Nite Cap UPDATE
UPDATE UPDATE UPDATE UPDATE
CORPORATE ED REFORM
'Ted Talks Education': A Sneak Peek of Tonight's Television Debut
TED Talks makes its first foray into television tonight, and the decision to focus on public schools wasn’t a tough call, said Chris Anderson, curator of the nonprofit organization that built its niche showcasing inspirational speakers in a variety of live and online formats.
“Re-imagining education is a topic we love at TED because we think figuring it out will be the key to a more hopeful future,” Anderson said.
Co-sponsored by WNET and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (as part of its American Graduate: Let’s Make it Happen campaign), “TED Talks Education” is hosted by musician John Legend, taps well-known innovators such as Geoffrey Canada (CEO of the Harlem Children’s Zone), and author Sir Ken Robinson,
Smith-Blum Finalists for BOE Position
The Seattle Times is reporting that Kay Smith-Blum is one of six finalists for an interim seat on the Washington Board of Education. She is being interviewed tomorrow for the seat. She says she is not sure what she will do if offered the position. The position is only for nine months and then she would have to run in November to stay in the position. The election would be by members of school boards from the Western Washington region.
If she did accept, she would have to resign her position on the Seattle School Board. That would then prompt the Board to have to take applications and then appoint a candidate from Smith-Blum's district. That person
New Schools for New Orleans: Don’t You Believe It
In April 2013, New Schools for New Orleans (NSNO) released this report, called, “Accelerating Academic Gains in New Orleans.” Please know that the only way to “accelerate the gains” is to manipulate what the public sees. This report is an optical illusion that relies upon both combining data for two different school systems and quoting stats on subcategories as though such are full categories.
Readers might find it helpful to open the link for the report and view the graphs prior to reading about them. (I could not reproduce them in my post.)
Here is how it works:
On page 3 of the report, NSNO presents a beautiful color graph labeled, “District Performance Scores for the
Stop Data Rape!
Have you ever heard the term data-driven instruction? It’s where data is used to drive instruction. Just by itself, it isn't clear what kind of data would be most useful, how best to collect it, how it should be used or by whom. But as long as we repeat the phrase often enough, and have lots of data being collected and laying all over the place, we’re good. No worries. Data-driven instruction is the bomb. However, it can also trigger an aggressive kind of arousal and single-mindedness in Read more [...]
Testing for exactly the opposite of what we need
Choice Quotes on the NYS ELA Exam
Many thanks to Lucy Calkins for having someone throw up a site to gather comments about the recent Common Core-aligned ELA exams in New York state. It is a bit of a mess, but kind of charming that in 2013 they chose to hack something together from scratch in PHP instead of just giving Google all the data directly.Here are some quotes I plucked — sorry they aren’t attributed or individually linked. I spent way too
Gov. Christie teaches kids how to handle unwanted spiders: smush ‘em
New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie gave some visiting school children a lesson in how to handle unwanted bugs: smush them with the palm of your hand. (See video below.) That’s what he did Friday when he spotted a little spider … Continue reading →
BREAKING NEWS!! PRINCess PAL Misconduct at PS 154 in the Bronx!!
Sorry been away so long. Baseball season has started for my son and been busy. He is playing in the local Little League and practicing for his summer travel team as well. Been running back and forth between games, practice, and lessons.
There is so much news and information that I am currently sitting on that needs to come out. To sum it all up in a nutshell, Rome is burning and Nero is clueless.
The breaking news that came into the SBSB newsroom today shows hypocrisy and a lack of ethics at its worse, and incompetency as never seen before.
Today, a 2nd grade student by the name of Hymie Morgenstern was all alone in the main office. No on
Too much Money being spent on Education: Not! by John Stoffel
To every person who comments on an Indiana online newspaper article with, “We continue to throw more money at education and we aren’t getting any better results…” I say, “I couldn’t disagree with you more.” Millions of dollars to McGraw-Hill for an online ISTEP test is not money spent on education. Millions more dollars for [...]