npr.org - Enlarge Stew Milne/AP Rhode Island Education Commissioner Deborah Gist, (center) looks on as Central Falls School Superintendent Frances Gallo (right) and Central Falls Teachers' Union President Ja...
politico.com - Everyone responsible for educating children for the knowledge economy of the 21st century agrees that America’s federal education law is in dire need of reform. Teachers, parents, school leaders, g...
epi.org - EPI Research Associate Richard Rothstein posted this response on the National Journal Experts blog, on the topic of school reform efforts being promoted by Bill Gates and other prominent education ...
southbronxschool.blogspot.com - I came thisclose to not writing about what I am going to write about tonight. In my ADD state of mind tonight I procrastinated quite profusely before I started to actually type these words that y...
gothamschools.org - Nearly 35,000 elementary and middle school students are being told this week that they should attend summer school based on their low test scores, the city Department of Education announced today. ...
preaprez.wordpress.com - When Governor Pat Quinn signed Senate Bill 7 into law today, there was a rogues gallery of education reformers present. The bill, amazingly supported by the IEA leadership under lame duck President...
salon.com - Jack Miller/dianeravitch.com Diane Ravitch In the intensifying debate over the future of education, two camps seem to be emerging. On one side, there are people like New York University professor/f...
huffingtonpost.com - WASHINGTON — Forty years after the explosive leak of the Pentagon Papers, a secret government study chronicling deception and misadventure in U.S. conduct of the Vietnam War, the report is coming o...
bigeducationape.blogspot.com - Mike Klonsky's SmallTalk Blog: SB-7 signed into law by Gov. QuinnSB-7 signed into law by Gov. Quinnby Mike KlonskyClears the way for assault on Chicago's teachers“This is not a bill to attack the t...
bigthink.com - Note to the Republican Party Debate Committee: you are free to appropriate the term “preseason exhibitions” from the NFL, since it looks like they won’t be using it any time soon, to better describ...
tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com - Workers tend to bear the brunt of the American economy's boom and bust cycles. When recessions hit and unemployment rises, workers' share of the national income -- the money people earn through wag...
thehill.com - The Department of Education (DOE) will perform an audit to determine whether employees provided information to Wall Street investors who were looking to gain an edge in trading on for-profit colleg...
schoolingintheownershipsociety.blogspot.com - DOE Officials Accused Of Leaking Info To Short-SellersMarcus Barum blogs on Huffington Post:Did Education Department officials leak market-sensitive info to stock traders?" That's the provocative ...
coolcatteacher.blogspot.com - Funny how fast things change. I'm finding that some incredible information and graphics are coming to me via Tumblr (see the Beginners Guide to Tumblr I produced a few weeks a go.) I sent out this ...
bigeducationape.blogspot.com - Only when someone else is looking « Failing SchoolsOnly when someone else is lookingJUNE 13, 2011by SabrinaI was brushing my teeth this morning when I glanced over at the bottle of mouthwash sittin...
edupln.com - I have a problem with creativity and I'm afraid it affects how I teach. I'm not sure when it started, but I think it has to do with feeling like my creative efforts as a child weren't perfect enoug...
huffingtonpost.com - What if corporate honchos, politicos and other non-professionals decided to give up on education and stick their reforming noses into medicine instead? (We know that Bill Gates is already doing thi...
bigeducationape.blogspot.com - News | www.kochwatch.orgThink Progress: After David Koch Leaves NIH Board, NIH Hands Down Long-Delayed Classification Of Top Koch Pollutant As A Carcinogen *-By Lee Fang* *June 11, 2011-* Large man...
californiawatch.org - Mike Ryan/FlickrApples top the Environmental Working Group's "Dirty Dozen" list of fruits and vegetables coated with pesticides. Hopefully, you’re a fan of onions, corn and pineapple – and not so s...
huffingtonpost.com - • "Did Education Department officials leak market-sensitive info to stock traders?" That's the provocative headline from Project on Government Oversight reporting on a probe by the agency's inspect...
sacramentopress.com - The nation’s top environmental official, Lisa Jackson, expressed her view in Sacramento on Monday that federal and state environmental regulations can help create demand for green businesses and te...
blogs.forbes.com - EducationJun. 13 2011 - 4:30 pm | 0 views | 0 recommendations |By E.D. KAIN Remember this chart?Well, Matt Yglesias has another one that helps add context to all that Texas job growth. Artificially...
bigeducationape.blogspot.com - Notes from the Field « City School StoriesNotes from the Fieldby fmurphyTeachers Seek Real EmpowermentSubmitted by Angela Chan, June 14, 2011Angela Chan has been a teacher with the School District ...
bigeducationape.blogspot.com - News | www.kochwatch.orgThink Progress: After David Koch Leaves NIH Board, NIH Hands Down Long-Delayed Classification Of Top Koch Pollutant As A Carcinogen *-By Lee Fang* *June 11, 2011-* Large man...
bigeducationape.blogspot.com - Special Guests on Pardon the Interruption: Jose Vilson and John Holland! | The Jose VilsonSpecial Guests on Pardon the Interruption: Jose Vilson and John Holland!by JosePardon the Interruption with...
Foundation offers millions to help 4 Colo. school districts implement new evaluations
By Yesenia Robles The Denver Post
POSTED: 06/14/2011 01:00:00 AM MDT
UPDATED: 06/14/2011 01:00:54 AM MDT
The Colorado Legacy Foundation announced Monday it will distribute $9.7 million to four Colorado school districts for work on implementing evaluation systems and new state academic standards.
Most of the money is from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Other donations came from JPMorgan Chase and local contributors.
"We know there are pockets of excellence throughout Colorado, and that some of this great work in educator effectiveness is already being done," said Colorado Legacy Foundation president and chief executive Helayne Jones.
The point is to highlight those pockets, she said, targeting supports for teachers, in order to learn from them and create models of effective teaching.
Because Denver Public Schools has already been working with money from the Gates Foundation, they have been selected as one of the districts to receive money to continue that work.
New Online Resource To Answer Parent & Student Questions About CollegeEn Camino: Educational Toolkit For Families is a series of free online “modules,” available in both English and Spanish, designed to help answer parent and student questions about college. It was just unveiled a few minutes ago by the National Center ...
Excellent Resources For Beginning & Intermediate English Language LearnersOne of my most popular “The Best…” lists shares The Best Websites To Help Beginning Readers. I just realized that in that post I share a general link to my website, but don’t provide a direct link to the literally thousands of “talking stories” that ...
The Best Posts & Articles About CurationA lot has been written recently about the importance of “curation” in this age of information “overload.” In March, I wrote a post titled The Difference Between “Curating,” “Aggregating” & “Creating” which shares my perspective on the topic. I ...
[Former Mayor] Daley managed to convince not only Chicago residents, but also businesses that expended millions at his behest that it was worth investing in what had been a miserable public school system. Daley put billions into school construction and helped pave the way for a host of reform ideas that are now being promoted nationally by his former schools chief, Arne Duncan, Obama’s secretary of education. “If Daley hadn’t changed the tone about what could be
I published a post last week by Richard D. Kahlenberg, a senior fellow at The Century Foundation and author of “All Together Now: Creating Middle-Class Schools through Public School Choice,” about the KIPP charter schools. He criticized KIPP, arguing that KIPP “skims motivated students and yet is pointed to as a segregation success story.” Yesterday Ryan Hill, executive director of four KIPP charter schools in Newark, N.Y., responded with a post arguing that Kahlenberg was wrong. You can read it here, and then come back and read this, Kahlenberg’s response to Hill.
Veteran teacher Rene Moore was not convinced how teacher colloration — real or virtual — could actually help students learn, but the Mississippi/South Africa Freedom Project changed her mind.
This is the latest installment in a series on The Answer Sheet called “Faces of Learning,” a national campaign designed to explore what powerful learning environments and highly effective teachers really look like.
The campaign is designed to answer the following questions: How do people learn? How do I learn? What does the ideal learning environment look like? And how can we create more of them?
This is going to be a mess--- and intelligent people would have figured out "the metrics" before moving forward with legislation. As an outsider, I'd like to believe that the insiders know what they're doing, but then I see a presser like this one and it just confirms that the people involved in this reform have no idea what they're talking about.
I'd like to point out that performance evaluation isn't only about how to measure the home economics teacher. There seems to be this notion that the state-mandated reading and math tests are remotely designed to gauge the quality of language arts and math teachers (when they're not), and that all we have to do is get some other kinds of tests for the social studies teacher and the PE teacher.
The only possible outcome is that kids are going to spend a heck of a lot more time being assessed, and that
California could benefit from Education Secretary Arne Duncan’s ultimatum to grant states waivers from controversial parts of No Child Left Behind if Congress doesn’t act on reauthorization before the next school year starts. During a telephone call with reporters Monday afternoon, Duncan said the Department of Education is working on a package of reforms he calls [...]
Juan Sepúlveda started the meeting with his usual question. “Before you got invited, how many of you knew this office existed?” Sepúlveda is Executive Director of the White House Office on Educational Excellence for Hispanic Americans. The response was different this time. Instead of the expected smattering of recognition, nearly everyone sitting around the conference [...]
“This is not a bill to attack the teachers,” said state Sen. Kimberly Lightford, D-Maywood, who sponsored the bill.
Illinois Gov. Quinn has signed into law SB7, which severely weakens the power of the state's teachers and their unions to bargain collectively. What makes SB7 different from legislation pushed by Tea Party govs and passed in Wisconsin, Ohio, and Michigan, is that the Illinois bill, now law, isn't as draconian. Public employees unions haven't been outlawed completely. Perhaps a more important difference is that the bill was passed with support from the state's three largest teachers unions, pretty much nullifying any opposition from the rank-and-file, wavering politicians, community activists or from other unions.
This "collaboration" is being hailed by corporate reformers and by some union leaders as a model for the rest of the nation and as a better alternative to the "chaos" and open class warfare in Wisconsin. We shall see whether or not that's true or whether it just makes that warfare more
One of the most frustrating things about my last year at my old school was the problem of "change for the sake of change." I worked in a school that was excellent by any measure--test scores were up, parents were happy, students were achieving and felt safe and happy. So many of the teachers at my school were never sure why the place had to be reinvented from the ground up when our new principal came, and this feeling that changes were being made simply so the new principal could assert the new authority that came with the job never went away.
Change for the sake of change should surely be the poisonous #13 on this listof why educators resist change. Coming from a blog focused on admins, it's nice to see school leaders talking frankly about how change-resisters aren't lazy or contrarian or afraid, but often have good reasons to fight back against change. That's not to say that change-resisters are always correct or that at
The Huffington Post has now surpassed the New York Times in online readership, Working in These Timesreported today, and their newsroom is now bigger, too, with 1,300 staff members, compared with the Times’ 1,200. However, the Times still pays their unionized writers (at least the “professional” ones), while the Post relies on volunteer bloggers for the bulk of its reporting.
In response, the Newspaper Guild and the National Writers Union have called on bloggers to refuse to write for the Huffington Post and for an electronic picket of the website. The unions are demanding a pay schedule be established for the compensation of all bloggers and that they be given greater editorial control over their work.
Not everyone has respected the picket, including Former U.S. Secretary of Labor Robert Reich, American Prospect Editor Robert Kuttner, Robert Creamer of Americans United for Change, and bloggers at the labor-funded Campaign for America’s Future, according to Working in These Times. Reich has argued that he is a proponent of the Creative Commons and gives his work freely to all. Yet he copyrights his books and makes a great deal of money from them. Furthermore, he is independently wealthy and does not depend on his blog posts for his survival.
The point of the Creative Commons, like all commons, is to maintain a resource that the masses can share and
Given the unrelenting decline of American public education and the war-failed economy which is being used to justify its continuing premeditated destruction, one often hears in description of this sick farce: "The definition of insanity is to continue implementing the same failed policies with the expectation of a different result.
While that seems to be a pretty good explanation of the militant ignorance that continues to drive public education policy into the ground, there now seems to be an even better definition:
"The definition of insanity is to continue using the same corrupt and mediocre people whose failed
Angela Chan has been a teacher with the School District of Philadelphia for the last 8 years. She started her career as a first grade teacher. For the last four years she has been teaching 3rd grade.
Today’s post contains an excerpt from a presentation she made as speaker at TAG’S second annual Curriculum Fair and Citywide Summit. In this address she described the challenges which Empowerment School teachers face as they grapple with the expectation that they implement a mandated curricula and focus extensively on test prep activities. She also discusses the impact this new instructional reality has on her students and fellow teachers.
As an Empowerment School, we implement the mandated scripted Corrective Reading and Math programs, and
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