We’re All Right-Wing Bastards Now, writes teacher Larry Sand of the anti-union California Teachers Empowerment Network in City Journal. Sand is responding to a speech by Bob Chanin, the outgoing general counsel of the National Education Association, who called critics of the union “conservative and right-wing bastards” who [...]
Epic Adventures Are Often Uncomfortable is hosting this week’s EduCarnival.
Darren writes about the principal’s classroom visits, which allegedly aren’t about evaluating teachers, but are about checking for student “engagement.” If students are disengaged, wouldn’t the principal form an opinion about the teacher’s ability?
[...]The Pledge of Allegiance is un-American, argues Michael Lind on Salon.
In a republic, the people should not pledge allegiance to the government; the government should pledge allegiance to the people.
“We owe each other an obligation to obey the rules that we, directly or through elected representatives, have mutually [...]
Two Kentucky librarians who decided a graphic novel was obscene have been fired for refusing to let an 11-year-old check out the book.
Sharon Cook, an employee of the Jessamine County library, checked out The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Volume IV: The Black Dossier in 2008 and kept [...]
A linguist father spoke only Klingon to his child for his first three years,
“I was interested in the question of whether my son, going through his first language acquisition process, would acquire it like any human language,” (d’Armond) Speers told the Minnesota Daily. “He was definitely starting to [...]
Will the world end in 2012? Impressed by ads for the new disaster movie, 2012, New York City students seem to think it’s a documentary, reports Ms. Rubin, a science teacher now covering earth sciences.
. . . every time I introduce them to some new feature of the [...]
Scribbit, a mom-blogger in Alaska, wonders why her high school age daughter watches so much TV at school. The daughter watched Enchanted in English class and Ratatouille, The Incredibles, Ice Age and Finding Nemo in German class.
“How many movies do you watch a week?”
She thought a bit, counting up [...]
The drama club edition of the Carnival of Educators is up.
[...]Educators have a new euphemism for struggling students, writes Jay Mathews on Class Struggle. “At-risk kids” are now “at-promise.”
“We use the term ‘at-promise’ in Alexandria City Public Schools to describe children who have the potential to achieve at a higher rate than they are currently achieving,” (Superintendent Morton) [...]
In a low-performing, high-aspiring San Diego high school with Mexican, Somali and Asian immigrants, advanced calculus is the hot class everyone wants to take and the biggest club is an honors math fraternity. Jonathan Winn teaches at Crawford Champs High, a Gates-funded school within a school. From Voice [...]
Test scores improved for students with disabilities from 2005-06 to 207-08, according to a new study by the Center on Education Policy.
The study found that students with disabilities showed progress at all levels of proficiency in 4th grade, where the median percentage scoring at the basic level or [...]
“Unfriend” is the word of 2009, according to the New Oxford American Dictionary. The verb refers to the act of removing someone as a “friend” on a social networking site such as Facebook. But some Facebook fans protested the choice, saying “defriend” is the term of art.
In technology, [...]
Jocelyn of A Pondering Heart is hosting the Carnival Of Homeschooling and urging bloggers to enter the homeschool blog awards over at The Post.
[...]Time is money. To save money on salaries, Hawaiii announced “furlough Fridays” to cut the school year to 163 days. (Gov. Linda Lingle has proposed using teacher planning days to restore the missing days in 2010.) Los Angeles hopes to save save $60 million by closing school for [...]
“Meep” is banned at Danvers High in Massachusetts in response to a Facebook-organized student plot to say “meep” frequently in class.
Principal Thomas Murray banned the word last week after school officials got wind of a student plan brewing on Facebook to stage a major disruption on school grounds using [...]
“Math educators” have dumbed down math content in a vain effort to “engage” low achievers, charges Sandra Stotsky in City Journal.
National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM) 1989 standards lead to “trendy, though empirically unsupported, pedagogical and organizational methods that essentially dumb down math content.”
Stotsky suggests emulating [...]
Teachers are selling lesson plans online, reports the New York Times.
While some of this extra money is going to buy books and classroom supplies in a time of tight budgets, the new teacher-entrepreneurs are also spending it on dinners out, mortgage payments, credit card bills, vacation travel and even [...]
While resilient ”dandelion” children thrive in any environment, ultra-sensitive “orchild children” will “wilt if ignored or maltreated but bloom spectacularly with greenhouse care,” writes David Dobbs in The Atlantic Monthly.
So holds a provocative new theory of genetics, which asserts that the very genes that give us the most trouble as [...]
Chicago’s highly regarded magnet schools will change admissions rules to drop race as a criteria. Instead, there will be more places for siblings and neighborhood children; socioeconomic status will replace race as a diversity factor.
Only 12 percent of all applicants won admission to elementary magnets this year, reports the [...]
Basic algebra stumps most first-year students at City University of New York freshmen, according to a CUNY report.
“These results are shocking,” said City College Prof. Stanley Ocken, who co-wrote the report on CUNY kids’ skills. “They show that a disturbing proportion of New York City high school graduates lack basic [...]
The teacher shortage has turned into a teacher glut, reports AP. Veteran teachers are delaying retirement and new teachers are having trouble finding jobs. Of course, the story features a woman who trained to be an art teacher in Kansas. There are more jobs in math, science and special [...]
The Onion asks: Are Our Children Learning Enough About Whales?
Currently, 84 percent of school funding is spent teaching children about whales. Is that enough? Should every school have its own whale?
[...]New Haven’s widely praised new teacher contract isn’t all that great, editorializes the Washington Post.
The editorial cites Thomas W. Carroll, president of the Foundation for Education Reform and Accountability, who complained in the Huffington Post that the “contract preserves tenure, prevents good teachers from getting paid more than [...]
Churchill’s speeches get low marks from a computerized grading system, British educators tell The Telegraph. “We shall fight on the beaches. We shall fight on the landing grounds. We shall fight in the fields and on the streets . . . ” Too repetitive.
His reference to the [...]
A Colorado high school’s automatic phone system called thousands of parents to say their student was failing one or more class. It turned out to be a fail by Hinkly High’s phone system:
The phone messages should have gone only to students who were actually failing — not the entire [...]
A San Jose charter elementary school with low-income students and very high test scores has won an award for financial efficiency, reports John Fensterwald on Educated Guess.
Rocketship Education saves $500,000 per school per year by using online instruction to supplement classroom teaching. The savings enables the network to pay [...]
The Education Trust and The New Teacher Project (TNTP) have issued reports calling for states to commit to “bold reforms” to increase teacher effectiveness in applications for federal “Race to the Top” funding.
Fighting for Quality and Equality, Too, by The Education Trust, and How Bold is “Bold”?, [...]
As Los Angeles Unified contemplates turning more schools into charters, parents in a heavily immigrant neighborhood received an anonymous flier written in Spanish: “DO NOT SIGN ANY PETITIONS FOR A CHARTER SCHOOL BECAUSE YOU COULD BE DEPORTED.”
While United Teachers Los Angeles, the union representing LAUSD teachers, was not [...]
Are Oklahoma students so ignorant of civics that they averaged 2.8 correct answers out of 10 questions taken from the citizenship exam passed on the first try by 92 percent of immigrants applying for naturalization. We’re talking about a test that asks: Who is George Washington?
An Oklahoma legislator repeated [...]
Epic Adventures Are Often Uncomfortable is hosting the EduCarnival v2.
Mr. Teacher reports on a 12-year-old student who can’t spell “education.”
[...]For $20, students at a North Carolina middle school can buy 20 test points — 10 extra points on two tests of the student’s choosing, reports Education Week.
Susie Shepherd, Rosewood Middle School principal, said a parent advisory council came up with the idea after last year’s chocolate sale flopped.
Shepherd [...]
Tucson has adopted racial/ethnic quotas for discipline, writes Heather Mac Donald on City Journal.
Schools that suspend or expel Hispanic and black students at higher rates than white students will now get a visit from a district “Equity Team” and will be expected to remedy those disparities by reducing their [...]
The Carnival of Educators, hosted by Andrea Hermitt, is up.
Janice Campbell is hosting the Carnival of Homeschooling, which reminds us that November is National Novel Writing Month or NaNoWriMo.
[...]In The Making of Americans: Democracy and Our Schools, Core Knowledge founder E.D. Hirsch argues that schools must teach our shared heritage and language to prepare children of many ethnicities to grow into “competent and civic-minded Americans who can function in the public sphere.”
Our nation’s founders strongly supported education [...]
Teacher ratings “in most districts are as discerning as peewee soccer award night, with everyone getting a trophy,” writes Jay Mathews in the Washington Post. Less than one percent of teachers were rated unsatisfactory in a New Teacher Project study of 12 districts, including Chicago, Denver, Cincinnati and Little [...]
In giving President Obama an A+ for school reform ideas and for “getting it,” columnist Ruben Navarette Jr. charges that “edu-crats” ignore and insult low-income black parents, then blame them for not participating in that “hostile environment.”
It’s been my experience that many teachers don’t really care whether parents go [...]
Hip-hop is going to school as a teaching tool, reports Teacher Magazine.
“Pencil and paper and worksheets and reading from a book isn’t going to cut it now days,” said Kelli Charles, a fifth-grade teacher at Irwin Intermediate School on Fort Bragg. “Especially with all the technology, Xboxes and video [...]
Today’s hyper-social teens are compulsive communicators, writes Jeffrey Zaslow in the Wall Street Journal.
A 17-year-old boy, caught sending text messages in class, was recently sent to the vice principal’s office at Millwood High School in Halifax, Nova Scotia.
The vice principal, Steve Gallagher, told the boy he needed to focus [...]
The number of teaching jobs increased last month, even while unemployment topped 10 percent, notes ABCTE blog. Stimulus money enabled districts to add 10,700 jobs.
[...]A Detroit charter school is funding the first year of college for 124 students, if they fulfill a senior-year contract calling for good grades, completed homework, extra reading and taking college readiness and study skills classes.
University Preparatory High School, which serves low-income black students, is offering “tuition, room [...]
In a study in India, teachers hired as test graders gave higher scores when the student was identified as high caste, lower scores to low-caste students, reports Inside School Research.
The Harvard study tested elementary and middle-school students in mathematics, language and art.
The tests, however, were randomly assigned different student [...]
With women earning 58 percent of bachelor’s degrees, some private liberal arts colleges are practicing affirmative action for male applicants to preserve a gender balance in enrollment. Private colleges have the legal right to discriminate against women, but don’t like to publicize it. Now the U.S. Commission on Civil [...]
Texas will judge teacher-training programs based on graduates’ effectiveness in the classroom, reports the Houston Chronicle. Poor programs could lose state accreditation. Till now, programs have been judged only by the percentage of graduates who pass the teacher certification exam.
The biggest change to the accrediting rules — and potentially [...]
The Chicago Teachers’ Union is a gang, charged James Meeks, chair of the Illinois Senate Education committee and pastor of Salem Baptist Church, in an Oct. 17 speech.
“Chicago Public Schools have a gang problem. The gang, however, is not the BDs (Black Disciples), the gang is not the GDs [...]
Raped repeatedly by her father, abused by her horrible mother and kicked out of school for her second pregnancy, Precious (also obese, black and illiterate) finds redemption when an alternative-school teacher (lesbian) teaches her to read and write a journal about her feelings. Writing isn’t going to save Precious [...]
States are creating alternate pathways to graduation for students who can’t pass high school exit exams, reports the Center on Education Policy. Most offer alternatives for disabled students; some also exempt students who aren’t fluent in English. Pass rates have improved in most states. Many more states are [...]
Texas spent $300 million over three years on merit pay for teachers, but saw no effect on student achievement, concludes a review by the National Center on Performance Incentives reviewed the now-defunct Texas Educator Excellence Grant.
The state is now funding another merit pay plan, District Awards for Teacher Excellence, [...]
When he criticized East Georgia College’s sexual harassment policy for offering no protection to the falsely accused, Professor Thomas Thibeault was accused of sexual harassment himself and escorted off campus by police. No specifics were provided. Now, under pressure from the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), the college [...]
Teacher effectiveness “is the key school-based variable we can control,” writes Michael Jonas in Commonwealth Magazine, “but almost none of the structures that have evolved over decades to govern how we hire, evaluate, pay, or assign teachers to classrooms are designed to operate with that in mind.”
We base hiring [...]
Joanne, Joanne Jacobs, Diana Senechal
