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Monday, October 10, 2011 - Columbus Day Mojave Desert Studies The Los Angeles Times' Carla Rivera begins The science of the Mojave, and scorpions that glow in the dark:
"Inclusion," San Diego Style Will Carless's Becoming a Special Education Teacher Almost Overnight on the Voice of San Diego highlights one classroom teacher in a series of articles about San Diego Unified's move to inclusion. Carless gives the situation pretty fair treatment, as the school system is in serious financial trouble, but also doesn't give them a pass for dumping special ed kids into regular ed with limited support and calling it inclusion. The series, along with one important column that sets up the series, includes:
Pearson Junkets for Education Commissioners Michael Winrip's Free Trips Raise Issues for Officials in Education tells of free trips for state education officials paid for by the Pearson Foundation, the nonprofit arm of one of the nation’s largest educational publishers, that may simply be "influence-buying junkets" for the parent company. Winerip writes that the trips to places such as Rio de Janeiro, London, Singapore, and Helsinki appear to be Pearson using its non-profit foundation "to push its business interests...a violation of the federal tax code." He quotes Marcus S. Owens, a lawyer who was director of the Exempt Organizations Division of the Internal Revenue Service for 10 years, as saying "The Pearson conferences fit the same fact pattern as the influence-buying junkets that the convicted lobbyist Jack Abramoff arranged for members of Congress." Winerip also notes that when asked about the trips, state education officials "emphasize the time they spend with educators from around the world to get ideas for improving American public schools. Rarely do they mention that they also meet with top executives of the Pearson company." Full disclosure: Several branches of the Pearson conglomerate were Educators' News affiliated advertisers...until this morning. Odds 'n' Ends
With Columbus Day falling on a Monday this year, a number of area schools decided to observe their fall break this weekend, taking both Friday and Monday off. Fall break in Indiana is a carryover from the days of a Thursday-Friday teachers' institute that was held in late October each year by the state education association. The days back then were paid days: If you didn't attend the association meetings and workshops, you had to work in your building or get docked pay. Fall breaks have been eliminated or cut to one day in many area schools in recent years. The practice of wrapping the break around a weekend for schools that take two days is not uncommon as well. But I'm not sure the folks who draw up these school calendars realize what two short weeks in a row can do in the classroom. Two weeks are disrupted with holidays. In elementaries, that means the kids will be nuts for two weeks instead of one. Send Feedback to |
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ESEA Reauthorization Draft Released Senator Tom Harkin, chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, released a draft proposal yesterday of what would be the first major revision of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) since No Child Left Behind (NCLB), the current version of the law, was passed in 2002. The measure would drop the Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) requirement of 100% proficiency for all students in reading and math, replacing it with a provision that states ensure all students are making "continuous improvement" in student outcomes. Alyson Klein gives the particulars in Senate ESEA Draft Bill Would Scrap Adequate Yearly Progress on Education Week. Klein writes that "there would be no specific achievement targets, either for entire groups of students, or for particular subgroups" in the proposal. Race to the Top and other competitive grants for state funding would be continued under the proposal.
Backlash to Indiana's School "Reform" Terre Haute Tribune-Star columnist Mark Bennett wrote about the Indiana Coalition for Public Education last Thursday in Could a new champion for public schools be emerging? The Coalition opposes much of the school "reform" agenda pushed through the last General Assembly by the Republican majority in both houses. Bennett writes that, "Deep down, millions of Hoosiers would wear the label 'advocate for public schools,'" noting "The proof of that bond emerges every time a community faces a possible school closing. Without fail, people arise to passionately plead to keep the doors open, and they extol the quality of the education kids receive and their school’s potential. They want to improve their schools, not abandon or drain them." The Coalition and Bennett see the legislature's actions as circumventing the spirit of Indiana's Constitution, pushing through "the nation’s most expansive use of taxpayer-funded scholarships to cover private-school tuition fees" for schools that "don’t have to accept all children," diverting funds desperately needed by public schools to private and parochial schools. The 700-member coalition has "mounted a court challenge to the voucher law," pointing out that the state constitution requires that "no money shall be drawn from the treasury for the benefit of any religious or theological institution." Note: I wanted to run a link to this article last Friday or even on Monday, but the piece either disappeared from the online Trib-Star or never was posted. (I'd read it in Thursday's print edition.) Emails to the author and editor of the Trib-Star went unanswered until yesterday, when Mark Bennett attributed the omission to a "glitch on the website." That's too bad, as the columnist tackles an issue few in the state's media want to touch, the Republican push to privatize Indiana's schools! On the Blogs
I've only read the free first chapter of Wu's book on Amazon, but what I read was well written and quite interesting. Her blog is also a good read...good enough that I've added it to my list of "teacher blogs" to follow for On the Blogs this year. Here are links to two recent postings I especially liked: Ben supplies links to several free LaTeX download packages in his postings. Our Freebies page also carries links to a couple of TeX editors I've used. Jim Horn totally unloads in Sanity Returns to Wake County School Board: Koch Candidates Crushed on the Schools Matter blog. He writes in reference to a group that took over the school board in the last round of elections and began undoing one of the nation's premiere diversity programs. He wrote in part:
I really like Jim's bluntness in this posting. It's time to call some folks out for who and what they are! Larry Ferlazzo has compiled some "articles that share thoughtful reactions" to Matt Richtel's New York Times article, In Classroom of Future, Stagnant Scores, in The Best Posts On The NY Times Ed Tech Article. One of the best is Tom Vander Ark's Richtel’s Rearview Mirror Misses the Mark on his Getting Smart blog. Mrs. Chili's Grammar Wednesday on A Teacher's Education from last week covers a subject-verb agreement disagreement in an interesting discussion. Miss Eyre wonders in Life Without a School Aide, Day 1 on NYC Educator "if Mayor Bloomberg or Chancellor Walcott ever has to wait to make copies on one functioning copier." She notes that they "were welcomed back from the long weekend by not one, not two, but three malfunctioning copiers." And her recently laid off aide is the one who usually fixes copiers that go down! I'm glad to see that Peggy Robertson is blogging again regularly on her Peg with a Pen blog. Her Teach at Your Occupy Movement Today. End Wall Street Occupation of Public Schools posting yesterday speaks to a lot more than the Occupy movement. What We're About Since I've been a Mac user for a long time, I really like Milton Chen's Paying Forward the Legacy of Steve Jobs on Education Week. Chen, a senior fellow at the George Lucas Educational Foundation, writes:
What he wrote goes for beyond Macintoshes, as throwing off "an authoritarian system of schooling" and trying to "liberate the learning experience for our students" is what a lot of us who oppose the current school "reform" movement are all about.
While it was slow going at first, my search for charity web banners to use here on Wednesdays began to pick up over the last week. I've updated the list of charity banner pages in last week's Odds 'n' Ends column, A Charity Phone Solicitation, to include my new finds. I also decided to share a tale this week about my search for an elusive 11 1/2 pork chop I thought I saw advertised on our local grocery's electronic sign. Amusing Myself relates a humorous upside of living with a reading disability and how that disability helped snag a $100,000 IDEA grant some years ago.
ESEA Reauthorization Plans Compared Alyson Klein does a great job of comparing the various House bills and the new Senate proposal for reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) in Bills Show Dueling Priorities on K-12 Spending. She writes of the "differing visions for K-12 education funding, pitting formula-grant programs crucial to school districts against some of the Obama administration’s favored competitive-grant programs." She relates that "Title I grants for disadvantaged students and aid for special education, would get flat funding for the 2012 fiscal year" under the Senate's plan, but "the funding proposal before the Republican-controlled House Appropriations Committee would include big boosts for special education and Title I." The House proposal would also scrap Race to the Top funding, along with the Promise Neighborhoods initiative and other Obama/Duncan favorites, while the Senate would still fund most of them. Occupy Wall Street If you're on some of the same mailing lists as me, you probably received one or more pleas yesterday via email to sign a petition urging New York Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and the owners of Zuccotti Park not to go ahead with plans to clear the park this morning. Fortunately, a bit of sanity broke out in New York, and the owners of the plaza where the protesters were camping backed off from their plans for an early morning eviction of the Occupy Wall Street protestors. CBS News reports that even with the eviction delayed or cancelled, some violence broke out. Protestors who had worked to clean up the plaza area, hearing that they could stay, moved with their brooms to "clean up Wall Street." A line of police scooters tried to move through the crowd, running over one protestor and starting several scuffles between protestors and the police. Mayor Bloomberg appeared to be somewhat defiant in a radio interview on Friday morning, seeking "to make it clear that the decision to postpone the cleanup was made by Brookfield Properties, the owner of Zuccotti Park," according to the New York Times. I think the importance of the Occupy movement may have been brought home to many teachers yesterday, when Occupy protestors joined teachers in San Francisco picketing Jeb Bush's two-day National Summit on Education Reform that featured News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch as a keynote speaker. The excesses of Wall Street and the attempts at demoralizing America's teachers and privatizing our public schools are definitely related. Here are some links to the story and the organization:
Odds 'n' Ends
Have a great weekend!
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that ended up as quiz items in Moodle such as the one pictured at left. 
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