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Wednesday, July 7, 2010

Oregon gets $33 million from feds to turn around Roosevelt High, other chronically low-achieving schools | OregonLive.com

Oregon gets $33 million from feds to turn around Roosevelt High, other chronically low-achieving schools | OregonLive.com

Oregon gets $33 million from feds to turn around Roosevelt High, other chronically low-achieving schools

Published: Wednesday, July 07, 2010, 12:28 PM Updated: Wednesday, July 07, 2010, 2:49 PM
Betsy Hammond, The Oregonian Betsy Hammond, The Oregonian
Oregon won approval today from the Obama administration for its plan to turn around its lowest performing high-poverty schools -- and $33 million in federal funding to pay for the school transformations.

To apply for the funds, Oregon had to list its worst-performing high-poverty schools, including all high schools with at least 75 percent low income students who failed to graduate 60 percent of them on time.


The six so-called "Tier I" schools at highest priority for a dramatic revamping included all three small academies on the campus of Portland's Roosevelt High. Portland school district


Biologists at Evolution 2010 in the Oregon Convention Center tell us what's hip and hot

By Ben Pittman-Polletta, The Oregonian

July 07, 2010, 8:57AM
Forget apes -- the biggest topics in evolutionary biology include genomes, dueling sperm and nanny gerbils. Full story »
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Oregon universities and colleges brace for record fall enrollments

Portland State University Physics Class

By Bill Graves, The Oregonian

July 06, 2010, 9:07PM
Oregon public and private universities and community colleges are getting swamped with students because of a weak economy, an influx of students from Washington and California, a large class of high school graduates and a continuing increase in population. Full story »
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Oregon City, 5 other Oregon districts seek federal millions to try teacher performance pay

By Betsy Hammond, The Oregonian

July 06, 2010, 12:04PM
Brought together by the nonprofit Chalkboard Project, the districts pledge to measure and reward the effectiveness of teachers and principals in high-poverty schools. Full story »
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Living in a Post-NCLB World, Part II � The Quick and the Ed

Living in a Post-NCLB World, Part II � The Quick and the Ed

Living in a Post-NCLB World, Part II

by Kevin Carey
A couple of weeks ago, in the course a long post about how we came to live in a post-NCLB world, I wrote:
Why did this happen? First, because NCLB didn’t work very well. The federal government is good at distributing money. It can fund research, provide information, and set standards. It has a significant if limited capacity to prohibit people from doing bad things. But it is very difficult for the federal government to make state and local governments do good things they don’t want to do. And that’s where NCLB fell down. You cannot create a regulatory apparatus that mandates, via adherence to enforceable rules, the transformation of bad schools into good ones.
I’ve been thinking about this some more and thought it would be worth elaborating.
Brown v. Board was a case of the federal government prohibiting people from doing bad things. It hasn’t been


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by Forrest Hinton
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Brooklyn HS principal becoming Bergtraum’s executive principal | GothamSchools

Brooklyn HS principal becoming Bergtraum’s executive principal | GothamSchools

Brooklyn HS principal becoming Bergtraum’s executive principal

by Anna Phillips
A few weeks ago, I wrote about the city’s plan to hire as many as eight executive principals, each with a $25,000 bonus, for next year.
Now thanks to a helpful commenter and confirmation from the Department of Education, we know who at least one of them is. The principal of ACORN Community High School, Andrea Lewis, is leaving to become the interim acting executive principal of Murry Bergtraum High School in lower Manhattan. As an executive principal, she’ll receive a $25,000 yearly bonus for agreeing to lead the struggling school for at least three years.
Lewis took over at Acorn Community in 2003 and described herself to InsideSchools — a parent-focused guide to the city’s public schools — as “a very procedure-driven person.” In the last three years, the school’s city-
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Inquirer (partially) wins disclosure request on Ackerman bonus | Philadelphia Public School Notebook

Inquirer (partially) wins disclosure request on Ackerman bonus | Philadelphia Public School Notebook

Inquirer (partially) wins disclosure request on Ackerman bonus

by Dale Mezzacappa on Jul 07 2010

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The Inquirer filed a request with the state Office of Public Records to see the the criteria used to award Superintendent Arlene Ackerman a $65,000 bonus. It also sought a copy of the evaluation itself.
Late last week, it won a partial victory. The state ruled that the criteria must be made public, but not the evaluation itself.
The School Reform Commission argued that the information is
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Campaign launches to educate youths about First Amendment - Yahoo! News

Campaign launches to educate youths about First Amendment - Yahoo! News

Campaign launches to educate youths about First Amendment

More from The Newsroom:

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Thu Jul 1, 1:33 pm ET
A nationwide campaign is launching Thursday to promote the First Amendment to young Americans through education and advertising.
1 for All, a nonpartisan effort, has the support of celebrities like Ellen DeGeneres, John Mellencamp and NBC “Meet the Press” host David Gregory — as well as Yahoo! News and more than 1,000 otherorganizations committed to helping publicize the campaign.
1 for All founder Ken Paulson, president of the Newseum and the First Amendment Center and former editor of
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CORE co-chair responds to Sun-Times “fire the teacher” editorial. � Fred Klonsky's blog

CORE co-chair responds to Sun-Times “fire the teacher” editorial. � Fred Klonsky's blog

CORE co-chair responds to Sun-Times “fire the teacher” editorial.

by preaprez
Jackson Potter is co-chair of CORE, the Chicago Teacher Union caucus that just won control of the union. Here is responds to the Chicago Sun-Times “fire the teacher” editorial.

July 7, 2010

In the editorial “Teachers’ performance counts more than years,” [June 27] the Sun-Times weighs in on the controversial topic of teacher evaluations. Unfortunately, the piece is very one-sided. The paper accepts without question the district’s contention that the 200 unsatisfactory teachers deserve to be fired immediately. It is never questioned who put these people in that category, whether a struggling teacher can improve with compassion and mentoring, or what is really behind the Board of Education’s new policy.

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The End of Management | Lefty Parent

The End of Management | Lefty Parent

The End of Management

by Cooper Zale

In a bit of personal synchronicity, my partner Sally pointed out that the latest edition of the wonderfully positive Ode magazine (which bills itself as a “community of intelligent optimists”) has an excerpt from Daniel Pink’s book, Drive: The Surprising Truth about What Motivates Us. It is the same Daniel Pink who does the impassioned voice-over for the 11-minute YouTube video I highlighted inmy previous blog piece. With all the handwringing and anger around corporate greed and its consequences (e.g. the BP oil spill and the misadventures of the American financial industry that contributed to our “Great Recession”), it’s nice to be able to report a positive movement happening in the corporate world, still on the

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Today's Big Education Ape Posts on Parents 4 democratic Schools #edu

Parents 4 democratic Schools

Today's Big Education Ape Posts on Parents 4 democratic Schools




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Meghan Murphy: Education cash crunch signals need for reform | recordonline.com

Meghan Murphy: Education cash crunch signals need for reform | recordonline.com

Meghan Murphy: Education cash crunch signals need for reform

Costs go up; NY enrollment slips
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Published: 2:00 AM - 07/07/10
Last updated: 9:46 AM - 07/07/10

Everyone last week seemed to be running around scraping together money to save education jobs. While they scramble, I have to ask: Is pouring money at the same old broken system a solution?

Thursday, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a bill that included $10 billion for education jobs. To pay for the fund, Congress robbed three stimulus reform initiatives.

During the past few months, local educators have said we need to keep teachers in the classroom. But they've also said we need reforms, such as those outlined in President Barack Obama's Race to the Top program.

Obama wants both, too. But what the House is saying is that we have to prioritize. So what do we choose — today or tomorrow?

The initial education stimulus money plugged a hole in New York's fiscal dam for almost two years. Albany supplanted state school aid with federal money and did little to address the rising tide of education costs.

Education spending in our state soared between 2003 and 2009. On Sunday, you read that more people are leaving our region than are arriving. So too have enrollments shrunk in 70 percent of mid-Hudson districts. Yet, school spending per pupil in the 24 districts where enrollment fell increased anywhere from 38 to 81 percent during the 2003-2009 period.

Though we might not like the way it happened, fiscal crisis forced substantial change in school budgets. In January, with little federal stimulus money left, Gov. David Paterson proposed cuts in state school aid. The cuts shifted some costs to taxpayers and the decision-making burden to school boards. But the end result was that districts kept spending down. On average, mid-Hudson budgets increased only about 0.4 percent for the upcoming school year.

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How Schools Can Achieve Obama's Lofty Education Goals - US News and World Report

How Schools Can Achieve Obama's Lofty Education Goals - US News and World Report

How Schools Can Achieve Obama's Lofty Education Goals

Three positive trends offer big lessons on making America more educationally competitive by 2020

By RICHARD WHITMIRE , ANDREW J. ROTHERHAM
Posted: May 18, 2010
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Richard Whitmire, author of Why Boys Fail, is coauthor of the recent New America Foundation report, "Pathway to the Baccalaureate." Andrew Rotherham is a partner at Bellwether Education and writes the blog Eduwonk.com.

Finding depressing education news is easy. The recession, combined with the waning of federal stimulus money, is about to trigger hundreds of thousands of teacher layoffs—an "education catastrophe," warns Education Secretary Arne Duncan.
The layoffs will play out against a background of flat national reading scores and mediocre showings on international education rankings. Looming behind everything: the country's much-debated school reform law, No Child Left Behind, has fallen into disrepute.
None of this can be sugarcoated; yet dwelling on the negatives masks some significant education breakthroughs that promise to pay dividends for years to come. Together they represent the country's best shot at achieving President Obama's ambitious goal of pushing
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