1-9-14 Fred Klonsky | Daily posts from a retired public school teacher

Fred Klonsky | Daily posts from a retired public school teacher who is just looking at the data.:

Scott Reeder is up to no good when it comes to TRS.

Scott Reeder has made a career out of bashing teacher unions. So, it was no surprise to find this piece of pseudo-journalism in something called Cornerstone Media – Lincoln Trails Publishing. Reeder has several arguments going in this article. One is that there is somehow something wrong with taxpayers, in the form of the state, paying into the retirement systems of those who work for the state. I

by Fred Klonsky / 9min 

Kirk Dillard opposes any minimum wage and then asks for union endorsement.

  Republican State Senator Kirk Dillard opposition to any minimum wage makes him a moderate among GOP hopefuls. While a lot of attention has been given to Bruce Rahmer flip-flop on the issue of a raise in the minimum wage, there has been less attention to the comments of his Republican opponent Kirk Dillard. Dillard opposes any minimum wage. Actually, Kirk Dillard wants to abolish the minimum wag

3 by Fred Klonsky / 1h 

Tony at the Red Line Tap.

“Shut the friggin” door,” yelled Tony as a staggered in from the Polar Vortex and a 40 mile an hour wind blowing south down Glenwood. “I had to get out of the house. I was going stir crazy. This is the fourth morning in a row I woke up to sub-zero temperatures. Sean. I’m feeling like a Portuguese Rochefort Trappistes 10. Bottle. No glass. “No problem,” said my new-age server. “Are you guys checki

by Fred Klonsky / 51min 

Somethings to read on a cold January night.

Nothing to do tonight? Not interested in the new episode of Parenthood? Captolfax provides us with links to the three law suits that have been filed so far. Curl up in front of the fire. Tabet Divito and Rothstein LLC on behalf of the Illinois Retired Teachers Association. Rabin and Meyers PC on behalf of the Retired State Employees Association. Donald Craven PC on behalf of the Illinois State Em

by Fred Klonsky / 39min 

Teacher Mrs. Lewis takes them to school.

by Fred Klonsky / 9min hide  //  save

1-8-14 Fred Klonsky | Daily posts from a retired public school teacher

Fred Klonsky | Daily posts from a retired public school teacher who is just looking at the data.: Standardized testing.. A few weeks ago I registered to take the online qualifying test for Jeopardy. Maybe like you, I have watched Jeopardy for years. Maybe like you, members of my family have said, “You should be on this show.” I was foolish enough to believe them. I was scheduled for last night at

by mike simpson / 8h 

teacherken at Daily Kos 1-9-14: Nick Kristof offers Progress in the War on Poverty

Daily Kos: Nick Kristof offers Progress in the War on Poverty:

Nick Kristof offers Progress in the War on Poverty

in this NY Times column in which he lays out the successes of the effort over the past 50 years, with links galore to support his argument that it has been a success. As he notes: The most accurate measures, using Census Bureau figures that take account of benefits, suggest that poverty rates have fallen by more than one-third since 1968. There’s a consensus that without the war on poverty, other

by rss@dailykos.com ... / 5h hide  //  save

Gail Collins weighs in on Chris Christie

for once I am NOT going to offer a lot of words of my own. The column, titledBridge Over Troubled Politics, speaks for itself. Here is the conclusion: Republicans around the nation are going to be brought up short by an idea of a plot to screw up our constitutional right to drive to work. Among the great political divides in this country is mass transit versus cars, and Republicans tend to be rath

by rss@dailykos.com ... / 5h

teacherken at Daily Kos 1-7-14: : Putting students at risk for testing?

Daily Kos: Putting students at risk for testing?:  Putting students at risk for testing?The weather in the Washington DC Metro area is dangerous this morning - temperatures at best in the single digits, with the wind having wind chills below zero. If you check the list of school closings, in Virginia the vast majority of the school systems are closed, with several (notably Arlington and Alexandria

by mike simpson / 8h 

1-9-14 Perdido Street School

Perdido Street School:

NYSUT President Iannuzzi Calls For No-Confidence Vote On SED Commissioner King

From the State of Politics blog:In an exclusive Capital Tonight interview, NYSUT President Dick Iannuzzi revealed he will soon ask his Board of Directors to bring an apparently unprecedented vote of no confidence on state Education Commissioner John King in response to what the union feels is a failure to respond to the growing concerns over the Common Core curriculum. “The frustration level is ov

by reality-based edu... / 7min

Amiri Baraka Dies

From NJ.comAmiri Baraka, the longtime activist and former poet laureate of New Jersey died today, officials confirmed. He was 79 years old.Baraka was placed in intensive care at Beth Israel Medical Center last month for an unknown reason, but a spokesman for his son's mayoral campaign said his condition was improving late in December.Newark Mayor Luis Quintana said Baraka will be sorely missed. &q

by reality-based edu... / 1h 

State Senate Minority Leader Wants To Look At CCSS, APPR, And InBloom Issues

From Capital Tonight:Senate Minority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins in a radio interview said she remains concerned over the speed of the roll out of Common Core evaluation standards as well as a plan to collect student data by the state Department of Education. “I am absolutely in favor of looking at what we’re doing, how fast we’re doing it and really evaluating what we’re looking at putting on t

by reality-based edu... / 2h 

NYSED Commissioner King: Merit Pay A Great Idea

From TWC.news:Another proposal from the governor, rewarding excellent teachers, those who rated highly effective on a valuations would be eligible to receive $20,000 as a bonus.Dr. John King said, "We certainly support rewarding highly effective teaching. We know there's an opportunity to identify teaching practices and allow them to be mentors for their colleagues." As Leonie Haimson po

by reality-based edu... / 4min hide  //  save

Cuomo Doubles Down On Education Reform

Sheriff Andy did not mention the controversy over the Common Core State (sic) Standards, the inBloom data project, the APPR teacher evaluation system or the state's Endless Testing regime during his State of the State speech yesterday.He did pat himself on the back for doing a really, really swell job as governor, however, and talked about how much better things are in New York State now that he's

1 by reality-based edu... / 2h 

1-8-14 Perdido Street School

Perdido Street School: Cuomo Has Protesters Penned Up For State Of The State SpeechSheriff Andy brooking no dissent reports Capital NY's Scott Waldman:ALBANY—The state's biggest anti-fracking demonstration of the year on Wednesday has been supplanted by New York apple cider, bobsleds and engines made in New York. A wide array of tourist billboards and display booths are being set up in the concour

by mike simpson / 8h 

Louisiana Educator: We Must Support Rather Than Bash the Teaching Profession

Louisiana Educator: We Must Support Rather Than Bash the Teaching Profession:

We Must Support Rather Than Bash the Teaching Profession

Congratulations to the Louisiana Federation of Teachers for their victory yesterday in once again having Act 1 of 2012 declared unconstitutional. Judge Caldwell made the right decision in ruling again against this poorly conceived and executed law. 

When we couple this legal victory with the decision last year on the teacher tenure case pursued by the Louisiana Association of Educators and decided in Judge Jones' court, we find some hope for the teaching profession as a respected profession. In that case, Judge Jones ruled that the state had no right to strip teachers of all due process by stacking the tenure hearing panel in favor of the administration. These two decisions have restored some of the dignity of the teaching profession that Jindal sought to destroy.

In my opinion this law was Jindal's attempt to reduce the status of teaching to nothing more than that of a teenage grocery store clerk. It was an abominable attack on the entire teaching profession. The only thing the different parts of the law had in common to tie them together was a general contempt for everyone in the teaching profession from the first year teacher to the 30 year Parish Superintendent with a Phd. Jindal still believes 

Thanks for reading! Our most popular blog posts of 2013 | Parents United for Public Education

Thanks for reading! Our most popular blog posts of 2013 | Parents United for Public Education:

Thanks for reading! Our most popular blog posts of 2013

Posted on January 9, 2014 by PARENTSUNITEDPHILALeave a comment

We’re well into 2014, but we wanted to thank all of our readers, supporters and funders for an important year of parent activism in 2013 and our first full year with our Parents United blog. Here’s a look back at our top five most-read blog posts of 2013. Thanks for reading and commenting!

Back to School: It’s So Much Worse Than You Think

Retired teacher Barbara Dowdall and friend at the 50th Anniversary of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. They had attended the original march as teenagers.

Schools opened in September but just barely. Of greater concern, the District sent very little communication to parents about what we should actually expect – serious and widespread overcrowding, 100 split grade classrooms, an absence of counselors, support personnel and administrators. Parents United, in partnership with the Public Interest Law Center of Philadelphia and other groups, launched an effort to file hundreds of formal complaints against the state Dept. of Education for their failure to properly fund schools and highlight the consequences of this shameful deprivation of basic educational resources and staffing. This post which ran just before the opening of school was the most widely read blog post on our site and was sadly prescient about a grim start to a school year that is still continuing.

Her name is LaPorshia Massey and our hearts are breaking

In late September just three weeks after the start of school, sixth grader LaPorshia Massey experienced an asthma attack at her school. With no nurse on duty, school staff did what they could and drove her home after school. The 12 -year-old died of asthma later that day at the emergency room. This tragedy struck home for every single parent and staff person in the 

Gates Foundation considers major Common Core grant program in California | EdSource Today

Gates Foundation considers major Common Core grant program in California | EdSource Today:

Gates Foundation considers major Common Core grant program in California

January 8th, 2014 | Add a Comment | 
By John Fensterwald

6

The Gates Foundation is considering investing in programs to help prepare California teachers for Common Core. Credit: Lillian Mongeau, EdSource file

Having largely steered clear of making education grants in California over the last half-decade, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundationis weighing whether to invest substantially in helping California’s teachers successfully put the Common Core standards into practice.

Fresno Unified and Long Beach Unified are the first of a half-dozen urban school districts nationwide that Gates is awarding with a three-year, $5 million grant for innovative ways to pursue training in the new math and English language arts standards. Impressed with Fresno’s and Long Beach’s proposals, Gates will decide by late spring whether to expand that initiative to networks of districts that may affect 25 percent to 30 percent of California’s 6 million students, Don Shalvey, Gates’ deputy director of U.S. programs, said in an interview this week.

Noting the $1.25 billon that districts received in this year’s state budget to prepare for Common Core and the first assessments next year, Shalvey said, “The state superintendent, the governor and the Legislature are aligned toward quality implementation of the Common Core State Standards. That energy in California in my mind suggests we should really think about a five-yearinvestment in networks of districts that are willing to learn from one another.”

Based on the three-year grants to Fresno and Long Beach, it would appear that Gates might be 

Sacramento’s schizophrenic love affair with Career Technical Education - by Fred Jones / commentary

Californians have never seen more systemic reforms of how schools are financed, assessed and held accountable than in the three years since Governor Brown took office. The State Board of Education, the State Department of Education and the Community College Chancellor’s Office officials are scrambling to implement these sweeping statutory ... [[ This is a content summary only. Visit the Edsource

by Fred Jones / comm... / 5h hide  //  save

Brown projects big increases in school spending in next year’s state budget - by John Fensterwald

With state revenues surging, Gov. Jerry Brown is proposing to raise K-12 spending in next year’s state budget a healthy $725 per student – 8.5 percent on average – and to use additional new dollars to wipe the last $6 billion of  late payment to schools, known as deferrals, off ... [[ This is a content summary only. Visit the Edsource Today website for full links, other content, and more! ]]

by John Fensterwald / 6h

What 'System' Works for Both of Us? - Bridging Differences - Education Week

What 'System' Works for Both of Us? - Bridging Differences - Education Week:

What 'System' Works for Both of Us?

By Guest Blogger on January 9, 2014 9:43 AM

Today, Robert Pondiscio once again writes to Deborah Meier.

Dear Deborah,

Happy New Year to you as well, and ... wait a minute.  Let me make sure I've got this right.  Youlined up $50 million in philanthropic funding to support 150 schools and 50,000 students, and the whole thing went up in smoke at the mere whim of a new schools chancellor?  That's not democracy, it's despotism!

You write that you've been "trying to imagine a 'system' that could work for the kind of liberty within the context of democracy that we both seek."  Perhaps the best "system" is no system at all.  My friend Andy Smarick wrote a book recently, The Urban School System of the Future, which argues that big city school systems have outlived their useful life and should be replaced.  All schools in a city, he thinks, should be run by outside operators.  A schools chancellor would be more portfolio manager than dictator.  I find his argument persuasive. Based on your experience perhaps you do, too. 

That said, I will always be more interested in what goes on inside schools than in governance issues and structural reform.  In theory, ed reform should encourage a full flowering of innovative curriculum and pedagogies.  In practice, however, we still have something close to an educational monoculture.  Too many of my colleagues in the ed reform camp remain stubbornly 

Is It Melodrama Or Is It Farce? – redqueeninla

Is It Melodrama Or Is It Farce? – redqueeninla:

Is It Melodrama Or Is It Farce?

Written by redqueeninla in LAUSD

I’m as desirous of allowing one and all to speak as the next.  But permitting a parade of the voiceless to be heard with the mute button on does not a democracy make.

What’s the point of letting everyone speak, as the LAUSD school board did last Wednesday night, when no one’s listening?  And by “no one” I mean the ones with the vote, the school board members.

They may all have been sitting up there in the “U”, those lights might have been on but no way was anyone home.  No way did it matter one iota what that parade of good citizens and elected officials had to say.

Those school board members had their minds all made up all in advance of the political theater.  That public charade was just a feel-good exercise:  we, the public were allowed to feel, and they, our elected, said it was all-good.  But it wasn’t.  Because they went ahead and voted as ulterior forces had long, long ago dictated.  Tuesday night’s farce was just an unrolling of the preordained, prejudiced factions that have been rolling about for a long time.

The issues have been well-laid out here, as they were at the special BOE meeting on Tuesday night.  Democracy is predicated on elections, but representation is not conferred exclusively by one.  In this instance, representation is crucial on the LAUSD board of education right now, in the immediate future.  An election will ensure the alienation of hundreds of thousands of stakeholders up and until such time as an elected board official 

The Real-est Place On The Westside

The one-hundredth post on this blog will consider a different sort of education.  It concerns the Culver Ice Arena which houses a wonderful skating school.  The rink exemplifies the best and the worst of ‘running as hard as you can to stay in the same place’.   It seems the Culver Ice Arena is in danger of closing due to the exorbitant value of its land resulting in non-renewal of their lease. As

6h hide  //  save

Concentrated Poverty in 2014 Now 50 Percent Higher than in 2000 | janresseger

Concentrated Poverty in 2014 Now 50 Percent Higher than in 2000 | janresseger:

Concentrated Poverty in 2014 Now 50 Percent Higher than in 2000

Posted on January 9, 2014 by janresseger

In her recent book, Reign of Error, Diane Ravitch decries the lack of political leadership during the past quarter century to address what she calls “the toxic mix”: racial segregation, poverty, and inequality:

“In the absence of active leadership by federal officials and the judiciary, the public is apathetic about racial and ethnic segregation, as well as socioeconomic segregation…  Neither of the major federal efforts of the past generation—No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top—has even mentioned segregation….  While these programs directed billions of federal aid, they did not leverage any funding to promote desegregation of schools or communities, and in their demand to expand the charter sector, they may have worsened the problem.  As black and Hispanic students remain segregated in large numbers, their academic achievement remains low.  Then federal law stigmatizes their schools as ‘failing’ and recommends firing their principals and their teachers and closing their schools.” (pp. 294-295).

One advocate who has persistently drawn our attention to the impact of concentrated poverty and inequality overlaid on racial segregation is Richard Rothstein of the Economic Policy Institute.  In a new piece posted on the website of the Economic Policy Institute, African American Poverty: Concentrated and Multi-Generational, Rothstein describes his just-published review for the American Prospect of a new book by sociologist, Patrick Sharkey, Stuck in Place, which according to Rothstein explores the multi-generational impact of living in communities where poverty is extreme and children and their families are surrounded by a concentration 

Shanker Blog » Talk, Talk, Talk

Shanker Blog » Talk, Talk, Talk:

Talk, Talk, Talk

Posted by Douglas Yeager on January 9, 2014

Our guest author today is Douglas Yeager, President of the Nancy M. and Douglas M. Yeager Family Foundation, a non-profit established in 2001 focused on programs delivering or supporting childhood development. This focus is based on Nancy Yeager’s lifelong interest in and commitment to early childhood education. Her love of teaching inspired her family to establish the Foundation.

Talk, talk, talk – odd as that may sound, a growing body of compelling research shows this to be a very effective strategy to reduce early language gaps among children from different socioeconomic backgrounds. And, fortunately, it doesn’t cost a cent.

If caring parents want their child to be ready for school (and for life after school), they should talk with that child at every opportunity. And, of course, it is also fundamental to listen and to respond appropriately. Conversations, after all, are two-way.

That said, parents need to be the ones initiating the practice, persisting in it, and never giving up. It means so very much to children, and it pays off big-time. As my colleagues at the Shanker Institute like to say: “You don’t need a lot of money to give your child a head start; conversations and ideas cost nothing.”

The Yeager Family Foundation is exploring a variety of ways to promote this idea directly to parents and early childhood development professionals through national, regional, and local channels. We are reviewing a range of English-language and Spanish-language materials that could be made available to parents via the Web, through prenatal programs, doctors’ offices, family centers, health centers, community centers, health departments, training programs, etc. Most are the products of respected organizations in the field, but we are also creating a few pieces of our own to fill gaps where free, high-quality materials are not available. For example, watch this segment of a forthcoming children’s book focused on this important topic:

Or download the book in PDF in English or Spanish for free.

This parental/caregiver initiative is a natural add-on to other early childhood education programs that our family