Welcome! "What's Happenin'?" is a casual community diary (a daily series, 8:30 AM Eastern on weekdays, 10 AM on weekends and holidays) where we hang out and talk about the goings on here and everywhere.
We chat about our lives, our health, our families, our social circles, our pets, etc. We welcome links to your writings here on dkos or elsewhere, posts of pictures, music, etc.
Just about anything goes, but attacks and pie fights are not welcome here. This is a community diary and a friendly, peaceful, supportive place for people to interact.
Everyone who wants to join in peaceful interaction is very welcome here.
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Good Morning!
Today is the last day of 9th grade for my 14 year old son. Summer has officially begun! In a few hours, I will pick him up and we'll carry on a tradition that I began 16 years ago when my older son was in kindergarten. We will go to a bookstore and he will select a book that he wants to read just for the pleasure of reading. (The rest of the summer it will be library books for him!) After that, we’ll go for ice cream – carbs be damned. I have such fond memories of books I’ve read during the summer, maybe because I equate them with the vacation we were on while I was reading them. One of my favorite “summer reads” was The Color of Water by James McBride. With my older son, who was 8 at the time, we stayed up the better part of the night reading our respective books while my husband and younger son slept. We were in a hotel in Williamsburg, Va and getting up the next day to go to Busch Gardens was pure hell! Yet, my son often mentions it as one of his fondest memories...it is one of mine as well.
“The library in summer is the most wonderful thing because there you get books on any subject and read them each for only as long as they hold your interest, abandoning any that don't, halfway or a quarter of the way through if you like, and store up all that knowledge in the happy corners of your mind for your own self and not to show off how much you know or spit it back at your teacher on a test paper.”
― Polly Horvath, My One Hundred Adventures
Save Our Schools March - Summer 2011
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Drop in
any time
day or night
to say hello.
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SOS People's Platform Convention 2012 - August 3rd thru 5th - Washington DC
http://www.saveourschoolsmarch.org/
Selling out students
Sallie Mae was created to help young people get loans, but it ended up putting profits before their well-being
http://www.salon.com/...
On April 12, a district judge in New York gave his preliminary approval to a settlement agreement in a class action suit filed by investors who claimed that Sallie Mae, the giant student lending company, had violated federal securities laws.
Learning by Making
American kids should be building rockets and robots, not taking standardized tests.
http://www.slate.com/...
On a morning visit to a Northern California middle school, I saw not a single student. The principal showed me around campus, but I didn’t see or hear students talking, playing, or moving about. The science lab was empty, as were the library and the playground. It was not a school holiday: It was a state-mandated STAR testing day. The school was in an academic lockdown. A volunteer manned a table filled with cupcakes, a small reward for students at day’s end.
Pasco schools reduce literacy coaches amid budget cuts
http://www.tampabay.com/...
A dozen of the positions the Pasco school district created three years ago to enhance student reading instruction won't exist this coming fall.
School Board members, long resistant to cutting literacy coaches from the schools, gave in late Tuesday amid continued efforts to cut spending by $24.7 million. It wasn't their first choice.
Rahmbo vs. the Teachers Union
http://online.wsj.com/...
Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel helped raise money for Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett, a fellow Democrat who is trying to unseat Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker in today's recall election. But part of Mr. Emanuel may be developing an appreciation for some of the Republican governor's reforms. The Chicago school district and teachers union can't agree on a new contract. The biggest roadblock? Collective bargaining, the same issue that sparked the Wisconsin recall effort.
The Pearsonizing of the American Mind
http://blogs.edweek.org/...
People keep asking why states are spending more and more money on testing at the same time that states are cutting the school budget, laying off teachers, closing school libraries, eliminating the arts, and increasing class size. A good question.
Principles for Education Policy, Issued by the Broader, Bolder Approach Campaign
http://www.epi.org/...
Two years ago, the Economic Policy Institute convened a diverse group of policymakers and scholars who developed and promoted statements calling for a ”Broader, Bolder Approach (BBA)” to education policy. BBA is independent, but EPI continues to host its website and provide other logistical support.
Last week, BBA issued a set of 6 key principles that its leaders believe should guide federal policymakers in Congress and the Administration as they consider the re-authorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (now called “No Child Left Behind”). BBA leaders include Co-Chairs Helen Ladd, Pedro Noguera, and Thomas Payzant, and Advisory Council Co-Chairs Susan B. Neuman and Richard Rothstein. Brief biographies of these and other BBA leaders are on the BBA website.
The most useless standardized tests
http://www.washingtonpost.com/...
Hundreds of thousands of students in New York are now taking “field tests” so that Pearson can try out new items for future high-stakes exams. Results on these field tests, good or bad, have no direct consequences for the students.
The State Education Department is reverting to these stand-alone field tests, even though it acknowledged in 2009 that they are fundamentally flawed .
Blog Posts of Interest
Van Jones Closes NN12 With Pleas to Save Nation . . . and Obama from Tea Party
http://news.firedoglake.com/...
The Second Term
http://www.newyorker.com/...
Outside of a dog, a book is a man’s best friend. Inside of a dog, it’s too dark to read.
—Groucho Marx