Antonio Villaraigosa: Collaboration and Innovation at the LAUSD

Report Highlights SC Education Overfunding
Add another report to the growing stack of data showing that public education funding in South Carolina didn’t miss a beat heading into (or during) the recent Recession … and has in fact continued to expand far beyond Inflation and the state’s growth in enrollment. A new white paper released on Friday by the South Carolinians for Responsible Goverment (SCRG) Foundation painstakingly breaks down more than a decade of education funding increases in the Palmetto state - expa...

Progress in the wrong direction
OVER at the American Prospect, Jamelle Bouie discusses a change in education policy that hits rather close to home. North Carolina's Wake County, home to the state capital city of Raleigh, has long had in place a rather ambitious policy of school integration. It's one with which I grew very familiar during my years attending Wake County Public Schools. I attended a neighbourhood Primary School in the county's very white northern suburbs, to which a number of minority Students were bussed in from...

Tea party-backed school board abolishes integreation policy
Some of the best and most diverse schools in Raleigh, NC are in the poorest sections of the city while its suburban schools include Children whose parents cannot afford a house in the neighborhood. The Washington Post says a new majority-Republican School Board backed by national Tea Party Conservatives has abolished the policy pledging to "say no to the social engineers!" Instead, the board is moving toward a system that requires Students to attend schools where they live and, says The Post , "...

Reversing course on integration
REVERSING COURSE ON INTEGRATION.... When far-right education officials aren't trying to remove minority communities from history textbooks, they're abolishing successful integration policies. The sprawling Wake County School District has long been a rarity. Some of its best, most diverse schools are in the poorest sections of [Raleigh]. And its suburban schools, rather than being exclusive enclaves, include Children whose parents cannot afford a house in the neighborhood. But over the past ye...

Frederick County hires firm to find superintendent
The Frederick County Board of Education has chosen a firm to search for a new Public Schools superintendent. The board voted this week to hire Hazard, Young, Attea and Associates, a large executive search firm serving public School Districts, at a cost of $25,000 plus expenses. Current Superintendent Linda Burgee is retiring on July 1 from the post she has held since 2004. School Board President Brad Young says the board will meet Monday to begin mapping out the selection process. Cell phone lea...

Tea Party Plans Will Foster Intolerance in NC Schools
Tea Party Plans Will Foster Intolerance in NC Schools Wednesday, 01/12/2011 - 4:16 pm by Lynn Parramore | Post a Comment Why the quality of education and diversity are inextricably mixed. Wake County, North Carolina, is a place people like to live. People with ideas and energy. Folks from vastly different backgrounds. One of the most educated regions of the country, it boasts an excellent Public School system where you can find superb schools in poor neighborhoods, and suburban schools where...

Parents Not Laughing At Chancellor Cathie Black's Birth Control Quip About School Overcrowding
NYC Schools Chancellor Cathie Black joked at a meeting yesterday that there's a solution to overcrowding in Lower Manhattan: "Birth Control." Some parents aren't laughing about packed classrooms, report our Monahan and Lisberg: "Could we just have some birth control for a while?" Black said. "It would really help us." Black earned chuckles for the joke at an overcrowding Task Force meeting, but downtown parents say the growing population of youngsters is no...

Police respond to San Diego school after threat
There was no immediate indication that shots had been fired at Helix High School in the San Diego suburb of La Mesa. A suspect was taken into Custody, said Doug Tyler, a receptionist at the Grossmont Union High School District. Tyler offered no further details. "A threat to the campus of a possible shooting was phoned in. Students are in secure campus mode while police investigate the potential threat," The La Mesa Police Department said in a statement posted on its website. A statement on the ...

21st Century Segregation: Inverting King's Dream
In "Final Words of Advice" from 1967, King asserted directly: "I am now convinced that the simplest approach will prove to be the most effective--the solution to Poverty is to abolish it directly by a now widely discussed measure: the guaranteed income. . . . We are likely to find that the problems of housing and education, instead of preceding the elimination of poverty, will themselves be affected if Poverty is first abolished." In the past forty years, the evidence is overwhelming that Ki...

A greener Crossroads school is sprouting in Norfolk
NORFOLK Construction of a new school kicked off Wednesday in the old Crossroads Elementary, built when World War II was still a current event. "Today, we are demonstrating our determination as a School Board and a city to provide state-of-the-art facilities to support our aspirations for Student achievement," board Chairman Kirk Houston told about 100 parents, staff and officials. Superintendent Richard Bentley said earlier that the existing Crossroads is so old, it is "beyond the...

Educators, lawmakers do math on Deal plan
Educators were sifting though Gov. Nathan Deal’s Budget Thursday and wondering how the numbers add up to no more unpaid Furloughs or school-day cuts for Georgia Public Schools. Ga. Politics news, helpful links PolitiFact Georgia » New Georgia Encyclopedia: Georgia lawmakers fuel up for the session by feasting on "wild" hogs. Deal pledged in his first combined State of the State and Budget address Wednesday to make k-12 a top priority, in part by ending teacher Furloughs a...

Officials remove error-filled textbook
Published: Jan. 13, 2011 at 9:17 AM A statement released by Five Ponds Press Publisher, Lou Scolnik, states, "During our initial review, we have found that many of the issues identified by the Department of Education's reviewers were corrected before we printed the First Editions and do not appear in the books Students are currently using. Additionally, many of the reviewers took issue with the scope and content of the Virginia Standards of Learning, which our books adhere to, and are not techni...

94 principals honored for students' performance
Principals from 94 schools in the Philadelphia School District were presented with Keystone Achievement Awards from the State Department of Education on Thursday for meeting academic benchmarks under the federal No Child Left Behind Law for two years in a row. The blue-and-gold, keystone-shaped placards were presented before a regularly scheduled citywide principals' meeting at the Arts Academy at Benjamin Rush School in the Far Northeast. The awards, which are based on Students' performance on ...

School Hands Out Misdemeanor Tickets To Elementary School Students...
School lockers at a High School in Houston, Texas. (credit: AP) Dallas (CBSDFW.COM) - Court has become a deterrent instead of detention for some North Texas Students. The social and economic group Texas Appleseed collected five years worth of data from 22 districts across the state and found young students, including a six year old in Dallas, who received class C Misdemeanor tickets for things like disrupting class, leaving school early and school yard brawls that didn’t include weap...

Best and Brightest Teachers Key to Solving U.S. Education Crisis
Why is it that the education of our Children has become such a national challenge? How could America rank in the bottom third among developed nations in terms of Student performance, yet we spend more per capita than virtually any other nation? How is it that U.S. fourth graders rank in the 80th percentile globally in science (that is, the top 20 percent), yet by the time they reach the 12th grade, they have dropped to the 5th percentile, while only half of our High School students are at an e...

Best and Brightest Teachers Key to Solving U.S. Education Crisis
Why is it that the education of our Children has become such a national challenge? How could America rank in the bottom third among developed nations in terms of Student performance, yet we spend more per capita than virtually any other nation? How is it that U.S. fourth graders rank in the 80th percentile globally in science (that is, the top 20 percent), yet by the time they reach the 12th grade, they have dropped to the 5th percentile, while only half of our High School students are at an e...

Greenville Co. Schools Announces Makeup Days
GREENVILLE, S.C. -- School officials in Greenville County announced dates Friday when Students will make up time missed because of winter weather. The district said that Students have missed five days so far this school year because of snow and ice. Four happened this week and the other happened on Dec. 16, when ice coated many roadways in Greenville County. Officials said that Students will use three snow days already built into the school calendar, April 1 and 4 and June 2, to make up some of ...

Cathie Black's Solution to School Overcrowding: 'Birth-Control'
Whoops! It took only two weeks for new schools chief Cathie Black to make her first gaffe and have parents howling. As Rachel Monahan in the Daily News reports, at a task force on school overcrowding Thursday night, Black had a novel solution to the problem of too many Students that is plaguing city schools. "Could we just have some Birth Control for a while?" she said "It would really help us." As DNA.info pointed out, Lower Manhattan—where the meeting was held—will need another ...

UC Merced enrollment at all-time high
The University of California, Merced, on Friday reported a record number of Student applications for admission to its campus this fall. Total undergraduate applications for fall 2011 admission increased about 11 percent from the prior year to 13,701, while freshman applications were up about 9 percent to 11,532. Meanwhile, UC reported, applications from students hoping to transfer to UC Merced increased more than 22 percent to 2,169. UC Merced opened in September 2005. UC Merced’s growth r...

How is 2011 faring so far? Ethnic studies and the 14th amendment
At this moment it is very hard to focus on anything but the tragic incident that marked the beginning of this year when a man in Tucson, Arizona opened fire on a public meeting killing 6 people and gravely injuring 14 others last Saturday. While this tragedy cannot be undone, there are a number of issues around which we can hope for some positive developments in 2011. In Arizona, the first week of 2011 saw all classes in the Tucson Unified School District’s Mexican-American Ethnic Studies ...

Ohio teacher fired for teaching creationism
Mt. Vernon, OH - The little town of Mount Vernon, about 3 hours south west of Youngstown, is in the news again, this time relating to a Public School Controversy. Mount Vernon made the news in November as the city where Tina Herrmann, her son Kody Maynard and neighbor Stephanie Sprang were murdered and dismembered and Herrmann's daughter was kidnapped by former Bazetta resident Matthew Hoffman. An eighth grade science teacher at Mount Vernon Middle School has been fired for teaching Creationism ...

Conservative Raleigh Area School Board Abolishes Desegregation Practices
An educational movement is underway in the School District of North Carolina’s capital that will redefine how the region has educated its Children. The Wake County Public School System is in turmoil because of new policies set forth by its nine-member conservative board.  The Tea Party-backed group has eliminated the district’s integration policy in favor of a more “community-based” learning system.  The idea is to shift the School District away from an economic...

Hello Tom Horne, I Am Your Worst Nightmare
Yesterday I got stuck on a photo from a new Tumblr I heard about, Fuck Yeah API History. (You can explore the meme here.) It's a new blog on the block that's just black and white photos of Asian and Pacific Islander Americans doing their thing. One photo in particular from the site, of a Sikh parade in Stockton, California, made me pause. Sikhs have a long history in the region--the first gurdwara in North America was built in Stockton in 1912. But on May 11, 1945, Sikh men in turbans and beards...

The True Cost of Polygamy
Mainstream Mormons (also known as Latter Day Saints) denounced Polygamy officially in 1890 but members of fundamentalist sects of Mormonism (Fundamentalist Latter Day Saints) are doing all they can to make this “alternative lifestyle” acceptable. Using the freedom of religion clause from the 1st amendment, adherents say plural marriage is their right. One such community (of many spread throughout the western United States, Mexico and Canada) is Colorado City, AZ. There, the first am...

Revenge
My new cellphone -- with a new number -- has been deluged by Robocalls.  So this story about a weary dad in the Washington, DC, area was a pleasure to read.  Aaron Titus, his wife, his five Children (including a newborn) were all sound asleep at 4:30 a.m. when a robocall woke them up.  It was from the local School District notifying parents about a later school opening on a Snow Day. ... Sometime later in the day, the 31-year-old father from Fort Washington, a lawyer who know...