Administration Cuts @ MMSD?

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UPDATE: Lee Sensenbrenner writes about last night’s “tense” board meeting.
Doug Erickson writes:

Carol Carstensen suggested Monday that the board seek an independent analysis of the school district’s administrative costs as it mulls $10 million in proposed cuts (on a 300+m budget).
Specifically, Carstensen said she’s heard concern from the public about the cost of the district’s administrators.
School Board President Bill Keys said he’s not sure the board can cut much more from the administration.
“You still need to buy supplies and cut checks,” Keys said. “There are things that have to be done.”

Keys is correct that some of these things must be done. Perhaps there are better ways, including further automation, outsourcing to local businesses or simply eliminating some processes.

Interesting Spanish Teaching Project

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Christopher Hamady, technology coordinator for the Regina Coeli School, is looking for help with an interesting project:

Our Spanish teacher would like to find a school in a native Spanish-speaking country that would like to do web-based video correspondence with our students. The format would entail that each school would make QuickTime videos of their students asking simple questions about the culture of the other, and the other school would reply using the same medium. The videos would be uploaded to the Web so that each school could easily access them.
Each group of students would have the opportunity to ask and answer questions in both English and Spanish, thus aiding development skills in speaking and translating of both languages. The participating school would have to have access to a web server to post their videos. The rest of the details could be discussed via email.

This is a great idea, and is quite doable with very inexpensive tools today.
Email reginacoeli_spanish@nwoca.org [from macintouch]

Sketchy Grade for Cyber Schools – Wired

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John Gartner writes in Wired that Cyber Schools are not measuring up…

Cyber schools — where students complete all coursework online using home computers — are a big hit with parents, who are signing up their children as quickly as the virtual doors open. However, test results for 2003 show students at many cyber schools are not measuring up to state standards or to their peers who attend brick-and-mortar schools.
According to the non-profit Center for Education Reform, or CER, the number of online public schools has grown from 30 to 82 during the past two years, offering instruction in 19 states. That number could more than double in 2004, as school districts in Ohio have granted charters to 63 cyber schools, up from seven in 2003.

I don’t know much about these initiatives, but one year’s worth of data does not mean a whole lot….

More money doesn’t always pay off….

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“Are we going to be replaced by a computer or what?” one veteran baseball scout told The Los Angeles Times last week.
Selena Roberts has a timely look at Billy Beane, General Manager of the Oakland A’s. Beane has made the Oakland A’s winners, despite a very low payroll and competitors with piles of cash (money is not the secret to success).

But what the swipes reveal is how threatening an alternate view is to baseball’s theology.
It’s a threat to inept owners ? and/or a certain baseball commissioner ? who have used their small-market woes as habitual excuses for futility. It’s a threat to Yankeesque teams who spend millions to assemble constellations only to be increasingly grounded by teams of cohesive humans. It’s a threat to romanticized scouts whose legends are built on a 5 percent success rate.
“Everyone thought they had it figured out a long time ago,” said Scott Hatteberg, the A’s first baseman. “Now you have these young guys coming in to mess with it.”

San Francisco’s Commonwealth Club has an interesting interview with Beane and writer Michael Lewis regarding last year’s excellent book, Moneyball.