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Friday, July 25, 2014

5 Essential Ingredients For Learning (SPLAT) | Connected Principals

5 Essential Ingredients For Learning (SPLAT) | Connected Principals:



5 Essential Ingredients For Learning (SPLAT)

I was listening to a fascinating show by Pat Flynn, blogger and podcaster who was interviewing Bryan Kelly from What The Speak on the neuroscience behind great presentations.
wts_SPLAT_graphic
As I thought about the research Kelly had done on what makes great presentations, I was reminded how good teaching, leadership, or any communication includes the same ingredients.
Kelly created the acronym, SPLAT, to define the five most ingredients in helping others learn.
S = Safety–creating an environment that allows for learning
P = Problem solving–helping others find solutions
L = Lectures–avoiding them and focusing on teaching instead
A = All–all audiences are visual learners
T = Talking–teaching others is one of the best ways to learn
How can these reminders help us in the school setting? Here are my 5 take-aways:
1. Safety
No matter how well prepared your team is, how credentialed, experienced, or creative–if learners do not feel safe, they will not flourish.
Kelly talks about this in the context of presentations. He encourages presenters to NOT put audience members on the spot or make them feel uncomfortable.
In school, the same applies in large settings, classrooms, or one-on-one.
When learners sense we are prepared, have created a safe-learning environment, and treat them with dignity and respect, then the atmosphere exists for learning to take place.
2. Problem Solving
No matter what the subject or content being covered, learners want to know “how is this going to help me?”
In the school setting, it takes a lot of creativity to dig deep and explain how colonial primary texts or quadratical formulas apply to our lives today, but those meanings do exist.
The creative educator finds ways to be aware of real-life problems and points to how 5 Essential Ingredients For Learning (SPLAT) | Connected Principals:

LAUSD BOARD ELECTION BETWEEN MCKENNA AND JOHNSON- IS THE BEST VOTE NO VOTE? - Perdaily.com

LAUSD BOARD ELECTION BETWEEN MCKENNA AND JOHNSON- IS THE BEST VOTE NO VOTE? - Perdaily.com:



LAUSD BOARD ELECTION BETWEEN MCKENNA AND JOHNSON- IS THE BEST VOTE NO VOTE?

McKennaandJohnson.jpg
(Mensaje se repite en Español)

In the 1998 Warren Beatty film Bulworth, the scene in the Black church on Vermont, when he tells the folks present that the only time they will see politicians is when they want their vote, is reminiscent of the LAUSD District 1 race between George McKenna and Alex Johnson to replace recently deceased Marguerite LaMotte. But when it comes to the toxic daily and generational reality that people in this district and their kids continue to face, nothing will change. 

While I personally held my nose and sent in my absentee ballot for George McKenna this week, at some point in my adult life I would love to vote for something more than the lesser of two evils. McKenna clearly knows his way around the self-serving old boy network, so one might wonder as to why this seasoned "educational expert" hasn't been successful in changing LAUSD's ingrained culture of failure up until now? 

And apropos of the same question, when it comes to measurable change at LAUSD, part-time (yes, it's a part-time job) LAUSD Board members like Kayser, Zimmer, and Ratliff with their entrenched bureaucracies that they inherited from their predecessors, have done- or been able to do- little to stem the privatization juggernaut and witch hunt against teachers that Superintendent Deasy continues to preside over unfettered by any LAUSD Board action to stop him. And it is unlikely that George McKenna will be able to do anything to change that. G-d would I love to be wrong about this, which is probably why I voted for McKenna in the LAUSD BOARD ELECTION BETWEEN MCKENNA AND JOHNSON- IS THE BEST VOTE NO VOTE? - Perdaily.com:




America’s Most Financially Disadvantaged School Districts and How They Got that Way | Center for American Progress

America’s Most Financially Disadvantaged School Districts and How They Got that Way | Center for American Progress:



America’s Most Financially Disadvantaged School Districts and How They Got that Way

How State and Local Governance Causes School Funding Disparities

child school bus

SOURCE: AP/Patrick Semansky
A student walks past vacant row houses to a waiting school bus as school gets out for the day in Baltimore.
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  • Endnotes and citations are available in the PDF and Scribd versions.
  • America’s Most Financially Disadvantaged School Districts and How They Got that Way
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This report explores some of the most financially disadvantaged school districts in the country and identifies a typology of conditions that have created or reinforced their disadvantage. Financially disadvantaged districts are those that serve student populations with much greater-than-average need but do so with much less-than average funding. The Education Law Center of New Jersey’s annual report, “Is School Funding Fair? A National Report Card,” uses a panel of the most recent three years of U.S. Census Bureau Fiscal Survey data on state and local revenues per pupil in order to determine which states achieve systematically greater funding per pupil in districts serving higher student poverty concentrations and which states maintain school funding systems where higher poverty districts have systematically fewer resources per pupil.
The same data have been used in follow-up analyses to identify the local public school districts across states that are saddled with greater-than-average student needs and less-than-average state and local revenue. As one might expect, numerous poorly funded local public school districts exist in the least fairly funded states. That is, where a state school finance system is such that higher-need districts on average have lower state and local revenue, there tends to be more high-need districts with lower state and local revenue. And as it turns out, there are unfairly funded districts in what are traditionally viewed as fairly funded states. In other words, poorly funded local public school districts exist in states where school finance systems are, on average, progressive. This report looks at why this happens—and what can be done about it.
First, this report lays out a typology of conditions that lead to severe fiscal disadvantage for local public school systems. It then provides examples of states, state policy conditions, and specific local public school districts identified as being severely financially disadvantaged. The causes of fiscal disadvantage are classified as follows:
  • Type 1. Savage inequalities: How persistent disparities in local taxable property wealth continue to undermine equity in American education
  • Type 2. Stealth inequalities: How dysfunctional, poorly designed, state school finance formulas fail to correct, and sometimes reinforce, disparities
  • Type 3. Some politics is still local: How local tax policy and budgeting decisions may undermine state equity objectives
  • Type 4. Not-so-blurred lines: How small, segregated enclaves embedded in population-dense metropolitan areas reinforce fiscal disparities
  • Type 5. Shift happens: How the changing demography of exurban and smaller city America leads to emerging fiscal disadvantage
The report concludes by providing policy recommendations. Approaches to reforming aid should address the following issues:
  • Organizational concerns. America’s public school districts remain highly geographically, demographically, and economically segregated. As long as this continues, leveraging state school finance policies as part of the solution to achievement gaps will be an uphill battle.
  • State policy leverage over local fiscal decisions. The power of state school finance systems to resolve inequities in funding across local districts is limited. Local district and municipal taxing and spending decisions can—and, in many cases, do—undermine state school finance policy objectives.
  • More-nuanced measures of local capacity and need in state aid formulas. The cases explored in this paper reveal some additional complexities to the economics and demography of local public school districts that likely require a closer look to determine the best methods for combining state aid and local revenues to overall adequate spending. Such policies could substantively improve equity in both taxation and the raising of revenue across communities that have disparate access to nonresidential tax bases without requiring them to raise and spend additional state aid.
  • Illogical state aid programs. States must take a hard look at plainly illogical state school finance formulas. Clearly, Michigan and Arizona need to revisit their general state aid formulas so as to allocate more of their existing aid to districts with greater needs, which will mean allocating less aid to districts with fewer needs.
While substantively resolving any one of these problems would move the ball forward on equity, definitively resolving all four is required for making consistent progress across all states and local public school districts. Resolving these persistent disparities between districts remains a prerequisite condition for resolving internal disparities in the most fiscally deprived school districts. Doing so also serves as a prerequisite condition to resolve disparities in essential resources, including teaching quality, class sizes, and access to deep and broad curricular opportunities for all children regardless of the school or district they attend.
Bruce D. Baker is a professor in the Department of Educational Theory, Policy and Administration at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey in New Brunswick, New Jersey.America’s Most Financially Disadvantaged School Districts and How They Got that Way | Center for American Progress:

The case against Alex Johnson

The case against Alex Johnson:



The case against Alex Johnson

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Poverty pimp Alex Johnson puts profits before pupils
When it comes to corporate sponsors poverty pimp Alex Johnson puts top auto racing teams to shame.
The original draft of this essay was written in mid-June, 2014. The figures cited in the piece are indicative of the Form-460 information available at that time. I will be writing another piece which discusses the currently fundraising figures soon. Given the despicable smear job the Johnson campaign has run against the distinguished Dr. McKenna, expediency dictated publishing this without the benefit of updates.

Ridley-Thomas has plenty of money left over from his $800,000 campaign war chest that was filled with donations from special interests like Monsanto, oil companies, liquor stores, big developers and Eli Broad. His father raised the money for the 26-year old, so surely Sebastian will fork over as much as he can for a campaign for his daddy’s education deputy and fellow Morehouse alum, Johnson. — Celes King IV

Johnson is the billionaire’s and California Charter Schools Association’s (CCSA) Candidate

Alex Johnson was the frontrunner of the three anti-public education candidates the neoliberal corporate reformers ran in the primary election. Despite raising more money than anyone else in a crowded field, he finished a distant second to the community favorite, and experienced educator, Dr. George McKenna. Johnson raised a The case against Alex Johnson:

Randi Weingarten on Testing and Common Core - Education Writers Association

Randi Weingarten on Testing and Common Core - Education Writers Association:



Randi Weingarten on Testing and Common Core






Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, talks about teacher frustrations with Common Core implementation.
Recorded May 19, 2014 at EWA’s 67th National Seminar.






David Sirota, you and me… | Reclaim Reform

David Sirota, you and me… | Reclaim Reform:



David Sirota, you and me…

Education Money1
David Sirota exposes yet another major rip-off of teachers – active and retired. The political leadership of both major political parties, the elected officials, and the corporate thieves who control major media outlets lie and propagandize about these rip-offs.
“As states and cities grapple with budget shortfalls, many are betting big on an unproven formula: Slash public employee pension benefits and public services while diverting the savings into lucrative subsidies for professional sports teams.”
So begins Sirota’s latest investigative article.
Illinois, Michigan, Florida, New Jersey, Arizona, and Maryland are all used as examples in Sirota’s article, yet many other state legislatures are following this same pattern of theft.
Active teachers pay a percentage of their salaries into pensions systems that are predicted to fail – predicted by the same legislators who both mandate teacher pension payments by teachers and their local school districts in addition to 401k “savings” and redistribute these mandated savings into the pockets of corporate thieves who contribute to the re-election of the legislators. Before the same legislators legalized this process with the help of the courts, it was called corruption. Now it is merely a “public-private partnership” that sells America one student, one teacher, one pension, one contract, one school, one special sales tax dollar, one high stakes test, and one soul at a time.
The misused and diverted earned income of active teachers is wage theft. Retired teachers watch as their earned income, pensions, is erroneously blamed for the crippling of David Sirota, you and me… | Reclaim Reform:

Nite Cap 7-25-14 #BATsACT #RealEdTalk #EDCHAT



James Baldwin said it best: 

"For these are all our children, and we will profit by or pay for whatever they become."


A BIG EDUCATION APE NITE CAP




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Kimble's Corner: On the Border with Rick and Louie
Kimble's Corner: On the Border with Rick and Louie:On the Border with Rick and LouieWhen something important like the border crisis comes along, I don't believe in patience.  I certainly didn't believe in waiting until Congress has the month of August off to do something about the problem.   Yesterday, I joined fellow Congressman Louie Gohmert and Texas Governor Rick Perry for a morning patrol of
PISA Envy | WagTheDog
PISA Envy | WagTheDog:PISA Envy Tests confirm…ed reformers are suffering from impaired judgement and diminished critical thinking skills due to an acute case of PISA envy.Ed reformers should reconsider their admiration for education systems that prepare young people to live and work in closed societies that don’t value creativity, freedom of expression, and independent thinking.In a free and open
If You Thought I Was Perfect, You Weren’t Paying Attention | Connected Principals
If You Thought I Was Perfect, You Weren’t Paying Attention | Connected Principals: If You Thought I Was Perfect, You Weren’t Paying Attentionby sblankenship • July 25, 2014 • 0 CommentsDid you know that great teachers feel slightly disappointed and somewhat unappreciated with a perfect evaluation? Take a look at the following quotes.“I want to be better. Telling me how great the lesson was does no
New database details pay of California public school employees - LA Times
New database details pay of California public school employees - LA Times: New database details pay of California public school employeesLast year, James Hammond, the superintendent of the Montclair-Ontario Unified School District in the Inland Empire, was paid $492,077. Jonathan Eagan, the principal of a junior high school in the Bay Area city of Martinez made $279,669.And 31 custodians at Califo
Nite Cap 7-24-14 #BATsACT #RealEdTalk #EDCHAT
James Baldwin said it best: "For these are all our children, and we will profit by or pay for whatever they become."A BIG EDUCATION APE NITE CAPMike Klonsky's SmallTalk Blog: Budget vote: Another reason to get rid of mayoral control of the schoolsMike Klonsky's SmallTalk Blog: Budget vote: Another reason to get rid of mayoral control of the schools: Budget vote: Another reason to get rid