bigeducationape.blogspot.com - A One-Sided Dialogue: Teacher Frustration Leads to Protest - Living in Dialogue - Education Week TeacherA One-Sided Dialogue: Teacher Frustration Leads to Protestby Anthony CodyWe are just over a m...
guardian.co.uk - Arab spring ... not a Facebook revolution but accelerated by the internet, claims Alec Ross. Photograph: Stringer/Iraq/Reuters Hillary Clinton's senior adviser for innovation at the US state depart...
nycpublicschoolparents.blogspot.com - Yesterday afternoon, oral arguments were heard in the UFT/NAACP school closing/co-location lawsuit. State Supreme Court Judge Paul Feinman’s courtroom was packed, mostly with attorneys and reporte...
palmbeachpost.com - AP Photo/Steve Helber, FileIn this Jan. 26, 2010 photo, Virginia Secretary of Education Gerard Robinson gestures during an interview in his office in Richmond, Va. Florida Board of Education voted ...
indypressny.org - Upper East Side A new charter high school proposed for Manhattan has close ties to a for-profit curriculum provider with family links to the chair of the state board that will decide on the school'...
bangordailynews.com - BANGOR, Maine — The number of Maine schools lagging behind federal school improvement requirements will increase drastically this year and might double in poorer areas, according to education offic...
myfoxchicago.com - Chicago - The Chicago Teachers Union protested at school headquarters Wednesday, days after the board denied teachers a 4 percent raise, opening the possibility of a teacher strike. The CTU was pro...
chicagoist.com - The Chicago School Board will meet today to vote for pay raises for Chicago Public Schools CEO Jean-Claude Brizard and four other school system executives. The vote comes a week after that same Sch...
bigeducationape.blogspot.com - Former employee alleges cheating cover-up by APS school chief | Get SchooledFormer employee alleges cheating cover-up by APS school chief10:26 pm June 21, 2011, by Maureen DowneyMany of you are alr...
michaelklonsky.blogspot.com - "This is what democracy looks like!" (M. Klonsky pic)I got to march this morning, with thousands of Chicago teachers and supporters who surrounded CPS headquarters to protest the mayor's latest as...
nydailynews.com - Bryan Smith for News Council member Letitia James is one politician urging Mayor Bloomberg to tap into rainy-day funds in order to save community programs from being cut. If Mayor Bloomberg has his...
nytimes.com - ALBANY — Legislative leaders said Tuesday that they had reached a tentative deal with Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo on renewing New York’s rent laws, capping property taxes for homeowners and raising tuitio...
hispanicallyspeakingnews.com - Published at 5:17 pm, June 22, 2011 Photo Credits: Reports Reveal Minority Men Face Toughest Challenges When Trying to Advance their Education According to two recent reports from the College Board...
dekerivers.wordpress.com - Almost makes you want to root for Michelle Bachmann. Despite the much-publicized rollout of Sarah Palin’s “One Nation” bus tour last month, the Palin bus seems to have taken an extended hiatus as t...
tomhayden.com - This article originally appeared at The Nation on June 22, 2011. Julian Assange has chosen a new legal team to represent him in his quest to prevent extradition from London to Sweden, where authori...
bigeducationape.blogspot.com - Big Money, Our Favorite Things « Failing SchoolsBig Money, Our Favorite ThingsJUNE 22, 2011by mariasalleeThe Summer Solstice has just passed, and it feels like a time to play with rhyming words. Af...
mediaite.com - Reddit, for those unfamiliar, is a user-submitted news website where you can discover links to stories about, say, a flesh-eating homemade Russian drug (“Drugs are so bad!” – Super 8), and original...
my.firedoglake.com - The United States has to cut back spending on the Commerce Department or it will bankrupt the country. Okay, I have no evidence for this and it really doesn’t make any sense. The Commerce Departmen...
theatlanticwire.com - Late Tuesday afternoon, The Wall Street Journal reported that Hulu was considering an offer after "a potential buyer approached it with an unsolicited offer." The Los Angeles Times tacitly confirme...
teamsternation.blogspot.com - BMW Rally from Alas Media on Vimeo. Literally. The company is trying to treat these long-time employees like so much trash to be thrown into the street. Earlier this month, BMW told 65 Teamsters th...
dailykos.com - Sen. Bernie Sanders (Chris Helgren/Reuters)It's a seriously fucked up new world in Washington, DC. A Senate subcommittee on Primary Health and Aging, chaired by Sen. Bernie Sanders, held a hearing ...
fdlaction.firedoglake.com - The Affordable Care Act will eventually start requiring health insurance policies to be explained in a simpler to understand manner. While this a good thing there is still the huge problem that si...
mariashriver.com - June 22, 2011 Creative Experts What Can We Learn From Feeling Hungry? By Penny Hoff Do you just want to eat, or do you want to stop being hungry? There is vital distinction between these two desire...
bigeducationape.blogspot.com - Former employee alleges cheating cover-up by APS school chief | Get SchooledFormer employee alleges cheating cover-up by APS school chief10:26 pm June 21, 2011, by Maureen DowneyMany of you are alr...
bigeducationape.blogspot.com - Students Mark School Closings With Memorial Service Outside DOE Headquarters « EdVoxStudents Mark School Closings With Memorial Service Outside DOE Headquartersby edvoxnyOne hundred high school stu...
bigeducationape.blogspot.com - Charter Schooling & Citizenship :: Frederick M. HessCharter Schooling & Citizenshipby Frederick M. Hess • Jun 22, 2011 at 10:00 amCross-posted from Education Week Print Send RSS ShareU. Missouri'...
In a recent interview with Thoughts on Public Education (Top-Ed), Dean Vogel, the new CTA boss, told Top-Ed’s John Fensterwald that the CTA “is really about making things better for kids, and making learning environments better for kids, and – and that’s where our members are, and they’re the ones that know about that, and – and so I really want to help them feel a reconnection to the union that’s representing them and –and fight for what’s best for public education.”
So what’s my beef with Vogel?
First, this rambling, incoherent statement is as meaningful as Obama’s mantra, Change We Can Believe In. The quote says nothing concrete about what the union is or does or how it intends to get there. It’s simply a feel-good sound bite meant to portray the union as the preeminent child advocacy organization in the state, which it is not.
This brings us to my second gripe: unions are supposed to fight for the interests of their members, not their clients. Obviously teachers care about their clients (i.e., students) and constantly make sacrifices to help them. However, a union that places the interests of the students above those of the teachers, as implied by Vogel’s quote, is not a union at all, but a child or education advocacy organization, of which there are already plenty.
The Summer Solstice has just passed, and it feels like a time to play with rhyming words. After playing with nursery rhymes and lullabies that need more work, I crafted a loving tribute to the apparent agenda big business bigwigs have in mind for our public school system. Think Rodgers and Hammerstein, with Maestra Maria Sallee instead of Maria von Trapp, and sing it out loud:
Trained career teachers’ inflated remittance Replaced by new people who’ll cost just a pittance Take unions’ bargaining powers away Tenure and contracts are all so passรฉ
Teaching by formula, oh how we love it True pedagogy, you know they can shove it Teachers with expertise threaten the plan, Find ways to shame them whenever we
One hundred high school students from the Urban Youth Collaborative (UYC), New York City’s largest student-led group, gathered on the steps of the Department of Education headquarters today to hold a memorial service for the four high schools being closed at the end of this school year and the more than 30 others that have been closed by the Bloomberg administration so far.
The students held a funeral precession through City Hall Park up to the steps of the Tweed courthouse. There they conducted an entire service complete with coffins, flowers and eulogies as they mourned the schools’ untimely passing, and the administration’s failed policy of unnecessarily shutting down struggling schools instead of helping their students achieve success.
“We mourn not only the closing schools, but the death of public participation in education under Bloomberg,” said
Maricela Guerrero is principal at one of the Rocketship schools.
In 2006, former software engineer John Danner co-founded Rocketship Education, a national nonprofit elementary charter school network based in San Jose, Calif., with Preston Smith. The network is gaining attention for its “hybrid” model of learning, which blends classroom teaching with small-group tutoring and individualized online learning. Danner, who won the John P. McNulty Prize last year for his innovations, has no small ambition: He wants to expand the Rocketship model to 50 U.S. cities and eliminate the achievement gap by 2020.
Rocketship’s expansion agenda comes at a time when online learning is exploding and as President Barack
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