Fred Klonsky’s PREA Prez Blog

Archive for October, 2007

24 hours and nothing to say.

Posted by: preaprez on: 24 Oct, 2007

It has been 24 hours and he literally had nothing to say. And Joe Williams seems to have run out of things to say as well. This is what he wants to criticize Obama about?

Look closely at the data.

Posted by: preaprez on: 24 Oct, 2007

If you haven’t been following my brother Mike’s dissection on his Small Talk blog of the Policy Studies Associates assessment of NY’s New Vision schools, you’re missing a course in Data Analysis 101.

Ah, Texas again!

Posted by: preaprez on: 24 Oct, 2007

What is it about the state of Texas? They gave us George Bush, Rod (”teachers are terrorists”) Paige and Maggie (”NCLB is 99% working”) Spellings. They fired an art teacher because she took her class to the Dallas art museum where they saw sculpture with breasts. And now this, from the Chicago Tribune:
Kaleb Tierce, 25, [...]

Pay for performance. Against myopia.

Posted by: preaprez on: 23 Oct, 2007

I have been wary of knee-jerk opposition to taking a new look at the way teacher salary schedules are created.
Much like the one-size-fits-all arguments against charter schools, I can’t see how this does teachers any good.
The traditional step-and-lane structure was here when most of us got here. There were good reasons for the way [...]

Bush would send kids’ health care money to Iraq.

Posted by: preaprez on: 23 Oct, 2007

A week after Bush vetoed the funding of children’s health care insurance, he asked Congress for $46 billion to fund the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and finance a possible Iran invasion
The figure, about nine billion more than the cost of the bill he vetoed, a veto that was later upheld by Cngresss, brings [...]

Nippersink in, Earlville out.

Posted by: preaprez on: 23 Oct, 2007

Classes have resumed in Richmond, Illinois. Teachers are on strike in Earlville.
Students and school employees returned to their Richmond schools Monday after a tentative agreement ending a strike was reached over the weekend.
Members of the Earlville Teachers Association started walking the picket lines Friday morning, as Thursday night negotiations with the Earlville Community Unit District [...]

Quote of the week.

Posted by: preaprez on: 21 Oct, 2007

If the Republican presidential candidates go any farther right, they’ll be opening their town meetings by biting the heads off squirrels.

-Gail Collins, NY Times

Rowling outs Dumbledore.

Posted by: preaprez on: 21 Oct, 2007

J.K. Rowling
What will the prudes at Safe Libraries do now? They went postal over Fat Kid Rules the World. Now they are faced with the fact that the most popular series of books for children ever features the Master Wizard who is gay.
Author J.K. Rowling spoke to readers at NY’s Carnegie Hall.
She was asked by [...]

Three over coffee.

Posted by: preaprez on: 20 Oct, 2007

Ah! Saturday morning. It’s a beautiful Fall Day in the Heartland. I’m getting a large latte and an everything bagel with chive cream cheese, onion and tomato. I deserve it. Yesterday I took 125 4th graders on the train to Chicago’s Loop and Millennium Park. The highlight, as always, was sliding down the Chicago Picasso. [...]

Tzimmes and borscht.

Posted by: preaprez on: 19 Oct, 2007

Tzimmes and borscht is a Yiddish expression expressing the idea of mixing apples and oranges. Here is a bunch of unconnected posts:
Nilaja Sun does No Child in Chicago.
A group of teachers from my school joined me and we went to see Nilaja Sun do her one-woman show, No Child. I saw it last year when [...]


 

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