Brockton, MA is home to one of the best large urban high schools in the country. But instead of celebrating that success, state officials are poised to approve a massive, for-profit charter school here.
The Common Core State Standards are inexorably coming to the 46 states and the District of Columbia, which have approved them. We’ve heard pros and cons of them in previous posts but here’s a broader look at what they may mean for public education. This was written by Yong Zhao, presidential chair and associate dean for global education at the University of Oregon’s College of Education, where he also serves as the director of the Center for Advanced Technology in Education. He is a fellow of the International Academy for Education. Until December 2010, he was director of both the Center for Teaching and Technology and the U.S.-China Center for Research on Educational Excellence at Michigan State University, as well as the executive director of the Confucius Institute/Institute for Chinese Teacher Education. This appeared on his blog.
Having a group I belong to and helped found described by Diane Ravitch no less as "one of the best organized" is shocking. But given that I leave most of the work to all the other amazing people I wrote about on Friday, it works for me.One of the best organized groups functions in New York state. It is called Change the Stakes. .... Diane Ravitch
Evaluation deal and mid-winter break days may be factor in delay.Tonight's UFT Executive Board meeting was pretty much drop-dead date for the UFT elections to take place within the rough time-frame that they have been run in the past: process begins in early January, petitions due in mid-February, ballots go out in March with vote count around April 1 (appropriate). The UFT constitution says they must be sometime in the spring, which ends around June 20. Is the Unity caucus leadership thinking they would fare better with ballots going out in June when the lost Feb. vacation days would become a memory and whatever eval deal they make would have been spun any which way the leadership wants?
Prospects looked bleak four months ago. A frenetic effort to rewrite California’s 40-year-old Stull Act died when Assemblymember Felipe Fuentes, a San Fernando Democrat, withdrew his bill to reform teacher evaluations (AB 5) amid recriminations and a power struggle between labor and management – teachers unions and superintendents. One key sticking point: who on a district level would decide which elements in an evaluation system should be used and how much they’ll count.
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| Bloomberg's anti-union rant. (Daily News) |
“Teachers want to work with the best, and most of them are not in sympathy with the union,” he said on Friday. “…The NRA’s another place where the membership, if you do the polling, doesn’t agree with the leadership.” -- Mayor BloombergRemember back in '04 when Bush's Sec. of Education Rod Paige was calling the teachers union, a "terrorist organization"? Now N.Y. Mayor Bloomberg is playing the same anti-union card, comparing the teachers union with the NRA. Is anyone buying this crap?
With no states receiving an A, two states receiving B-minuses and 11 states branded with an F, StudentsFirst would seem to be building a reputation as a harsh grader.
Ms. Rhee said that the relatively weak showing reflected how recently statehouses had begun to address issues like tenure and performance evaluations. “We didn’t say in any way that we want to show people how bad it is,” she said in a telephone interview. “We wanted to show the progress that is being made, but in places where progress is slower to come, be very clear with leaders of that state what they could do to push the agenda forward and
It’s OK to support regular-old public schools.
The vast majority of Americans attended public schools and have sent their children to neighborhood campuses. They thank public schools for their livelihoods. They see them as gateways to opportunity for kids with disintegrating families. They judge their home values by the
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| Gov Scott and high-prices consultant, Rhee, visit a privately-run charter school in Opa Locka, FL. |
