Sunday, November 28, 2010

Parent Advocates - ParentAdvocates.org

Cathie Black, Bloomberg's Pick For NYC Chancellor, Doesn't Have A Charter School Visit In Her Bio After All

| Posted 11/28/2010 at 5:05 PM

City schools chancellor nominee Cathie Black insists she's connected to public education via a highly touted charter school - but a close look shows she's had no contact with students, parents or teachers there. Officials at the Harlem Village Academies admit the school's National Leadership Board, which Black joined just five months ago, has never met.

Free The Teachers by Philip K. Howard

Government Lies, Corruption and Mismanagement | Posted 11/28/2010 at 4:43 PM

Teachers need to be free from bureaucratic policies that stifle creativity, and they must once again be allowed to inspire learning.

Schools Debate Whether To Grade Hard Work Or Mastery of Material

Stories & Grievances | Posted 11/28/2010 at 4:16 PM

As test scores fast become the single and most powerful measurement by which educational outcomes are being judged, more schools might find themselves engaged in what has become a pivotal debate: Should students be rewarded for being friendly, prepared, compliant, a good school citizen, well organized and hard-working? Or should good grades represent exclusively a student’s mastery of the material?

How the governor tried to eliminate mental health services for schoolchildren | Thoughts on Public Education

How the governor tried to eliminate mental health services for schoolchildren - by Bill Koski

by Bill Koski

On Oct. 8 , the same day that the Legislature passed the state budget, Gov. Schwarzenneger unceremoniously line-item vetoed funding for AB 3632 services, stating that his “policy is to suspend mandates not related to elections, law enforcement, or property taxes in order to maintain a prudent reserve.” With that metaphorical pen stroke, the governor [...]

Why Isn’t #Wikileaks Trending, and Should We Care? « Student Activism

Why Isn’t #Wikileaks Trending, and Should We Care?

by Angus Johnston

So the Wikileaks organization released the first batch of a promised quarter million US State Department cables today, and it seems like everyone on the planet is talking about it. The story is front-page news at media sites across the globe, it’s all over the television, and for a while this afternoon more than two percent of all Twitter traffic was about the leaks.

You read that right — one in every fifty tweets was about Wikileaks this afternoon. To put that in context, it’s about three times as many as mentioned Justin Bieber.

And yet “Wikileaks” hasn’t hit Twitter’s trending topics list all day. Right now #becauseofjustin, a Bieber-related hashtag, holds the top spot on Twitter’s global trending topics list, even though it’s running just one tenth the volume of #wikileaks itself.

Twitter being Twitter, there’s no shortage of speculation about why this is. Some suggest it’s a conspiracy of

School Tech Connect: The Great Innovator

The Great Innovator

by effacethefacade@yahoo.com (Tim)

Let me see if I have this right--- and I'm serious, here. I think I'm missing something.

Illinois has adopted the Common Core Standards, which means that everyone's going to be tested on those standards with the new magical tests that don't yet exist, starting in the 2014-2015 school year. The tests are going to be high level, computer-based, and they're not simply going to measure the distribution of poverty, in spite of the basic impossibility of this task, and notwithstanding the unwillingness of the Core people even to admit that there are factors (beyond teacher behavior) that affect education.

Every school district in the state is now trying to figure

Gary Anderson: Cathleen Black: Education's Sarah Palin?

Gary Anderson

Professor of Education, New York University

Posted: November 28, 2010 02:14 PM

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Cathleen Black: Education's Sarah Palin?

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It was business as usual on Friday as David Steiner apparently has agreed to provide Bloomberg with the waiver he needs to appoint Cathleen Black as the new chancellor of education for New York City.

Cathleen Black is as embarrassingly ignorant of education as sure-to-be presidential candidate Sarah Palin is of national and geopolitical issues. Steiner, though should know better.

Unfortunately, although steeped in philosophy and educational theory, he shares Bloomberg's corporate ideology, and apparently is ultimately a political animal. He thinks John Dewey was wrong-headed and that he recanted his life's work. Instead of blaming exploding rates of inequality, concentrated poverty, and unemployment for the plight of inner-city youth, he blames

Circle of learning is more than a figure of speech - latimes.com

Circle of learning is more than a figure of speech

Teachers are using a traditional technique to help students communicate with one another as a way to build bonds that will foster learning and help them stay in school.

Wilshire Park Elementary student Julia Kim talks during a session about acts of kindness. (Gina Ferazzi/Los Angeles Times / November 27, 2010)

By Teresa Watanabe, Los Angeles Times

November 27, 2010

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It's story time at Amelia Earhart Continuation School, a place where high school students who have ditched class, flunked out or otherwise fallen behind in their academic credits come to catch up.

On this day, the students in Nancy Stringer's English class sit in a circle. As they pass around a "talking piece" — a black rubber rat named Scar — they share stories of elementary and middle school.

I stabbed a kid. I broke my hand. I got my first kiss. I got straight A's. I was scared of ghosts because a janitor committed suicide.

It may seem simple, but the North Hollywood students say that sharing stories in this way — a practice known as "council" — has made a huge difference in their lives. Through stories, they say,