say it, SO WHAT!!!!

I am offered a generous amount of swearing, and attitude, and parent issues, and family issues, and gang problems, and weapons, and threats, and yelling and screaming every day.

I had a girl say to me "this is how teachers get hurt" last week.
Then I had her mom call and yell at me for 20 minutes.
So is it okay that I get a small bone thrown my way for sticking around and trying to give these kids a small dose of what it takes to be successful and responsible.
I know my small amount of time will not be enough for most kids, but maybe for a few. Maybe for my softball girls or special Olympic kids.
So instead of getting shit on all day at school AND in the paper, maybe its okay to have SOMETHING positive thrown my way.

Half of MPS students regularly skip school, report shows

Don't worry, all we need is:
more money
more meetings
bash teachers for not working hard enough

DO NOT:
blame the kids
blame the parents
blame the community

So in the liberal world of education you DO the things that do NOTHING to help, and DO NOT do what would actually help. Shame is not a bad thing.
I can go into class this morning and tell the kids about this story and they wouldn't miss a beat.
Here is a simple but correct comment: You can't teach kids who don't go to school...

MPS takes deserved beating in the paper

The local paper has finally started to catch up with my criticism of MPS.
The district has been run into the ground by its superintendent and rubber stamped by the school board.
I have said for more than a year that the district had no direction, that is was a free for all with no planning or continuity.
Why MPS is even worse than before:
1. Our superintendent was a simple middle school principal who thought what worked in one south side school with decent kids is going to work district wide were most kids have way more problems on their plate.
2. There used to be a common plan and goal between schools in an area. You had some K-5 schools, a middle school or two and a high school. Now you have K-8 schools, K-12 schools, 6-12 and so on. Instead of working together every school is fighting for every possible student. And let me tell you a fact...kids who go to these "one building fits all" K-8 or K-12 schools are missing out on many services and extras that make a school a home. They probably don't have many clubs, sports are either club or they have to get buses to a big school, no plays, no band, nothing...
3. Many parents on the north side use school as a baby service. If you live on 110 and Mill road you get an extra hour of free baby sitting if you send your kid to a far south side school.
4. The state letting anyone rent out an abandoned building and open a charter school peels off so many kids everything is in chaos.

Their 3 R's include running

At least one school has it right.
Study after study show that a healthy body creates a healthier mind.
Kids who exercise and have PE early in school are able stay focused and learn how to read faster because they have better tracking skills.
It would be nice to see others follow, but the trend is to cut, cut, cut everything that is not the basics....and it hurts our kids.

Young females may be on path to poor health

That might be true, but there is no need for any type of health or nutrition information in school. We should make sure that kids can read well so they can read their friends obituary at 45.

Talk with a student about public vs private schools

A girl in my first block came into class right as the school doors opened this morning. Since none of the other kids will walk into the room until the tardy bell rings or after, we were able to talk for a few minutes.
I teach at an inner city public high school, and she had recently been attending a private school.
She told me that because they moved too far away from this private school she had to come to this public school.
She told me how much more she liked the private school because the kids were not allowed to mess around and act as terrible as they are allowed to act at my school.
The work was hard, but she liked that. "If these kids acted this way at my old school, they would all of a sudden be gone." "You would think, is that student absent today?" You would find out they just got rid of them.

I know that we are probably not able to get the level of academics as high as that private school, but we make sure we stay down in the lowest regions of education due to all our stupid gimmicks we are told we have to do on a daily basis.
We have "experts" and "consultants" come in and give us the latest liberal gimmick, the latest trick that will make us better "entertainers."
Since too many teachers are liberal and do not believe in strict discipline, the kids expect to get away with whatever they want, and the worst that will happen is that they will have a "talk" with someone and try and convince them that saying the N word or F word or any other bad word 10 times in a one minute period is not acceptable.
See, at the private school you get suspended or eliminated from school.
If public schools had strict discipline, from the beginning, the kids would follow suit.
Since we do not do it at all, if we started it would be vary hard work, it would be hell for a year or two. Liberal teachers would cry that too many kids were suspended or expelled.
And there would be a lot of them.
But eventually the expectation would be that school is for learning, not listening to mp3 players, not to "clown" in the hall, come to class whenever you want and "clown" some more.
The kids have learned from the years and years of soft, liberal education that they control the school. They decide when and where they will follow the rules.
If they don't want to do their work, fine...the teacher will be blamed and will have to come up with a new gimmick to try and convince someone to do their work.
I'm sorry, it is pathetic and I am getting sick of it.
If you really cared about these kids you would stop with the games and get tough.

Is this what we can expect in MPS in 5-10 years???

DOLTON, Ill. (CBS) ― In the latest in a wave of violence scares that have shut down more than a dozen schools and affected thousands of students, an entire south suburban school district will be closed until Tuesday at the earliest after a threat was found in a boy's bathroom. CBS 2's Joanie Lum reports.

Conn. Students To Get Cash For Passing AP Tests

This is so sad.
Actually, the life lessons we teach our children in school is sad.
It's no longer the principles of hard work and dedication that are taught.
It's second, third, forth chances.
Bribes to do what you are supposed to do.
Special ed students who get to do whatever they want....and they know it.
We are teaching our kids that if they complain enough, if they band together and refuse to follow rules or work hard, educators will back down and give into them.
We are failing our kids, they are not getting prepared for the real world.

A meeting to oppose "massive forced busing"

I find this amazing.
All liberal ideas fail, and usually the ideas hurt the people they are trying to help...also, liberals usually have to take the exact opposite position after their failed ideas really go to crap.
take busing...

In the late 1970's and early 1980's liberals decided that black students would get better test scores and be more successful in school if they sat on a bus for up to 2 hours so they could sit in class with more white kids. They will use the word diversity and that they want to do desegregate the schools...but of course, not the schools are more segregated than ever. Ask ANY school teacher of the time when did MPS (or any inner city public school) when did the school system start to go down the toilet, they will ALL say when they started busing. Liberals started the slow destruction of inner city public schools with one bad idea after another.
they offer an idea, it fails, two years later, another one, fails, another one, fails...they have ALL failed.
Are minority students now better off in a school district that has NO diversity AT ALL? (hint to liberals: diversity is when you have many different groups represented, INCLUDING white people).
It is silly to see them getting all up in arms AGAINST busing, when it was one of their first failed attempts and solving inequality in schools...now all we have in inequality....thanks.
What is the next a-hole idea that I have to sit and listen to meeting after meeting that will fail and be replaced with the next flavor of the month?

Changes at St. Anthony make it a school to watch

See what happens when you run a school with conservative principles...it works.
When you don't latch on to the newest failed liberal idea that is forgotten about 3 years later, and stick to hard work and traditional teaching, guess what, kids learn!!!

School Bans Hugs Over 2 Seconds

I better get a stop watch...
And throw away my brain while I'm at it...
Why do we keep making things worse and worse for our kids in this PC world?

Teens losing touch with common cultural and historical references

Twenty-five years after the federal report A Nation at Risk challenged U.S. public schools to raise the quality of education, the study finds high schoolers still lack important historical and cultural underpinnings of "a complete education." And, its authors fear, the nation's current focus on improving basic reading and math skills in elementary school might only make matters worse, giving short shrift to the humanities ? even if children can read and do math.

"If you think it matters whether or not kids have common historical touchstones and whether, at some level, we feel like members of a common culture, then familiarity with this knowledge matters a lot," says American Enterprise Institute researcher Rick Hess, who wrote the study.

To some in our society, nationalism or any commonality of a culture is not very PC. A vast majority of experts and research says otherwise. It is actually GOOD for kids to have some common teachings and beliefs. Add another item to the list of where our public schools are failing.

Among 1,200 students surveyed:
•43% knew the Civil War was fought between 1850 and 1900.
•52% could identify the theme of 1984.
•51% knew that the controversy surrounding Sen. Joseph McCarthy focused on communism.
In all, students earned a C in history and an F in literature, though the survey suggests students do well on topics schools cover. For instance, 88% knew the bombing of Pearl Harbor led the USA into World War II, and 97% could identify Martin Luther King Jr. as author of the "I Have a Dream" speech.

It seems the traditional items are no longer taught, giving way to whatever is the hot topic to liberal teachers. I'm sure in 5 years if you ask questions about global warming kids will know that, yet probably not know who the first President of the United States was.

Study finds 'relative parity' in voucher, MPS student performance

I'm glad to see this because it is what I have thought has been going on all along.
It is my belief that school choice and every other program that simply takes kids out of the big public school and places them somewhere else has much more negative than positive.
The kids still come from the same household, and since the teachers are paid much more in public school you are most likely getting a brand new teacher that couldn't get a job in public school, a teacher who is not able to teach in public school, and a few who are willing to take the huge pay cut because they believe they can teach more effectively in private school.

So the kids are not doing better, but you are hurting the big schools on a number of factors.
Bigger schools have more money and therefore have more programs and more opportunity.
You have all these kids going to small schools all over Milwaukee with the bare minimum. And obviously they are not learning more.
Cut cut cut cut cut is what happens all over MPS, so kids can leave and parents can pretend their kids are getting a better education. In a few cases they probably are, but not in the vast majority.

We need to stop the trend of small schools and more and more kids leaving MPS. MPS is forced to teach a large amount of kids with less and less resources.
Lets get a leader in MPS who has a vision and a plan and not what we have now, which is everyone fending for themselves, doing whatever they want, usually at the expense of another school.
MPS keeps cutting and cutting and for what?
Now we know it is for nothing

Federal report criticizes reform in MPS schools

This story shows that sometimes it is not the kids fault. Our "leader" has taken something bad and made it worse. Our school district is in complete chaos. There is no plan, no direction, everyone is doing whatever they want, every school is becoming anything it wants to without and plan or regard for the district as a whole.

First Things First's impact questioned
By ALAN J. BORSUKaborsuk@journalsentinel.com
Posted: Feb. 17, 2008
The improvement plan being implemented in four large Milwaukee high schools has been given a bad report card by the arm of the U.S. Department of Education that evaluates what works and what doesn't in school reform.
The program, First Things First, "was found to have no discernible effects on (students) staying in schools in its first year of implementation," the What Works Clearinghouse said.
Leaders of the organization behind First Things First criticized the federal report, saying the authors based their conclusion on too few schools that had used the program too brief a time, and ignored results that were more meaningful and more favorable.
Laurie Levin, executive vice president of the Institute for Research and Reform in Education, said: "The idea of using the first year of implementation to make any determination of a reform approach that is comprehensive and complex is essentially irresponsible. It totally misrepresents the world of comprehensive reform and what it takes to be successful."
Milwaukee Public Schools officials and representatives of the program say they are encouraged by how things are developing at each of the schools, and they remain committed to the approach.
"We're on the right path," said Marty Lexmond, director of school innovation for MPS. "The challenges have been and continue to be in front of us, and we continue to use the reform framework to respond. . . . We've definitely focused on improving the relationships among kids and between adults and kids and on improving instruction."
Bradley Tech and Pulaski high schools are in the second year of using First Things First; the James Madison Academic Campus is in its first year; and Custer High School is planning to launch the program next fall. Vincent High School is expected to start the program the following year.
The program aims to create better relationships between students and staff members and to assure that approaches to teaching engage students. Under First Things First, large schools are divided into smaller learning communities of 350 students or so, and groups of about 17 students and a staff member are assigned to a "family" unit that meets weekly and stays together for all four years of high school. Teachers in a learning community share blocks of planning time each week, and administrators frequently monitor classroom activity to try to quantify reports on whether teachers are using the best techniques.
Bradley Tech, Pulaski and Madison each had problems with the launch of First Things First, including resistance from some teachers, difficulty launching the family approach and, in some cases, serious behavior issues.
The federal researchers said four studies on First Things First that they reviewed did not meet their standards for use in judging the program, but a fifth study, focusing on dropout rates at three schools in Houston in the first year of the program, did. It showed no difference in the rate at schools using the program.
Research in Kansas City, Kan., which has used the program in all its high schools for several years, was not accepted because there were no schools in the city that weren't using the program and could be used for comparison purposes.
But Kansas City has been the main showcase of the program's success, and Levin strongly criticized the federal researchers for not accepting results there, which include schools with strong increases in graduation rates and declines in behavior problems.
"To say we were disappointed in what the clearinghouse chose to do with the information we had is probably an understatement," she said.
Levin said the What Works Clearinghouse issued its report even though its parent organization, the federal Institute for Education Sciences, recently granted $6 million for further research on the program.
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has made grants of about $11 million to schools around the country to support implementation of First Things First, including two grants totaling $1 million to Milwaukee.
Marie Groark, a spokeswoman for the foundation, said First Things First has been "a very important partner of ours around the country" in pursuing higher success rates among high school students. She said studies other than the one from the clearinghouse had shown it was having a "phenomenal" impact in some schools. The new report, she said, "is in no way definitive or changes our support."