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Monday, August 22, 2011

The Real Cheating Scandal of Standardized Tests - Miller-McCune

The Real Cheating Scandal of Standardized Tests - Miller-McCune

The Real Cheating Scandal of Standardized Tests

Opinion: The widening circle of cheating scandals on standardized tests should fuel the movement to reduce the stakes these exams have on public education in the U.S.


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As the list of states and cities plagued by allegations of cheating on standardized tests grows fromWashington, Baltimore and Atlantato include Pennsylvania and New Jersey, the Obama administration’s call for enhanced “test security” is ringing hollow. Instead of a shocking anomaly, it seems that the egregious test cheating uncovered in Atlanta public schools earlier this month may be more common than we as a nation want to believe.

The truth is that the greater the

Diverse: Issues In Higher Education - Commentary: The Catch-22 of Racial Disparities

Commentary: The Catch-22 of Racial Disparities

Commentary: Reducing College Costs Starts From Within While college costs have outpaced the inflation rate, one way to curb college costs is to find better and more cost-efficient ways to do things, a financial aid consultant advises. in News

Cheating Scandal Newsflash: Teachers Aren't Plaster Saints! :: Frederick M. Hess

Cheating Scandal Newsflash: Teachers Aren't Plaster Saints! :: Frederick M. Hess

Ackerman out today? | Philadelphia Public School Notebook

Ackerman out today? | Philadelphia Public School Notebook

Notes from the news, Aug. 22

notes from the news imageUPDATED: Arlene Ackerman is out as Philly superintendent Philly School Files
Leroy Nunery will be interim superintendent, according to multiple sources.

Ackerman's removal seen as imminent The Inquirer
The Inquirer interviewed a variety of people connected with the Philly schools to gather comments and context for Ackerman's likely impending exit.

See also: Karen Heller: Ackerman calls the tune; we pay the piper The Inquirer
Pa. urban schools are sending out the 'SOS' The Patriot-News (opinion)

Nutter, Cole Have Spirited SRC Discussion Fox29
Nutter said that Ackerman's employment status is a matter between her and the SRC.

See also: Nutter mum on Ackerman The Notebook blog

The 'write' stuff The Notebook blog
A look at the Mighty Writers afterschool program, which includes a class on comic book writing.

School accountability is still a good idea Philly.com (opinion)
The accountability piece of NCLB remains important for encouraging transparency.

See also: NCLB and waivers, what is going on? The Notebook blog

Principal Talks About Her School Making AYP Mt. Airy Patch
C.W. Henry elementary's principal described how the school made AYP.

Prisons Get More Money Than Schools Fox29

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Notes from the news

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Ackerman out today?

Kristen Graham of the Inquirer is reporting this morning that Arlene Ackerman will be removed as superintendent later today, with Deputy Superintendent Leroy Nunery taking her place on an interim basis. According to Graham's post, a national search will be conducted for a permanent replacement.

Graham also reports that Ackerman's buyout will be funded by District and private dollars, and that $500,000 of the buyout will be paid from the District. You can follow Graham's updates via @newskag on Twitter.

More to come. This is a developing story.

Featured Title:
Breaking news

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Shanker Blog » Teachers' Preparation Routes And Policy Views

Shanker Blog » Teachers' Preparation Routes And Policy Views

Teachers’ Preparation Routes And Policy Views

In a previous post, I lamented the scarcity of survey data measuring what teachers think of different education policy reforms. A couple of weeks ago, the National Center for Education Information (NCEI) released the results of their teacher survey (conducted every five years), which provides a useful snapshot of teachers’ opinions toward different policies (albeit not at the level of detail that one might wish).

There are too many interesting results to review in one post, and I encourage you to take a look at the full set yourself. There was, however, one thing about the survey tabulations that I found particularly striking, and that was the high degree to which policy opinions differed between traditionally-certified teachers and those who entered teaching through alternative certification (alt-cert).

In the figure below, I reproduce data from the NCEI report’s battery of questions about whether teachers think

As the school year starts, it’s a sad story for the growing numbers of poor kids in America. « Fred Klonsky's blog

As the school year starts, it’s a sad story for the growing numbers of poor kids in America. « Fred Klonsky's blog

As the school year starts, it’s a sad story for the growing numbers of poor kids in America.

School starts today for millions of American kids.

Millions more will come to school next Monday or following Labor Day.

Thousands of teachers will be look at the children in front of them and those children will be poor and hungry. They will be homeless and sick.

There is no in-service that will solve this. There will be no new instructional program. No new unfunded federal or state mandate. No self-serving press release from the US Department of Education. No crazy rhetoric about cutting the federal deficit.

Teachers having unions didn’t create this. It’s not the result of tenure or seniority rules. Our pensions don’t make

Team Perry Member/TEA Commissioner hypocritically calls out Sec Duncan for being political « A "Fuller" Look at Education Issues

Team Perry Member/TEA Commissioner hypocritically calls out Sec Duncan for being political « A "Fuller" Look at Education Issues

Team Perry Member and TEA Commissioner hypocritically calls out Sec Duncan for being political

The Dallas Morning News ran an editorial supporting Robert Scott in criticizing Secretary Duncan for being political and untruthful in his criticism of Texas education.

http://dallasmorningviewsblog.dallasnews.com/archives/2011/08/robert-scott-fi.html

This is like the pot calling the kettle black. Commissioner Scott routinely plays politics at TEA , especially in the area of pres releases and statements. Having lived in Texas from 1970 through 2011, I can say that Commissioner Scott has been the MOST politically driven Commissioner that I can remember.

Let’s look at some examples:

Recently, TEA released a press release noting a Texas A&M study of charter schools. The report had some very sloppy methodology that resulted in the finding that charter schools do not worse academically than other

It's Time to Get Serious About Boosting Black Males' Academic Achievement - Education - GOOD

It's Time to Get Serious About Boosting Black Males' Academic Achievement - Education - GOOD

It's Time to Get Serious About Boosting Black Males' Academic Achievement

black.male
As school systems across the country grapple with the sobering statistics about black males' performance, a new documentary hopes to inspire some real solutions.

The film, Beyond the Bricks, follows two black male students in Newark, New Jersey, but the issues the teens face are representative of what their peers across the country experience. On the 2009 National Assessment of Educational Progress test, a mere 12 percent of black fourth-grade boys were proficient in reading or math. In

As The State Drops Out, So Do The Kids | California Progress Report

As The State Drops Out, So Do The Kids | California Progress Report

As The State Drops Out, So Do The Kids

By Peter Schrag

State-level school graduation and dropout statistics have always been squishy, and the most recent numbers, from California’s Department of Education, are not immune to some of the familiar problems.

While far more accurate and reliable than anything we’ve had before, they can’t capture all the uncertainties of student mobility or cut through all the fog of educational definitions. Nor do they tell anything about the quality of the education those students have gotten, another area where there’s lots of numbers and even more fog. And of course, they say nothing directly about the shabby support their schools have been getting from the state or the voters; they only reflect it dimly and indirectly.

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One in Four California Families Can't Afford Food for Their Kids

By Raul Rodriguez

One in four California households with children reported food hardship, according to a new analysis of Gallup data released last Thursday by the Food Research and Action Center (FRAC).

“It’s disturbing, but not surprising,” said Kelly Hardy, director of health policy at Children Now.

The report analyzed data gathered as part of the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index project’s responses to the question: “Have there been times in the past 12 months when you did not have enough money to buy food that you or your family needed?”

“It sends a clear signal of economic distress, particularly for families with children,” noted James Weill, president of FRAC. “The answers to the question reveal there are times that these families are going without eating a meal, or the parents are skipping a meal for their children, or children are skipping meals.”

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BART and the New Era of Censorship

By Tim Karr
Free Press

I have spent most of the week poring over news stories, blogs and commentary on last week’s decision by Bay Area Rapid Transit officials to shut off cellphone service to quash planned protests on its trains and platforms.

Opinions are many and range from BART spokesman Linton Johnson, who says constitutional rights end the moment people go through transit-authority turnstiles, to “X” of the hacker collective Anonymous, who protested BART’s action and said our freedom to connect should be absolute and universal.

I tend to agree with “X,” but adding my criticism to what has already been heaped on BART seems of little consequence at this point.

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Senator Feinstein – Protect Social Security!

By Katie Gjertson
AFL-CIO

Three days following the 76th birthday of the creation of Social Security, 1,000 seniors, students, and community members rallied in front of Senator Feinstein’s San Francisco and LA offices Thursday, urging the Senator to be a champion on protecting Social Security. Check out photos and video from the events here.

Members of the California Alliance of Retired Americans (CARA) have been meeting with Senator Feinstein’s staff to stress the importance of protecting Social Security. To put a human face on the importance of Social Security, CARA asked its members to submit stories to share with the Senator and her staff.

The response was overwhelming.

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Florida Charter Schools Spend Public Money Without Public Scrutiny | Florida Center for Investigative Reporting

Florida Charter Schools Spend Public Money Without Public Scrutiny | Florida Center for Investigative Reporting

Florida Charter Schools Spend Public Money Without Public Scrutiny

Gov. Rick Scott visited North Broward Academy of Excellence, a charter school, in September 2010. (Photo courtesy of Rick Scott.)

By Ralph De La Cruz
Florida Center for Investigative Reporting

As public school students and educators throughout Florida prepared to return to schools that have fewer teachers, larger classes and smaller budgets, a for-profit charter school company, Charter Schools USA, paid for 2,000 employees to attend a pep rally. The rally included controversial charter schools proponent Michelle Rhee and Gov. Rick Scott — the man who

The school reform deniers | The Great Debate

The school reform deniers | The Great Debate

The school reform deniers

AUG 21, 2011 19:37 EDT

By Steven Brill
All opinions expressed are his own.

Every year I tell students in a journalism seminar I teach about the junior reporter for The American Lawyer – the magazine I founded and edited –who committed a classic error when he submitted a draft of a profile about some lawyer in the news who had made it big. Midway through the article, the young reporter described a showcase this lawyer had in his office that displayed a bunch of combat medals. The reporter declared, matter-of-factly, that our legal hero had won the medals for his heroics in Vietnam, which was relevant, he added, because the lawyer made his war record and his lock-n-load approach to his work part of his pitch to potential clients.

In the margin next to the statement about the lawyer having won the medals I wrote, “Who says?”

Schooling in the Ownership Society: Koch responds to Buffett: "Take your shared sacrifice and ..."

Schooling in the Ownership Society: Koch responds to Buffett: "Take your shared sacrifice and ..."

Koch responds to Buffett: "Take your shared sacrifice and ..."

Charles Koch, head of the massive petrochemical, manufacturing, and commodity speculating Koch Industries corporation, has responded to Warren Buffett's call for shared sacrifice:
“No Thanks.” In a statement to right-wing media, Koch says: "I believe my business and non-profit investments are much more beneficial to societal well-being than sending more money to Washington." --Think Progress
Koch brothers have seen their wealth rise $11 billion in recent