Monday, February 4, 2013

Failed DC Chancellor Michelle Rhee’s memoir: What you can learn from reading it

Failed DC Chancellor Michelle Rhees memoir: What you can learn from reading it:

Failed DC Chancellor Michelle Rhee’s memoir: What you can learn from reading it

Posted by Valerie Strauss on February 4, 2013 at 5:42 pm

Text Size
Print
Reprints

Michelle Rhee’s memoir, “Radical,” is coming out Tuesday and you may be wondering what, if anything, you could learn from reading the book. Plenty of things — like, for example, how the first time she fired someone was as a college sophomore while she managed a deli named Grumpy’s, how she got “huge, crazy red welts” on her body from stress when she was a young teacher, and how she watched Teach for America founder Wendy Kopp dance “without much success at rhythm” at a TFA event.

Interestingly, in this review, titled “What’s Missing From Michelle Rhee’s Memoir,” Bill Turque, my Washington Post colleague who covered her tenure as D.C. Public Schools chancellor, says:

But aside from some cringe-inducing prose (“His head shined. His eyes burned,” is how she described her first meeting with then-mayor and political patron Adrian Fenty)

Jon Stewart’s betrayal: #michellerhee – @ the chalk face

Jon Stewart’s betrayal: #michellerhee – @ the chalk face:

Jon Stewart’s betrayal: #michellerhee

by Timothy D. Slekar

Tonight: Jon welcomes author Michelle Rhee. Her new book on education reform is called “Radical.” 11/10c.
I know. I know. Someone has to say it! WTF Jon? Really?
You spoke at the SOS rally two years ago in favor of public school teachers. Your mom was a teacher. You have been the lone “media” voice pointing out the ridiculous claims made by the idiots (education reformers) that disparage teachers. And now your going to allow “her” to promote her bullsh!t book on your show? I’m confused. I’m dazed. I , I, I,… I feel like William Wallace in Braveheart when he lifts the armor mask from his foe only to reveal his supposed friend Robert the Bruce. I feel deeply betrayed. I feel like nothing really does matter expect for money.
Popout
I mean “we” (peons fighting edreform for a decade) have absolutely nothing but the god damn truth on our side

Seattle Schools Community Forum: Ingraham PTSA Speaks on MAP

Seattle Schools Community Forum: Ingraham PTSA Speaks on MAP:

Ingraham PTSA Speaks on MAP

by Michael Rice

January 29, 2013

Dear Superintendent Banda,

The board of the Ingraham High School PTSA respectfully requests that the district suspend all MAP testing at the high school level, effective immediately.

Our PTSA represents the diverse community of parents, teachers, and students at Ingraham. We want our teachers to have the support they need to teach our students and effective tools to measure academic progress. An overwhelming majority of the teachers at our school have expressed a lack of confidence in the MAP as an appropriate assessment for our students. We trust the experience and judgment of our teachers, so we support

Questions and issues for discussion at the school closure meetings: | The Sacramento Coalition to Save Public Education

Questions and issues for discussion at the school closure meetings: | The Sacramento Coalition to Save Public Education:

Questions and issues for discussion at the school closure meetings:

by Kate_Lenox

Why is the district closing schools in the light of the passage of prop 30 and the Governor's new policy initiative to change the way schools are funded? Sac City is 73% free and reduced lunch students. It could receive an infusion of funds.

The district has sighted the Sacramento County Office of Education's requirement that that district have a balanced budget 3 years out or face being taken over by SCOE out as a reason for deep worst case scenario budget cuts. Where in the Ed Code does it grant Supt. David Gordon the authority to demand this?

There is a movement nationally to challenge school closures under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act. While the district is not using an academic component in its criteria for closures, all the proposed closures are high minority, high poverty schools. These proposed closures will negatively impact the neighborhoods of these

Schedule of district meetings on schools closures:"

The Sacramento City Unified School District has set a series of 11 community meetings at each of the school sites that may close next school year. District officials and board members will visit each of the schools and talk to parents about the closure proposal.
Trustees are scheduled to vote on the closures Feb. 21. Schools that receive a majority vote from the seven-member board will be closed after the school year ends.
Meetings will be held at 6 p.m. on the following days:
Wednesday: Tahoe Elementary School, 3110 60th St.
Monday, Feb. 4: Bret Harte Elementary School, 2751 Ninth Ave.
Monday, Feb. 4: C.B. Wire Elementary School, 5100 El Paraiso Ave.
Tuesday, Feb. 5: James Marshall Elementary School, 9525 Goethe Road
Tuesday, Feb. 5: Susan B. Anthony Elementary School, 7864 Detroit Blvd.
Wednesday, Feb. 6: Mark Hopkins Elementary School, 2221 Matson Drive
Wednesday, Feb. 6: Fruit Ridge Elementary School, 4625 44th St.
Wednesday, Feb. 13: Washington Elementary School, 520 18th St.
Wednesday, Feb. 13: Maple Elementary School, 3301 37th Ave.
Tuesday, Feb. 19: C.P. Huntington Elementary School, 5921 26th St.
Tuesday, Feb. 19: Joseph Bonnheim Elementary School, 7300 Marin Ave.

Superintendent Apologizes for 'Several Factual Errors' in CFO Interview - Voice of San Diego: Education

Superintendent Apologizes for 'Several Factual Errors' in CFO Interview - Voice of San Diego: Education:

Superintendent Apologizes for 'Several Factual Errors' in CFO Interview

Photo by Sam Hodgson
Bill Kowba

Posted: Monday, February 4, 2013 12:36 pm | Updated: 12:39 pm, Mon Feb 4, 2013.

By WILL CARLESS

San Diego Unified School District Superintendent Bill Kowba sent over a lengthy written response to our explosive interview last week with the district's new chief financial officer, Stan Dobbs.

The letter states that Dobbs made "several factual errors and misrepresentations that need corrections" in his interview.

The key inaccuracies, according to Kowba:

• Teachers at the district do not make an average of $92,000 a year plus benefits, as Dobbs said. Kowba writes that the $92,000 figure includes health and other benefits costs. "A classroom teacher’s average salary is in the $65-$70,000 range with starting teachers

Big Education Ape - SPECIAL Mid Day Banana Break 2-4-13 #soschat #edreform

Big Education Ape - Mid Day Banana Break

The cradle-to-prison pipeline

by Bill McKenzie / Editorial Columnist

Stand for Children-Dallas is part of the Stand for Children-Texas network. The goal of the organizations is to increase access to quality public schools for Texas children living in poverty.
Stand for Children-Dallas recently looked at zip codes with a high number of residents in Texas prisons. It turned out that 10 Dallas zip codes had the largest number within our city.
Then the organization looked at data for the high schools in those zip codes. It wanted to see how many of their students were learning at a level that would qualify them for college.
The result was both astonishing and disturbing. Something like 3,100 people were in prison from those zip codes. But less than one percent of the high school students were on a college-ready track..
Last week, I did an email exchange with Mitchell Savage, executive director of Stand for Children-Dallas. Here’s

The Starting Line – San Diego Schools' CFO Takes a Long Walk on Voice of San ...

San Diego Free Press
The need to push controversy overwhelms any need for fact checking; it's okay to let public officials yell 'fire' in the schoolhouses of our city. So it was with this sense of 'newsworthiness' that the VOSD published an interview on Friday with Stan ...

Closure savings are labor savings

by thenotebook

Sub Title:

The District says shuttering 37 schools will lower expenses by $28 million annually. But in the short run there are “substantial” transition costs.

Author:

by Bill Hangley, Jr.

Author Bio:

Bill Hangley, Jr. is a regular freelance contributor to the Notebook.

Philadelphia School District officials say that closing buildings will save them millions of dollars a year.
But a closer look at the numbers shows that the lion’s share of savings will come from eliminating jobs.
Officials have been adamant that their Facilities Master Plan, which would close 37 schools and relocate seven more, is a financial necessity that will ultimately save the District $28 million annually – but less in the first year.

Image:

Image Caption:

Matthew Stanski is the District's new chief financial officer

Photo Credits:

School District of Philadelphia

Michigan Tea Partier: Charter Schools Are For Kids From "Ethnically Challenged Families"

—By Andy Kroll

| Mon Feb. 4, 2013 9:03 AM PST

Anti-right-to-work protest signs wait for protesters to take them before the march to the state capitol in Lansing, Michigan, in December 2012. Eric Seals/MCT/ZUMAPRESS.com

A few weeks ago, the Michigan chapter of Americans for Prosperity, the Koch-backed conservative advocacy group, held a "citizen watchdog training" in a suburb of Detroit. The training was billed as a workshop for regular folks to learn "the best tools and techniques in investigative journalism, social media, and opposition research." Featured speakers—including local activists, conservative state legislators, and Scott Hagerstrom, AFP-Michigan's director—would also speak about efforts to "reform" Michigan's schools.

Among the AFP set, reforming public schools usually means converting them into non-union,

Education Opportunity Network

Old McDonald and Mr. Holland Take a Sentimental Journey

by Nancy Flanagan

I took a media break yesterday. I like football when I'm sitting in the stands and know who's on the field, but overexcited Super Bowl hype holds no allure for me. It snowed all day, so I turned off my phone and the internet and read in front of a crackling fire.
Reconnecting with social media this morning, I found endless re-posts of The Farmer Commercial. It was the Facebook conversation du jour-- I wept, I remembered, I was drawn back into the greatness of our nation, farmers are amazing people, best Super Bowl ad ever, blah, blah, blah.
What the farmer commercial engendered in me was:
#1) A creepy flashback of hanging out in my grandmother's kitchen, where Paul Harvey was a revered radio

John Dillon says to call Madigan with “warmest regards.”

by Fred Klonsky

John Dillon, who publishes the blog Pension Vocabulary, also asks you to contact Chairman Madigan and reverse his refusal to talk to the We Are One Coalition.
John echoes Madigan churlish “with warm regards” conclusion to his drop dead letter to the state’s public employee unions.

Michael Madigan refuses to meet with the public union coalition We Are One, who have called a summit in Burr Ridge for February 11^thto discuss reasonable and constitutional methods of alleviating the crushing debt facing Illinois after nearly a half century of not making payments to the pension funds – a period of

Anti-Common Core Bill Filed in Missouri Senate

by Shane Vander Hart

From School Reform News:

On Jan. 24, state Sen. John Lamping (R-Ladue) introduced Senate Bill 2010, which rescinds the Missouri Board of Education’s decision to adopt the Core, forbids state agencies from implementing it, and requires the Missouri legislature to sign off on state standard shifts. State Rep. Kurt Bahr (R-St. Charles) plans to file companion legislation in the next week.

…Missouri legislators’ central concerns are cost and workability, Bahr said. The state has not published an estimate of costs for shifting to

Rosa Parks’ 100th Birthday Today!

by billayers

10 Things You Didn’t Know About Rosa Parks
Jeanne Theoharis, Posted: 2/4/13 8:14 AM Updated: 2/4/13 11:05 AM

(from The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks by Jeanne Theoharis)

1. Parks had been thrown off the bus a decade earlier by the same bus driver – for refusing to pay in the front and go around to the back to board. She had avoided that driver’s bus for twelve years because she knew well the risks of angering drivers, all of whom were white and carried guns. Her own mother had been threatened with physical violence by a bus driver, in front of Parks who was a child at the time. Parks’ neighbor had been

How Are Race to the Top States Doing in Year Two?

by Cameron Brenchley

In only two years, the 12 states with Race to the Top grants continue to show improvements in teaching and learning in their schools. Last week, the U.S. Department of Education released state-specific reports for the 12 Race to the Top states, providing detailed, transparent summaries of each state’s accomplishments and challenges in year two, which covered the 2011-12 school year.

The 12 states—Delaware, the District of Columbia, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Maryland, Massachusetts, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Rhode Island and Tennessee—reached a number of benchmarks in year two, as they implemented unique plans built around Race to the Top’s

UTLA Defends Disclosure and Reporting

by LA School Report

Over the weekend, United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA) Director of Communications Suzanne Spurgeon emailed us a statement about our Friday story on how UTLA has been reporting and spending its money so far in the LAUSD School Board campaign:
“To our knowledge PACE has reported expenditures in a timely and proper manner. If there have been any

The election politics of pension reform.

by Fred Klonsky

Rich Miller’s column in the Southtown Star is interesting, if only to those of us who spend too much time speculating on politics and elections.
Particularly pension politics.
Miller reports that current polling shows Lisa Madigan trouncing Pat Quinn in a Democratic gubernatorial

L.A. Unified was warned about ex-priest before hiring, church says

The Los Angeles Archdiocese said Monday that it had warned the L.A. Unified School District of concerns it had with a former priest accused of molestation before the school system hired him in 2002 as a community outreach coordinator.
The former priest, Joseph Pina, admitted in internal church documents to a sexual relationship with a minor and to repeated “boundary issues” with women throughout his career in the clergy.
The archdiocese apparently never alerted law enforcement authorities about Pina. But a spokesman on Monday

On the Growth Model

by NYC Educator

Value-added gets a pretty bad rap, being junk science proven valid by absolutely no one. Therefore, when UFT leadership talks about the evaluation system, they call it a growth model. It's simple, they say. Wherever your students happen to be, be they slow, fast, needy, or perfect, you need only get them a little further. Sounds simple, doesn't it? We can all show some progress, somehow, with our students.

Yet here's what no one says. Who designs these tests? What sort of pre-test will there be before a Regents exam? What end-term exam will be given if there is no Regents exam? Who will decide what goes on it?

It won't be you, of course. You cannot even be trusted

OK school says ‘zero tolerance’ for bullying after teen shoots self in bathroom

by David Edwards

Authorities in Oklahoma on Monday were unable to confirm if bullying was involved after a 15-year-old male killed himself with a gun in a Cowetta school bathroom. Speaking to reporters at press conference, Superintendent Jeff Holmes explained that a “ninth grade student at Cowetta...

Malloy to present proposed Fiscal Year 2014-2015 state budget on Wednesday

by jonpelto

Connecticut is facing a $148 million budget deficit this year If the state’s elected officials want to maintain current services, that is adopting a budget that preserves the present level of programs, the state will be facing a $1.2 billion deficit next year. In addition, a current services budget would mean an expenditure level that [...]

(Read more...)

Washington counted more than 27,000 homeless students in 2011-12 school year

by The Associated Press

The numbers of students without homes is up nearly 47 percent from the start of the recession.

Latest News and Comment from Education

Monday, February 4, 2013