Friday, February 11, 2011

Senators Show Up for Michelle Rhee, Leave for Bill | Sunshine State News

Senators Show Up for Michelle Rhee, Leave for Bill

Committee vote on performance pay bill delayed at least one day

BY: GRAY ROHRER | POSTED: FEBRUARY 10, 2011 3:55 AM

TAGS:

EDUCATION REFORM, MERIT PAY, MICHELLE RHEE, NEWS, SEN. BILL MONTFORD, SEN. LIZBETH BENACQUISTO,SEN. STEPHEN WISE, SENATE EDUCATION PRE-K - 12 COMMITTEE, WASHINGTON D.C., GOVERNMENT

1comment

Stephen WiseHide

While Michelle Rhee got most of the attention during her presentation Wednesday at the Senate Education PreK-12 Committee, it is the legislation discussed afterward that will have the most lasting impact on Florida’s education.

Most of the reporters and senators, some of whom are not even on the committee, left along with the controversial former chancellor of the Washington, D.C., School District, leaving just three senators to deal with legislation that will tie teacher pay to performance.

Sen. Stephen Wise, R-Jacksonville, who chairs the Education Committee, filed Senate Bill 736 last week, which would create teacher evaluations that would determine their salary and in some cases, whether they remain employed as a teacher.

The evaluations would be developed by the Department of Education, but would be based

Good-bye to dictators! « Fred Klonsky's blog

Good-bye to dictators!

by Fred Klonsky

Mubarak resigns.

Follow the news here.

Do your homework - News - Local Stories - February 10, 2011 - Sacramento News & Review

Do your homework

New charter plan may have violated state law

By Cosmo Garvin
cosmog@newsreview.com
More stories by this author...
Read 1 reader submitted comment

This article was published on 02.10.11.

Read more of Cosmo Garvin’s charter-schools coverage on his blog atwww.newsreview.com/snog.

It wasn’t a surprise, but local school board trusteesfrom Sacramento City Unified, Natomas Unified and other area school districts were still disappointed that the Sacramento County Office of Education board usurped its power to approve or disapprove charter schools and greenlighted a plan by Fortune Schools to open several new charter schools throughout the county.

Fortune Schools—a nonprofit organization run by Margaret Fortune, who was instrumental in converting Sacramento High School to a charter school in 2006—will be allowed to open five schools over the next five years—with five more to follow, pending approval from the SCOE board. The charter network would serve 5,000 kids in all.

Fortune’s stated goal is closing the achievement gap between African-American and white students, which prompted SCOE trustee Harold Fong—the sole “no” vote against the plan—to complain that the board might be approving segregated schools.

But mostly, the local school boards feel undermined. “I’m disappointed,” said Sacramento City Unified trustee Patrick Kennedy. “I think this is a local decision, with impacts on our local

Mike Klonsky's SmallTalk Blog: Wing-nuts stalking my brother? Oops, a tactical mistake.

Wing-nuts stalking my brother? Oops, a tactical mistake.

by Mike Klonsky

There's a tiny group of right-wing crazies in Michigan called the Education Action Group. EAG claims it's all about "school choice." But for them, choice is merely a code word for privatization, anti-union, and anti-teacher politics. While they're tiny, as you might expect, they are heavily funded by a rich and powerful bunch of conservative types who group around the Mackinac Center for Policy Research. EAG serves as the Center's hired attack dogs, used against teacher unions and even spying on individual teacher pro-union activists. One of those they're currently stalking is my brother Fred. Ooops, a tactical mistake.

Fred is a veteran elementary school art teacher and a damn good one. He's well respected by his colleagues and has represented them for two terms as their elected local union president. Fred is also a long time social-justice, civil rights, anti-war and union political activist. He's very open about his political views and makes them known to all who are interested on Fred Klonsky's Blog. You can also follow him on Twitter.

Olsen

The other day, the district supt. informed Fred that someone named Ben Velderman had filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request demanding to see all of Fred's work

How’s Partnership Working for Teachers? | Labor Notes

How’s Partnership Working for Teachers?

Howard Ryan

| February 2, 2011

Bill Gates took the stage with AFT President Randi Weingarten at the union's last convention, earning an ovation from some delegates. Photo: George N. Schmidt.

With a few local exceptions, America’s teachers unions—the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association—have met billionaire school reform with surrender, accommodation, and ill-advised partnership. The AFT’s largest local is a case study in the turn-the-cheek approach.

New York City’s United Federation of Teachers is a mammoth union in a mammoth school district, with 87,000 teachers serving 1.1 million students. While union responses vary from city to city, the UFT’s posture is representative of national trends and, by virtue of its size and sophistication, strongly influential. It is no accident that AFT President Randi Weingarten led UFT before rising to the helm of the national union, as did two of her

This Week In Education: Events: Five Ideas For TFA's Next 20 Years

This Week In Education: Events: Five Ideas For TFA's *Next* 20 Years

Events: Five Ideas For TFA's Next 20 Years

by Alexander Russo

Here are five completely unsolicited ideas for TFA's next 20 years, on the occasion of its first: (1) Tell locals to pick one or several struggling schools, stuff them with corps members and alumns over the course of two or three years, and show everyone what you can really do at the the whole school level. Rinse, lather, repeat. (2) Stop expanding to new cities and do more in the cities you're already in. Create two or three "superlocals" to get involved in reform, short of operating schools but well beyond the current menu of training, placement, and support. (3) Get off the

Who is behind Bill Vederman, the guy who has been stalking me? « Fred Klonsky's blog

Who is behind Bill Vederman, the guy who has been stalking me?

by Fred Klonsky

Fred,

I’ve been following your saga with Kyle Olsen and the EAG bunch. EAG is a well-funded off-shoot of the Mackinac Center in Michigan. It was started in West Michigan and usually focuses on inflamitory, sensational news stories. They like to follow people around with cameras, FOIA emails, etc…

Here is some background on the Mackinac Center.
http://www.mea.org/privatization/pdf/mackinaccenter-thetruth.pdf
The Mackinac Center is part of the State Policy Network (SPN), a network of state-based think tanks patterned

My Take on the L.A. Times Reanalysis :: Frederick M. Hess

My Take on the L.A. Times Reanalysis

by Frederick M. Hess • Feb 11, 2011 at 10:35 am
Cross-posted from Education Week

Send

RSS

Last summer, the Los Angeles Times created a furor with its hotly debated decision to post the value-added scores for thousands of Los Angeles teachers and to identify individual teachers, by name, as more or less effective. This week, the situation roared back to life when University of Colorado professor Derek Briggs, and coauthor Ben Domingue, issued a report titled "Due Diligence and the Evaluation of Teachers" which charged that the L.A. Times analysis was "based on unreliable and invalid research" and that the use of an alternative value-added model might have changed how half of 3,300 fifth-grade teachers were rated when it came to reading. Even the Huffington Post has got into the action, running a solid post by Chuck Kerchner.

The issue has been rife with drama, with the L.A. Times breaking the story on an examination of its own

Renuncia miembro de la SRC - Latino News and Opinion - pontealdia.com

Renuncia miembro de la SRC

Por AL DÍA NEWS
08:48 \| 02/10/11
Compartir este artículo\|\| - Uno de los cinco miembros de la Comisión de Reforma Escolar (SRC), el organismo encargado de vigilar la transparencia del Distrito Escolar de Filadelfia, anunció su renuncia. David Girard-diCarlo, el único republicano de la SRC, anunció ayer que se retira de la SRC porque quiere pasar más tiempo con su esposa Connie y porque estará fuera de la ciudad la mayor parte de marzo y abril. Girard-diCarlo, de 68 años, quien es ex-embajador de Estados Unidos en Australia,

Detroit schools: ‘Kids Aren’t Cars’ — Joanne Jacobs

Detroit schools: ‘Kids Aren’t Cars’

by Joanne

“Kids Aren’t Cars” blames self-serving adults — notably the teachers’ union — for the sad state of Detroit’s public schools. Only about a quarter of the city’s public high school students earn a diploma.

Education Action Group, which favors school choice, made the videos through EAG TV.

Popout

4LAKids - some of the news that doesn't fit: ACTION ITEM: Don’t let Congress balance the budget on the backs of students!

ACTION ITEM: Don’t let Congress balance the budget on the backs of students!

by smf

e-mail from Joshua Rovner, NASBHC Sent: Fri, Feb 11, 2011 5:59 am Next week, Congress will vote to cut hundreds of millions of dollars from programs that help support school-based health centers (SBHCs) and that keep students healthy and learning. These cuts are being proposed at the same time that many states are cutting their SBHC funding. Tell Congress to protect student health! A

Marian Wright Edelman: Law of Unintended Consequences

by Marian Wright Edelman

The federal government should be the engine of equality, not the locomotive of inequality. With the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), Congress has the opportunity to fundamentally transform American education and set it on the path towards equality and excellence for all children.

When ESEA was last reauthorized by Congress in 2002 with overwhelming bipartisan support, the Bush administration called the new law the "No Child Left Behind Act" (NCLB)—a play on the Children Defense Fund's trademarked mission statement to "Leave No Child Behind."

To many, the rhetoric of the new law's title promised to match the reality: it aimed at measuring the progress of every child, in every school, every year; data would be broken down to identify racial/ethnic and socioeconomic achievement gaps. Schools, districts, and states would document and track the academic performance of all

How Bad Is "Hyper-Segregation" In Chicago? - District 299: Chicago Public Schools Blog

How Bad Is "Hyper-Segregation" In Chicago?

by Alexander Russo

What's the racial and socioeconomic breakdown in your school? What would you say is the breakdown (roughly) on your block or in your neighborhood? How about among your friends and family? The reason I ask is that University of Chicago researcher Adam Green says that Chicago isn't merely segregated but rather "hypersegregated" in ways that make it far worse than other cities like Cincinnati, Cleveland, Baltimore and St. Louis and almost as bad as

Friday Churn: Mayoral candidates & DPS | EdNewsColorado

Friday Churn: Mayoral candidates & DPS

What’s churning:

Candidates for Denver mayor are slated this morning to talk about K-12 education, in a forum hosted by KIPP Colorado Schools. Confirmed candidates include Doug Linkhart, James Mejia, Chris Romer, Ken Simpson and Thomas Wolf.

The event gets underway at 8 a.m. in the auditorium of the Rishel campus, home to three schools including KIPP Denver Collegiate High School. Nate Easley, president of the Denver school board, will give opening remarks.

So what’s the Denver mayor’s role in Denver Public Schools? John Hickenlooper was an active cheerleader, promoting ballot issues such as ProComp and helping to launch what would become the

Schools Matter: Waiting for Superman: The Neighborhood Party Version

Waiting for Superman: The Neighborhood Party Version

by Jim Horn

If you thought the stakes were high for getting education reform right in this country, you just need to have a look, Mister, at the new animation offered up by the Gates-funded producers of the not-going-the-Oscars propaganda film, Waiting for Superman. The achievement gap? Excellence? Equity? Just small potatoes!

The Oligarchs who funded the WfS docu-ganda piece are now urging parents who didn’t see it on the big screen to buy a DVD and host a house party. And to whet your appetite, ladies and gentlemen, they have put together an animated ad that proceeds with fear of impending world disaster where nervousness about the disaster of schools left off with the first round of advertisements.

The clip opens with the familiar ticking time bomb piano keys and a cascade of animated images

Latest News and Comment from Education

Friday, February 11, 2011