October 6 Issue

Interesting that Chinese money would cause us to add Mandarin to our curriculum. I guess it's probably safe to say that if Iraq, Kuwait, or the UAE gave us money we would add Farsi to our curriculum. I wonder if China's human rights abuses could be discussed in these classes. Never-the-less in these times of shrinking education dollars foreign aid from any where would be welcomed. Funny, that we had the money to destroy and rebuild Iraq but we can't afford to adequately fund our schools.
I liked the quote from Chester E. Finn Jr. "This is not our ally. This is the country on the planet from which The United States faces the largest and most worrisome long-term threats". I totally agree, it is just a matter of time till China flexes its military muscle in South East Asia. Then, because of our defense treaty obligations with places like Taiwan we will be forced to go to war against China. Which could easily become nuclear.
Still better to know the enemy as long as you don't get to cozy with them.

The Districts begin looking harder at abseteeism article seems like a no-brainer. Of course absenteeism starts the road to dropping out. You don't need to be a Rhodes Scholar to figure that out.

Ditto, with effort to revamp Newark schools. Any place that has such an abysmal record with it's schools should be happy to get help from anywhere it can.

As far as the TIF grants go, I guess tainted money is better than no money at all. If the unions can just hold their noses as they take the merit pay money. Ironically, there is an extremely small percentage of teachers that are really incompetent and if the unions hadn't made it so difficult for school districts to get rid of them everyone wouldn't have been made to suffer. The sad part of this is that teachers will be forced even more to teach to the tests. I guess they too will have to hold their noses as they take the money. I think the whole discussion of merit pay and no child left behind policy should be introduced into the curriculum. That way the students will know who to blame for their lousy educations--the politicians.

I liked the Rigorous and Deeper Learning article. It's interesting what coorporations value in education and that some are willing to put their money where their mouth is.

Best of all the articles I thought was the Teaching for Inspiration article. Yeah, I think all teachers, future teachers, students, and parents would applaud this teacher's efforts. Funny, there is no room in national standards and assesments for this type of teaching and it has to be squeezed in there. Seems like this is what teaching is all about.

In a different puublication "Neatoday" October/November edition there was a great article on the educatonal system in Finland. Great reading, too bad the politicians and experts running our educational system will never implement anything like it. After all if the U.S. didn't think of it--it will never work.

Hey, I'm liking this blog thing, a great opportunity to vent!