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Mr. Furguson On Education

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Principals Protest Role of Testing in Evaluations

November 28th 2011 20:45

President Obama has decided that one of the more unfair provisions of No Child Left Behind, one about basing teacher evaluation on their performance, does not go far enough. Instead of trying to limit the amount of importance that the evaluations,his education policy wants to make it more dependant on performance evaluations. Lately, the principals, who are normally not a part of this anti teacher rhetoric, are getting shafted by the president and the administration.

Principals in New York State, and possibly the 10 other winners of Race to the Top, consider it demeaning to have to learn a new evaluation process that is not finished. That is not a joke. The framework for the Race to the Top evaluations are not finished and the designers did not work on finishing it before they presented it. This caused a lot of principals to take up the protest against the president. There are almost 1000 principals that have signed a petition concerning the unfair practices of Race to the Top.

I am glad that they are standing up for themselves, but I think that it is too little too late. They have to deal with this evaluation process until the next time the National Defense Education Act of 1958 gets renewed.

[url=http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/28/education/principals-protest-increased-use-of-test-scores-to-evaluate-educators.html] Education principals getting shafted

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Posted By: Joseph Furguson - Category: No Category

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Getting the Students Involved in their Education.

November 25th 2011 20:32

In California, Massachusetts, Virginia and a few other states, they educators get input and feedback from students concerning their fellow students education. These boards represent what American schools need to focus on, but have not in the past: what the students want and need. Some of the things that the students want express the typical concerns that students might have, namely their future and standardize testing.

I am not sure if this is a good idea or a topic to discuss because I am conflicted by this one. On the one hand, I am certain that students are capable of controlling their educational destinies and would love to be a part of the process, but their input is not necessary. You see education is not really for them. Most of the time, education is about them, a desire for adults to correct some of the mistakes that were made while they were at school.

Yes I am well aware that children love to be challenged, but that stereotype only works in a vacuum. After they get past that puberty thing, the students will be just like any adult that you will meet. Some will be hard working an interested in the challenge, others will not be like that. I understand that this could be considered a jaded position, but in all honesty, it is a realistic one to have. You cannot expect things to work for one group to apply to another.

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Posted By: Joseph Furguson - Category: No Category

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Education is a group effort.

November 22nd 2011 00:21

A lot of our current debate about education, in fact most of our educational culture, is focused on the individual learning. This is true the world over because it is still tied to its original purpose in some regard. Our modern education system came out of a desire to create as many factory workers as possible. It does not require a lot of work to get people to focus on the job they have in had if you start training them at a very young age. If, however, you try to change that mode of thinking, you are going to meed with resistance with everyone involved there.

A study done in India and repeated in Africa, Italy and other non- English speaking parts of the world that if you give children a goal and the tools they need to get there, they will find a way to get to that goal. The main tools in this study are kind of unconventional as well. Instead of a teacher, they had someone that was in the nurturing grandmother role, wherein her job was to praise the child no matter what it showed the adult. They also had the Internet and that is about it.
How did it work? surprisingly well. Through this method of learning students were not only able to pick up English, and the subject area they were asked to look at, but they were able to maintain the knowledge 6 months to a year longer than they would have been other wise. The main reason why this thing worked is because it was mostly group work with some rather loose rules of organization. The kids were given a ton of freedom to do their project.

The main thing is that children have this tremendous desire to please the adults. This is true the world over. If you given something that they find interesting, they want to share it with their peers and other students.

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Going to College is not for everyone.

November 20th 2011 15:45

Us News did a debate amongst its contributors and staff members about whether or not college

My opinion is no. Everyone does not needs to go to college. Most jobs out there require you to have some college and that is about it

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Future of Education is online... maybe.

November 19th 2011 12:29

In something that I would like to call the University of Phoenix approach to education, there is this national push to make public education into a viable option for students. Florida is in the forefront of this movement and it has already allowed funding for the online education providers to expand their services in a way that was not possible months ago.

While I do object to the fact that this idea started out as a way for people of a certain mindset to try and undermine our public school system, I do believe that this idea has some merit. I am all for students to hand parents to have choice where they send their kids to school, hoe they do it and what they want to teach their kids. However, I do believe that the whole enterprise needs to be better regulated in order for it to work as as well as it can

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Abstinence Only Education Does not work.

November 18th 2011 03:05

Recently the New York Post went on a rather lengthy diatribe about the wonders of abstinence only education. They cite a chicago study where it does show to have an effect with teenagers. They showed that middle aged students who were told not do have sex said that they were willing to wait longer to have sex than before the talk.

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School Censors U.S. Flag over Cinco De Mayo Celebration

November 16th 2011 15:42

Back in 2010, two students in a San Francisco area school were sent home because they would not comply with an order from school officials concerning their choice of clothing that day. The students wore the American Flag to school as protest to a Cinco de Mayo celebration. The students then sued the school because they felt they were being discriminated against.

In what would be called a predictable outcome of the lawsuit, the judge sided with the school because the students wearing the American flag were the ones in danger of being beat up by the ones wearing Mexican Flags. The people who lost the suit proudly claimed that the school was discriminating against the students showing their patriotism and they would appeal

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High School Writing Programs: Total Reboot may be the only real option.

November 15th 2011 15:46

If you are an adult in this country, you probably have been exposed to the following model of paragraph writing: Introduction sentence, 3 topic sentences, one detail sentence for each topic sentence an a conclusion sentence. This model also follows into paragraph writing as well. Introduction paragraph, 3 Topic paragraphs, and a commentary paragraph, otherwise known as a the conclusion paragraph. If you learned how to write in this manner, I am truly sorry that you were exposed to it. That rigid writing style limits creativity causes a lot of potentially good writers to be lost in the shuffle, as it were

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On NCLB and Waivers.

August 14th 2011 21:18

Recently, Arne Duncan stated that 82 percent of all schools will be labeled as failures when it comes to NCLB standards. While all the data has not come in, it is looking that he is not far off from that assessment. How can he be so accurate in his assessment? Does he understand the problems the schools face better than the rest of us? Did he pull the numbers out of the ether?

Actually, it is far more devious than that. He knew long before that 85 percent of schools are going to fail to meet standards not because he is psychic, but because of that stupid No Child Left Behind legislation, the one that Bush signed into law. No it is not partisan to point out that fact

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Can Good Teachers Overcome Poverty? Yes, but....

August 13th 2011 16:08

Jaime Escalante, Ron Clarke, Erin Gruwell, Geoffery Canada, and so many other of that kind have been making news about how revolutionary they are. They have inspired new generations of students and teachers with their innovative style of teaching. These good teachers allowed the students they had work with to overcome poverty and make better lives for themselves and their communities.

However, we hold up these exceptional teachers up because they are that: exceptions and not the proven rule. Not every teacher has the drive, the motivation, or the tenacity to motivate students into climbing up the socioeconomic ladder

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November 2011

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