Tuesday, June 15, 2010

Joel Shatzky: Educating for Democracy: Is "Green Education" Possible?

Joel Shatzky

English Professor

Posted: June 15, 2010 12:21 PM

BIOBecome a Fan

Get Email Alerts Bloggers' Index

Educating for Democracy: Is "Green Education" Possible?

What's Your Reaction:

Inspiring
Enlightening
Infuriating
Scary
Helpful
Amazing
Innovative
Adorable

0views

Get Green Alerts

"It isn't easy, being Green." - Kermit the Frog

One of the dilemmas I've noticed coming out of the environmental disaster that is still roiling the Gulf of Mexico is the interconnectedness of our economic system with toxic policies. By "toxic policies" I mean programs or planning that will lead to eventual destruction of human life on this planet, if not in the immediate future, than within several generations. The future drilling for oil in the Gulf of Mexico for instance, even if done carefully, will result in the pollution of the entire area from the "little disasters" at oil rigs where there are "dribbles" of oil escaping from the pumps that have a cumulative effect on marine life, not to mention other forms of pollution that are poisoning the oceans.

Fabien Cousteau, grandson of the famous oceanographer Jacques Cousteau, is himself involved in the environmental awareness movement with his programs about pollution in the Pacific Ocean. He warned, over a year ago:

"We have to start treating the oceans like a bank account," . . . . 70% of our food depends, directly or indirectly, on a healthy ocean, as do many of our medicines and much of the natural protection we enjoy against storms. Already, roughly half the commercial fish stocks of the world have collapsed since the 1950s, and 90% of certain types of fish, like tuna and

Arizona Local News - Chandler, Gilbert, Mesa, Queen Creek, Tempe, Phoenix: Arizona - As need for college grows, Arizona to lead most states in jobs for dropouts

As need for college grows, Arizona to lead most states in jobs for dropouts

Posted: Tuesday, June 15, 2010 3:57 pm | Updated: 4:38 pm, Tue Jun 15, 2010.

Michelle Reese, Tribune |0 comments

A new national study shows that by 2018 Arizona will be one of the top five states with jobs available for high school dropouts.

But conversely, just more than 60 percent of jobs in Arizona will require some type of postsecondary education by 2018, according to the study released Tuesday by The Center on Education and the Workforce.

Arizona's vast tourism industry which creates service-related positions - housekeepers, food service, grounds keepers - is driving the growth of jobs for those lacking a diploma, according to Lee McPheters, research professor of economics at the W.P. Carey School of Business at Arizona State University.

"You come to Arizona to play golf," he said. "Business travel and tourist travel are important to the Arizona economy, more so than other states."

But Arizona's expected population growth will also fuel a need for more doctors, nurses and others in health care, McPheters said. Those jobs all require postsecondary education.

The report released Tuesday, "Help Wanted: Projections of Jobs and Education Requirements through 2018," was created out of Georgetown University. It looks at job growth by sector and educational requirements across the country. Nationally, 63 percent of jobs will require postsecondary education, from associate's degrees to college training to bachelor's and graduate degrees. In Arizona, 61 percent of jobs will require postsecondary education.

"The economy (that follows) this recession will be very different than the economy we entered it with. It will require more and more postsecondary education. We've come to the point we've been headed for a long time: If you don't have some type of postsecondary education or training you will have a much reduced chance of earning a middle class wage," Anthony P. Carnevale, director of the Center on Education and the Workforce, said Tuesday morning during a web conference.

Welcome to Matter Of Trust

Together we're all orchestrating a phenomenal mobilization to help the Gulf!

June 14, 2010: Orange Beach, Alabama using the donated natural fiber booms (hair, fur, fleece, feathers stuffed into nylons by volunteers) then put in shrimp bags with pool noodles for flotation. They want more because they say it works better since the oil floats underneath the white conventional boom. More photos & Boom FAQ

bothsides

Donated natural fiber booms in shrimp bags and conventional boom

How everybody can get involved! SIGN UP HERE It's free & fast.

Our latest YouTubes (see more)
... ... ... Comparison .................... Flotation .......................How fast it is ................. General info

ALL salons, groomers, alpaca, llama, sheep fleece farmers, feather donors, individuals, & pet owners... Please sign up to be a part of this recycling system for hair, fur, fleece, feathers, nylons... and to volunteer to make booms..More info below...

We shampoo because hair collects oil. Why should millions of pounds of absorbant, natural, renewable hair, fur, fleece clippings go to waste?

School Board gives OK to raise class sizes to 35 :: CHICAGO SUN-TIMES :: Education

School Board gives OK to raise class sizes to 35

Comments

June 15, 2010

BY ROSALIND ROSSI Education Reporter

In a dramatic emergency meeting, Chicago School Board members today unanimously gave Schools CEO Ron Huberman the green light to raise class sizes to up to 35 students — a move that would trigger thousands of layoffs — to plug a $427 million deficit.
To prepare their fiscal house for the uncertain times ahead, board members also moved to stave off any chance of a strike over teacher pay by unanimously declaring the system had the money to bankroll promised four percent raises to teachers and workers in seven other unions, at a cost of $135 million.
The board also agreed to let Huberman obtain a short-term line of credit worth up to $800 million to cover more than $400 million in late state aide and replete a reserve fund that will topple, by school year’s end, to what officials called a “perilously low’’ level of less than $50 million. That’s the equivalent of about one week of operating expenses.
In one somber moment, the board’s veteran member, LaSalle Bank chairman emeritus Norm Bobins, said the emergency vote was “the most difficult” he had cast in his 15 years on the board under Mayor Daley.
“As a banker, I have opposed having a line of credit,’’ Bobins said. “We need the line of credit not to fund the deficit but to cover us for the fact that we have not been paid for over five months by the state, and we’ve used up our cash reserves.’’
Bobins said he was “not a proponent of having 35 students in a class or

School Tech Connect: Some Interesting Thoughts On The Core

Some Interesting Thoughts On The Core

by Tim

Linda Perlstein asks and answers the big questions about the press coverage of the adoption of the Common Core. It's an interesting piece. Go read it. I'll wait.

She's right; they're boring. They're excessively boring. Standards detached from curriculum are nothing but gas. They're someone's idea of a good idea, but in reality, they only appeal to people who aren't actually teaching

Handicapping New York’s RTTT app: Good and medium news | GothamSchools

Handicapping New York’s RTTT app: Good and medium news

by Maura Walz

How does New York’s Race to the Top application compare to other states? An analysis of school district and union buy-in to state applications published yesterday by EdWeek gives some clues.
On a piece of the application that is worth 60 out of the total 500 points, New York outperformed the national average - but not staggeringly so.
One of the ways a state can win Race to the Top is by proving that its school districts and teachers union support the reforms the application proposes. States prove this by turning in Memorandums of Understanding signed by each of those groups. The more MOUs a state submits, the more points it gets toward the 60-point categories for buy-in. (You can read the full scoring guidelines for the competition here.)
In New York, all of the state’s 744 school district superintendents agreed to participate in New York’s plan if the state wins grant money. That’s a lot more than the average of 61 percent of school districts that signed onto their

HISD's high school chief is on leave | School Zone | Chron.com - Houston Chronicle

HISD's high school chief is on leave

David Simmons

David Simmons, Houston ISD's new chief officer over high schools, is on leave, district spokesman Norm Uhl confirms. Uhl had no other details.

HISD Superintendent Terry Grier hired Simmons, who had abruptly resigned from his job as superintendent of Richardson ISD, in February. If you'll remember, Grier's first pick for his chief of middle schools, Terence Johnson, who worked for KIPP,bowed out and decided to stay at the charter school chain, shortly after his name was released.

We'll let you know if we get more details.

UPDATE: Grier says Simmons is on medical leave.

Posted by Ericka Mellon at June 15, 2010 03:25 PM

HechingerEd Blog | Earn an online degree at iCollege

Earn an online degree at iCollege

My Old School (Photo by Dave Bleasdale)

Minnesota’s two-term governor Tim Pawlenty challenged the status quo of higher education when he appeared on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart Thursday night. He talked about the role of government and how we educate our students at the post-secondary level, but the overall message was about efficiency.

“Do you really think in 20 years somebody is going to put on their backpack … haul their keisteracross campus, and sit and listen to some boring person drone on about econ 101…?” asked Gov. Pawlenty. The segment in which he discussed education can be seen here.

If it seemed unusual for a governor to be on a national television program touting alternative methods of higher education, his timing was perfect. Across the United States, public universities are raising tuitions due to budget cuts, making it harder to afford traditional higher education. Community colleges have become selective because they are oversubscribed.

Enter the innovators.

Burck Smith, an internet entrepreneur and founder of StraighterLine, an online venue for college courses, is “bent on altering the DNA of higher education as we have known it for the better part of

Continuing the Search for Better Quality Indicators � The Quick and the Ed

Continuing the Search for Better Quality Indicators

by Bill Tucker

Since students will increasingly blend their learning experiences — taking virtual courses but also continuing to attend place-based institutions in some form, there’s a pressing need to develop a better set of course-level quality indicators.
Rob responds to my suggestion of four outcome-focused quality measures by warning about thepotential for providers to cream: soak up public funding but offer little real learning or value-add. In particular, he re-counts the story of how he self-taught himself to test out of his high school civics class. Agreed,

Too Much Institutional Autonomy is Bad

by Kevin Carey

Last month, for-profit Kaplan University and the California Community College Chancellor’s Office announced a mutual course articulation / transfer arrangement whereby CCC students who transferred to Kaplan would be able to bring their credits with them and get a 10 percent price discount on Kaplan courses, while students who stayed enrolled at a CCC while taking Kaplan courses would get a 42 percent price discount and be able to count those Kaplan credits toward their CCC degree. The arrangement was spurred by the fact that incompetent politicians and feckless voters in California have run their state into utter financial ruin and are thus unable / unwilling to provide space in public colleges and universities to tens of thousands of students despite the fact that economic down times are precisely when such access is needed the most.
Jane Patton, President of the Academic Senate for California Community Colleges, objected to the deal, saying “I’m hard pressed to see where we could … make this favorable to faculty.” Fellow Brainstormer Sara Goldrick-

Reed Vs. California - Perdaily.com

Reed Vs. California

by Leonard

Even in H.G. Wells classic science fiction story The Time Machine, the passive Eloi ultimately get the guts to fight back from being bred as the food supply for their more assertive underground dwelling Morlock masters. While LAUSD hasn't started eating teachers yet, I don't put anything past LAUSD's carnivorous leadership that like the Morlock will do anything to survive in a Los Angeles that is more devastated year after year. But let's face it folks, the less than intellectual wizards that continue to run the District and public education into the ground in Los Angeles couldn't do so if they were not kept in power and supported by the puppet masters in Sacramento and Washington who take their marching orders from corporate interests that President-elect Karen Lewis of the Chicago Teachers' Union sees only concerned with the potential $380 billion privatization of public education.

Just take a look at the recent case of Reed vs. California which recently came down from the California Supreme Court and hopefully you will realize just how coordinated the attack is against professional teachers and the hard

Sacramento teachers voting on pay cut, concessions | News10.net | Sacramento, California | News

Sacramento teachers voting on pay cut, concessions

Sharon Ito

Last updated 2 hrs ago

SACRAMENTO, CA -- The Sacramento City Teachers Association could be the latest teachers union to take a pay cut to help out its financially-troubled school district.

SCTA members are voting this week on a contract agreement reached between the district and union leadership that calls for significant concessions. Results are expected to be announced on Friday.

District spokesman Gabe Ross said the pay reduction is "equivalent to three furlough days," however, the number of instructional days for students has not been reduced.

The pay cut is expected to save the district up to $2.4 million, according to Ross. However, the district entered negotiations facing a $32.5 million budget deficit.

Under the agreement, teachers will have to work 15 years, up from 10 years, in order to become vested, and employees will be contributing more to their health insurance benefits.

The district and the union have also agreed to explore a parcel tax measure in order to maintain class size reduction.

If the teachers approve the deal, it will head to the school board for approval.

Teachers in the Elk Grove Unified School District

Evaluating Expanded Learning Time � The Quick and the Ed

Evaluating Expanded Learning Time

by Elena Silva

We know, we know…American kids are falling behind each other and other nations because we’re stuck with an outdated “agrarian” school calendar. President Obama and Secretary Duncan have both made public statements about the need to modernize school schedules, and over the past several years states and districts have been steadily moving toward a new phase of school time experiments (the 1990s saw a similar spate of time reform after 1982’s A Nation at Risk called for extending school from the average 180 to 200 days and then the National Education Commission on Time and Learning put out recommendations in the early 90s for time reform). Year-round or “modified” calendars are now back in the news, and extended school days and years, including a wide range of alternative start and stop times, have been proposed and implemented by schools and districts around the country.
Massachusetts’ Expanded Learning Time initiative, established in 2005, has been the best signal that today’s time reform efforts might have some staying power. The state supported initiative has been growing annually, more than doubling school and district participation. Its creator, the nonprofit advocacy group Mass2020, just-released its 2010 progress report touting the ELT initiative’s successes. The ELT model, says the report,

QUICK Hits

by Forrest Hinton

Quick Hits is a short compilation of question-raising news stories, blog posts, and video clips that Education Sector team members are reading and viewing each day.

Taking summer school courses while sitting by the pool? Virtual learning comes to Chicago schools. (Chicago Sun-Times)
Why do graduates wear those ridiculous-looking robes? (Slate)
Is the U.S. headed for a gross mismatch between educational training and labor market demand? (Inside Higher Ed)
What’s the latest development in federal edujobs money? (Politics K-12)

Text of proposed SCUSD CTA contract � SCUSD Observer

Text of proposed contract � SCUSD Observer