The Los Angeles Unified School District has declined to release to the Los Angeles Times the names of teachers and their scores indicating their effectiveness in raising student performance.
The district says giving names to the Times could cause jealousy among instructors, lead to poor school morale and result in parents demanding teachers with high ratings.
The once-ascendant Perry torpedoed his own bid during a Sept. 22 debate in Orlando, Fla., when he endorsed using taxpayer dollars to educate the children of illegal immigrants. A single sentence started him on a downward slide:
If you say that we should not educate children who have come into our state for no other reason than they’ve been brought there by no fault of their own, I don’t think you have a heart.Edsall thinks that the major threat to the Republican “white” strategy is a revival of the high turnout among minorities that carried Democrats to victory in 2008. Republicans, however, are taking advantage of their newly
You too can be a League of Education Voters (LEV) activist along with Ramona Hattendorf the Washington State PTA lobbyist who is also an “LEV Activist”, Chad Megendez and Alison Meryweather.
I am on the League of Education Voters e-mail list, lucky me, and was offered this “opportunity” to train to beg for charter schools during the upcoming legislative session.
What I find interesting about the e-mail below is that, per each bullet point:
1. There will be no state funding. See my previous post If you don’t think that you are a part of the 99%, think again: The Governor’s budget request.
2. What the heck does “school pushout” mean? I’ve never heard of it but I guess it sounds scary enough to want
Remember how last year a lot of wealthy people put their money into a campaign to not have an income tax in our state for the top 1% earners? That was the campaign against I-1098. Well, they won and the rest of us lost. Actually, our children lost along with those with the least among us.
So while the 1% have their children in private schools enjoying all of the benefits of a well-rounded education sans TFA, Inc. recruits, the rest of us will have less than we have now and just when you thought it couldn’t get any worse in terms of funding for our schools. There was one program that was spared, the ed-reformy pilot program for teacher/principal evaluations. Great.
To follow is part of the Washington State School Directors Association (WSSDA) Newsletter that was sent out
This note is in response to James O’Keefe’s attempt to discredit me on his Project Veritas web site (though I think his point was intended to larger than this). I was lucky (?) enough to be part of one of his investigative set ups earlier this fall. I wrote and held on to this post and all related e-mails.
His scheme was uncovered in this Huffington Post piece to which he refers in his most recent report:
The story:
Back in September, I was contacted b
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| We've Saved the Schools! (Image from Flickr, Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com) |
Please send a message to the DOE today; protesting the failure of the DOE to reduce class size and have allowed class sizes to increase to levels that are damaging our children’s education and chance at success.
I’m going to give you an easy one today. For Public Schools Action Tuesday (PSAT) and to start Thanksgiving a little early, please give thanks for teachers.
The Use Your Teacher Voice web site is a good place to start. You’ll hear from a variety of teachers like David, from Social Justice High School, who explains the link between poverty and student learning difficulties.
I am so grateful to the teachers in my own family. My Dad was an education professor and reading diagnostic expert whose no-nonsense, progressive approach to student learning was a great model. My Mom is a retired elementary music teacher who went the extra mile, writing and directing a musical every year and including most of the older students so that everyone could be a part of the fun. I’m also grateful for my older sister Kris who had
November 22, 2011 in Anonymous, Art, Obama, OccupyTogether, Pop Cult
I am not directly associated with either the Obama re-election campaign or the organizers of Occupy Wall St. After I put my Occupy HOPE image and brief statement online Friday, I received responses from people and some very important issues were raised. It is hard to put across complex ideas with an image, and even harder to have a reasonable discussion in this polarizing, sound-bite oriented, media landscape, so I was grateful for some thoughtful feedback. My most eye-opening discussion was with an organizer of Occupy Wall St. who remains anonymous to preserve the lack of hierarchy within the movement. Below is a bit of our dialogue, which shows the many nuances to be navigated…
This image represents my support for the Occupy movement, a grassroots movement spawned to stand up against corruption, imbalance of power, and failure of
There is a push among many individuals and groups advocating new teacher evaluations to predetermine the number of outcome categories – e.g., highly effective, effective, developing, ineffective, etc. – that these new systems will include. For instance, a “statement of principles” signed by 25 education advocacy organizations recommends that the reauthorized ESEA law require “four or more levels of teacher performance.” The New Teacher Project’s primary report on redesigning evaluations made the same suggestion.* For their part, many states have followed suit, mandating new systems with a minimum of 4-5 categories.
The rationale here is pretty simple on the surface: Those pushing for a minimum number of outcome categories believe that teacher performance must be adequately differentiated, a goal on which prior systems, most of which relied on dichotomous satisfactory/unsatisfactory schemes, fell short. In other words, the categories in
Read this great article about the impact of homelessness on education. I share my comment below:
This is quite a beautifully written article, Andrew, about a vitally important topic. For obvious reasons, I sympathize with the kids. As a special ed teacher myself, I have seen what negative impact homelessness and transiency have. A few days ago I learned that one one of my students, a girl three years below grade level and in such poor health her tooth crumbled while I was giving a
