In giving a C, Mitt Romney’s French teacher noted a “false sense of knowledge.” (HuffPo via Russo)
An Upper East Side private school put out a press release backing NCLB waivers. (Digital Journal)
Brooklyn teacher Ryan Hall (see his class here) says eighth-graders can see algebra’s value. (HuffPo)
Mike Petrilli renounces his belief that the government shouldn’t subsidize PBS: It’s too good! (Ed Next)
A satirical police alert was filed after prolific Diane Ravitch didn’t tweet for 45 minutes. (Students Last)
A student who says her school is unsafe and too easy is told that transferring will be hard. (Insideschools)
Aaron Pallas draws contrasts between his retention research and TNTP’s. (GS Community/Hechinger)
A UFT chapter leader urges his colleagues to conduct their own surveys of teachers. (Labor Lessons)
A teacher recognizes his own history teacher’s excellence and worries about others like him. (Yo Mista)
A national office faults the way districts coordinate special education services after high school. (HuffPo)
Principals who lobbied against New York’s teacher eval law say getting heard is tough. (Answer Sheet)
The nation’s report card will include more contextual details about students’ lives. (Curriculum Matters)
Gotham Reader
Yo Mista – this is a good writer. Who is this guy?
Philip Nobile
Congrats to Chapter Leader John Elfrank-Dana for initiating an independent staff survey at Murray Bergtraum. I did the same when I was chapter leader at the Cobble Hill School of American Studies in 2007 when our incompetent principal Ken Cuthbert refused to meet with the faculty to discuss issues in the building. Our survey, structured like Dana’s, was most unflattering to Cuthbert’s leadership. As a consequence, he declined to meet with the Chapter Committee and me for the entire second semester. I grieved his breach of contract and won. But the nastiness lingered on. Three times he threw me out of his office when he became befuddled. A teacher who witnessed one of his meltdowns wrote it up for the record:
“The hearing of Mr. Nobile and Mr. Cuthbert was called to an early adjournment by Mr. Cuthbert when out of the blue; he declared ‘this meeting is over’. In addition, he refused to read any documents that Mr. Nobile handed him and yet wouldn’t listen when Mr. Nobile read aloud. His demeanor was uncooperative, antagonistic and could only be interpreted as hostile towards Mr. Nobile.”
Two years later Cuthbert lost his job and was kicked upstairs after Cobble Hill was put in turnaround.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.