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PBS Teachers Innovation Awards From PBS Teachers:
Entries in the contest will be accepted from PBS Teacher members (free membership) January 11-March 31, 2011, with winners announced by May 31, 2011. The contest is open to U.S. residents who are a:
A Worthy Proposal Walt Gardner makes a sensible proposal today in his The Gini Index and Educational Achievement posting on his Reality Check blog. Walt first describes the Gini coefficient, "which measures the range of income inequality in a society from 0 (no inequality) to 1(total inequality)". He then notes that "the U.S. has one of the world's worst Ginis for an industrialized country at .468 in 2009," before going on to suggest that "whenever test scores are published, the Gini index must be published with them." Of course, that would never do, as it doesn't fit the agenda of current education "reformers." Special Education Funding While the title suggests just Oregon faces special education funding issues, Oregonian writer Kimberly Melton looks at several states in Oregon special education funding drops; state may face federal sanctions. She notes that federal law "requires states to fund special education at the same level or higher from year to year or face penalties." Five states that have cut special education funding, Iowa, Kansas, South Carolina, Alabama and West Virginia, have already requested waivers from the federal government, with Oregon soon to join them. If approved for the waivers, federal officials say those states will face closer monitoring than other states in the future. And the states will still face the federal regulation prohibiting cuts in succeeding years.
Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels and Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Bennett continued their assault on public education in Indiana last week with more anti-teacher, anti-public school statements. Daniels is working to portray himself as a fiscal conservative in hopes of launching a 2012 Presidential bid. Bennett, well, is just an idiot. Conservative CNHI writer Maureen Hayden in Daniels pushes educational reform to cut costs quotes Bennett as saying:
Both Daniels and Bennett like to note that they're in step with President Barack Obama's reform strategies for education. Their program of "accountability, competition, and freedom" includes:
Daniels' track record has been one of cutting funding wherever possible for public education. While he passes out individual awards for teachers, he regularly participates in the "bad teacher" bashing so prevalent now in the press. Now with a Republican legislature, he hopes to "revolutionize" Indiana's public schools, much like he's privatized, to the state's dismay, other entities such as the toll road and state assistance (since rolled back because of privatization's utter failure to serve the state's needy). As for Bennett, he's a puppet just taking his cues from the governor. Upon taking office according to Education chief Bennett raises goal for tests, graduation and noted here last year, he immediately gave us a Star Trek Captain Picard moment ("Make it so.") in saying that he would "push the state to the nation's highest graduation rate within four years and require students to make unprecedented gains in test scores." When pressed for specifics and not having Mitch whisper in his ear yet, he answered that he did not have specific reforms in mind but stressed that the goals will affect every decision he makes while he planned to use the bully pulpit that comes with his job to change Indiana's education culture. No improvement has been noted here in the months since. Keep an eye on Daniels, as he's incredibly ambitious and willing to destroy Indiana's public schools in an effort to aggrandize himself. Lots of Odds 'n' Ends I often end up putting a few items I find interesting, but not necessarily worthy of a whole blurb, at the end of postings in this Odds 'n' Ends section. While writing much of this posting Sunday afternoon, there were lots of such items to link to. Scienceman Joe Martha features guest blogger Gale Martha's Fracking: An Imminent Disaster this weekend as a follow up to his link to the Burning Water documentary. Since we live in an area that has been heavily (coal) mined and has lots of oil and natural gas wells, this item really caught my interest. Christina Hoag's Teachers take charge to save ailing public schools tells about the Woodland Hills Academy in the San Fernando Valley. Hoag describes how "teachers stepped out of the classroom and took charge of the school," dramatically raising test scores. She also covers questions about scalability of such efforts and how difficult such efforts truly are. It's a good, unbiased read. It looks like there's a scandal brewing in the San Francisco Student Support Services Department. Trey Bundy tells the story in San Francisco School Administrators Schemed to Take Money, Documents Say. No big surprise, but Bill Turque reports that "Highly effective" teachers are spread unevenly across [the] District, clustered mainly in the wealthier schools. Education Week's Alyson Klein tells that some major organizations are asking for changes in NCLB now in Groups Eye Regulatory Relief Under NCLB. She notes major changes are unlikely, as "it undercuts the urgency of revising ESEA." As noted here in October, the NEA provides a quick way for members and non-members alike to contact their representative and senators about reauthorization of ESEA. And Boys' Self-Esteem Problems by Lisa Wolfe tells of a "change occurring in America’s classrooms is leaving boys feeling helpless and sapping them of their motivation." Welcome Back...and a Funny, if Embarrassing, Story One of our affiliate advertisers moved this year from one of our affiliate consortiums to an independent affiliate program. We followed them to buy praying mantis egg cases, although we later had to drop them from our affiliates for questionable business practices!
But the story I didn't tell on Senior Gardening, because it really is a classroom "war story" and was embarrassing then, is about hatching out praying mantises as a classroom observation early in my teaching career. I strung a praying mantis egg case from thread in one of those clear plastic photo cubes. The class eagerly checked the egg case in the cube for days and was at last rewarded when hundreds of tiny mantises emerged from the egg case during the school day. They hung down from the egg case in a string of mantis bodies. Some even began some cannibalistic activity on their brothers and sisters! At the end of the day, a Friday, we released the young mantises onto our school playground. I just set the open cube and egg case on our science table. A fact that often doesn't appear on mantis postings such as Wikipedia is that the egg case is often built a half at a time with some time in between the egg laying in the separate halves. When we returned to the classroom the following Monday, the other half of our egg case had hatched out. My classroom was filled with tiny, hungry, baby praying mantises! I hope your Monday is going better than that particular Monday did for me!
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time lapse camera. The camera worked great. I just forgot to change the batteries and ended up missing recording hundreds of tiny mantises emerging from the egg case. I'll try again next year.
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The Leonid Meteor Shower Space.com's Joe Rao gives all the pertinent info needed for watching the Leonid meteor shower in The Leonid Meteor Shower Peaks Wednesday: Tips for Skywatching. If you'd like to locate the constellation Leo, the area from which the meteors appear to emanate, before Wednesday, I'd recommend the free, open source Stellarium planetarium software. It's easy to use, and did I say "free?"
American Indian Heritage Month Resource WGBH has some activities that might help with any American Indian Heritage Month activities you might be going. The Teachers' Domain resource Trail of Tears from the We Shall Remain series "features powerful reenactments of the Cherokee's forced migration by the U.S. from Georgia to lands west of the Mississippi." Odds 'n' Ends Stephen Sawchuk tells of a new report on teacher training in Momentum Builds to Restructure Teacher Education on Education Week. OpenOffice, the free, open source productivity suite, finally reached version 3.3 this week. And Sam Dillon's Gates Urges School Budget Overhauls tells of Bill Gates's speech today in which he urges an end to "teacher pay increases based on seniority and on master’s degrees." Gates instead suggests "rewarding the most effective teachers with higher pay for taking on larger classes or teaching in needy schools." Have a great weekend! Ads shown on this site do not represent an endorsement or warranty of any kind of products or companies shown. Ads shown on archive pages may not represent the ads displayed in the original posting on Educators' News. |
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©2010 Steven L. Wood