Friday, March 26, 2010

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ESEA Renewal Blueprint Faces Legislative Hurdles

The Obama administration's plan has drawn some early praise, though federal lawmakers have qualms about specific points.

(March 26, 2010)

Congress Gives College Aid a Boost

The switch to direct government loans will result in savings to boost Pell Grants and make it easier for some workers to repay their student loans. (March 26, 2010, AP)

Principal-Training Portal Aims for Ease of Use

New Leaders for New Schools offers a range of online professional-development resources through its Effective Practice Incentive Community. (March 25, 2010)

Kappner vs. Olson-Jones for OEA president The Education Report

The Education Report

Kappner vs. Olson-Jones for OEA president

By Katy Murphy
Thursday, March 25th, 2010 at 7:24 pm in OEA
5 Comments »

Tania Kappner, a teacher at Oakland Tech and a community organizer for the Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action Integration Immigrant Rights and Fight for Equality By Any Means Necessary (BAMN), wants to lead the Oakland teachers union — a post currently held by two-term incumbent Betty Olson-Jones.

Voting has gone on all week, and ends at 6 p.m. Friday. If Olson-Jones defeats Kappner (who challenged her in 2008), this will be her last term.

Eduflack: A College Degree for Every Child?

A College Degree for Every Child?

By now, most in national education policy circles realize we are transitioning from the era of AYP to the era of college/career ready. Instead of using middle school reading and math proficiency as our yardstick, we will soon be using the college- and career-ready common core standards to determine if states, districts, and schools are truly making progress toward student achievement.

Over at National Journal's Education Experts Blog, they've been spending the week discussing EdSec Arne Duncan's Blueprint for ESEA Reauthorization. Lots of interesting opinion here, from Sandy Kress' significant disappointment to Michael Lomax' support to real concerns about the "5 percent rule" to a general feeling that lack of details is a good thing in planning legislative policy.

But this morning, your NJ ring leader Eliza Kligman broke a bit from protocol and posted an anonymous comment from a reader in South Carolina. (For those who don't realize the participant list for the Education Experts Blog is a virtual who's who. There are MANY in the chattering class who desperately want to be added to the list, but haven't yet. And to focus on these experts, National Journal doesn't allow readers to post comments to the blog. A general concept that usually means the kiss of death for a blog, but seems to work for National Journal.)

But I digress. This reader raised an important question with regard to the next generation of ESEA and our intent of getting every child in the United States "college ready." In fact, the comment is a little more pointed, with the reader stating, "if everyone is highly technically trained or college

(Mis)Understanding the NAEP Results � The Quick and the Ed

(Mis)Understanding the NAEP Results

Stories from the NY Times, Mother Jones, and the Washington Postbemoaned the flat National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) reading scores released Wednesday. Jay Matthews called it the epitaphof the No Child Left Behind era. The results aren’t quite so simple.

See, NAEP is different than most standardized tests. It takes a sample of the current population in every state, so this year’s population of kids is compared to the last time the test was administered. There’s an automatic correction for changing demographics, so as America has gotten less white, so has NAEP. In statistical terms this creates something called Simpson’s Paradox, which makes trend lines seem worse than they really are because of a hidden variable, in this case, race.

To show how this impacts NAEP scores, here are the results of the long-term trend NAEP results for fourth-grade reading from 1975 to 2008 (I’m using the long-term

What Does It Mean To Be American? - Perdaily.com

What Does It Mean To Be American?

Yesterday was my 63rd birthday and after spending the last 5 months writing posts for perdaily, I would like to reflect on why education reform is so important to me. When I used to teach history, I always started out class by having the students read the front page of the Los Angeles Times while I took the roll and did the our mundane classroom maintenance tasks. In confronting student reticence about the relevance of reading today's newspaper in a World or American History course, I would respond that if I could not connect what was on the front page of the paper to what we were studying, I would not have them read the front page of the newspaper anymore.

There were two stories that caught my eye this morning as I was having my breakfast, one was about a young woman in Afghanistan who had been murdered because she refused to be married to her cousin and the second one was about economically necessitated cuts to arts programs and threatened the very existence of programs like the Watts Towers Art Center. What could these two apparently unrelated stories have in common for me? Then it

Notes from the news, Mar. 26 | Philadelphia Public School Notebook

Notes from the news, Mar. 26

by Erika Owens

From turmoil, a S. Phila. High honor The Inquirer
Wei Chen, president of the Chinese-American Student Association, won the Princeton Prize in Race Relations for "exceptional and sustained leadership."
See also: Student, not district, wins race-relations prize Daily News
Reaction to violence muted by stereotypes The Inquirer (opinion)
A history lesson on anti-Asian racism in the U.S. and conclusion that the incidents at South Philly High didn't gain national attention due to race.
Elmer Smith: On education, this is a president left behind Daily News
Obama is still getting flack for his comments in support of the wholesale firing of a district of teachers in Rhode Island, and its relevance to his proposed changes to NCLB.
Phila. School District ''Webinar'' Looks for Solutions to Flash Mobs KYW
Junior Great Books: A month of learning & reflection Philly Teacher blog
Please email us if we missed anything today or if you have any suggestions of publications, email lists, or other places for us to check for news.
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Notes from the news
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California Teens Use Facebook to Save School Library - 3/23/2010 - School Library Journal

California Teens Use Facebook to Save School Library

By Lauren Barack -- School Library Journal, 3/23/2010

High school students in California’s Tracy Unified School District have launched aFacebook fan site, hoping to drum up support for their librarians as the school board considers laying off staff.

‘Save the Tracy Unified School District Libraries’ may not sway school board members, but its 526 fans are still hopeful that other cuts may replace those made to their Northern California school libraries.

“Of all things to cut from a school, they chose a LIBRARY,” says Alina Armour on the Facebook page, and who is herself a student at Merrill F. West High School, where its school librarian is on a list to be cut. “It's ridiculous, so show the district that we want our libraries!”

Attempts to reach Armour were unsuccessful.

At its February 23 meeting, Tracy Unified School District’s Board of Educationproposed cutting 42 principals, assistant principals, and other staffer, including Donna Sonnenburg, Merrill F. West High School’s librarian. The district needs to cut $13.9 million from its 2010-2011 budget and an additional $2.1 million for the 2011-2012 budget.

However, Bill Swenson, president of the board of education, says no specific budget reductions have been approved, as of yet, for the 2010-2011 school year. “The final decision will be made March 30th at a special school board meeting,” he says by email.

Viewpoints: Protesting students get a C in logic - Sacramento Opinion - Sacramento Editorial | Sacramento Bee

Viewpoints: Protesting students get a C in logic

By Bruce Maiman
Special to The Bee

Published: Friday, Mar. 26, 2010 - 12:00 am | Page 19A

Once again, college students from all over the state flocked to Sacramento on Monday to protest education cuts and tuition hikes.

The system suffered a 20 percent spending cut last year. In response, the colleges raised fees for students, eliminated courses and furloughed workers.

It may surprise you to know that these students, telling taxpayers to spend more money as they struggle to pay their way, are leaving up to $500 million in Pell Grants untouched. They don't apply for them.

About half a million of California's 2.9 million community college students could receive a federal Pell Grant, according to Debbie Cochraneof the nonprofit Institute for College Access and Success in Berkeley.

Why does the money sit there? Because the application process is complicated. "A lot of students do give up," Cochrane says.

One student told the San Francisco Chronicle she thought about applying for financial assistance but when she showed up at the financial aid office, she walked out.

The Educated Guess Is common core good for California?

The Educated Guess

Is common core good for California?

Posted in Common Core standards, Race to the Top, Standardized tests

Draft common-core standards got a boost this week when the respected Thomas B. Fordham Institute gave it a solid thumbs-up. Fordham’s evaluators standards “a clear, ambitious, and actionable depiction of the essential skills, competencies, and knowledge that our young people should acquire in school and possess by the time they graduate.”
Fordham will be encouraging states to adopt the math and English language arts standards. But interestingly for California was a sentence inserted in a draft of the report earlier this month: “Still, it’s likely that a handful of states—Massachusetts and California come to mind—will decide they’re better off with the standards they’ve got today.”
So now that Fordham has brought the question out into the open — or almost did (the specific references to California and Massachusetts were actually cut from the report’s final version) – it’s time that California’s education community addressed it: Should California go ahead and adopt common core later this summer? A good argument can be made that it shouldn’t. The answer, however, is inextricably tied to decisions related to Race To The Top.
(Read more and comment on this post)

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