In September, the puppy dogs in the Chicago City Council, like Ald. Latasha Thomas (17th Ward) backed the Mayor in his strong arming of CPS teachers into working a longer school day. Now the bill has come due. Where is the City Council now?
Who didn’t see this coming?
Chicago’s Mayor Emanuel tried to strong-arm CPS teachers into shredding their contract and add 90 minutes to
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| Mayor Harold Washington, Timuel D. Black, Jr., (second from left) and others are shown in this 1984 photo. | Courtesy Chicago Public Library |
“I think it’s arguably the single best collection of material on Chicago African-American history that
Educators at the Delaware College Preparatory Academy in Wilmington have voted to join the Delaware State Education Association, making them the state's only charter school educators represented by a union.
Employees of the city school, which has about 270 students, approved joining the union by an 11-5 margin in a secret ballot on Jan. 13. While it is not the first Delaware charter school to select a union for representation, it is the first to do so in more than a
Dear Diane,
I survived, thanks to my two sons and granddaughter. And we had a great time. People in Japan were extraordinarily kind and gracious to us. The sights were amazing—from ancient to futuristic standing side by side. At our hotel room in Tokyo we looked out of our room onto Mount Fuji. At sunset it was like a fairy tale. We ate and ate and ate—wonderful food.
We stopped at the City Museum in Nagoya to see my family's WWll mural by Diego Rivera from thecontroversial Rockefeller Center fiasco. It's Diego's redoing of the central and most controversial panel—with Lenin, Marx, and Engels leading the way, alongside of lots of warring communists. Stalin, with bloody eyes, looks down at a smiling Bukharin (whom he subsequently murdered), and across from a stalwart-looking Trotsky
Does the current push for “Value Added” measures mean that education has finally figured it out, or is this yet another silver bullet that will fail — and perhaps do more harm than good along the way?
While that is an interesting question, a number of prior questions need answers:
1. What exactly do we mean by ‘value’?
2. Who adds ‘value,’ and how do they do it?
3. How can we enable the women and men now teaching to add more ‘value’?
4. How can we attract people who add value to go into teaching?
5. At the end of the day, what do we value?
Recently I was introduced to Masha Tarasyuk, who spoke no English when she immigrated from the
Many of us have had extensive ongoing conversation about the Big Study (CFR) that caught media attention last week. That conversation has included much thoughtful feedback from the authors of the study. That’s how it should be. A good, ongoing discussion delving into technical details and considering alternative policy implications. I received the following kind note from one of the study authors, John Friedman, in which he addresses three major points in my critique:
Dear Bruce,
Thank you very much for your thorough and well-reasoned comment on our paper. You raise three major concerns with the study in your post which we’d like to address. First, you write that “just because teacher VA scores in a massive data set show variance does not mean that we can
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| Protesting the mayor's latest assault on free speech. |
The role of poverty in shaping educational outcomes is one of the most common debates going on today. It can also be one of the most shallow.
The debate tends to focus on income. For example (and I’m generalizing a bit here), one “side” argues that income and test scores are strongly correlated; the other “side” points to the fact that many low-income students do very well and cautions against making excuses for schools’ failure to help poor kids.
Both arguments have merit, but it bears quickly mentioning that the focus on the relationship between income
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There are many good reasons for teachers not to bully children. First and most obviously, it's wrong, followed closely by the fact that it is illegal and you could lose your job if you engage in it. We as educators are meant to build the capacities of children, be honest with them but also fair and kind, and if we humiliate, belittle, and hurt children, those very basic goals are not going to get accomplished. We can all agree on that, right?
