02/08/2010

AP - A lawyer for a ninth-grader charged with shooting a fellow student to death at their Alabama school says the violence was likely related to gang activity.

02/08/2010 AP - Consolidating public school districts in Kansas could save millions of taxpayer dollars, although not enough to solve the state's budget crisis this year, according to a new report released Monday.

02/08/2010 AP - In a recorded jailhouse conversation, a teenager charged with fatally stabbing another student at a suburban high school told a friend he was being "persecuted" because he stayed behind to help the victim.

02/08/2010

AP - The Obama administration will ask Congress to improve childhood nutrition by ridding school vending machines of sugary snacks and drinks and giving school lunch and breakfast to more kids.

02/08/2010

AP - The third and fourth graders at Sharon Elementary know where the veggies in their soup come from because they've visited the farms. They know the nutritional value of the carrots, onions and cabbage because they've studied them in class, and they know how they're grown because they've nurtured them in raised beds out back.

02/05/2010 AP - There's no denying that the Super Bowl is all about money, and lots of it.

02/04/2010 AP - Federal appellate judges wrestling with whether schools can discipline students for Internet speech posted offsite reached different rulings Thursday in two Pennsylvania cases.

02/04/2010 AP - The state of Washington is not fulfilling its constitutional duty to fully pay for basic public education, a King County judge ruled Thursday.

02/03/2010 AP - Charitable contributions to colleges and universities plummeted an average 11.9 percent nationwide in 2009, the steepest drop in at least three decades, according to a new report.

02/02/2010 AP - The initial 911 report from the Vancouver, Wash., elementary school was alarming: shots fired at a school playground. That had police and SWAT officers scrambling Tuesday morning — only to find the weapon was a bright orange cap gun.

02/08/2010

Dr. Susa Beckman Nahmias chairs the Georgia Parents for Responsible Health Education, an Atlanta-based non-profit organization working to improve sexuality education in Georgia’s schools. She and other health professionals are concerned about critical omissions in the state’s new performance standards for health education and she wrote this piece about those concerns:

Teens are becoming complacent about sex since we, as adults, do not talk to them about it. Parent-Child communication is essential – parents need to talk about their personal values to enable their children to develop their own. However, many parents feel ill-informed about the various aspects of sexuality and reproductive health, which is why it is vital that our schools provide students, in an age-appropriate manner, with the basic facts and with the skills to avoid risky sexual behavior.

Kids today desperately have to get this education to counteract misinformation, media in all its forms and peer pressure. …

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02/08/2010

And you thought the governor didn’t care: Just in from the governor’s office:

ATLANTA – Governor Sonny Perdue announced today education legislation has been introduced that would increase pay for Georgia’s top teachers and principals, and increase the integrity of Georgia’s testing system.

“Boosting pay for Georgia’s top teachers is an idea whose time has come,” said Governor Perdue. “Focusing on student improvement with other measures like peer evaluations aligns state funding with our policy priority: improving the education of our students. The new pay model will help the state attract, reward, encourage and retain top teachers.”

Sen. Don Balfour, chairman of the Senate Rules Committee, is introducing SB 386, the Governor’s legislation to increase pay for high performing teachers and principals.

“This legislation rewards our All-Star teachers through higher pay,” said Senator Balfour. “These teachers go all the way for our students and should be …

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02/08/2010

At the last House Education meeting Thursday, House Bill 908, the so-called expenditure flexibility bill,  was pared back to three areas in which desperate school systems can ignore the state mandates and spend the money where they see fit.

Those areas are media centers, the extra 20 days of instruction for struggling students and professional development.

Those three represent only a small slice of the state money coming to schools. Herb Garrett of the Georgia Superintendents Association used Cobb as an example and said those areas gave the county about $15 million to move elsewhere — out of $400 million. That $15 million would not make up for Cobb’s current austerity cut of $60 million, said Garrett.

The media centers – libraries in my day – sent a lobbyist to protest the cuts, but there wasn’t much hope as lawmakers want to give systems some leeway.  If they cut out media centers from the list, they are giving systems leeway over a bag of change.

This week, the …

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02/08/2010

I admire the work done by Bob Schaeffer and FairTest as I think we need perspective on the testing frenzy that has gripped the country. He’s targeting National Merit testing and scoring now.

(By the way about testing, a bill is pending that would eliminate mandatory CRCTs in first grade here in Georgia. More on that later.)

I found this note from FairTest interesting because one of my kids ran into this issue. My oldest attended boarding school out of state on a scholarship and would have qualified for the National Merit pool in the state where the school was located but missed it by a few points because boarding schools as a group had a higher cutoff.

Until then, I had not been aware that the qualifying score varied state by state. So, for example, a 214 qualifies you for National Merit in Georgia, but you need a 221 in Massachusetts and Maryland. You only need a 201 in Wyoming and a 202 in Nevada and North Dakota.

Schaeffer is upset because the National Merit Scholarship …

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02/07/2010

The intervention of a judge in an inquiry-based math curriculum adopted by the board of education took Seattle schools by surprise. The judge ordered the Seattle board to review its decision to approve the Discovering series of texts for teaching math, a decision that she called “arbitrary and capricious.”

According to the Seattle Times:

A King County Superior Court judge has ordered the Seattle School Board to take another look at its decision to use the Discovering Series of texts for teaching mathematics.

In a terse ruling Thursday, Judge Julie A. Spector called the decision to teach from the Discovering curriculum “arbitrary and “capricious.”

A group of parents had sued the school district, the School Board and district Superintendent Maria Goodloe-Johnson to stop the books from being used in high schools.

“We’re very pleased,” said Cliff Mass, one of the plaintiffs.

“What we would hope is they would find the books they selected were a mistake and then replace the books …

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