The Nov. 2 deadline for potential Renaissance Schools managers to respond to a Request for Qualifications for turnaround teams has passed, with District officials saying they are in “good shape” based on the submissions they have received.
“We’re still compiling [the responses],” said Diane Castelbuono, the District’s associate superintendent for strategic programs.“There is a nice mix of national and local [providers.]”
When "Casey A." graduated from high school at the Challenger Memorial Youth Center, he couldn't read a single word on his diploma.
"He didn't know what a diploma was, even though he was handed one," Mark D. Rosenbaum, chief counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California, said Thursday.
"And when we asked him where he wanted to have lunch to celebrate, he said `Denny's' because there were pictures on the menu and that was the only place he could order."
Hundreds of youths like Casey A. at the Lancaster youth camp will now be targeted for improved educational efforts under the settlement of a class-action lawsuit filed by the ACLU and other public interest law firms.
The groups sued the county in January alleging the county's largest juvenile detention facility had failed to
Acting Education Commissioner Rochelle Hendricks, left, announced Wednesday she will not be attending the teacher union's convention, headed by NJEA President Barbara Keshishian, right.ATLANTIC CITY — At least one member of the state Board of Education today questioned whether Gov. Chris Christie pressured his education chief to reject an invitation to speak at the annual New Jersey Education Association convention in Atlantic City.
The accusation centered on a letter acting Commissioner Rochelle Hendricks wrote to NJEA President Barbara Keshishian this week to "respectfully decline" the union’s offer to address its members. Hendricks cited what she called the union’s lack of interest in working with the governor on "reforms that put results for our children first."
Some believe those weren’t the commissioner’s thoughts, but rather those of the governor, who has been locked in a messy and ongoing battle with the state’s largest teachers union.
"She may have signed (the letter), but I honestly
It might be a health-conscious parent's worst nightmare: McDonald's, home of the 740-calorie Double Quarter Pounder with Cheese, teaching their child about nutrition. But the nightmare is really happening. The fast-food giant recently hosted a workshop to teach six-graders from Stratford, CT about the benefits of eating vegetables and making healthy choices.
In McDonald's terms, that means something like this:
"I learned that McDonald's can be very healthy for you if you make the right choices. I usually have lots of
Many years ago I attended an education Conference in upstate New York and saw, as I remember, a Keynote speaker who was a superintendent of an upstate district. He told the audience of an experience he had with a business owner in his region. The businessman told the superintendent that the students being graduated were not coming to him with the skills needed for his industry. He invited the superintendent to visit his plant and see the problem he faced matching the needed skills with the skills being taught. He then told the superintendent that he couldn’t even hire Lathe operators from the high school graduates.
The Superintendent visited the industrial arts teacher the next day, and asked if the proper use of the lathe was taught in his class. The superintendent even looked over the lathe that students used to do their work. It was an
Last month, I wrote a post titled “The Research Question that Wasn’t Asked,” in which I questioned whether many of us have overstated the connection between research on teachers with advanced degrees and compensation policies that link compensation to advanced degrees.
I pointed out in my post that:
Studies of the association between different levels of experience and the association between having a master’s degree or not and student achievement gains have never attempted to ask about the potential labor market consequences of stopping providing additional compensation for teachers choosing to further their education – even if only for personal interest – or stopping providing any guarantee that a teacher’s compensation will grow at a predictable rate over time throughout the teacher’s career.
Many, like Rotherham but even more so, NCTQ, present this as a “research given.” That clearly,
The Post-Election Education Landscape: Vouchers Up, WEAC Down by: Alan J. Borsuk
Let’s assume it’s good-bye to the 22,500-student cap on the voucher enrollment in Milwaukee. Will
The city will receive nearly $20 million in federal funds for the 11 city schools it hopes to “transform” with longer school days and experiments in teacher training.
The city has been expecting this money since April, when the federal government gave New York State $300 million to turn around the state’s “persistently lowest achieving” schools. A total of 34 of the schools on the state’s list are in New York City, and more city schools are expected to be added to the list when the state updates it in the coming weeks.
The Department of Education was eligible for $2 million for each of the schools on the state’s list, but this year the city chose to only apply for funds for 11 of them.
For these schools, the city chose the “transformation” model of school improvement, the least severe of four
PARIS — The U.S. education secretary is hopeful that this week's Republican election victories won't derail ambitious school reforms, which he argues are crucial to keeping up in an ever-smarter global economy.
"We used to be at the top of the world" in education rankings, Arne Duncan told The Associated Press in Paris on Thursday. "People think we're still there, but we're not."
In an interview, he said the "absolutely unacceptable" U.S. high school dropout rate — a quarter of students drop out or don't finish on time — "produces the effect of a permanent recession" because of lost productivity.
Duncan says he's relieved the elections are over and is "very hopeful" that the new Congress will approve the funding he wants to turn around poor schools and encourage better teacher performance. "I have a good relationship with (incoming House Speaker) John Boehner, I've known Boehner for years, I look forward to continuing to work with him."
Duncan has been working with Democratic and Republican legislators for months on getting the Elementary and Secondary Education Act reauthorized, and said the bipartisan discussions have been a model of civility. "We're looking forward to reauthorizing and hopefully moving pretty quickly," he said, though gave no timeframe.
He was similarly upbeat though vague about the future of Race to the Top, a program of federa
A day after an election that saw most of the union-backed candidates win their races, New York City teachers union president Michael Mulgrew was still celebrating. “We had a very good night,” he told me.
In total, 157 of the 170 candidates the United Federation of Teachers supported were victorious on Tuesday, union officials said.
Mulgrew said he was pleased to see former City Councilman Tony Avella take Republican Frank Padavan’s seat in the State Senate. A month before the election, when polls showed Avella was down by over two dozen points, Mulgrew said he sent union members to campaign in northeast Queens. Avella, who also ran and lost in the city’s mayoral race last year, ended up with 53 percent of the vote.
“It was fun because everyone told us we wouldn’t win,” Mulgrew said.
Union-backed candidates lost in 13 races. Among them was Democratic Congressman Michael McMahon, who
State officials this week unveiled the ratings for 2,080 schools or programs under the Education Accountability Act of 2009. Only those ratings agreed upon by state and district officials have been released. Another 99 campuses are still being reviewed.
Ratings possible are Performance, Improvement, Priority Improvement and Turnaround. To learn more about the
Tuesday evening, as the polls were closing in most of the country, a young black Milwaukeean named Andre Douglas tweeted that only 4.7% of blacks had voted in his home state. It’s still not quite clear where he got this incorrect information — my best guess is that he or someone he knew misread a report that only 4.7% of Wisconsin voters had been African American — but the stat spread like wildfire on Twitter that night, quickly losing its connection to Wisconsin and becoming a “fact” about the country as a whole.
The claim was greeted with skepticism by many, but the doubters were overwhelmed by the believers. The story was repeated so often that it — combined with the news that the US Senate would be losing its only black member — turned the term “African Americans” into a Twitter trending topic for much of Wednesday.
Why did this false claim, first made by a guy with fewer than three hundred followers, blow up so big? Three reasons, I think…
First, it couldn’t be easily debunked.
You might think that how many African Americans voted in this week’s election would be a fact you could
Teach for America, Inc. was back on the agenda at last night’s Seattle Public School Board meeting.
The district already has an undated (draft? final?) contract between TFA, Inc. and Seattle Public Schools ready to be signed by TFA, Inc.’s Managing Director Janis Ortega and Seattle Superintendent Maria Goodloe-Johnson.
Community input? Zero.
Public demand for short-term new college grads with only five weeks of training to teach in the district’s public schools? Zero.
Seattle Public Schools have laid off teachers two years in a row. There is no shortage of qualified teachers
