‘Data’ Is Not the Plural of ‘Anecdote’

‘Data’ Is Not the Plural of ‘Anecdote’

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"Two AEI reports predicted and then found that states and districts were simply taking about $75 billion in federal funds and using it to backfill their existing budget holes. This isn’t particularly sophisticated policymaking: States and districts had huge deficits due to the recession, the federal government (able to borrow without end despite its own deficits) gave them money via the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), and they used it to pay for what they were already doing."

you suck. But you're right

Major mood swing at our public schools

Massachusetts Charter Decisions Made to Rescue Governor from “Political Cul de Sac”

It’s a complex story out of Massachusetts with a simple payoff: The state secretary of education wants charter school authorizations to be based on political considerations, and not on their educational merits.
It begins with reporter Patrick Anderson of the Gloucester Daily Times using a public records request to find a February 5 e-mail from Secretary of Education Paul Reville, Gov. Deval Patrick’s school adviser, to Education Commissioner Mitchell Chester. Gov. Patrick, like many other governors, found religion in charter schools soon after the Obama administration made them a centerpiece of Race to the Top funding. But which charter school applications would be approved, and which rejected, seems to be less of an academic concern and more of a matter of political pressure. Here’s the full text of the e-mail:

Mitchell,
Hope all’s well and warm in AZ. I appreciated our talk today and your openness and flexibility. This situation presents one of those painful dilemmas. In addition to being a no-win situation, it forces us into a political cul de sac where we could be permanently trapped. Our reality is that we have to show some sympathy in this group of charters or we’ll get permanently labeled as hostile and they will cripple us with a number of key moderate allies like the Globe and the Boston Foundation. Frankly, I’d rather fight for the kids in the Waltham situation, but it sounds like you can’t find a solid basis for standing behind that one. I’m not inclined to push Worcester, so that leaves Gloucester. My inclination is to think that you, I and the Governor all need to send at least one positive signal in this batch, and I gather that you think the best candidate is Gloucester. Can you see your way clear to supporting it? Would you want to do the financial trigger even in light of likely stimulus aid?
Thanks for not seeing this as an independence issue. It really is a matter of positioning ourselves so that we can be viable to implement the rest of our agenda. It’s a tough but I think necessary pill to swallow. Let’s discuss some more tomorrow.
Paul

There has been plenty of editorializing about the e-mail itself, so I’ll just add a roundup of links and not add to it myself…
“Editorial: Ed chief’s e-mail kills his, secretary’s and charter’s credibility”
“A political swirl on charter schools”
“Paul Reville must resign”
“Editorial: Charter chess”
…but I’m also intrigued by the press play involved. The story was broken by a small local newspaper, in which the state newspaper of record (the Globe) is mentioned as one of Gov. Patrick’s “key moderate allies” that has to be appeased by approving the Gloucester application. Today, while others are calling for Reville’s head, the Globe published a puff piece headlined, “Seeking calm after charter school storm: Education chief focuses on reform.”
My favorite paragraph was this one:

Ironically, it was Reville who raised the alarm about the politicization of education six years ago, when Governor Mitt Romney proposed restoring the position of education secretary. Placing a gubernatorial appointee in charge of education, as well as other proposed changes, Reville told legislators, could allow political considerations to creep into decisions that should be based on the best interests of children.

Saturday, August 29, 2009

Deflation - American Style

In economics, deflation is a decrease in the general price level of goods and services.^[1] Deflation occurs when the inflation rate falls below zero percent, resulting in an increase in the real value of money – a negative inflation rate. This should not be confused with disinflation, a slow-down in the inflation rate (i.e. when the inflation decreases, but still remains positive).^[2]Inflation reduces the real value of money over time, conversely, deflation increases the real value of money. Money refers to the functional currency (mostly unstable monetary unit of account) in a national or regional economy.

Currently, mainstream economists generally believe that deflation is a problem in a modern economy because of the danger of a deflationary spiral.^[3] Deflation is also linked withrecessions and with the Great Depression. Additionally, deflation also prevents monetary policy from stabilizing the economy because of a mechanism called the liquidity trap. However, historically not all episodes of deflation correspond with periods of poor economic growth,^[4] while there are many examples of how strong rise in CPI immediately precedes or accompanies an economic downturn, such as Great Depression, the 1970-80's, and the 2008 economic crash.

Sunday, August 23, 2009

"At stake is not only union jurisdiction over hotels and casinos, but control of the only union-owned bank, the Amalgamated Bank, which had $4.47 billion in assets in 2008.[2]

Thursday, August 20, 2009

Three teachers robbed at gunpoint at a Moreno Valley elementary school

10:00 PM PDT on Wednesday, August 19, 2009

By JOHN ASBURY
The Press-Enterprise

Education officials plan to re-evaluate security procedures after a gunman stormed a teacher's lounge at a Moreno Valley elementary school early Wednesday morning and robbed three teachers.

Officials want to enhance security procedures, including adding security patrols and closing certain access points to schools, said Superintendent Rowena Lagrosa, of the Moreno Valley Unified School District.

Box Springs Elementary School Principal Sam Stager said the man entered the open-access campus at 6:50 a.m., before students arrived. The man got into the teacher's lounge from a side or rear entrance where he robbed the teachers at gunpoint, demanding their purses, Stager said.

The women gave him their purses and he ran off the campus carrying a small handgun.

No one was injured and no arrests had been made as of Wednesday evening.

Police are not sure if he ran through the neighborhood or to a waiting car on Athens Drive, which runs past the school and homes, Stager said.

Moreno Valley police officers arrived within minutes after a school custodian called them but the suspect had already fled.

The three teachers were sent home for the day; substitutes took their places. The school district's crisis management counseling team was also called to the campus, Lagrosa said.

Parents were notified of the incident through an automated call system, Lagrosa said. Students were not told of the robbery and continued their normal school day.

"It's terrifying. We're a very close-knit community and school," Lagrosa said. "We're just in disbelief that this could happen. We want this to be a safe haven for our students and staff."

The Moreno Valley Educators Association was unavailable for comment.

Moreno Valley's elementary schools have a private security firm that patrols the area after hours until 6:30 a.m. One school resource officer patrols each of the district's middle schools and each high school has a full-time Moreno Valley police officer on campus.

Reach John Asbury at 951-763-3451 or jasbury@PE.com

Posted by Praetorian at 10:48 AM 2 comments

Behind the story
• Overview of legal issues for teachers

Walk through any airport in America and the passengers know. Don't joke about bringing bombs on the plane. Enter any public school, and the students know, too. Don't talk about bringing a gun.
Schools, once thought of as the safest place for children, are no longer the impenetrable havens they once were. In an era where school shootings, beatings, rapes and campus riots have become not only reality, but for some the norm, campus safety is no joke.
Some experts say schools have become too vigilant. Others say not enough. And school officials nationwide are erring on the side of caution, taking any and all threats the only way they can seriously.
In San Bernardino, two second-grade boys at North Park Elementary School, the same school where a first-grader brought an unloaded gun to school last month, were disciplined this week for making drive-by threats despite the fact both are too young to drive.
At Victor Valley High School, a 16-year-old girl reported she was jumped by a dozen other girls this week on the way to class.
In the Coachella Valley, a 10-year-old girl was raped in the bathroom of her elementary school, an attack that has rattled school officials and caused major changes in the campus' day-to-day operations.

---

Since the tragic mass shooting at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo., in 1999 that left 15 dead and 23 wounded, schools have changed the way they view campus security.
Security cameras have gone up.
Visitors must sign in and out and wear badges.
Reports of terrorist threats, no matter how seemingly insignificant, are always investigated.
Herb Fischer, superintendent of schools for San Bernardino County, said any and all threats to student safety will be taken seriously by school officials. He also said schools are entering a new era of openness and striving to let parents know whenever dangerous or suspicious incidents occur.
"With heightened awareness of school-safety issues nationwide, I applaud them for that," Fischer said. "They are working to assure parents that our schools are being as open as possible and at the same time as cautious as possible."
A number of school safety summits sponsored by local legislators have been held in the past few months. The county Probation Office has developed a special gang-intervention plan and has made a commitment to work with all county schools, Fischer said.
Gary Underwood, police chief of the San Bernardino City Unified School District, said that since Columbine, the universal police doctrine for responding to a shooter on campus has changed.
In addition to surveillance cameras and controlling who has access to campus, stronger ties to school psychologists have been adopted in order to evaluate kids who may be troubled.
Controlling visitor access can be more difficult in Western states where schools are laid out in an open, sprawling fashion, as opposed to East Coast schools, which are typically built in one building with several levels.
Newer campuses typically have only one entry point, which is easier to police, as opposed to older schools, which may have several, Underwood said.
All threats taken seriously
Two second-grade boys at North Park Elementary School in San Bernardino were disciplined this week for making threats off-campus about a drive-by shooting, district officials said.
District spokeswoman Linda Hill confirmed the students were disciplined but would not elaborate, citing student privacy laws.
"We want our parents to know the district takes any threat to students' safety seriously," Hill said.
School board trustee Tony Dupre, speaking from a conference in Las Vegas, said he was unaware of any incidents at the elementary school but that the district must respond swiftly to threats under the Education Code, even if no weapon is seen.
"We cannot take that lightly, and the student will be ultimately recommended for suspension or possible expulsion," Dupre said.
The district can be held liable if threats are made, it takes no action, and then a student later acts on the threats.
Trustee Elsa Valdez, whose 6-year-old granddaughter attends North Park, said that as a veteran educator, the incident involving the two boys disturbed her.
"We had to look into it," she said. "I was concerned about it. And if there were rumors here like at Beaumont, I would probably keep my granddaughter home as well. As a parent or grandparent, you can't afford to take any chances."
At Victor Valley High, a 16-year-old student claimed she was jumped by a dozen or so other students on her way to class. The school resource officer is investigating the attack, said sheriff's spokeswoman Shelley Williams.
"The girl claimed she was jumped by other girls, and we've investigated," said Principal Elvin Momon. "So far, it looks like two girls fighting and nothing more."
The community's issues sometimes end up on campus and educators don't know what they will get on a daily basis, he said. Administrators and campus security must listen to and look for signs that are out of the ordinary and be prepared to respond to almost anything.
But if someone says they'll bring a gun onto campus, all bets are off, Momon said
"We're gonna react," he said.
Doing things differently
At Palm View Elementary in Coachella, no student goes to the restroom alone. A school employee has been dispatched to monitor the bathrooms full time.
A 10-year-old girl reported that she was sexually assaulted in a bathroom during school hours within the last 10 days, said Principal Maria Grieve. The Riverside County Sheriff's Department, which is investigating the incident, have no suspects yet.
"We have totally changed the way we do things," Grieve said. The school district is providing a full-time security guard for the campus. More yard supervisors have been added, and two will stay throughout the school day.
Parents have also volunteered to monitor the office door to ensure campus visitors sign in. That's in addition to it being monitored by a school secretary.
"There's been a shift in our society and parental responsibility almost to the point of us raising their children for them," Grieve said. "We have some parents who see us as a baby-sitting service. That's why more of them (children) are joining gangs. They want to belong to a family, and gangs become a substitute family."
Widespread campus violence
Violence has plagued the region's school campuses in the last six months, and it is not limited to shootings. Among the incidents was a fight at A.B. Miller High School in January in which 20 students were detained by police. Pacific High School has seen a spate of fighting since the beginning of the school year.
On Jan. 9, rumors kept roughly half of Beaumont High School's 1,500 students from coming to school after Internet-chatroom conversations indicated some students might bring firearms to school. A month later, shots were fired in a Beaumont neighborhood, causing a short lockdown at five nearby schools. Last month, Beaumont High School had its worst fight in recent history when a brawl broke out after a school assembly.
"We've become a society very afraid of violence, and it's hit close to home in this general area," said Karen Poppen, an assistant superintendent for the Beaumont Unified School District. "This is not just a school problem, it's a community problem. The question is how do we come together and how are we going to solve this?"
Last fall, the school district began working with Beaumont police, and training for district security officers has improved along with the level of security as a whole, Poppen said.
Earlier this month, interim Superintendent Nicholas Ferguson began holding community task force meetings to discuss issues like campus safety and student discipline.
Such problems are new for the district, Ferguson said.
"We're not accustomed to that kind of thing," he said.
Jerry Sturmer, director of educational safety and security for the Rialto Unified School District, said he has noticed more physicality between students and an increase in gang activity.
"We must react to violence," he said. " We need more resources, right now they are extremely limited."
Sturmer is frustrated about applying for a competitive five-year $500,000 state grant that would help with campus safety needs. Only 35 grants are being offered.
He is also angry that the federal government is cutting Safe and Drug-free schools money by 21 percent next year, money that pays for school resource officer anti-drug and anti-violence programs.
"Everybody says we need safe schools," he said. "But nobody wants to pay for it."   (So District Superintendents feel it necessary to lie and cover up. In the end making it harder to obtain the very financial help they needed in the first place );I, Praetorian

Changing times
Ever since Columbine and 9/11, in some ways school officials have "sometimes overreacted," said Valdez, a professor of race and ethnic relations at Cal State San Bernardino.
"We've all been told all the signs were there, but no one paid attention," she said. "Are these kids going to go and carry out what they say they will? Who knows?"
Children are bombarded every day with violent images on television, movies and video games, and society is becoming desensitized to violence, Valdez said.
Times have changed.
Students in the '60s and '70s would get into trouble, fighting and drinking beer and smoking, but it was different from today, Valdez said.
"You didn't ever hear about the same type of vicious crimes like shootings and rapes," she said. "And there was never anybody getting raped in the bathroom."
Staff Writer Mike Cruz contributed to this report.

A Nation at Risk - 25 years later

 

Teacher layoffs high despite stimulus aid

Published: Sept. 8, 2009 at 12:07 AM

U.S. stimulus funds have not prevented extensive school layoffs in states with overwhelming budget deficits, education officials said.

In states with manageable budget deficits the stimulus money replaced revenue from local taxpayers, The New York Times reported Tuesday. In those states, many teachers and other school workers who had been laid off were hired back.

In states like Arizona, California and Georgia, however, teachers were laid off (the majority), shuffled into new districts (that i've never heard of in 14 years) or unfamiliar grade levels.

Education experts (Who and credentials please?) said many districts were forcing out strong teachers rather than those of limited effectiveness. Officials are dismissing teachers hired most recently because of union contracts or state laws that protect tenured teachers, Timothy Daily, president of the New Teacher Project, a non-profit organization, said.

He said few districts have accurate systems to evaluate teacher performance. (While the later is true, no body in government or education has come up with the magic system that is both valid, replicatable, and empirically sound.  This is the   solution to the problem of the day; that everyone claims to be the solution BUT nobody seems able to put forth a plan that will accurately measure teaching ability or progress YEAR AFTER YEAR. Please don't quote the president of some obscure "non-profit" organization with a questionable purpose. The federal prisons are full of them.) In my state, California, the CTA and its "associations" have ruined the profession's status and mishandled millions of dollars in dues. I am no fan. Many of my friends and darnN good teachers and counselors are headed for the unemployment line. ALL because the CTA's blood for money approach to negotiations as disseminated through the locals and in direct violation of their own guidelines for "Associates" to negotiate under. Even still theres no talk of pickets and CTA HAS NO STRIKE AND DEFENSE FUND. THEY ARE IN THE PROCESS OF RAISING ONE BY RAISING DUES TO NEARLY 100$  a month per member.
Still most usn

"Districts tend to make their problems worse by laying off good teachers and keeping bad ones," (How the hell does he know what the mitigating factors are? UPI has conveniently left them out.) Daly said.

Teacher layoffs also cause class sizes to jump (if their not replaced with low paid substitutes or interns). In Arizona up to 50 students are in many classrooms, and the norm for Los Angeles high schools this school year is 42.5 students per class.

© 2009 United Press International, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Disenfranchised - Help and Hope: Outside Agencies that Can Help

This is Where Some of our Children Live Here - Maybe More Than We Think

.

The buildings had no running water, illegal wiring, boarded up windows and rodent infestations, officials said.any of these 74 children are presumably of school age, and will be starting one of Oakland's elementary schools next Monday. They are now homeless, living with relatives or in a shelter. When they arrive at school, they will not have a sign explaining their conditions. They will just be among the many thousands of Oakland students struggling to live way below the poverty line. Many of Oakland's schools are attended by students who live in poverty. Some schools are more than 90% economically disadvantaged.

We are often told not to make excuses for the poor performance of our schools, but I have seen firsthand the effect that poverty has on student performance. The children who lived in this apartment complex (until they were made completely homeless this week) are not that unusual. They have no place to study, so it is tough to do homework. There are drug users around the building, so it is noisy at night, making it hard to sleep. There are shootings in the neighborhood, so sometimes they have to dive to take cover from flying bullets. The nearest real grocery store is literally miles away, so food is often purchased at the neighborhood convenience store, and is highly processed and unhealthy. You can see them walking to school in the morning, eating their breakfast of corn chips and soda pop.

And just the stress of being poor takes its toll. If I am a bit short with my bills at the end of the month, I know how stressed that makes me. But those without regular work have a level of stress I have never even known. Unemployment in the Bay Area is over eleven percent, and is at least double that in many of these neighborhoods. That stress spills into family life, making people short-tempered and even violent. Children are often moved from one home to another, depending on who has space and food to take them in. Can you imagine how you would feel as a parent if you could not even afford to pay for a roof over your children's heads?

On Monday, teachers will welcome their students to class. The ones without homes, the ones who are hungry, the ones in foster care -- they will do their best to hide these conditions. Like wounded birds, they do not want to appear weak or flawed. Once they are grown and have achieved success, they may take some pride in their humble origins, but there is no pride in being homeless when it is your reality today.

Good teachers will find out soon who the hungry ones are, and work with the school and the child's parent or guardian to get them signed up for free lunches. They will make space for the children to stay after school and do homework. They will push all their students to do their best regardless of their circumstances. School can be a sanctuary for these students, a place where they are safe, and have a chance to be seen as human beings.

This fall there is less money than ever. Most of the Republicans in the state legislature have signed a pledge not to ever raise taxes, so when state revenues plummeted this year, school funding was cut by more than a thousand dollars per student. While the Bay Area remains an expensive place to live, Oakland's teachers are among the lowest paid in the region. Class sizes will expand, and there will be no money to repair the copy machine or replace broken furniture or lost books. Teachers will dip into their savings accounts to make up the difference for their children, because that is what we do.

But there is a way in which education rhetoric these days seems to deny that poverty has an impact on the ability of students to learn. Sometimes it feels as if the schools and teachers are actually being blamed for the conditions our students are forced to live in. These conditions should not be used to justify a poor quality education. But the schools and teachers that serve these students have special challenges, and need our support.

What is the impact of poverty on your students? How do you respond as an educator? How should we respond as a society?

Posted by Anthony Cody on August 26, 2009 7:49 AM