Billionaires are different from you and me, for obvious reasons, including the fact that they buy much pricier baubles than we do.
A sleek car costing $100,000? Why, for them, that's just an easy impulse purchase. A few million bucks for a Matisse original? Go ahead -- it'll liven up the hallway. How about throwing a fat wad of cash at a university to get an academic chair named for you? Sure, it's all part of the fun of living in BillionaireLand.
Then there is the top crust of the upper-crust -- such megalomaniacal megabillionaires as the Koch brothers. Using money from their industrial conglomerate, their foundation and their personal fortunes, these two far-out, laissez-faire extremists are literally buying public policy. Their purchases of everything from politicians to the tea party help them push the privatiza
My Day with the PTA
This is going to be one of those long ones, so get yourself a cup of coffee or hot tea and get comfortable.
Because of my interest in education and legislation, I volunteered to be the PTA Legislative chair at my daughter’s school. That was almost two years ago. I followed what was going on and reported back to the membership. That was easy. I do remember that the Seattle Council Legislative VP, Heidi Bennett, seemed a tad bit over the top about Race to the Top but at the time I thought that was her personal view. She did seem to be pushing it a bit too much after a while but again, I couldn’t imagine that this had anything to do with the PTA but possibly another organization that she might have been a part of like the Alliance for Education or the imaginary Our Schools’ Coalition. I had no idea that she was following an edict by way of the PTA, not until Friday, October 8, 2010 when I
A new National Research Council (sponsored by the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Engineering) finds that offering incentives or threatening punishment to schools does not result in improved student learning.
The report, Incentives and Test-Based Accountability in Education, finds that high-stakes testing can result in “teaching to the test” and, therefore, are not an accurate measurement of student learning. Instead, the report looks:
at students’ scores on “low stakes” tests — such as the National Assessment of Educational Progress — that are not linked to incentives and are therefore less likely to be inflated, the report says.
Using that more accurate measurement. the study’s authors finds minimal or no positive change in student
Mandated as a condition for states to receive federal Race to the Top (RTTT) funds, many states and districts are concocting schemes to “evaluate” their teachers in large part based on student test scores. These initiatives are inconsistent with strong evidence showing such uses of tests are error-prone and will undermine the quality of teaching and learning. Some states and districts are mandating dozens more exams, so that all teachers can be included in test-based evaluation plans.
Tennessee, which implemented the first so-called “value-added measurement” (VAM) system, based on a commercial norm-referenced test, decided to count student “achievement” as 50% of a teacher’s score, with 35% of the score based on VAM. Other states are proposing similar rigid weightings. More flexibly, a draft plan in Massachusetts requires student scores to be a significant part of the evaluation (echoing federal language), but would leave the details up to districts with state approval. However, Massachusetts also would require districts to judge every teacher by at least two tests, forcing the districts to buy commercial tests or make their own. In most cases the quality will be poor. Even young children, notoriously erratic test
The sharp decline in U.S. union membership over the past 30-40 years is well known, but does it reflect a change in attitudes towards organized labor? In other words, is decreasing union membership accompanied by decreasing support for labor?
Of course, if attitudes have in fact changed, they might be both exogenous (membership declines because support decreases, leading to fewer unionization drives and less political support) as well as endogenous (support decreases because membership declines, as fewer people are exposed to unions and to the benefits of membership) to unionization levels. And, to some degree, attitudes and membership likely change independent of each other.
In any case, it’s worth taking a look at how attitudes towards labor have changed over the past few decades. In
Publicado el 26 Mayo 2011
Archivado en Josep |
En este segundo trimestre del curso, tenemos programada la lectura del Lazarillo de Tormes en 3Āŗ de ESO. Pienso que los clĆ”sicos han de leerse y comentarse en clase, aunque se trate de esta obra, que muchos profesores consideramos “fĆ”cil de leer”, pues para la competencia lectora de los jĆ³venes de hoy sigue siendo un texto mĆ”s bien Ć”spero. Para abordar esta lectura he fijado, como en otras ocasiones, un calendario de lectura que nos permitirĆ” ir comentando en clase un capĆtulo por semana (mĆ”s o menos). Como novedad y siguiendo el ejemplo de 2Āŗ de Bachiller, tenemos una pĆ”gina en Tuenti para ir ampliando y anotando algunas dudas que surjan durante la lectura.
Durante unas semanas, he dado vueltas al trabajo que podĆan hacer para enriquecer
I hardly ever met any movie stars in my 6th grade at Orchard Elementary in West Valley City, Utah where I taught a generation of girls and boys. But I saw movie stars and TV stars, directors and script writers the other night at a function sponsored by the Creative Coalition, the National Education Association and professional wrestlers. Seriously.
And the topic was very serious. It would have to be to bring together such a diverse group. The topic: Keeping kids safe from bullies. As I was explaining the tremendous interest educators were getting on this issue, a fairly jaded friend of mine remarked that this was simply the “fashionable” cause of the moment.
She’s wrong. I know she’s wrong because I talked to the writer of a new film the NEA is helping to promote called, “That’s What I Am”.
I have never met a more sincere, concerned individual. He knows this film will be important to the children who see it. I talked to one of the young actors who plays a bullied teen.
He knows that his role is one that thousands of students will relate to. I talked with an executive from the WWE
The Obama administration’s $3.5 billion effort to turn around the country’s lowest-performing schools has had a bumpy start in New York City.
The first schools to participate in the program here used one of the less dramatic of the four models laid out by the Obama administration for how schools can be overhauled. To comply with a requirement that the principal of the school be removed, one set of schools played a game of musical principals. And officials’ efforts to reach an agreement with the teachers union on how to use a more drastic model — one that requires removing teachers as well as the school principal — faltered. Late in the school year, officials to turned to the “re-start” modelinstead.
A new package on Education Week’s web site suggests that New York’s rocky experience is not entirely
If you hadn't heard already that the state has officially banned the process known as "scrubbing," your principal has probably already had nightmares about it. Scrubbing refers to the re-scoring of borderline Regents exams to see if a failing exam might possibly be a passing one, or a mediocre exam might turn into an honors exam. One or two extra points on an essay, for example, on the English Regents can make a difference. You're never directly asked to violate your academic conscience, but if you can find it in your heart to give, say, a 4 instead of a 3 on the 6-point English rubric, well, that kid and that kid's teacher would really appreciate it.
This week, national organizations representing school boards, superintendents, principals, teachers, parents and other stakeholders sent Secretary of Education Arne Duncan a letter asking for regulatory relief from the No Child Left Behind Act. While Congress and the Obama administration work on reauthorizing the Elementary and Secondary Education Act to fix NCLB’s flaws, the organizations asked the Secretary to consider using his regulatory authority to alleviate some of NCLB’s flaws.
In a letter, 16 organizations from the Learning First Alliance wrote:
“Absent swift reauthorization of ESEA, LFA member organizations urge the Department of Education to explore its authority for offering regulatory relief around NCLB. Once those areas are identified, we would recommend that the department then engage in collaborative discussions with our individual member organizations – as well as other interested stakeholders, including Congress – and focus on building consensus around proposals offering appropriate and immediate regulatory relief for the upcoming 2011-12 school year.”
Separately, two Learning First Alliance members, the American Association of School Administrators and the National School Boards Association, started gathering signatures for an online petition supporting “regulatory relief for the 2011-12 school year, and any efforts to rescind or modify current regulations and alleviate undue pressure on the nation’s schools.”
Secretary Duncan has been working closely with Congress to create a bipartisan bill to reauthorize ESEA. The President has called on Congress to pass an ESEA bill before the next school year begins. The Obama administration’s main goal is to change the accountability framework to fix the problems created by NCLB, which mislabels too many schools as low-performing and doesn’t reward successful schools.
The Secretary understands the frustrations of education stakeholders and shares their concerns about the slow pace of work in Congress. He remains committed to fixing NCLB so that its flaws are addressed as we move into the new school year.
View full sizeThe now-closed Standish Maximum Correctional Facility."We rank nationally at the top in the number of people we incarcerate. We also spend the most money per prisoner annually than any other state in the union. Now, I like to be at the top of lists, but this is one ranking that I don’t believe
