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Sunday, July 18, 2010

School chief urges changes - The Boston Globe

School chief urges changes - The Boston Globe

Changes urged for Mass. schools

Education official wants adoption of US standards

By James Vaznis
Globe Staff / July 17, 2010
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The state’s commissioner of elementary and secondary education recommended yesterday that Massachusetts replace its highly regarded academic standards for English and math with a uniform set of national standards that could lead to major changes in standardized testing.
The recommendation by Mitchell Chester sparked a mix of praise and condemnation around Beacon Hill and on the campaign trail, following months of speculation across the state and nation over whether Massachusetts would join other states in adopting standards that outline what material should be taught in kindergarten through 12th grade.
Chester, other education officials, and Governor Deval Patrick had said they would not support the so-called Common Core Standards if they were not as


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Larry Ferlazzo's Websites of the Day...

Larry Ferlazzo's Websites of the Day...


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    I'm Larry Ferlazzo and here you will catch me talking about websites that will help you teach ELL, ESL and EFL!

Cool Cat Teacher Blog: Daily Education & Technology News for Schools 07/18/2010

Cool Cat Teacher Blog: Daily Education & Technology News for Schools 07/18/2010

Daily Education & Technology News for Schools 07/18/2010


  • Cool Cat Teacher on Facebook
    I've made a facebook page for the readers of my blog. This will be different. It will have small daily challenges for using technology or improving your life that will go into your facebook. You don't have to friend me - just "like" the page and you can converse and share.

    Just trying to separate out my "personal" life on facebook with professional and I suggest all teachers and bloggers do this as it will simplify things.
    tags: education facebook

  • Lean Manufacturing Blog, Kaizen Articles and Advice | Gemba Panta Rei - Annotated
    Great article my husband, Kip, sent me discussing "thinking across silos" or out of discipline. Truly, in education we must do this with IT learning to think like curriculum, admin, and teachers and vice versa.

Tired of acronyms, some Oaklanders “want Mack back” | The Education Report

Tired of acronyms, some Oaklanders “want Mack back” | The Education Report

Tired of acronyms, some Oaklanders “want Mack back”

By Katy Murphy
Friday, July 16th, 2010 at 4:40 pm in community, high schools, initiatives, school reform

Mack remained the name of the high school sports teams. File photo by Anda ChuOakland saw a flurry of new and redesigned schools in the last decade. Along with the more substantive changes came a slew of inventive names – many with acronyms for aspirational adjectives, nouns, verbs and phrases: BEST, EXCEL, ASCEND, EnCOMPASS, Reach, United for Success, and EXPLORE, to name a few.
McClymonds High School, or Mack as it’s also known, was officially closed in 2005. The names of the two small high schools that opened on its campus were a mouthful: Business Entrepreneurial School of Technology (BEST) and Experience, eXcellence, Community, Empowerment and Leadership (EXCEL).
BEST closed in June, though, and now that McClymonds will be a one-school campus again, a group of people — possibly, alumni — want to undo the name change. They’ve circulated a petition titled “Change the name back to McClymonds High.” Read the rest of this entry »
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American Indian center might close its doors

By Katy Murphy
Friday, July 16th, 2010 at 12:33 am in achievement gap, preschool

Hintil Kuu Ca in the early 1980s. (Courtesy photo)I drove up to the Hintil Kuu Ca childhood development center this morning (yesterday morning, technically). It’s name means “Indian children’s house,” according to this fascinating article about the center published in 1986 in Cultural Survival Quarterly.
Hintil opened in 1973; it was started by mothers whose kids — recently relocated from reservations as part of a federal government integration program — were struggling socially and academically in Oakland schools. In the late 70s or early 80s, it moved to its current location in the Oakland hills, near Merritt College and behind Carl Munck Elementary.
But Hintil is on the list of seven childhood development centers the Oakland school district plans to close at the end of the month in response to the governor’s proposed budget cuts. Read the rest of this entry »
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Adults sure are scarce in CA schools

By Katy Murphy
Wednesday, July 14th, 2010 at 12:39 pm in budget

teacher at Knightsen Elementary. File photo by Sherry LeVars/Bay Area News Group
Take a look at this June 2010 report by the California Budget Project. If you only have a minute, I suggest you zero in on Table 1.
The report ranks California 44th of 50 states in K-12 spending in 2009-10 – $8,826 per student, compared to $11,372 in the rest of the United States. And it found California schools had way fewer administrators, teachers, guidance counselors and librarians per student in 2007-08 than the national average.

Saturday, July 17, 2010

Keeping tabs on the Billionaire Boys Club. � Fred Klonsky's blog

Keeping tabs on the Billionaire Boys Club. � Fred Klonsky's blog

Keeping tabs on the Billionaire Boys Club.


Diane Ravitch named them the Billionaire Boys Club. They are the Wall Street wheeler dealers, hedge fund

Standardized English Tests, Including TOEFL, Are Halted in Iran - NYTimes.com

Standardized English Tests, Including TOEFL, Are Halted in Iran - NYTimes.com

Standardized English Tests Are Halted in Iran




WASHINGTON — The Educational Testing Service has announced that it is temporarily suspending registration for its tests in Iran, including the popular Test of English as a Foreign Language, in what may be one of the first tangible effects of the new sanctions levied against the country by the international community.

Related

Experts and Iranian expatriates were appalled, saying that if the sanctions prohibited Iranians from studying abroad, they would hurt precisely the kind of outward-looking young Iranians the West would like to help.
The Test of English as a Foreign Language, or Toefl, is a widely recognized measure of English proficiency and is often used by Western universities in evaluating international students for admission.
The statement posted on the E.T.S. Web site on Wednesday cited the United Nations Security Council resolution “affecting banks and financial institutions that conduct business in Iran.
“As a result of this resolution, E.T.S. is currently unable to process payments from Iran,” the statement said.
In an interview with the Iranian Mehr news agency, Ibrahim Khodai, an official at the

N.F.L. Youth Clinics Link Football Skills and Citizenship

A league official sees a direct connection between the N.F.L.’s efforts to clean up behavior and the more than 125 high school player development clinics the league is running around the country this summer.
ABOUT NEW YORK
A SCHOOL’S LOSS Students from Columbia Secondary at a sidewalk memorial set up for their classmate, Nicole Suriel, 12.

How a Reward Led to a Tragedy at the Beach

Private fund-raising in public schools is a complex issue, one that is surely part of the chain of events that led to Nicole Suriel’s death.
David Blackwell

David Blackwell, Scholar of Probability, Dies at 91

A statistician and author of influential academic papers on probability and game theory, he was the first black scholar to be admitted to the National Academy of Sciences.

THE PERIMETER PRIMATE: I "heart" Dave Obey

THE PERIMETER PRIMATE: I "heart" Dave Obey

I "heart" Dave Obey

The Fiscal Times' Washington Editor Eric Pianin talked to Rep. David R. Obey (WI), the chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, on Tuesday, July 13, in his office at the Capitol. Here are some excerpts, but it's definitely worth reading the full story:

“I have been working for school reform long before I ever heard of the secretary of education, and long before I ever heard of Obama,” Obey told The Fiscal Times in an interview this week in his office in the Capitol. “And I’m happy to welcome them on the reform road, but I’ll be damned if I

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ON BILL GATES' ED REFORM


The inferior "test-prep" agenda which bases the pedagogically fraudulent "data" standardized tes


David Obey Locks Horns with Obama in his Last Budget Battle - TheFiscalTimes.com

David Obey Locks Horns with Obama in his Last Budget Battle - TheFiscalTimes.com
David Obey Locks Horns with Obama in his Last Budget Battle
This summer is fast turning into a bittersweet swan song for David Obey, the veteran Democratic House member from Wisconsin.
The mercurial chairman of the House Appropriations Committee and stalwart champion of liberal economic and social policy is set to retire after more than 40 momentous years in Congress. But instead of celebrating, Obey is locked in a bruising and highly personal budget battle – not with his Republican adversaries, but with Democratic President Obama and a prominent cabinet member.
Read excerpts of The Fiscal Times interview with David Obey.
In the greater scheme of things, the spending controversy is “small potatoes,” a “lousy little fight” over an asterisk in a multitrillion-dollar annual budget, as Obey describes it. At issue is whether to trim $500 million from Obama’s signature “Race to the Top” education initiative to help avert the threatened layoff of 140, 000 school teachers across the country. Obey believes the proposed trim of about 15 percent of funding for future programs is a small price for the administration to pay to keep teachers on the job now, amid a stubborn recession. But Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan are treating it as a potentially devastating assault on their new education program, and have threatened a veto.
Just Thursday, Duncan and White House domestic policy adviser Melody Barnes told reporters that, in effect, the House Democratic action was making a false choice between reform and keeping teachers in the classroom. “You can’t pit jobs against reform,” Duncan said in a conference call. “The president