Saturday, November 27, 2010

School Tech Connect: Set Up To Fail

Set Up To Fail

by effacethefacade@yahoo.com (Tim)

Nothing against Mr. Polakow-Suransky--- I've never met him. Indeed, my hat's off to anyone who serves, and I'm sure he's highly competent and worthy, but I just want to point out this:

The man is 38, and he's already a former principal and top official at headquarters. He's the career-educator graybeard that's going to serve as a counterweight to the publishing magnate now running the NYC schools.

Credentials Count « InterACT

Credentials Count

by Martha Infante

Economists Want to Stop Teachers’ Degree Bonuses-Washington Post

“You are just as likely to find a great teacher with 3 years of experience as you are a terrible one with 25 years on the job, and vice versa. Other than the first few years, experience does not matter one iota.”-Chad Alderman at the Quick and the Ed

That’s the latest narrative, isn’t it? Teacher experience matters very little, Master’s degrees are superfluous and expensive, and expensive, lazy, union teachers should be replaced by charter schools and Teach for America instructors.

I have a different point of view on this.

Both as a student and teacher in Los Angeles public schools, I have seen and experienced the wonder of master teachers. As a teacher assistant, my first assignment was in the classroom of a teacher who had entered teaching late in life, a career transition. He was clearly out of his element in a classroom full of wild, rambunctious second graders. They hid in the cabinets, pounced from the tops of closets, sat in trash cans,

Critics Blast Compromise Over City Schools Chancellor Pick - NY1.com

Critics Blast Compromise Over City Schools Chancellor Pick

By: NY1 News

Critics of Mayor Michael Bloomberg's choice for the next schools chancellor say they will file for a temporary restraining order on Monday to try to prevent publishing executive Cathie Black from getting a waiver to fill the position.

At a protest in Brownsville, Brooklyn this morning, Councilman Charles Barron said he will continue protests against Black and resort to civil disobedience if necessary.

Barron urged parents to keep their children out of city public schools until a "qualified chancellor" is selected. He also said the state should repeal mayoral control of city schools.

"Mayoral control is out of control. The mayor is disrespectful, the mayor is abusive of the power the

Another home visit by UCPD | THOSE WHO USE IT

Another home visit by UCPD

Posted on November 26, 2010 by thosewhouseit| 5 Comments

We have received word of yet another home visit by UCPD pigs in an ongoing effort to intimidate students who were arrested and/or spoke to media at the Regents’ meeting at UCSF on November 17. This puts the verified total at 4 in the last week, and we are still looking for confirmation of another 3 possible cases. The latest case is a Berkeley undergrad who was arrested in the parking deck on the 17th and charged with obstructing an officer. On Monday, November 22nd around 9:30 am, two UCSF cops reportedly showed up to her off-campus apartment, though thankfully she was already out of town for Thanksgiving. Her building manager spoke with the officers, who told her to tell the student that they wanted to talk about “anything else [she] saw” at the meeting.

Why the hell are these pigs continuing to harass students at their homes?

What further information following a non-violent protest arrest (with vague obstruction and resisting charges at that!) could possibly be useful to any

Saturday coffeee. « Fred Klonsky's blog

Saturday coffeee.

by Fred Klonsky

I’m exhausted.

This Thanksgiving week stuff is great, but today is some much-needed down-time. Maybe I’ll take Ulysses over to the park for a run. After all, the temperature is up from the mid-20s yesterday. And he needs to let loose.

In the mean while, I’m sitting here at the counter with my second cup of Italian roast. I poached an egg and dropped it on some re-heated corn bread stuffing with some Cholula sauce. Then I opened up the paper and to read about the soap opera that Cathie Black has become.

Cathie Black and mayoral control.

Anyone who can refrain from laughing when the next person in power talks about doing what’s “best for the kids” following the Cathie Black episode deserves a medal.

The battle over NY Mayor Bloomberg’s appointment of the clueless Hearst executive to the post of Chancellor of the city’s schools, her rejection by his hand-picked panel and the cave-in by NY state commissioner David

Old school.

by Fred Klonsky

Ry Cooder.

Schools Matter: White Knuckles Among Corporate Education Reformers

White Knuckles Among Corporate Education Reformers

by Jim Horn

With the Daley/Duncan reforms in Chicago so poisonous that Ron Huberman is in flight even as "Ren2010" has been eliminated from the City bureaucracy's vocab, and with Michelle Rhee repudiated and dismissed in DC, and with the empirical evidence piling up that nearly all of the federal (Gates/Broad) K-12 initiatives have no support among scientists, humanists, or serious researchers, and with parents around the country quickly coming to realize that charter choice means choice without a voice, and with teachers reclaiming their own voices from the whore union leaders who have been selling teachers down the river, and with students the world over openly confronting the Oligarchs who want to eliminate the public space for education and to make it a multinational corporate enterprise, with all this going on, the challenge to Bloomberg's corporate dictatorship in the City was a big deal. Even Arne called the corporate stooge, Steiner, to give his blessing to the "deal."

The deal, of course, centers on the appointment of Polakow-Suransky as Cathie Black's obsequious tutor on all

Other school systems unlikely to embrace city's radical teachers' contract - baltimoresun.com

Other school systems unlikely to embrace city's radical teachers contract

Teachers in other districts are represented by a different national unions

By Liz Bowie, The Baltimore Sun

9:28 p.m. EST, November 26, 2010

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Mike McCabe says he has had a "good gig" teaching in Montgomery County schools for the past decade, but the contract that Baltimore teachers approved recently is attracting his attention and making him ponder a move.

"I want the ability to be paid based on how well I do what I do as opposed to how well I survive the school year. It is something I will keep an eye on," he said.

While it is too early to say whether the passage of a radical new teachers' contract in the city will have any effect on how other union contracts are negotiated, or whether teachers from other districts might be attracted to the

Despite Waiver Reports, Opposition To Cathie Black Remains « CBS New York – News, Sports, Weather, Traffic and the Best of NY

Despite Waiver Reports, Opposition To Cathie Black Remains

November 27, 2010 9:12 AM

Print 3

Cathie Black and Joel Klein (credit: AP)

NEW YORK (CBS 2) — Just days after a state panel recommended against it, news broke Friday night that Cathie Black, a former executive with Hearst Media with no education experience, will be given a needed waiver to become the next New York City Schools Chancellor. As Derricke Dennis reports, reaction to the news is mixed.

Various community leaders planned to announce their opposition at P.S. 13. in East New York Saturday.

“When the Mayor first approached me about becoming Chancellor, I was immediately enthusiastic,” Cathie Black said. She will be the next chancellor, according to a new report by the Associated Press.

A source told the AP that the state’s education commissioner will announce Monday that Black, even though she lacks the required educational background

Bloomberg and Education Commish Reach Deal: Report | NBC New York

Bloomberg and Education Commish Reach Deal on Black: Report

By HASANI GITTENS

Updated 9:05 AM EST, Sat, Nov 27, 2010

BUZZ UP!

10 retweet

0digg

Black is back.

According to a report in the New York Times, embattled Schools Chancellor-nominee Cathie Black will indeed be able to take her place in charge the city's public school system -- with a catch.

A deal has been reached between the Bloomberg administration and the State Education Commissioner David Steiner to appoint a "Chief Academic Officer" to serve as Black's right hand, The Times reported.

That brand new position would be filled by Shael Polakow-Suransky, a life-long educator who is currently the Deputy Chancellor for

4LAKids - some of the news that doesn't fit: IT'S TIME FOR SCHOOL CHOICE + TROUBLE WITH VOUCHERS + smf's 2¢

IT'S TIME FOR SCHOOL CHOICE + TROUBLE WITH VOUCHERS + smf's 2¢

IT'S TIME FOR SCHOOL CHOICE

BY TERRY PAULSON | VENTURA COUNTY STAR COLUMNIST | HTTP://BIT.LY/EL9GPU

11/22/2010 == Take time to watch Academy Award-winning director Davis Guggenheim’s Waiting for Superman, voted best U.S. documentary at the prestigious Sundance Film Festival, and you’ll be confronted with the sorry state of America’s school system. How can America invent a more innovative and profitable future without a quality education system? In response, experts suggest that the dismissal of 1,000 of the country’s worst teachers would allow our great teachers to build on what’s been learned instead of being stuck teaching students what they should’ve already mastered.

But teacher unions resist any attempts to discipline and fire failing, sub-standard teachers. They also have squashed any attempt to pay for performance—rewarding at a higher level the best teachers and minimizing the pay of the less effective teachers. Instead of being part of the solution, they just keep campaigning for more money. With an exploding deficit at the national and state level, the funds aren’t there.

As President Obama’s team love to say, “A crisis is a terrible thing to waste.” Maybe it’s time “we the people” just blew our educational system wide open, and I don’t mean improve the Department of Education. Improvements are for wimps. I mean abolish it. Deep six it. Eliminate, toss, obliterate it; give it the old heave-ho; force it to

Queens Teacher: Ravitch Gives Black Advice

Ravitch Gives Black Advice

by Queens Teacher

Education expert has suggestions for Black
By Anna Gustafson

Diane Ravitch, a leading educational historian who spoke at St. John’s University this week, had some advice for the woman selected to be the city’s next schools chancellor.

Respect teachers, work closely with parents, do not close schools and do not locate charter schools inside current school buildings were some of the actions Ravitch urged Cathie Black to undertake in her remarks to the St. John’s biannual Carol Gresser Forum Lecture Monday.

“She has to listen beyond the circle of people around the leader who tend to be yes men and women,” Ravitch said, referring to Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who chose Black. “You must listen to these parents and guardians and hear what they have to say. You work for them now, you don’t work for the mayor anymore.”

More than 300 people packed into St. John’s D’Angelo Center to hear Ravitch, whose most recent book, “The

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