Thursday, December 16, 2010

Boston School Committee OK’s cost-cutting plan - The Boston Globe

Boston School Committee OK’s cost-cutting plan - The Boston Globe

Boston School Committee approves cost-cutting plan

By James Vaznis
Globe Staff / December 16, 2010

The Boston School Committee voted unanimously last night to close or merge 18 schools, during an emotional and heated meeting that drew hundreds of upset parents, students, staff, and community activists.

Many attendees left the meeting in tears, while others in the crowd shouted to the School Committee, “shame on you.’’

“I’m disgusted,’’ said Kerry Kealey, a second-grade teacher at the Agassiz Elementary School in Jamaica Plain, which will be shutting down in June. “We pour our hearts into our jobs every day. We don’t even have paper in our building. We have to buy our own, but we do it for the kids.’’

School Committee members argued they had no choice but to support the changes for next fall as part of an effort to remedy a potential $63 million shortfall for the next school year. The

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Race matters: Groundbreaking agreements put racial bias front and center | Philadelphia Public School Notebook

Race matters: Groundbreaking agreements put racial bias front and center | Philadelphia Public School Notebook

Race matters: Groundbreaking agreements put racial bias front and center

by Helen Gym on Dec 16 2010

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December 15th marked one year to the day that a historic boycott by Asian immigrant youth endedafter gaining national and international attention to racial violence at South Philadelphia High School. The groundbreaking agreements by the U.S. Department of Justice and the Pennsylvania Human Relations Commission make clear the responsibility of school officials to protect students from racial and ethnic bias and harassment.

The decision to seek remediation through the Department of Justice was a conscious one by many community members who sought not money or lengthy lawsuits, but lasting change and acknowledgment for the suffering of Asian immigrant students and families at the school. Below is the statement released by the South Philadelphia High School Asian Students Advocates (Asian Americans United, Boat People SOS, Victim/Witness Services of South Philadelphia, and the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund). On behalf of all the students

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Schools Matter: Boston's Appointed Superintendent and School Board Couldn't Be More Polite and Undemocratic

Schools Matter: Boston's Appointed Superintendent and School Board Couldn't Be More Polite and Undemocratic

Boston's Appointed Superintendent and School Board Couldn't Be More Polite and Undemocratic

by Jim Horn
The air of irony last evening could not have been thicker at the first public high school of Boston, as all the children in the audience at Boston's Public High got an unforgettable lesson in what what democracy does and doesn't look like.

On the "doesn't" side was the feckless School Committee, peering down from the stage of the school auditorium at speaker after speaker, 70 in all, most of whom came to speak against the impending school closures. The seven appointed Board members and their appointed Superintendent of Schools sat, some leaning forward, some flouncing, some yawning, some chatting, and all waiting patiently for the anticlimactic climax, to make the centrally-planned backroom decision official, while thumbing their noses at the citizenry, regardless of pleas, logic, tears, begging, demonstrations, catcalls, raps, and the rest.

The school closing decision, of course, had been made for them, and they were there last evening to play their
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Do you really think the Calif education board wants Compton charter probe???

Calif education board wants Compton charter probe

Benjamin Austin, Member State Board of Education

Mr. Benjamin Austin

Contact:
State Board of Education
1430 N Street, Room 5111
Sacramento, CA 95814

Took Office: April 24, 2010
Term Expires: January 15, 2014

Ben, a proud parent of two young daughters, has served as the Executive Director of the Los Angeles Parents Union since April 2008. He has dedicated much of his career to fighting for a California where every child can get a great public education. Prior to joining the Parents Union and launching the Parent Revolution campaign, he directed the successful campaign to transform Locke High School from the worst high school in Los Angeles into a college preparatory model of reform. Ben has also served as a Deputy Mayor under Mayor Richard Riordan from 2000-2001, where he helped craft the mayor's education reform policy; as well as Senior Advisor to Rob Reiner and First 5 California from 2002-2006, where he helped create LAUP (Los Angeles Universal Preschool), a $600 million preschool program rooted in high standards, accountability and parental choice that serves 10,000 low-income children every year.

Ben has also worked on numerous Democratic presidential campaigns, served in the Clinton White House in a variety of roles, and was an early supporter of Barack Obama's presidential campaign. He is a native of Venice, California, and is a graduate of UC Berkeley and Georgetown Law School. He currently lives in Los Angeles with his wife, Tracy, and their two daughters, Fiona and Eloise. He was appointed to the State Board of Education in March 2010.

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Abraham, Martin & John - Dion - Lyrics

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The Fight of Our Lives | California Progress Report

The Fight of Our Lives | California Progress Report

The Fight of Our Lives

by christine

By Robert Cruickshank

At Tuesday's education budget meeting in Los Angeles, educators from across the state took to the microphone to tell Governor-elect Jerry Brown that schools cannot accept more funding cuts without the system collapsing. And Brown, along with Treasurer Bill Lockyer and other state officials, explained that while they understood full well that California's schools have already been cut to the bone and are funded worse than in almost every other state, there's not going to be any avoiding those cuts - unless new revenues are approved.

read more

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Madigan’s ed reform committee meets today and tomorrow. « Fred Klonsky's blog

Madigan’s ed reform committee meets today and tomorrow. « Fred Klonsky's blog

Madigan’s ed reform committee meets today and tomorrow.

by Fred Klonsky

Boss Madigan has schedule hearings of his phony education reform committee in Aurora today and tomorrow.

I say phony for several reasons.

  • The hearings are scheduled to receive testimony on bills that have not even been written yet.
  • The committee is stacked with legislators who have a pre-existing condition, paid for by Stand for Children, a Superman political action Oregon-based outfit who advocate doing away with tenure, seniority rights, union collective bargaining rights and the right to strike.
  • The current legislative session is too short to consider any bills that the public, teachers and education
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That Was Then

That Was Then

That Was Then

by Kevin Carey



Asked a perfectly reasonable question about the differing roles think tanks and universities play in the career arc of education researchers, Diane Ravitch responds as follows:

These are indeed two different worlds. Different definitions of success. Different career ladders. Think-tankers blog. Blogging counts for nothing in ed school world. Academe requires peer review before publication; thinktankia does not. Ed schools focused on ideology, methods, closer to schools and practitioners. Thinktankia focused on politics, outcomes, “results,” connections with policymakers. Ed schools tend to see education issues from ground up. Think tanks from top down. Ed schools see through eyes of practitioners. Think tanks through eyes of policymakers (seeing like a state). Ed schools veer to left. Think tanks veer to right. Ed schools identify with powerless. Think tanks identify with powerful.

Diane Ravitch was for many years an active member of the Board of Trustees at the Thomas B. Fordham

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This Week In Education: Followup: Experts Debate "Thinktankia"

This Week In Education: Followup: Experts Debate "Thinktankia"
Followup: Experts Debate "Thinktankia" [image: ScreenHunter_16 Dec. 15 15.29] Comments continue to come in on the issue of whether "thinktankia" (Ravitch coinage?) is a viable and creditable career path for education researchers. In addition to the initial set of folks (Ravitch, LDH, ...
Media: Journo Explores Korean Education System [image: image from 1.bp.blogspot.com]Washington Post education reporter Michael Alison Chandler is on a Fullbright and blogging about her experiences in Korea learning about its education system (Confucian Times). Check it out if that's your kind of ...
AM News: Board President Saved By "Board Binder" [image: News2]Schumer: Little-known tuition tax break extended: A little-known tuition tax break that was due to expire this month has been renewed for middle-class families nationwide and will provide as much as $2,500 a year in tuition relief ...
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Shanker Blog » The 5-10 Percent Solution

Shanker Blog » The 5-10 Percent Solution

The 5-10 Percent Solution

by Matthew Di Carlo

In the world of education policy, the following assertion has become ubiquitous: If we just fire the bottom 5-10 percent of teachers, our test scores will be at the level of the highest-performing nations, such as Finland.Michelle Rhee likes to make this claim. So does Bill Gates.

The source and sole support for this claim is a calculation by economist Eric Hanushek, which he sketches out roughly in a chapter of the edited volume Creating a New Teaching Profession (published by the Urban Institute). The chapter is called “Teacher Deselection” (“deselection” is a polite way of saying “firing”). Hanushek is a respected economist, who has been researching education for over 30 years. He is willing to say some of the things that many other market-based reformers also believe, and say privately, but won’t always admit to in

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Locking Down School Internet Access? The Defense Department’s Different Approach

Locking Down School Internet Access? The Defense Department’s Different Approach

Locking Down School Internet Access? The Defense Department’s Different Approach

by Bill Tucker



Schools across the country are fighting a never-ending — and mostly hopeless — war to lock down computer networks and protect students by limiting access to social networking and other sites. The Department of Defense is pursuing a different strategy:

David Wennergren is an unlikely prophet for a new approach to information security — one

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Damn Good Education Daily

Damn Good Education Daily
Damn Good Education Daily
scholasticadministrator.typepad.com - December 15, 2010 | Posted At: 09:40 AM | Author: john thompson If you have any doubt that the "war on teachers" is doing serious harm to students, listen to Claudio Sanchez's " All Things Consider...

alexanderrusso




blogs.edweek.org - Earlier this fall, there was lots of excitement about Waiting For Superman. It was the talk of the town for a bit, prompted NBC to discover education for a week, and made a school reform icon out o...

mikeklonsky
blogs.edweek.org - Dear Deborah,When the results of the latest international assessment—the Program for International Student Assessment, or PISA—were released, our national leaders sounded an alarm about a national ...

mikeklonsky




nydailynews.com - Nearly three-quarters of city high school students entering City University community colleges failed placement exams in reading, math and writing this year.About 74% of first-time freshmen who gra...

leoniehaimson




pheedcontent.com - There is something very odd in the otherwise fine story by my colleague Bill Turque about security deteriorating at Dunbar High School in D.C. In a chart comparing the number of late summer and fal...

alexanderrusso
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