AM News: Romney Campaign Discovers Educatoin
Romney Considering Big School Choice Expansion Politics K12: Disadvantaged families and parents of students in special education could choose to spend federal funds at any district or charter public school, tutoring provider, or online course, according to the document circulated over the weekend. ALSO: Romney Names Education Policy Advisers
National Labor Conference Focuses Seeks To Improve Teaching Profession AP via HuffPost: Educators including the U.S. secretary of education, teacher union leaders and school administrators will focus this week on ways to transform the teaching profession with such targets as better recruiting, preparation and career development, and evaluations based on effectiveness.
AFT Task Force Eyes Teacher Preparation, Again Teacher Beat: The American Federation of Teachers has convened a task force to make recommendations on how to improve the quality of teacher preparation.
Do ‘zero tolerance’ school discipline policies go too far? TIME/Hechinger Report: The teenage girls knew they were being loud when they belted out Michael Jackson’s “Man in the Mirror” and the gospel favorite “We Lift Our Hands” during lunch at New Orleans’ Sojourner Truth Academy charter school. But they never expected school officials would slap them with out-of-school suspensions just for singing in the cafeteria.
Are Teachers Prepared To Learn From Standardized Tests? HuffPost: These days, it's not enough for teachers to know how to manage a classroom, impart knowledge and deliver lesson plans.
Are Teachers Prepared To Learn From Standardized Tests? HuffPostEDU: Some teachers agree that their education didn't prepare them for the torrent of information they'd have to analyze. "The college I went to did not prepare us for the push on 'data, data, data,'" says Christine Yarzabek, a first-grade teacher in Hershey, Pennsylvania.
MORE NEWS ITEMS INSIDE
More Parents Are Saying No to Pearson's Field Tests NYT: As city students have begun a new round of standardized tests -- this time so-called "field tests," which are experimental tests that the state-contracted test-maker, Pearson, is using to try out questions on city students for future use -- more parents are talking about opting out. And test resistance appears to becoming more widespread, with substantial numbers of parents at several city schools deciding their children would not participate.
Charter School Group Reports Steady Demand for Seats NYT: An estimated 133,080 applications were submitted for 14,600 available seats in this spring’s random admissions lotteries, according to the New York City Charter School Center. The Charter Center's C.E.O. says that shows city parents still want more public school options.
New Race to the Top Money Will Support Individualized Teaching NYT: The federal government will announce on Tuesday that $400 million will go to districts or clusters of districts that can show how they will focus resources on “students facing significant challenges, such as students with disabilities, English learners and students affected by impacts of poverty or family instability.”
L.A. Unified can apply for federal Race to the Top funds LAT: For the first time, the U.S. Department of Education will let districts bypass state officials. L.A. Unified wants funds to alter the teacher evaluation process.
NEWS: Proposed rules for new Race to the Top pose issues for NYC GothamSchools: In the beginning, there were charter schools, data systems, and teacher evaluations. Then, there was early childhood education. And now, the Obama administration wants to reward individual school districts for tailoring their offerings to individual students.
I hope as many parents of primary school children as possible have their children opt out of all of this testing, particularly that which resembles lab rat testing in unpaid support of for-profit testing companies. I think the U.S. education and labor departments ought to investigate this practice as an abuse of child labor laws, as well as a possible civil rights infringement. We ought to leave the bulk of our mass testing emphasis in upper secondary education, while repealing No Child Left Behind. It seems to me that NCLB's remaining supporters (some of whom I like -- but I like pretty much everyone who is sincerely trying to improve children's educations) are taken with the law's advances in data collection and analysis, but they are often too far removed from classrooms to appreciate the harmful backwash effects the law has brought on.
Posted by: Bruce | May 23, 2012 at 17:34 PM
Is the misspelling of “education” intentional in the headline? The problem is, given Romney’s dismissal of education as an important policy thus far, it could be a clever jab. I honestly can’t tell.
Posted by: Sarah | May 24, 2012 at 06:41 AM
And suspensions are being used as a cure-all, without question. My question is, what is the value of an out-of-school suspension? The type of child that commits a wrong bad enough to truly justify a school saying “we don’t want you back until you learn from your mistakes” is exactly the kind of child that such a punishment will not help.
Posted by: Sarah | May 24, 2012 at 06:42 AM