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Monday, April 26, 2010

Education - Everything you need to know about the world of education.

Education - Everything you need to know about the world of education.

Opera star finds racial harmony in Suitland H.S.


Tre'Von Bray, left, Joey Baker and Evelyn Kenner help Djuan Wigfall prepare for a performance at Suitland High. (Linda Davidson-TWP)













VALERIE STRAUSS
The Answer Sheet
A School Survival Guide for Parents (And Everyone Else)
Posted at 6:20 AM ET, 04/26/2010

Vote on Obama's commencement speech contest

Starting today the public can rate the six public schools named as finalists in a White House competition that offers up President Obama as the prize. Obama will give the commencement speech at the winning school.
Posted by Valerie Strauss | Permalink | Comments (1)
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JAY MATHEWS
Class Struggle
What's Right and Wrong With Our Schools
Posted at 10:00 PM ET, 04/25/2010

Explosive book for a new teacher generation

This new cohort of educators is frustrated with traditional teacher training. They think most education schools are too fond of theory (favorite ed school philosopher John Dewey died in 1952 before many of their parents were born) and too casual about preparing them for the practical challenges of teaching impoverished children.
Posted by Jay Mathews | Permalink | Comments (4)
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Ed Buzz: The Nation

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EducationNews.org - EducationNewsToday

EducationNews.org - EducationNewsToday
EducationNews.org
A Global Leading News Source
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April 26, 2010
EducationNews Today

As Recession Ebbs, Heavy Debt Threatens U.S. Higher Education
4.26.10 - As the nation's economy struggles to gain steady footing, experts say accumulating debt threatens the long-term financial security of U.S. colleges and universities in the recession's aftermath.

Traditional schools focus on the basics
4.26.10 - Those include teaching techniques where students sit in rows and educators teach to the entire class instead of breaking into groups. All students are expected to learn the same things at the same pace....

Jay Mathews: Explosive book for a new teacher generation
4.26.10 - This new cohort of educators is frustrated with traditional teacher training. They think most education schools are too fond of theory (favorite ed school philosopher John Dewey died in 1952 before many of their parents were born) and too casual about preparing them for the practical challenges of teaching impoverished children....

Suit over how to grade students pits districts against Texas
4.26.10 - Eleven Texas school districts will ask an Austin judge today if they can keep cutting a break to students who badly fail courses despite a new law mandating truthful grading. ..

Resistance to ROTC on elite campuses eases
WASHINGTON - Administrators at Harvard, Brown, and other elite universities are softening their resistance to the Reserve Officers' Training Corps more than four decades after the military scholarship programs were driven from campus in the face of fierce antiwar sentiment ...

EdNews Reports

Texas Gives the Boot to Liberal Social Studies Bias

4.25.10 - After three days of contentious meetings, Texas State Board of Education (SBOE) members gave preliminary approval to revised social studies standards they say are intended to rein in the liberal bias of teachers and academics
Commentaries

An Interview with Dan Redford: What's Going on in Shanghai?
4.26.10 - Michael F. Shaughnessy - Shanghai is hosting the world's biggest World Expo ever, and I am serving as a U.S. Student Ambassador. I work at the USA Pavilion, and am living in state of the art apartments that have been erected within the last year to serve as the Expo Village.

The nature of this evil is arrogance - the kind that has a deadly outcome

Ernie Hunt's primary intention when he wrote Paris Under Siege (Publish America) was to bring attention to the issue of human slavery; in particular, the plight of some Muslim women....

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Rise & Shine: State tests that start today are harder, officials say | GothamSchools

Rise & Shine: State tests that start today are harder, officials say | GothamSchools

Rise & Shine: State tests that start today are harder, officials say

by Philissa Cramer
  • Many districts want to switch to performance-based layoffs, which could still cost young teachers. (Times)
  • The business practices of the country’s largest for-profit charter school company raise red flags. (Times)
  • A profile of Harlem Success CEO Eva Moskowitz explains why she wants to mobilize parents. (NY Mag)
  • State education officials say fewer students will pass this year’s state tests, which start today. (Post)
  • Test prep helps Brooklyn’s PS 172 post high test scores despite having lots of needy students. (Times)
  • Race to the Top’s second round has brought a new round of union-state skirmishes. (Wall Street Journal)
  • State Sen. John Sampson wants charter schools to have a certain number of special ed students. (Post)
  • Three up-and-coming Harlem politicians are weighing runs against State Sen. Bill Perkins this fall. (Post)
  • Mayor Bloomberg criticized Perkins for opposing charter schools when he benefited from choice. (Post)
  • The Post says it can’t wait for someone to officially throw his hat in the ring to unseat Perkins.
  • Families at University Heights High School in the Bronx continue to protest the school’s move. (Times)
  • Global Tech Prep, a new school in Harlem, is using technology to engage its students. (Gotham Gazette)
  • KIPP AMP Charter School wants out of the teachers union after joining last year. (GothamSchools, Post)
  • The city’s plan to close the rubber rooms by December has some big logical flaws. (GothamSchools)
  • The state and city teachers unions spent nearly $5 billion lobbying in 2009, down from $6.6 billion. (Post)
  • More students from Queens’ PS 15 say a recently arrested teacher molested them, too. (Daily News)
  • The Daily News says ed schools teach only “gobbeldegooky theory” by people such as “Thomas Dewey.”
  • A tradition at Stuyvesant High School holds that students plan over-the-top prom proposals. (Post)
  • Students who attended the high school fair for unplaced students faced only limited choices. (NY1)
  • A math prodigy at Stuyvesant has been accepted to elite colleges — and he’s only in tenth grade. (Post)
  • A student at Christopher Columbus High School in the Bronx died suddenly during gym class. (NY1)
  • A recent fight at a Bronx high school building dominated a speakout for Bronx teenagers last week. (NY1)
  • Students enjoy competing in Double Dutch jumprope, the city schools’ newest varsity sport. (WNYC)
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NorthJersey.com: Schools create a community for teachers

NorthJersey.com: Schools create a community for teachers

Harrington Park is using Professional Learning Communities in its school.
Monday, April 26, 2010
BY MIKE CURLEY
THE RECORD
STAFF WRITER
Harrington Park School Principal Brian Gatens recently discussed Professional Learning Communities, which are designed to improve the learning environment for teachers and students.
Harrington Park School Principal Brian Gatens, center, at a 'PLC' meeting with professional developmental coach Patty McGee, left, and teachers Allison O'Brien, Kim Niland and Katie Rausa.
ROY CARATOZZOLO III/STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER
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Harrington Park School Principal Brian Gatens, center, at a 'PLC' meeting with professional developmental coach Patty McGee, left, and teachers Allison O'Brien, Kim Niland and Katie Rausa.
What are Professional Learning Communities?
The PLCs were a state initiative that the Northern Valley has held onto strongly. Ultimately, they're a way of organizing teachers in such a way that they work together in small communities. The old model treated teachers as an 'individual subcontractor.' The PLC model gets rid of that isolation, and teachers coordinate with one another. The teachers still have individual curriculums, but the focus is on student learning, and how they can get students to learn more.
How do the PLCs help students?
What benefits them the most is that teachers look at the student data, and tailor instructional choices based on student feedback. They're able to see how students are performing in class, and modify their instruction based on that.
Data assessment is taken of the students, and the teachers analyze it. They see what students are doing well, and who is having trouble, and re-teach as necessary. We're making a point of looking at student data, and how that will modify teachers' choices.
It's really taken away the idea of children being anonymous. The teachers know the children very well, and can teach better. It's improved the quality of instruction and improved communication between the professionals.
Is there coordination between the different subjects?
We've built in a common planning time between teachers. The biggest thing with PLCs is time. If you can't
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Sacramento Press / Late Sac State alum wins journalism award

Sacramento Press / Late Sac State alum wins journalism award

Late Sac State alum wins journalism award


Jamie Gonzales was a good journalist and a better friend. Her tragic death at age 25 as a result of colorectal cancer never seemed fair to those who knew her.
Despite her short career in journalism, Jamie made an impact, and her work was recognized last week when the California Newspaper Publishers Association awarded her first place for column writing in its annual Better Newspapers Contest.
Her column/blog series focused on her “experiences and struggles with rectal cancer.”
Jamie graduated from California State University, Sacramento, with a degree in government-journalism in 2007. She spent some time as an intern at The Auburn Journal before working as a reporter at the Elk Grove Citizen, covering the city's government.
When she was diagnosed with cancer, the Citizen editors let her stay on, enabling her to continue doing what she loved. And when it got so bad that she couldn’t go into work, they allowed her to blog from home. In a time when newspapers are cutting every cost possible in order to stay solvent, I thought that concrete gesture of support was really special.
I know Jamie did.
I met Jamie during my first semester at the Sacramento State campus newspaper, The State Hornet. At the time, she was the photo editor. I was surprised when she made the transition into reporting, and then eventually became the breaking news editor.
It’s uncommon for a student journalist to do so much and actually do it well, but Jamie had a knack for the business. She was even writing a fantasy novel in her spare time.
“It's not hyperbole to say her work helped usher The State Hornet website
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Jerry Large | Saving the Batwa with art | Seattle Times Newspaper

Jerry Large | Saving the Batwa with art | Seattle Times Newspaper

Saving the Batwa with art

Marsha Conn plans to help Batwa pygmies make art for profit. The Batwa need the income because their old ways of making a living have been...
Jerry Large
Seattle Times staff columnist
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Marsha Conn plans to help Batwa pygmies make art for profit.
The Batwa need the income because their old ways of making a living have been denied them. Worse, they have to reshape their culture to fit a new existence.
In the early 1990s they were moved out of their homes so that gorillas could have the mountain forests they once shared.
Conn is a retired teacher from Seattle whose acquaintance with the Batwa came about by chance, as is often the case with significant events.
Chance is also the way she became a teacher.
She told me she was approaching graduation from Boston University when her parents asked, 'Well, now what are you going to do for a living?' She hadn't given it a thought. So she took her English lit degree and applied to graduate school. She emerged an English teacher.
Conn taught in Chicago schools for 20 years before moving to Seattle in 1986. She had always integrated art work into her teaching and did more of that here including teaching other teachers how to do it before settling in at Seattle's Hawthorne Elementary School.
She loves traveling and nearly every summer during her teaching career, she would take off to see some new part of the world.
A few years ago, a friend bid at an auction on a trip for four to Bolivia to benefit Renton-based Smiles Forever, which trains girls to do dental work.
Conn went along and did an art project for the young girls.
A show at the Columbia City Gallery of portraits done by the Bolivians sold out on opening night and the

Students run 5K to raise cash for fitness education

Approximately 1,000 students, teachers, parents and school-board members — most from the Seattle School District — helped raise money for physical-education programs Sunday at the fifth annual Boardwalk 5K Run & Walk, which began and ended at Husky Stadium.

Battery-operated car is one high-schooler's senior project

A Spokane County high-school student his turned an old Geo Metro into a completely electric vehicle. He will be submitting it as his senior culminating project.


Surprise tucked into state budget bill: a panel to plan school-district mergers

The state budget isn't all dollars and cents this year. Buried deep in the budget bill passed this month is a $250,000 line item to create a school consolidation commission.


Study: Better teachers help children read faster

Genetics play the biggest role in determining how fast a child learns to read, but a good teacher can make a measurable difference as well, according to a study released Thursday.
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Sex Tourist Professor Scrubs His Site � Student Activism

Sex Tourist Professor Scrubs His Site � Student Activism

Sex Tourist Professor Scrubs His Site

by Angus Johnston
Cal State Northridge Economics professor Kenneth Ng has shut down his website Big Baby Kenny in the wake of the site’s outing in the media, but the pages live on in Google’s cache.
The site, which promised to show readers “how to get banged better, cheaper, and more efficiently in the Thailand Girl Scene,” has been known to university administrators for months. Ng was initially defiant when approached by reporters last week, but backpedaled in the face of public outrage. University provost Harry Hellebrand released a statement on Friday thanking Ng “for his reflection and removal of the site.”
Although Ng says he “never encountered any child prostitution” in Thailand, and denies that his site was a sex tourism guide, his own writings, now deleted, reveal these claims to be lies. Ng makes a number of references to encountering girls whom he believed to be underage at sites of prostitution, sites for which he provided directions and GPS coordinates to his readers.
Warning: The excerpts provided below include depictions of child prostitution and the physical abuse of women.
Pages that have been taken down include…
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