School Technical Ideas

johnnywestmi: MEA began it’ take over of the education system in 1964. Education has steadily declined ever since then. The mantra of their defense has been “we need more money”. When are we all going to wake up to the fact that the MEA is a failure organization and disban it from control of our children’s preparation for life! The MEA has failed. Fire them now.

defenderguy: So much for the stimulus dollars! A few weeks ago, I read a journal article that said Westwood had received something like 1.2 million? Their “restructurin” plan was to change the titles of the principal and assistant principal, but keep the same folks in place? Their Superintendent has the credentials to be a Supt, but lacks the basic skills. Her comment that things are too complex for her to understand? When will this insanity end? That district needs to be taken over by the State and ALL administrators replaced!

bowserfan: Clowns like Flanagan ARE the problem. They’ve been blowing through huge amounts of amount for decade after decade. They create a “problem” then prescribe their “cure.”
At the end of the day their cure is for us to give them more money and repeat the cycle.

RamJet327: No surprise. You have weak parents whose kids are telling them to buzz off as soon as they turn 16 and get a car from mom & dad for their birthday. By the time they graduate, all they are thinking about is enjoying this higher plateau of ‘freedom’. Then they spend the next 8-10 years partying, working part time and refusing to move out of their parent’s house. Then they’re shacked up and living off their woman’s WIC benefits

Teachers and like-minded parents have struck first in an expected statewide battle over education changes being proposed by Gov.-elect Rick Scott’s transition team.

They have held meetings and conference calls, traded information via Facebook, planned an education summit and formed bill-writing committees to create alternative legislation.

And on Tuesday, they plan to wear red to send the new governor — and the Republican-dominated legislature — a message that they support public schools.

“They’re hearing nothing but Jeb Bush and his cronies — that’s the whole transition team,” said Rita Solnet, an education activist in Boca Raton who’s involved in an effort to build a statewide coalition of parents and teachers who support traditional public education.

Bonnie Cunard, a Fort Myers teacher, said: “We’ve been absolutely ignored.”

Scott’s 20-member transition team has been led by Michelle Rhee, the former chancellor of Washington, D.C., schools who fired more than 200 teachers and closed dozens of failing schools, and Patricia Levesque, director of Bush’s education think tank.

Last week, the team released proposals to revisit teacher merit pay, expand school voucher programs and dramatically alter how public schools are funded. Most of the proposals aligned with Scott’s campaign promise to get rid of an “outdated system” that relies too much on traditional schools.

Teachers and parents are using several Facebook pages to organize opposition — much like they did last year when Republicans passed Senate Bill 6, a wildly controversial merit pay proposal that tied teacher pay to student test scores.

After parents and teachers staged massive protests and inundated his office with phone calls and e-mails, outgoing Gov. Charlie Crist vetoed the legislation. Crist said then that it was like no other issue he’d seen before.

Some of the same Facebook groups involved in the merit pay fight, such as Stop Senate Bill 6 and Testing Is Not Teaching, said they will battle Scott, too — but this time they know what they’re doing.

“We need to let the legislators know that we’re more organized than with Senate Bill 6 and we’re not just going to roll over,” Solnet said.

Cunard said some group members sent teachers a template for crafting legislation and encouraged them to draw up counterproposals over the holiday break from school.

“We’re all for improving public schools,” she said. “But we want a voice.”

Even before Scott had been elected, four of the Facebook groups met in Orlando to organize a coalition, Solnet said. Testing Is Not Teaching has more than 11,000 fans, while Stop Senate Bill 6 has nearly 50,000.

They also are inviting legislators and the community to an education summit on Jan. 26 at Lynn University Bachelor’s, master’s & online degrees in Boca Raton.

The “Wear Red to Support Public Ed” campaign, which also has been endorsed by Illinois-based Save Our Schools Million Teacher March, is a signal to Scott, members said.

We’re going to wear red “since we obviously can’t afford the tickets to his party to tell him,” Cunard said.

Tickets to Scott’s inaugural ball cost $95; some other events are free.

Testing Is Not Teaching, which formed about a year ago in opposition to a new curriculum plan in Palm Beach County schools, used a similar tactic when members sent their children to school in orange clothes to show support for teachers, said its founder, Lisa Goldman. That group succeeded in getting the plan scrapped.

Goldman, a Wellington mother of four, said she was afraid of what might be in store for public schools under Scott.

The idea to wear red started — where else — on Facebook.

A Jacksonville teacher, Donna Yates Mace, put out the word on multiple Facebook pages. Within hours of Mace’s post on Stop Senate Bill 6, the page’s administrators had made the campaign an official event. Nearly 200 people committed to it within a day.

Many fans from both pages changed their profile pictures to an image of a red T-shirt emblazoned with the phrase “Keep Public Schools Public.”

“These sites see a common purpose and we’re all pulling together,” Goldman said.

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A long-awaited biography of the late U.S. Supreme Court Justice William J. Brennan Jr., being released Oct. 4, contains some interesting anecdotes about key education cases Brennan was involved in during his 34 years on the court.

Justice Brennan: Liberal Champion (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) was written by Seth Stern and Stephen Wermiel. Wermiel was The Wall Street Journal‘s Supreme Court correspondent when Brennan in 1986 agreed to start meeting him for a series of biographical interviews. Wermiel would arrive at Brennan’s chambers at 7:30 a.m. on many weekdays to interview the justice or sift through his case files and other records.

Brennan, appointed by President Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1956, retired after the 1989-90 term of the court and died in 1997. Wermiel, who now teaches law at American University in Washington, worked on the biography but apparently let it languish after Brennan’s death. Co-author Seth Stern, the Supreme Court reporter for Congressional Quarterly, got involved in 2006, conducting additional interviews and helping Wermiel organize his vast notes and complete the biography.

** It was relatively early in Justice Brennan’s tenure when he was tapped in 1958 by Chief Justice Earl Warren to write the court’s unanimous, joint opinion in Cooper v. Aaron, which reaffirmed the court’s commitment to its decision in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka and held that the governor and legislature of Arkansas were bound by federal court orders to desegregate the Little Rock schools.

Brennan worked delicately to craft an opinion that would retain the unanimity of the Brown decision. The book recounts that Brennan was on the front porch of his home in Washington’s Georgetown section working on his opinion in the case in September 1958 when a neighbor who was a TV journalist came by to strike up a conversation. The journalist, Richard Harkness, had just returned from a reporting swing through the Deep South and remarked to Brennan that the word “integration” had riled many white Southerners, provoking fears of interracial sex and marriage. The word “desegregation” didn’t bother them as much, Harkness told the justice.

Brennan took heed of his neighbor’s observations, and he used the term “desegregation” in his Cooper opinion.

** After the American public’s harsh reaction to the Supreme Court’s 1962 decision in Engel v. Vitale, striking down a state-approved prayer for use in public schools, Justice Brennan, as the court’s lone Roman Catholic, felt the need to explain his views in the next school prayer case, which came along in 1963 in Abington School District v. Schempp.

Brennan wrote a 70-page concurrence to the Abington decision, which with a companion case struck down compulsory Bible reading in Pennsylvania and Maryland public schools, and he refused to let any other justices sign on to the concurrence, wanting it to be his alone.

“Brennan traced the history of school prayer back to the English colonies in the 17th Century and … he took pains to try to prove that the Court had firmly grounded its conclusion in both law and tradition,” the authors write. “Here, Brennan sought specifically to explain to a Catholic audience what justified his breaking with what he viewed as the Church’s position” in support of official public school prayer, the book says.

** In 1982, as the court considered a case from Texas on whether the children of illegal immigrants had a 14th Amendment equal-protection right to receive a public education, Brennan told his clerks that then-Associate Justice William H. Rehnquist referred to the children at the center of the case as “wetbacks” during the justices’ private deliberations, the book says. Rehnquist defended the term as one still in wide use in the American West, prompting an angry response from Justice Thurgood Marshall, who told Rehnquist that under that theory Marshall used to be known as a “nigger.”

Brennan wrote the opinion for the court in Plyler v. Doe, which upheld the immigrant children’s right to a public education. The book says Brennan had to restrain his views about treating educational rights as deserving of heightened constitutional protection to gain the necessary fifth vote of Justice Lewis F. Powell Jr. in the case.

The book has other education episodes, and many anecdotes of interest, including a discussion about why Brennan, a champion of treating sex discrimination with heightened judicial scrutiny, long resisted hiring female law clerks. Eventually, though, he gave in.