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Saturday, December 3, 2011

Big Education Ape: 12-3-11 AM SUPPORT COMMUNITIES, NOT WALL STREET EDITION #OWS #edreform

Big Education Ape: Ed News Now:

Published by Coopmike48 – 5 news spotters today

Working America

ninedemands.com - Support education for all. Reduce class sizes, ensure access to early childhood education and enrichment courses, keep educators in the classroom, support local school construction and modernizatio...

mikeklonsky

Newt’s War on Poor Children

nytimes.com - Newt Gingrich has reached a new low, and that is hard for him to do. Nearly two weeks after claiming that child labor laws are “truly stupid” and implying that poor children should be p...

leoniehaimson

Problems With Credits at School in the Bronx

nytimes.com - The chances that a student at Jane Addams High School for Academic Careers in the Bronx would graduate in four years were already poor, but seniors there said this week that they had been told of a...

leoniehaimson

Voices of the Occupation: What they'll take away

opinion.latimes.com - On Tuesday, in the hours before Occupy L.A. was ejected from the grounds of City Hall, Margot Roosevelt photographed participants and interviewed them about what had brought them to the protest and...

mikeklonsky

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coopmike48 Democurmudgeon: ACLU Criticizes New "Pay for Protest" Rules. -goo.gl/eiQ81 #ows4 minutes ago · reply · retweet · favorite

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coopmike48 The Whistle Blower As Hero | Dissident Voice - goo.gl/c3hFV4 minutes ago · reply · retweet · favorite

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coopmike48 Read Damn Good Education Daily ▸ today's top stories via@emilyschoolsyou @teacherreality ▸paper.li/coopmike48/bir… #P2 #OWS#EDCHAT20 seconds ago · reply · retweet · favorite

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coopmike48 Why #Pencilchat May Be the Most Clever Education Allegory Ever - Education - GOOD - goo.gl/jSuQ926 minutes ago · reply · retweet · favorite

EducationSee all

Give schools support, not pink slips - Chicago Sun

suntimes.com - Letters to the Editor December 1, 2011 5:58PM Updated: December 2, 2011 2:21AM When an area of the city has an increase in crime, the local police station isn’t closed, and the police and people wh...

mikeklonsky

Mayor Hits Nerve in Remarks on Class Sizes and Teachers

nytimes.com - Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg faced tough questions for a second day Friday on comments he made about two of the most sensitive issues in New York City education: teacher quality and class sizes. ...

mikeklonsky

Virtually Educated

nytimes.com - It’s weird how you can lose track of our ever-changing world. For instance, until recently I thought “reality TV” meant games about people who were stuck on an island or locked in a house together ...

mikeklonsky

SocietySee all

Newt’s War on Poor Children

nytimes.com - Newt Gingrich has reached a new low, and that is hard for him to do. Nearly two weeks after claiming that child labor laws are “truly stupid” and implying that poor children should be p...

mikeklonsky

Gov. Walker’s Latest Genius IdeaTruthdig

truthdig.com - As if the idea of designated “free speech zones” isn’t a skin-crawlingly bad enough test of the bounds of free speech, here comes Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker to up the creepy ante: Why not char...

fklonsky

Exam Cheating on Long Island Hardly a Secret

nytimes.com - GREAT NECK, N.Y. — The suspected test takers came from prominent, respected families, some of them in financial distress — among the five facing felony charges were the sons of a well-known lawyer,...

fklonsky

PoliticsSee all

Assembly Told To Prepare For Three-Day Session

capitaltonight.com - Members of the Assembly are being given a heads up this morning that a tentative three-day special session in Albany next week is possible, a highly placed Democratic source said. The potential ses...

leoniehaimson

Greek Workers Walk Out in Protest for 7th Time

nytimes.com - ATHENS — Thousands of Greek workers walked off the job on Thursday in the seventh general strike this year to protest government austerity policies after a year and a half of cutbacks. ...

fklonsky

StoriesSee all

Homeless woman, pet dog find a way to weather windstorm

latimesblogs.latimes.com - Without the Internet or television, and not having read a newspaper or listened to the radio, Joanne had no idea what she was heading toward Wednesday night as she drove into town with her life's b...

coopmike48

Art & EntertainmentSee all

News Host Is Scrutinized for Her Ties to Candidate

nytimes.com - Greta Van Susteren, the Fox News host, faced questions on Wednesday about whether she should have disclosed the friendship between her husband, a noted Washington lawyer, and Herman Cain, whose wif...

fklonsky

BusinessSee all

U.S. Adds 120,000 Jobs; Unemployment Drops to 8.6%

nytimes.com - The United States logged yet another month of mediocre job growth in November. The Labor Department said Friday that the nation’s employers added 120,000 jobs last month, after adding 1...

mikeklonsky

#owsSee all

#corpreformSee all

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  • leoniehaimson

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    Jersey Jazzman: Rochester Leads the Way

    Jersey Jazzman: Rochester Leads the Way:

    Rochester Leads the Way

    by Duke
    Oh dear; Eli Broad isn't going to like this:



    Can everyone understand now why the corporate reformers are pumping large wads of cash into school board elections? Why Jonah Edelman, money funnel to the obscenely wealthy, got himself involved in the Denver School Board race, which set records for campaign spending? Why the dictatorial Michael Bloomberg - who apparently now thinks of himself as a sort of stoned generalissimo - appoints corporatists to lead "his" schools? Why Newark continues to suffer under dictatorial control of its education system?

    It has nothing to do with party politics. This is all about control: control of the schools, control of the contracts, control of the teachers, control of the students, control of the parents, control of the community. These people
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    Rick Scott’s Week of Shaking Hands, Kissing Babies and Picking the Pockets of Public Education | Scathing Purple Musings

    Rick Scott’s Week of Shaking Hands, Kissing Babies and Picking the Pockets of Public Education | Scathing Purple Musings:

    Rick Scott’s Week of Shaking Hands, Kissing Babies and Picking the Pockets of Public Education

    by Bob Sikes

    Florida’s Department of Education has a blog. Even Commissioner Gerard Robinson posts occasionally in the curiously named Finding Common Ground. My colleagues in public education probably find my use of “curiously” to be a bit lacking. Perhaps “disingenuous” would be better. Especially if the time frame we consider begins with the run-up to the battle over SB6 during the spring of 2010. No suggestions for amendments were accepted by republican legislators for that bill. There’s little difference between SB6 and the recently passed SB736 aside from the 7 and the 3.

    After Charlie Crist’s veto, Florida’s bitter and shrill republicans said they’d be back with SB6. They just assumed at the time it would be with milquetoast Bill McCollum as governor. Instead they got someone whom opponents have frequently referred to as Lord Voldemort. The depilated Scott might be the sort of ideologue the state’s

    Posted by at

    Jersey Jazzman: Hubris Of the Incompetent

    Jersey Jazzman: Hubris Of the Incompetent:

    Hubris Of the Incompetent

    by Duke
    Let's leave aside Jersey for a sec and mix things up a bit.

    Down in Tennessee, the ruling elite have been waging a war on teachers, funded in large part by disgraced junk bond king Michael Milken. As regular visiter to this site "jcg" has pointed out in comments, the evaluation tool Tennessee uses assumes a standard distribution of scores; if the actual scores don't fit, they game the system to make it fit. Would you like your job performance evaluated this way?

    As Michael Winerip has reported in the NY Times, teachers in Tennessee who teach subjects where students don't take standardized tests now have to play a game where they pick and choose the test results in other subjects that become a mandatory part of their evaluation; in other words, the art teacher has to decide whether she wants her evaluation to include the school's results in reading, writing, or math as part of her rating. No, I'm not kidding.

    So, what do the overlords of Tennessee's business community think about this massive exercise in stupidity?
    The business community strongly supports these education
    Posted by at

    Daily Kos: Respect for teachers - Yes and No

    Daily Kos: Respect for teachers - Yes and No:

    Respect for teachers - Yes and No

    by rss@dailykos.com (teacherken)

    is the title of this widely distributed blog post by Joe Nathan, Director of the Center for School Change at Macalaster College in St. Paul, MN. He begins by writing

    I was stunned. There were more than 36 million responses to a Google search for the phrase “teachers get no respect.” At the same time, a respected national poll shows widespread respect for teachers. And given the chance to reduce their taxes, thousands of Minnesota voters instead responded, “yes” to maintaining or increasing their tax levels.
    (Nathan feels that most Americans respect teachers, but that perhaps some teachers do not respect parents.) Yet despite the the data which shows strong national support for teachers, many teachers increasingly express their frustration that they, their profession, and the work they do is not respected. Nathan responds to this by writing
    Let’s acknowledge several things:

    - Creative, effective teachers deserve all the praise we can offer.
    - Teaching can be very demanding and difficult.


    Newt's War on Poor Children

    by rss@dailykos.com (teacherken)
    Newt Gingrich has reached a new low, and that is hard for him to do.
    So begins Charles Blow in this New York Times column which I assure you is a must read.

    He notes Gingrich's remarks about poor children, saying "Really poor children in really poor neighborhoods have no habits of working and have nobody around them who works." Actually, the full statement by Gingrich is offensive, far more than having poor children do janitorial work in schools. Blow provides the complete statement, then says bluntly

    This statement isn’t only cruel and, broadly speaking, incorrect, it’s mind-numbingly tone-deaf at a time when poverty is rising in this country. He comes across as a callous Dickensian character in his attitude toward America’s most vulnerable — our poor children. This is the kind of statement that shines light on the soul of a man and shows how dark it is.

    shines light on the soul of a man and shows how dark it is - but then, most of the people here probably knew that already, right?

    But there's more . . .

    Posted by at

    If by Rudyard Kipling

    Click on picture to Listen to Diane Ravitch


    If by Rudyard Kipling:


    If you can keep your head when all about you
    Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;
    If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
    But make allowance for their doubting too:
    If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
    Or, being lied about, don't deal in lies,
    Or being hated don't give way to hating,
    And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise;

    If you can dream---and not make dreams your master;
    If you can think---and not make thoughts your aim,
    If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
    And treat those two impostors just the same:.
    If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
    Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
    Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
    And stoop and build'em up with worn-out tools;

    If you can make one heap of all your winnings
    And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
    And lose, and start again at your beginnings,
    And never breathe a word about your loss:
    If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
    To serve your turn long after they are gone,
    And so hold on when there is nothing in you
    Except the Will which says to them: "Hold on!"

    If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
    Or walk with Kings---nor lose the common touch,
    If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
    If all men count with you, but none too much:
    If you can fill the unforgiving minute
    With sixty seconds' worth of distance run,
    Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
    And---which is more---you'll be a Man, my son!


    Rudyard Kipling
    Posted by at

    Illinois charters lack transparency | catalyst-chicago.org

    Illinois charters lack transparency | catalyst-chicago.org:

    Illinois charters lack transparency

    In Massachusetts, the public can easily find financial information forcharters, including how much money they bring in, where that moneycomes from—including private sources—and how much the schools spend onteacher salaries and other expenses. In Illinois, it is nearly impossible to get a good read on similarfinancial information from charters. Doing so, however, could helpdirect policy, serve as a guide for future charter schools and giveauthorizers specific information about which charter schools are infinancial trouble.
    By: Sarah Karp / August 3, 2010
    From the Summer 2010 issue of Catalyst-Chicago Renaissance 2010

    In Massachusetts, the public can easily find financial information for charters,

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