Saturday, June 11, 2011

Michelle Wright talks about Dept. of Education raid at her Stockton home | news10.net

Michelle Wright talks about Dept. of Education raid at her Stockton home

STOCKTON, CA - Michelle Wright has not had any contact with the federal agents who showed up at her home early Tuesday morning, but she did return a phone call to News 10.

Wright said she would not be able to comment on several issues until she retained a lawyer, but did allow herself to be quoted on some for this news story.

Tuesday morning, Wright's estranged husband, Kenny Wright, and her three children were dragged from their home and placed in the back of a police car as Department of Education agents searched their home.

Kenny Wright said the federal agents were looking for Michelle Wright.

Michelle said she had no idea that federal agents were reportedly interested in her prior to an Office of the Inspector General raid on her Stockton home Tuesday.

Neighbors said they witnessed Michelle

Education secretary working on 'plan B' for U.S. schools | Seattle Times Newspaper

Nation & World | Education secretary working on 'plan B' for U.S. schools | Seattle Times Newspaper

Education secretary working on 'plan B' for U.S. schools

Frustrated by what he called a "slow-motion train wreck" for U.S. schools, Education Secretary Arne Duncan said he will give schools relief from federal mandates under the No Child Left Behind law if Congress drags its feet on the law's long-awaited overhaul and reauthorization.

By DORIE TURNER

The Associated Press

JIM MONE / AP

U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan says he wants to be able to act if No Child Left Behind law isn't updated.

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That could mean everything from granting waivers on test score requirements to flexibility on how schools spend federal funding, though Duncan offered few details because he said the department is just beginning to work on its plan.

The Obama administration has called for an overhaul of the 9-year-old federal education law by the fall, but lawmakers have indicated that won't be possible. Duncan told reporters Friday that his first goal is for

Jersey Jazzman: Our Failed Education Discourse

NJ's Worst Pundit My triumphant return to the blogosphere wouldn't be complete without a quick look at NJ's Worst Pundit ®. And you gotta give it Bob "Hoover" Ingle - he has a way of seeing things that is certainly... unique: Gov. Christie announces a pilot program in ...

Our Failed Education Discourse We'll leave aside for a minute the fact that this guy is a Libertarian working at a PUBLIC college, and instead focus on how he perfectly encapsulates the failure of "reformers" to understand anything about how schools actually work: The City of ...

Jonathan Alter: The Top 20% Are Better Than Average! No, I'm not kidding - Jonathan Alter actually said this: *"It's true that charters overall do not perform better than traditional public schools; and charter schools, of course, are public schools. But the top fifth of charter schools - in other words, ...

Critical thinking is subversive | Dailycensored.com

Critical thinking is subversive

Written by Danny WeilEducationJun 11, 2011

0digg

From Larry Miller’s blog out of Wisconsin

Filed under: MPS,Right Wing Agenda — millerlf @ 1:48 pm

Right wing fringe blogger Kyle Olsen, who has admitted to making up stories to move his right-wing agenda, now has criticized a Milwaukee teacher for having students discuss and write about civic duty at a school where parents and staff alike have been trying to come up with answers to the cuts devastating Milwaukee Public Schools.

Even before Scott Walker began his slash and burn policies toward Milwaukee Public Schools this elementary school in Milwaukee’s Riverwest community faced $150,000 in cuts from the previous year. This led to school-wide discussion that students inquired about both at home and in school. One of the parents’ response was to help start a new organization to help fight for public education called I Love My Public Schools. Since Walker made his budget moves this organization has fought hard against

Schools Matter: Poverty=failure

Poverty=failure

by skrashen

Poverty = Failure

Published in the USC Trojan Family Magazine Summer, 2011

The deck preceding the stimulating interview with gaming experts ("Deep play," Spring 2011) announced that online games "may help salvage our failing schools." The experts interviewed made an excellent case for games, but our schools are "failing" for only one reason: Poverty.

Studies show that American students from well-funded schools who come from middle-class families outscore students in nearly all other countries on international tests. Our average scores are less than spectacular because the US has the highest percentage of children in poverty of all industrialized countries (over 20%; in contrast, high-scoring Finland has less than 4%).

Poverty means inadequate nutrition, inadequate health care, exposure to environmental toxins, and little access

Jersey Jazzman: Our Failed Education Policy Debate

Our Failed Education Policy Debate I am going to try to stay on Bruce Baker's good side. Because when he delivers a beat-down, it ain't pretty: I’ve reached a point after these past few years where I feel that I’ve spent way too much time critiquing poorly constructed arguments and ...

Halliburton High Why bother with "Opportunity Scholarships" and charter schools when you can just give taxpayer money directly to the corporate reformers? He called it a pilot program, an "experiment," a restoration of hope. It was also — for better or worse — an ...

More Investment Opportunities in Education! Charter schools are bringing in the big boys of both the banking and tennis worlds! There are big ideas, and then there are Big Ideas. Building a $40 million college-preparatory charter school from the ground up in less than a decade? That's a big ...

I'm Back Just finished a whole bunch of concerts, so I'm back. Anything happen while I was gone?

Fanatic Right Wing Blogger Attacks Teacher for Engaging Students in Real Life Civic Action « Larry Miller's Blog

Fanatic Right Wing Blogger Attacks Teacher for Engaging Students in Real Life Civic Action

by millerlf

Education First Principles - E.D. Kain - American Times - Forbes

Education First Principles

by E.D. Kain

1 person liked this

Shawn Gude has a terrific post up at The League of Ordinary Gentlemen. Much of it is an examination of my “shifting rhetoric” on education reform.

On the whole, Kain’s rhetorical shift is salutary stuff. If you follow the education reform debates, you know it has gotten super polarized — you’re either a recalcitrant mossback in the tank for teachers unions or a harebrained reactionary out to destroy public education. When blinkered dogmatism and hyperbolic rhetoric supplant reasoned rumination, impoverished debate ensues. In this type of environment, incredulity, nuance-adding, and elevating the level of discourse (as Kain has done) are all good things.
With that said, I think some reformers do want to fundamentally alter the education system in ways I find repugnant. And you have people like Jonathan Alter—who has openly said “I loathe the teacher’s unions”—calling the education reform movement “the most significant social movement of our time.” It shouldn’t come as a shock that many on the left are incensed. The lines have been drawn, and unions are seeing their biggest adversaries as an existential threat. The perception of existential threats prompts overheated rhetoric.To be fair, most reformers don’t want to deracinate

Modern School: Evaluation Reform Means Big Profits (Big Surprise?)

Evaluation Reform Means Big Profits (Big Surprise?)

by Michael Dunn

The Ed Deformers have been attacking teachers and public education from numerous fronts (e.g., charter schools, vouchers, LIFO, VAM, etc.). While they claim that their intentions are to improve educational outcomes for students, each of these “reforms” allows entrepreneurs to transfer tax dollars into their pockets. NCLB, for example, has given away billions of dollars to textbook and test publishers, and billions more to Supplemental Educational Service providers. Both NCLB and Obama’s Race to the Top (RTTT) have accelerated the growth of private charter schools and for-profit Educational Management Organizations (EMOs), worth billions more in taxpayer dollars, while Common Core Standards (CCS) has been driven by publishers, who have reaped millions of dollars by forcing states to purchase new textbooks.

One of their latest targets of “reform” is the teacher evaluation system, which critics cite as one

Schools Matter: Education Reformer Doesn't Even Get Half Real

Education Reformer Doesn't Even Get Half Real

by Jim Horn

Valerie Strauss posted a commentary by Mike Petrilli the other day that made nice toward Diane Ravitch by acknowledging her point that 100 percent testing proficiency is never going to happen as long as substantial numbers of children continue to live in poverty. But like the rest of the blinkered racers to the top, it never seems to occur to Petrilli that he might advocate for something other than a downward adjustment in the proficiency targets, graduation targets, or some other psychometric bow to reality. A big clip from Petrilli:

Try this exercise. This fall, about 1 million very poor children will enroll in kindergarten in the United States. The vast majority of them will live in single-parent families headed by women in their late teens or early twenties. Most of their mothers will have dropped out of high school; most of their fathers are nowhere to be seen. Most live in urban or rural communities hit hard by the recession, places where unemployment, addiction, and violence are all too commonplace.

Still, not everything is bleak. Almost all of these children participated in some form of pre-school

I Feel So Cheap and Dirty, Part I | Mr. Teachbad's Blog of Teacher Disgruntlement

I Feel So Cheap and Dirty, Part I

by mrteachbad

Three days after I published the last video, the sadly prophetic one about teachers being coerced into giving students grades they don’t deserve, here’s what happened to me:

I had entered senior grades on Sunday night. When I checked my email in the morning I found a few papers that had been turned in overnight. I graded them. I entered new grades. No big deal. That was Monday. The seniors were officially done with classes.

On Tuesday they all started coming around to get things signed off for graduation. I have to “verify” that they have read a certain number of books in my class, that they turned in the text-book, and what grade they earned in the class just now ending. In order to graduate, you have to pass my class.

So little Timmy comes up to get his stuff signed. (Side note: I feel compelled to call him Timmy or Johnny so that no one will say I’m racist. Why did you call him Shae’Quan’trello? Why did you call him Jesus? Because black and Hispanic kids are dumb? No. I’ve been teaching for six years and I’ve never even seen a white kid. ALL of the brilliant, stupid, lazy and industrious students I have ever had have been non-white, none named

THE PERIMETER PRIMATE: The New York Times vs Harmony Public Schools

The New York Times vs Harmony Public Schools

by The Perimeter Primate

The New York Times has published a lengthy article about some highly concerning financial practices of Texas’s Harmony Schools. The front page piece, which appeared above the fold on June 7, 2011, is entitled “Charter Schools Tied to Turkey Grow in Texas.” Written by Stephanie Saul, a Pulitzer Prize winning investigative journalist, the article has introduced hundreds of thousands of people to the reality that the Gulen movement is deeply, deeply involved in the U.S. charter school business.

In an attempt to control the damage to their operations which will be produced by this long-awaited public transparency, the superintendent of Harmony Public Schools (AKA Cosmos Foundation) responded with the usual Gulenist denial. Soner Tarim's open letter states:

…As we told the Times reporter repeatedly, Harmony Schools…have no affiliation with Fetullah Gulen or the so-called Gulen movement yet the article repeatedly states and implies that such an

4LAKids - some of the news that doesn't fit: GOOD NEWS FOR CALIFORNIA AND DREAM ACTS ACROSS THE COUNTRY

GOOD NEWS FOR CALIFORNIA AND DREAM ACTS ACROSS THE COUNTRY

by smf

Themes in the News for the week of June 6-10, 2011 by UCLA IDEA |http://bit.ly/j9ILOR 06-10-2011 - This week, the U.S. Supreme Court brought closure to a decade-old dispute over extending educational opportunities for undocumented immigrant students. While the court’s action is significant, much more will be needed to ensure that all California students can realize the dream of a college

CALIFORNIA’S 529 COLLEGE SAVINGS PLAN TO BE REVAMPED

by smf

Fidelity Investments will no longer manage California's 529 college savings plan, which will get new investment options and a new administrator. By Walter Hamilton, Los Angeles Times | http://lat.ms/iscfEG from the SEC: http://1.usa.gov/w462S What is a 529 plan? A 529 plan is a tax-advantaged savings plan designed to encourage saving for future college

Education Not Deportation: Guide for Undocumented Youth in Removal - Hispanically Speaking News

Education Not Deportation: A Guide for Undocumented Youth in Removal Proceedings

DREAMActivist.org has created a really useful guide titled, “Education Not Deportation: A guide for undocumented youth in removal proceedings.” This guide is meant to serve both youth facing deportation and their attorneys.

Read Guide Here in HSN Library

Published in Notitas de Noticias

7 tips for a great experience at the 2011 ISTE Conference | Dangerously Irrelevant | Big Think

7 tips for a great experience at the 2011 ISTE Conference

by dr.scott.mcleod@gmail.com (Scott McLeod)

1 person liked this

Want to have a great experience at the 2011 ISTE Conference? Here are 7 tips to get you started...

Approach every vendor booth and presentation with one question in mind: Will this genuinely enhance my ability (and that of my students) to live at the upper end of Bloom's taxonomy? This simple question allows you to winnow out the shady salesmen who are just trying to make a buck off of you, avoid all of the sessions and pitches regarding technology for technology's sake, ignore everyone who's participating in the Great Tchotchke Land Rush, and skip all of the rest of the presentation chaff that's not worth your precious time.
Walk out of every session that doesn't meet your needs. Every single one. Don't feel bad about it. Don't

Schools Matter: The NAACP Case Against NYC

The NAACP Case Against NYC

by Jim Horn

Ben Jealous in op-ed at the NY Daily News:

The NAACP fights for the rights of all children. As the civil rights organization that represents the most parents and children of color in the most places across this country, we know well the anguish of parents with few to no choices for quality education. That anguish fuels the sense of urgency with which we approach the fight to ensure all children have access to quality education.

In recent years, this anguish has led us to support a range of local and state reform efforts, including
* Suing the State of the New Jersey multiple times to require it to abide by its state Constitution and provide equitable, quality education to all of its children.

* Backing teacher tenure reform and the ability of parents to impose reform on schools in California.

* The reform of zero-tolerance policies in Florida, and the end of discriminatory discipline practices

California Senate rejects extending state taxes, votes to expand local tax pow « State of Emergency

California Senate rejects extending state taxes, votes to expand local tax pow

by billguy

Senate Bill 23 1X, approved on party-line vote, would give county supervisors and school officials the ability to ask voters to increase taxes on a variety of goods and services – including income, sales, alcohol, cigarettes, medicinal marijuana and oil – to fund local services.

http://www.sacbee.com/2011/06/11/3692564/california-senate-rejects-extending.html

Saturday, June 11, 2011