January 18, 2010
I’m a finance guy, so I’ll get right to the point. I want to talk about a dirty word, or at least a word that conjures up negative images in many people’s minds. "Administration." There, I said it. That one word which evokes a vision of bureaucrats squandering hard earned taxpayer money as we speak. […]
January 18, 2010
On Tuesday, New Jersey will submit its application for the U.S. Department of Education’s "Race to the Top" competition. The prize is a huge infusion of federal dollars to fund innovative, transformational changes in how we prepare children for success in college and the workplace. The competition among states for this money will be very […]
January 18, 2010
Iowa’s K-12 public school districts will have to wait a year before they know how much state foundation aid funding they can expe ct for their fiscal 2012 budgets. The Senate voted 46-0 Thursday to delay for one year a statutory requirement to establish the percentage “allowable growth” increase for K-12 schools and accompanying educational […]
January 18, 2010
A funny thing happened today at the U.S. Department of Education’s expert hearing on how state procurement rules can affect the process of designing commo n assessments. It got interesting. I freely confess that I went in wondering if I would lapse into semi-consciousness, lost in the tall weeds of conversation about obscure regulations and […]
January 18, 2010
Dedication to Special Education, an all-volunteer parent group, will donate more than $85,000 to Marin classrooms this year through its Grants to Special Educators Program. The money will be used to purchase 20 computers, dozens of software programs designed for children with special needs, 15 portable memory keyboards, listening stations for audio books and more. […]
January 18, 2010
W hat were they thinking? The over the next fcash-strapped Broward School Board turned down the potential for $34 million our years to improve teacher training, better track individual student achievement and help low-performing schools improve. By a 5-4 vote, the board decided Tuesday it would not join most other Florida school districts — including […]
January 18, 2010
On Friday, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and other state officials signed California’s grand, ambitious, 550-page application for federal Race to the Top (RTTT) education funding. It came just a week after the governor submitted a budget plan for the coming year that’s so riddled with holes, misrepresentations and improbabilities that you’d never know they applied to […]
January 18, 2010
Parents’ frustration with the district’s handling of their children’s special education needs boiled over several times during a meeting with the school board chairman and superintendent Wednesday morning. Many attendees said the families who strongly advocate for their children — even wage legal battles on their behalf — are too often labeled as "problem parents" […]
January 18, 2010
The Democratic bosses of the state Legislature are playing with fire – and threatening to burn both New York’s children and the taxpayers in the process. Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver and state Senate conference boss John Sampson appeared willing Friday to forgo any shot at up to $700 million in federal education aid out of […]
January 18, 2010
More than 100 West and Middle Tennessee educators are in Jackson for a two-day assistive technology conference sponsored by Jackson-Madison County Schools and Lambuth University. The conference continues today in the Wilder Student Union. Assistive technology is a term used in the special education field to describe the tools used to help students develop communication […]