Monday, March 22, 2010

Student Loan Bill Poised to Pass in Health Vote - NYTimes.com

Student Loan Bill Poised to Pass in Health Vote

By DAVID M. HERSZENHORN

WASHINGTON — Along with the major health care legislation, the House on Sunday approved a major revamping of federal student loan programs that eliminates fees paid to private banks to act as intermediaries.
Related

House Approves Health Overhaul, Sending Landmark Bill to Obama (March 22, 2010)

Instead, the government will expand a direct lending program, a step that theCongressional Budget Office said would save taxpayers $61 billion over 10 years, and use the money to increase Pell grants for students.
The student loan bill is a centerpiece of President Obama’s education agenda, and it was included in the budget reconciliation measure that also made final revisions to the Senate-passed health care bill.
The bill sets automatic annual increases in the maximum Pell grant, scheduled to rise to $5,975 by 2017 from $5,350 this year. The new Pell initiative also includes $13.5 billion to cover a shortfall caused by a steep rise in the number of Americans enrolling in college and seeking financial aid during the recession.
In last year’s budget resolution, Congressional Democrats put forward a plan to complete major education and health care legislation through a reconciliation bill.
The budget reconciliation rules set goals for reducing future federal deficits, and the loan bill helps to meet those goals by redirecting $10 billion in savings from subsidies to private

Community colleges, students join for protest

One way to protest education cuts is to block classroom doors, shut down campuses and hurl torches at a chancellor's house. All have been tried recently by students angry at rising tuition and declining quality of California's higher education.

Then there's the approach thousands of community college and California State University students plan to take today in Sacramento.
"We will be respectful, not disrupt class, and work with our administration," said Lee Fuller, a delegate to the Student Senate of the California Community Colleges, which is sponsoring what they've dubbed the "March on March."
It's the third large rally this month to demand that state lawmakers restore millions of dollars to public education.
The earlier rallies were mainly peaceful, but drama stole the spotlight each time. On March 4, protesters ran onto Interstate 880 in Oakland late in the day, snarling rush-hour traffic for hours. Three days earlier, five students from the University of California refused to leave a lawmaker's Sacramento office. Their arrests grabbed the headlines.
There's no guarantee that acts of civil disobedience won't be tried today, as an expected 10,000 students will march from Raley Field to a rally at the state Capitol and an address from Community College Chancellor Jack Scott.
But student organizers say attention by mayhem is not what they want. Many plan to bus to the Capitol with administrators from their schools.
"This is a peaceful protest," said Bradley Stottler, a Berkeley City College student and community college senate delegate. "We're there to have our voices heard."
Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/03/21/BA7Q1CIJJG.DTL#ixzz0iuDxQhJS

Charter school surviving by running as a business

March 22, 2010, 03:30 AM By Heather Murtagh Daily Journal Staff

Heather Murtagh/Daily Journal
A San Carlos Learning Center first grade student mixes a green mixture that will soon become lizard bread.

Holding a little wooden stick, first grade student Sydney stirred the green concoction in her little Dixie cup.
“It’s green because of the dye,” she explained while continuing to stir.

It’s a Friday in Colleen McPeek’s class at the San Carlos Charter Learning Center. McPeek always tries to keep cooking in the loop during Friday centers, a time in which children are able to work in small groups and try a variety of activities. In this particular center, the students are making green bread.

“The kids just love it,” she said.

Having small group time and being able to assess a student’s individual level of learning is a luxury for many schools right now. In a time of massive budget cuts, the San Carlos Charter Learning Center is making it work on less by looking at education from a business perspective. First, the school generates income through before-, after- and summer-school offerings. But the largest resource is free: Volunteers. The key, officials said, is managing those volunteers throughout the campus to maximize benefits to the school and all the children served. As a result, teachers like McPeek are able to regularly offer smaller, individualized plans for her students.

Serving 260 children in kindergarten through eighth grade with a $2.2 million annual budget has forced a lean operation and thinking outside the box, said Director Christopher Mahoney.

Keeping afloat has meant restructuring education in recent years while becoming a business and offering other programs.

California became the second state to allow charter schools in 1992, behind Minnesota. Originally, a 100-school limit was placed on such schools. San Carlos became the first to open a charter school with the San Carlos Charter Learning Center, which was granted a charter in 1993 and opened its doors to 85 students the following year. It’s funded per student from the state at a level slightly below the district in which

A ruinous meltdown, state after state

By Bob Herbert
A story that is not getting nearly enough attention is the ruinous fiscal meltdown occurring in state after state, all across America.

Taxes are being raised. Draconian cuts in services are being made. Public employees are being fired. The tissue-thin national economic recovery is being undermined. And in many cases, the most vulnerable populations - the sick, the elderly, the young and the poor - are getting badly hurt.

Arizona, struggling with a projected $2.6 billion budget shortfall, took the drastic step of scrapping its Children's Health Insurance Program. That left nearly 47,000 low-income children with no coverage at all. Gov. Jan Brewer is also calling for an increase in the sales tax. She said, "Arizona is navigating its way through the largest state budget deficit in its long history."

In New Jersey, newly elected governor, Chris Christie, has proposed a series of budget cuts that, among other things, would result in public schools receiving $820 million less in state aid than they had received in the prior school year. Some well-off districts would have their direct school aid cut off altogether. Poorer districts that rely almost entirely on state aid would absorb the biggest losses in terms of dollars. They're bracing for a terrible hit.

For all the happy talk about "no child left behind," the truth is that in Arizona and New Jersey and dozens of other

Texas curriculum vote stirs conflict | eSchoolNews.com

Texas curriculum vote stirs conflict

Some opponents worry that conservative-backed changes to Texas's social studies curriculum will influence other states, but others say these concerns are overblown

By Maya T. Prabhu, Assistant Editor

The conservative slant that Texas curriculum may take could influence curriculum in other states.

Observers are conflicted as to what effect the conservative slant that Texas's curriculum might take will have in other states.

Some historians are decrying the proposed changes to Texas’s social studies curriculum for next year, saying many of the changes do not accurately reflect United States history. But the potential injection of conservative ideals into the social studies, history, and economics lessons that will be taught to millions of Texas students for the next decade might not have as much of an effect on the rest of the country’s curriculum as some opponents fear.

“It’s a bit of an urban myth that the Texas curriculum automatically hops state borders. I think the media accounts have been exaggerated,” said Jay Diskey, executive director of the school division for the Association of American Publishers. “Nearly all states expect or require publishers to align to their state standards.”

If the curriculum passes as is when the final vote is cast in May, teachers in Texas will be required to cover the Judeo-Christian influences of the nation’s Founding Fathers, but not highlight the philosophical rationale for the separation of church and state.

The new curriculum standards also would describe the U.S. government as a “constitutional republic,” rather than a “democratic” system, and students will be required to study the decline in value of the U.S. dollar, including the abandonment of the gold standard. The standards also herald “American exceptionalism” and the U.S. free enterprise system, suggesting it thrives best without excessive government intervention.

2nd Banana SUNDAY, MARCH 21, 2010

2nd Banana SUNDAY, MARCH 21, 2010

Sunday, March 21, 2010

SCUSD Observer: The Sup uses the word "blueprint"

The Sup uses the word "blueprint"

by Sac City Schools Observer

Editor's Note: Blueprint is the buzzword for the re-issue of No Child Left Behind.

Here is the most recent letter from Jonathan Raymond to pink-slipped employees:

March 22, 2010

Dear Colleague:

At Thursday night’s Board meeting, I was thrilled to announce that we plan to send letters out on Monday that will rescind approximately 170 of the layoff notices that were sent out last week. We hope, in the coming weeks, to rescind even more. These rescissions mark a step in the right direction but make no mistake - we still have a long way to go. I understand that this process can be confusing at times and that it can be laden with tremendous anxiety and upset, and my staff and I are available to answer any questions you might have about the status of the process.

The unfortunate truth is that there is no way to avoid some layoffs to balance our fiscal house. The exact number that will be needed is undetermined at this time, but I can tell you that I am doing everything in my power to have as few people as possible be impacted.

Discovery Premieres Stunning 11-Part "LIFE" Series Tonite - THE DAILY RIFF - Be Smarter. About Education.

Series Narrated By Oprah Winfrey
Stunning Photography
"Ultimate Portrait In Animal Behavior"
See Behind-The-Scenes Video Below

From the Discovery Channel here. Excerpts:

"LIFE is a massive television event showcasing extraordinary animal behavior."

"If Planet Earth was the stage, LIFE is about the lives of the actors. . ."

"Four years" of filming in "over fifty countries"

"Ultimate portrait of animal behavior"

"Taking animal behavior to a whole different level"

Two video below:

Finally, a detailed guide to school budgets | Philadelphia Public School Notebook

Finally, a detailed guide to school budgets

by Paul Socolar on Mar 21 2010 Posted in Eye on the budget

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For this year's budget season, the School District has provided for the first time in memory a detailed guide to school budgets, explaining how funds are allocated to schools.

It's a daunting read - a dense, 51-page document, including the 10 appendices. But the document reflects the complexity of the system it is trying to explain. For instance, it identifies 17 different centrally allocated funding streams to schools - such as kindergarten teachers, special education, ELL support, school nurses, school police, and food service - where the school must spend the dollars as the District dictates.

As a first step in the District's move toward a new system for alloting funds to schools, known as weighted student funding, District officials have pledged to make the existing system of school budgeting more transparent. Making the system transparent is going to require a lot of explaining, but this document is an important first step.

Natl. science ed. conference: Saturday | Philadelphia Public School Notebook

Natl. science ed. conference: Saturday

by Timothy Boyle on Mar 20 2010 Posted in Boyle's law

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Before I knew I would covering the NSTA conference for the Notebook, I had planned on spending Saturday at the conference as a professional development.

I teach third and fourth grade, which entails using three different FOSS curricula. This afternoon FOSS was running two workshops: assessment and notebooking.

While four and half hours of professional development can be daunting, it was time well spent.

FOSS assessment

I especially enjoyed the assessment workshop. I know that I still have a long way to go in better assessing my students. In the midst of a young career, I have concentrated most of my efforts on the delivery of instruction. Personally, I enjoy the teaching aspect of education more than the evaluation. Divorcing assessment from instruction is not an option however.

The framework for the assessment workshop was the knowledge gleaned from theAsk Project. FOSS has spent years developing a series of embedded and formative assessments in their curricula. The formative assessment takes the shape of a pre- and post-surveys along with I-Check. I-Checks are benchmark assessments with a very precise scoring system.

I particularly like the I-Check scoring because it is designed to inform teachers and students about student understanding as opposed to achievement. FOSS Co-Director Larry Malone posited a transition from the current state of "achievement of arbitrary goals to one of student progress." His rationale for this transition is that it values the efforts of all teachers and students. Instead of NCLB style winners and losers, we could see who is facilitating children's growth the most.

A progress model also takes into account the different levels of prior knowledge students might have. I thought the point that we don't stop educating children when they accrue a certain amount of education was quite poignant. Taking into account that some of students come from disadvantaged backgrounds, but still show

Schools Matter: DC Charter Report Takes Shots at KIPP, Imagine?

DC Charter Report Takes Shots at KIPP, Imagine?

From the 2009 School Performa nce Reports (published March 2010):

...KIPP AIM's vision and philosophy is compromised when the ideas of “Work hard, be Nice” are not modeled by the adults in the building.

Hmmm...was someone not working hard, or not being nice? Maybe it was the strict learning environment and penal pedagogy...

According to the report, Imagine Southeast PCS boasts a 30% truancy rate. There's also a bit about assessment that makes me wonder if this is just a test-prep factory. Keep in mind this is a PK-3rd grade school - and they're using Scantrons. I guess DC kids need lots of practice in filling in the bubbles for later success in Rhee's testing dungeons. You'll notice the mention of not using ILPs appropriately and the failure to use formative assessments (which can be useful for teachers when used appropriately, but

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Monday, March 22, 2010