Tuesday, July 10, 2012

Schools Matter: Why Is AFT Investing Millions for Common Core Prep?

Schools Matter: Why Is AFT Investing Millions for Common Core Prep?:


Why Is AFT Investing Millions for Common Core Prep?

New York's UFT members have been invited to join the AFT crowd in Detroit, at least the ones who will sign a statement pledging to not get in the way of the misleaders' steamrolling of the resolution to to make Common Core endorsement official.  From NYC Educator:
. . .the only UFT members at the convention will be those who've signed a paper agreeing never to disagree with the Unity position [including resolution in support of Common Core] in public. That's hardly representative of working 


Invest in instruction, not in unnecessary tests


Sent to the Los Angeles Daily News, July 9, 2012

Because of severe budget cuts, LAUSD is cutting summer school offerings. The situation, we are told, could be worse next year, with no funding for summer school available (“Summer squeeze: LAUSD offers limited summer school classes,” July 9). The same situation exists in school districts throughout the country, with severe cuts in many programs and services known to be of great value to students, such as libraries and librarians.


At the same time American schools seem to be eager to spend billions of dollars of tax money on untested standards, to be accompanied by a massive set of tests that do nothing but enrich publishers and testing 

Microsoft's Stack Ranking System Crippling Innovation

It doesn't get any better than this when it comes to explaining how the sheer IDIOCY plaguing Microsoft is now also crippling an entire generation of schoolchildren, intellectually, emotionally and psychologically. Stack ranking, high stakes testing, performance benchmarks, merit pay, and humiliation -- it's all the same strategy and it's a disaster that some say could prove fatal.


Gates and his billionaire buddies dictating ed policy think they know it all and have blindsided desperate politicians and broke state governments with lots of money with lots of string