NJ Spotlight | Statewide School Survey Indicates Increasing Class Size Is the Norm

NJ Spotlight | Statewide School Survey Indicates Increasing Class Size Is the Norm

Statewide School Survey Indicates Increasing Class Size Is the Norm

Even with a slight boost in state aid for the current school year, many districts say class size will still climb

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By John Mooney, August 11 in Education |Post a Comment

Always an important number for parents, class size is also often a barometer of the fiscal condition of a school system: the tighter the dollars, the fewer the staff, the more students in each classroom.

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NJSBA Class Size Survey

A new survey of New Jersey schools over the past two years proves that this state is no exception -- although the results also present some interesting twists.

The New Jersey School Boards Association contacted all 575 districts in June to quiz them on how class size has been affected by two budgets: last year's (2010-2011), which saw steep cuts in state aid, and this year's (2011-2012), which saw a slight increase.

A total of 186 districts responded. Not surprisingly, about a third of all participants again said class

The Duncan Precedent, 2013 Edition :: Frederick M. Hess

The Duncan Precedent, 2013 Edition :: Frederick M. Hess

The Duncan Precedent, 2013 Edition

by Frederick M. Hess • Aug 11, 2011 at 7:59 am
Cross-posted from Education Week

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The Obama administration steadfastly refuses to acknowledge the problems with ED's "backdoor blueprint" waiver strategy or the ugly precedent that it's trying to set. But those with even a glimmer of imagination can see where this is going...

Transcript from Fox News Channel
January 13, 2013

Chris Wallace: First off, congratulations Congresswoman Bachmann on being named U.S. Secretary of Education by President-elect Perry.

SecEd Nominee Bachmann: Thanks very much. It's a big job, and I'm looking forward to tackling it.

Chris Wallace: Last November, the Democrats narrowly retained control of the Senate and the Republicans

Larry Ferlazzo’s Websites of the Day… - This Week’s “Round-Up” of Good School Reform Articles & Posts

Larry Ferlazzo’s Websites of the Day… - This Week’s “Round-Up” of Good School Reform Articles & Posts

Viewbix Lets You Make Easy “Interactive” Videos, But Is It Useful In The Classroom? Viewbix is a new free web tool that lets you bring a little interactivity to pretty much any online video. Here’s an example I created in about one minute — if you click on the button you’ll be taken to the Save Our Schools website: I’m having a ...

This Week’s “Round-Up” of Good School Reform Articles & Posts Here are some recent good school reform posts and articles: Cheating report confirms teacher’s suspicions is from CNN. I’m adding it to The Best Posts & Articles About The Atlanta Testing Scandal. Why I’m Against For-Profit Schools is by Chris ...

Two New Useful (& Free) ELL Publications Here are two newer publications — free and downloadable — on teaching English Language Learners that readers might find helpful: English Language Learners with Disabilties comes Mobility International USA. STEM For English Learners comes from the ...

“Gangaroo” Can Be A Surprisingly Good Place For Student Writing Gangaroo lets your search for pretty much any product on Amazon and other sites, click on it, write a review of it, and then the image, your description and your review will show up on a public list. You can make separate lists of books, DVD’s, ...

KOCH OUT News | www.kochwatch.org

News | www.kochwatch.org

Mike Papantonio: Wisconsin Continues to be a Victory

AlterNet: 6 Shady Right-Wing Groups Pouring Money Into Wisconsin Recall *As Wisconsin progressives fight to recall Scott Walker's allies in the state senate, here are some of the conservative groups funding their right-wing agenda. * *-By Sarah Jaffe* *August 8, 2011- *Today will see the recall elections of six ...

Thom Hartmann: ALEC vs. Lee Fang - he was dragged out!

The Brad Blog: 'National Director' of Koch's 'Americans for Prosperity' Created Mysterious WI 'Gun Group,' Coordinated on Misleading Absentee Ballot Mailings *Creator of 'United Sportsmen of Wisconsin, Inc.,' John Connors, is a long-time AFP affiliate, has history of deceptive campaigns...* *-by Brad Freidman* *August 8, 2011-* On Saturday we posted an article detailing the similarities, and apparent ...

The Brad Blog: Exit Pollsters Shut Down Again in Waukesha *Other reports good, poll turnout said very high...* *-By Brad Friedman* *August 9, 2011-* The polls in Wisconsin closed moments ago. So far, so good in the state's unprecedented recall elections today, at least according to the bulk of media ...

Democratic Party of Wisconsin Spokesman Accuses Clerk of Tampering With Votes.

MSNBC: Democrats fall short in Wisconsin recall elections *In massive battle of money and organizing, GOP state senators prevail in four of the six districts targeted by Democrats* *-By Tom Curry* *August 10, 2011-* Democrats failed late Tuesday in their effort to gain control of the Wisconsin state senate ...

Battle over online class fees moves to Capitol

Battle over online class fees moves to Capitol

Nanette Asimov, Chronicle Staff Writer

Thursday, August 11, 2011

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• Online courses: Task force wants to allow fees 07.23.11
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Efforts to quickly legalize student access fees for community college cyber-classes - fees that are banned by state law but which may be rampant across California campuses - have hit a snag in the state Capitol.

Darrell Steinberg, president pro tem of the state Senate, has strongly criticized a recent recommendation by a community college task force to change state law to permit such fees, which are charged by publishers capitalizing on the explosive popularity of online courses.

The problem, he told community college leaders, is that the group met behind closed doors, was heavily

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/08/10/BA1L1KLC3H.DTL#ixzz1UiniQITS

Lobato 8/10: Teachers have a say | EdNewsColorado

Lobato 8/10: Teachers have a say | EdNewsColorado

Lobato 8/10: Teachers have a say

by Todd Engdahl

The first teachers to testify in the Lobato v. State school funding lawsuit took the stand Wednesday on the eighth day of trial.

Fourth-grade teacher Matt Keefauver and science teacher Justine Bayles each choked up a bit as they described the financial challenges facing the Montezuma-Cortez schools and the academic challenges facing their students.

“We have no classroom budget” for supplies, Keefauver said. “I buy those things out of my own pocket.” Keefauver said he has an herb-growing business, works at odd and

Adults struggle to grasp “new” bullying

by Rebecca Jones

Youngsters may feel constantly harassed by threatening text messages or hurt by ugly posts on online bulletin boards, but fear keeps them from telling their parents.

It’s not so much fear of the cyberspace bully as much as fear of their parents’ reaction if they find out.

“The reason they’re so reluctant to tell their parents is they’re afraid they’ll take away the technology, which is

The link between ‘Rise of the Planet of the Apes’ and testing - The Answer Sheet - The Washington Post

The link between ‘Rise of the Planet of the Apes’ and testing - The Answer Sheet - The Washington Post

The link between ‘Rise of the Planet of the Apes’ and testing

By Valerie Strauss

This was written by Carol Corbett Burris, principal of South Side High School in New York. She was named the 2010 New York State Outstanding Educator by the School Administrators Association of New York State.

By Carol Corbett Burris

I went to see “Rise of the Planet of the Apes” the other night. After the first ten minutes, everyone in the theatre knew things would not end well — at least not for the humans. The well-meaning protagonist ignores the warning signs that something is just not right with his experimentation. The damage is compounded when the entrepreneur smells the profit. The doomed experimentation accelerates and chaos

Parent Trigger law puts AFT in “kill mode” | Thoughts on Public Education

Parent Trigger law puts AFT in “kill mode” | Thoughts on Public Education

Parent Trigger law puts AFT in “kill mode”

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Union fights new tactics by parent groups

Posted on 8/11/11 • Categorized as Parent Trigger, Parent activism, State Board of Education,Unions

By Kathryn Baron

Parent Revolution, the Los Angeles-based group responsible for California’s Parent Trigger law, did something rare in education politics: it outmaneuvered a powerful teachers’ union.

The American Federation of Teachers basically admits as much in a guide used last month at the union’s TEACH conference to describe how the Connecticut chapter diluted that state’s version of the parent trigger. There, on page four, third bullet point down, it reads: “We learned from mistakes made in CA.” A few pages later, under the heading “Plan A: Kill

NYC Educator: Forgotten, but Not Gone

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Forgotten, but Not Gone

by NYC Educator

Cathie Black has finally made her stamp on NYC schools. Ms. Black famously asked, when presented with evidence of chronic and systematic overcrowding, why we couldn't have just a little more birth control. Now, it appears, Mayor4Life is making her idea a matter of law. We must have sex education classes in city schools, and that's pretty much it.

After all, with class sizes the highest in the state already, years of failure to reduce class sizes, and a history of taking hundreds of millions for class size reduction yet achieving the opposite, it's a tough row to hoe. So Mayor Blooomberg is taking the long-term

Daily Kos: A little girl who cared

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by rss@dailykos.com (teacherken)

Bear with me. I am going to share 3 paragraphs, and then explain.

In the midst of this grim summer, my faith in humanity has been restored by the saga of Rachel Beckwith. She could teach my generation a great deal about maturity and unselfishness — even though she’s just 9 years old, or was when she died on July 23.

Rachel lived outside Seattle and early on showed a desire to give back. At age 5, she learned at school about an organization called Locks of Love, which uses hair donations to make wigs for children who have lost their own hair because of cancer or other diseases. Rachel then asked to

solidaridad: Daily Censored: Elmo isn't Gramsci for kids and the mythical soft bigotry of low expectations

solidaridad: Daily Censored: Elmo isn't Gramsci for kids and the mythical soft bigotry of low expectations

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by Robert D. Skeels * rdsathene

We address the soft bigotry of low expectations so that we may ignore the hard racism of inequity. — John Kuhn


What do Ben Shapiro, Whitney Tilson, The Heartland Institute, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, The Hoover Institution, Wendy Kopp, The Manhattan Institute, and Democrats for Education Reform all have in common? They all shamelessly use

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Penchant For Pensions

by noreply@blogger.com (Tim)

Well, back to the grind. And by grind, I mean defending the pensions. Apparently this is now the permanent, ongoing thing we all have to do on a weekly basis. I'm ready. I'll be revving up the fax tomorrow and recruiting my network of hellraisers.

If you're working in a school, may I suggest that you do like Arne Duncan says to do, and raise the bar. You might even want to change the game. Ask people to post their advocacy letters on a bulletin board; use a checkoff list. Give people little gold stars. Set a goal for x number of letters and faxes by a certain date.

Colleagues sometimes ask me what to write--- and sometimes I help them. The thing is to do a bit of research

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Here is the guest post I mentioned earlier today, from Cedar Riener, a college professor of psychology who normally blogs at Cedar's Digest:



Cathy Davidson is making the rounds again in the education blogosphere. A few years ago, she gave up on grading, structuring her classes around peer review. Each assignment was graded by peers (pass/fail) and the final grade was determined by the number of assignments completed. Now she is promoting her new book Now You See It, which, as I see it, is an effort to apply Dan Simons' and Christopher Chabris' Invisible Gorilla to... well, everything. But the edu-blogsphere is all a-twitter through Virginia

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(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)

Choice for me but not for thee, episode 5,486.

It’s easy to send a torpedo slamming into the USS Rahm below the waterline on this, but for the record, I think Emanuel should make schooling decisions as a father, rather than as a Mayor or the leader of the Chicago

Teachers Feeling 'Beat Down' As School Year Starts : NPR

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As students prepare to begin another school year, their teachers are hopping mad. They're facing layoffs and deep budget cuts and many say they're tired of being blamed unfairly for just about everything that's wrong in public education. They're so mad that many are bypassing their unions and mounting a campaign of their own to restore the public's faith in their profession.

Betsy Leis, a middle school teacher in Florida, is one of these angry teachers.

"I give my heart and my soul to every single student in my classroom and all I see on the news is that we aren't doing our job. We're constantly beat down. That's why I'm angry," Leis says. "I don't

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Public schools located in former Catholic school buildings will have to find another place to teach newly required sex education.

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