Sunday, October 3, 2010

Government fails poor kids - Other Views - MiamiHerald.com

Government fails poor kids

BY CAL THOMAS

TMSEDITORS@TRIBUNE.COM

The new film Waiting for Superman by documentary filmmaker Davis Guggenheim, director of An Inconvenient Truth, should be mandatory viewing for every member of Congress.

As a synopsis on the Fandango movie site says, this film ``explores the tragic ways in which the American public education system is failing our nation's children . . . ''

Not only do we see children and their parents on the edge of their seats during a lottery that will determine who gets the educational equivalent of a ``get out of jail free'' card, we also watch the crestfallen faces of those who don't draw the magic numbers for decent schools, a better education and, thus, a hope for the future. Is this how a poor child's destiny should be decided, by lottery ?

Democurmudgeon: Why American Education is on the Ropes. Poverty.

Why American Education is on the Ropes. Poverty.

by Democurmudgeon

An article about poverty in Janesville, Wisconsin made it perfectly clear how it effects our kid’s education. It’s the root cause of low achievement and graduation rates. Poverty controls their lives.
StateJournal: Rock County is scrambling to help two groups of needy children - those who were born into poor families and those who fell from the middle class when the Janesville GM plant closed in December 2008 … Rock with the second worst child-poverty rate in the state … The Janesville Public School District is seeing more students coming to class hungry, without a good night's sleep and distracted by the stress of living in need, said Ann Forbeck, school district

Parents: Impasse hurting students - The Boston Globe

Parents: Impasse hurting students

Teachers withhold key help, they say

By Rachel Lebeaux

Globe Correspondent / October 3, 2010

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Parents of King Philip Regional High School students are steamed at its teachers, saying the union’s means of protesting its drawn-out contract dispute with the district are hurting their children’s studies and their college plans.

They report that many teachers are refusing to write personal recommendation letters for students who are applying to colleges, issuing form-letter recommendations instead. They also say that many teachers have canceled independent study courses, offered mostly to upperclassmen, forcing the students into study halls or to look outside the system for similar instruction this fall.

And, they say, many teachers are not entering grades, homework assignments,

What Do Corporate Earnings Reports and School Test Scores Have in Common? � Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

What Do Corporate Earnings Reports and School Test Scores Have in Common?

by larrycuban

The answer is that intense pressures upon corporate executives to satisfy investors and upon school leaders to raise test scores distort routine practices and too often leads to chicanery. Over the last decade, stories have emerged from multi-billion dollar corporate offices that CEOs doctored earnings reports to keep investors happy (while protecting their stock options), and educators fiddled with standardized test scores.

Before the 2008 financial meltdown, earnings statements (and forecasts) as signs of corporate success pushed corporate officers to claim as earnings funds that had little to do with actual transactions with customers in a given year. For example, Computer Associates and Xerox CEOs claimed revenues in one year that their

Score two for the forces against democracy | Reflections on Teaching

Score two for the forces against democracy

by alicemercer

Since I’m in the middle of a school reform first-hand, I haven’t had time to keep up with all the edu-reformy news that’s been coming out at hyper-speed the last week. Just look up school reform on Larry Ferlazzo’s blog for a list of the latest and greatest posts. My big picture impression is truth may have been the first victim in a lot of what’s been going down, but we’re moving beyond that to the point where basic things like democracy and rule of law are getting thrown out the window as so-called reformers continue to push their agendas. I’m getting Tom’s point that it is feeling like things are hitting a critical juncture. Here are two examples, little and big, of that:

I bring you news from Providence, Rhode Island via Tom Hoffman’s Tuttle SVC blog:

Linda Borg for the ProJo:

PROVIDENCE — Hope High School students said their fears have come true: Hope is no longer a

Down the Education Rabbit Hole � InterACT

Down the Education Rabbit Hole

by David B. Cohen

“…but Alice had got so much into the way of expecting nothing but out-of-the-way things to happen, that it seemed quite dull and stupid for life to go on in the common way.”

Lewis Carrol - Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

I guess I’m not as adaptable as Alice. It’s only the end of Chapter One when she realizes that once she’s hit the bottom of the rabbit hole, nothing will “go on in the common way.” Much of the education reform debate has been down the rabbit hole for a while, but I keep expecting people to act with some common sense.

Apparently, I’m clinging to a strange notion about education: if you want to improve schools, you need teacher

Queens Teacher: Rheeform Has Its Consequences

Rheeform Has Its Consequences

by Queens Teacher

The canary in the education reform movement's coal mine

All teachers throughout the country need to rejoice with the recent Washington, D.C., mayoral primary as the all-but-official new Democratic mayor elect, Vincent Gray, will most likely make the firing of Michele Rhee, chancellor of the D.C. schools, one of his highest priorities. Rhee, whose picture recently was on the cover of Time magazine, had fired 240 teachers in Washington, D.C., and will now most likely also join the lines of the unemployed. Rhee had crossed the lines of professionalism when she openly campaigned in the more affluent sections of Georgetown for the outgoing mayor, Adrian Fenty. Following Fenty's defeat, she then put her foot in her mouth when she called the results of the election "devastating." It is also no secret that Gray had criticized

Saturday, October 2, 2010

Is Education The New Subprime? | iStockAnalyst.com

Is Education The New Subprime?

By: Jacob H. Zamansky Saturday, October 02, 2010 11:28 AM

Stop me if you've heard this one before: Publicly traded corporations accused of wrongdoing countering critics by saying they are helping low-income Americans achieve the American dream.

No, this isn't the subprime loan debacle all over again. It's the for-profit higher education industry, which is currently reeling from plummeting stock prices and shareholder unrest due to a government investigation that found potentially fraudulent practices and a need for new regulations.

Indeed, on August 3, 2010, the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) issued a report which concluded that for-profit educational institutions had "encouraged fraudulent practices" designed to recruit students. The GAO investigated for-profit colleges in Arizona, California, Florida, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Texas and Washington, D.C. Recruiters at

Progressives Rally for Justice, Jobs, Education | CafeSentido.com

Progressives Rally for Justice, Jobs, Education

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2 October 2010 :: staff

The ‘One Nation Working Together’ rally on the National Mall in Washington, DC, is projected to gather 200,000 progressive activists, volunteers and supporters from around the country. There are sister rallies taking place across the country, as part of a collective effort to promote progressive values and “demand change”. The rally has been said to show the progressive base is highly energized and will mobilize to support Democrats and Pres. Obama’s reform agenda.

The rally’s organizers say the event is intended to call for concerted national action to promote justice, create jobs and make education more affordable and more accessible for all Americans. The central message of the rally was: opportunity should be available to all people; justice should prevail over tribalism and class difference; and economic prosperity must be rooted in a society-wide consciousness of

Blog U.: Chinese Contradictions - The World View - Inside Higher Ed

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Chinese Contradictions
By Philip G. Altbach October 2, 2010 2:45 pm
Recent statistics concerning flows of students from China and Chinese views about migration raise some interesting questions concerning the present and future of Chinese higher education—particularly at the elite levels. Record numbers of Chinese continue to study abroad—270,000 are self-funded and (only) about 25 percent are returning to China, surprising in the context of the economic problems of the West and China’s booming economy (figures come from Willy Lam of the Jamestown Foundation).
Almost 100,000 Chinese students study in the United States. At the same time, China is now host to 240,000 international students, approaching the number of Chinese students going abroad. Most are from Asia, but a growing number are from Western countries, including 18,000 from the United States. Information is not available what percentage of these students are pursuing a degree versus staying for a year or semester, or where they are studying. To encourage more incoming students, the Chinese government has announced that it will offer 20,000 scholarships to international students. China is increasingly an important player not

The tragic loss of reduced class size

Delaine Eastin

Friday, October 1, 2010

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My grandmother's favorite poem ends with the line,

"For of all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these: 'It might have been!' "

So much might have been so much better in California had Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and some feckless members of the Legislature not put their no-taxes pledge ahead of our children's destiny. With $17 billion in spending cuts in education over the past two years, many of the initiatives that were showing such promise are being axed by a penny-wise, pound-foolish set of policies.

In 1995, when I proposed cutting class sizes in kindergarten through third grade, then-Gov. Pete Wilson at first rejected the call, saying he had a better idea of what to do with

Teacher Layoffs and War | CommonDreams.org

Teacher Layoffs and War

Rethinking Schools Editors

Our government’s perverse definition of “national security” was on display again this summer. By large majorities, the U.S. Congress approved a so-called emergency appropriation of $33.5 billion to escalate the war in Afghanistan—adding to the more than $1 trillion that the United States has already spent waging wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Meanwhile, as schools faced the potential layoff of an estimated 300,000 teachers across the country, Congress dawdled until the second week in August, finally approving $10 billion to save the jobs of about half that number. The catch was that Congress “found” the money by cutting $12 billion in spending on food stamps (the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program)—a measure that the Food Research and Action Center says will hurt 40 million people, almost half of them children, when the cuts take effect in 2014. As Connecticut Rep.

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Sunday, October 3, 2010