“One Newark” plan faces legislative investigation | Bob Braun's Ledger

“One Newark” plan faces legislative investigation | Bob Braun's Ledger:

“One Newark” plan faces legislative investigation

State Sen. Ronald Rice

The co-chairman of the Legislature’s Joint Committee on Public Schools last night said he would pursue an investigation into possible abuses tied to state control of the Newark schools. State Sen. Ronald Rice (D-Essex), who already is pursuing legislation aimed at blocking the closing of neighborhood schools in the state’s largest city, said he would seek subpoena power if state officials continue to refuse to provide him with information.

“Let me assure you I will be calling for an investigation into the operation of the Newark district,” Rice said at the close of a two-hour hearing in Newark City Hall about the so-called “One Newark” plan that would close, transfer to charters, redesign or otherwise “repurpose” more than a third of the schools in the state’s largest city. He predicted state education officials and Cami Anderson, the state-appointed superintendent, would probably not show up to answer questions.  “If they continue to refuse to respond, then we will have to begin to demand they give us answers. We will ask for subpoena power.”

Assemblywoman Mila Jasey

The hearing was conducted by the Legislature’s Black Caucus. Assemblywoman Mila Jasey (D-Essex), who chaired the session, promised additional hearings.

“We’re going to have to have an investigation,’’ said Jasey, who said she 

My name is Andrea Rediske, and I am Ethan Rediske’s mother. Please Pass the Ethan Rediske Act! | Teachers' Letters to Bill Gates

My name is Andrea Rediske, and I am Ethan Rediske’s mother. Please Pass the Ethan Rediske Act! | Teachers' Letters to Bill Gates:

My name is Andrea Rediske, and I am Ethan Rediske’s mother. Please Pass the Ethan Rediske Act!

Posted on February 19, 2014by Teachers'LettersToBillGates

Dear Bill and Melinda,

A national wave of empathy and outrage was created when the state of Florida demanded a child named Ethan Rediske take the FCAT high stakes test.  Despite the fact that Ethan was on his deathbed at the time, and despite the fact that Ethan qualified for special education; Ethan’s family had to prove that he could not possibly take the FCAT.Unfortunately, this story needs a much better ending, as subsequently Ethan has since passed away as of February 7th.  We here at Teachers’ Letters to Bill Gates extend our greatest sympathy for Ethan and his family.

Out of respect for Ethan and his family, we have offered to extend their appeal to all who read this:  Pass the Ethan Rediske Act!

We hope that by sharing Ethan’s story here, our readers can help give Ethan’s family their wish as they presented it to the Florida Department of Education in a speech shared with us today.

A  group called Opt Out Orlando escorted Ethan’s  courageous mother to speak before the Florida Department of Education.

Andrea Pratt Radiske spoke on behalf of her son, on behalf of all children with special needs, and on behalf of any children who suffer pain and suffering from high stakes testing.  Please watch the video of her speech and read it below.

We would like to broaden her message to call upon the common sense and morals of all corporate reformers, President Barack Obama, Secretary Arne Duncan, all legislators, 

Community schools can help break the cycle of poverty | EdSource Today

Community schools can help break the cycle of poverty | EdSource Today:

Community schools can help break the cycle of poverty

February 18th, 2014 | Add a Comment | 
By Ed Center / commentary

Ed Center

We’ve known for some time that children from low-income families are less likely to succeed in school relative to their higher-income peers. Many solutions to address this achievement gap have been explored, such as greater funding, more accountability for teachers or a longer school day. Yet as of 2012, 70 percent of the students who did not graduate from high school were living in poverty. Without a high school diploma, those students’ chance at future success is small.

So, is our public education system incapable of serving our low-income kids? No, but we must rethink the relationship between education and poverty.

The Local Control Funding Formula is a step in the right direction, aiming to improve academic outcomes by providing greater funding to schools with high-needs students. It’s also intended to give local school districts more control over the way they distribute their education dollars.

But as Professor Sean F. Reardon of Stanford University’s Graduate School of Educationsuggests, we need to take this work one step further. While flexibility of funding is critical, what we do with those funds is even more so. Investment in top-notch educators is essential when serving our highest-need students, but we must also invest in solutions that address the complex challenges that our low-income students bring to school.

Enter community schools, which are revolutionizing the way we solve educational and poverty-related challenges. Community schools bring fragmented services found in the community – such as food assistance, health clinics and after-school programs – onto school campuses, integrating them into the core educational strategy. The challenges that students bring with them each day – hunger, homelessness, health issues, a parent in jail – are addressed by professionals offering specialized community-based services. That way children can focus on school, rather than an 

Renewed push to let community colleges award bachelor’s degrees - by Kathryn Baron

When Michigan granted community colleges the authority to confer baccalaureate degrees a year ago, it became the 21st state to do so. An effort is under way to make California No. 22. Senate Bill 850 by Sen. Marty Block, D-San Diego, would create an eight-year pilot program allowing each of the ... [[ This is a content summary only. Visit the Edsource Today website for full links, other content,

by Kathryn Baron / 4min 

Report: College Success Compared of Those Submitting ACT, SAT Scores Versus - Higher Education

Report: College Success Compared of Those Submitting ACT, SAT Scores Versus - Higher Education:

Report: College Success Compared of Those Submitting ACT, SAT Scores Versus

February 18, 2014 | Category: News,Subfeature | :

     inShare       

 

by Ronald Roach

No significant differences were found in the success rates of students who provided standardized admissions test scores to colleges in comparison to those who had not submitted scores, a new national study on test optional admissions policies has found.

In “Defining Promise: Optional Standardized Testing Policies in American College and University Admissions”, the report authors found “the differences between submitters and non-submitters are five one-hundredths of a GPA point, and six-tenths of one percent in graduation rates.”

“By any standard, these are trivial differences,” said the study, which was posted Tuesday by the National Association for College Admission Counseling on the organization’s website. The three-year national study analyzed the records of 123,000 students at 33 institutions and is said to be the first major published research to evaluate optional testing policies in depth and across institutional types.

“From my point of view, the key message here is that human intelligence is far more fluid, complex, and multi-layered than we perhaps think it is,” said Dr. William C. Hiss, the study’s principal investigator.

Hiss, a faculty member and former admissions dean at Bates College, says critics of standardized admissions test believe the “study may be a tipping point and that it will encourage more colleges and universities to really think carefully about how much weight they put on testing and see if there’s a better way.”

“My hopes are that colleges use the study to examine carefully their own protocols, their own methods of admitting students, and see if optional test admissions could provide one route to substantially widen the doors to higher education. I believe it can,” Hiss said.

Hiss teamed up with Valerie Franks, a higher education research consultant and former Bates Colleg

DIARY OF A PUBLIC SCHOOL TEACHER!: Questions for a Standardized Test: Maybe Your Creators Can Answer!

DIARY OF A PUBLIC SCHOOL TEACHER!: Questions for a Standardized Test: Maybe Your Creators Can Answer!:

Questions for a Standardized Test: Maybe Your Creators Can Answer!

• See the picture above, that's my first question.
• Why am I told to make anchor charts that my students use throughout the year, and then told to take them down during testing? Do you really believe that any of my anchor charts have answers on them?
• Why are we told to use technology to enhance instruction, become paperless, etc.., and then told our kids cannot use the computers once they are finished the test? What are they going to be able to do, give another student answers?
• Why must I force my students to sit for hours taking a test that proves...?
• Why do my students' show growth on these tests, but are still made to feel like failures because they did not meet the "target"?
• Who created these "targets"? What are they based on? Made a call to DOE 2 years ago, still waiting for an answer.
• Why am I giving a Science test based on the K-5 curriculum? Seriously? Have you ever heard of the Summer Slide? Now, consider 4 years!Oh wait, I forgot, I can 

The mother of the seriously disabled child who recently died, tells the FLDOE about the insane high stakes testing demands… | Reclaim Reform

The mother of the seriously disabled child who recently died, tells the FLDOE about the insane high stakes testing demands… | Reclaim Reform:

The mother of the seriously disabled child who recently died, tells the FLDOE about the insane high stakes testing demands…

Posted on February 18, 2014by Ken Previti

Ethan Rediske, the seriously disabled child who recently died, was pressured until his death to take Florida’s mandatory high stakes tests. Ethan’s mother addresses the Florida Department of Education members.

Presently this video is posted for Facebook viewers.

Andrea Rediske speaks of the insane high stakes testing demands placed upon her dying son.

Here is the text of her statement.

My name is Andrea Rediske, and I am Ethan Rediske’s mother. Before you peg me as merely an angry and grieving mother, let me tell you a little bit about myself: I am an educator. I have a Master’s degree in microbiology and have been an adjunct professor of microbiology for 11 years. I have a passion for education and I know how to write an exam that accurately assesses the abilities of my students. Not only was the Florida Adapted Assessment inappropriate for the level of my son’s abilities, it endangered his health – the long, stressful testing sessions requiring him to sit in his wheelchair caused pressure sores, fluid to pool in his lungs, and increased seizures and spasticity that 

Wisconsin Senate adopts narrow voucher school accountability bill | Larry Miller's Blog: Educate All Students!

Wisconsin Senate adopts narrow voucher school accountability bill | Larry Miller's Blog: Educate All Students!:

Wisconsin Senate adopts narrow voucher school accountability bill

Filed under: Vouchers — millerlf @ 8:38 pm 

No sanctions included in measure

By Jason Stein of the Journal Sentinel 2/18/14

Madison — The state would better track the performance of taxpayer-funded private voucher schools and expand the fight against heroin abuse, under bills passed by the Senate Tuesday.

After rejecting a much broader schools measure in recent days, Senate Republicans moved forward Tuesday with a narrow bill that would apply existing state report cards for public schools to voucher institutions but not impose sanctions on schools receiving poor marks. Assembly Republicans, meanwhile, still hope to proceed with a broader bill that would sanction failing schools.

The narrow measure passed the Senate 29-3 and now goes to the Assembly. Three Democrats voted against it: Sens. Bob Wirch of Pleasant Prairie, Jon Erpenbach of Middleton and Jennifer Shilling of La Crosse.

The Senate bill’s lead sponsor, Sen. Luther Olsen (R-Ripon), said that he had to postpone an “ambitious agenda” to sanction schools of all kinds that receive public money but don’t measure up. But Olsen said the bill made a “big step forward” forward by moving up the date for voucher schools to receive report cards from 2020 to the 2015-’16 school year.

“That’s my definition of accountability and that’s what this piece of legislation does,” Olsen said.

Sen. John Lehman of Racine, a former teacher and the ranking Democrat on the Senate Education Committee, dismissed that, saying that most senators of his party didn’t feel the bill went far enough. Republicans, he said, had caved to pressure from voucher supporters and broken a promise to hold voucher schools to the same standards as public schools.

“This bill started out as one thing and ended up as what I call a ‘no consequences bill,’ ” Lehman said. “I have a fear that this is going to be sold as some kind of an accountability bill, which it is not… This bill 

Justice Dept. Urged to Investigate Treatment Immigrant Children in NC | HispanicallySpeakingNews.com

Justice Dept. Urged to Investigate Treatment Immigrant Children in NC | HispanicallySpeakingNews.com:

Justice Dept. Urged to Investigate Treatment of Immigrant Children in NC Schools

Published at 6:39 pm EST, February 18, 2014

A coalition of civil rights groups on Tuesday urged the federal Justice Department to launch an investigation of two North Carolina school districts for discrimination by denying admission to - or turning away - immigrant children.

The complaint was filed by the Southern Poverty Law Center, Legal Services of Southern Piedmont, North Carolina Justice Center and the Southern Coalition for Social Justice.

It is unconstitutional to refuse to let children register for school based on their age, immigration status, place of origin or inability to speak English, and the groups believe that this is a situation that occurs in various school districts in North Carolina, said SPLC staff attorney Caren Short by telephone.

Under North Carolina law, all students under age 21 have the right to attend public school at the place where they reside.

In the complaint, the groups mention the case of C.V., age 17, a Honduran girl who lives with 

Are you busy busy, busy? | Connected Principals

Are you busy busy, busy? | Connected Principals:

Are you busy busy, busy?

by Amber Teamann • February 19, 2014 • 0 Comments

This post is cross posted from Technically yours, Teamann.

Busy is the new black. Ask anyone how they are doing and what do response do you get?

“Stressed!” “Overwhelmed!” “Can’t keep up!” “Tired!”

Can you imagine what would happen if you just answered that question with a “Inbox zero, task list completed, actually have time for an extra nap this week…”? It would stop traffic!

Many times busyness is equated with productivity. Just because the wheels are constantly spinning doesn’t mean you’re getting anywhere. I know that for me, my to do list can shift based on priority but I literally can work 12 hour days and still not get caught up…which makes it feel as if I am not making progress.

I listened to a podcast this weekend and heard something simplified that is so common sense I am almost ashamed to admit how clarifying it was for me. The author (Crystal Paine) was discussing how hard it is for her to say no and to prioritize her tasks. She said that at the beginning of each month (day, week, year, etc) she lists her BIG goals. Her big, all encompassing, gotta be done goals. Then she files all of her tasks into alignment with those goals. If it doesn’t fit? She doesn’t commit.

I’m a big “yes” girl. I like feeling accomplished and like I’ve done more than my share, like I’ve had my opportunity to get 

New Report: An Empirical Critique of “One Newark” « New Jersey Education Policy Forum

New Report: An Empirical Critique of “One Newark” « New Jersey Education Policy Forum:



New Report: An Empirical Critique of “One Newark”

 Our new report is too long to post in its entirety in blog form.

The report can be downloaded here: Weber.Baker_OneNewark_Jan24_2014

Below is the executive summary of the report:

Executive Summary

On December 18, 2013, State Superintendent Cami Anderson announced a wide-scale restructuring of the Newark Public Schools. This brief examines the following questions about One Newark:

• Has NPS identified the schools that are the least effective in the system? Or has the district instead identified schools that serve more at-risk students, which would explain their lower performance on state tests?
• Do the interventions planned under One Newark — forcing staff to reapply for jobs, turning over schools to charter operators, closure – make sense, given state performance data on NPS schools and Newark’s charter schools?
• Is underutilization a justification for closing and divesting NPS school properties?
• Are the One Newark sanctions, which may abrogate the rights of students, parents, and staff, applied without racial or socio-economic status bias?

We find the following:

• Measures of academic performance are not significant predictors of the classifications assigned to NPS schools by the district, when controlling for student population characteristics.
• Schools assigned the consequential classifications have substantively and statistically significantly greater shares of low income and black students.
• Further, facilities utilization is also not a predictor of assigned 

Cami to Newark parents: Don’t worry, we know best. | Bob Braun's Ledger

Cami to Newark parents: Don’t worry, we know best. | Bob Braun's Ledger:

Cami to Newark parents: Don’t worry, we know best.

Cami Anderson: You don’t need to know

Pity the parents of Newark’s public school children. Many are unsure where their children will attend school in the fall. They’ve had to fill out application forms and hope they get their first choices in an ever-changing program called “One Newark.” For many, if their first choice was a neighborhood public school, they’re out of luck. Now comes a new insult—if they want to know how their children were  picked for this school or that, they can just forget it. That’s secret information. They’re not allowed to know.

But, hey, no worries. The decisions will be made by a NPS staff with lots of experience with organizations like the Broad Academy, funded by the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation. One worked with Barclay’s Capital, another with McKinsey & Co. Newark parents can feel comfortable their children are in the hands of people trained in business and by billionaires who understand completely what it’s like to be poor and live in Newark. Right.

That’s the answer received by the City Association of School Administrators (CASA), the union representing Newark’s school principals.  They asked for public records showing how children will be distributed among the public schools and charter schools participating in the so-called “universal application” that’s part of the “One Newark” scheme.

The answer came back from Cami Anderson, appointed by Gov. Chris Christie to 

Right Wing War on Public Schools Drones On | National Review Online

Winning the War on Charter Schools | National Review Online:

Winning the War on Charter Schools

By Reihan Salam

February 18, 2014 1:21 PM

Comments

1

The public charter school movement is entering a new phase. To put it bluntly, charter schools are finally becoming genuinely frightening to the powers-that-be in traditional public education, and for good reason. Charter schools have always been frightening to traditional public schools for the simple reason that they are granted wide autonomy to develop new instructional models, and most of the people associated with traditional public schools are afraid of change, or rather afraid of change that doesn’t involve increasing compensation levels. This is true of the people associated with most organizations, public or private, but public schools have long been shielded from the entry of new start-ups that leave them no choice but to start doing things in new ways. Brick-and-mortar retailers might resent Amazon.com for forcing them to experiment with new pricing models, or to have to learn how to deliver their products across vast distances quickly and inexpensively, but they often have a hard time strangling innovative business models in the crib — for one thing, incumbent businesses are often divided amongst themselves as to how to respond to new threats. In contrast, traditional public educators benefit from (a) enormous political influence, a product of the size of the public education workforce and the organization of large swathes of this workforce into effective labor unions, which are keen to protect the interests of their median members; and (b) the fact that “business-as-usual” has prevailed for so long makes it easy for people to awesome that newness is bad. You don’t generally have competing unions of public school teachers with dramatically different attitudes towards charters, despite the fact that you have individual public school teachers who might be sympathetic, or who might think that the competition for talent among charter schools might actually leave them better off than they are under the unionized status quo. But unions, like all democratic organizations should, represent the interests of their median members, and it is generally true that the teachers who think they’d be better off in a more diverse, competitive educational landscape represent a minority.

So unionized public school teachers have, from the start, fought to limit the expansion of public charters and, to the extent possible, their organizational autonomy. For example, if public charters are required to be subject to the collective bargaining agreements that prevail in a given district, you’ve kind of defeated the point of having a charter school, which is to allow school administrators and teachers to experiment with new ways of doing things. This is all old news. The new news, or the newish news, is that after years of fighting these battles, public charters have nevertheless kept growing. In 2010-2011, public charters represented 5 percent of all K-12 public schools in the United States and

Shallal criticizes D.C. school reform efforts, saying he would chart a different course - The Washington Post

Shallal criticizes D.C. school reform efforts, saying he would chart a different course - The Washington Post:

Shallal criticizes D.C. school reform efforts, saying he would chart a different course

 The District’s high-profile efforts to improve public schools have largely failed, according torestaurateur Andy Shallal, the first mayoral candidate to challenge the fundamental policies that have driven D.C. education reform under Mayor Vincent C. Gray and his predecessor, Adrian M. Fenty.

“Education reform is just not working in Washington,” Shallal wrote in a white paperreleased Friday, criticizing the city’s emphasis on using standardized tests to judge educators and schools as a “war on teachers” and a strategy of “intimidation and punishment.”

(Marvin Joseph/The Washington Post) - Mayoral candidate Andy Shallal talks about what he what do if elected mayor at Turner Elementary School in Washington on Jan. 18.

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Gray (D) has highlighted education as a strong point in his campaign for reelection, citing national standardized test results that show the District — while still performing far below average — has made larger gains over the past two years than any state or other large city.

But Shallal — who has made the city’s growing income inequality a central theme of his campaign — argues that the citywide figures mask a large achievement gap between the city’s low-income and affluent students, and between black, Hispanic and white students.

Poor black students in the continue to trail their counterparts in other cities; only 9 percent of those students scored high enough in fourth grade to be considered “proficient” in reading, compared with 78 percent of white students.

“If we keep harping on this idea that the schools are doing great, we are misleading people,” Shallal said in an interview Monday.“We should not be married to an ideology at the expense of our children.”

Gray spokesman Pedro Ribeiro said that black students made statistically significant gains in all grades and subject areas on the most recent national exam and that the bottom-performing 10 percent of students made some of the largest gains across the city.

While some of Gray’s challengers have criticized him as moving too slowly on improving