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Tuesday, December 20, 2011

Big Education Ape: 12-20-11 AM WORSE THAN BEDBUGS: New charter school advocacy lobby formed EDition

Big Education Ape: Ed News Now:

Published by Coopmike48 – 6 news spotters today

Come Back To Jamaica | Gary Rubinstein's TFA Blog

garyrubinstein.teachforus.org - The New York City reform model is centered upon closing ‘failing’ schools and opening new ones. Some of these ‘failing’ schools have been pillars of their communities for decades. One such school I...
DianeRavitch

10 Years of Assessing Students With Scientific Exactitude

nytimes.com - In the last decade, we have emerged from the Education Stone Age. No longer must we rely on primitive tools like teachers and principals to assess children’s academic progress. Thanks to the best e...
DianeRavitch

New charter school advocacy lobby formed - JY Teachers

jyteachers.com - Posted October 29th, 2011 by Caleb Macdougall A new high-powered lobbying group has been formed to push expansion of charter schools in Florida, and it expects to have an inside track with lawmaker...
DianeRavitch

Tells the Facts, Names the Names

counterpunch.org - My arrest, or, more accurately, my assault was personal. I was taking photographs of the police arresting Occupy Wall Street demonstrators at the December 12 Winter Garden flash mob, which had been...
leoniehaimson

Kindergarten Test on Hold - WSJ.com

online.wsj.com - New York's kindergartners can relax—for now. The state has shelved a plan to test the students after losing a competitive federal grant for early-childhood programs. New York, New Jersey and Connec...
leoniehaimson

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coopmike48 Young entrepreneurs battle teen suicide | EdNewsColorado -goo.gl/qsqvA5 minutes ago · reply · retweet · favorite
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coopmike48 Newt Gingrich berates poor and black children « Larry Miller's Blog: Educate All Students! - goo.gl/txBw64 minutes ago · reply · retweet · favorite
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coopmike48 Bon Jovi jokes about death reports during concert - latimes.com -goo.gl/60vp93 minutes ago · reply · retweet · favorite
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EducationSee all

10 Years of Assessing Students With Scientific Exactitude

nytimes.com - In the last decade, we have emerged from the Education Stone Age. No longer must we rely on primitive tools like teachers and principals to assess children’s academic progress. Thanks to the best e...
DianeRavitch

SocietySee all

'I Come From Public Housing' [UPDATED]

huffingtonpost.com - Florida Gov. Rick Scott (R) told hundreds of Florida A&M University students marching at the governor's mansion, protesting his decision to call for the suspension of the president of the state's l...
mikeklonsky

StoriesSee all

Me and Bank of America. « Fred Klonsky

preaprez.wordpress.com - I did it! This morning Bank of America stock price dropped to $5 a share. It’s what they call the danger zone. A month or so ago I decided I would support the movement to pull my money out of Bank ...
fklonsky

A Survival Guide « MomsRising Blog

momsrising.org - For years I would wake up at 5:30 in the morning every Black Friday, leaving the kids with my mother-in-law, and get to the mall by 6:15 am. Every year, I would return six or seven hours later, loa...
coopmike48

PoliticsSee all

Money talks, twice | Feature

chicagoreader.com - click to enlarge A year ago, Miguel del Valle was running for mayor. His resume was outstanding. He'd risen from blue-collar roots on Chicago's near-northwest side to the state senate, where he was...
mikeklonsky

EnvironmentSee all

And Now for the Hard Part...

baycitizen.org - Crews will begin installing the huge steel cable that will hold up the new eastern span of the Bay Bridge this week. Currently, temporary steel structures support the bridge. At a media briefing Mo...
coopmike48

Art & EntertainmentSee all

Kids Are Heroes - Lily's Heroes

kidsareheroes.org - Jordan Brown is a WWII buff and has embarked upon a campaign to ensure that the WWII vets who served on D-Day are memorialized. In May 2010, he learned of an effort to honor Jordan’s hero, Major D...
coopmike48

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    Jersey Jazzman: Throwing Angels Under a Bus

    Jersey Jazzman: Throwing Angels Under a Bus:


    Throwing Angels Under a Bus

    by Duke
    Everyone working in a schools knows the hardest job is teaching special education - especially to the most challenging children. Like all elementary music teachers, I work with special education teachers every day, and I have to tell you that they constantly amaze me with their sympathy, intelligence, insight, and patience. As far as I am concerned, anyone who devotes their career to teaching these deserving but demanding children is an angel on earth. And people who casually dismiss their work ought to be ashamed of themselves.

    Which is why this next story bugs the hell out of me:

    Advocates for Children of New Jersey has been working on child poverty issues for a good long while, but only recently started focusing on K-12 education. They recently released a report - Newark Kids Count 2011 - which bemoans the poor level of reading achievement for 3rd graders in the city. The Star-Ledger's Jessica Calefati

    Ghost Of Chris Cerf's Past

    by Duke
    Michael Winerip of the New York Times had a brutal piece on Sunday documenting a decade of testing disasters in New York. After years of assurances that the state's standardized tests were valid, the system came crashing down:
    JULY 2010 Finally someone — Dr. Tisch, the chancellor of the Board of Regents — has the sense to stand up at a news conference and say that the state test scores are so ridiculously inflated that only a fool would take them seriously, thereby unmasking the mayor, the chancellor and the former state commissioner. State scores are to be scaled down immediately, so that the 68.8 percent English proficiency rate at the start of the news conference becomes a 42.4 proficiency rate by the end of the news conference. Shael Polakow-Suransky, chief accountability officer for the city, offers the new party line: “We know there has been significant progress, and we know we 
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    African American drivers in Milwaukee are seven times more likely to be pulled over by police than their white counterparts « Larry Miller's Blog: Educate All Students!

    African American drivers in Milwaukee are seven times more likely to be pulled over by police than their white counterparts « Larry Miller's Blog: Educate All Students!:


    African American drivers in Milwaukee are seven times more likely to be pulled over by police than their white counterparts

    by millerlf
    National Coalition of Black American Men, Inc. 2727 N 67th Street
    Milwaukee, WI 53210
    414-763-4545/ 414-915-5297 Wendell J. Harris, President
    wharris38@aol.com  
    wendellharris-mke.com
    RACIALLY BIASED POLICE STOPS
    Whoever said that Milwaukee is the “Home of the Free?” Racial profiling in Milwaukee traffic stops proves the exact opposite – that African American drivers in Milwaukee are seven times more likely to be pulled over by police than their white counterparts, while Latinos are five times more likely to be stopped.
    In a review of 45,703 MPD traffic stops in the first four months of 2011, the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel found that


    Newt Gingrich berates poor and black children

    by millerlf
    Larry Miller Published Dec. 18, 2011 http://onmilwaukee.com
    In recent statements Newt Gingrich argued that “Really poor children in really poor neighborhoods have no habits of work and have nobody around them who works … So they have no habit of showing up on Monday.”
    Alluding to “43% of black teenage unemployment,” he said, “What if they cleaned the bathrooms? What if they mopped the floors? (What) if they had money of their own and didn’t have to become a pimp, prostitute or drug dealer?”
    Gingrich’s implication that poor and black children are lazy and undisciplined is the same racist and revisionist historical argument that was used in defense of slavery, Jim Crow segregation and job discrimination. He adds to 
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    Real Concerns About Costly Virtual Schools « City School Stories

    Real Concerns About Costly Virtual Schools « City School Stories:


    Real Concerns About Costly Virtual Schools

    by fmurphy
    Notes from the Field
    Submitted by Frank Murphy on December 20, 2011
    The state of Pennsylvania spends a large amount of taxpayers’ money financing the operations of cyber charter schools.  In the 2009- 2010 school year, just four of these virtual schools received more than $231 million from the state’s education budget.  This sum is about eighty percent of the amount of money that the School District of Philadelphia lost in state aid this last budget year.
    During the 2009-2010 school year, Agora Cyber School received approximately $55 million of the funding Pennsylvania dispersed to the nine-cyber schools operating within its borders.  Agora is part of the for-profit 
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    A Push to Have Students Factor Into Teacher Evaluations - Chicago News Cooperative

    A Push to Have Students Factor Into Teacher Evaluations - Chicago News Cooperative:


    A Push to Have Students Factor Into Teacher Evaluations

    by REBECCA VEVEA
    The Chicago Public Schools and the Chicago Teachers Union opened negotiations earlier this month on a state-mandated requirement about what should–and should not–be included in teachers’ performance evaluations.
    CPS and the union have until March to grapple with the specific terms, such as what tests to use for measuring academic growth, how much the results should factor into the evaluations, and how to measure the performance of teachers whose subjects are not tested on state exams.
    To add to the mix, an organized group of public school students, the Voices of Youth in Chicago Education(VOYCE), are preparing a formal request to CPS in the coming months to include student input in the new teacher evaluation system.
    Some teachers want their students to weigh in on their performance.
    “I think my students are in a unique position to evaluate me because they are the only people who see me teach every day of the year,” said Alex Seeskin, an English teacher at Lakeview High School.
    Still, many Chicago teachers remain hesitant and the CTU has not formally endorsed the inclusion of student 
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