Organizers say the effort aims to galvanize and give voice to those who believe policymakers, including U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and state governors, have gone astray in their remedies for improving American schools._________________________________________
Twenty-three people were arrested as a result of acts of civil disobedience in front of the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Chicago yesterday.
Eighteen different community groups and labor unions held three different rallies that converged into one outside the Hyatt where a conference of corporate Chief Executive Officers was being held.
This from the Chicago Teachers Union:
CPS is talking about cutting the budget – including possibly denying you your contractual raise – while at the same time banks and developers are refusing to pay their fair share to educate our kids. CPS is having a vote on June 14th – we must make our voices heard, that balancing school budgets on the backs of students and teachers/psrps is unconscionable.
Please join us on June 14th, as we ask the Chief Financial Officers of major national corporations who are raking in record profits while our schools suffer to
A menu overhaul is underway that will mean fewer meals that resemble fast food and more vegetarian offerings. Spinach tortellini in butternut squash sauce and California sushi rolls, along with many ethnic foods, are to be added.
Corn dogs, chicken nuggets and other breaded items are out, said Dennis Barrett, food services director.
Megan Bomba, a project coordinator with Occidental College's Urban and Environmental Policy Institute, agreed with the move, saying "the meal needs to be better, not [that] we need to keep chocolate milk" to attract students to the cafeteria, she said.
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Thousands of educators, parent activists, and others are expected to convene in the heat and humidity of Washington next month for a march protesting the current thrust of education policy in the United States, especially the strong emphasis on test-based accountability.
Organizers say the effort aims to galvanize and give voice to those who believe policymakers, including U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and state governors, have gone astray in their remedies for improving American schools. Leaders of the march—current and former educators among them—say they’re determined to build a grassroots movement that has staying power beyond the gathering this summer and “restores” a central role for educators, parents, and communities in policy decisions.
June 15th, 2011 – In 2009 the Los Angeles Unified School District, rolled out a major reform and reclamation program to create quality high performing schools. It was called the Public School Choice Act. , authored by Board Member Yolie Flores. The Act itself was passed by the Board in August of 2009. Since that time we have heard the mantra of parent involvement in every phase of the process as an integral part of addressing the real needs of students and community.
From the beginning I was opposed to the Act for it was blatantly clear its real design was to exclude rather than include the community of Parents and local organizations. Its structure was such that it was impossible for small non education community organization to build capacity to effectively and efficiently operate a public school. In fact the design could clearly be seen to favor specific groups previously mentioned during the development of language for the Act. However, provisions were made for Parent voting. Now we are told those Parents were paid to vote and buses were provided to transport those paid parents. That brings us to where we are today in 2011 with the process in its third round of school distribution. I say distribution maybe it would be better to say allocation of Public Schools to a select group of private (non profit) organizations.
Remembering that this whole movement came about for the community to have a voice and actively participate in the education of their
Well, I finally wrote the article I always wanted to write: a letter to my 3,000+ faculty peers in Educational Leadership preparation programs all across the country about how our collective inattention to technology-related issues is an embarrassing indictment of our lack of relevance:
Regular readers of this blog will recognize some of the language that I used in my broadside against my own profession. Here are a few quotes to whet your appetite:
We also are witnessing the early adolescence of a vastly different global economy. For instance, the rapid growth of the Internet and other communication technologies has accelerated the offshoring of jobs from the developed world. Complex corporate global supply chains locate manufacturing work wherever costs are lowest, expertise is highest, or necessary talent resides. Geographic or product niche monopolies disappear in the face of Internet search engines. Micro-, small-batch, and on-demand manufacturing techniques facilitate customized, personalized production. Whatever manufacturing work remains in developed countries is high skill, is high tech, and,
NOTE: With this post, we are starting a new “feature” here at Shanker Blog – periodically summarizing research papers that carry interesting and/or important implications for the education policy debates. We intend to focus on papers that are either published in peer-reviewed journals or are still in working paper form, and are unlikely to get significant notice. Here is the first:
Are School Counselors a Cost-Effective Education Input?
Scott E. Carrell and Mark Hoekstra, Working paper (link to PDF), September 2010
Most teachers and principals will tell you that non-instructional school staff can make a big difference in school performance. Although we may all know this, it’s always useful to have empirical research to confirm it, and to examine the size and nature of the effects. In this paper, economists Scott Carrell and Mark Hoekstra put forth one of the first rigorous tests of how one particular group of employees – school counselors – affect bothdiscipline and achievement outcomes. The authors use a unique administrative dataset of third, fourth, and fifth graders in Alachua County, Florida, a diverse district that serves over 30,000 students. Their approach exploits year-to-year variation in the number of counselors in each school – i.e., whether the outcomes of a given school
