Saturday, December 11, 2010

'Parent Trigger' Supporters Face Intimidation Tactics in School Reform Battle in Compton, Antonio Villaraigosa Jumps into Fray - Los Angeles News - The Informer

Parent Trigger' Supporters Face Intimidation Tactics in School Reform Battle in Compton, Antonio Villaraigosa Jumps into Fray

By Patrick Range McDonald, Fri., Dec. 10 2010 @ 3:04PM

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Categories: Education, politics

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Ted Soqui

McKinley Elementary School in Compton

UPDATE: L.A. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa says school reform in Compton "isn't about pointing fingers or dragging our feet." More comments from Villaraigosa after break. First reported at 7 a.m.

As expected, the battle over control of McKinley Elementary at Compton Unified School District, which was ignited this Tuesday when parents made historic use of a new school reform law called the Parent Trigger, has started to get ugly, with Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa jumping into the fray.

Villaraigosa, along with former California State Senator Gloria Romero, Rev. Eric Lee of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference of Greater Los Angeles, and Rev. K.W. Tulloss of the National Action Network Los Angeles, is holding a morning press conference today in front of McKinley Elementary to show his support for the parents

Are No Child Left Behind-Funded Tutors Ripping Off Students and Taxpayers? Or, You Don't Need To Be In Washington To Be A Watchdog - The Project On Government Oversight (POGO) Blog

Are No Child Left Behind-Funded Tutors Ripping Off Students and Taxpayers? Or, You Don't Need To Be In Washington To Be A Watchdog

Several studies of the No Child Left Behind Act’s performance in raising student achievement through federally-funded “supplemental education services” (SES)—i.e. tutoring—for low-performing schools have shown that it is having a negligible effect.

“Third-party evaluations of these services are finding small, if any, statistically significant effects of the program in improving student acfhievement,” wrote Heinrich Mintrop and Gail L. Sunderman in a peer-reviewed journal article in Educational Researcher published in summer 2009.

This is surprising. After all, some tutoring should do some good.

Some education activists in Columbus, Ohio, think they know partly why SES has been such

Baltimore Teacher Union signs performance-pay pact

Dec 11, 2010 10:20am

BALTIMORE (AP) — The Baltimore Teachers Union and school system leaders have signed the new teachers contract that links pay increases to student performance.

The school board voted unanimously Wednesday night to approve the contract. Now, planning and implementation of the new agreement kicks into high gear.

Under the pact, teachers will no longer receive automatic raises based on tenure and degrees. Instead, they will climb a career ladder based on their performance in the

U.S. is average — except in inequality — Joanne Jacobs

U.S. is average — except in inequality

by Joanne

The U.S. education system is ahead of the pack in one category — inequality — notes Education Trust in its analysis of the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) results.

Compared to other developed countries, the United States has the fifth largest gap between low-income students and their more affluent classmates. In reading, for example, students attending our high-poverty high schools performed 24 percent below those from higher income schools.
. . . Many of the countries at the top of the performance rankings – Canada, Finland, and Korea, for example – rank noticeably at the bottom of the list measuring the size of socioeconomic-status

How Twitter Stopped Wikileaks From Trending, and Why « Student Activism

How Twitter Stopped Wikileaks From Trending, and Why

by Angus Johnston

On Wednesday Twitter finally released an official statement on the controversy over Wikileaks’ failure to appear on trending topics lists in the last few weeks. They answer the question of whether they’ve blocked Wikileaks from the lists with an “absolutely not,” then go on to provide an overview of what trending is and how it works.

What they have to say will be familiar to those who followed my back-and-forth with company representative Josh Elman on my blog last week, but here are the bullet points:

“Twitter Trends are automatically generated by an algorithm that attempts to identify topics that are being talked about more right now than they were previously.”
“Put another way, Twitter favors novelty over popularity.”
“Sometimes a topic doesn’t break into the Trends list because its popularity isn’t as widespread as

Saturday coffee. « Fred Klonsky's blog

Saturday coffee.

by Fred Klonsky

Anne made the coffee hot and strong this morning. We will get a breather from the week’s freeze today as the temperature will get into the 30s.

A teacher conversation this week turned, as it will do now and then, to how little acknowledgement we get for our work. Apart from some hoppla and congratulatory emails if our dibel scores should go up a few points, administration rarely offers much in the way of positive feedback.

I pointed out that in all my years of teaching, no principal (and I have had 11, I think) has ever said a word to me

Old school.

by Fred Klonsky

Luther Van Dross.

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Daily Kos: on perceptions and assumptions

on perceptions and assumptions

by teacherken

Yesterday as I read kos's front page piece DK4 open beta just days away, and why we did it I was surprised to find myself mentioned:

. . .you may follow Teacherken, but without the one-a-day limit, you may find that his interests run much further than education and he might introduce you to random stuff you might've never seen otherwise.

I was honored, and also pleased that he acknowledged how broad my interests are - I do write about music, politics, the environment, human rights, and whatever might capture my fancy. In the past when kos solicited nominations for the front page I remember that some would criticize nominations of me on the grounds I was too narrow, that I only wrote about education.

Also yesterday, I discovered that several people had nominated me for the Edublogs 2010 Awards,

“Class Size Crunch” | Larry Ferlazzo's Websites of the Day...

“Class Size Crunch” “Class Size Crunch” is an article in Scholastic Administrator that has a fair amount of good information. I’m adding it to The Best Resources For Learning About How Class Size Does Matter. Thanks to Leonie Haimson for the tip.

My Most Popular Blog Posts Of The Year — 2010 It’s time for the annual list of my most popular blog posts of the year — determined by the number of times they’ve been visited. You might also be interested in these previous lists: Most Popular Posts Over The First Three Years Of This Blog The ...

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The Answer Sheet - 'If you find yourself in a hole, stop digging'

'If you find yourself in a hole, stop digging'

This was written by Kevin Welner, a professor of education policy and program evaluation in the School of Education at the University of Colorado at Boulder, and director of the National Education Policy Center. He can be reached at welner@colorado.edu. This also appeared on Huffington Post. By Kevin G. Welner According to Education Secretary Arne Duncan, the PISA scores released this past Tuesday were "a massive wake-up call." The scores show American students holding relatively steady in the middle of the pack of the developed nations taking the international exam. I can't figure out what to make of Duncan's response. Certainly he knows that the 15-year-old Americans taking this exam grew up in schools dominated by the high-stakes testing of No Child Left Behind. He must also know that the other main trend in education during these students' schooling was a great increase in charter schools and other forms of

Queens Teacher: Parents Sue To Stop Cathie Black's Waiver

Parents Sue To Stop Cathie Black's Waiver

by Queens Teacher

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Favorite line:
"Ms. Black is not equipped, in a finger nail, to support these (special needs)children."

Video of My Feminist Students at TEDxYouth 2010 « Feminist Teacher

Video of My Feminist Students at TEDxYouth 2010

by feministteacher

Several weeks ago, the students in my feminism class, Fierce and Fabulous: Feminist Women Writers, Artists, and Activists, spoke at TEDxYouth at the Hewitt School. We shared our various stories about how we found our feminist voice. The video of our talk has been picked up by nist.tv, one of my favorite new websites that features feminist videos.

During the first half of the talk, I shared stories about how I came to my feminism as a queer Latina high school

Friday, December 10, 2010

For-Profit Education Stocks Rise as GOP Opposes Tighter Rules - Bloomberg

For-Profit Education Stocks Rise as GOP Opposes Tighter Rules

By Esmé E. Deprez and John Lauerman - Dec 10, 2010 2:24 PM PT

Representative John Kline, the Republican who will head the House Education Committee, said he opposes tighter rules for the for-profit education industry, sending company shares higher.

“I would push back really hard against a bill that might come out of Chairman Harkin’s committee,” Kline, of Minnesota, told Reuters, referring to Senator Tom Harkin, the Iowa Democrat who heads the Senate education committee. Harkin has commissioned a government probe of for-profit colleges and held hearings on their sales tactics, use of government funds and program quality.

A measure of 13 education company stocks advanced 2.6 percent at 4 p.m. New York time.

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Saturday, December 11, 2010