4-17-14 Scathing Purple Musings | Color me purple in Florida

Scathing Purple Musings | Color me purple in Florida, red in Washington, dark sky-blue in Israel and public school in Education:

United Front in Jacksonville Opposes Field Test Folly

From Denise Smith Amos in the Florida Times-Union: Decrying what they call an untested test, leaders in Duval schools and teachers union — and some parents — urged voters Wednesday to flood state legislators’ phones and emails this week, urging them to slow down on some of the punitive aspects of the state’s new tests. Duval teachers union president Terrie Brady, three school board members and Su

by Bob Sikes / 3h  

4-16-14 Scathing Purple Musings | Color me purple in Florida

Scathing Purple Musings | Color me purple in Florida, red in Washington, dark sky-blue in Israel and public school in Education: Dockery: Senate Should Let Voucher Expansion DieWriting in her hometown newspaper, the Lakeland Ledger, former republican  state senator Paula Dockery makes the clear case why voucher expansion cannot be intellectually be defended: Opponents of voucher expansion make a v

by mike simpson / 8h 

4-17-14 Larry Ferlazzo’s Websites of the Day… | …For Teaching ELL, ESL, & EFL

Larry Ferlazzo’s Websites of the Day… | …For Teaching ELL, ESL, & EFL:

Cinco de Mayo Resources

Cinco de Mayo, May 5th, commemorates the defeat of the French by the Mexican Army in 1862. It’s a national holiday in Mexico, and is celebrated by Mexican immigrants and Mexican-Americans in the United States. You might be interested in The Best Sites For Teaching & Learning About Cinco de Mayo.

by Larry Ferlazzo / 58min 

British Pathé Makes 85,000 Historical Clips Available On YouTube

I’m just going to begin with a quote from Open Culture: British Pathé was one of the leading producers of newsreels and documentaries during the 20th Century. This week, the company, now an archive, is turning over its entire collection — over 85,000 historical films – to YouTube. The archive — which spans from 1896 to 1976 – is a goldmine of footage, containing movies of some of the most importa

by Larry Ferlazzo / 1h hide  //  save

Updated Holocaust Resources

From The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum: Congress established the Days of Remembrance as the nation’s annual commemoration of the Holocaust and created the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum as a permanent living memorial to the victims. Holocaust remembrance week is April 27–May 4, 2014. I have multiple Holocaust-related “Best” lists, and you can find them all at The Best Sites For

by Larry Ferlazzo / 1h 

Ideas For Finishing The School Year Strong & Beginning The Summer Even Stronger

A very popular excerpt from one of my books was titled “Finishing The School Year Strong” was published both at Education Week Teacher and at Edutopia. It’s very practical, and here’s an excerpt: Okay, so that’s for dealing with these last several weeks of school. Is there anything we can do to set-up our students for continuing their academic success in July and August? When there were funds for

by Larry Ferlazzo / 30min 

“Dissecting Grades: What Do They Mean, What Are They Worth?” Is My New BAM! Radio Program

Dissecting Grades: What Do They Mean, What Are They Worth? is the title of my new ten-minute BAM! Radio program. My guest is Rick Wormeli. I’m adding it to The Best Resources On Grading Practices.

by Larry Ferlazzo / 4min 

Study: Gratitude Increases Self-Control

I’ve written in the past about my use of “Reflection Cards” in the classroom, including the research behind them (you can download a copy of the card and read the research at my post, Giving Students “Reflection Cards.” Research shows that self-control can be replenished by both self-affirmation exercises and by remembering better times. So, I created cards that I sometimes give to students when

by Larry Ferlazzo / 11min 

Book Reviews – & Shakespeare – In Three Panels

I’ve previously posted about Lisa Brown’s “Three Panel Book Reviews” that formerly appeared in The San Francisco Chronicle. They’re great models for student projects. I recently learned about how another artist uses this “three panel” idea, though Mya Gosling uses it to summarizes Shakespeare’s plays. You can see all of her work here, and they’re more great models for student work. I’m adding thi

by Larry Ferlazzo / 9h 

4-16-14 Larry Ferlazzo’s Websites of the Day… | …For Teaching ELL, ESL, & EFL

Larry Ferlazzo’s Websites of the Day… | …For Teaching ELL, ESL, & EFL: Surprise, Surprise — Study Finds Shouting At Children “creates further discipline problems”To few teachers surprise, a new study has found that shouting at children is counter-productive. You can read all about it at Shouting at children ‘increases their behaviour problems’ in the British newspaper, The Telegraph. There hav

by mike simpson / 8h 

4-17-14 Fred Klonsky | Daily posts from a retired public school teacher

Fred Klonsky | Daily posts from a retired public school teacher who is just looking at the data.:

Chris Christie’s pension theft in New Jersey. Nation-wide pension theft needs a nation-wide response.

Some of my friends from elsewhere around the country try to tell me that the pension theft that is going on in Illinois is a local issue. It’s not. The stealing of public employee pensions is a national effort calling for a national response. Each state and municipality may have it’s own local characteristics. In New Jersey, Governor Chris Christie is diverting state pension funds to his politica

1 by Fred Klonsky / 10min 

GTCR is Rauner’s Baine Capital. So Squeezy gives him a state contract. Shaking up Springfield?

The Better Government Association is reporting this morning: Bruce Rauner, the Republican challenger for governor, stands to profit from a lucrative state contract awarded last year by the administration of his opponent on the November ballot, Gov. Pat Quinn, records show. Rauner formerly headed GTCR LLC, a Chicago private equity firm in which he still holds a stake as an investor. In any other s

8 by Fred Klonsky / 1h 

4-16-14 Fred Klonsky | Daily posts from a retired public school teacher

Fred Klonsky | Daily posts from a retired public school teacher who is just looking at the data.: Awareness.Banners went up and banners came down. Some were professionally printed. Some were hand-made by students on long white sheets of butcher paper. April was a busy month for banners. Shoe-horned in around Spring Break was Poetry Appreciation month and Autism Awareness month. This is about Autis

by mike simpson / 8h 

4-17-14 Wait What?

Wait What?:

Corporate Education Reform Industry group starts radio campaign in support of new charter schools

Surprise, surprise… An out-of-State charter school advocacy group has started an advertising campaign to support the Malloy administration’s decision to give Steve Perry his own privately run, but taxpayer funded, charter school in Bridgeport. According to a reports from the CT Mirror and Hartford Courant, Families for Excellent Schools, Inc., a charter school advocacy group based […] The post Cor

6 by jonpelto / 2h  

4-16-14 Wait What?

Wait What?: Even more students lose as the “cost” of the Common Core Testing growsThe Common Core Smarter Balanced Assessment Field Test of a test means more testing and less learning. The Common Core test will cost Connecticut’s students and teachers hundreds of hours of lost instructional time. The Common Core test will cost schools and taxpayers tens of millions in computer and internet upgrade

by mike simpson / 8h 

The Answer Sheet 4-17-14

The Answer Sheet:

The ‘new’ Graze to the Top program

If you need a laugh, this is for you. It’s by Matt Farmer, a Chicago trial lawyer  who is a member of the Local School Council at Philip Rogers Elementary School. Farmer wrote this satirical piece about Race to the Top, the competitive funding program run by Arne Duncan’s Education Department to dispense federal grants […]

19 by Valerie Strauss / 1h 

Bad behavior in college: Not just at Dartmouth

Philip J. Hanlon, the new president of Dartmouth College, has just gone public with his concern that the Ivy League school’s future “is being hijacked by extreme behavior,” by which he means in part sexual assaults and the proliferation of groups with “racist and sexist undertones.” He also lamented a campus culture marked by commonplace […]

by Valerie Strauss / 12min 

Seven things kids need to read better

For two decades,  Ellie Herman was a writer/producer for television shows including “The Riches,” “Desperate Housewives,” “Chicago Hope” and “Newhart.” Her fiction has appeared in literary journals, among them The Massachusetts Review, The Missouri Review and the O.Henry Awards Collection. In 2007, she decided, “on an impulse,” she wrote, to become an English teacher and […]

7 by Valerie Strauss / 3h hide  //  save

Even the strongest relationships sour

Bobby Jindal, governor of Louisiana, and John White, Louisiana’s education commissioner, were once a great school reform pair — seemingly inseparable.  Times have changed. In early 2011, Jindal tapped White, then the superintendent of the Recovery School District in New Orleans, to become education chief in Louisiana and the state Board of Education approved the […]

7 by Valerie Strauss / 6h  

The Answer Sheet 4-16-14

The Answer Sheet: Live online chat at 1 p.m. todayI’ll be doing a live chat on washingtonpost.com at 1 p.m. today, so if you have any questions or comments about anything in education (or even marginally related), send them in here: http://live.washingtonpost.com/the-answer-sheet-20140409.html#submit-question Here’s a transcript of the first chat, and here is the transcript of last week’s.by Valer

by mike simpson / 8h 

4-17-14 Schools Matter

Schools Matter:

Really? Do We Really Want Experienced Teachers to Resign

How many more experienced, professional educators will submit their letters of resignation before Washington and the State Legislatures stop catering to the monied interests intent on destroying any meaningful and real education for the next generation? Haven't we already documented extensively through research and blogging how damaging the current corporate education reform movement is to the nat

by freetoteach / 1h 

NYT Talking about the Tests as Weapons of Mass Distraction

The New York Times editors appear to be catching on to the fact that the proliferation and misuse of high stakes testing  are not only a huge waste of resources that are actually doing more harm than good, but are also a "distraction" from the very real problems of poverty and inequality.  It's about time.To the Editor:Elizabeth Phillips decries the gag order that school principals are u

by freetoteach / 1h  

4-15-14 Schools Matter

Schools Matter: Labeling, Sorting, Segregating: The History of Standardizing Tests in U. S. SchoolsMuch of the first sections of TMoE is dedicated to tracing out how tests came to be used as social sorting tools during our first Gilded Age when grand canyons of inequality between rich and poor had turned American cities into dangerous and unhealthy place. Below is a piece posted last week at Alter

by mike simpson / 6h

4-17-13 Curmudgucation Week

CURMUDGUCATION:

Paul Bruno's Advice for CCSS Supporters

Paul Bruno is a science teacher who writes a blog of his own while occasionally contributing to This Week in Education over at Scholastic. He calls himself a CCSS agnostic and generally writes about the standards with a fairly even hand.After spanking CCSS supporters for abandoning an affirmative case for the standards, Bruno was asked by Morgan Polikoff to provide a positive suggestion, and so to

by Peter Greene / 27min 

CT Makes New Strides in Grittology

Sandwiched in the midst of a puff piece about Connecticut's new elite cadre of Common Core teacher shills is this important paragraph:Getting on the list was competitive. According to a news release from the Department of Education, teachers "were chosen through a competitive statewide application on the basis of their content knowledge, grit, and understanding of the Common Core State Standa

by Peter Greene / 3h  

4-16-13 Curmudgucation Week

CURMUDGUCATION: Bill McCallum, CCSS Author & Sad ScientistWhen movies present us with science-related disasters, we generally involve one of two sciency types-- the mad scientists and the sad scientist. The mad scientist is the one genetically engineering giant gerbils to take over the world (cue maniacal laugh). The sad scientist is the one who believes that he is Doing Great Things, like cre

by mike simpson / 5h