EduSolution Blog

Folks, welcome to the school of the future. From Chicago News Cooperative: One of the city’s highest-performing charter school groups, the Noble Street Charter School Network, has raked in nearly $400,000 over the last two school years by fining students for disciplinary infractions, a group of Chicago Public School students and parents said this morning. The Noble Street Charter School Network collected $188,647 in fines, which it calls “fees,” during the 2010-2011 school year across the 10 high schools it operates. Since the 2008-2009 school year, the organization has collected $386,745 in detention fees and behavior classes. Noble schools charge students $5 for behavior infractions like “bringing chips to school” and “not looking a teacher in the eye,” and students with multiple infractions must pay  $140 to take a behavior-improvement course during summer school, according to information obtained by a trio of student, parent and legal advocacy groups. The findings a Read More

Thanks to Buzzfeed for this: Leading Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney said this:  “We (Americans) are the only people on Earth that put our hand over our heart during the playing of the National Anthem.”  Watch: Wow! We (Americans) are the only people on Earth that put our hand over our heart during the playing of the National Anthem. Then how do you explain this China                                 Brazil       Ghana                     Cuba                     Romney should know all of this. If I am correct, he was in charge of the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, Utah. He must have seen all those athletes putting their hands on their hearts when their national anthems were being played.   Read More

Critics of charter schools have consistently pointed out that they don’t often serve the most needy students and that they have the ability to pick and choose their students unlike public schools which cannot turn away any student who shows up at their doors. The strongest evidence of this is in this letter of resignation. Pedro Noguera, a trustee of the State University of New York, resigned late last month, citing concerns that SUNY and its Charter Schools Institute, which authorizes charters in New York, have a political agenda to increase the number of charters, rather than a mission to develop experimental schools. SchoolBook invited Mr. Noguera to explain his decision. Believing that charter schools could serve as models of “best practice” for expanding access to college and improved forms of teacher education, Noguera syas this has not been the case because “politicians in New York and Washington are far more interested in competition between public and charter s Read More

Recently I posted this about the world’s population reaching 7 billion people. Today, I came across this cool video from NPR explaining how we got here.     Then take a look at this more than cool interactive chart from the Census Bureau giving us details of the population in each state including ethic breakdown. The chart is in the middle of the screen. Click on view full screen to see it much better. Click here.  Read More

For better or worse, public education is changing. New reforms are being implemented at such a rapid pace that it is hard to keep up. Anthony Cody, a veteran teacher, does a good job in keeping us up to date. In a recent post, he looks at how new evaluation systems being implemented across the country is going to affect teachers. The post is a lengthy one but it well worth reading. I extracted below some of the more important points.  “Teachers will now pay the price – be declared successes or failures, depending on the rise or fall of their students’ test scores. Under NCLB it was schools that were declared failures. In states being granted waivers to NCLB, it is teachers who will be subjected to this ignominy. Of course we will still be required to label the bottom 5% of our schools as failures, but if the Department of Education has its way, soon every single teacher in the profession will be at risk for the label. . . According to the Wall St. Journal, as of last Read More

On a recent campaign stop, The Republican presidential candidate, Rick Santorum, told the following story: “I was in a town hall meeting in Hollis, in New Hampshire the other day, and a young man got up and started going after me, talking about the Constitutional separation of Church and state,” Santorum said. “And I asked him where it was in the Constitution, and he insisted it was in there. That’s the kind of, really, indoctrination that’s going on in our country, as to the role of faith in public life.” Of course, Santorum, like so many conseravtive Christians, does not believe in the separation  of church and state. It is true that that the actual phase “separation of church and state” does not appear in the actual text of the Constitution. But almost all constitutional scholars agree that it is implicit in the First Amendment which reads “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the Read More

In the various Republican debates so far, the candidates have been talking a lot about Iran and Israel. Juan Cole reminds us how little Americans know geography by pointing to this National Geographic-Roper Survey of Geographic Literacy which surveyed geographic knowledge of 18- to 24-year-olds across the United States. Respondents were shown a blank political map of the Middle East and asked to identify four countries: Israel, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Iran. These were the results: I’ts amazing that so many Americans support dropping bombs on Iran yet three-quarters of us do not know where to drop those bombs. We did somewhat better on Iraq; a little over one-third of Americans could locate the country on a map. This, of course, was some years after we invaded and occupied Iraq reminding one of Ambrose Bierce’s dictum that “War is God’s way of teaching Americans geography.” Cole suggests a new rule for war: If a majority of your country cannot find the enemy country Read More

Sometime ago I commented on the steady erosion of our civil liberties., particularly the 4th Amendment which protects us from illegal searches and seizures. Law professor, Johnathan Turley, writing in the Washington Post, picks up on this theme. He examines how civil liberties, since 911, have been under assualt both by the Bush and Obama administrations. More frightening, though, Professor Turley looks at ten areas in which he sees signs that call into question the very idea of America being a free country. He writes: Even as we pass judgment on countries we consider unfree, Americans remain confident that any definition of a free nation must include their own — the land of free. Yet, the laws and practices of the land should shake that confidence. In the decade since Sept. 11, 2001, this country has comprehensively reduced civil liberties in the name of an expanded security state. The most recent example of this was the National Defense Authorization Act, signed Dec. 31, wh Read More

Lisa Abdelsalam said she feels “like she swallowed poison” in the days since the threat of parental protests caused the Muslim mother and author to cancel a talk with students at A.M. Kulp Elementary School in Hatfield. “I have a such a sick feeling in my stomach,” said Abdelsalam, 48, who lives in Colmar with her husband and children, all of whom were or are North Penn students. Born in Lansdale, the 1981 North Penn High School graduate converted to Islam at 19, when she married her husband, who is from Egypt. As she has many times at many North Penn schools, she was scheduled to meet with several Kulp classes over four days earlier this month to discuss how she wrote and published her book, “A Song for Me, A Muslim Holiday Story,” based on her son Yoseph’s experiences at York Avenue Elementary in the 1990s. “A Song for Me, A Muslim Holiday Story,” has illustrations based on pictures of the York Avenue school and details a Muslim boy’s efforts to fit into the holid Read More

The Daily Show Jon Stewart had an interesting interview with Elizabeth Dowling Taylor, author of A Slave in the White House: Paul Jennings and the Madisons. The book highlights the life of Paul Jennings who was born into slavery on the plantation of James and Dolley Madison in Virginia. When Madison became the 4th President of the United States, he took Jennings to the White House as his personal slave. He was only 10 years old. Yes, it may seem hard to believe, but several of our early presidents and Founding Fathers were slave owners. Also, James Madison is remembered as the man who wrote the U.S. Constitution. In his will, Madison bequeathed all his 100 slaves to his wife. Jennings expected to be freed upon the death of Madison but Dolley refused to set him free even though Jennings had married a slave woman at a nearby plantation and had children. So Jennings’ wife and children lived on a separate plantation owned by a separate master. Jennings decided to purchase his own fr Read More