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Monday, March 5, 2012

Big Education Ape: 3-5-12 AM Hard-Working Teachers, Sabotaged EDition #SOSCHAT #STOPTEACHERBASHING

Big Education Ape: PARENTS CAN!:
Big Education Ape: PARENTS CAN!

Published by Coopmike48 – 6 news spotters today

A rare break from testing madness - The Answer Sheet

washingtonpost.com - This was written by Pamela Grundy, a founding member of Mecklenburg Area Coming Together for Schools (Mecklenburg Acts), a grassroots coalition of parents, citizens and organizations working on beh...

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coopmike48 Mike Klonsky's SmallTalk Blog: WEEKEND QUOTABLES: Mike Klonsky's SmallTalk Blog: WEEKEND QUOTABLES:WEEKEND ... bit.ly/AzpJuz#edu2 minutes ago · reply · retweet · favorite

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coopmike48 pick the good guy | angry asian man - goo.gl/42xfeabout 1 minute ago · reply · retweet · favorite

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coopmike48 Read Damn Good Education Daily ▸ today's top stories via@thanks2teachers @rheefirst ▸paper.li/coopmike48/bir… #SOSCHAT17 seconds ago · reply · retweet · favorite

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coopmike48 Prosecutors will continue to attack defense in Rutgers spycam trial -NorthJersey.com - goo.gl/czQ5X6 minutes ago · reply · retweet · favorite

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Charter school dangers on display in Scientology case

tampabay.com - The Life Force Arts and Technology Academy in Dunedin, a charter elementary school serving low-income children, has sold area parents a bill of goods. It promised an enriching arts and technology p...

leoniehaimson

SocietySee all

Occupy Buffalo's F29: ALEC Protest at Bank of America

my.firedoglake.com - 2/29/12- Occupy Buffalo assembled in Niagara Square to participate in F29 in solidarity with 80 other cities nationwide. F29 targeted corporations that are members of ALEC, that is the American Leg...

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In Which I Admit I'm Squatting....

schooltechconnect.com - Scout In PursuitHere's an image from the day, mashed up in Fotoflexer. So here's a conundrum. I have a number of different URL's that I pay for--- none of them have anything to do with these topic...

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School Tech Connect: In Which I Admit I'm Squatting....

bigeducationape.blogspot.com - School Tech Connect: In Which I Admit I'm Squatting....:In Which I Admit I'm Squatting....by noreply@blogger.com (Tim)Scout In PursuitHere's an image from the day, mashed up in Fotoflexer. So here'...

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George W. Bush impersonator Steve Bridges dies at 48

latimesblogs.latimes.com - Steve Bridges, 48, a comic actor and impersonator who was best known for his mimicry of President George W. Bush and appeared alongside the chief executive at the 2006 White House Correspondents' A...

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U.S. senator asks FTC to probe Apple, Google

democraticunderground.com - Source: msnbcNEW YORK — A U.S. senator has urged the Federal Trade Commission to investigate reports that applications on the Apple and Google mobile systems steal private photos and contacts and p...

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This Week's Education Research Report #soschat #edchat

bigeducationape.blogspot.com - Education Research Report:Does Shortening the School Week Impact Student Performance?Jonathan Kantrowitz at Education Research Report - 7 minutes agoĪ© Public schools face difficult decisions on how...

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Video

nypost.com - By CYNTHIA R. FAGEN and SUSAN EDELMANShe has appeared on “60 Minutes,” starred in the documentary “American Teacher” — and makes $125,000 at an unusual Washington Heights charter school.But celebri...

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Mike Klonsky's SmallTalk Blog: WEEKEND QUOTABLES

Mike Klonsky's SmallTalk Blog: WEEKEND QUOTABLES:

WEEKEND QUOTABLES

by Mike Klonsky
31 were arrested at Virginia protest against law requiring women to have an ultrasound before getting an abortion.
Rep. Delores McQuinn
"The men and women who marched on Capitol Square have a right to peacefully protest without the threat that they will be arrested for exercising that right. At several recent women’s rights events, there has been an overabundance of police presence. In fact, the Capitol Police tactical team has been at all of the events." -- Richmond Times-Dispatch
Anna Allanbrook, principal of P.S.146 in Brooklyn
Calls the scores the “invalid value-addeds.”-- Michael Winerip in NYT
Maureen Dowd
Mitt Romney reacted to Limbaugh for days with craven silence before finally allowing on a rope line
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Teachers, students rally against standardized testing

Teachers, students rally against standardized testing:

Teachers, students rally against standardized testing

Teachers, students and activists protest against standardized testing Friday by marching from the Capitol to the Texas Education Agency. They say focusing on tests misses the point of education and critical thinking.

Calling for fewer standardized tests, about 65 teachers, students and activists marched Friday from the Capitol to the building that houses the Texas Education Agency.

"More teaching, fewer tests: education at its best," they chanted, building off comments made by the state's education commissioner in January that questioned whether testing in Texas public schools has gone too far.

Students begin taking the new State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness this month. Lawmakers required that the new end-of-course exams count as 15 percent of a student's grade in each course, unlike the old Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills.

While state and local business leaders have supported the tests and Texas' accountability system as a way to make sure students are ready for college and careers, many parents decried the mandate over concerns about the tests' affect on grade-point averages, class rank and college admissions.

At a Texas Association of School Administrators meeting in January,

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Get Ready For The Edu-Debt Crisis | California Progress Report

Get Ready For The Edu-Debt Crisis | California Progress Report:

Get Ready For The Edu-Debt Crisis

by megan

By Jeff Bryant

Last week the US House of Representatives, with bipartisan support, passed a bill, H.R. 2117, with the misleading title of The Protecting Academic Freedom in Higher Education Act.

The title is misleading because the bill has absolutely nothing to do with "protecting academic freedom" and everything to do with making our country more vulnerable to a rapacious campaign to turn America's entire system of education into an enterprise that can be exploited by corporate rentiers.

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The GOP: driving moderates to the Democrats

by megan

By Peter Schrag

As Spike Jones used to sing about that Strauss waltz – the Danube ain’t blue, it’s green – California ain’t nearly as blue as the political maps have it. It’s purple. We may vote for Obama, Feinstein, Boxer and all those other Democrats, but we also love our Proposition 13, our term limits, and our three-strikes laws.

We got another reminder of our purpleness – and a lot else besides – from Eric McGhee and Daniel Krimm’s elegant analysis of California’s political geography that PPIC, the Public Policy Institute of California, issued last month. The report is at http://www.ppic.org/main/publication_quick.asp?i=1007

McGhee and Krimm crunched a lot of PPIC survey data to produce their political artwork, some of which looks like nothing you’ve ever seen.

read more

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Occupy the Capitol for Education! | The Sacramento Coalition to Save Public Education

Occupy the Capitol for Education! | The Sacramento Coalition to Save Public Education:

Occupy the Capitol for Education!

by admin
Monday, March 5, 2012 - 10:00am

Occupy the Capitol March 5th flyer

OCCUPY THE CAPITOL!
Monday, March 5, 2012

10 AM: Mass March * Southside Park (6th & T Sts)
11 AM: Rally at the Capitol Building
12:30 PM: Lunch at the Capitol Building
3:30 PM: General Assembly and Nonviolent Direct Action Training to Occupy the Capitol!
5:30 PM: RALLY NORTH STEPS in Solidarity with Occupy the Capitol

Thousands of students, parents, teachers, and workers will flood into Sacramento on Monday, March 5th. How long we stay will be up to you.

Join us to demand that Wall St. and the 1% pay to refund education, jobs, essential services, and a better future!

For more information on the day of action, please visit www.occupyeducationca.org/march5.

For more information about the 5:30 PM rally, please contact the Sacramento Central Labor Council at 916-927-9772.

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Editorial: Refreshingly, school board is mending fences - Editorials - The Sacramento Bee

Editorial: Refreshingly, school board is mending fences - Editorials - The Sacramento Bee:

Editorial: Refreshingly, school board is mending fences

Published: Monday, Mar. 5, 2012 - 12:00 am | Page 9A
Last Modified: Monday, Mar. 5, 2012 - 12:17 am

Thursday night's cordial meeting of the Sacramento City Unified School District board of trustees stands in stark and welcome contrast to several contentious recent board sessions.

The main agenda item of the night was a school closure, always a hotly debated subject, but not last Thursday. Following district staff's recommendation, the board voted 6-0, with one abstention, not to close A.M. Winn Elementary School.

Previous board meetings involving school closure disputes had deteriorated into emotional outbursts with board members sniping at one another. Thankfully, none of that was on display.

Sacramento City Unified has had a history of warring school boards and nasty divisions that have


Read more here: http://www.sacbee.com/2012/03/05/4310946/refreshingly-school-board-is-mending.html#storylink=cpy

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Seventy-five percent of the students left Milwaukee’s voucher program. Journal says that’s a success? « Fred Klonsky

Seventy-five percent of the students left Milwaukee’s voucher program. Journal says that’s a success? « Fred Klonsky:

Seventy-five percent of the students left Milwaukee’s voucher program. Journal says that’s a success?

by Fred Klonsky

The Milwaukee Journal, editorializing about a longitudinal study of the city’s voucher program, says:

A multiyear study tracking students in both Milwaukee’s private voucher schools and Milwaukee Public Schools found that the voucher schools were exceeding the public schools in several key areas. The report’s findings may be significant, especially on reading, but there are still questions, and the bottom line is that improvement and strong accountability are still required for all schools in Milwaukee.

The final installment of an examination of the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program shows that voucher schools made significantly higher gains in reading

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Missouri Education Watchdog: Now in the Florida Senate. Coming Soon to a Legislature in Your State?

Missouri Education Watchdog: Now in the Florida Senate. Coming Soon to a Legislature in Your State?:

Now in the Florida Senate. Coming Soon to a Legislature in Your State?

by stlgretchen

Education reform looks more and more like health care reform but with one important caveat. This reform, unlike the Health Care Reform pushed through the US Senate and House, is bi-partisan. Keep an eye out on your state legislature and its stance on school reform. Florida is perhaps the one of the first states to institute mandates, laws and reforms without due diligence by both political parties:

  • The Florida Senate votes tomorrow without a cost analysis.
  • Strong political forces denied all public (remember the public pays for the education reform decided on by legislators) opposition to be presented at each step...Parents Across
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Charters choose Brown’s tax plan | Thoughts on Public Education

Charters choose Brown’s tax plan | Thoughts on Public Education:

Charters choose Brown’s tax plan

Loyal to governor whose support they can count on

Posted on 3/05/12 • Categorized as 2012 election, Charters, Initiatives, Jerry Brown, State Budget, Student spending, Taxes

By John Fensterwald - Educated Guess

Charter schools and the state’s largest teachers union rarely find anything to agree about. But the California Charter Schools Assn. is now the second major education group, next to the California Teachers Assn., to endorse Gov. Jerry Brown’s $7 billion tax initiative. The13-member board of CCSA, representing most of the 982 charter schools in the state, voted unanimously to support it last week, said Jed Wallace, CEO of the charter schools association.

Brown has been leaning on political leaders to exclusively back his tax plan in order to put the squeeze on sponsors of two competing tax initiatives gathering signatures and make them drop out. But Brown didn’t call him, and he didn’t need to, said Wallace. “The

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NYC Educator: To Know or Not to Know?

NYC Educator: To Know or Not to Know?:

To Know or Not to Know?

by NYC Educator
Mayor Bloomberg is a stalwart supporter of "value-added" scores being released to the public. After all parents need to have this information. The fact that it is thoroughly unreliable, with margins of error so wide you could drive tanks through them is of no importance whatsoever. They need to know!

However, there are also things they don't need to know. For example, they don't need to know how many trailers are being used in Fun City. After all, in 2005 there were 400 of them, and Mayor Bloomberg declared we'd be rid of them by 2012. Now, in 2012, there are 400 of them, and it's fairly clear by any
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Daily Kos: Paul Krugman is a MUST-READ

Daily Kos: Paul Krugman is a MUST-READ:

Paul Krugman is a MUST-READ

by rss@dailykos.com (teacherken)

In States of Depression he explains, in detail, why the recovery is not stronger, including providing specific comparison with the recovery on Reagan's watch. The biggest single drag on the economic recovery is state and local governments cutting back on their employment, something that falls especially heavily on my profession, teaching. AS Krugman puts it rather bluntly near the beginning of his column,

one significant factor in our continuing economic weakness is the fact that government in America is doing exactly what both theory and history say it shouldn’t: slashing spending in the face of a depressed economy.
Some of this of course is because the sources of revenue for state and local governments remain significantly depressed as a result of the collapse of the financial services industry and of the value of housing. It is worth remembering that local governments are heavily dependent upon taxes on real property, and state governments upon income and sales taxes. All of these sources remain depressed, so states and localities, which by law/state constitution almost always have to run balanced budgets, have been making cuts to employment and purchases.
These state and local cuts have led to a sharp fall in both government employment and government
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LAUSD'S WILL MAKE FINAL BUDGET CUTS BEHIND CLOSED DOORS WITHOUT PROMISED PUBLIC INPUT - Perdaily.com

LAUSD'S WILL MAKE FINAL BUDGET CUTS BEHIND CLOSED DOORS WITHOUT PROMISED PUBLIC INPUT - Perdaily.com:

LAUSD'S WILL MAKE FINAL BUDGET CUTS BEHIND CLOSED DOORS WITHOUT PROMISED PUBLIC INPUT

by Leonard Isenberg
Sham.jpg
(Mensaje se repite en EspaƱol)

(For a national view of public education reform see the end of this blog post)

Tomorrow, March 6th, LAUSD's Board of Directors will make final decisions behind closed doors in complete derogation of their promise last month to reconsider the proposed draconian cuts with parent and other stakeholder input. These cuts, if allowed to go through, will decimate adult education and many other vital programs throughout LAUSD, which the LAUSD Board was unwilling to do last month, when confronted by sustained resistance from parents.

What makes tomorrow's behind closed doors meeting to make these cuts prior to the March 15th deadline so dishonest are several factors:

1. Although these cuts are supposedly necessitated by a $500 million budgetary shortfall, the truth is that
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How Charter School Myths and Accountability Schemes are Unraveling in New York | Scathing Purple Musings

How Charter School Myths and Accountability Schemes are Unraveling in New York | Scathing Purple Musings:

How Charter School Myths and Accountability Schemes are Unraveling in New York

by Bob Sikes

The New York Post is no friend of public schools and its teachers. But this story in yesterday’s paper is a double haymaker against today’s ed reformers.

She has appeared on “60 Minutes,” starred in the documentary “American Teacher” — and makes $125,000 at an unusual Washington Heights charter school.

But celebrity teacher Rhena Jasey, 32, scored a low 18 — on a scale of 0 to 100 — in the recently released Department of Education teacher ratings.

Jasey, a 32-year-old Harvard grad, works at The Equity Project, a publicly funded but privately run

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