Thursday, April 1, 2010

It’s Been One Year Since I Joined Twitter | Larry Ferlazzo's Websites of the Day...

It’s Been One Year Since I Joined Twitter

by Larry Ferlazzo

I joined Twitter — reluctantly — one year ago this month, and it was a great move. I’ve been able to connect with so many more teachers, get answers to many questions, and use it as sort of my own version of a Delicious-like bookmarking service.
I highlight my choices for best “tweets” each month on this blog, and you can see them here.
If you’re already on Twitter, you can “follow” me here.
If you’re not on Twitter, but would still like to get my “tweets,” you can subscribe to my Twitter RSS feed here.
You might be also be interested in a couple

Papunet Word Exercises

by Larry Ferlazzo

Papunet Word Exercises are simple games ideal for Beginning English Language Learners. You’re shown an animated picture, along with various questions you have to answer by clicking on something in the picture (”click on the figure flying the kite”)
I’ve placed the link on my website under Reading.

Broad Goes South For "Best" Districts In US This Week In Education

This Week In Education

Broad Goes South For "Best" Districts In US

by Alexander Russo

This year's Broad Finalists: Charlotte-Mecklenburg, Gwinnett County, Montgomery County, Socorro ISD, Ysleta ISD.

News: Stakeholders Fight Over RTTT Failures

by Alexander Russo

Unions attacked over school funding Denver Daily: “We are not willing to take the fall for this,” said Fallin... Not all Republicans hate Race to the TopHouston Chronicle: Former U.S. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist offered some effusive praise today for President Obama's so-called Race to the Top initiative...Minnesota districts cutting ties to charter schools Star Tribune: The new law requires authorizers to submit to a longer certification process and to keep much closer tabs on charter schools... Education" target="_blank" style="color: rgb(34, 68, 187); ">Last Call for Nightclub in a School AP: District officials had demanded an end to the school’s arrangement with Club Damani, which had been operating on the premises during off-hours despite an expired liquor license...Few movies about teachers earn an 'A' Greg Toppo AP: Educational experts agree that 'Stand and Deliver' might be the best of the bunch. Beyond that, it's a fairly weak field...RI school district finds deficit after mistake AP: The East Providence school district will have a deficit for the last fiscal year because it failed to track up to 20 out-of-district special education students...

Cartoon: The 33 Types Of Students

by Alexander Russo

An oldie but a goodie from Life In Hell (precursor to The Simpsons).

Sacramento-area districts deal with problem math books - Sacramento News - Local and Breaking Sacramento News | Sacramento Bee

Sacramento-area districts deal with problem math books

Published: Thursday, Apr. 1, 2010 - 12:00 am | Page 1ABy Diana Lambert
dlambert@sacbee.com

Five times three equals five.

Second-graders at 79 Sacramento-area schools can find that equation in their new math books.

Other students using the math series are being asked to count the flies in the playground – only there's no picture of a playground on the page.

These are just a few of the errors in the Macmillan/McGraw-Hill math series that two area school districts – Sacramento City Unified and Folsom Cordova – started using this year in kindergarten through sixth-grade classrooms.

Among the others: lesson plans that don't connect to homework assignments; tests that don't match textbook lessons; student texts that don't parallel teachers' books; and mistakes in the answer keys.

"Teachers begin to question themselves," said Folsom Cordova teacher David Chun. "It develops a student mistrust in the program."

It's not unusual to find occasional mistakes in textbooks, according to educators. But the errors popping up in the Macmillan/McGraw-Hill series are unusually pervasive: In Folsom Cordova – where some teachers have students looking for the bloopers as a learning exercise – the fourth

I Have Returned | Intercepts

I Have Returned

It will take some time to get caught up, but in the meantime enjoy this video of staffers from NEA New Hampshire and various other Northeast and Eastern Seaboard NEA state affiliates picketing NEANH’s Delegate Assembly last Friday. Staff and union management have a large number of ongoing grievance disputes and are in the midst of a contentious contract negotiation. NEANH is also looking for a new executive director.

City Controller questions payments to charter-school accountant | Philadelphia Inquirer | 03/31/2010

City Controller questions payments to charter-school accountant

By Martha Woodall

Inquirer Staff Writer

An accountant was paid $700,561 over four years by three city charter schools and claimed to have worked more than 365 days in each year, City Controller Alan Butkovitz disclosed yesterday.
In addition, the accountant, Rhonda Sharif, collected $101,587 in 2008 for "unspecified" credit-card expenses from one of the schools, and authorized paying thousands of dollars for conferences and staff retreats but could provide no documentation for the expenses, Butkovitz said.
"These findings raise very troubling questions and serious concerns about oversight and financial accountability," Butkovitz said.
Charters, he said, operate under fewer rules than traditional public schools, "but in the end, these are taxpayers' dollars."
Records show that Sharif was the business manager of the Harambee Institute of Science and Technology Charter School in West Philadelphia at the same time she held that position at the Khepera Charter School in West Mount Airy and served as the chief financial officer of the Mathematics, Civics and Sciences Charter School at 447 N. Broad St.
Butkovitz said his office began examining operations of these and 10 other city charter schools and the School District's oversight of them in 2009 after The Inquirer reported allegations of financial mismanagement and a widening federal criminal probe of area charter schools.

14 Phila. schools to get radical makeovers

Fourteen low-performing Philadelphia public schools will undergo radical transformation in the fall, opening as charters or schools run directly by Superintendent Arlene Ackerman or outside managers.

Beloved Frankford High teacher gets Rachael Ray kitchen

Wilma Stephenson, whose dedication, tough love, and success with Frankford High School culinary students was immortalized in the 2009 documentary Pressure Cooker, was flabbergasted yesterday to learn that her kitchen classroom would get an extreme makeover, courtesy of the celebrity chef Rachael Ray.

Christie would add aid for teacher wage freeze | Philadelphia Inquirer | 03/31/2010

Christie would add aid for teacher wage freeze

By Rita Giordano

Inquirer Staff Writer

In an attempt to ramp up the pressure on New Jersey's teachers and the state's largest teachers' union, Gov. Christie yesterday offered additional aid to school districts whose teachers agree to a one-year wage freeze.
"I don't think it's wrong to say in these difficult times, that they step up and make some sacrifice," Christie said in a statement. "We're not talking about forgoing raises forever."
The New Jersey Education Association, which represents most of the state's teachers, was quick to attack the proposal. And although some school officials said they welcomed anything that would lessen the cuts their districts were facing, others - especially in smaller districts - said Christie's offer would not yield much beyond salary savings.
Some superintendents also expressed disapproval of Christie's continued hammering on teachers and the escalating battle between the governor and the NJEA.
"The NJEA didn't cause the $11 billion [budget shortfall]. Teachers are not the problem in our schools," said Gary Dentino, superintendent in Waterford Township. He said some of Christie's statements have belittled teachers, who he said work hard and often spend their own money on students.
"This lobbing of grenades back and forth has to stop," Dentino said.

An elementary PR strategy The Education Report

The Education Report

An elementary PR strategy

By Katy Murphy
Wednesday, March 31st, 2010 at 4:43 pm in Uncategorized
1 Comment

I wish more kids wrote news releases. I’ve been meaning to post this one from Katherine Irving, a fourth-grader from Hillcrest Elementary, for awhile now. She makes a pretty good case for educational opportunity, don’t you think?

Fourth graders at Hillcrest Elementary School have started a campaign for Pennies for Peace, a program made by the Central Asia Institute, otherwise known as the CAI. The CAI is a non-profit organization that helps to build schools all over Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Everyone knows that pennies don’t matter much in

Race To The Top's "Blackmail" While California Schools Suffer California Progress Report

California Progress Report

Race To The Top's "Blackmail" While California Schools Suffer

Posted on 31 March 2010

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By Robert Cruickshank

Calitics alum David Dayen takes a look at the recent announcement that Delaware and Tennessee have won a chunk of the "Race To The Top" funds awarded by Education Secretary Arne Duncan, and reaches a conclusion I wholly endorse:

I hope we can be honest about what this actually represents: blackmail. It forces states to change their education laws to fit particular notions about how to manage public education in America. And it does so at a time of crippling state budgets, when the Race to the Top funds mean the difference between thousands of teachers laid off or kept on the job, between class sizes expanding or shrinking. Basically, Arne Duncan and the White House are leveraging crisis to make preferred changes in education policy....

But the metrics for winning these stimulus funds comes down to "what Arne Duncan likes about education policy."...What we do know is that only one side of this debate is withholding funding until their preferred policy prescriptions are enacted. And they're doing it at a time when the biggest obstacle to education in America in the near-term can be measured in dollars and cents. Giant budget shortfalls in the states mean layoffs for teachers and worse opportunities for students, whether your state has a cap on charter schools or not.

I've been slamming Arne Duncan's shock doctrine attack on public education for some time now, calling on Sacramento to repeal policy changes recently enacted to pursue the Race To The Top funds, only for Secretary Duncan to deny California's grant application. I also similarly called on the Washington State legislature to reject proposals that would make that state eligible for RTTT funds.

It makes no sense for states to adopt unproven educational reforms merely because

Wednesday, March 31, 2010

New Marysville K-8 campus could reopen in 2012 in Southeast Portland | OregonLive.com

New Marysville K-8 campus could reopen in 2012 in Southeast Portland

By Kimberly Melton, The Oregonian

March 31, 2010, 5:01PM

Portland Public Schools plans to rebuild Marysville K-8 School and reopen the Southeast Portland campus in January 2012.

The Portland School Board's finance, audit and operations committee approved a resolution this afternoon that would allow the district to pursue design plans for the school, which was damaged by fire in November.

The fire destroyed about a third of the school building. The district expects to receive about $4.5 million from insurance to put toward the rebuild.

But staff members estimate that rebuilding and modernizing Marysville

Presidential Proclamation - Cesar Chavez Day | The White House

Presidential Proclamation - Cesar Chavez Day

by The White House

A PROCLAMATION
The rights and benefits working Americans enjoy today were not easily gained; they had to be won. It took generations of courageous men and women, fighting to secure decent working conditions, organizing to demand fair pay, and sometimes risking their lives. Some, like Cesar Estrada Chavez, made it the cause of their lives. Today, on what would have been his 83rd birthday, we celebrate Cesar's legacy and the progress achieved by all who stood alongside him.
Raised by a family of migrant farm workers, Cesar Chavez spent his youth moving across the American Southwest, working in fields and vineyards, and experiencing firsthand the hardships he would later crusade to abolish. At the time, farm workers were deeply impoverished and frequently exploited, exposed to very hazardous working conditions, and often denied clean drinking water, toilets, and other basic necessities. The union Cesar later founded with Dolores Huerta, the United Farm Workers of America (UFW), still addresses these issues today.
After serving in the United States Navy, Cesar Chavez became a community organizer and began his lifelong campaign for civil rights and social justice. Applying the principles of nonviolence, he empowered countless laborers, building a movement that grew into the UFW. He led workers in marches, strikes, and boycotts, focusing our Nation's attention on their plight and using the power of picket lines to win union contracts.
"The love for justice that is in us is not only the best part of our being, but it is also the most true to our nature," Cesar Chavez once said. Since our Nation's earliest days of independence, we have struggled to perfect the ideals of equal justice and opportunity enshrined in our founding documents. As Cesar suggests, justice may be true to our nature, but as history teaches us, it will not prevail unless we defend its cause.
Few Americans have led this charge so tirelessly, and for so many, as Cesar Chavez. To this day, his rallying cry -- "Sí, se puede," or "Yes, we can," -- inspires hope and a spirit of possibility in people around the world. His movement strengthened our country, and his vision lives on in the organizers and social entrepreneurs who still empower their neighbors to improve their communities.
NOW, THEREFORE, I, BARACK OBAMA, President of the United States of America, by virtue of the authority vested in me by the Constitution and the laws of the United States, do hereby proclaim March 31, 2010, as Cesar Chavez Day. I call upon all Americans to observe this day with appropriate service, community, and education programs to honor Cesar Chavez's enduring legacy.
IN WITNESS WHEREOF, I have hereunto set my hand this thirty-first day of March, in the year of our Lord two thousand ten, and of the Independence of the United States of America the two hundred and thirty-fourth.

BARACK OBAMA

The Educated Guess � Remembering Jaime Escalante

Remembering Jaime Escalante

Posted in Uncategorized

The anniversary of the birth of Cesar Chavez is a fitting time to celebrate the life of Jaime Escalante, who died yesterday at the age of 79. In the ’80s, before the achievement gap was coined but when it was just as real, Escalante inspired students at Garfield High in Los Angeles to take — and pass the exam in — AP calculus. The spirit was infectious; within a few years, significant percentages of Latinos at the school were taking a range of AP courses. In 1987, more Garfield students took AP calculus exams than all but four high schools in America.
(Read more and comment on this post)

Thompson: NAEP Exclusion Rate Ridiculousness This Week In Education

This Week In Education

Thompson: NAEP Exclusion Rate Ridiculousness

by john thompson

EdWeek's Catherine Gewertz raises the question of whether Kentucky’s success in being the only state to increase NAEP reading scores between 2007 and 2009 deserves an asterisk.
Sure enough, Kentucky excluded 48% of its 4^th grade students on IEPs, and 55% of its 8^th grade special education students. This contrasts with the national exclusion rate of 29% for 4^th graders, and 28% of 8^th graders on IEPs.
The same question might be asked about the District of Columbia. The Washington Post's Jay Mathews recently noted that "A 5-point score jump (in NAEP 4th grade scores) at a time when the national scores are flat is more than enough to keep

Adult education in Oakland faces budget cuts, layoffs – Oakland North -- North Oakland News, Food, Art and Events.

Adult education in Oakland faces budget cuts, layoffs

Students in one of Oakland's GED classes offered by the Students in a GED class offered by Oakland's Adult Education program listen as thier instructor explains parallel structure.

By: Lillian R. MongeauMarch 31, 2010 – 11:33 am

In Russia, Murod Lutfiyev was a veterinarian. In Oakland, he is a laid-off parking attendant taking a General Education Development, or GED, course in a spacious classroom at a converted Parks and Recreation building in downtown Oakland. His change in status has not dimmed his hopes for a successful future in America.

“I want to improve my English and work here in my field,” Lutfiyev said from the front row of Carolyn Chin’s two and a half hour GED course.

“Every day I am humbled by your effort,” Chin, who has taught adult education in Oakland for over 15 years, told the class after Lutfiyev explained his story. “I have so much respect for what you all are doing.”

The class of 17 smiled at her approval and some fiddled nervously with their English grammar worksheets. Though a few students had dropped out of high school in the US and were now returning to complete their degrees, 13 members of the class said they had immigrated to Oakland

A Question On Student Independent Reading About Gangs | Larry Ferlazzo's Websites of the Day...

A Question On Student Independent Reading About Gangs

Filed under reading, teacher resources

At our school, we place a strong emphasis on student independent reading and choosing books that interest them.

Katie Hull, my extraordinarily talented colleague and co-author of a future book on teaching writers to English Language Learners, raised an interesting question to me last week related to this practice. We’re interested in getting responses from other teachers.

Reading books about gang life is always a favorite among our students — both those who at risk for gang involvement and those who just find the books engaging. The books we have in our classroom libraries are written by former gang members (for example, by Luis Rodriguez) and have an anti-gang message.

However, Katie’s concern (and I think it’s a legitimate one) is that the ones who are being tempted by gang life may ignore the positive

Statement by the President on the Passing of Jaime Escalante | The White House

Statement by the President on the Passing of Jaime Escalante

by The White House

I was saddened to hear about the passing of Jaime Escalante today. While most of us got to know him through the movie that depicted his work teaching inner-city students calculus, the students whose lives he changed remain the true testament to his life’s work. Throughout his career Jaime opened the doors of success and higher education for his students one by one, and proved that where a person came from did not have to determine how far they could go. He instilled knowledge in his students, but more importantly he helped them find the passion and the will to fulfill their potential. Jaime’s story became famous. But he represented countless, valiant teachers throughout our country whose great works are known only to the young people whose lives they change. Michelle and I offer our condolences to Jaime’s family, and to all those who knew him and whose lives he touched.

The Perimeter Primate: On “So Much Reform, So Little Change”

On “So Much Reform, So Little Change”

by The Perimeter Primate

“After spending more than thirty years working in urban education, I have finally found a lucid description of many of the things I experienced as a classroom teacher and administrator. Hopefully the education community will use Dr. Payne's observations and insights in their efforts to improve urban education.” (Amazon reviewer, T. Tenny on "So Much Reform, So Little Change: The Persistence of Failure in Urban Schools" by Charles Payne)

In an effort to promote this book, I offer you a few excerpts from the first chapter. The bolds are mine.

Chapter 1: Dimensions of Demoralization

If we take organizational morale to be “the enthusiasm and persistence with which a member of a group engages in the prescribed activities of that group” (Manning 1991), the fact that an institution needs to squelch and marginalize its most energetic, most enthusiastic, or best-prepared members tells us these are demoralized institutions…
All this stands behind clocks that don’t get fixed and broken windows that don’t get repaired. Failed institutions make the simplest things difficult. The problems manifest themselves in so many ways that they may obscure the fact that many of the discrete problems are either generated by or reinforced by the sheer lack of connectedness among people. Giving up on the institutional mission goes hand in glove with giving up on one’s colleagues. The denizens of demoralized social spaces do what they have to but without little heart or hope. (p. 23)

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Whenever we talk about the social climate in inner-city schools, we need to make a special effort

So Much Reform, So Little Change: The Persistence of Failure in Urban Schools (Paperback)

~ Charles M. Payne (Author)

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