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Wednesday, May 18, 2011

Big Education Ape: 5-18-11 PM On Cursing When Necessary Edition

Big Education Ape: Ed News Now


Big Education Ape: Ed News Now


Published by Coopmike48 – 6 contributors today



On Cursing When Necessary | The Jose Vilson

thejosevilson.com - Today, I got an e-mail from my SOS March compatriot Nancy Flanagan about the flare-up of protest towards Justin Hamilton, press secretary for Secretary of Education Arne Duncan. Not sure what the p...
fklonsky

Poverty: Is there an app for that? « Cooperative Catalyst

bigeducationape.blogspot.com - Poverty: Is there an app for that? « Cooperative CatalystPoverty: Is there an app for that?by tellio“Development is the gradual emergence of a problem-solving system.”via Poverty: Is there an app f...
coopmike48

Standardized Testing Mythbusters! - Living in Dialogue

blogs.edweek.org - 18497 « Local Teacher Association's President: We Must Challenge the Obama Administration's Education Policies | Main An excellent new book, "The Myths of Standardized Tests," has hit the shelves, ...
mikeklonsky

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leoniehaimson Albany public schools defeat despicable attack from charter school operators « Parents Across America:http://t.co/vttNO8w35 minutes ago · reply · retweet · favorite
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coopmike48 #EDU High school students get voice in how tasty and healthy school lunches will be: High school students get vo... http://bit.ly/k1Rm8S34 minutes ago · reply · retweet · favorite
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coopmike48 High school students get voice in how tasty and healthy school lunches will be http://bit.ly/jvJdbn #Edu34 minutes ago · reply · retweet · favorite
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coopmike48 Big Education Ape: Poverty: Is there an app for that? « Cooperative Catalyst - http://goo.gl/hpcQw34 minutes ago · reply · retweet · favorite

EducationSee all


Chicago Shopping

chicagotribune.com - As parents fight to bring back recess in Chicago's public schools, a California-based non-profit has launched a pilot program in nine city schools aimed at teaching students how to play at recess. ...
mikeklonsky

PoliticsSee all


Student loans, gov't pensions eyed by budgeteers

sfgate.com - (05-18) 14:39 PDT WASHINGTON (AP) -- The White House and key lawmakers are considering reductions in student loan subsidies, farm payments and support for federal workers' pensions as they search f...
coopmike48

Balance the Budget? Cut off the Republican Welfare States!!!

democurmudgeon.blogspot.com - With tongue firmly in cheek, this commentary cuts right to the real problem; Republican welfare states. WashingtonPost: Okay. Just for the hell of it, let’s go after the debt and the deficit the Re...
coopmike48

Art & EntertainmentSee all


ASPIRA celebrará en Nueva York su 50 aniversario

vidayfamilia.univision.com - Más de un millón de jóvenes latinos y latinas se han beneficiado de los programas de ASPIRA de desarrollo de la juventud, orientación vocacional y mentoreo. - Thinkstock LLC/Picture Quest VIDEO La ...
coopmike48

Sly: Tommy Had Extra-Curricular Activities with Nun!

uppitywis.org - This morning, while discussing Arnold Swartzenegger's poor behavior, beloved Madison talk show host John "Sly" Sylvestor let rip on an alleged affair between Tommy Thompson and a nun. As you might...
coopmike48

LivingSee all


'Coffee With a Cop' Set for Thursday Morning

rosemont.patch.com - Your name [["validates_presence_of",{"message":"Please enter your name."}],["validates_length_of",{"too_long":"Your name must be shorter than 100 characters.","maximum":100,"allow_nil":true}]]Email...
coopmike48

Schools Matter: Democracy Now Interviews Harry Belafonte

bigeducationape.blogspot.com - Schools Matter: Democracy Now Interviews Harry BelafonteDemocracy Now Interviews Harry Belafonteby Jim HornBelow is commentary by Bruce Dixon, who references the Democracy Now interview above:A Bla...
coopmike48

StoriesSee all


With love and memories :: rogerebert.com :: In Memory

rogerebert.suntimes.com - / /October 31, 2008 Studs Terkel In the last two years I've written two long articles about Studs. My 95th birthday tribute is here. My recent reflection, "How Studs helps me live my life," is here...
mikeklonsky

School Tech Connect: Use The Technology

schooltechconnect.com - I have suggested this before, but as my mother once told me, "If you keep saying things on your blog, they will come true." So here goes again. It is long past time for our state associations to cr...
tbfurman

A Pause, to Give Thanks

thechoice.blogs.nytimes.com - I am an exceptionally average pool player. When faced with a game of billiards, I turn mediocrity into an art form, spinning with my cue a beautiful tapestry of mild competence. “I’m a bit rusty, s...
coopmike48

HealthSee all


The Asbestos of Our Time? « MomsRising Blog

momsrising.org - Every time I travel out east to visit my parents and grandmother I always think of my grandfather. Growing up, he was a second father to me, always present and supportive in every way. I will never...
coopmike48

The World of Today - E.D. Kain - American Times

blogs.forbes.com - EducationMay. 18 2011 - 2:15 pm | 47 views | 0 recommendations |By E.D. KAIN What Yuval Levin doesn’t say in this post is more revealing than what he does say. Simply put, if the residents of nursi...
coopmike48

#eduRead this paperSee all


Modern School: Obama’s Thugs Are Coming For Your Child

bigeducationape.blogspot.com - Modern School: Obama’s Thugs Are Coming For Your ChildObama’s Thugs Are Coming For Your Childby Michael Dunn13 year-old Vito LaPinta was interrogated at his school in Tacoma, Washington, this week ...
coopmike48

#ucdavisRead this paperSee all


UC leaders: Tuition hikes nearly inevitable

insidebayarea.com - The University of California may charge higher tuition each of the next five years even if the state stops cutting its budget, UC leaders said Wednesday.Administrators presented four budget scenari...
coopmike48

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High school students get voice in how tasty and healthy school lunches will be

High school students get voice in how tasty and healthy school lunches will be

High school students get voice in how tasty and healthy school lunches will be

Sacramento : CA : USA | May 18, 2011
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Students eat a healthy lunch at Marston Middle School in San Diego
Students eat a healthy lunch at Marston Middle School in San Diego

Haitian childreneating lunch
Haitian childreneating lunch

You're never too young to have a voice in what you eat at school as you bring in the recipes, fit them to the budget, and cook the food. Check out the May 18, 2011 Sacramento Bee article by Matt Kawahara, "Not satisfied, Luther Burbank student cooks get their shot."

Sacramento's Luther Burbank High School students enrolled in the Food Justice class want a voice in and more power over what they eat in local school lunches, breakfasts, and snacks. They want a voice of confidence, resilience, and expertise in making sure meals are both tasty and healthy.

See the article, [PDF] Teens Take on Cafeteria Food. Also see, Food Justice in Our Schools – Sacramento, CA – 02/04/11. Recently, the class was asked by the district to

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Modern School: Obama’s Thugs Are Coming For Your Child

Modern School: Obama’s Thugs Are Coming For Your Child

Obama’s Thugs Are Coming For Your Child

by Michael Dunn

13 year-old Vito LaPinta was interrogated at his school in Tacoma, Washington, this week by Secret Service agents who were concerned that he might be a threat to President Obama’s safety. The interrogation occurred without the knowledge or consent of his mother, who was outraged by the incident.

According to Democracy Now, the questioning occurred after he wrote a Facebook message expressing his concern that terrorists might target Obama because of the assassination of Bin Laden. KFSN-TV, in Fresno, quoted the boy: "I was saying how Osama is dead and for Obama to be careful because there might be suicide bombers."

KFSN reported that Tacoma schools called Vito's mom but didn't wait for her to arrive because they felt that she didn't take the phone call seriously. The mother, Timi Robertson, denies the school’s allegations and claims she rushed to school as quickly as she could.

It sounds to me like the school didn’t take their responsibility to protect their students very seriously. If they did, they should have made more of an effort to delay the interrogation until his
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NYC Public School Parents: Lawsuit to block the closing of schools and charter co-locations!

NYC Public School Parents: Lawsuit to block the closing of schools and charter co-locations!

Lawsuit to block the closing of schools and charter co-locations!

by Leonie Haimson
Stop the presses! Today, UFT, NAACP and parent groups filed suit to stop the school closings and charter co-locations. Lawsuit papers posted here; here is a NY1 story, about how "outraged" Dennis Walcott is; here is the UFT press release. But the best statement is from Ernie Logan, head of the principals union, who have supposedly "empowered" by DOE. Let's cross our fingers this lawsuit wins. But too bad Logan isn't empowered to make the decisions when it comes to closing schools!
“Chancellor Walcott is understandably outraged because students in our lowest-performing schools don’t have better options. But the underlying outrage should be, not that the UFT has filed suit to keep 20 schools open, rather that the DOE long ago chose to close schools
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Patrick Boyle: When We Ban Kids from School, the Damage Goes far Beyond Academics

Patrick Boyle: When We Ban Kids from School, the Damage Goes far Beyond Academics

When We Ban Kids from School, the Damage Goes far Beyond Academics


This post was written with Karen Pittman, CEO of the Forum for Youth Investment, and appeared at www.youthtoday.org.

It's so depressing: Last week brought yet another outrageous tale of zero tolerance gone wild -- this time from Maryland, where a high school suspended a lacrosse player for having a pen knife in his locker.

No, it's beyond depressing. With more and more students being suspended and expelled from their schools for moderate first-time offenses, it's time to get past the debates about fairness: whether a student should be banned from school for possessing a pen knife (he says it was to repair his stick) or a toy gun, or for dyeing her hair too red. What's at stake here is the significant harm that we're wreaking on many of our children.

That's because for many students, being banned from school means more than missing math class. It means being banished from a community.

So when we read about the lacrosse player and the red-haired girl, we think about Nick Stuban -- a high school student in a Washington suburb who committed suicide a few months ago after being

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Lessons from the Heart: 2011 State Teachers of the Year Discuss Their Own Favorite Teachers | ED.gov Blog

Lessons from the Heart: 2011 State Teachers of the Year Discuss Their Own Favorite Teachers | ED.gov Blog

Lessons from the Heart: 2011 State Teachers of the Year Discuss Their Own Favorite Teachers

Posted on May 18, 2011 by John McGrath

What does it take to inspire an award-winning teacher?

Not long ago, the 2011 State Teachers of the Year visited the Department of Education, and we asked them to talk about the teachers who had the greatest influence on them. Some praised colleagues and mentors, and others remembered inspiring teachers from their own days as students. Their tributes were varied and poignant: “She treated all of us as though we were her special children.” “She made me love every piece of literature that at the time I absolutely hated.” “He thinks the best of his colleagues, and so we want to live up to his expectations and prove that he’s not wrong.” Now at the very top of their profession, the 2011 State Teachers of the Year surely took lessons like these to heart.

Click here to watch a video compilation of the State Teachers of the Year thanking their favorite teachers.


Click here to watch a video about the 2011 State Teachers of the Year visit to the U.S. Department of Education.

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Several Hundred Chapter Presidents Converge on Capitol to Lobby for School Funding « State of Emergency

Several Hundred Chapter Presidents Converge on Capitol to Lobby for School Funding « State of Emergency

Several Hundred Chapter Presidents Converge on Capitol to Lobby for School Funding

by Leonard Feldman

(SACRAMENTO, Calif.) 18 May 2011 – Several hundred presidents of local CTA chapters are hard at work in the state Capitol today. They have come to Sacramento to persuade lawmakers to provide the two-thirds’ majority required to pass the governor’s tax extension proposal that would raise billions in additional dollars for public education.

The CTA members are telling their stories of how more than $20 billion worth of budget cuts have decimated their local schools, ballooned class sizes, and eliminated counselors, nurses, and other vital services to their

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Morning Joe: Michelle Rhee on teacher pay and seniority - THE DAILY RIFF - Be Smarter. About Education.

Morning Joe: Michelle Rhee on teacher pay and seniority - THE DAILY RIFF - Be Smarter. About Education.

Morning Joe: Michelle Rhee on teacher pay and seniority

joe:mika.jpg

On "Morning Joe" this morning: "union boss" George Parker and Michelle Rhee join forces at Students First org.; discuss teacher pay and seniority; Howard Dean talks about charter schools (needing some fact - checking here), and the importance of early education, in this "Education Nation" segment below:
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Fact-Checking Joel Klein: Is it True Most Teachers Think Traditional Training is Useless? - Dana Goldstein

Fact-Checking Joel Klein: Is it True Most Teachers Think Traditional Training is Useless? - Dana Goldstein

Fact-Checking Joel Klein: Is it True Most Teachers Think Traditional Training is Useless?

by Dana Goldstein

Klein joelAt the NewSchools Venture Fund Summit this morning, News Corp. executive and former NYC schools chancellor Joel Klein claimed that "most" teachers believe the traditional teacher training process--coursework and student teaching followed by a state certification exam--is useless.

"Most of the people who've gone through it don't think the credential is valuable," Klein said.

There are very few polls of the American teacher corps, but the surveys that do exist show Klein is mischaracterizing teachers' views. The majority of teachers believe there is value in entering the profession only after studying education and pedagogy both as a student and a student-teacher. What's more, teachers who do come into the profession through accelerated, alternative-route programs are the most likely to feel unprepared during their first year in the classroom.

In 2007 Public Agenda surveyed 865 first-year teachers in high-needs schools, some of whom had graduated from traditional teaching programs, others who entered the profession through alternative routes such as Teach

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Poverty: Is there an app for that? « Cooperative Catalyst

Poverty: Is there an app for that? « Cooperative Catalyst

Poverty: Is there an app for that?

by tellio

“Development is the gradual emergence of a problem-solving system.”

via Poverty: Is there an app for that?.

If you substitute “learning” for “development” , then you have one of the most profound and simple definitions for what it is that teachers must become–guides to the idiosyncratic and utterly customized problem solving system that is a child’s mind.

The authors are speaking from an NGO’s stance and a long term one at that. So much failure in ‘developing’ countries has been the result of what has been referred to as the ‘carpenter’s dilemma’–every problem looks like a nail. And the hammer, while tres handy, cannot cement a foundation or glaze a window or feed a mother and child.

Kentaro Toyamo, a UC Berkeley ICT development expert, critiques this single-minded strategy this way according to blogger Tate Watkins,

Anyone imagining that a day or two of hacking will produce solutions to development problems, even in some small part, is either a technologist drunk on her own self-image who believes that she’ll solve a mindboggling social challenge with technology, or a

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Schools Matter: Democracy Now Interviews Harry Belafonte

Schools Matter: Democracy Now Interviews Harry Belafonte

Democracy Now Interviews Harry Belafonte

by Jim Horn


Below is commentary by Bruce Dixon, who references the Democracy Now interview above:
A Black Agenda Radio commentary by BAR managing editor Bruce A. Dixon

Does President Obama really want us to “make him do it,” to organize and agitate and create the conditions that will let him end the wars, cut the military budget, create jobs and address the hyper-incarceration of black and brown youth? Or is the “make me do it” president an urban legend who lives only inside our heads? A recent presidential encounter with Harry Belafonte tells more than some of us may want to know.

There is a popular myth which explains President Barack Obama's reluctance to stand up to Pentagon militarists, Wall Street banksters and corporate greedheads. This myth excuses the president for ignoring massive black unemployment and not providing his promised path to citizenship for the undocumented, for not using presidential authority to halt the foreclosure epidemic, or curbing the hyper-incarceration of black and brown youth. The myth of course, is that President Barack Obama really does want to do all these things and more, but if they haven't
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Let’s Move!: Federal Employees Help Students Gear Up for Fitness | ED.gov Blog

Let’s Move!: Federal Employees Help Students Gear Up for Fitness | ED.gov Blog

Let’s Move!: Federal Employees Help Students Gear Up for Fitness

Posted on May 18, 2011 by Guest Blogger

While Friday the 13th is generally believed to be a day of perpetual bad luck, for the more than 200 students at Charles H. Houston Elementary in Washington, DC, last Friday was anything but unlucky, as students grooved to Kenny Loggins’ Footloose and recognized the winners of the “Why Fitness is Important” essay contest who each received a free pedometer, jump rope, two bottles of water, and new athletic shoes.

The students were gathered as part of a new community-based initiative to fight childhood obesity called Foot Lose. The initiative is the creation of an enthusiastic group of federal agency professionals known as “The Soaring Swans,” who are enrolled in the Executive Leadership Program at the Graduate School in Washington, DC. Through the Foot Lose campaign, federal employees in the Executive Leadership Program are asked to donate new athletic shoes and to encourage children to lose unhealthy habits that lead to childhood obesity.

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Passing Muster Fails Muster? (An Evaluation of Evaluating Evaluation Systems) « School Finance 101

Passing Muster Fails Muster? (An Evaluation of Evaluating Evaluation Systems) « School Finance 101

Passing Muster Fails Muster? (An Evaluation of Evaluating Evaluation Systems)

by schoolfinance101

The Brookings Institution has now released their web based version of Passing Muster including a nifty calculation tool for rating teacher evaluation systems. Unfortunately, in my view, this rating system fails muster in at least two major ways.

First, the authors explain their (lack of) preferences for specific types of evaluation systems as follows:

“Our proposal for a system to identify highly-effective teachers is agnostic about the relative weight of test-based measures vs. other components in a teacher evaluation system. It requires only that the system include a spread of verifiable and comparable teacher evaluations, be sufficiently reliable and valid to identify persistently superior teachers, and incorporate student achievement on standardized assessments as at least some portion of the evaluation system for teachers in those grades and subjects in which all students are tested.”

That is, a district’s evaluation system can consider student test scores to whatever extent they want, in balance with other approaches to teacher evaluation. The logic here is a bit contorted from the start. The authors explain

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Cool Cat Teacher Blog: Pat Conroy's Inspiration for Teachers

Cool Cat Teacher Blog: Pat Conroy's Inspiration for Teachers

Pat Conroy's Inspiration for Teachers

by coolcatteacher@gmail.com (Victoria A Davis, Cool Cat Teacher)
For teacher appreciation week, author Pat Conroy has released a lovely video.

Most captivating to me are his words:

"I didn't know if I could teach or not, but they let me know I could. And the teaching caught up, it caught inside me and I could not help it."
Most good authors are teachers at heart. They teach us with words. I'll never forget that Pat's book Beach Musicwas one of my first that I listened to as an audiobook. My children were small and I was a stay at home Mom. I didn't think I could make it through the days and I plugged in the book (into my walkman cd player) and listened. Transported to another world, it helped my world of diapers and Barnie.

When the note came across my inbox from his publicity company, I had to jump at the chance to be the first
blog to feature this video. (The ebook that is offered is through Pat's organization and has no affiliation or
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