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Wednesday, January 15, 2014

Special Late Nite Cap UPDATE 1-15-14 #BATsACT #RealEdTalk #EDCHAT #P2

Nite Cap UPDATE


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CORPORATE ED REFORM




Michelle Rhee: Chicken?
This is hilarious:Michelle Rhee’s call this morning at 10:25 on Twitter, saying “I’m around for a bit, does anyone have any questions for me?” was like dumping pretzels on a beach filled with hungry seagulls.The Twitterverse lit up with questions that came fast and furious, and overwhelmingly from critics of Rhee, the former D.C. schools chancellor and current lightning rod for issues around schoo
Karen Lewis Has @GovChristie's Number
Karen Lewis, president of the Chicago Teachers Union, knows what it's like to have a bullying politician try to unilaterally force school system changes on students, their families, and their teachers. Because she is so damn smart, she saw through mayor Rahm Emanuel's transparent union-busting call for a longer school day, and demanded instead that Chicago's children get a better school day. Thank


A rising superstar in education is Rutgers student Stephanie Rivera, who I first wrote about last year.  Stephanie just published a very compelling blog post called To All The Teachers Telling Us To Not Go Into Teaching, Stop.  In response to the recent flood of videos and blog posts by frustrated teachers, Stephanie suggests that these warnings may not be serving a good purpose.  Stephanie conclu

Being named a top party school by the Princeton Review could cost a university an 8 to 9 percent decline in the percentage of out-of-state students who enroll. That’s among the conclusions of a new study that measures the impact on higher education of controversial annual college rankings. Being named one of the 25 best colleges by U.S. News & World Report gets an institution 6 to 10 percent m

School safety experts to lawmakers: Prevention is vital
The Arapahoe High School shootings fresh in their minds, members of the legislative education committees got a briefing on school safety Wednesday. Safety experts from the state and two school districts, plus a veteran school resource officer, discussed the issue and took questions from lawmakers. Panel members generally agreed that schools are more secure and better able to respond to threats tha
Rural AP incentives, school supply sales tax holiday among new bills
Proposals intended to make it easier for rural districts to offer Advanced Placement classes and cheaper for parents to buy school supplies were among 10 education-related bills introduced in the Colorado legislature over the last two days. The Advanced Placement bill, sponsored by Salida Republican Rep. Jim Wilson, would create a pilot incentives program that would provide money to small rural di
A White House meeting of higher education leaders Thursday will spotlight a plethora of efforts to draw more students from low-income families into college, one of President Obama’s top priorities. Among them is a program that sent Alexandria Johnston, 21, a brand-new graduate from the University of Virginia, to southern Virginia to help disadvantaged high school students navigate the labyrinths


Late Night: Stop Billionaires From Hurting Us: Find, Create and Use Leverage
I think protest movements don’t find, create or acquire enough leverage to use on the people who have the power to make change. So, how do we do that? I watch a lot of Kilgore Trout TV. That’s TV I named after a SF writer character in Kurt Vonnegut’s books. He had great ideas but his books were poorly written. These Billionaires look so nice. Why would they want to hurt us?I also watch The Wire TV


The most scathing questions from Michelle Rhee’s doomed Twitter Q&A | Salon.com
The controversial education reformer held a Twitter town hall, but not all of the questions were friendly ELIAS ISQUITH Apparently having learned nothing from last year’s #AskJPM and #AskRKelly debacles, controversial education reformer Michelle Rhee announced on Wednesday that she’d be answering questions from folks on Twitter using a hashtag of her own: #AskMichelle. via The most ...read moreThe

Thanks to blogger TeacherKen for drawing my attention to this startling story about a failed voucher school in Milwaukee. A small religious school called LifeSkills Academy closed “in the dead of night” in December, after collecting $200,000 in taxpayer funds for the year. It became a voucher school in 2008 and had collected some 2 million dollars since then. By the time it closed, its enrollment

From Private to Public Profit
It will be a bitter pill for people to swallow–the idea of having less so that big business can have more. Nothing that this nation or any other nation has done in modern history compares with the selling job that must be done to make people accept the new reality. — Business Week editorial, October 12, 1974 The “new reality” spoken of above was old capitalist private profit-public loss economics.
From Austerity to Abundance
Governor Jerry Brown and his staff are exchanging high-fives over balancing California’s budget, but the people on whose backs it was balanced are not rejoicing. The state’s high-wire act has been called “the ultimate in austerity budgets.” Welfare payments, health care for the poor, and benefits for the elderly and disabled have been slashed. State workers have been downsized. School districts in

Obama Announces Manufacturing Institute at North Carolina State
President Obama announces the creation of a manufacturing hub at North Carolina State University. RALEIGH, N.C.—President Barack Obama on Wednesday sought to push Congress to promote 21st-century manufacturing jobs by establishing hubs where universities and companies work together to invent, design and make new products. The first such hub will be based at North Carolina State University, and the

Alex Johnson, aide to Ridley-Thomas, joins L.A. school board race
A senior aide to an L.A. County supervisor has joined the race for an open seat on the Los Angeles Board of Education.

Last week’s massive spill of the toxic chemical MCHM into West Virginia’s Elk River...


IS 162 Bronx AP Greg Papadopoulos, Look To PS 106's Marcella Sills About Absenteeism
Lots of news this week with that principal with the blue eye shadow out at PS 106 in Far Rockaway, Marcella Sills. Yes, we can harp on the other stuff, but being the individuals that we are here at SBSB and not always wanting to go with the flow, The Crack Team was able to find a modicum of positivity in all the mess that was created at PS 106.For all the misdeeds of Marcella Sills she shows up to

Some news: my manuscript is officially turned in. Outside of a few edits here and there, I’m confident that this draft is the draft and every draft from here on after will be the grammatical equivalent of shooing away really tiny fleas. After the editing process proved to wring my deepest thoughts out like a sponge, I was asked by numerous people, including my editors and fiancĂ©e. My initial respo


1. How to Choose the Best Day Care Center for Your Toddler!!!
Posted by Oscar Marin on January 13, 2014
2. Learning Without Technology
Added by Thomas Whitby on January 8, 2014
3. What Most Schools Don't Teach
Added by Thomas Whitby on January 12, 2014


Alaska Pulls Out of Smarter Balanced
The Fairbanks News-Miner reports that the Alaska State Department of Education and Early Development announced the state was pulling out of the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium.  Alaska was an advisory state, not a governing member of the consortium that has seen a number of states leave.Alaska announced its plan Tuesday to pull out of the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium and hire a ne
A Review: Myths and Facts of the Common Core State Standards
We have some new readers tonight so I wanted to take time to bring to their (and our) attention some common myths put forth by the Common Core advocates and how they are debunked.You can find the Myths and Facts page here for future reference and here they are below:Myth .  Common Core (CC) was a state-led initiative.Fact .  The CC standards were initiated by private interests in Washington, DC, w
Karen Lamoreoux Discussing Common Core With Glenn Beck
I wanted to first welcome Glenn Beck viewers who are coming our way due to the plug we were given during the program.  Just finished watching the video that The Blaze posted of Karen Lamoreoux from Arkansas Against Common Core speaking with Glenn Beck.Fabulous job Karen!  Thank you for your voice!  I also want to thank all of the Moms and Dads who are quietly fighting in the trenches.  Keep it up!

Special Issue: NCAA Convention
In this NCAA sports-focused edition, Diverse tackles head injuries in collegiate sports, specifically football, and how it will it affect the demographics of college football in the next decade or two. Stanford’s history of diverse head coaches under the guidance of legendary 49ers coach Bill Walsh is also covered, as well as the proposed removal of collegiate sports altogether at the University o



Breaking Up (With Ed Reform) Is Hard To Do | Gatsby In L.A.

Breaking Up (With Ed Reform) Is Hard To Do | Gatsby In L.A.:

Breaking Up (With Ed Reform) Is Hard To Do







 Lisa Alva is a dangerous woman.  At least some people think so: last month, she published a blistering piece on the InterACT education website recounting her “broken romance” with some of the leading organizations in education reform.  Lisa had already butted heads with some union leaders by speaking out publicly against their seniority policies and resistance to accountability.  But her association with the reform movementended abruptly this past December:
I phoned into a conference call that wasn’t what I expected, and it ended my relationships with the Partnership for Los Angeles Schools, Teachers for a New Unionism and Educators4Excellence, and put some others in the doghouse…
Listening in to a conference call with the United Way that was supposed to be a talk with education groups but turned into a recruiting session to rally support for LAUSD Superintendent John Deasy, Lisa “felt the hair stand up on the back of [her] neck” as she realized that the groups were brainstorming to throw their support to a superintendent believed by some to be anti-union and currently very unpopular due to his recent expenditure of a billion dollars to purchase iPads for LAUSD students.
To Lisa, who had believed these groups to be above politics, it felt like a personal betrayal.  For her, groups representing private or charter interests had no business throwing their