There's a thread on Gotham Schools that's interesting not so much for its content, that Mulgrew won, but rather for its comment thread. Particularly interesting is the Unity fan, one "Les Vegas." Les has strong opinions about MORE.
...you were running a slate of unqualified candidates, several with radical practices.
This is a theme that comes up whenever anyone has the temerity to oppose the Unity stranglehold on power. They're unqualified and incapable. I remember Unity calling New Action, "No Action" back in the eighties when NA was really an opposition caucus. Of course, no one will ever be qualified to run the UFT but them, because we, as teachers, apparently know nothing. Then, of course, they drop the bomb:
Not your two Socialist organizers.
Oh my goodness! Socialists! In a union! They might support subversive practices. Like trade unions, for example. Socialist is a loser of a label in the United States, in my opinion. But Republicans and Democrats have been pretty awful to teacher unions lately, and I'm much more worried about them lately. In fact, it's most recently the
As a student, I had a specific notion of what a principal should be and in my head they were similar to the “Wizard of Oz”; a person that hid behind the curtain but had all of the knowledge in the world. I would say that when I became a teacher, that notion carried over. They would always have the answer and be the place where the “buck stops”. Working closely with my last couple of principals though, I saw something much different that threw me off. When I became a principal, I understood why. Being in the middle area of both age and experience on my staff, yet being the “boss”, I knew that there were a lot of people that knew a lot better that I did in specific areas and I would be foolish to not tap into their knowledge.
Many new to leadership might see that this mindset actually shows weakness but I believe the opposite. Being “smart” now doesn’t necessarily mean “knowing the answer” as much as it means knowing where to get the
Concerns about the Common Core adoption and implementation keep surfacing about the lack of transparency in the process and the lack of any pilot studies providing research based documentation of CCSS proponent claims. Hundreds of millions of dollars will be spent by the states who must adhere to the mandates drawn up by the two private trade organizations, the National Governors Association (NGA) and the Chief Council of State School Officers (CCSSO) without any direct evidence these standards, assessments, change in curricula and computer infrastructure will deliver what these organizations have promised if adopted and completed.
Utah will spend an enormous amount with its new testing system and the state had some meetings explaining the new system and Common Core to taxpayers. District officials didn't seem to be very successful in
Friday many of us in MORE attended one of the best rallies we've been part of on the steps of Tweed which were packed with parents, teachers and children protesting high stakes tests with many MORE tee-shirts in the crowd. Change the Stakes has emerged out of a committee set up by GEM 2 years ago and has grown into a powerful parent advocacy group. The other teacher oriented arm of GEM inspired and helped organize MORE. Both CTS and MORE are more or less sister organizations but over the past year have not had the time to work as closely together as we should, though I and some other MOREs have been deeply involved in CTS. Below some pics with lots
On a student retreat in March, student leaders in Colorado decided that more actions needed to take place to fix our public school system. From there, three student leaders went to Washington D.C. to speak as presenters at the annual Occupy the DOE 2.0 protest; while in D.C. they met with other student activists as well as representatives of the Dept. of Ed. They shared their ideas, their concerns and plans to take local action upon their return to Colorado.
One of many actions they are taking includes a student walkout on May 10th. They will be taking a stance against high stakes standardized testing and the privatization of public education occurring across the country.
In the coming year, schools will have to compromise their curriculum to teach to the new PARCC test which is aligned with the common core standards. We will see an increase in test prep and skill/drill. Public tax dollars will be used to fill the requirements necessary for the increased testing and curriculum aligned with common core (which has never been field tested). Students will be denied classroom environments focused on creative, critical and conceptual thinking.
We, the students, will be asking for:
-A democratic education, wherein the biggest stakeholders (i.e. students and teachers) have influence and input
-Equitable funding and access to education
-Inclusivity and anti-oppression
-Engagement in equitable curriculum reform
On May 10th, the students will be standing up for their education. They will advocate for an authentic education where they are evaluated by portfolios, self-directed projects and self-written evaluations. They want to see an education system where they have a passion-driven curriculum.
Students will participate by walking out during lunch and will join together at the Capitol where their voices will be heard. They encourage all students, parents, teachers and concerned community members to join them as they stand up for their education.
Alex Kacsh states: “This will be the start of the education revolution.”
Our mission is to contribute to the improvement of the New Orleans Public Schools by conducting research on reforms, and publishing research findings, so that successful reforms can be replicated, and failing practices can be eliminated.
Our organization goals and our mission are founded upon the premise that effective education policies and practices:
1. Promote equal access and quality education for all students, 2. Are research-based and data-driven, and 3. Reflect an understanding of how children learn and how schools become effective.
Corporate reform thrusts ahead with little regard for what is legal or even decent. Privatizers are just fine with forcing those whose lives they callously damage to spend both money and time in litigation in order to gain what they were legally entitled to in the first place.
I’m sure Eli Broad would be proud. He probably offers Make the “Non-talented” Waste Their Resources on Needless Litigation as a course at his (We Are Anything But) Superintendents Academy.
At the conclusion of my update on John White and InBloom, I mentioned that I would write a post in which I discuss lawsuits filed against White and LDOE for their withholding data and violating open meetings laws. Let me add BESE and Superintendents Advisory Council Chairman Michael Faulk to the list of those being sued. Also, in addition to withholding data, let me add withholding other public documents to the list.
In this post, I focus on three lawsuits. I will address them chronologically.
The first of these lawsuits was filed in October 2012 by the New-Orleans-based group, Research on Reforms (ROR).
Research on Reforms Sues LDOE
Research on Reformswas developed because of the urgency to collect data and analyze the findings to determine if the educational reforms of 2005 were working. The 2005 Louisiana Legislature enacted laws that allowed experimentation in the public schools, and recognized
He was 88.
Since 1958 he taught at the Jacobs School of Music at the University of Indiana.
He was, simply put, one of the greatest cellists to ever live.
I offer that evaluation as one who was himself as an adolescent a very serious cellist and as one who had the opportunity to play in an orchestra behind him.
perhaps this will give you a sense of his mastery: Popout
He was, according to friends who studied at Indiana, an absolutely superb teacher, as you can see here:
As I write this, it is the weekly anniversary of that fateful visit January 27 to the x-ray center at Virginia Hospital Center where this all began.
It has been a relatively quiet week. Chemo began again on Tuesday for another 2-week cycle. As a result blood tests taken before receiving chemo, Leaves was temporarily put on a supplement to adjust one of her mineral levels - not a big deal, but a pill that had to be broken in to. Otherwise her lab work has been excellent.
Still, between us we take lots of pills, me for my cholesterol and high blood pressure as well as my permanent problem with my sinuses, her as part of the overall plan to whip this cancer back into remission.
Today is Palm Sunday for Orthodox Christians. Tomorrow begins an intensive week of services. She does not know whether she will make the full length of each, but was able to stand and sing in choir for more than an hour this past Wednesday, then stay for a lecture by the now retired priest who married us back in 1985. She has can dress or undress herself without me. She can put on and take off Gregor, her back brace. She can even get what she wants to eat or drink. And once I have set up all the pills for the week?? Am I really still necessary? Well, she isn't allowed to deal with cat litter (and that would also require bending over) so with four felines I still have my irreplaceable responsibilities. It's nice to feel necessary for some things, even nicer that I am still wanted for things she can do but which I can make easier.
It must be. After all, Sally Quinn, wife of former legendary editor of the Washington Post Ben Bradlee and author of the "On Faith" part of the paper, wrote that U.S. military should put religious freedom at the front.
There are others here for whom tracking the Dominionists in America, including what they are doing in the military, is their main focus. Thus you could - and should - have read Death by Dominion by Frederick Clarkson, who is an acknowledged expert on the topic. When I pointed out the Quinn piece to him, he encouraged me to write about it.
What I offer is placing the authorship in context. Sally Quinn is as representative of "The Village" - the conventional wisdom of the permanent pundit class of Washington - as is anyone.
The occasion for this piece is a conversation Quinn had with three men - former chief of staff to Colin Powell Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, former Ambassador Joe Wilson, and head of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation Mikey Weinstein (who has been attempting to get people to address this issue for a number of years).
Wilkerson pointed out that proselytizing and sexual assault both undermine the bonds necessary for a
Earlier today there was a good exchange on the idea of finding common ground. Robert Shepherd explained why it should happen, and Ira Shor said it would not happen in light of the unreasonable attacks on teachers and public schools.
As it happens, Jeff Bryant addressed the same issues two years ago..
He commented today:
“Why there is not a middle ground in the education debate:
Dayne Sherman is going to a rally at the state capitol in Baton Rouge on April 30.
The people of Louisiana are waking up to Jindal’s war against the common weal.
Now, says Sherman, even the Legislature is turning against Jindal.
Four big issues stir public antipathy: First, we have to repeal the tax give-aways passed under Jindal. Rep. Jerome “Dee” Richard (I-Thibodaux) has a bill to do this very thing. We now give away an extra 2 billion dollars a year since Jindal took office. This is
In response to an earlier post by Robert Shepherd, asking whether it might be possible to find common ground on contentious issues, Ira Shor, a professor at the City University of New York, answers:
“Dr. Shepherd sounds like a person of good will who is extremely uncomfortable with the rash, untested, arrogant impositions of high-stakes testing so profitable to corps. like Pearson, and through which govt. officials like Jindal, Emanuel, Cuomo, Christie, etc., make whimsical decisions to disrupt communities, families, kids, and teachers, none of whom send their own kids to pub schls. The opposition consolidated by the brilliant work of Dr. Ravitch has not done any damage to pub schls, kids, teachers, or families, so to represent the issue as good
Diane Ravitch's blog | A site to discuss better education for all: [image: Click on picture to Listen to Diane Ravitch] Parents File Class Action Lawsuit Against State Testing by dianerav Parents in Rochester, New York, filed a federal class action lawsuit against the state and their son’s school, which punished him for refusing to take the tests in accordance with his parents’ wishes. The school not only punished the boy, but sent the sheriff’s office to the ballfield to make sure he was not allowed to play baseball. Good for them! I would sue too. The story says: Hello, NY D...more »
Here’s a fact that may not surprise you: the children of the rich perform better in school, on average, than children from middle-class or poor families. Students growing up in richer families have better grades and higher standardized test scores, on average, than poorer students; they also have higher rates of participation in extracurricular activities and school leadership positions, higher graduation rates and higher rates of college enrollment and completion. Whether you think it deeply unjust, lamentable but inevitable, or obvious and unproblematic, this is hardly news. It is true in most societies and has been true in the United States for at least as long as we have thought to ask the question and had sufficient data to verify the answer. What is news is that in the United States over the last few decades these differences in educational success between high- and lower-income students have grown substantially. One way to see this is to look at the scores of rich and poor students on standardized math and reading tests over the last 50 years. When I did this using information from a dozen large national studies
Van White, the attorney handling the class action lawsuit of parents whose child was punished for opting out of the state exams in the Rochester area, is looking for information from New York state parents, to be sent to him at van.white@thelegalbrief.com.
More specifically, he would like to hear from parents if their children opted out of these exams and were punished in some way by their schools or districts, as well as from parents whose children opted out but received no punishment. He is especially interested in hearing from parents of children who were deprived of some "instructionally related event or material" as a result.
Please send him your stories, along with your name, school, district and your child's grade level, to help him gather evidence about unequal treatment of students across the state. His email is below; please contact him directly with this information.
More on this case can be found here. The defendants in the lawsuit include the State of New York, the NYS Education Department, Commissioner of Education John B. King, the Rush-Henrietta School District, its Board of Education, Superintendent J. Kenneth Graham Jr., and the Burger Middle School principal. And please forward this message to other parents. Thanks!
Hello. My name is Van White. I am an attorney in Rochester, NY. By now I think you may have heard from several sources …that I am representing a family whose son is being punished (no extra curricular activities for each day he refused to take the state assessment exams). One of the claims made in the suit is that there is great disparity among how children are being treated for having opted out and this inequity, we argue, amounts to a violation of the Equal Protection clause.
To support this claim I'm looking for parents/students who opted out and were either punished or not punished. Because it seems that most districts did not punish, I am especially interested in cases where students were punished. Moreover in those cases (where they were punished) I am particularly interested in those students who were denied access to some instructionally related event or material. (That is because the more the activity relates to the instructional arena, the more likely the court will find that it is a constitutional violation.) I am trying to amend the complaint (with any additional clients or facts that I get) to keep the case moving along, so your prompt response would be appreciated. Please let me know if you need anything further. Thank you.
Monday, April 29th
Special meeting of Audit& Finance. One thing on the agenda - potential RIF presentation by HR head, Paul Apostle.
Also, if you wish to speak at the School Board meeting on Wednesday, you can start calling/writing at 8 am on Monday.
Tuesday, April 30th Charter Commission Meeting in Bellevue from 10 am - 5 p.m. at the Bellevue Arts Museum. Agenda. Open to the public (and people do come and go).
They will be having an Executive Session first thing until 10:40 am. They will then have a presentation about "charter school research findings" from the CRPE's Robin Lake. (I have heard Ms. Lake speak before and she's
TALLAHASSEE, Florida (Reuters) - Public university students in Florida next year will be able to start working toward college degrees without actually going to college, under a law Governor Rick Scott signed on Monday in front of educators and business lobbyists.
The state-run University of Florida plans to start a series of online bachelor's degree programs next year, with $15 million start-up funds for 2014.
Until now full-time online education has just been available to elementary and high schools in the state.
"This bill transforms education in Florida," said House Speaker Will Weatherford, a Republican who has long been a proponent of "virtual learning" in public schools.
"Now, we will be home to the first fully accredited, online public research university institute in the nation," said Weatherford. "These bold higher-education reforms will help increase Florida's global competitiveness and ensure our students have meaningful opportunities after high school."
Colorado State University began offering online university courses in 2007, according to Kyle Henley, a university spokesman, though students must first have 13 credits from another university to be eligible.
California and Texas are also developing totally online university programs, while Illinois considered the idea and discarded it, according to a spokesman for the Association of Public and Land-grant
President Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan. (ed.gov)
President Obama has a big problem in his second term in terms of education policy: his first term.
Obama and his education secretary, Arne Duncan, pushed hard in their first term to have a major impact on changing public schools with a larger-than-ever federal role in school policy issues that affected every single classroom in the country. And they did, with rare bipartisan support.
They borrowed tactics from the corporate world, setting up the competitive Race to the Top initiative, in which states competed for federal funds by promising to implement specific reforms. Those included new accountability systems that linked teacher evaluation to student standardized test scores, new standards that became known as the Common Core initiative, and an expansion of charter schools. Only 11 states and the District of Columbia won in the $4.3 billion state Race competitions, but other states, in hopes of winning some of the cash, signed on to these reforms, too. The administration’s attempt at leveraging the money they had to get more bang for their buck worked.
In 2008, Obama campaigned on rewriting the 2002 No Child Left Behind law — which was supposed to be done in 2007 because even its authors knew it had to be improved due to its
