From a bathroom

The fact that I found this poster in a bathroom made it so, so funny.  Remember, it's what it sounds like.

Posted via email from Aaron's posterous

Online schools not living up to their own hype

Faruqi & Faruqi, LLP Announces Investigation of K12, Inc. - Yahoo! Finance: The investigation focuses on whether the Company and its executives violated federal securities laws by failing to disclose that: (1) according to various academic benchmarks, K12 students were chronically underperforming their peers at traditional schools; (2) K12 has aggressively recruited students to their schools, regardless of how well-suited they might be for the Company’s curriculum; (3) as a result of K12’s haphazard recruiting process, the Company experiences student retention problems resulting in high rates of withdrawal; (4) K12 schools often have far larger student-to-teacher ratios than the Company advertises; and (5) K12 teachers have been pressured to allow students to pass regardless of academic performance, in order to receive federal funds.

This company operates in Memphis and was marketed as a solution to the woes of public education. I get a large knot of disgust in my tummy when I see people capitalizing on poverty, I really do.

The McEducation of the Negro

The McEducation of the Negro: Education is acquiring a basic body of knowledge needed to competently vote and play Jeopardy, appreciate music and art, go to college and get a job, communicate and so on.�

I had a professor in college who said that the benefit of going to college was being able to get the jokes at parties.

I've been doing a good deal of reading lately about school change and education reform.  The more I read, and the more I experience, the more I feel that we are undereducating vast swathes of humanity in this country in the name of some sort of accountability and progress.

Learning is fuzzy.  Different people will learn different things from the same lesson.  Accountability is a way to make sure that learning is happening, but fine tuning it to identify what specific learning is happening is near the heart of the problem.

middle school / high school collaboration

As part of a nascent project here in Memphis and specifically at Craigmont, I'm looking for documented examples of collaboration between middle schools and high schools in the same area.  

Our beginning idea is to create a theoretical bridge between this middle school where I teach and the high school into which it feeds.  It's right down the block, yet after working here for three years I do not know a single teacher there.  The cultures are the schools are radically different, as is the quality of extracurricular programming (according to some observers).  For example, the middle school has a chess club while the high school does not, and the high school has a debate club while the middle school does not.  

We hope that by creating extracurricular (and eventually curricular) bridges between the two schools, we can increase student/parent/teacher/administrator motivation and create a culture of excellence.

Like I said at the beginning, I'm looking for documented examples of this sort of collaboration: any middle school clubs that attract high school students or vice versa.  

Posted via email from Aaron's posterous

from discovery education

This question was found in the Discovery Education database. Can you
feel the emotional affect?

Posted via email from Aaron's posterous

Brownsville Protects Chess Legacy at Its Schools - NYTimes.com

Brownsville Protects Chess Legacy at Its Schools - NYTimes.com: Budget cuts may have taken more than $30 million out of the Brownsville Independent School District’s budget for the next two years, but administrators say they are working to preserve financing for one key pot of money: the chess budget. This academic year, it totals $400,000.

And I can't even find 2 other teachers in MEMPHIS who are willing to start a chess organization!

Surge in Free School Lunches Reflects Economic Crisis - NYTimes.com

Surge in Free School Lunches Reflects Economic Crisis - NYTimes.com: Among the first to call attention to the increases were Department of Education officials who use subsidized lunch rates as a poverty indicator in federal testing. This month, in releasing results of the National Assessment of Educational Progress, they noted that the proportion of the nation’s fourth graders enrolled in the lunch program had climbed to 52 percent from 49 percent in 2009, crossing a symbolic watershed.

That's more than half of the country's fourth graders living in poverty in the United States. Granted our definition of poverty is unique to us, but it is still relevant. I've stopped calling this country developed; we're caught somewhere between the first and second worlds.