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Sunday, June 20, 2010

How Florida education reform bill didn't become law: Opponents took fight to Crist | jacksonville.com

How Florida education reform bill didn't become law: Opponents took fight to Crist | jacksonville.com

How Florida education reform bill didn't become law: Opponents took fight to Crist

Thrasher pushed it through, never expecting Crist's veto

Posted: June 19, 2010 - 11:38pm

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Florida Gov. Charlie Crist talks to 50th No More founder Colleen Wood during a Jacksonville campaign stop in April. Crist's office denies the governor ever told Senate Bill 6 supporters he would sign the bill. BOB MACK/The Times-Union
BOB MACK/The Times-Union
Florida Gov. Charlie Crist talks to 50th No More founder Colleen Wood during a Jacksonville campaign stop in April. Crist's office denies the governor ever told Senate Bill 6 supporters he would sign the bill.

By Brandon Larrabee
TALLAHASSEE - As the legislative session approached last year, Senate Republicans decided to launch an ambitious education reform effort. At its center would be an attempt to overhaul teachers' employment protections and use student achievement as a basis for their pay.
The bill would be carried by a veteran of past education reform battles, Sen. John Thrasher, R-St. Augustine, the junior member of the Senate Education Committee.
"I guess you could say I drew the short straw," Thrasher said, laughing, "or my fellow members knew that they didn't want to touch that one."
In its two-month trip through Florida politics, Senate Bill 6 became one of the most controversial education bills in years. Social media like Facebook and Twitter helped energize opponents, while teacher unions drew lines against business supporters to kill the measure. And a governor used it to take his first tentative steps away from his lifelong membership in the Republican Party.
The final reverberations from the battle have yet to be felt. But this is the story of Senate Bill 6 so far: how it came to be, how it lived and how it died.
Racing to battle
The fight was rooted in the debate over how to position the state for the Race to the Top grants being offered by the U.S. Department of Education.
The program offered states millions of dollars in exchange for promising education reform efforts. Jeff Wright, director of public policy advocacy for the Florida Education Association, said the union and the
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$20M Lynch fund aims to make better principals - BostonHerald.com

$20M Lynch fund aims to make better principals - BostonHerald.com

$20M Lynch fund aims to make better principals

By Renee Dudley
Sunday, June 20, 2010 - Added 14h ago
Citing the “cancer” of weak education in America, philanthropists Carolyn A. and Peter S. Lynch have donated $20 million to Boston College for a new program to train principals of Boston’s Catholic, charter and public schools.
The Lynch Leadership Academy says it will award 25 fellowships annually to principals for a leadership retreat, two-week summer program, and monthly and weekly sessions with leadership coaches.
In an interview Friday, Peter Lynch pointed out that although the United States has an enviable higher-education system, many of the country’s kindergartens through its high schools struggle.
“There’s a cancer affecting the country in that students in some schools are not being well-served and that only limits their future opportunities in life,” said Lynch, a 1965 graduate of Boston College.
“Education in the early grades is the most important issue in America,” Lynch, who serves as vice chairman of Fidelity Management and Research Co., added
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EducationNews.org Breaking the habit of skipping school

EducationNews.org

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David Morales

R.I. School to reverse ban on boy's soldier hat

6.20.10 - The superintendent of a Rhode Island school district that banned a second-grader's homemade hat because it displayed toy soldiers with tiny guns said
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Breaking the habit of skipping school

6.20.10 - With Nevada still reeling from the latest national report to lambaste its education system, educators and community advocates want the spotlight on what they say is a key factor in the Silver State’s dismal graduation rate...
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Chicago's new teachers union president

6.20.10 - Karen Lewis, the president-elect of the Chicago Teachers Union, left Kenwood High School in 1970 without a diploma, skipping right from her last day of junior year to a prestigious university...
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Many top educators double dip the system

6.20.10 - For the past decade, Larry Morgan has been collecting a pension check from the State Teachers Retirement System and a paycheck as superintendent of the Stark County...

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Education - Everything you need to know about the world of education.

Education - Everything you need to know about the world of education.

T.C. Williams hustles to get off urgent-reform list


After landing on the government's in-need-of urgent-reform list, T.C. Williams High struggles to find the prescription for smaller achievement gaps and higher graduation rates.
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A father's story: Saving a troubled son

A father tells the difficult story of how his son was brought back from a world of trouble with the help of dedicated staff at several therapeutic schools and wilderness programs.
Posted by Valerie Strauss | Permalink | Comments (0)
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New regs for private special ed schools


District officials proposed new rules Friday to more tightly regulate the quality and cost of private schools where special education students are sent at public expense.
A 2006 law passed by the D.C. Council authorized more rigorous oversight, but only now is the District getting around to establishing specific regulations to put the measure on its feet. The rules, published Friday in the D.C. Register, will require the schools to obtain a "Certificate of Approval" (COA) from the Office of the State Superintendent of Education confirming that they comply with health and safety standards and are following each student's Individual Education Plan (IEP) -- the official document setting out the help that a child needs. It will also, for the first time, place limits on what the Di
Alexandria educators try to reform (TWP)
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N.J. School Boards Association to spend millions on renovations despite cutbacks at schools | NJ.com

N.J. School Boards Association to spend millions on renovations despite cutbacks at schools | NJ.com

Sussex County teacher is one of 12 chosen for special archeological dig in Siberia

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By Joe Moszczynski/The Star-Ledger

June 20, 2010, 9:00AM
JEFFERSON TOWNSHIP — Claude Larson won’t be going on a typical summer vacation this year. Instead, the eighth-grade science teacher at the Jefferson Township Middle School will be embarking on a journey of a lifetime as she travels to Siberia in search of artifacts left by a civilization affected by climate warming 6,000 years ago. "I’ll be living in... Full story »
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N.J. School Boards Association to spend millions on renovations despite cutbacks at schools

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By Elise Young/Statehouse Bureau

June 20, 2010, 6:30AM
TRENTON — The publicly financed lobby for New Jersey’s school boards is spending millions to renovate its headquarters, even as local districts face massive state aid cuts, defeated budgets and construction proposals, and pending teacher layoffs. The New Jersey School Boards Association collects more than $7 million a year from 588 member districts, which are legally required to join.... Full story »
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Textbook rentals will give N.J. college students more options this fall

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By Kelly Heyboer/ The Star-Ledger

June 19, 2010, 9:30PM
Campus bookstores hope to bring students back with cheaper textbooks Full story »
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Paramus principal scales back middle school graduation after food fight

By The Star-Ledger Continuous News Desk

June 19, 2010, 8:39AM
PARAMUS — The principal of a Paramus middle school told parents Friday that Monday's graduation would not have music, speeches, a bagel breakfast and other "fun" activities because of a food fight that occurred the day before, a report on NorthJersey.com said. Principal Oscar Diaz of West Brook Middle School said the eighth-grade class was being punished for the cafeteria... Full story »
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Cool Cat Teacher Blog: Daily Education & Technology News for Schools 06/20/2010

Cool Cat Teacher Blog

Teaching students with new tools, enthusiasm, and belief that teaching is a noble calling.

Cool Cat Teacher Blog: Daily Education & Technology News for Schools 06/20/2010

Daily Education & Technology News for Schools 06/20/2010

by coolcatteacher@gmail.com (Victoria A Davis, Cool Cat Teacher)

Rennovating this Blog: Seven Goals as I Re-look at my Blogging

by coolcatteacher@gmail.com (Victoria A Davis, Cool Cat Teacher)
About every year and a half, I give my blog a facelift. I've been working on it today but it is late and I'm not going to be done.

I will say that the new blogger template is so good, that I did get rid of the almost completely hand coded site. I still have a lot of custom html that I wrote in the side widgets, but blogger does now have "pages" which looks a bit like wordpress. And it has more templates and functions a little more like weebly on the back end.

Anyway, I haven't finished reinstalling the disquscomments and may just go back to blogger, although I had many times that people reported that the blogger 

7 Tips to Analyze the Formula of Your Life

by coolcatteacher@gmail.com (Victoria A Davis, Cool Cat Teacher)
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    School Tech Connect: On A Lighter Note

    School Tech Connect: On A Lighter Note

    On A Lighter Note

    by Tim
    This RSS clip on my blogroll has been making me laugh for a week now.



    But I can't get that song out of my head! Way to go, Miss Cheska!

    Tolerance Can Actually Be A Virtue

    by Tim
    Reer. (cat noise)

    I understand what he's saying, and nobody is a more eloquent advocate for technology in education but the whole "zero tolerance" language makes me nervous.

    If I were back in the classroom, I would think long and hard before committing to a tech-centric, web-energized, project-based approach unless I had a really good 1:1 laptop program, awesome connectivity at school and in the homes of my students, freedom from draconian filters, and permission to go off-script, as it were.

    I think if I were in a school with, for example, a laptop cart that I had to check out and which sucked no matter how wonderful the tech director made it sound, or in a school where I had to ask for every little thing to be
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