China Needs More Creativity - Pearson's commitment to China began over forty years ago

China Needs More Creativity - Bloomberg Business:

China Needs More Creativity

As it shifts from being the world's factory to a source of innovation

Pearson China

Pearson China Suite 1208, Tower D, Beijing Global Trade Center 36 North Third Ring Road East Dongcheng District, Beijing, 100013 China Tel +86 10 5735 5000 Fax +86 10 5825 7950 www.pearsoned.com.cn www.edexcelchina.com  www.nyif.com.cn Sina Weibo: http://weibo.com/pearsonhk Edexcel has two accounts on Weibo (China's equivalent of Twitter): http://weibo.com/edexcelbtec http://weibo.com/edexcelalevels Pearson's commitment to China began over forty years ago with a partnership in the 1960s that has continued to grow and strengthen into the 21st century. With offices in cities including Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou, Pearson has an unprecedented broad and in-depth presence in China. Pearson's businesses in China include Education Publishing and Solutions, Edexcel, New York Institute of Finance, Pearson Test of English, Longman Schools, Global Education, and Wall Street English. For more information on Pearson Test of English Academic in Chinese, please clickhere. (The English version is available here.) Edexcel has been operating in China for 13 years. Through more than a decade of developing, promoting and adapting qualifications, we have established partnerships with over 80 Chinese schools, colleges, universities and training centres all over China. The Pearson Foundation and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) has produced an investigative film series that documents successful education initiatives currently improving student learning in classrooms around the world. To see the Shanghai, China video, click here. Significant milestones 1995 First Pearson office is set up. 1996 The Education Inspection Office, Beijing Municipal Government, introduces BTEC L3 qualification to five secondary vocational schools in Beijing. 2001 Start of co-publishing business in China. 2002 The Higher National Diploma, one of the most popular BTEC qualifications around the world, is brought into China. Aug 2003 The Official Edexcel Representative Office in China is opened. 2004 Pearson China co-publishes English course"新課標英語" for Senior Secondary with Beijing Normal University. 2005 Pearson China signs mutual agreement with the MOE for education publishing. Edexcel signs a MoU with the Beijing Municipal Education Commission for the promotion of BTEC HNDs. 2006 Edexcel co-hosts the "China-English Seminar for Higher Level Vocational Education Cooperation' with the China Scholarship Council. 2007 Pearson China receives award for best co-publishing partner by the Microsoft Research Center in China. New York Institute of Finance office is opened in Beijing. 2008 Pearson China receives "突出貢獻獎"award from the MOE (Outstanding Contribution Award). 2009 Pearson acquires Wall Street English. Pearson is named by China Daily 21 Century Post as the most influential English education publishing company and co-publishing international company. Edexcel starts promoting A Levels to local Chinese schools and has seen rapid growth since. 2011 Pearson acquires Global Education.

Pearson China

 As China's economy boomed, so did advances in education.

Enrollment rates in schools at all levels soared, with 7.5 million students set to graduate this year alone. The OECD’s PISA scores measuring 15-year olds’ competence in math, reading and science have ranked Shanghai top worldwide ever since the city started participating in the program.

A glowing report card, right? Wrong.

As China moves from being the world's factory to a source of innovation, it needs to shake up the way its students learn and remove lingering inequalities, according to the OECD.    

The problems:

* The children of internal migrants as well as rural and poor families are still at a major disadvantage at every education level

* The focus on rote learning and exams remains excessive

* More bridges are needed between vocational and general education

* Graduating students often struggle to find a job matching their expectations and employers do not always find people with the required skills

* Despite a soaring number of Chinese patents, the quality of most patents is still low and innovation output is weak

Then there's a skills mismatch, with too many white-collar workers and not enough young people willing to get their hands dirty.

Now the OECD's prescriptions:

* More and better focused funding of education, giving greater opportunities to children with socio-economic or physical disadvantages

* Reducing the role of after-school tutoring, focusing less on memorization and more on creativity

* Enhancing the appeal of the teaching profession

* Improving students’ information on labor market prospects

* Developing workplace training, making greater use of online education, and more effectively nurturing research and innovation

The OECD's bottom line: "Human capital accumulation has played a large role in China’s economic catch-up over the last three decades as educational attainment made rapid progress. It is becoming even more crucial now to bring about further improvements in living standards in the face of an aging population and to provide the right skills needed to transition from the world’s factory to a leading innovator.''China Needs More Creativity - Bloomberg Business:

Anthony Cody: A Remarkable Statement by a Chinese-American Student on Common Core, Testing, Pearson, and Standardiz... http://bit.ly/1FLis4X

Schools Wait to See What Becomes of No Child Left Behind Law - NYTimes.com

Schools Wait to See What Becomes of No Child Left Behind Law - NYTimes.com:

Schools Wait to See What Becomes of No Child Left Behind Law

 CLEVELAND — Ginn Academy, the first and only public high school in Ohio just for boys, was conceived to help at-risk students make it through school — experimenting with small classes, a tough discipline code and life coaches around the clock.

Its graduation rate was close to 88 percent last year, compared with 64 percent for the Cleveland Metropolitan School District as a whole. And it has enjoyed some other victories. There is the junior whose test scores are weak but who regularly volunteers at a food bank. And the senior proudly set to graduate this spring who used to attend school so irregularly that he had to be collected at home each morning by a staff member.

But under No Child Left Behind, the signature education initiative of the George W. Bush administration, the academy, which opened in 2007, was consistently labeled low performing because it did not make the required “adequate yearly progress” in raising test scores.

Nicholas A. Petty, the principal, said, “I wouldn’t say stop making us be judged by the tests at all, but get a better system that really monitors students on more of an individual basis.

As Congress debates a rewrite of the No Child Left Behind law, Mr. Petty may well see that happen.

The law, which was intended to make sure schools were educating children, particularly the neediest, ushered in an era of high-stakes testing to measure student progress. After more than a decade, the proliferation of tests, and punishments for schools that failed to improve their scores, has angered parents and teachers. It has also set off protests and boycotts of testing.

Congress needs to find a way to “let 1,000 flowers bloom” and back away from a punitive approach to controlling schools, said Robert C. Pianta, dean of the Curry School of Education at the University of Virginia.

A rewrite of the law could collapse in partisan disarray as in past years. But it could also herald a new era of education, keeping some testing but eliminating prescriptive punishments for schools. At the same time, it could allow some states to lower their academic standards, and others to reduce the amount of federal money flowing to schools that serve the poorest children.

No Child Left Behind was a bipartisan effort that was intended to help schools improve reading and math in the third to eighth grades. The law required that every child in the nation be proficient by 2014 in those subjects, as measured by standardized tests. Cascading punishments — beginning with mandated tutoring and going all the way to school takeover — were imposed on schools that failed to make sufficient progress toward this goal.

As Arne Duncan, the education secretary, put it in a speech this year, the law, formally a reauthorization of President Lyndon B. Johnson’sElementary and Secondary Education Act, “created dozens of ways for schools to fail and very few ways to help them succeed or to reward success.”

As almost all schools began to fall into the failing category — and a partisan logjam kept Congress from reauthorizing the law when it expired eight years ago — the Obama administration began granting states waivers from its requirements.

Over the past three years, schools in all but a few states have been given waivers, allowing them to show success through measures other than test scores and eliminating the 2014 deadline for universal proficiency.

Those waivers, though, came with conditions. Among them were that states adopt academic standards like the Common Core, which defines what students need to know and be able to do between kindergarten and high school graduation, and that they agree to base teacher evaluations in part on test scores.

Parents have been rebelling against new tests based on the Common Core, and many Republicans, as well as a group from the left, see these requirements as a federal power grab in an area traditionally governed by the states. Those lawmakers are determined to keep the requirements out of the reauthorization. Leading Democrats and many civil rights groups, though, worry about giving too much control back to the states.

“The worry is that if you leave it to the states, they will drop the ball, as they did in the past,” said Martin West, who studies the politics of kindergarten through high school education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

No Child Left Behind required the public release of test scores by race, sex, disability and family income. The release of those subgroups’ scores is broadly considered a success, bringing transparency that focused attention on children needing the most assistance, and helping to shrink achievement gaps.

Before No Child Left Behind, 17 states had no accountability systems forSchools Wait to See What Becomes of No Child Left Behind Law - NYTimes.com: 

California’s teacher shortage is becoming a crisis | The Sacramento Bee The Sacramento Bee

California’s teacher shortage is becoming a crisis | The Sacramento Bee The Sacramento Bee:

California’s teacher shortage is becoming a crisis

 It’s hard to imagine that after nearly six years of constant pressure on school districts to balance budgets through teacher layoffs, we could be talking about a serious teacher shortage.

But here we are. As a report by the California Commission on Teacher Credentialing recently noted, in 2013 there were fewer than 20,000 students enrolled in teacher preparation programs, less than half the number in 2008.

The inclination is to think that there are thousands of teachers who were let go during the recession and who are ready and willing to fill these jobs. Unfortunately, few younger, less-experienced teachers hung around after seeing their jobs disappear; many chose different careers.

More than 20 percent of California teachers have more than 20 years of experience. Many of them will retire just when districts are trying to bring staffing back to pre-recession levels, and just when the pipeline of teachers to replace them drastically narrows.

The reality of teacher shortages in Sacramento and San Joaquin Valley counties hits home when one scrolls through job postings on EdJoin.org, the state’s online repository of available education positions. The Stockton Unified School District has 60 vacant teaching positions despite the school year being nearly over.

The dearth of new teachers entering the classroom has obvious negative consequences: larger class sizes, more long-term substitutes or teachers with emergency permits, and even worse shortages in subjects such as math, science and special education. Vacancies also disproportionately impact schools serving low-income communities, which are traditionally harder to staff.

Not only do we need to identify a lot of new teachers in coming years, but we also need teachers capable of serving a rapidly changing student population. Every year, we see an increasingly diverse student body in our public schools – more low-income students, more English language learners and more immigrant families.

How are we going to recruit new teachers to meet this incredible need?

We must reach out to college students and to those already in jobs but seeking opportunities to make a difference on the next generation. We must make excellent public education the most pressing issue for our emerging leaders so that more and more find their way to the classroom.

We know great teachers come from all backgrounds, so we need people from all walks of life to consider entering the profession. We need those who can use their privileged upbringing to address inequity, but also those who share backgrounds with students and can be role models. To bring that diverse talent into the classroom, we must build a more welcoming environment that celebrates the contributions of all teachers and supports them as they grow as professionals.

We must also move beyond the false divides to foster increased collaboration between traditional and alternative routes into the classroom. While education schools remain a mainstay of teacher training in California, high-quality alternative programs broaden the pool of aspiring teachers, increase the diversity of our teacher workforce, and focus on filling positions in high-need schools and subjects.

Recruiting our next generation of great teachers can only be done by acknowledging this critical need and working together.California’s teacher shortage is becoming a crisis | The Sacramento Bee The Sacramento Bee:

Read more here: http://www.sacbee.com/opinion/op-ed/soapbox/article15380525.html#storylink=cpy

Read more here: http://www.sacbee.com/opinion/op-ed/soapbox/article15380525.html#storylink=cpy

Rahm's Accomplishments REALLY!!! Does Rahm deserve another four years? #‎Chuy2015‬ ‪#‎imwithchuy‬

Rahm's Accomplishments - Home:

RAHM'S ACCOMPLISHMENTS

Four years of Rahm's Achievements

Chicago likes a tough mayor that gets things done.  Let's take a look at what Mayor Rahm Emanuel has done in his short tenure.  From finance and crime, to education and jobs, Rahm has touched every aspect of our city in less than four years.

Finance & Ethics

• Of Emanuel’s top 106 contributors, 60 of them received favors from the city. 
• Evaded his own, much-trumpeted executive order banning campaign contributions from city contractors by shoveling $38 million in city resources to his donors via “direct voucher payments,” a sketchy loophole that lets businesses get city money without bids or contracts — without, in fact, any way of documenting what the money is used for.
• Disregarded ethics and laws and accepted more than $600,000 worth of donations from executives at firms managing Chicago pension money.
• Doesn’t attempt to recoup more than $100 million from issuance of $1 billion in risky auction-rate debt paired with interest-rate swaps…despite a federal rule that requires banks to "deal fairly" with governments when they underwrite government bonds. 
• Established regulations favorable to Uber, a company Rahm’s brother stands to make a billions dollars from.
• Pays for preschool using dubious scheme in which investors could double their money and cost the city dearly.
• Missed the only opportunity to fight the parking meter deal, and instead locked the contract in place for the next 75 years.
• Chicago’s bond rating dropped to near junk-bond levels.
• Appointed board member Deborah Quazzo, who invests in companies that privatize school functions tripled their business with the Chicago Public Schools while she was on the board.
• Cut pensions of middle-class workers and diverted funds to enrich some of his biggest campaign contributors.
• Fails to reform disability programs, costing taxpayers millions.
• Facing budget crisis, spends $2.7 million on armor for horses for a NATO summit.
• Outsourced CTA fare card, despite having one that worked fine, to a company for $454 million, which then added new fees that bilk the poor on a grand scale.
• Top donor bought stock in Marriott immediately before City awarded company huge contract.
• Accepts $50,000 donation from George Lucas and $138,000 from executives of Star Wars parent company Walt Disney, then demands Lucas Museum placed on public park land with little public debate.
• Chicago has slower population increase than other major cities, despite claims that families are returning.
• Gave $55 million in public tax dollars to DePaul, a private university.
• Gave $5.2 million in public tax dollars to a company owned by the Pritzkers, one of the wealthiest families in the world.
• Hikes property taxes $750 million dollars.
• Steals credit for closing coal plant.
• Steals credit for minimum wage hike.

Education

• Closed 54 schools yet has $1.71 billion in special accounts often used to finance corporate subsidies.
• Fails to hold charter schools accountable in the same way neighborhood schools are held accountable.
• Significant decline in number of African-American teachers. 
• CPS has lowest enrollment since 1970.
• CPS can’t find 434 students since closing 54 schools.
• Closed 54 schools for underutilization yet continues to open new charter schools.
• CPS altered charter school test data.
• CPS sued for discriminating against pregnant teachers.
• CPS was able to juke the statistics on high school graduation rates — which supposedly went from 70 to 85 percent over the last decade — by contracting with for-profit online education companies that demanded very little work from students, while still allowing them to receive diplomas from the last school they attended.
• Argues against elected school board to prevent politics in education; refuses to proctor high-stakes test to gain votes before election.
• Interrogated young children without parental consent.
• Outsourced custodian and food services to Aramark; principals, teachers, and parents complain about the increased filth in schools due to the poor services, in part because they laid off hundreds of janitors.
• First teacher strike in 25 years.
• Cuts $11 million from public libraries budget, 363 positions reduced.
• Demolished public school library, against the parents' wishes, and arrested protesters.
• Promised libraries for schools that accepted students from 54 closed schools; a year later only 4 schools received new libraries and only 38% have librarians.
• Costs of school closings triple the amount estimated, millions more than promised, leads to vandalized and unsecure buildings.

Crime & Safety

• Crime statistics altered to hide murder rate, including a woman who was bound and gagged declared dead not from murder but by “unspecified means”.
• Chicago Murder rates increase 50%.  
• Number of shootings increases.
• Spends $95 million in police overtime.
• Arrest rate for marijuana hasn’t changed, despite decriminalization, costing City millions and disproportionally affect Hispanic and African-American youth. 
• CPD Homan Square “black site” where arrestees are locked up for days at a time without access to lawyers, including a 15 year old, and a 44 year old that died in custody.
• The administration insisted the red-light cameras led to a 47 percent decline in “T-bone” crashes, when the true number was 15 percent — and they also caused a corresponding 22 percent increase in rear-end collisions. 
• CPD eavesdrops on protesters' cell phones.
• Yellow light times too short causing more rear-end collisions and more red-light tickets.
• Claims red light cameras are for safety; personal motorcade routinely runs red lights.
• Closes half the mental health clinics in the city.

Employment & Poverty

• Chicago’s African-American unemployment rate higher than other large cities.
• As of 2013, black unemployment was hovering around 25 percent, not significantly different than it was when the mayor took office. Poverty, too, has barely budged.
• Youth unemployment, especially for African-American youth, higher than other cities.
• Job growth trails the suburbs by nearly half.
• Gave $7 million in tax dollars to Mariano's, a private company, that drove Dominick's out of Chicago.  Mariano's pays lower wages than Jewel.
• Increased regressive taxes, which disproportionately affects the poor; Chicago now has the 4th highest regressive taxes in the nation.
• Dismisses seriousness of racial segregation, as if it's a good thing.
• CHA socks away $353 million, failing to issue 13,000 vouchers for families to receive housing.

Does Rahm deserve another four years?

Rahm's Accomplishments

Rahm's Accomplishments - Home:

Toward Fiscal Sustainability: A New Approach in Prudent Fiscal Management of Chicago

Click here to go to Jesus "Chuy" Garcia for Mayor of Chicago Website

‪#‎Chuy2015‬ ‪#‎imwithchuy‬

Education Department does reboot for computer services deal - NY Daily News

Education Department does reboot for computer services deal - NY Daily News:

Department of Education does an about-face, cancels firm's $637M contract to provide computer services to public schools

 In a startling reversal, the city’s Department of Education has canceled a $637 million contract it approved only a month ago for a private firm to provide computer services to all public schools, the Daily News has learned.

The Panel for Educational Policy voted on Feb. 24 to award the five-year contract — one of the costliest in school system history — to Long Island-based Custom Computer Specialists, Inc.

But on Thursday, the agency unexpectedly notified Custom that it was rescinding the award, rejecting three other competing bids, and will insead seek new requests for proposals.

The Department of Education “believes that its objectives can be better met by a new procurement that affords greater flexibility,” David Ross, director of contracting for the city’s schools, said in a letter, a copy of which The News obtained.

“It’s better to get things done right than to get them done quickly,” one city official said.

The about-face marks an unusual admission by the de Blasio administration that it botched a major initiative.

It follows a flurry of meetings in the past few weeks between school officials, City Hall aides, and a handful of elected officials furious at the way Custom was chosen.

The critics jumped into action after Leonie Haimson, director of the watchdog group Class Size Matters, came across a tiny reference to a proposed $1.1 billion contract for Custom, one that was published on the school system’s website less than two weeks before the Feb. 24 meeting.

Haimson quickly alerted Public Advocate Letitia James and Helen Rosenthal, head of City Council’s contracts committee.

Both immediately demanded more information from the Education Department. They especially wanted to know how Custom had been chosen, since the firm had previously been cited in a criminal probe for looking the other way while a corrupt school system consultant stole millions of dollars from the city.

School officials only made matters worse by waiting until the eve of the Feb. 24 vote before releasing any details about the contract. Those details showed Custom had been selected despite lower bids from two other competitors.

Even more surprising, they announced at the eleventh hour that they had somehow managed to negotiate a sharp reduction in Custom’s final price — to a still-whopping $637 million.

At the actual actual vote, several members of the educational panel openly complained about the lack of transparency from school system staff and questioned the rush to award the contract.

Ross and Schools Chancellor Carmen Fariña told them the city could lose up to $23 million in federal reimbursements for Internet funds if the contract was Education Department does reboot for computer services deal - NY Daily News: