A teacher set to share space with a Success school recalls a visit from construction. (Inside Co-Location)
In a Pineapple-inspired fable, the animals didn’t eat the pundit with undigestible ideas. (Aaron Pallas)
A teacher and his colleagues worry about the ninth grade’s collective apathy. (Urban Teacher’s Ed)
“A dog that keeps digging holes … wants to be a gardener, right?” based on the ELA exam. (Gawker)
Law students have been training students at J.H.S. 22 about Fourth Amendment rights. (SchoolBook)
The national teacher of the year is a seventh-grade English teacher from California. (Huffington Post)
The promise and problems with Common Core implementation get a wave of press attention. (EdWeek)
Winawer
It seems to me that the Rashid Davis pieces on Schoolbook are simply attempts to curry favor with the Bloomberg/Walcott admin. You want testing, I give you even more testing! He compares his results to District 17….but his school is widely open to all Brooklyn residents….phony comparison. Only 4% of his students scored above an 85 on the Math Regents! Are those results that allow him to write with some authority? Why are you giving Regents on material that hasn’t been taught? He thinks he is teaching ‘resiliency”.
Clay
Gotta love the Sisulu-Walker charter school article…
“the official wrote in an e-mail. “The UFT is looking for a scapegoat but our history and the facts dispel their BS.””
Stay classy charter school leaders!
Michael M. (parent still)
Still waiting for a pineapple-inspired fable about co-locations, a rigged race for space, etc…
Larry Littlefield
“Philadelphia public schools is not the School District,” Chief Recovery Officer Thomas Knudsen told a handful of reporters at yesterday’s press conference laying out the five-year plan proposed to the School Reform Commission. “There’s a redefinition, and we’ll get to that later.” He got to it: talk about “modernization,” “right-sizing,” “entrepreneurialism” and “competition.”
Hmmm, so there are big tax cuts going on in Pennsylvania and the City of Philadelphia? Wrong. There is a disaster caused by debts, past pension underfunding, and retroactive pension enhancements for the city and state. But no one is saying that’s why the schools are being cut.
How bad is it? According to an analysis by indepedent actuary John Bury, Philadelphia’s pension system is more underfunded relative to its benefit promises as…wait for it… the New York City pension system.
Per Bury “Defined Benefit plans covering city employees in Detroit, Chicago, and Philadelphia are on schedule to go broke within this decade. Using hard numbers from available valuation reports on 25 plans in 17 of the largest US cities and consistent with the methodology used in our previous study of state plans we conservatively calculate a funded ratio for these plans of 64.46% with 9.63% of assets being paid out annually. Among the highlights: Philadelphia is paying out over 20% of it’s money annually forcing contributions to rise near that level to put off projected bankruptcy until 2018. New York City’s plans go bankrupt in 2023. Plans in El Paso, San Antonio, Dallas Police & Fire and, surprisingly, Washington, DC are adequately funded, for now. Chicago plans, across the board, will run out of money by 2019.”
New York State ‘s pension funds, which cover local government workers elsewhere in the state, are also relatively well funded.
Larry Littlefield
You know, there are all these “innvoations” and “reinventing.” They just can’t come out and say “sorry kids (and future teachers and in some places future retirees), you’re screwed.”
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