Nov. 20 – OTL Education Action Summit in Albany, NY | National Opportunity to Learn Campaign | Education Reform for Equity and Opportunity

Nov. 20 – OTL Education Action Summit in Albany, NY | National Opportunity to Learn Campaign | Education Reform for Equity and Opportunity:

Nov. 20 – OTL Education Action Summit in Albany, NY

Posted on: Tuesday October 29th, 2013

Join OTL allies from across New York for the Alliance for Quality Education's Education Action Summit on Nov. 20 in Albany! The event will include a day of trainings and workshops, and the kickoff of AQE's No More Excuses Campaign:

"For too long, Albany has broken its promise to provide a quality education to all of New York's students! Join us for the kick-off of the No More Excuses Campaign and building a bigger, stronger movement to ensure that all of New York's students receive a high quality education." 

Register today!

WHEN: Wednesday, Nov. 20

TIME: 10:30 am – 4:30 pm

WHERE: New York State Museum (260 Madison Ave. Albany, NY)

For more details, see the flyer below. To register, click here.

Mike Klonsky's SmallTalk Blog: Obama comes to Brooklyn. Warns students, 'the Chinese, Indians, Russians... are coming.'

Mike Klonsky's SmallTalk Blog: Obama comes to Brooklyn. Warns students, 'the Chinese, Indians, Russians... are coming.':

Obama comes to Brooklyn. Warns students, 'the Chinese, Indians, Russians... are coming.'

Obama arrives at JFK on route to Brooklyn

S.T.E.M. schools are the flavor of the month and President Obama took the opportunity, while stumping for Bill de Blasio (not that de Blasio needs it), to make a speech at his favorite, Brooklyn's P-Tech. 

P-Tech bills itself as "the first school in the nation that connects high school, college, and the world of work through college and industry partnerships." The school has students from grades 9-11 and then offers them a program at CUNY leading to an A.A. degree (I have one of those from L.A. City College in the 60's but no one has ever asked to see it).

The school is run under a partnership between New York Public Schools, the City University of New York and IBM, and is being hailed by corporate execs and the President himself as the new model for schools everywhere. However, I'm not really sure what those outside partnerships mean to the school, since both CUNY and IBM have big problems of their own.

“This country should be doing everything in our power to give more kids the 

In Memphis, city schools are at the epicenter of controversial changes | Hechinger Report

In Memphis, city schools are at the epicenter of controversial changes | Hechinger Report:

In Memphis, city schools are at the epicenter of controversial changes

By Sarah Carr

This story also appeared at:

MEMPHIS — Depending on who you talk to, Memphis is rapidly becoming one of the best cities to teach in America—or one of the worst.

For Amanda Montgomery, a 24-year-old teacher, for instance, the takeover of her elementary school by Aspire Public Schools—the California-based charter network—has brought smaller class sizes and more-consistent mentoring. “I have a lot more coaching … and supports,” she said.

But Sarah Kennedy-Harper, a veteran special-education teacher at Memphis’s Northside High School, aggressively opposed a similar takeover at Northside, knowing she could lose some job security. “I need to pay my bills,” Kennedy-Harper said. “I can’t afford to be at a school where they could hand us pink slips at any time and say, ‘We don’t need your services.’”

The classrooms at Cornerstone Prep, a young charter school in Memphis’ Achievement School District, are named after colleges and universities like Columbia. College banners and flags hang throughout the school. (Photo: Sarah Carr)

The city’s schools are on the vanguard of controversial changes reshaping urban education nationally, including decentralized control, more charter schools, increased use of data to determine which schools stay open, and a greater reliance on new teachers who come through alternative preparation programs such as Teach for America or the Memphis Teacher Residency.

At the heart of these changes is the state-run Achievement School 

A Call for a Return of Local Control in Education | Truth in American Education

A Call for a Return of Local Control in Education | Truth in American Education:

A Call for a Return of Local Control in Education

Filed in Common Core State Standards, Education at State Level by Shane Vander Hart on October 29, 2013• 0 Comments

• 11
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Tom Pauken, a former member of the Texas Workforce Commission and now a Republican candidate in the Texas gubernatorial race, wrote a great piece in Human Eventscalling for a return of local control in education.

He points out the defining characteristics of a philosophy that he says is shared by Common Core advocates and intellectual elites who he says have taken over public schools in Texas:

• a top-down, centralized approach
• an obsession with testing
• one-size-fits-all standards and curriculum
• the use of buzzwords like “rigor” so as to imply that opponents favor low quality education
• giving lots lip service to principles like local control while essentially threatening those (schools, districts, states) who don’t choose to comply to do so under state mandates.

He said that Republican advocates of the Common Core have missed the shift that has taken place with the conservative expectations surrounding education policies.

Republican supporters of the Common Core have missed the shift that has occurred among conservatives since the time when Bush took office in Texas. Conservatives have returned to their roots. After letting their guard down in the mid-1990s, they recovered their healthy 

7 Things Sex Education Should’ve Taught Us But Didn’t | toteachornototeach

7 Things Sex Education Should’ve Taught Us But Didn’t | toteachornototeach:

7 Things Sex Education Should’ve Taught Us But Didn’t 

By Mark Manson

It’s 2013 and two things are abundantly clear:

1. Sex education matters, and
2. Cultures that believe sex is shameful screw everything up.

The statistics are glaring. More pragmatic approaches to teenage sexuality (i.e., “Hey, you’re going to do what you’re going to do, but here’s how to be responsible about it”) outperform strict abstinence/religious forms of sex education (i.e., “Don’t have sex until you’re married, or else”) by almost every statistical measurement including teenage pregnancies, abortions and HIV infections.

By the way, the United States is the worst offender in all of those categories. And we all know how comfortable we are with our own sexualities. (Hint: We’re not at all.)

The recent government-funded “abstinence only” programs have been found to actually increase teen pregnancy and STI rates in states where they’re implemented, proving, yet again, that teenagers will always do exactly what you tell them not to and 

UPDATE: Author Maya Angelou blasts Obama’s Race to the Top + What gets kids in trouble: ‘Borrow’ from Wikipedia

Author Maya Angelou blasts Obama’s Race to the Top:

Author Maya Angelou blasts Obama’s Race to the Top

• BY VALERIE STRAUSS

• October 29 at 5:00 am

Maya Angelou (Photo by Marvin Joseph/The Washington Post)

Renowned author and poet Maya Angelou was one of more than 120 authors and illustrators who recently signed a letterto President Obama asking him to curb policies that promote excessive standardized testing because  of the negative impact “on children’s love [of] reading and literature.”  Now she has blasted Obama’s signature education initiative, Race to the Top, saying that it is “a contest” that doesn’t help children learn to love to read and get a better understanding of the world.

Angelou, who has been a strong public supporter of Obama’s, appeared Monday on the MSBNC show “Andrea Mitchell Reports,” where she was asked about her opposition to policies that emphasize standardized testing and her view of Race to the Top, a multibillion-dollar competition run by the U.S. Education Department that allowed states and later individual school districts to vie for federal funds by promising to enact favored education  reforms favored by the administration. Critics have charged that Race to the Top has led to increased high-stakes standardized testing because it requires states that win funds to evaluate teachers in part on student standardized test scores.

“Race To The Top feels to be more like a contest,” Angelou said, “… not what did you learn, but how much can you memorize.”

She also said that young people should have the freedom to read the great authors, including Tolstoy and Balzac, because their books help young people learn about the complexities of the world.

“Writers are really interested in forming young men and women,” she said. “… ‘This is

Quotations from Chairman Mark: Every public word of Zuckerberg’s in one file

Your wait is over. Researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee have gone ahead and satisfied the large demand for a digital archive — officially called The Zuckerberg Files — that include every single solitary word that Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg ever said in public. Really. This isn’t like the digital archives you ordinarily find at […]    

1 by Valerie Strauss / 0min 

Five key strategies to get/keep kids engaged at school

Here’s an excerpt from Larry Ferlazzo’s new book, “Classroom Q & As: Expert Strategies For Teaching,”  recently published by Education Week. It’s a compilation of some of  the weekly teacher advice columns he writes for Ed Week, and includes contributions from acclaimed educators from across the United States. Ferlazzo teaches at Luther Burbank High School in […]    

1 by Valerie Strauss / 30min 

Rand Paul does what gets kids in trouble: ‘Borrow’ from Wikipedia

Sen. Rand Paul gave a  speech at Liberty University in Virginia on Monday that got a lot of media attention because he said he believes that the combination of abortion and modern scientific advances could lead to the practice of eugenics. But he got coverage for more than just that message: MSNBC host Rachel Maddow said […]    

4 by Valerie Strauss / 17min 

When earning a D is ‘doing well’

Classroom dynamics are complicated, and progress in student achievement comes in many different forms. Here’s a personal look at how one teacher helped one child at risk of failing, and what success looked like. This was written by Michele Kerr,  a math teacher at Kennedy High School in Fremont, CA. This post comes from her blog. […]    

3 by Valerie Strauss / 35min 

Three ways to listen (and learn) better

Do you ever listen to something only to find your mind wandering? Here’s a piece on how to listen by written by Annie Murphy Paul, a book author, magazine journalist, consultant and speaker who helps people understand how we learn and how we can do it better. She is a contributing writer  for Time magazine, writes a […]    

5 by Valerie Strauss / 4h 

4 Caution Lights For School Leaders | Connected Principals

4 Caution Lights For School Leaders | Connected Principals:

4 Caution Lights For School Leaders

October 29, 2013

By William Parker

Zig Ziglar’s “wheel of life” is often referred to by leadership coaches, like Chris Locurto, because it represents a good visual of the competing interests in each of our lives.

The thought goes, when the areas of our life are held in good balance, the ride is much smoother. When one area of our life is off-balance, we experience a flat tire.
Although it is safe to say that none of us has a perfectly balanced life, I almost made a fatal assumption in my early years of school leadership by thinking if I worked harder, I would accomplish more.
I believed managing the needs of students, teachers, staff, parents, etc. required every second of school as well as hours before and after. As a result, I consistently worked through lunches or skip dinners to keep up with the demands.
Eventually, this pace led to burn-out. And a leader who burns out is a miserable leader…and eventually so are those around him or her.
Do you often feel driven to work harder and harder to reach your goals? Here are some caution-lights I try to keep in mind on my journey:
1. Recognize the The Danger-Signs of Workaholism
As I discovered the havoc over-work was creating in my life, my wife told me one day, “The kids 

Making Better Sense of Our Differences - Bridging Differences - Education Week

Making Better Sense of Our Differences - Bridging Differences - Education Week:

Making Better Sense of Our Differences

By Deborah Meier on October 29, 2013 8:23 AM

Dear Mike,

Amazing.  We've found important legislative reform we can both sign onto. (Even if it's not, perhaps, to either of our mutual self-interests!) Make inheritance taxes more draconian—enough to ease the way so that children don't go cold turkey from riches to rags, but severe enough so that they don't start miles ahead. It still won't be "fair"—since by the time their parents die they'll already be well ahead on their way to the finish line on that imagined racing track. But it has the practical advantage of directing more funds to lessening, by even a little, that awful gap between the haves and have-nots.  A little closer to requiring everyone to start somewhat closer to the same starting line.

Meanwhile, we might also work at changing the metaphor itself—life as a race.

Actually, what we're hoping for when we make our wills is that we've provided a safety net for the ones we love when we can no longer do so directly.  That safety net I believe is a great idea for everyone.  Yes, it deprives a few people each generation of the opportunity to pull themselves up from nothing—without help—by their own bootstraps.  I'm prepared to say goodbye to that 

#NaNoPrep – are your WriMos ready? « Teaching Between the Lines

#NaNoPrep – are your WriMos ready? « Teaching Between the Lines:


#NaNoPrep – are your WriMos ready?

If your students are participating in NaNoWriMo (in T – 3 days), then they are probably chomping at the bit to start writing.  There’s nothing like telling students they CAN’T write until a certain date to get them begging for permission to write!  If they have created their characters, crafted their conflicts and plotted their plot, then they are probably more than ready to start chapter one.

But being ready to write doesn’t mean they are ready to deal with the inevitable road blocks that will get in their way once they get past the first page.  Be proactive and get your students ready before they crash and burn:

• give them time to explore the resources on the Young Writers Program site for NaNoWriMo.  Not only should they create and personalize their accounts, but they also need time to check out the Dare Machine, the NaNo News and the Author Pep Talks, and to find their writing buddies on the site. When they start writing on 

LA schools superintendent review brings out political divides | Pass / Fail | 89.3 KPCC

LA schools superintendent review brings out political divides | Pass / Fail | 89.3 KPCC:

LA schools superintendent review brings out political divides

Annie Gilbertson | October 29th, 2013, 6:00am

AFP/AFP/Getty Images

A superintendent’s review is usually routine: board members check in on goals such as raising test scores and increasing graduation rates.

But a public uproar has turned Superintendent John Deasy’s review on Tuesday into a political referendum.

The upswing in interest began late last week, when local media reported Deasy had told some board members he is considering stepping down in February.

Deasy responded by saying he hadn't formally resigned — but declined to speak about his intentions — until after Tuesday's review.

That sent shock waves through the city, with leaders and various groups weighing in publicly. There have been newspaper editorials; a group of business leaders signed a letter in support of Deasy; a group of parents are leading a letter writing campaign against him and a group of nonprofits is holding a rally at 10:30 a.m. for or against Deasy.

Board member Steve Zimmer said any thought that the board was planning to oust the 

 

New advice from pediatricians on screen time for kids

Apple’s iPad is a hot holiday gift this year — for kids, too.; Credit: Holtsman/Flickr Creative Commons License Don't be surprised if the next time you take your child to a check-up, the pediatrician asks about screen time. The American Association of Pediatrics has released new guidelines on children's use of electronic devices. The group recommends parents make a “media use plan” with clear rul

by Deepa Fernandes / 1h 

Funding facts from Ralph Martire Parents United for Responsible Education

Parents United for Responsible Education » Blog Archive » Funding facts from Ralph Martire:

Funding facts from Ralph Martire

Julie Woestehoff and Ralph Martire, Oct. 2013

PURE was pleased to co-sponsor a forum on October 11, 2013, featuring state budget expert Ralph Martire, of the Center for Tax and Budget Accountability. The information he provided was important to share, so we have prepared the following fact sheet based on his presentation and are solely responsible for its content. For more information about the Center for Tax and Budget Accountability and these critical issues, please go to www.cbtaonline.org. You can also download a printable version of the fact sheet here.

Facts about school funding from Ralph Martire

A summary of Ralph Martire’s presentation on state school funding for Illinois Friends of Public Education, October 11, 2013

1. There has been a 10% drop in Illinois Pre-K-12 funding from 2000 -> 2014.

2. Illinois ranks 50 out of 50 states in the portion of education funding provided by the state.

3. Illinois’ temporary tax increase did help. This planned four-year tax hike – from 3% to 5% — enacted by Illinois in 2011 stabilized the deficit at about 8 billion. Without the tax increase, the deficit would now be about 33 billion.

4. The tax increase was not a “job killer.” In fact, more jobs are lost when the state spends less money by cutting jobs. When jobs are lost, spending (and state revenue) drops. Our

- See more at: http://pureparents.org/?p=20961#sthash.0PigFoor.dpuf

Warily, Schools Watch Students on the Internet - NYTimes.com

Warily, Schools Watch Students on the Internet - NYTimes.com:

Warily, Schools Watch Students on the Internet

By SOMINI SENGUPTA

SAN FRANCISCO — For years, a school principal’s job was to make sure students were not creating a ruckus in the hallways or smoking in the bathroom. Vigilance ended at the schoolhouse gates.

Now, as students complain, taunt and sometimes cry out for help on social media, educators have more opportunities to monitor students around the clock. And some schools are turning to technology to help them. Several companies offer services to filter and glean what students do on school networks; a few now offer automated tools to comb through off-campus postings for signs of danger. For school officials, this raises new questions about whether they should — or legally can — discipline children for their online outbursts.

The problem has taken on new urgency with the case of a 12-year-old Florida girl who committed suicide after classmates relentlessly bullied her online and offline.

Two girls — ages 12 and 14 — who the authorities contend were her chief tormentors were arrested this month after one posted a Facebook comment about her death.

Educators find themselves needing to balance students’ free speech rights against the dangers children can get into at school and sometimes with the law because of what they 

Paul Horton: Pseudo Democracy: Duncan Double Dribbles in Chicago - Living in Dialogue - Education Week Teacher

Paul Horton: Pseudo Democracy: Duncan Double Dribbles in Chicago - Living in Dialogue - Education Week Teacher:

Paul Horton: Pseudo Democracy: Duncan Double Dribbles in Chicago

By Anthony Cody on October 28, 2013 8:32 PM

Guest post by Paul Horton.

 

You may have heard about the Common Core Forums in New York, otherwise known as "the attack of the special interests." New York Education Commissioner John King had a hissy fit when he was forced to listen to a few folks who not so gently disagreed with his ideas about Education Reform.

 

The Chamber of Commerce has also led a circus parade around the country in support of the Common Core.  When a major employer comes to town and says it's Common Core or the highway to the dormitory factory in some brand new Chinese city, how can we yokels have any doubts about standards as potentially unemployed citizens?

 

So when I got word through the campus e-mail chain that Arne Duncan would be speaking at a "Forum on the Implementation of the Common Core Curriculum" (Oct. 25) across the street, I said to myself, I have got to see what these Forums are all about. So I signed up on the "Eventbrite" page.

 

Given the fact that Arne's popularity has tanked and that we have a huge number of aging friends ofBill Ayers  in our strange neighborhood mix of neoliberal Nobel Prize winners or Prize-winners-in-

New school funding law sets first-time accountability for foster youth SI&A Cabinet Report – News & Resources

SI&A Cabinet Report – News & Resources:

New school funding law sets first-time accountability for foster youth
By Kimberly Beltran
Tuesday, October 29, 2013

New laws that ushered in California’s landmark Local Control Funding Formula call on the departments of social services and education for the first time to identify and share information about foster students with school districts.

Schools are also mandated to track and report on the academic progress of foster youth – making California the first to do so in the nation.

The new requirements could prove challenging for many schools – mostly because it is simply unfamiliar territory, says one expert who helped write the section of law emphasizing this new student subgroup’s success.

“This is not a subgroup of students that school districts have traditionally focused on, unlike English learner students and low-income students, where for many years they’ve been trying to improve the educational outcomes for those subgroups,” said Jesse Hahnel, an attorney and director of the California-based FosterEd, a non-profit initiative of the