Tuesday, May 31, 2011

Food Pyramid Being Replaced With Plate-Shaped Logo - NYTimes.com

Goodbye Food Pyramid, Hello Dinner Plate

By WILLIAM NEUMAN

Published: May 27, 2011

REPRINTS

Whatever you do, don’t call it a pie chart.

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Chris Graythen/Getty Images

The first lady, Michelle Obama, has led the push for increased exercise and healthy eating.

U.S. Introduces a Revised Food Pyramid (April 20, 2005)

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Officials said the current food pyramid, above, was confusing.

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The Obama administration is about to ditch the food pyramid, that symbol of healthy eating for the last two decades. In its place officials are dishing up a simple, plate-shaped symbol, sliced into wedges for the basic food groups and half-filled with fruits and vegetables.

The circular plate, which will be unveiled Thursday, is meant to give consumers a fast, easily grasped reminder of the basics of a healthy diet. It consists of four colored sections, for fruits, vegetables, grains and protein, according to several people who have been briefed on the change. Beside the plate is a smaller circle for dairy, suggesting a glass of low-fat milk or perhaps a yogurt cup.

Few nutritionists will mourn the passing of the pyramid,

Is the U.S. Doing Teacher Reform All Wrong? Lessons from Finland and Shanghai - Dana Goldstein

Is the U.S. Doing Teacher Reform All Wrong? Lessons from Finland and Shanghai

by Dana Goldstein

cross-posted at the Washington Post

There is good reason for education reform efforts to focus on teaching. We know that although about two-thirds of the achievement gap can be explained by family poverty, teachers are among the most important in-school factors that effect student learning, with some teachers being better than others at helping children progress. We also know that most teachers are given cursory and unhelpful evaluations (if they are evaluated at all) and that tenure makes it difficult to remove bad teachers from the classroom.

To address these problems, many American education reformers spent the past decade demanding that districts and states get tough with teachers and provide them with more prescriptive advice on how to improve their practice. The political results are the new state laws written in response to the Obama administration’s Race to the Top grant program, some of which base up to 51 percent of a teacher’s evaluation on student test-score data.

But what if the United State

Cal Students Rally in Support of DREAM Act | California Progress Report

Cal Students Rally in Support of DREAM Act

by kaldveer

By Major Tian

Student groups at the University of California system are campaigning to support two state Assembly bills, AB130 and AB131, introduced this January and collectively known as the 2011 California DREAM Act.

UC Student Associations (UCSA) have collected more than 11,000 signed postcards since February and plan to deliver them to Gov. Jerry Brown’s desk for approval later this month.

UCSA Communications Director Christine Byon said the group is trying to arrange a face-to-face meeting to deliver the postcards in person to Brown, who had spoken in favor of the Act during last year’s election campaign. DREAM Act supporters can also sign a petition to the governor through the UCSA website.

The first of the bills, AB130, allows qualified undocumented students to receive institutional financial assistance, while the second, AB131, would make such students eligible for state-administered aid.

Congressional Voting Record

Click here to download the 2010 Voting Record
This past year the nation continued to see unprecedented economic and fiscal challenges the likes of which had not been seen in decades. Retirees faced these hardships as well. While the economy began a slow recovery, unemployment remained high. We also celebrated the 75th anniversary of Social Security and 45th anniversary of Medicare, vivid reminders that even during times of economic hardship these two vital programs have remained strong, delivering the guaranteed benefits for which retirees worked hard.

Explanation of 2010 House Votes

Explanation of 2010 Senate Votes

Archives:

Voting Record 2009.pdf 2009 saw unprecedented economic and fiscal challenges the likes of which had not been seen in decades. The economy slowed dramatically and shed jobs at alarming rates. Many retirees saw their retirement security put in serious jeopardy. Millions saw their home values, personal savings and retirement accounts plummet. A new administration came to Washington in the midst of this turmoil.

Voting_Record_2008.pdf 2008 saw dramatic change come to Washington. Key retiree issues included whether to privatize Social Security, continue the wasteful subsidies under Medicare Advantage, and allow the continuance of the confusing Medicare Part D prescription drug program without the ability to negotiate for lower drug prices. Voters responded and the result was increased majorities in Congress and a major change in the White House.

If Prison Costs Rob Education, What Then? | California Progress Report

If Prison Costs Rob Education, What Then?

by kaldveer

By Tom Reifer

The dramatic drop in crime rates in San Diego County – with the exception of hate crimes and bank robberies – mirrored to varying extents around the country, cries out for explanation. It defies the premise that economic crisis usually leads to increased crime.

Here, though, citizens must be cautious. Consider an election debate last year between the top contenders for California attorney general. Los Angeles County District Attorney Steve Cooley, who was to lose to his counterpart from San Francisco, Kamala Harris, asserted that historically low crime rates in California were due primarily to increased mass incarceration.

Cooley’s assertion may not be correct.

Gates’ money is everywhere — Joanne Jacobs

Gates’ money is everywhere

by Joanne

Bill Gates is putting his billions into education advocacy, writes the New York Times. That includes “financing educators to pose alternatives to union orthodoxies on issues like the seniority system and the use of student test scores to evaluate teachers, ” creating new advocacy groups and “bankrolling many of the Washington analysts who interpret education issues for journalists and giving grants to some media organizations.”

“We’ve learned that school-level investments aren’t enough to drive systemic changes,” said Allan C. Golston, the president of the foundation’s United States program. “The importance of advocacy has gotten clearer and clearer.”
The foundation spent $373 million on education in 2009, the latest year for which its tax returns are available, and devoted $78 million to advocacy — quadruple the amount spent on advocacy in 2005. Over the next five or six years, Mr. Golston said, the foundation expects to pour $3.5 billion more into education, up to 15 percent of it on advocacy.

“It’s Orwellian in the sense that through this vast funding they start to control even how we tacitly think about the problems facing public education,” Berkeley Education Prof. Bruce Fuller tells the Times.

New study: You can't live on minimum wage | Detroit Free Press | freep.com

New study: You can't live on minimum wage

9:23 PM, May. 30, 2011 |
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Cameo Thomas, a single mother, plays with her 4-year-old twins outside the Community Action Agency in Jackson, where she is learning to manage her finances. / ANDRE J. JACKSON/Detroit Free Press

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BY L. L. BRASIER

DETROIT FREE PRESS STAFF WRITER

FILED UNDER

Local News

Michigan

ZOOM

Cameo Thomas of Jackson works two jobs as a nursing home aide to support her 4-year-old twin sons.

One job pays $9.50 an hour, the other $13.05. Sometimes she works 60 hours a week to make ends meet -- hard physical labor, most of it on her feet.

"Sometimes I get off work and think, 'Man, I'm going to need a new pair of shoes,' " the 23-year-old said.

Working harder and longer may not be enough to support a family in Michigan, particularly for

ZOOM

Learn to budget

For information on the Michigan $AVE$ program and other financial assistance, as well as classes on budgeting and debt management, contact:

East Michigan: Oakland Livingston Human Service Agency, 196 Cesar Chavez Ave., Pontiac. 248-209-2600.

Southern Michigan: Community Action Agency of Jackson, Hillsdale and Lenawee Counties, 1214 Greenwood, Jackson. 517-784-4800.

West Michigan: 1413 Madison SE, Grand Rapids. 616-451-9140.employees in low-paying jobs such as

America's Education Problems Way Deeper Than 'Good' or 'Bad' Teachers | Investigations | AlterNet

America's Education Problems Way Deeper Than 'Good' or 'Bad' Teachers
Educational disparities may be getting worse, not better, yet the heated debate over school reform has paid little attention to the hard realities families and teachers face.

May 30, 2011 |

Last year in East LA, Jose Pedraza was struggling mightily in his classes and drifting listlessly through his days. It was worrying enough to his teachers at Oscar De La Hoya Animo Charter School, where he was then a junior, that the principal called his mother Pascuala Jaramillo and asked for an urgent meeting.

Jaramillo, a seasoned education activist who had organized other parents and made it a point to get to know her kids’ teachers, grabbed what she calls her “bible” and ran straight to the school. It’s actually not a holy book, but rather a binder of her kids’ education documents and information about her own parental rights—“everything I need to defend myself,” she explains. Her years of organizing other parents taught her that teachers and administrators are often too burdened

Three Employment Policy Crises: Jobs, Wages and Public-Sector Collective Bargaining | Business Wire

Three Employment Policy Crises: Jobs, Wages and Public-Sector Collective Bargaining

National Policy Briefing to Bring These Issues to Top of Nation’s Agenda

WASHINGTON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--The nation is experiencing its greatest employment crisis since the Great Depression, yet national policy makers hold widely divergent views about jobs, wages and now public-sector collective bargaining.

Prominent economic and employment experts will discuss the latest research and findings to inform policymakers on:

unemployment and job growth,
wage stagnation and the need for a new social contract, and
the future of public-sector collective bargaining and pension reforms.

The 9 a.m. to noon Monday (June 6) briefing is hosted by the Employment Policy Research Network (EPRN) in partnership with the Labor and Employment Relations Association(LERA) National Policy Forum on June 6-7 at the Cafritz Conference Center, Elliott Room (310) at George Washington University 800 21^st St. N.W. Washington, D.C., 20052.

Also sponsoring the briefing are the New America Foundation, the Economic Policy Institute, the Center for Economic and Policy Research, the Center for American Progress and theUpjohn Institute for Employment Research.

EPRN was created with startup support from the Rockefeller and Russell Sage foundations to bring more evidence-based research and analytical focus into debates on critical work and employment policy issues. It is a network of more than 125 researchers from 50 major U.S. universities. In-depth EPRN research-policy briefings on unemployment, wage stagnation and public-sector collective bargaining are available at the EPRN web site.

Chairing the briefing session is Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Thomas A. Kochan, a Sloan School of Management professor. He will summarize

Mike Klonsky's SmallTalk Blog: We almost lost Detroit in '66

We almost lost Detroit in '66

by Mike Klonsky

But now we're losing Motown's public education system

Gil Scott Heron died Friday. I've listening to his music and poetry all week and still have the words to his anti-nuke anthem, We almost lost Detroit, spinning around my brain. Gil's song was based on a book by the same title, written two years earlier by John Fuller about the partial meltdown in Michigan of Fermi 1, America's first breeder reactor, in 1966.

Yesterday I read this headline in the Detroit Free Press --IS DETROIT PUBLIC SCHOOLS WORTH SAVING?

The Detroit Public Schools, as we know it, could disappear in a few years. A DPS action plan would charter up to 45 schools, close 20 and leave about 70 that include the best-performing schools, some newly constructed and a handful of special-education schools that are expensive to run... With such a concerted effort to shrink DPS, local leaders, educators, politicians and taxpayers are debating a question: Is DPS worth saving?

Neither Fuller nor Heron could have predicted that the death of this great American city and its school system would come, not from a nuclear meltdown, but rather from an economic meltdown and meltdown of civil society

We Party Patriots » FRED & Tim = Union Letter-Writing, Phone-Calling Credited With Turning the Tables on Illinois Pension Reform

We Party Patriots » Blog Archive » Union Letter-Writing, Phone-Calling Credited With Turning the Tables on Illinois Pension Reform

Union Letter-Writing, Phone-Calling Credited With Turning the Tables on Illinois Pension Reform

The spin on the Illinois pension reform story is taking all shapes this morning. Yesterday, the state legislature decided to shelve the contentious measure, instead passing a gambling bill allowing slot machines and more casinos, a redistricting package and, importantly, a budget.

The Sun-Times calls the pension reform pass-up a “major win” for unions:

House Speaker Michael Madigan and House Minority Leader Tom Cross abruptly pulled the plug Monday on legislation forcing government workers to pay more for their pensions in a major win for the state’s public-employee unions.

Madigan (D-Chicago) and Cross (R-Oswego) faced an almost unheard-of legislative setback, succumbing to a dizzying letter-writing and phone-calling campaign to rank-and-file lawmakers by more than a half-dozen unions.
After passing out of a House committee last week, Madigan’s and Cross’s legislative package drew support from no more than 45 House members when 60 votes were needed to pass a bill, union sources told the Chicago Sun-Times.

“Thanks to the most potent grassroots lobbying campaign ever waged, we have blocked passage of a measure backed by leaders of both political parties and the biggest corporations in the state of Illinois,”

Pension killer retreat. There’s got to be a morning after. « Fred Klonsky's blog

Pension killer retreat. There’s got to be a morning after.

by Fred Klonsky

Yesterday afternoon we grilled some chicken. I tossed back my favorite summer drink. Compari and soda. We raised a toast to the public employees of Illinois who kicked butt yesterday.

Beating Michael Madigan and the Civic Committee is my definition of a good day.

Okay. That’s done.

Now let’s move on to the next stage.

Some morning after thoughts:

I so agree with my blogging pal Tim Furman at School Tech Connect.

The work is just starting. We’re way, way past the point where we can rely solely on the centralized communication system that has us frantically sending postcards every time a disaster looms. We need to be aware of who is represented by whom so that we can build an actual grass roots.

While the IEA leadership has been quick to take responsibility for the Civic Committee’s set back in killing our

A Dark Day in New York State - Bridging Differences - Education Week

A Dark Day in New York State

by Mary-Ellen Phelps Deily

Dear Deborah,

May 16, 2011, was a dark day in the history of New York state. On that date, the New York State Board of Regents, once known for careful deliberation and the integrity of its standards, approved a plan to evaluate teachers by their students' test scores. Students' scores will count for as much as 40 percent of teachers' evaluations. This plan has neither research nor evidence to support it. The Regents are making a gamble with the future of educational quality and with the lives of the state's teachers.

To be fair, they did it for the money. New York won a Race to the Top award, so officials obliged themselves to judge teachers by test scores, but their proposal said that the scores would count for only 20 percent when judging a teacher's worth. Now the Regents, allegedly in response to a request by Gov. Andrew Cuomo, raised the percentage to up to 40 percent, to be composed of state and local tests, or state tests only. I say "allegedly" because Gov. Cuomo has heretofore not been known for his interest in technical issues related to teacher evaluation.

Like other states, New York now will operate on the assumption that student scores are a valid measure of teacher quality. They are not. The Regents chose to ignore a letter from 10 of the nation's leading assessment experts, urging them not to go down this path. The testing experts summarized research showing that the

Schools Matter: Darling-Hammond to Every New and Old Educator on Graduation Day

Darling-Hammond to Every New and Old Educator on Graduation Day

by Jim Horn

From The Nation, a big chunk of Darling-Hammond's commencement speech to the graduates of TC. It is honest, brave, and hopeful, and may every educator, new and old, take a few minutes to read it, and heed it:

At the commencement ceremony for Columbia University's Teachers College on May 18, Stanford education professor Linda Darling-Hammond—a nationally renowned leader in education reform and former education adviser to Barack Obama's presidential campaign—was awarded the Teachers College medal for distinguished service. . . .

. . . Teachers College has, for more than a century, represented the heartbeat of the education profession in the United States and our deepest aspirations for a democratic system of education. When TC was founded by Grace Dodge in 1887 as the New York School for the Training of Teachers, it was intended to provide a new kind of schooling for the teachers of the poor in New York City, one that combined a humanitarian concern for helping others with a scientific approach to human development and learning. At that time, when most teachers had little more than a high school education (and were frequently taught primarily to follow scripted textbooks that were

7 obvious things in education that are ignored - The Answer Sheet - The Washington Post

7 obvious things in education that are ignored

by Valerie Strauss

This was written by educator Anthony Cody, who taught science for 18 years in inner-city Oakland and now works with a team of science teacher-coaches that supports novice teachers. He is a National Board-certified teacher and an active member of the Teacher Leaders Network. This post appeared on his Education Week Teacher blog, Living in Dialogue.

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