Wednesday Schools’ Roundup – Admission Possible expands / St Paul gets stimulus $ / Braised Artichokes

• Admission Possible expands into North Metro suburbs.  AP is an college-prep organization that works in schools to get low-income students ready for college, and guides them through the admissions process. (Star-Tribune)
•  The St Paul Public Schools’ Board of Education gets an update on how they can spend federal stimulus dollars.  The district expects to receive $29 million, but because of strings attached to the funding, it will not prevent layoffs planned to close the district’s $25 million budget shortfall, caused by declining enrollment, which reduces the amount of aid a school district receives from the state. (Pioneer Press)
• Secretary of Education Arne Duncan talks more about how he’d like to see schools spend the stimulus money. (Education Week)
• Remember the Pioneer Press’ recent series on how hyper-competitive school sports have become?  The Star-Tribune has a piece on the pricey “spring training” trips to Florida taken by some high school sports teams. (Star-Tribune)
• Tom Doher of Education Minnesota (the state teacher’s union) doesn’t like the Senate’s education budget. As a matter of fact, he doesn’t really like any of the big three budget proposals – from the House, Senate, and Governor – circulating around the State House.  He also doesn’t really answer Cathy Wurzer’s questions (and she doesn’t press him further) about why districts can’t use their reserves to make up payment shifts, and how he proposes to close the education budget gap.  He definitely does not like Q-Comp, though, and argues that it will increase inequity in the classroom, and between districts.  Look for more on this, later. (MPR)

I think I’ll have to try to make this recipe: artichokes braised in lemon and olive oil.  One of my favorite foods as a kid was Artichokes boiled with peppercorns, and served with a mustard-herb vinaigrette, so maybe I’m biased, but my mouth watered when I read that post!

Filed under: Minneapolis, Minnesota, National, St Paul, Admission Possible, Arne Duncan, Education, Education Funding, Food, School Sports, Stimulating Stimuli, Tom Doher

Thursday’s Schools Roundup — Education Budget Battles / Ban Candy Cigarettes / Lakeville Magnets

 

Flickr/ingirogio

Happy Thursday?  Mostly budget news today: 

 

• “Budget work is starting in earnest,” says MPR as the state Senate and House square off over their respective education budgets.  The Senate leadership fully pulled the wraps off its proposal yesterday, with a net cut of around 3% — 7% cut across the board, with a little over 3% restored by federal stimulus money.  The House leadership isn’t too happy. (MPR/St Paul Legal Ledger)
• MTN has video of one of the Minneapolis schools forums on how the district might restructure opperations to close their budget deficit. (MTN, via TC Daily Planet)
• St Paul teens organize and advocate to end the sale of candy cigarettes in the city.
• Lastly, I forgot to include this development in yesterday’s item about suburban segregation.  Plans are moving ahead in Lakeville to establish magnet programs that would draw minority students from around Lakeville and from neighboring districts to create more integrated schools.

Today’s recipe: My obsessoin with kale continues: Kale, Butternut Squash, and Pancetta Pie!

Filed under: Minneapolis, Minnesota, National, St Paul, Achievement Gap, Arne Duncan, Education, Education Funding, Minneapolis Public Schools, Minnesota, News, Restructuring, Segregation, St Paul, Stimulating Stimuli

Wednesday’s Schools Roundup — Minorities in Suburbia / Budget Woes / Finally, Stimulus News!

Last month’s fight around the West Metro Education Program centered around issues of segregation in suburban districts.  Now the Pew Hispanic Center has a report out, giving a national overview of the increase in the suburbs’ minority population.  However, the researchers note that most minority students attend schools that are majority non-white — like cities, the suburbs are segregating.  Unfortunately, the report doesn’t go into the economic demographics of the trend.

Filed under: Minneapolis, Minnesota, National, St Paul, Achievement Gap, Arne Duncan, Budget Crisis, Education, Education Funding, Minneapolis Public Schools, News, Segregation, St Paul Public Schools, Stimulating Stimuli

A puffed pastry filled with Friday Roundup!

(Quick Puffed Pastry Recipe Follows)

According to a Greek friend of mine from high school, whose mother aunt is a professor on Crete, the most under-reported story of last year’s riots was the complete and utter failure of education reform. (Ekathemerini)

As we all know, you can’t have a Gay-Straight Alliance in a school because it’s “disruptive.” Saying the word “gay” causes conservative heads to explode. (AP)
Joel Klein vs. Michael Bloomberg – Gotham school showdown! (NYTimes)

School bus driver tries to crowd-source passenger management (Loudon Extra)

Arne Duncan has hit the pavement, plugging the stimulus package. According to an interview with the Washington Post, it will “help retool” education in America. We shall see. Reading the WaPo story and listening to Duncan on WBUR-Boston’s On Point radio show (shout out to my home town!), I didn’t hear much in the way of hard-and-fast restrictions on aid.

After speaking with a spokesperson from the Minnesota Department of Education last week, I gather there’s going to be a significant amount of “maintenance of effort” requirements – that is, states won’t be able to shift funds from education to cover holes in other parts of the budget, and replace the cut funding with stimulus dollars. And the money is targeted at a number of broad areas, including teacher quality. But it seems that it will be up to individual states and school districts to pick programs, etc. Possibly good, but I haven’t seen anything about how recipients will have to justify their expenditures with hard data. We shall see.

One interesting question – will the stimulus, via the current NCLB regimen, cement “20th century learning?” Would technology help create a better evaluation system? (Speaking of which – so-called 21st century skills like problem-solving, etc. have taken a bit of flack this week) (NPR’s The Takeaway/Marion Barry/EdWeek/Joanne Jacobs)

For those of us with mild procrastination problems (notice I didn’t post this until 3pm today?), a quick puff pastry recipe – unlike traditional scratch recipes, this apparently can be made in an afternoon while trying to avoid assigned reading. Behold, Law Student’s Puff Pastry! (The Basil Queen / Public Radio Kitchen)

Filed under: Announcements, Arne Duncan, Education Funding, Education Reform, News

Krazy for Kale — It’s the Friday Round-up!

After a two-week hiatus, the Friday round-up returns, full of health promoting, sulfur-containing phytonutrients. 

- Firing the newest-hired teachers in a budget crunch (as Minneapolis does) is not good for business.  (Ed Week, 2/17/09)  Doug Mann (and his 2008 last-place finish) is vindicated…

- It’s echoes of Minneapolis’ Fresh Starts as St Paul Public Schools restructures Arlington High, and Humboldt Junior and Senior High Schools — 46 re-assigned teachers say they were imperiously re-assigned, and want more input.   The three schools have persistentnly failed to meet Federal student performance benchmarks under the No Child Left Behind law, which mandates their restructuring.  (Pioneer Press, 2/18/09)

- The Stimulus floods the federal Dept. of Ed with money.  ”What’s this strange stuff?” they ask.  (NYTimes, 2/16/09)

…Amy Wilkins, who as vice president at the Education Trust, a civil rights group, has studied the budgets of several of Mr. Duncan’s predecessors. “Margaret [Spellings, the previous Secretary of Education] was looking for quarters in her pencil drawer.”

Some nitty-gritty deets here and here.

- Obama and Duncan want the stimulus to “transform the Federal role in education” (AP, 2/17/09)

- Gov. Pawlenty’s -er- controversial teacher pay-for-performance scheme  works for us, says Marshal, MN super (Marshall Independent, 2/13/09)

- “The budget boondoggle” at the U of M, MnSCU (MN Daily, 2/18/09)

- Why Americans love peanut butter. (Slate, 2/9/09)

- And lastly, Some Tasty Kale Recipies.

Filed under: Announcements, Minneapolis, Minnesota, National, St Paul, Arne Duncan, Fresh Start, Minneapolis Public Schools, Minnesota, National Issues, News, Peanut Butter, Q Comp, Stimulating Stimuli, Teacher Quality

OJT for teachers? No problemo! — US Dept. of Ed.

Photo: Flickr/user "Wappas"

It’s good news for Teach For America’s plans to move into Minneapolis: A new study commissioned by the US Department of Education argues that teachers who are still completing their teaching credentials while they teach aren’t any better or any worse than teachers who follow the traditional route of completing their coursework before stepping into a classroom.  In the past, TFA and other groups have raised eyebrows – and attracted significant criticism from the likes of the Obama campaign’s top education advisor, Linda Darling-Hammond – by putting their teachers on the front lines after relatively minimal training.

Filed under: Minneapolis, National, Achievement Gap, Arne Duncan, Education, Education Policy, Education Reform, Minneapolis, Minneapolis Public Schools, National Issues, News, Race, Teach for America, Teacher Quality

Friday national news round-up

 

The caption contest is still open!  Come up with a better title for the Friday national education news round-up than, well, the Friday national education news round-up.  The prize is my gratitude, and perhaps your name in the title, if you can find a clever way to work it in.

The Round-up

• San Diego teachers, schools argue about teacher quality 
• Don’t eat the peanut butter!
• St Paul faces a $25 million deficit — expect layoffs, the board is told
• Education Week (sign-in required) on the future of ELL education
• T-Paw suggests an increase in education funding — if schools sign onto his pet program that some have criticized in the past as a union-busting measure
• The Washington Post has the transcript of Education Secretary Arne Duncan’s confirmation hearing
• National Public Radio’s education podcast

In local news, a memorial service will be held at 2pm at St Paul’s Como Park Pavillion for Kathy Kinzig, the much-beloved founder of EcoEducation who died in December after a long battle with bone cancer.  She was 43. 

From the announcement:

“Kathy was the person who figured out that kids didn’t need to go into the woods to learn about the environment — it’s in your own back yard.  The Urban environment’s flora and fauna include workers, residents, business, colleges, dogs and cats, boulevard trees and weeds asserting themselves through the cracks in the sidewalk, which all leave their mark on the health and well being of the city’s eco system.

“Eco Ed serves students and teachers in grades 5-12 at about 14 public and charter schools in the two cities, with a waiting list as long as your arm.  It provides a couple of curriculums which can be taught across disciplines, or through social studies, science and humanities classes, called “City Connections” and “Urban Stewards.”  The programs teach kids how to identify problems they want to solve in their communities and then gives them the tools (through community resource volunteers, buses, equipment, materials) to go forth and make change.  Kids even do grantwriting and make presentations to Eco Ed staff to make their case for additional dollars. “

Filed under: Announcements, National, Arne Duncan, Budget Crisis, Education, Education Funding, ELL, Minnesota, National Issues, Secretary of Education, Teacher Quality, Tim Pawlenty

Arne Duncan, Secretary of Education

A day late in posting this, but Arne Duncan has been “warmly recieved” by the Senate.  

“Duncan promised to aggressively pursue Obama’s agenda: expanding preschool, making college more accessible and affordable, finding new ways to prepare teachers and helping overhaul the 2002 No Child Left Behind law.

‘We must do dramatically better. We must continue to innovate,’ Duncan said. ‘We must build upon what works. We must stop doing what doesn’t work. And we have to continue to challenge the status quo.’”

 

Some alternative opinions on Duncan here:

http://www.catalyst-chicago.org/RUSSO/index.php/entry/1429/Duncan_Pros_and_Cons

http://www.democracynow.org/2008/12/18/duncan

http://www.counterpunch.org/libby12292008.html

 

And some advice for Duncan, via the Washington Post

Filed under: National, Arne Duncan, Education, Education Policy, National Issues, Secretary of Education

Yeah yeah yeah…

So Arne Duncan, Superintendent of Chicago Public Schools, has been named the next Secretary of Education. It’s really a draw for either side in the education reform wars, though — Duncan has signed on to both major reform platforms, and has a history of walking a middle road between the Michelle Rhee/Joel Klein camp and the Laura Darling-Hammond camp — decent relations with the Chicago teacher’s union, but has still pushed hard for teacher accountability and the like. As The American Prospect’s blog points out, the thing to watch will be who is Under-Secretaries are.

Filed under: National, Arne Duncan, Education, Education Policy, Education Reform, Federal Education Policy, Secretary of Education