I participated in professional development at two national conferences last week, hence no blogs. My brain gets too full! I find I’m not only taking in the content of the meetings, but dreaming about how to use the knowledge to push us forward. It’s the activist in
Read more →Thanks to John Mooney and and NJ Spotlight, we now know that 308 employees of the School Development Authority, including nearly 50 making over $100,000, have worked for nearly a year to reconsider 50 school projects and reorganize the organizational chart. With roughly 60 SDA employees per
Read more →As I get ready for Dr. Evan’s forum at Rosa Parks tonight at 5 pm, I’m thinking about charter schools as a reform strategy. As Dr. Evans explained last week, Paterson does not have the authority to give any group a charter. Currently, only the New Jersey
Read more →More choice. Academic rigor. New school configurations. School/teacher reward plans. I listened to Dr. Evans at Thursday night’ forum with hope and dread. Hope: Because the strategic plan and this year’s targets are bold and doable. Dread: Because the foes of change in Paterson have defeated every
Read more →Dr. Evans brought better news to the Board of Education on Wednesday night. The meeting was called to order at 7:05 with Best, Guzman, Irving, Kerr, Mendez and Simmons present. Rodriguez and Hodges entered at 7:10 and Taylor at 7:30 pm. Evans announced that the special auditors
Read more →Yesterday, I went to see “Waiting for Superman, with four colleagues. Going with my trusted colleagues is very important to this story, because I didn’t go alone. As I think back upon the film, I’m stuck by the isolation of everybody in it-parents, children, teachers, experts. They
Read more →You decide: You say that you want everyone to take the bus to the game. The bus costs $3.00. Jerry has three dollars, Stacey has $2.50 and Eddie has $2.00. Ok , you say, I’ll give everyone $.50 so they can take the bus. That’s fair, everyone gets
Read more →Two interesting reports were released Oct 12: one on fairness in school funding and the other on mayoral control of schools. I’ll write about the school funding report later. But for now, let’s consider mayoral control of schools as a possible way to return to local control.
Read more →Most of the news wasn’t good. Spring 2010 test scores were mostly down. One hundred eighty-six seniors didn’t pass the final exit exam and were denied diplomas. The board had lots of ideas about what to do that include all of us, especially parents, in motivating students.
Read more →Yesterday I attended the Joint committee on Public Schools meeting. Here are a few things I thought noteworthy. Senator Rice asked some very pointed questions about QSAC. He wanted to know: the implementation process, how many districts had been evaluated, how many were in each level of monitoring
Read more →