Special Late Nite Cap UPDATE 11-30-12 #SOSCHAT #EDCHAT #P2

Nite Cap UPDATE

UPDATE UPDATE UPDATE UPDATE

My Best Posts Over The Years — Volume Two

by Larry Ferlazzo

I’ve been writing this blog for six or seven years. I thought readers might find it useful for me to dig back in the “archives” and highlight my choices for some of the best posts that appeared during that time.
The first list in this series, My Best Posts Over The Years — Volume One, focused on the year 2007 and included a fair amount of still-useful material (at least in my opinion).
Here in Volume Two I’ll identify the best of 2008:
I began an eighty (no, that’s not a typo) o

Tentative Agreement: LAUSD-UTLA TEACHER EVALUATION PROCEDURES

by smf

from UTLA.NET TENTATIVE AGREEMENT: LAUSD-UTLA 2012 Evaluation Procedures Supplement to Art X 11-29-12

STUDENT SCORES MAY BE USED IN LAUSD TEACHER RATINGS: Union leaders and District officials agree to make testing data part of evaluations. But some hurdles remain.

by smf

  "This is a complex agreement and possibly the most sophisticated evaluation agreement that I have seen. It assures that test scores will not be overused, will not be assigned an arbitrary and inappropriate weight, will not be the sole or primary determinant of a teacher's evaluation." -Diane Ravitch By Teresa Watanabe and

From Robert Rendo: a short essay on profit and priorities

by ed notes online

Public Education has long become a billion dollar industry, according to a report put out way back in 2007 by Thomas Meldon, professor in the Benerd School of Education at the University of the Pacific in California, and editor of Teacher Education Quarterly, and Bruce A. Jones, professor and director of the David C. Anchin Center at the University of South Florida.

In their fact finding, they state that companies that produce educational materials and supplies were (then) over the billion dollar threshold, with product lines rapidly expanding.

Vacation-Time Distortion Equation

by teachbad

Hey, Everybody– Congratulations on making it through another week and another month. Don’t start your countdown calendar yet. But it’s mighty tempting, isn’t it? It’s a little bit of a problem that Thanksgiving was early this year. That obviously makes the spread between then and the Big One longer. Oh, so much longer…Here we are, more than a week after Thanksgiving and there’s still more than three weeks until Christmas? Really? So we cope. Here’s something that won’t really help with Read more […]

Sen. Alex Padilla will reintroduce bill making it easier to fire teachers for misconduct

by By Barbara Jones, Staff Writer

State Sen. Alex Padilla, D-Pacoima, plans to reintroduce legislation Monday that would make it easier for school districts to fire teachers for misconduct.

Nearly 2,000 school employees retire tomorrow to avoid benefit loss

by Maureen Downey

Interesting story about 1,700 school employees retiring tomorrow to take advantage of a base pay boost that is about to disappear.
According to the AJC:

In a typical year, fewer than 300 of the state’s educators retire Dec. 1, while the school year is in full swing.
But this year, 1,707 educators across the state have opted to retire now. This includes 123 employees — including 63 teachers, four counselors, seven paraprofessionals, two assistant 

Deasy: “This Has Never Been Done”

by Hillel Aron

Superintendent John Deasy explained to LA School Report why the tentative agreement was so historic:
“You don’t do this stuff in California – this has never been done. People were very very conscious and concerned,

Stupid Tweets from Seattle Times Opinion

by Charlie Mas

I subscribe to the Seattle Times Opinion Twitter feed so I get to see every stupid thing they write on it.



Here are some recent tweets from them:

• The top one is innocuous.
• The second one says that charter schools must hold themselves accountable and that not doing this has been a problem with traditional public schools. Of course, with the new report from NACSA we now know 

Will Americans View Spanish as an International Language in the Future?

With more than 420 million people speaking it, the future of Spanish “as an international language” is on the line in the United States, the director of Spain’s Cervantes Institute told Efe here Friday.
“Large sectors of the United States preceive Spanish as a language of immigrants, not as a treasure. And that needs changing,” Victor Garcia de la Concha said.
On a visit to the Guadalajara International Book Fair, De la Concha said that Spain’s current economic crisis, which has entailed budget cuts for the Cervantes Institute, should not hold back 

Not a Waterbed Without Water

by Imagine Wisconsin

Chiming in this week is Bill Conway--a world traveler, an acclaimed social studies teacher, and my colleague.

Recently, Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker has been touting his balanced budget and the surplus money he put into a rainy day fund. I have a hard time celebrating this news as our school district continues to face dire economic issues.  

Have we gone too far with these hatchet-style budget cuts?  Have we passed a tipping point?  Wisconsin’s Superintendent asks for more for schools that are in need, while our Governor is promising to deliver less. Can we work with less? Can we deliver what our communities and children deserve with what we are being given?

I had an economics class in college, way back when. My professor used a waterbed 

NOTHING LIKE A SEX SCANDAL TO COVER A TEACHER WITCH HUNT

by Leonard Isenberg

(Mensaje se repite en Español) 

(For a national view of public education reform see the end of this blog post)

The reason Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) "officials failed to promptly report nearly 150 cases of suspected teacher misconduct- including allegations of sexual contact with students- to state authorities as required by law" is not as Howard Blume uncritically goes along with in his Los Angeles Times article yesterday. Rather, the reason that LAUSD was busy trying to intimidate mostly innocent teachers into resigning or retiring was to balance its in the red budget from