May 16, 2008
New TV ad protests school budget cuts
Filed under: Education by Edwize Admin @ 4:50 pm
A new TV ad, sponsored by the Keep the Promises coalition, began airing this week. The ad, which shows school supplies vanishing in front of kids, urges New York City residents to call 1-800-961-6198 to tell the mayor and City Council to uphold their commitment to kids. Check it out!
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May 13, 2008
Done
Filed under: New Teacher Diaries by miss_g @ 1:28 pm
[Editor’s Note: Miss G is the pseudonym for a second-year special education teacher in the Bronx.]
With grad school.
As of Saturday, May 9, I’m officially done, and graduation is May 21.
As a final activity we had to fill out chart paper with “things we would take with us” and “things we’d leave behind” – not from grad school, but the Teachers for America experience … from learning to be a teacher, a New Yorker, and… well… a grown up. (more…)
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May 11, 2008
Watch What They Do, Not What They Say…
Filed under: Education by Leo Casey @ 2:03 pm
Posting published by the Principal of PS 71 in the Bronx:
Anticipated Vacancy Circular - School Year 2008-2009. Position: Lower Grade ATR - Absent Teacher Reserve Positions
Duties and Responsibilities: Cover class of absent teacher. Classes to be covered will be kindergarten through fifth grade, with no special education classes. The position is a regular teaching position for a regularly assigned teacher. If no teachers are absent, the teacher assigned will be doing small group AIS. Salary: Salary and Seniority do not change…
Amazing, isn’t it, that while the DoE and The New Teacher Project are telling anyone who will listen that the numbers of ATRs are a burden to the system, principals are issuing — in clear violation of the contract — postings looking for more of them?
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May 8, 2008
And the real number is . . . ?
Filed under: Education by Maisie @ 3:20 pm
The DOE took the opportunity to 
lash out against the UFT’s recent class size report [PDF] yesterday, telling the Daily News, “The UFT is able to reach its predetermined conclusions only by ignoring key data, such as the impact of team teaching and innovative scheduling.”
For the record, Collaborative Team Teaching classes were included in the analysis of all K-8 classes. And the “innovative scheduling” we ignored–presumably programming middle school students for reduced class sizes in some subjects–is not how DOE itself counts middle school class sizes. (more…)
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May 7, 2008
That Masked Woman Strikes Again!
Filed under: Education by Leo Casey @ 7:01 pm
She will make you laugh: Eduwonkette on $4 gas and on A Nation At Risk.
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May 6, 2008
A Nation At Risk At 25
Filed under: Education by Leo Casey @ 12:04 pm
The Columbus Education Association has asked a number of educational bloggers, including the AFT’s Ed Muir, to contribute to a colloquium on its blog on the subject of A Nation At Risk. My contribution is here.
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More Stubborn Facts: A Response To The New Teacher Project’s Tim Daly
Filed under: Education by Leo Casey @ 2:58 am
In the previous post, Tim Daly of The New Teacher Project [TNTP] responded to the criticisms we made of the campaign the NYC Department of Education [DoE] has mounted against displaced [excessed] public school educators in New York City. Here we respond to his comments. We have organized our response around four key questions in the debate.
Why is there a large pool of displaced New York City public school educators? (more…)
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The New Teacher Project Responds
Filed under: Education by Leo Casey @ 2:57 am
What follows is a response from Tim Daly of the New Teacher Project to our posting, Stubborn Facts, Pliable Statistics and The Manufactured Crisis of Excessed Educators. At his request, we are publishing it here, exactly as we received it, together with our reply, which appears in the next post. While the Department of Education has never provided the UFT with opportunities to respond to their publications on their web site, we believe that New York City public schools are best served by a complete discussion of this issue.
Statement from The New Teacher Project
May 5, 2008 (more…)
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May 5, 2008
Stubborn Facts, Pliable Statistics and The Manufactured Crisis of Excessed Educators
Filed under: Education by Leo Casey @ 8:14 am
“Facts,” John Adams once said, “are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.” That may be true, Mark Twain later wrote, but “statistics are more pliable.”
Faced with a set of “stubborn facts” around the situation of excessed teachers serving as ATRs, the Department of Education and the New Teacher Project manufactured a crisis using what, it has now become clear, are “pliable statistics.” In the days since they first published their paper and launched their assault on these teachers, we at the UFT have been engaged in the careful research that should have been done by the DoE and NTP, if there was an honest and sincere attempt to ascertain the actual facts of the situation. In this morning’s New York Sun, Elizabeth Green reports on some of what we found. Here is our account. (more…)
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May 3, 2008
Bloomberg’s Broken Promises
Filed under: Education by Leo Casey @ 9:02 pm
A tax cut, Mayor Bloomberg proclaimed, would be “about the dumbest thing I’ve heard in a long time from an economic point of view.”
“The 30 bucks is not going to change anybody’s lifestyle. The billions of dollars that we would otherwise have in tax revenues can make a big difference as to what kind of a world we leave our children.” (more…)
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