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Wednesday, February 9, 2011

Class Struggle - Rhee's response to blogger's allegations

Class Struggle - Rhee's response to blogger's allegations

Rhee's response to blogger's allegations

By Washington Post editors

Michelle Rhee's advocacy group, StudentsFirst, on Wednesday eveningissued a statement challenging blogger G.F. Brandenburg's account of her record as a Baltimore school teacher. The entire statement appears below:

"A Response to the Unfounded Attacks on Michelle Rhee
Our schools are in crisis. Instead of talking about how to fix them, we're getting unfounded attacks on Michelle. To get back to the debate about public schools, we want to address this misinformation head-on.
A blogger has posted some error-laden numbers, based on a 1995 study, claiming that Michelle was not an effective teacher. A couple of mainstream journalists have picked up and re-broadcast this storyline

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Answers to the Latest Quiz on the Baltimore-Rhee “Miracle” « GFBrandenburg's Blog

Answers to the Latest Quiz on the Baltimore-Rhee “Miracle” « GFBrandenburg's Blog

Answers to the Latest Quiz on the Baltimore-Rhee “Miracle”

Here are the answers:

(1) There is not a single Baltimore Edison/EAI/Tesseract school at which students in math jumped from the 13th percentile to above the 90th percentile, in either CTBS reading or math, at any grade level, during the period 1992 through 1995.

(2) The school where Michelle Rhee taught was school O (with a yellow background).

(3) The ones that were run by Tesseract/EAI/Edison were schools

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Do our schools stink or not? – The Mike Thomas Blog – Orlando Sentinel

Do our schools stink or not? – The Mike Thomas Blog – Orlando Sentinel
Do our schools stink or not?
Uncategorized — posted by mike thomas on February, 9 2011 4:43 PM
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Former Washington DC school boss Michelle Rhee testified in front of the Legislature today about the need for school reform. She advocated firing 8 percent of the state’s teachers.

Sen. Bill Montford, D-Tallahassee, asked Rhee about the recent report from Education Week, that ranked Florida the No. 5 in the country.

“How can we be such an inept public school system and rank so high?” Montford said.

Rhee replied: “Number five in this nation? This nation is not where we need to be in the global marketplace.”

(Thanks, St. Pete Times)

And just as that hit the blogs, I got this in my e-mail from Jeb Bush’s education foundation.

Sunshine State Students Lead Nation in College Readiness

Tallahassee, FL – Florida’s students and teachers are once again demonstrating what a strategic partnership and

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'Deny The Waiver' Pushes Appeal Against Black | The New York Observer

'Deny The Waiver' Pushes Appeal Against Black | The New York Observer

'Deny The Waiver' Pushes Appeal Against Black

February 9, 2011 | 4:23 p.m

A coalition of lawmakers and child advocates will announce tomorrow that they will appeal a lower court's decision to decline to deny schools chancellor Cathie Black a waiver that she needed to assume control of the city's schools.

Since Black was nominated for the position of chancellor by Mayor Michael Bloomberg three months ago, she has faced much criticism from public school parents and education advocates who think her lack of education experience should prevent her from serving as the Public Schools Chancellor. Bloomberg had to ask Department of Education Commissioner David Steiner for a waiver for Black's application, and it was granted in late November.

A group called the Deny the Waiver Coalition then sued to have the waiver revoked, and they are now

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Seattle Public Schools community blog: This May Be the Line in the Sand

Seattle Public Schools community blog: This May Be the Line in the Sand

This May Be the Line in the Sand

by Melissa Westbrook
Several of us have seen advance notice of what Central Administration cuts lead staff is going to present to the Board this afternoon/evening at the Board Work Session on the budget.

What I saw almost borders on the ridiculous. There are, to the naked eye, almost no coaching cuts. There are also no senior level cuts (and that's where we would save money).

It is also confusing what they suggested and what got saved.

Example: 10 people work in Child Nutrition Services - no cuts. Enrollment/Planning has 6.5; they would cut 2.3.

Example of total elimination of work: cut all from the following:
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What Do Good Parents and Good Schools Have in Common?

What Do Good Parents and Good Schools Have in Common?

What Do Good Parents and Good Schools Have in Common?

by Rick

How to Exercise Authority

Of the 20 schools I visited last fall, two stand out. Any parent would know in the first five minutes of each visit what I knew: I want my child in school A, and I will fight like hell to keep my child out of school B. One was a place of education and one felt like a prison. To protect the innocents (the inmates and their supervisors) I will give these two schools fictitious names: The Learning Academy and BrandX.

In The Learning Academy all kids were on a mission, they seemed lit from within with the joy of learning. In two hours I saw no bored or unhappy student, and they were all engaged in challenging academic work. Each classroom exuded creativity—in every corner of every classroom.

In BrandX I saw three students in the hallway and one in the principal’s office “being disciplined.” The incidence of enthusiasm was so low I had to search for it and never found it. There was a debate at the doorway of one

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solidaridad: Charter Voucher Charlatans Now Advocating AIG Style Derivatives

solidaridad: Charter Voucher Charlatans Now Advocating AIG Style Derivatives

Charter Voucher Charlatans Now Advocating AIG Style Derivatives

by Robert D. Skeels * rdsathene
"The education industry represents, in our opinion, the final frontier of a number of sectors once under public control... represents the largest market opportunity... the K-12 market is the Big Enchilada." — Montgomery Securities prospectus quoted in Jonathan Kozol's "The Big Enchilada"

Charter Voucher Charlatans Now Advocating AIG Style Derivatives
If we ever needed more evidence that the entire charter-voucher charade is about market share and money making, Expand a Proven Finance Solution for All Charter Schools, [1] by Ricardo Mireles, the well heeled Executive director of Academia Avance provides us with clear insight.

In the piece Mr. Mireles, without any regard to the fact that he's discussing public money, advocates "sell[ing] our state receivables to private
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A Catholic 'Teach for America' - Philly.com

A Catholic 'Teach for America' - Philly.com

A Catholic 'Teach for America'

Alliance for Catholic Education places young teachers in needy schools.

February 07, 2011|By Martha Woodall, Inquirer Staff Writer

When Desmond Shannon was a student at the Gesu School in North Philadelphia, he thought students at that private Catholic elementary school had more homework than their teachers.

Thanks to a new, local program that trains young college graduates to teach at inner-city Catholic schools, Shannon, 22, now knows better.

"I see the other side," said Shannon, who teaches

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Teacher Write

Teacher Write

Why I am Blogging

by Laura

Recently I had the great pleasure of hearing Dr. Stephen Krashen speak right here in lil’ ol’ Petaluma. I have read Dr. Krashen’s work since the early 1980′s, when I was an English major at San Francisco State University, then again as a teaching credential candidate at Sonoma State University, and again when I studied for my CLAD credential, and always as a teacher who values free-choice reading for students. What an honor to sit

I Have a Dream of Schools that Work

by Laura

(with gratitude to and reverence for the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.)

Nine years ago, President George W. Bush, in whose symbolic shadow our children now shiver, signed the No Child Left Behind legislation. This momentous decree came as a great beacon light of hope to millions of children who had been seared in the flames of educational injustice. It promised a joyous daybreak to end the long night of their inferior education.

But nine years later, many children have indeed been left behind. Nine years later, many children’s minds are still sadly crippled by the manacles of under-funded schools and the chains of standardized tests. Nine years

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The gap between the top 1% and everyone else hasn’t been this bad since the Roaring Twenties: The girth of the widening inequality | Dailycensored.com

The gap between the top 1% and everyone else hasn’t been this bad since the Roaring Twenties: The girth of the widening inequality | Dailycensored.com

The gap between the top 1% and everyone else hasn’t been this bad since the Roaring Twenties: The girth of the widening inequality

Written by Danny WeilLifestyle, PoliticsFeb 9, 2011
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A More “Equal” Inequality: The falling tide.

By KOBI ABAYOMI

Kobi Abayomi is an Asst. Professor in ISYE-Statistics at Georgia Tech

To see more graphs depicting the race to the bottom go to:http://www.businessinsider.com/15-charts-about-wealth-and-inequality-in-america-2010-4#the-gap-between-the-top-1-and-everyone-else-hasnt-been-this-bad-since-the-roaring-twenties-1

There has been more than just a bit of attention to the gross increase ineconomic inequality in the United States over the past forty some years.

Notwithstanding a debate about the causes — from an increasingly regressive tax policy, the dimunition of American educational quality at even the best institutions, to the post-industrial financialization of the economy — or the effects — recalcitrant, persistent malaise, a surprising maladjustment of local and national budgets, or, as Nicholas Kristof puts

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