Education Voters PA County Legislative
Great resource – for each
county they list your state senators and state representatives along with their
contact information, committee assignments and the school districts that they
represent.
A full
list of legislative guides can be viewed and downloaded HERE: http://www.educationvoterspa.org/index.php/site/take-action/legislative-guide7/
Daily postings from the Keystone State Education Coalition now
reach more than 1650 Pennsylvania education policymakers – school directors,
administrators, legislators, legislative and congressional staffers, PTO/PTA
officers, teacher leaders, members of the press and a broad array of P-16 education
advocacy organizations via emails, website, Facebook and Twitter.
These daily emails are archived at http://keystonestateeducationcoalition.org
Follow us on Twitter at @lfeinberg
“Midland's
rejuvenation has been underwritten by virtually everyone who pays state taxes
and school property levies. PA Cyber
gets around $100 million a year from districts whose kids choose its online
school.”
Midland still upbeat on economy despite probe of charter schools
By Rich
Lord / Pittsburgh Post-Gazette September 30, 2012 12:13 am
Long a
steel town until the mill shut down 30 years ago, Midland has an economy
rebuilt around an unusual anchor: the charter school movement, in the form of
the Pennsylvania Cyber Charter School and the Lincoln Park Performing Arts
Charter School.
Hundreds
of millions of dollars in public funding from school districts all over the
state have flowed into the two schools across Midland Avenue from each other.
The results for this Beaver County town are undeniable.
Delco districts struggle with PSSA results
Published: Sunday, September 30,
2012
By JEFF
WOLFE jwolfe@delcotimes.com @delcoreporter
When the PSSA test scores are
released each year, it’s a set of numbers that call for a range of analysis
from school administrators and the Pennsylvania Department of Education. And while the majority of Delaware County
school districts met the state requirements of having 81 percent of students
proficient in reading and 78 proficient in math in grades 3-5 and grades 6-8,
when it came to results of the tests taken by high school juniors, the numbers
tell a different story.
President of Harrisburg teachers union thinks new
evaluation system will hurt urban, rural teachers
Published: Sunday,
September 30, 2012
Teachers at more affluent suburban school districts will have an unfair advantage over urban and rural educators when the state’s new teacher evaluation system is implemented next year, the president of Harrisburg School District’s teachers union said.
Public school teachers have always been graded through
classroom observation, but starting next year the new
evaluation model also
will assess student achievement.
And the state’s 501 districts will use the
same criteria to measure achievement, which Harrisburg Education Association
President Sherri Magnuson said puts teachers in low-income districts such as
Harrisburg at a disadvantage due to the overwhelming negative socio-economic
factors present among the student population.
The spokesman for the Pennsylvania Department of
Education and the executive director of the Pennsylvania League of Urban
Schools disagreed.
“If I
wasn't educated and lived in the poorest of neighborhoods would your
perspective of me have been different? Because my perspectives wouldn't have
changed!”
Where All the
Children Are Above Average
In the new my-kid-first world of education,
anxious moms like Charissa Stone are demanding pricey special help from their
public schools. It's what any good parent would do ... isn't it?
|
Philadelphia
Magazine by Sandy Hingston
I’m
really hoping Charissa Stone will turn out to be crazy.
It’s been
a week now since Stone sent me an email out of the blue, suggesting I write
about her eight-year-old daughter, Erin, and how the Council Rock School
District has refused to acknowledge that her needs aren’t being met by the
regular curriculum in her classroom. Erin, Stone wrote, has a learning disability
that qualifies her for special education. Council Rock ought to recognize this,
she said, because while Erin’s IQ is above the district’s 130-point “gifted”
designation, her academic performance is only average.
The Top 100 Philadelphia-Area Public Schools 2012
Philadelphia
Magazine
The United States of ALEC: Bill Moyers on the Secretive Corporate-Legislative Body
Writing Our Laws
THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 27, 2012
Video
runtime 42:36 - Segment covering the
role that Connections Academy and K12, Inc. had in writing Tennesee’s
cyberschool legislation and subsequent no-bid contract starts about 26:00
Democracy Now! premieres "The United States of ALEC," a special
report by legendary journalist Bill Moyers on how the secretive American
Legislative Exchange Council has helped corporate America propose and even
draft legislation for states across the country.
Apollo 20:
One Man’s Plan to Fix Failing Schools
PBS FRONTLINE September
25, 2012, 8:37 pm ET by Sarah Childress
Like many of the kids who wind up
in failing public schools, Harvard economist Roland Fryer grew up amid violence
and drugs, and with little hope for the future.
Now, Fryer is the youngest
African-American tenured professor at Harvard and a leading expert on education
reform. His latest project: figuring out the right formula to help kids excel
in school.
Most education experiments today
are being done in charter schools — some of which have flourished, while others
have failed. But at the slow rate charter schools are growing, Fryer said he
realized that it could take decades to close the achievement gap in education.
So a few years ago, Fryer and his
team at Ed Labs, a Harvard education research “laboratory,” spent a year
scrutinizing 40 charter schools in New York to find out what they did right —
and wrong. They analyzed lesson plans and homework. They also videotaped
classrooms and broke the footage down into two-minute chunks to see what was
happening.
Of the 500 variables they
studied, Fryer’s team found that five accounted for a full 40 percent of the
schools’ success. “That was just astonishing to us,” Fryer said, especially
since so many seemed, at least on paper, to be relatively common-sense notions:
Fostering Tech Talent in Schools
New York Times By NICK
WINGFIELD Published: September 30, 2012 25 Comments
SEATTLE — Leandre Nsabi, a senior at Rainier Beach
High School here, received some bluntly practical advice from an instructor
recently. “My teacher said there’s a lot
of money to be made in computer science,” Leandre said. “It could be really
helpful in the future.”
That teacher, Steven Edouard, knows a few things about the
subject. When he is not volunteering as a computer science instructor four days
a week, Mr. Edouard works at Microsoft.
He is one of 110 engineers from high-tech companies who are part of a Microsoft
program aimed at getting high school students hooked on computer science, so
they go on to pursue careers in the field.
In doing so, Microsoft is taking an unusual approach to tackling a
shortage of computer science graduates — one of the most serious issues facing
the technology industry, and a broader challenge for the nation’s economy.
There are likely to be 150,000 computing jobs opening up each year
through 2020, according to an analysis of federal forecasts by the Association
for Computing Machinery, a professional society for computing researchers. But
despite the hoopla around start-up celebrities like Mark Zuckerberg of
Facebook, fewer than 14,000 American students received undergraduate degrees in
computer science last year, the Computing Research Association estimates. And
the wider job market remains weak.
Weekend
Posting - Our Failing Public Schools
Building One Pennsylvania 2012 Statewide Public Meeting
Promoting sustainable,
inclusive and economically prosperous communities
Saturday, October 13, 2012 10 am to 11:30 a.m. (doors open at 9:30
for registration)
Declining local tax bases, aging infrastructure, unfair state and federal
policies are undermining our communities. It's time to stand together to
support our diverse, middle class communities.
Join local elected, faith and civic leaders from across Pennsylvania
·
Reduce our local
property tax burdens
·
Invest in our schools
·
Redevelop our
infrastructure while creating local jobs
·
Promote more balanced
housing markets
The event is free but you must register in advance to reserve your
seat. Register at www.buildingonepa.org or by emailing name, title,
organizational affiliation, address, phone and email to info@buildingonepa.org. To defray the cost of the
event, we are accepting donations. Suggested donation: $5-$10.
2012 PASA-PSBA
School
Registration is Now Open! Hershey Lodge & Convention Center, Hershey, PA
www.psba.org/workshops/school-leadership-conference/
Registration is Now Open! Hershey Lodge & Convention Center, Hershey, PA
www.psba.org/workshops/school-leadership-conference/
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