I write about education for a living. About cute kids and their projects. About local government in the form of school boards. About budgets that are squeezed or bloated. About the programs that money can't buy. About inequality and fairness, and how kids learn the difference. About triumphs and tragedies. About life, where pass/fail isn't an option, and the future is on the line.
More about me? @MerandaWrites.com
Is commencement address really the time to call blogging a “gimmick from a dying industry” ? I want to know the background of this comment.
In April, Seattle Public Schools settled a lawsuit filed on behalf of two of Hill’s victims for $3 million. Depositions, personnel files and other records from that lawsuit expose a school’s culture of fear and confusion, and they explain how Hill managed to remain a teacher for so long.
At least 30 times since the late 1980s, teachers and staff warned administrators at North Seattle’s Broadview-Thomson Elementary School of their suspicions about Hill, lawyers for the two girls say. The Seattle School District disputes that figure but does admit to five warnings.
State law requires school personnel to report suspected abuse to police or Child Protective Services, but teachers kept their concerns in-house, hewing to a school policy that says go to an administrator. Once passed along, their complaints almost always died, with no investigation, no discipline, no calls to outside investigators.
The elite college wait-list turned acceptances aren’t having the predicted trickle down effect. But some kids are still holding out hope for their top choice.
As the forces of economic downturn ripple widely across the United States, the job market of 2008 is shaping up as the weakest in more than half a century for teenagers looking for summer work, according to labor economists, government data and companies that hire young people.This deterioration is jeopardizing what many experts consider a crucial beginning stage of working life, one that gives young people experience and confidence along with pocket money.
Little more than one-third of the 16- to 19-year-olds in the United States are likely to be employed this summer, the smallest share since the government began tracking teenage work in 1948, according to a research paper published by the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University in Boston. That is a sharp drop from the 45 percent level of teenage employment reached in 2000.
Interesting take on referendum funds for local schools and why so few schools take that route:
Public school districts have the option of establishing an extra fund in their budgets and raising residents’ property taxes to collect money for it. Officials must ask the residents in their districts to vote on the matter at the ballot box as part of a referendum and the money is good for a maximum of seven years before it must be reaffirmed.
It’s worth noting they cite LSC as one of the schools here who has this funding. LSC does, but it’s referendum was for Sunnyside, installing security cameras at Jeff and a few other specific things that aren’t on-going. So when the money’s gone, it’s gone but then the project is finished, too.
MICHIGAN CITY - A high school teacher accused of calling the Muslim father of one of his students a terrorist will not be back next school year.
The examination of this phenomenon - called social promotion - in eight Tucson-area school districts draws upon millions of records obtained by the Arizona Daily Star during the course of a 10-month investigation. It shows that in almost every school in the metro area, students are failing to meet basic standards, but are still being promoted. On top of that, other students’ grades may be inflated.
This is such a simple and yet awesome school project. I can’t think of a class that wouldn’t benefit.
As the frenzied admissions season winds to a close, many students finally know where they will be attending college in the fall. But there remains a troubling question: how much damage was done along the way?
Tallmadge, Ohio, near Akron apparently will charge $2,500 this year for kids to be in full-day kindergarten.
I didn’t realize this was an issue in Ohio as in Indiana. But seriously, I hear plenty of moaning about $50/week or $1,800/yr for some districts. This is a lot more than that.
Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings used her executive powers on Tuesday to propose a series of ninth-inning regulatory fixes to President Bush’s signature education law, No Child Left Behind, including requiring states to use a single federal formula to calculate and report high school graduation rates.Ms. Spellings also wants to require schools to notify parents of their right to transfer students out of failing schools two weeks before the start of each school year, and to explain more fully to parents the opportunities for federally financed tutoring that are available to students attending troubled schools.
Ms. Spellings said she was proposing the fixes because efforts in Congress to rewrite the legislation have stalled and because “everywhere I go I meet parents who are demanding change.”
The nation’s future may depend on how well we educate the current and future generations, but (like the renovation of the nation’s infrastructure, or a serious search for better sources of energy) that can wait. At the moment, no one seems to have the will to engage any of the most serious challenges facing the U.S.An American kid drops out of high school every 26 seconds. That’s more than a million every year, a sign of big trouble for these largely clueless youngsters in an era in which a college education is crucial to maintaining a middle-class quality of life — and for the country as a whole in a world that is becoming more hotly competitive every day.
Ignorance in the United States is not just bliss, it’s widespread. A recent survey of teenagers by the education advocacy group Common Core found that a quarter could not identify Adolf Hitler, a third did not know that the Bill of Rights guaranteed freedom of speech and religion, and fewer than half knew that the Civil War took place between 1850 and 1900.
When students created Facebook pages that viciously attacked a teacher, and when their wealthy parents on the school’s board defended them, Horace Mann was forced to confront a series of questions: Is a Facebook page private, like a diary? Is big money distorting private-school education? And what values is a school supposed to teach?
Is local control better? Or is lack of educational autonomy crippling the U.S. education system and holding our kids back from competeing with other nations?
