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Chicago teachers strike for first time in 25 years

As the strike deadline approached, parents spent Sunday worrying about how much their children’s education might suffer.

Thousands of teachers walked off the job Monday in Chicago’s first schools strike in 25 years, after union leaders announced that months-long negotiations had failed to resolve a contract dispute with school district officials by a midnight deadline.

The walkout in the nation’s third-largest school district posed a tricky challenge for the city and Mayor Rahm Emanuel, who said he would push to end the strike quickly as officials figure out how to keep nearly 400,000 children safe and occupied.

“This is not a strike I wanted,” Emanuel said Sunday night, not long after the union announced the action. “It was a strike of choice … it’s unnecessary, it’s avoidable and it’s wrong.”

Some 26,000 teachers and support staff were expected to join the picket. Among teachers protesting Monday morning outside Benjamin Banneker Elementary School on Chicago’s South Side, eighth-grade teacher Michael Williams said he wanted a quick contract resolution.

“We hoped that it wouldn’t happen. We all want to get back to teaching,” Williams said, adding that wages and classroom conditions need to be improved.

Contract negotiations between Chicago Public School officials and union leaders that stretched through the weekend were expected to resume Monday.

Officials said some 140 schools would be open between 8:30 a.m. and 12:30 p.m. so the children who rely on free meals provided by the school district can eat breakfast and lunch, school district officials said.

City officials acknowledged that children left unsupervised — especially in neighborhoods with a history of gang violence — might be at risk, but vowed to protect the students’ safety.

“We will make sure our kids are safe, we will see our way through these issues and our kids will be back in the classroom where they belong,” said Emanuel, President Barack Obama’s former chief of staff.

The school district asked community organizations to provide additional programs for students, and a number of churches, libraries and other groups plan to offer day camps and other activities.

Police Chief Garry McCarthy said he would take officers off desk duty and deploy them to deal with any teachers’ protests as well as the thousands of students who could be roaming the streets.

Union leaders and district officials were not far apart in their negotiations on compensation, Chicago Teachers Union President Karen Lewis said. But other issues — including potential changes to health benefits and a new teacher evaluation system based partly on students’ standardized test scores — remained unresolved, she said.

“This is a difficult decision and one we hoped we could have avoided,” Lewis said. “We must do things differently in this city if we are to provide our students with the education they so rightfully deserve.”

Before the strike, some parents said they would not drop their children at strange schools where they didn’t know the other students or supervising adults. On Monday, as only a trickle of students arrived at some schools, April Logan said she wouldn’t leave her daughter with an adult she didn’t know. Her daughter, Ashanti, started school just a week earlier.

“I don’t understand this, my baby just got into school,” Logan said at Benjamin Mays Academy on the city’s South Side before turning around and taking her daughter home.

Some students expressed anger, blaming the school district for interrupting their education.

“They’re not hurting the teachers, they’re hurting us,” said Ta’Shara Edwards, a 16-year-old student at Robeson High School on the city’s South Side. She said her mother made her come to class to do homework because so she “wouldn’t suck up her light bill.”

But there was anger toward teachers, as well.

“I think it’s crazy. Why are they even going on strike?” asked Ebony Irvin, a 17-year-old student at Robeson.

Emanuel and the union officials have much at stake. Unions and collective bargaining by public employees have recently come under criticism in many parts of the country, and all sides are closely monitoring who might emerge with the upper hand in the Chicago dispute.

The timing also may be inopportune for Emanuel, whose city administration is wrestling with a spike in murders and shootings in some city neighborhoods and who just agreed to take a larger role in fundraising for Obama’s re-election campaign.

As the strike deadline approached, parents spent Sunday worrying about how much their children’s education might suffer and where their kids will go while they’re at work.

“They’re going to lose learning time,” said Beatriz Fierro, whose daughter is in the fifth grade on the city’s Southwest Side. “And if the whole afternoon they’re going to be free, it’s bad. Of course you’re worried.”

The school board was offering a fair and responsible contract that would most of the union’s demands after “extraordinarily difficult” talks, board president David Vitale said. Emanuel said the district offered the teachers a 16 percent pay raise over four years, doubling an earlier offer.

Lewis said among the issues of concern was a new evaluation that she said would be unfair to teachers because it relied too heavily on students’ standardized test scores and does not take into account external factors that affect performance, including poverty, violence and homelessness.

She said the evaluations could result in 6,000 teachers losing their jobs within two years. City officials disagreed and said the union has not explained how it reached that conclusion.

Emanuel said the evaluation would not count in the first year, as teachers and administrators worked out any kinks. Schools CEO Jean-Claude Brizard said the evaluation “was not developed to be a hammer,” but to help teachers improve.

The strike is the latest flashpoint in a very public and often contentious battle between the mayor and the union.

When he took office last year, Emanuel inherited a school district facing a $700 million budget shortfall. Not long after, his administration rescinded 4 percent raises for teachers. He then asked the union to reopen its contract and accept 2 percent pay raises in exchange for lengthening the school day for students by 90 minutes. The union refused.

Emanuel, who promised a longer school day during his campaign, then attempted to go around the union by asking teachers at individual schools to waive the contract and add 90 minutes to the day. He halted the effort after being challenged by the union before the Illinois Educational Labor Relations Board.

The district and union agreed in July on how to implement the longer school day, striking a deal to hire back 477 teachers who had been laid off rather than pay regular teachers more to work longer hours. That raised hopes the contract dispute would be settled soon, but bargaining continued on the other issues.

Chicago teachers strike for first time in 25 years

Posted By Staff and wire services reports On In Teaching Trends,Uncategorized | No Comments

Thousands of Chicago teachers walked off the job Monday for the first time in 25 years, after union leaders announced they were far from resolving a contract dispute with school district officials, the Associated Press reports. The walkout in the nation’s third-largest school district posed a tricky test for Mayor Rahm Emanuel, who said he would work to end the strike quickly.

“This is not a strike I wanted,” Emanuel said Sunday night, not long after the union announced the action. “It was a strike of choice … it’s unnecessary, it’s avoidable and it’s wrong.”

Some 26,000 teachers and support staff were expected to join the picket. Among teachers protesting Monday morning outside Benjamin Banneker Elementary School on Chicago’s South Side, eighth-grade teacher Michael Williams said he wanted a quick contract resolution.

“We hoped that it wouldn’t happen. We all want to get back to teaching,” Williams said, adding that wages and classroom conditions need to be improved.

Contract negotiations between Chicago Public School officials and union leaders that stretched through the weekend were resuming Monday…

Click here for the full story [1]

Studies find more students cheating, with high achievers no exception

Posted By Staff and wire services reports On In Research,Teaching & Learning | No Comments

Large-scale cheating has been uncovered over the last year at some of the nation’s most competitive schools, like Stuyvesant High School [2] in Manhattan, the Air Force Academy [3] and, most recently, Harvard [4], the New York Times reports. Studies of student behavior and attitudes show that a majority of students violate standards of academic integrity to some degree, and that high achievers are just as likely to do it as others. Moreover, there is evidence that the problem has worsened over the last few decades. Experts say the reasons are relatively simple: Cheating has become easier and more widely tolerated, and both schools and parents have failed to give students strong, repetitive messages about what is allowed and what is prohibited.

“I don’t think there’s any question that students have become more competitive, under more pressure, and, as a result, tend to excuse more from themselves and other students, and that’s abetted by the adults around them,” said Donald L. McCabe [5], a professor at the Rutgers University Business School, and a leading researcher on cheating.

“There have always been struggling students who cheat to survive,” he said. “But more and more, there are students at the top who cheat to thrive.”

Click here for the full story [6]

Private school vaccine opt-outs rise

Posted By Staff and wire services reports On In Research,Teaching & Learning | No Comments

Parents who send their children to private schools in California are much more likely to opt out of immunizations than their public school counterparts, an Associated Press analysis has found, and not even the recent re-emergence of whooping cough has halted the downward trajectory of vaccinations among these students. The state surveys all schools with at least 10 kindergartners to determine how many have all the recommended immunizations. The AP analyzed that data and found the percentage of children in private schools who forego some or all vaccinations is more than two times greater than in public schools. More troubling to public health officials is that the rate of children entering private schools without all of their shots jumped by 10 percent last year, while the opt-out figures held steady in public schools for the first time since 2004. Public health officials believe that an immunization rate of at least 90 percent in all communities, including schools, is critical to minimizing the potential for a disease outbreak. About 15 percent of the 1,650 private schools surveyed by the state failed to reach that threshold, compared with 5 percent of public schools…

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Elementary school nixes homework

Posted By Staff and wire services reports On In Curriculum,eClassroom News,Teaching & Learning | No Comments

Instead of assigning homework, teachers at Gaithersburg Elementary School in Maryland are asking students to spend 30 minutes a night reading [8], Fox 5 reports. After conducting a review of work students were sent home with, Principal Stephanie Brant and her staff concluded the majority of assignments were worksheets that did not relate to what students were studying in the classroom.

“It was just: we were giving students something because we felt we had to give them something,” Brant told the station.

The principal, who joined the school’s staff two years ago, procured permission from the school district to abolish homework in favor of reading time [9]. Most parents support the no-homework policy. Luz Gomez, whose son is a third-grader at the school, told Fox 5: “When [my son] comes home, he has relaxing time. And I think kids need that relaxing time.” The Washington Examiner reports that elsewhere, in Vienna, Va., Cunningham Park Elementary School instituted a “Homework Bill of Rights” that prevents teachers from grading homework [10] and assigning it over weekends or holidays…

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Texas backs away from NCLB, its own Bush-endorsed creation

Posted By Staff and wire services reports On In District Management,IT Management,Teaching & Learning | No Comments

Texas, the state that launched school accountability as an experiment, has applied to untangle itself from parts of the federal No Child Left Behind mandate, the same law [11] that experiment eventually yielded, the Huffington Post reports. The deadline was Thursday for states to take President Barack Obama’s administration up on its offer to waive parts of the law in exchange for implementing elements of the White House’s education agenda. Texas announced [12] that, like at least 40 other states, it wanted out, too.

“NCLB’s reauthorization in a timely manner has created an obsolete system that does not adequately reflect the accomplishments of the state’s schools,” the state’s education chief Michael Williams wrote in an open letter Thursday. By the law’s definition, in Texas 47.8 percent of schools — and 27.6 percent of its school districts — made “adequate yearly progress” this year. When campaigning in 2008, Obama promised to release states from the 2002 law [13], a signature initiative from President George W. Bush that requires standardized testing of students and a system of penalties for low test scores…

Click here for the full story [14]

CoSN examines BYOD safety and security

Posted By From staff and wire reports On In IT Management,Teaching & Learning,Top News | No Comments
BYOD initiatives are popular, but they present unique security challenges.

A new report from the Consortium for School Networking (CoSN), titled “Safe & Secure? Managing the Risks of Personal Devices,” examines today’s advancing Bring Your Own (BYO) initiatives and related safety and security risks facing school districts nationwide.

“Apps and mobile devices are being utilized more and more in education, forcing schools to reexamine their mobile device policies,” said CoSN CEO Keith Krueger. “These continuous advancements are creating an unprecedented set of safety and security challenges for school leaders, so it’s imperative that leaders are prepared and have at their fingertips a set of technical solutions to prevent data breaches and protect personal devices.”

The report outlines leading BYO initiatives—namely, Bring Your Own Device (BYOD), Bring Your Own Network (BYON), and Bring Your Own Cloud (BYOC) / Bring Your Own Applications (BYOA)—and explains the factors driving these initiatives, including ensuring that students receive a 21st-century education and lowering district costs.

But BYO initiatives have created safety and security risks in schools, the report says, including…

In addition, the report provides real-life examples of solutions to address these challenges effectively and includes information about the most preferred technologies for mitigating mobile security risks. This section of the report also provides a table detailing the solutions that provide the recommended protections and notes their advantages. Solutions include wireless authentication, federated identity management, and virtual desktops.
The BYO movement is gaining steam in part because of stretched school budgets that don’t allow schools to purchase technology tools or update existing technology.

“Bring Your Own initiatives can reduce the cost burden to districts by shifting some costs of device purchases and internet access to families—while still providing educational benefits,” the report says.

BYO opponents maintain that the initiatives don’t address access issues and that students who do not own devices do not have the same level of technology and information access, because they often use spare classroom devices and are not able to use the devices outside of the classroom.

CoSN’s EdTechNext Reports are a series of mini-reports developed to keep educators up to speed on the latest trends in educational technology. They provide a brief introduction to new and emerging technologies and insight about their educational value. Sponsors of the reports include Adobe, Comcast, Gartner, GlobalScholar, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, HP, IBM, Intel, Lenovo, Lightspeed Systems, Pearson, PolyVision, Qualcomm, SAS, SchoolDude, SMART Technologies, and Wireless Generation.

To learn more about the report, which is available only to CoSN members, go to www.cosn.org/EdTechNext [15].