Education News for 08-31-2012

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State Education News

  • Program eyes link between students, Chillicothe community (Chillicothe Gazette

    • Chillicothe City Schools is enlisting the help of community members this fall to bolster student performance at Mount Logan and Tiffin elementary schools…Read more...

  • High-calorie drinks limited in schools (Dayton Daily News)

    • Beverage companies decreased drink calories offered in schools by 90 percent between 2004 and 2010, according to a recent study, a strategy industry and school officials…Read more...

Local Education News

  • Stow school board member sues peers, district treasurer (Akron Beacon Journal)

    • A Stow-Munroe Falls Board of Education member has sued the rest of the board and the district’s treasurer…Read more...

  • Perry classroom addresses needs of children with autism (Canton Repository)

    • Elementary school is all about exploration. It’s about discovering the world and its shapes, colors, sounds and numbers…Read more...

  • Being bullied is no joke, students told (Findlay Courier)

    • The message was clear: Something you may find funny may forever damage another person's view of themselves…Read more...

Editorial

  • Planned budget cuts harm at-risk youth (Cincinnati Enquirer)

    • There is a lot of talk in our nation’s capital about the pending sequestration of nondefense discretionary programs…Read more...

RNC Convention Final Day - Upstaged!

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On education related issues, the final day of the RNC convention featured Jeb Bush, former Florida Governor and brother of former President George W. Bush. His speech centered on the issue of education, and if you're not a fan of corporate education reform, you probably didn't like what he had to say. The Washington Post reported it thusly

Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush said pretty much what you’d expect him to say about education reform at the GOP convention — schools are failing and teachers unions are bad —
[...]
Here are some other things Bush said in his speech — and things he didn’t say:

* Insisting that American schools are failing, he threw out statistics such as: “Of 34 advanced nations in the world, American students rank 17th in science, 25th in math.” But he didn’t note that Americans have always ranked ranked at best average in international rankings.

* “China and India produce eight times more engineering students each year than the United States,” Bush said, without noting, as my colleague Jay Mathews did in this blog post, that “we are light-years ahead of them in providing instruction and opportunity for every child who wants to go to college or adopt a useful trade.”

* Teachers unions are super powerful and their supporters are “masters of delay and deferral,” he said, without mentioning that the unions have lost so much political power that they have been unable to stop the implementation in a number of states of unfair teacher evaluation systems that link teachers’ pay to student standardized test scores. Bush’s implication that teachers unions are stopping academic progress ignores the fact that the problems that ail urban schools are the same in union states as they are in non-union states.

* Bush praised his own school reform program when he was governor from 1999-2007, which became known as the “Florida Miracle” and has been a model for other governors who have adopted its key tenets, which include standardized test-based accountability, charter schools, vouchers, virtual education, an end to teacher tenure, merit pay and assigning letter grades to school.

But he didn’t mention that the standardized testing regime that he pioneered, the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test, is in shambles after a succession of scandals, and that his claims of great progress in student achievement are questionable.

Of course the highlight of the evening was to be the acceptance speech by Mitt Romney, but somewhere along the line the proceedings got sidetracked and overwhelmed by a bizarre 11 minute piece of theater performed by movie legend Clint Eastwood having a conversation with an invisible President Obama, or an empty chair depending upon your perspective.

A new internet meme has been born - Eastwooding (google it, but be prepared to waste some of your day).

Romney's speech lacked any policy specifics, "Where was the policy?" wrote one Washington Post reporter. Here's the word cloud of his speech - he mentioned America, a lot

Erasure scandal now a farce

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The controversy over school attendance erasures started out life with questionable reporting, layered with supposition and innuendo and is now descending into farce.

Unable to perform their own investigation after years of oversight failure, ODE passed the investigation over to the State Auditor. Now the State Auditor is having to fire his own investigative staff.

State Auditor Dave Yost warned Columbus schools leaders a month ago that contacting the district’s internal auditor as she investigates claims of data rigging could have serious consequences.

Yesterday, a member of Yost’s own staff resigned after he failed to take his boss’s advice. John Davis, who also volunteers as a member of the school district’s audit committee, urged the school district’s internal auditor, Carolyn Smith, to speak with an attorney for the school board who has been meeting with district officials to ask about data rigging.

This comes just days after William Zelei, Associate Superintendent of Accountability and Quality Schools at ODE, submitted his letter of resignation.

It seems more heads are rolling among the investigators than the investigated. The one person from a district that has been fired, the Superintendent of Lockland, is now filing a law suit

Former Lockland Schools Superintendent Donna Hubbard and her son, Adam Stewart, Wednesday sued to keep their jobs, alleging the school board last week violated Ohio’s Open Meetings laws.

The lawsuits are the latest salvo in a battle between Hubbard and Lockland, one of the smallest school districts in Ohio with about 700 students.

The school board Aug. 23 voted 3-to-1 to begin the termination process for Hubbard after a state investigation found she and Stewart, the district’s database coordinator, falsely listed 37 habitually truant students as withdrawn from the district.

This entire scandal has nothing to do with educating students, it has everything to do with corporate education reform policies that require increasing large amounts of data with which to slice and dice. Not one bit of any of this will have any impact on what is going on in thousands of classrooms across Ohio right now - but it sure makes good theater.

RNC Convention Day 2 - chock full of misstatements

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Day 2 of the RNC convention saw the introduction of Mitt Romney's running mate, Rep. Paul Ryan, a life long public employee.

One reader described his speech as "chock full of misstatements" - something many major media outlets also noticed.

Indeed, there were so many whoppers, it is now being parodied - Ryan Launches Campaign Theme of Lying About Everything

As for Presidential nominee Mitt Romney, he said he was working “around the clock” to add additional lies to his speech tonight: “I’m no Paul Ryan, but, darn it, I’m going to do my best.”

Here's the word cloud from Paul Ryan's speech

Education News for 08-30-2012

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State Education News

  • Lax sex ed lets fallacies flourish (Columbus Dispatch)

    • Plenty of Americans thought Missouri Rep. Todd Akin was out of line, wrong and maybe even a little nutty when he said that a woman’s body has a way of preventing pregnancy in cases of “legitimate” rape...Read more...

  • Attendance scandal claims a casualty (Columbus Dispatch)

    • State Auditor Dave Yost warned Columbus schools leaders a month ago that contacting the district’s internal auditor as she investigates claims of data rigging could have serious consequences...Read more...

  • Hathorn predicts improvements in Youngstown schools (Youngstown Vindicator)

    • Although the release of the state report cards is weeks away, city schools Superintendent Connie Hathorn expects it to show improvement...Read more...

Local Education News

  • Bay Village school district sees health insurance premium hike (Cleveland Plain Dealer)

    • Health and prescription insurance premiums for school district employees will increase by more than 9 percent beginning...Read more...

  • Man challenges effort to roll back school tax (Columbus Dispatch)

    • Gene Hollins says he has friends on both sides of the ballot issue that aims to repeal part of a property tax for the Westerville school district...Read more...

  • Crawford County partnership links education, economic development (Mansfield News Journal)

    • Adding the word education isn't just a change in semantics for a local group...Read more...

  • Lakewood teachers to receive base pay raises (Newark Advocate)

    • For the first time since the 2009-10 school year, Lakewood teachers will receive a base pay raise...Read more...

  • Preschool programs return to Southwest Licking (Newark Advocate)

    • At this time last school year, the classrooms inside Southwest Licking's former kindergarten center were empty and quiet, but that no longer is the case...Read more...

  • Parents Threaten To Take School District Back To Court Over Busing Issues (WBNS)

    • Parents were threatening to take a school district back to court over whether their children should be bused to private schools...Read more...

  • Willoughby-Eastlake Schools to bring new technology into the classrooms (Willoughby News Herald)

    • The Willoughby-Eastlake School District is preparing to train 200 teachers as it moves to bring in newer technology in the classroom...Read more...

Education News for 08-29-2012

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State Education News

  • New K-12 standards bring change to teacher colleges too (Cincinnati Enquirer)

    • New “Common Core” curriculum standards coming to Ohio and 44 other states next year won’t just impact kids. Aspiring teachers – and the colleges that train them...Read more...

  • Columbus school board talks ethics in secret (Columbus Dispatch)

    • In the middle of a state investigation into data rigging, the Columbus school board spent more than three hours behind closed doors last night, talking about ethics and meeting with private attorneys...Read more...

  • Riverside School District receiving ODOT grant (Willoughby News Herald)

    • The Riverside Local School District has been awarded $491,000 from the Ohio Department of Transportation for several projects related to safety. The funds will go toward the district's action plan...Read more...

  • Success will continue to drive Youngstown district (Youngstown Vindicator)

    • City schools Superintendent Connie Hathorn says student success will continue to drive the school district. “... Everything we do, every program we offer, every decision we make” is based on student success...Read more...

Local Education News

  • Cleveland kindergartner assigned to nonexistent school gets apology (Cleveland Plain Dealer)

    • Cleveland public schools CEO Eric Gordon had to make a telephone call Tuesday that no school superintendent wants to make. That's a telephone call in which you tell a parent that you're sorry for instructing her young child...Read more...

  • Elementary-school students in Upper Arlington chat with astronaut aboard the International Space (Columbus Dispatch)

    • As she pondered her greatest fear of space travel, the astronaut bobbed up and down in zero gravity, her mass of curly hair a dark halo behind her head...Read more...

  • Bus tests help Northridge schools’ plan to cut routes (Columbus Dispatch)

    • If the bus had made it to his kids’ Licking County school in 30 minutes or less, Bill Jones would have been validated...Read more...

  • Young professionals to mentor high school students (Marion Star)

    • A group of young community-minded individuals preparing to help carry the community into the future is making plans to encourage the next generation to do the same...Read more...

  • Urbana Schools offers free breakfast to all students (Springfield News-Sun)

    • For the first time, all students at Urbana City Schools this year will be eligible to receive breakfast at no cost at the beginning of each school day...Read more...