Valarie Strauss highlights a tragic story of Los Angeles Academy, LA Unified school that will be part of the districts next round of school turnarounds. The author argues that the schools failure is a least in part the result of the layoffs the school has experienced in the last two years
Jim Morrison (AP Photo, file)
TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (CBS/AP) Florida's outgoing governor wants to posthumously pardon rock 'n' roll icon Jim Morrison, the lead singer of The Doors who was famously convicted of exposing himself at an anarchic 1969 concert in Miami.
Gov. Charlie Crist, a 54-year-old baby boomer and Morrison fan, said the evidence that Morrison unzipped his pants was flimsy and prosecutors were trying to make an example of the singer, whose on-stage excesses and appetite for sex and drugs were legendary.
"There's some troubling aspects to it as to whether there was a valid conviction. The more I learn about it, the more I'm convinced a wrong may have been done here. My heart just bleeds for his legacy and his family," said Crist, who leaves office in January and figures "it's sort of now or never."
Exactly what happened that night at the Dinner Key Auditorium is one of rock 'n' roll history's enduring mysteries.
According to police, The Doors' singer was drunk at the concert and exposed himself, which Morrison denied.
Doors keyboardist Ray Manzarek told The Associated Press that he never saw Morrison expose himself and
The main opponent mentioned at the Republican Governors Assn. conference here — described in terms ranging from misguided to downright evil — is the other party, the Democrats.
But running a close second are the public employee unions, particularly the teachers unions.
"Frankly," said Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty, "the public employee unions would stick a shiv in all of us if they could."
The biggest laugh of the Thursday morning session came when New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie made a joke out of a union's opposition to his proposal to require teachers to pay a portion of their health insurance costs.
"You laugh," Christie said. "That's the crap I have to listen to in New Jersey."
And among the lines most quoted and paraphrased among the governors was the comment in September from Scott Walker, now governor-elect of Wisconsin, regarding the need to trim the salaries and benefits of public employees: "We cannot and should not maintain a system where public employees are the haves and the taxpayers footing the bill are the have-nots."
Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, on a panel discussion titled "Saving America," included among his ideas setting salaries and benefits of state employees "within the framework of the taxpayers'
Speaking to reporters this afternoon, Chancellor Joel Klein declined to give any public advice to the mayor’s choice for his successor, publishing executive Cathie Black. The outgoing chancellor said that while he has been meeting with Black each day, most of that time has been spent explaining what he has already done, not telling her what she should do in the future.
But a few minutes later, Klein told a group of local and national educators that he did have one piece of advice for the next chancellor: push his reforms even further.
As he often does, Klein invoked Sir Michael Barber, an education aide to former British Prime Minister Tony Blairknown for his impatient approach to school reform. Barber’s instructions, Klein said, were to “be bold.” Klein said that he wished he had followed that advice more closely.
“We should have been bolder,” Klein said. For example, Klein said, he wishes that Department of Education officials had started their experiments with online and personalized instruction like the School of One and iZone
When you live by test scores, you run the risk of dying by them too -- or, at least, the policies that dictated their importance should.
Education Secretary Arne Duncan issued a statement Thursday after the release of 12th grade reading and math scores on the National Aassessment of Educational Progress, the test sometimes called “the nation’s report card,” that said in part:
"Today’s report suggests that high school seniors’ achievement in reading and math isn’t rising fast enough to prepare them to succeed in college and careers. Reading results have improved since 2005, but are
A few moments ago, I replied to a commenter on my Huffington Post piece about yesterday’s incident in which a University of California police officer pointed a gun at a group of student protesters with the following:
Ultimately the issue here isn’t this one officer’s actions. That wasn’t the focus of my essay, and it’s not the focus of my concern. The issue is the University of California’s systematic undermining and marginalizing of legitimate student protest, and the radicalizing effects that this strategy has had on activists and campus police alike.
Yesterday five UC students were threatened with arrest for chalking on their campus. Today several UC students were cited for putting up posters that included an image of the officer who drew his gun yesterday.
Mayor Bloomberg called for over 6,100 teaching jobs to be cut from the city’s public schools next year in a new austerity budget released today.
The preliminary budget, which tries to close a massive gap left by the end of federal stimulus funding, will leave the Department of Education with a total deficit of $435 million. The department was spared a more brutal cut by the mayor’s decision to shift funding from other areas into the school system, partially filling the hole left by the loss of $853 million in stimulus funds and $350 million in budget cuts.
Folded into the city’s calculations is the assumption that another 1,500 teachers will be lost through the attrition schools experience every year. It also assumes that schools will bear the full brunt of the $435 million cut, though a spokeswoman for the DOE said officials have not decided what, if any, cuts will be made to the central administration.
“Right now, the City is facing unprecedented budget conditions and we recognize that everyone will have to make
DAVIS, California – According to one twitter feed, there are 20 students sitting in at a US Bank branch on the UC Davis campus.
The topic of teacher experience is getting a lot of attention in education debates. In part, this makes sense, since experience (years of service) does play several important roles in education policy, including teachers’ raises and transfer/layoff policies.
Usually, experience is discussed in terms of its relationship to performance –whether more experienced teachers produce larger student test score gains than less experienced teachers. There is a pretty impressive body of research on this topic, the findings of which are sometimes used to argue for policy changesthat eliminate the role of experience in salary and other employment policies. Proponents of these changes often argue that experience is only weakly related to performance, and therefore shouldn’t be used in determining salary and other conditions of work. It is not unusual to hear people say that experience doesn’t matter at all.
As is often the case when empirical research finds its way into policy debates, the “weakly related” characterization of the findings on the experience/achievement relationship borders on oversimplification, while the claim that experience doesn’t matter is flat-out wrong. The relationship is substantial but context-dependent
Update from a comrade who was posting these fliers today: “Cops are taking the flyers away from folks even if they are posted in ‘designated areas.’ They have written a couple folks up for ‘association.’ They said they are worried for Kemper’s (the cop in the flyer) life. And here I thought we were the ones worried for our lives? Meeting tonight 6pm at 370 Dwinelle.Stop the repression!”
“‘Where are the academics who are in favor of value-added?’ Here they are, with persuasive reasoning.”
So concludes the press release that today announced a new Brookings report, “Evaluating Teachers: The Important Role of Value-Added.” The report was co-authored by Steve Glazerman (Mathematica Policy Research), Susanna Loeb (Stanford), Dan Goldhaber (University of Washington-Bothell), Doug Staiger (Dartmouth), Stephen Raudenbush (University of Chicago) and Russ Whitehurst (Brookings).
The report can be seen in some ways as a direct reply to the EPI brief, “Problems with the Use of Student Test Scores to Evaluate Teachers,” released in August. The EPI brief was co-authored by an equally distinguished set
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