Wednesday, June 17, 2009

Shuttle Launch Woes

NASA has again had to postpone the launch of the space shuttle Endeavour on mission STS-127 to the International Space Station. The launch was scrubbed due to "a leak associated with the gaseous hydrogen venting system outside the shuttle’s external fuel tank." The next possible launch opportunity will be on July 11, as there is "an orbital sun-angle condition" from June 22 to July 10 "that "creates a thermal condition that prohibits shuttle and space station docked operations."

The image at right is from the NASA Image of the Day Gallery showing workers attempting to fix the leak on Endeavour's external fuel tank.

• NASA Press Release: Fuel Leak Again Postpones Launch of Space Shuttle Endeavour
• Space.com: Gas Leak Prevents Space Shuttle Launch Again

Small Schools, Large Schools

Javier C. Hernandez has an interesting story in the New York Times, Success at Small Schools Has a Price, a Report Says. He tells of a recent report about New York's small and large high schools which found that "the comprehensive high schools were overwhelmed by influxes of students who had histories of poor attendance, behavior problems and low academic achievement."

Odds 'n' Ends

I walked out into one of our garden areas yesterday morning checking on this and that and snapped a shot of one of our yellow squash plants. When I got back inside and looked at the vibrant colors of the shot, I decided to put it up on my Desktop Photos page (and add it to the rotation of desktops on my computer). Since I was updating the page, I also added a sunset I showed here on Educators' News in April that I had planned to add but had forgotten.

You can follow my garden exploits (and missteps) on our new site, Senior Gardening.

With the coming of summer, things have really slowed down in education news. I keep an eye on things, but am not updating this site nearly as regularly as I do over the winter months. All the stuff about merit pay, getting rid of bad teachers, and so on wears me out, and I'd guess, also dismays my readers. While it's all about improving instruction for our kids, it sometimes seems the policy folks get pretty detached from what classroom teachers do every day.

Since I really am unemployed retired now, I do have time to play around with some things I never seemed to have time for before. One of them is a toy my darling wife, Annie, got me for Christmas, a Brinno GardenWatchCam. It's a low-cost, weather resistant, time lapse camera that really might have some good classroom applications. While not terribly exciting, I could see the GardenWatchCam being used in the classroom for recording plant growth, mold growth, crystals forming, and all sorts of things in science classes. But for my part, I've used mine to record sunsets, seed germinating (Whoa! Talk about your exciting times in retirement!), and the hummingbirds at our back porch shown at right.

On Science@NASA

Dr. Tony Phillips should attract at least a few Colbert Report viewers with his latest release on Science@NASA, Running Out of This World. He tells of the Combined Operational Load Bearing External Resistance Treadmill (Colbert) that International Space Station astronauts will be receiving in August and some of the tricks associated with running in space.

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Friday, June 19, 2009

D.C. Teachers Fired

D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee this week fired 80 tenured teachers who had been under the system's 90-day (improvement) plan. Bill Turque's About 250 Teachers Are Given Pink Slips relates that those receiving termination letters were placed on the plan when they were found to be "deficient in at least six of 17 categories, including content knowledge and classroom management," from principals' classroom observation. Sixty first- or second-year teachers (not tenured) also were let go along with around a hundred others who failed to meet certification requirements.

NCTM and IRA Left Out of National Standards Process?

Officials of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM) and the International Reading Association (IRA) "voiced concerns last week about not having a more defined role in the 'Common Core' project being led by the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers." Subject-Matter Groups Want Voice in Standards tells of the limited roll so far for several professional organizations that should have been included in the effort from the beginning.

Charter Schools

A study released this week by the Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO) at Stanford University "found that there is a wide variance in the quality of the nation’s several thousand charter schools with, in the aggregate, students in charter schools not faring as well as students in traditional public schools."

Mitchell Landsberg has a couple of related stories in the Los Angeles Times, California charter schools stronger in reading than math and Low-performing charter schools in California could close under plan.

Odds 'n' Ends

I'll throw in links here to eSchool News's Schools suffer despite stimulus funding and Duncan to states: Don't slash school funding and Education Week's 'Response to Intervention' in Math Seen as Challenging, and we'll have pretty well touched on all the hot education issues today (oops, left out merit pay). But we have Michelle Rhee firing teachers in D.C., which may or may not be a good thing, national standards of a sort on the way, and news that not all charter schools may be up to snuff.

Have a good weekend!

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