Stories to watch for this weekend

Coming this weekend are a couple stories I’ve been working on from the education beat.

First, there’s a story about the retirement of Tom Purcell, the principal at Apollo High School for the last eight years and a teacher for more years than I’ve actually been on this Earth. Not only does he have an impressive work record, but he’s a pretty popular guy, which I think comes across pretty well in the story from the comments of Daviess County Public Schools Superintendent Tom Shelton.

Second, there’s a story about the new Wesleyan Fellows Program. The program, technically not new any more since it just finished its first year, is a work-study program that nine students took on. They researched, they worked, some for an entire calendar year, and then they presented in public their projects. Some pretty fascinating stuff there, if I might say so, though I couldn’t go into too much detail in the news article for the sake of space. Between the microbiology project and the history project that I learned about from the two students I interviewed, I had enough to geek out about for the better part of the day.

Anyway, watch for those stories and more. And eat some barbecue too!

Pecuniary strangulation

That’s a fancy term for “broke.”

Worse than being broke though, is not knowing how you can spend your money or even how much you’ve got.

Right now, because the state legislature has yet to pass a budget, that’s the situation each and every school district finds itself in.

Worse yet, there are possibilities. One version of the budget, the House version, cuts out two instructional days. Administrators don’t know if that will become reality, but they have to plan that it will. Teachers will get that much less pay. Students will get that much less instruction. The state saves $30 million or so.

Read tomorrow’s paper for more info about it. I definitely did not enjoy talking to administrators about this, because it’s never fun talking about how you’re going to do more with less.

Earth Day

In just a little bit, I’ll be heading out to Tamarack Elementary School, where the students are putting a pretty ambitious project into effect as part of their observation of Earth Day.

Among their activities, the students will be planting flowers and helping put together a sensory garden that can be enjoyed by all. I’d like to tell you a little more about it, but I have to go see it first.

In the meantime, have a read about going green at the college level.

Click!

What’s the right incentive?

Mind you, I’m all for encouraging kids to read, learn and expand their minds. However, I think that there’s a right way and a wrong way to do that encouraging.

Now, a younger version of me would probably have hopped the nearest time machine, jetted into the future and is about to punch me right in the face for saying this, but I don’t think handing cash to students for achieving is the best way to encourage learning.

My number one problem is this: The money has better uses. Two, I think it sends the wrong message. But that’s just me.

Here’s an article I read that has to do with this very topic. Read and let me know what you think.

a preview of things to come

For the past few days I’ve been researching and trying to chase down a story. With a little luck today, I’ll pull it off.

The story is about charter schools and Kentucky’s renewal of the debate over whether or not they should be used in our state.

According to the Web site uscharterschools.org, Kentucky is one of 10 states that still have no legislation with regard to charter schools.

Here’s an excellent post from Kentucky Education Commissioner Terry Holliday on his blog, talking about why Kentucky is looking at charter schools now.

Race to the Top skepticism?

Kentucky was one of the 16 finalists for Race to the Top funding, a first cut at a piece of a $4.35 billion dollar pie that was slated for education out of the stimulus, or the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act.

But only two states, Delaware and Tennessee, were awarded first dibs. That went and made plenty of people not only upset, but skeptical about the doling out of this money, despite the fact that a second shot has been promised in the coming months. Mind you, that negative turn of emotions is largely probably due to the fact that states can’t ask for as much money in the second round as they did at first. For Kentucky, $200 million was what was hoped for at first, but now the state can only get $175 million at most, and that’s vital money to making the reforms mandated by 2008′s Senate Bill 1 out of the Kentucky legislature.

Read more here in the New York Times article that I found.

Jaime Escalante goes to the great classroom in the sky

A sad day for lovers of awesome educators, as the man who inspired the movie Stand and Deliver has died at age 79. Read the news article here.

And read more about the movie he inspired here.

No Child Left Behind might get left behind itself

Quick post on a news story I caught earlier today.

No Child Left Behind was the biggest education-related initiative of the George W. Bush administration, but now it is facing a rewrite, thanks to a proposed plan that President Obama is pushing.

In essence, the changes would rewire NCLB and instead of tying it to a stringent set of tests and requirements, would focus more on creating college and work-ready students. How it will do that is yet to be seen though…

Have a read of the article here.

Define “textbook”

Meant to post this yesterday, but alas, schedule conflicts trumped awesome blog content…

Now, a bit of a warning, this link goes to a fairly left-wing site. I don’t agree with some of the language that they use in terms of bashing the people behind these Texas textbook changes, but at the same time, the facts they quote are not only accurate, but scary.

On a personal level, I have nothing but respect for people of any faith. Having faith is a difficult thing, since it requires believing in something you may not necessarily be able to directly see, taste, touch, feel, etc.

At the same time though, I don’t think that religion has any place being taught as fact in schools, simply based on the fact that one of the core principles of this country is a separation between church and state. Teaching about religions is all well and good. I’m all for it because I think it promotes tolerance and understanding. But teaching a certain religion as if it’s 100 percent certain that’s how it happened isn’t right, because not everybody believes the same thing. Even people who call themselves Christians believe different things. That’s why you have Catholics, protestants, and the subgroups of Methodists, Lutherans, etc.

Anyway, have a read of the article and let me know what you think. Should anyone have the power to rewrite textbooks as they see fit, based on religion and personal opinion?

Updated at 1:34 p.m. The New York Times had an editorial on this topic, which forwarded onto me by Owen Covington, Opinion Editor at the M-I. Read it here.

Core standards released for public viewing

A couple weeks ago I wrote that Kentucky was the first state to commit to the Core Standards Initiative that would set the bar for education in almost every state in the nation.

On Wednesday, the core standards draft was released and you can read it at http://www.corestandards.org.

The new standards are going to redefine how schools teach and assess their students. In a nutshell, they’re tackling the issues of reading and math, which are basically the foundation of education’s pyramid. If you can read and you can add, you can learn just about anything, I hear.

Keep your eye out for more news about how Kentucky, and Daviess County in particular, help set the bar for these core standards, especially since Daviess County Public Schools are one of six districts in the state actually developing the new assessments that will be a part of these core standards.