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Bracey Report In a poignant column last Friday, Jay Mathews notes that one can't get the full effect of Gerald Bracey's The Bracey Report on the Condition of Public Education, 2009 from just reading a column review of it. In Bracey's last report--trashing our educational assumptions, Mathews writes that one must "read every word" of the late analyst's last report "to catch the excitement" of Bracey taking on the false assumptions of leaders in education "reform" and laying them waste. If you have the time, be sure to read both Mathews's column and the report in their entirety. (Hint: If you're tired of being browbeaten about "failing schools," inadequate teachers, etc., the report will may raise your spirits a bit.) Selling Lesson Plans and Such Winnie Hu discusses what can be a delicate situation in Selling Lessons Online Raises Cash and Questions. Teachers who create lesson plans or other materials at school, on school time and using school equipment, may be surprised to find that their employer may have claim to ownership of those plans as intellectual property created as work for hire. If the teacher should decide to market the plans, the school district might be able to assert their right of ownership and block the teacher from selling the lesson plans. Hu gives examples of some that do and some that don't. Hawaii May Reinstate Some Furlough Days After some scolding last week from Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, Hawaii's governor announced a plan yesterday that would restore 27 days of school previously cut from the calendar for budgetary reasons. Under the plan the state would tap its "rainy day" fund and teachers would give up planning and collaboration days to end teacher furloughs in 2010 and 2011. Nine furlough days in 2009 would remain. Odds 'n' Ends Andy Gammill has a good column today in the Indy Star, Colleges look at new ways to teach teachers, that looks at how Indiana's teacher colleges are responding to popular fast-track methods such as Teach for America and The New Teacher Project. Education Week's Emily Feistritzer also looks at the subject in The Impact of Alternate Routes to Teaching. Susie Shepherd, the principal involved in the cash for grades fundraiser in North Carolina reported here Friday, has taken immediate retirement rather than waiting until her planned retirement date of next spring. Lynn Bonner, who broke the original story, relates the pertinent details in Principal retiring in wake of cash-for-grades fundraiser. Sounds like a tough way to go out. Stephen Sawchuk writes in Education Week about peer assistance and review gaining new life in Peer Review Undergoing Revitalization (free registration required). I somehow got away from doing a monthly looking ahead section last spring and was reminded of it from a recent reader email. Once I remember why I cut it out, I'll decide whether to resume the section or not! But the Teachers Corner's monthly calendars and daily writing prompts are good pages to have bookmarked on your web browser. Send Feedback to |
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DOE Video Contest Voting A press release yesterday from the Department of Education put me on to the ten finalists of the DOE's I Am What I Learn contest. The contest asked for original two minute videos from US students over 13 that conveyed "the importance of education, as well as the student’s individual academic goals." The finalists were selected from over 600 entries on the basis of "creativity, strength and originality of content, and ability to inspire." The finalists present a varied, diverse, creative, and compelling look at their world. The contest is set up so that you can vote for just one or two, or all ten finalists if you wish! You can watch and vote for your favorites either on the I Am What I Learn contest page or on Ed.gov's YouTube page. Baking Dog Biscuits Conor Shine has a great human interest story in the St. Paul Pioneer Press, What's the value of a dog biscuit? Shine tells of Denise Cayle's special ed classroom at John Glenn Middle School in North St. Paul where students inventory, measure, mix, bake, count, package, and distribute dog biscuits "to incorporate math, reading and writing into a project with a community focus." Breakfast in the Classroom Washington Post writer Bill Turque often covers the busy and controversial D.C. Schools beat, but yesterday had a great article about a school breakfast program. Meal program aims to keep kids hungry for learning tells how Friendship Public Charter School's Southeast Elementary Academy has moved breakfast into the classroom to increase student participation.
STS-129 Begins Journey to ISS
• STS-129: Stocking the Station I wasn't subbing or otherwise occupied yesterday, so I was able to watch the launch on NASA TV. I find that after years of following the space program, from listening to Alan Shepard's first flight in a classroom when I was in eighth grade to yesterday's launch, is still an exciting experience. Odds 'n' Ends I keep going back to the blogs I linked to last week and finding great stuff. On Organized Chaos, I found a great look into what we do with breaking it down with patterns of thinking. On I'm a Dreamer, Not Everyone Does, But I Do shares what has to be an experience many of us have had in education.
The image of the combine emptying its hopper while in motion is available on my Desktop Photos page along with a few other new ones I uploaded yesterday. When I was farming, it was all I could do to stay on row with the cornpicker, or when picking beans, keeping the grain head up so it didn't scoop up rocks. So I really appreciate the intricate dance of dumping on the fly farmers seem to do without much trouble.
Gates Foundation Grants The amounts reported vary a bit by news source, but the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation committed $290-335 million on Thursday to several programs around the country. The big winners were the Hillsborough County Public Schools in Tampa, Florida ($100 million), the Memphis City Schools ($90 million), the Pittsburgh Public Schools ($40 million), and "a coalition of charter school organizations in Los Angeles" ($60 million). The reform projects "will focus on teacher training, put the best teachers in the most challenging classrooms, give the best teachers new roles as mentors and coaches while keeping them in front of children, make tenure a meaningful milestone, get rid of ineffective teachers, and use money to motivate people and schools to move toward these goals."
The announcement of the new Gates Foundation grants come just a two weeks after the Ford Foundation pledged $100 million to "transform secondary education in urban schools." Some of the recipients include "The American Institutes for Research in Behavioral Sciences, to develop new school-finance models; Stanford University education professor Linda Darling-Hammond, to write a series of papers about assessment methods; and the American Federation of Teachers Innovation Fund, for 'innovation efforts' by its local affiliates involving teachers, administrators and parents." The Ford Foundation grants produced one of the nastiest and most unfair editorials I've ever seen: The Edsel of Education Reform from the Wall Street Journal. NYC High School "Grades" Jennifer Medina and Robert Gebeloff write that "an analysis by The New York Times of school grades released this week" show "that over the last three years, high schools that received the lowest marks from the city have been the ones with the highest percentages of poor, black and Hispanic students." In Schools’ Grades Reflect Persistent Disparity Medina and Gebeloff relate some of the apparent reasons for the low scores. Be a Martian
The server appeared to be seriously overloaded when I tried to access the site Tuesday night and Wednesday, but appears to be working a bit better now. There are still some bugs. Trying to access the site via the Anonymous Tourist Visa link in Internet Explorer 8 kept returning me to the start page. Interestingly, Apple's Safari for Windows worked well with the site! The site also requires Microsoft's Silverlight 2.0, which locks out users with older, non-Intel powered Macs (PowerPC G5, G4, and so on). Microsoft never produced a 2.0 version for PowerPC. Boycott Microsoft Bing New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof is calling for folks to Boycott Microsoft Bing. On his blog, Kristof explains that "Microsoft is sacrificing the integrity of Bing searches so as to cozy up to State Security in Beijing." If one does a search on Bing "with the simplified characters used in mainland China, then you get sanitized pro-Communist result." Images of atrocities such as the Tiananmen Square massacre disappear. The Dalai Lama is characterized as an oppressor, and Falun Gong believers become villains, not victims. Kristof writes of Microsoft, "In effect, it has chosen become part of the Communist Party’s propaganda apparatus." Odds 'n' Ends Obama’s new push for preschool for at-risk children by Amanda Paulson looks at Chicago's Educare center as "a model that some hope will become more prevalent if the Obama administration's Early Learning Challenge Fund becomes law." Learning to Teach to Bridge the Achievement Gap by Phil Yost tells of a turnaround school in San Jose, the Leroy Anderson Elementary School. Secretary Duncan spoke in Indianapolis yesterday pushing what the Indy Star described as "too many adults - in classrooms, communities and state governments -- standing in the way of American children getting a good education." Michael Alison Chandler has an interesting article about the success of using portfolios in Alternative test may inflate score gains. Have a great weekend!
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©2009 Steven L. Wood