Wednesday, October 20, 2010

In wake of Tyler Clementi suicide, Facebook teams with support groups to combat cyberbullying | NJ.com

In wake of Tyler Clementi suicide, Facebook teams with support groups to combat cyberbullying

Published: Wednesday, October 20, 2010, 11:54 AM Updated: Wednesday, October 20, 2010, 11:56 AM

The Star-Ledger Continuous News Desk
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FacebookFacebook is teaming with several organizations to combat cyberbullying after Tyler Clementi's death.

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Less than one month after Rutgers freshman Tyler Clementi committed suicide after his gay sexual encounter was transmitted over the Internet,Facebook is partnering with MTV and the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) to form a “Network of Support” for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender teens, according to a report on Mashable.com.

The network aims to combat cyberbullying by providing gay teens and their parents with information, resources and support on how teens can protect themselves online, block bullies and report harassment, the

City could release individual teacher ratings as soon as today | GothamSchools

City could release individual teacher ratings as soon as today

by Anna Phillips

The debate that begin in Los Angeles over whether it is ethical to release public school teachers’ effectiveness scores has made its way to New York City. The city’s Department of Education may give the ratings, which are based solely on test scores, to reporters today.

According to sources familiar with the discussion, city officials are debating with the teachers union over whether to release the scores with or without teachers’ names attached. The union is also considering whether to sue the city in order to halt the release.

The release would cover all 12,000 city teachers who have value-added reports, which measure a teacher’s

Shanker Blog � More On What "Superman" Left Out

MORE ON WHAT “SUPERMAN” LEFT OUT

by Diane Ravitch

Our guest author today is Diane Ravitch, Research Professor of Education at New York University and an historian of education. In addition, she is a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C.. Her latest book is The Death and Life of the Great American School System.

In my recent article for the New York Review of Books about “Waiting for Superman,” I praised the SEED Charter

Yong Zhao � Blog Archive � Cargo Cult Science: McKinsey’s Report on Teacher Recruitment

Cargo Cult Science: McKinsey’s Report on Teacher Recruitment

20 OCTOBER 2010 9 NO COMMENT

The late Nobel Prize winning physicist Richard Feynman once criticized some educational and psychological studies as cargo cult science:

In the South Seas there is a cargo cult of people. During the war they saw airplanes land with lots of good materials, and they want the same thing to happen now. So they’ve arranged to make things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head like headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas—he’s the controller—and they wait for the airplanes to land. They are doing everything right. The form is perfect. It looks exactly the way it looked before. But it doesn’t work. No airplanes land. So I call these things (some educational and psychological studies) cargo cult science, because they follow all the apparent precepts and forms of scientific investigation, but they are missing something essential, because the planes don’t land (Richard Feynman & Ralph Leighton, 1985, Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman, New York, Norton,

The Answer Sheet - The rich irony in Virginia’s history textbook error

The rich irony in Virginia’s history textbook error

There is rich historic irony in the news that a textbook given to Virginia’s fourth-graders wrongly claims that thousands of African Americans fought for the South during the Civil War: The process by which textbooks are adopted by some states was initiated after Southern states decided they did not want children reading the North’s version of the conflict. As reported in today's Washington Post by my colleague Kevin Sieff, the book “Our Virginia: Past and Present,” used by Virginia students for the first time last month, was written by an author who is not a trained historian and who said she found the information about black Confederate solders on the Internet. The author, Joy Masoff, has penned other works including "Oh Yuck! The Encyclopedia of Everything Nasty" and "Oh Yikes! History’s Grossest Moments." (You can’t make up this stuff.)

An Awkward Moment for School Reformers :: Frederick M. Hess

An Awkward Moment for School Reformers

by Frederick M. Hess • Oct 20, 2010 at 10:50 am
Cross-posted from Education Week

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Yesterday, Gwinnett County, Georgia, claimed the Broad Prize in a classy awards ceremony at New York City's Museum of Modern Art. The event featured New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and NBC anchor Brian Williams talking about the vital role of school reform, and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan naming the winner.

Unmentioned by all, and for good reason, was that Gwinnett is in the middle of a very unreformish attempt to prohibit the Georgia Charter Schools Commission (GCSC) from approving or funding charter schools. Awk-ward....

Gwinnett has been one of several districts suing the state since 2007 over the GCSC's "imposition" of charter schools. This is especially awkward in the case of charters like Ivy Preparatory Academy, an all-girls charter

This Week In Education: Campaign '10: Stand For Children In Illinois

Campaign '10: Stand For Children In Illinois

by Alexander Russo

Stand For Children is joining DFER in finding centrist Dems and Republicans state-level races in places like Illinois where it recently doled out more than half a million dollars to nine candidates (six of them Democrats) according to this Progress Illinois story (A New Player In State Education Politics). The

New Jersey's Christie Seeks to Hire Rhee, Report Says - State EdWatch - Education Week

New Jersey's Christie Seeks to Hire Rhee, Report Says

by Sean Cavanagh

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie is courting District of Columbia schools chancellor Michelle Rhee to become his state's commissioner of education, according to a report.

Rhee, who announced that she would resign from her current post last week, has voiced reservations about whether family concerns would allow her to take the New Jersey job, according to a story on the Star-Ledger, a

Government as venture capitalist? | The Education Report

Government as venture capitalist?

By Katy Murphy
Tuesday, October 19th, 2010 at 11:01 pm in school reform.

On the Marketplace radio program this evening, “Freakonomics” co-author Steve Dubner compared the Obama administration’s Race to the Top grant competition to innovations and competitive prizes in the private sector.

After talking about the X Prize (slogan: Revolution Through Competition) and Google’s practice of giving engineers a day each week to try out their own ideas — even though most of them flop — Dubner played a tape of the following statement and asked the host, Kai Ryssdal, to guess who the speaker was:

Well we’re fundamentally trying to change the business we’re in and we’re trying to drive innovation rather than being in this compliance-driven bureaucracy. And the idea

What Works' Broadens Its Research Standards Education Week: From the Wires

Education Week: From the Wires

FROM THE WIRES

Virtual Summer School Program Paying Learning Dividends

The South Carolina county school district's first Virtual Summer School program helped students retain knowledge during the summer months.

October 20, 2010

School Board Lawyer: Don't Text During Meetings

Members of the Wake County school board should not send text messages, instant messages or e-mails about board business while meetings are in progress, the panel's attorney lawyer said today.

October 20, 2010

Panel Proposes Series of Reforms to Close State's Achievement Gap

October 20, 2010

Report: Ex-D.C. Schools Chief Offered N.J. Job

October 20, 2010

Wis. Group Demands Tenn. School Cease Game Prayers

October 20, 2010

Report: Many CCRI students unprepared for college

October 20, 2010

79 Minnesota School Districts Seek Levy Approval

October 20, 2010

Va board specifies what school fees are allowed

October 19, 2010

1000's demand more money for Austrian universities

October 19, 2010

Holocaust study mandatory in southern Brazil city

October 19, 2010

Neb. education workers taking 240 unpaid days off

October 19, 2010

O'Donnell questions separation of church

October 19, 2010

NH shows off school bus safety features

October 19, 2010

Quarter of DC students receive dinner at school

October 19, 2010

Vt. schools bans breast cancer bracelets

October 19, 2010

Tulsa School Board Compromises on Private-School Scholarships

The Tulsa school board voted Monday to process six applications that have already been received for private-school scholarships for special education students but turn away all future applicants.

October 19, 2010

What Works' Broadens Its Research Standards

The federal clearinghouse goes beyond 'gold standard' research and sets standards for accepting other types of studies. (October 20, 2010)

Gates Foundation Turns Attention to Ed. Tech.

For the first time in nearly a decade, the foundation unveils an initiative in the educational technology arena. (October 20, 2010)

DIGITAL DIRECTIONS

Schools Combine Netbooks, Open Source

(October 20, 2010)

Panel Proposes Series of Reforms to Close State's Achievement Gap

(October 20, 2010)

Gwinnett County, Ga., Wins $1M Broad Prize

(October 19, 2010) | Comments (4)

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FEDERAL POLICY

President Barack Obama is introduced by Javier Garcia of Brownsville, Texas, before signing the Executive Order on the White House Initiative on Educational Excellence for Hispanics on Oct. 19 at the White House.

—Charles Dharapak/AP

Obama Signs Order Renewing Hispanic Education Initiative

Dropout prevention, the path to higher education, and the DREAM Act all shared the spotlight at a Washington summit culminating a months-long listening tour on the topic.(October 19, 2010)

Virtual Summer School Program Paying Learning Dividends

(October 20, 2010)

Dan Choi Re-Enlists in the Army in Times Square: DURING & AFTER

Schools Matter: Ravitch Review of WfS Breaks Long Silence on NAEP's Fanciful Cut Points

Ravitch Review of WfS Breaks Long Silence on NAEP's Fanciful Cut Points

by Jim Horn

The entire review is well worth the reading, but the clip below is central, especially since it breaks Ravitch's long silence regarding the incredibly unrealistic NAEP cut scores that she helped to establish in the early 90s, along with Chester Finn and others who subsequently used the unrealistic cut scores to demonize public education.

As Richard Rothstein points out in Grading Schools . . . (pp. 59-65), the National Academy of Sciences, no less, had grave reservations about the NAEP cut points in 1991, but Ravitch and her standardista friends kept pushing the unrealistic goals. As Bracey subsequently pointed out repeatedly to little effect, if the children in other countries who are cleaning our clocks test-wise were to take the NAEP, they would not be proficient, either.

Mike Klonsky's SmallTalk Blog: Rahm: Taking the public out of public education

Rahm: Taking the public out of public education

by Mike Klonsky

Chicago mayoral hopeful Rahm Emanuel, is kind of making it up as he goes along on school reform. If he wins the election, he will replace Mayor Daley as the school system's new autocrat. Although he appears to know next to nothing about public education, he will get to pick a new group of bankers and real estate speculators to replace those currently on the board of education. They in turn will choose a new C.E.O. (that's what we call the superintendent these days) to replace Ron Huberman. It will likely be a manager from another city department, who is a machine loyalist and who

D.C. Schools Insider - Is Rhee heading northeast--or west?

Is Rhee heading northeast--or west?

The Star-Ledger of New Jersey reports this morning that outgoing D.C. schools Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee is "seriously considering" an offer from the governor to become state education chief.

Gov. Chris Christie (R) has been on the hunt for an education commissioner since he fired his last chief, Bret Schundler, over bungling of the state's Race to the Top application that may have cost New Jersey a shot at hundreds of millions of dollars.

But where Rhee wants to move after she leaves the D.C. schools job this month is still unclear.

After her resignation announcement last week, Rhee did a round of interviews with national press, including "Good Morning America," where she told George Stephanopoulos that she's looking for a high-impact

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Wednesday, October 20, 2010