AM News: Dept. of Education Awards $290 Million to Incentivize Teachers

Education Department Awards $290 Million In Grants To Incentivize Top Teachers AP: The Obama administration is awarding $290 million in grants to reward top teachers and boost opportunities for teachers who work in impoverished schools. The Department of Education says the funds will flow to almost 1,000 schools in 18 states plus the District of Columbia.

PTA Claims For-Profit Rival Poaches Members WSJ: The National Congress of Parents and Teachers, the umbrella organization of the PTA, sued the parent company of PTO Today on Wednesday in U.S. District Court, accusing the for-profit company of using "false and misleading statements encouraging members to leave the National PTA" and opt, instead, to form a local parent-teacher organization, or PTO.

Romney, Obama Education Speeches Paled In Comparison To Bill Clinton, Jeb Bush At Political Conventions: Insider Survey HuffingtonPost:Whiteboard Advisors, a consulting firm that specializes in school policy, recently conducted one of its monthly surveys of 50 to 75 anonymous political and policy "insiders," including current and former senior staff from the U.S. Department of Education, White House, Congress and think tanks. Respondents were asked to weigh in on the Democratic and Republican National conventions, as well as the ongoing presidential campaign.

Admissions Policy to Elite NYC Schools Prompts Complaint Schoolbook: Claiming not enough black and Latino students are gaining admission to New York City’s eight specialized high schools, civil rights advocates on Thursday filed a complaint with the U.S. Department of Education questioning the use of the specialized high school admissions test (SHSAT) as the sole criterion for entry.

Parsing Fact From Fiction In 'Won't Back Down' NPR: In Won't Back Down, union leaders care more about their collective bargaining rights than about kids. This was fresh in people's minds as they walked out of a screening in Chicago, literally a day after the teachers' strike there ended.

 

Comments

[CarolineSF]

Both the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times ripped "Won't Back Down" to shreds. In both cases, the movie reviewers are exceptionally well informed about the education politics, and far more perceptive than their own newspapers' editorial boards.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/28/movies/wont-back-down-with-maggie-gyllenhaal-and-viola-davis.html

http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/movies/moviesnow/la-et-mn-wont-back-down-review-20120928,0,2053199.story

And even reviewers who liked the movie, including my own hometown paper, the San Francisco Chronicle, unhesitatingly dub it anti-union. That's amusing considering the director and stars staunchly insist that they're pro-union liberals and that the film isn't anti-union. Overall, the movie is getting trashed by critics, whether they address the education politics or not.

[Bruce]

Those are two very poor reviews, written by movie critics who try to mask their absolute lack of knowledge of the conditions of struggling inner city schools with a cynical, pseudo-knowing tone. They oversimplify the educational issues and the drama more than the movie itself does, and are utterly naive about the shocking realities of what conservative unions will do to protect their positions.

I admit, I am in no position to be a judge of the effectiveness of the plotting, having lived through events uncannily like those portrayed in the movie so as to be incapable of seeing them as an ordinary movie-goer might; and there is an obvious lack of realism in the demographics of the Pittsburgh neighborhood portrayed and in the likelihood of a dyslexic single mother working two jobs being able to overcome so many obstacles; but the blatant bias of these reviewers disables them from being able to do the movie, or their readers, justice.