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Education
Voters PA Statewide Call to Action for Public Education Today, Wednesday
January 25th
Please consider taking a
few minutes today to make a couple calls and forward this to other public
education stakeholders.
Today, Wednesday,
January 25, Education Voters of Pennsylvania is sponsoring a Statewide Call to Action for Public Education. Click here to tell the Governor and your state
legislators that Education is important to you!
PA House Education Committee
to hold informational meeting on cyber charter school funding and operating
issues
Thursday, January 26, 2012 10:00 AM , Room 60 East Wing
Corbett asked to aid poor schools
Bipartisan effort pursues
workable plan for distressed districts
Wednesday, January 25, 2012 By Tom Barnes, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
"We need a plan,
Mr. Secretary; we need a plan," Sen. Jeffrey Piccola, R-Dauphin, told
state Education Secretary Ronald Tomalis. "It's time to end the
finger-pointing and the blame game. Taxpayers are fed up with the increasing
costs of public education. They see it every July when their school tax bill
arrives."
Sen. Andrew Dinniman,
D-Chester, was even more blunt. "This administration is trying to destroy
public education in the poorest districts," such as Chester Upland
[outside Philadelphia ],
Duquesne schools and others, he contended. "This administration isn't
serious about education of the poor in Pennsylvania ."
PA Dems on
YouTube
Chester
Upland SD is 16 miles from the Radnor SD.
In this year’s budget, Chester Upland got cut by $29K per class;
compared to Radnor cut of $950 per class of 25 students.
Inspector General's office
interviewing teachers in PSSA-test cheating probe
By Martha Woodall, Inquirer Staff Writer Posted:
Wed, Jan. 25,
2012 , 3:01 AM
The Pennsylvania Inspector General's Office is
assisting the state Department of Education with its probe of allegations of
cheating on 2009 state exams.
Agents arrived in Philadelphia
this week to begin interviewing teachers at the 13 Philadelphia district schools and three
charter schools that are part of the inquiry, according to educators and others
with knowledge of the probe.
The Inspector General's Office has set up a
hotline that teachers may call if they have information about cheating at their
schools: 855-448-2435. The "PSSA test-integrity hotline" is
operational statewide and allows callers to provide information anonymously
about the Pennsylvania System of School Assessment tests.
Obama on education in
State of the Union address
Here’s the part of
President Obama’s 2012 State of the Union address that was about education, taken from a text prepared for
delivery:
....To prepare for the
jobs of tomorrow, our commitment to skills and education has to start earlier.
For less than one
percent of what our Nation spends on education each year, we’ve convinced
nearly every State in the country to raise their standards for teaching and
learning – the first time that’s happened in a generation.
Obama in SOTU: ”Stop teaching to the test”. Duncan ’s
Race to the Top: teach to the test or risk losing your job.
High Tech Testing on the Way: a 21st Century Boondoggle?
In my recent exchange with
the Department of Education regarding President Obama's remarks critical of our
obsession with testing, it became clear that there is a vast expansion of
testing on the horizon. Few reports have emerged that describe this, and I fear
the public may be unaware of the resources that soon will be diverted from our
already decimated classrooms. I asked two of the nation's experts on this trend
to share what they have learned about this recently. Here is their report.
“there is no evidence
supporting the idea that tests to enforce national standards, no matter how
subtle and refined, will have any positive impact on student learning. In fact,
the evidence we have suggests that it will not: States that use more high-stakes
tests do not do better on the NAEP tests than states with fewer…”
by Stephen Krashen and Susan Ohanian
by Stephen Krashen and Susan Ohanian
When the plans to create Common Core Standards
were announced, Secretary Duncan told us that it would be accompanied by
assessments to enforce the standards. We were also told that developing
standards would be relatively inexpensive, but developing assessments, by
contrast, will be a "very heavy lift financially" (USA Today, June 14, 2009 ).
AP Exclusive: States weaken
teacher tenure rights
By KIMBERLY HEFLING
AP Education Writer
WASHINGTON (AP) -- America 's public school teachers
are seeing their generations-old tenure protections weakened as states seek
flexibility to fire teachers who aren't performing. A few states have
essentially nullified tenure protections altogether, according to an analysis
being released Wednesday by the National Council on Teacher Quality.
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