Monday, January 10, 2011

California Governor Brown Shakes Up Education "Reform" Board

Walt Gardner's Does California Shakeup Signal Education Reform Shift and Seema Mehta's Many see influence of teachers union in Gov. Jerry Brown's shakeup of California Board of Education tell of a possible change in direction from the punitive education "reform" measures now in vogue across the country to a more reasoned approach to improving schools. Both Gardner and Mehta note that California Governor Jerry Brown "sacked" the a majority of the state's Board of Education members, removing supporters of charter schools, teacher accountability based on student test scores, and parental empowerment. Gardner notes "that teacher morale is at an all-time low" and sees teachers in California being more likely to "buy into" reform measures that acknowledge their current efforts and commitment to students while seeking improvement in education. He notes the potential for a national trend, saying:

Although California is hardly alone in this regard, its sheer size makes the potential for defiance impossible to ignore. That's why I suspect the Brown decision carries more implications for education everywhere than are immediately apparent.

Heartwarming Stories of Students Making a Difference

Five Do-Gooders by Katie Zezima, Abby Ellin, and Inyoung Kang tells of some incredible ways students have found to "give back" a little. My favorite is the story of Elizabeth Jane Handel's A Book From Mom program. The program donates books to women's prisons so incarcerated mothers could select a book to read with their children during visits, with the child taking the book home as a gift.

Best Ten iPad/iPod Touch Apps for Education

eSchool News assistant editor Jenna Zwang has published her list of 10 of the best apps for education. She made sure to include five free apps along with five commercial ones that may find a place in your classroom. While I appreciate Zwang's effort, Jonathan Wylie's The 10 Best Apps for Education was a bit more useful for me. Angela W. La Fon's Top iPhone Apps for Elementary School Kids is another good listing.

More on School 61 Kindergarten

I've linked to each of the excellent stories in Robert King's series about the kindergarten at Indianapolis Public School #61 over the last few months. It's an excellent look at what kindergarten is like in a big city school system. During the past week, a paperwork foulup by the system left a new kindergartener at the school with no one knowing who he was! IPS goes to great lengths to identify "mystery boy" and Boy's family says it visited school tell that story.

King's photographer for the series, Alan Petersime, has a photo story this week of the kids and teachers in See School 61 kindergartners through lens of Star photographer.

Odds 'n' Ends

While most of today's posting could fit into this category, I decided to feature some of the other stuff while plopping a couple of articles I liked here:

• Some educators resist giving woodshop the chop by Linda Matchan
• America ignores education funding at our own peril by Robert Reich

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Friday, January 14, 2011

Some Quick Notes

I ran across a Test your nutrition IQ quiz that is interesting and might even have some classroom value. They got me on their first question, "On nutrition labels, a healthier food will have fewer grams of total fat."

Here in Indiana, Governor Mitch Daniels surprised no one with his state of the state speech that called for quick adoption of his education "reform" plan that includes vouchers and more charter schools, weakening teachers' unions, using student test scores to evaluate teachers, and support for the Obama/Duncan draconian measures for "failing schools." Possibly the key to understanding the speech was the line, "When it comes to our children's future, the real devil is not in the details, he's in the delay, and 2011 is the year the delay must end." Daniels is in a very big hurry to run for president in 2012 as an education expert and fiscal conservative.

Sharon Otterman has an interesting article that tells of the status of New York City's attempts to publish individual teacher rankings based on student test scores.

Valerie Strauss writes of a new analysis of a Gates Foundation report that supported the validity of “value-added” measures. The new study "concludes that the substance of the report doesn’t support its conclusions."