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News Libby Quaid has an article that may not please kids all that much, More school: Obama would curtail summer vacation. I also found Christine Armario's Migrant kids take long step from fields to schools to be a good read. Moving Weekend Since this was "moving weekend" for Educators' News and mathdittos2.com, there's not much content today. But the last of the site files were uploaded to the new site at around midnight, so we should be ready for the changeover when the DNS (internet address) changes take effect later this week. During the transition, we'll be updating both the old and new host sites. Note that our Senior Gardening site has been down for days. The hard drive array in the host server failed, as did their backup. So, we still have one more site to move to a new web host.
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Total Student Load Education Week's Debra Viadero tells of a new book published this month, William Ouchi's The Secret of TSL With so many school districts cutting staff due to budgetary concerns and the national reform effort seemingly fixated on charter schools and linking test scores to merit pay, it's good to see something in the news about class size. I'm not sure TSL is a panacea for education, but I do know I do a better job teaching when the numbers are down. Senior Gardening Still Down Our other web site, Senior Gardening, is still down with the web host not having any projection as to when they'll get their server back up. With all the bungling involved (lack of a good backup of the site/server, no notification to clients for over 72 hours after the failure, etc.), I reluctantly moved Educators' News to a new web host. Senior Gardening will follow once we get our domain registration moved. Striving Readers Grants Awarded A DOE press release yesterday, $6.6 Million in Striving Readers Grants Awarded to help Struggling Readers, lists eight states to receive Striving Readers grant funding. Michigan, Illinois, Washington, Virginia, New York, Kentucky, Wisconsin, and Louisiana will all share in the program that attempts "to raise reading achievement in Title I-eligible middle and high schools where significant numbers of students are faced with the challenges of poverty and reading below grade level." Projects include:
Site Status While my site statistics indicate that most folks are being routed to the new mathdittos2.com host, our DNS server is still directing us to the old site. Today will be the last day I'll make dual updates to the two hosts, with future updates only going to the new site on Hostmonster.com. (Our term with our previous web host, MacHighway, expires at midnight tonight.) Our other web site, Senior Gardening, is back up and running on Hostmonster.com. I'm still uploading files to the site as I write this posting, so it will probably be this evening before the site is available again in its entirety.
DC Teacher Evaluations to Include Test Scores Bill Turque writes in New D.C. Teacher Ratings Stress Better Test Scores:
The new evaluation program, IMPACT, will "assess teachers against an elaborate new framework of requirements and guidelines that cover a range of factors, including classroom presence and how carefully they check for student understanding of the material," including student scores on the "annual District of Columbia Comprehensive Assessment System, or DC-CAS. Student value-added will account for half of their evaluation." Start of School Here in Indiana, legislative committees are hearing testimony from parents who want to push back the start of school from mid-August. Parents urge pushing back start date for school year by Mary Beth Schneider tells that parents are pushing for a late August or early September start date to be put into Indiana law. It will be interesting to see how that can be folded into the current push by the Obama Administration for longer school days and a longer school year.
Today's Earthshots, Grand Canyon by Yoan Eynaud, is a real dandy. And, it's really easy to incorporate the free daily service on your school web page. Earthshots provides the code on their webmasters page. Handwriting Class for Teachers Putting Pencil To Paper by Emma Brown tells of Arlington County (VA) teachers who "gathered last week to learn nitty-gritty details about how to teach their students handwriting -- proof that, even in this age of ubiquitous and hand-held computers, old-fashioned writing hasn't gone out of fashion." When I first moved from regular education to teaching students with developmental delays, I was wisely required to spend the whole summer in inservice training. One week of that training was devoted to teaching handwriting. I wasn't thrilled about having to take a handwriting workshop at the time, but found the training invaluable years later when I needed a good slant print handwriting font and couldn't find one anywhere. I ended up buying a copy of Fontographer and writing my own font, MSDWT Manuscript, based largely on what I learned in that workshop. It's not really a finished font, but it did what I needed in the classroom.
Teacher Tools 1: AppleWorks and Teacher Tools 4: A Roll-Your-Own Spelling Program tell how I employed the font. Achievement Gap Closing? The Center on Education Policy released a report today that indicates some progress has been made in closing the achievement gap between whites and minorities in the United States. Amanda Paulson describes the results in Achievement gaps narrowing in US schools since No Child Left Behind. The full report, state profiles, supplemental tables, and the CEP press release are available on the Center on Education Policy site. Peppers What do sweet bell peppers have to do with an education related web site? Probably not much, but we really needed a touch of color this week.
I've always thought that if I ever taught a photography course (talk about the blind leading the blind...), I'd make an assignment for students to photograph ripe peppers...sorta like painters doing the bowl of fruit thing. The colors are incredible, although I could use some work on my lighting. I also forgot to reset the ISO (film speed to those of us old timers) on my camera down from its maximum of 1600 that I was using to for a previous session, so the shot above is a bit grainier than I'd like. Site Status We're now operating totally on servers on Hostmonster.com. All files for Educators' News, mathdittos2.com, and Senior Gardening have been successfully uploaded. If you find a glitch, please let me know.
A NASA press release today led me to NASA's Waste Limitation and Management of Resources Design Challenge. There's not a lot of information up as yet about it on the NASA site, but the contest/project in a nutshell is to:
The WLMR-DC site also notes:
While only one team will win the "expense-paid trip to the NASA Kennedy Space Center," this one sounds like it might be a good project for middle school science classes. It reminded me of a cool project a friend once did with her classes at Tuttle Middle School in Crawfordsville, Indiana, on water pollution in their community’s Sugar Creek. That project is described in Working Together to Make a Difference. We Knew That I generally like Associated Press education writer Libby Quaid's stuff, but I think I'll have to file her most recent posting in the "We already knew that" category. Despite States are not boosting aid for schools being something we have all probably witnessed, it's good someone is noting what has happened with education stimulus funds, and someone else (Libby) is writing about it.
With the massive infusion of new federal education funds, it's sad to see that the net result may be the status quo or worse at the local level due to state budget cuts to education. I'm not sure we'll see the national resolve necessary again soon to come up with big bucks to improve education. Top Ten
Even with all the fun and games we had at the end of September with our Senior Gardening site's server going down and having to move both Educators' News and Senior Gardening to a new web host, we were able to glean our site stats for the month. Portuguese Kale Soup is as much a story as a recipe. It is timely, as many gardeners now have almost all the ingredients for the delicious and hearty soup on hand at this time of year. We've made and canned one big batch of it already this fall and will make another as soon as I get the last of our potatoes harvested. We may also wait for the frost to touch the kale plants, as this is said to actually improved the flavor of kale! Indiana Teacher Licensing USA Today reports that public hearings have been scheduled "on a contentious proposal to revamp Indiana's teacher licensing requirements." I've covered this emerging story here on Educators' News (July 31, August 22) as the whole deal smacks of a vendetta by an anti-public education governor with presidential aspirations, rather than an effort to improve teacher education. One proposal that blew me away is a requirement for elementary education majors to have either a math or science minor. I think I'd rather see more focus on helping new teachers learn to teach kids to read effectively than added expertise in math or science (at the expense of reading). The State Superintendent of Public Instruction has quietly scheduled three meetings in the middle of workdays for public comment on the proposals. Have a great weekend! D.C. Lays Off 200+ Teachers More than 200 Washington, D.C. teachers were laid off on Friday. Bill Turque and Emma Brown of the Washington Post report in More Than 220 D.C. Teachers Lose Jobs that teachers were given dismissal notices Friday afternoon. The dismissal notice "asked that they return all District property and said they could return Saturday between 10 a.m. and 2 p.m. to gather personal belongings." The layoffs weren't totally unexpected. The Post reported in mid-September that D.C. budget cuts would produce teacher layoffs. Washington Teachers' Union president George Parker said he was informed that 266 teachers had been terminated, mostly "senior teachers over 50."
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. In 
, an education best-seller that called for decentralizing schools.
©2009 Steven L. Wood