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Do Poor Kids Deserve Lower- Quality Education Than Rich Kids? Evaluating School Privatization Proposals in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. During the past year, Wisconsin state legislators debated a series of bills aimed at closing low- performing public schools and replacing them with privately run charter schools. These proposals were particularly targeted at Milwaukee, the state. Nevertheless, the more ambitious proposals will likely remain at the core of Wisconsin.
To help inform these deliberations, this report addresses the most comprehensive set of reforms put forward in the 2. Rocketship proposes that its model. It is these groups, rather than parents or community organizations, that provided the impetus for legislators to consider proposals for mass school closure and privatization in Milwaukee. In advocating school privatization, MMAC, allied corporate lobbies, and corporate- funded think tanks claim to be acting out of social altruism, motivated by the tragedy of poor children whose needs are unmet in the public school system. This briefing paper also explains how such proposals might fit within the broader economic agenda of both local and national corporate lobbies. Above all, the report questions why an educational model deemed substandard for more privileged suburban children is being so vigorously promoted. There is thus no basis for believing that replacing traditional public schools in Milwaukee with privately run charters will result in improved education.
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The “blended learning” model of education exemplified by the Rocketship chain of charter schools. But evidence from Wisconsin, the country, and the world shows that students receive a better education from experienced teachers offering a broad curriculum that emphasizes curiosity, creativity, and critical thinking, as well as getting the right answers on standardized tests.
Blended- learning schools such as Rocketship are supported by investment banks, hedge funds, and venture capital firms that, in turn, aim to profit from both the construction and, especially, the digital software assigned to students. To fund the growth of such operations, money earmarked for Milwaukee students is diverted to national headquarters and other cities where the company seeks to expand. Furthermore, the very curricular model that Rocketship employs is shaped not simply by what is good for kids but also, in part, by what will generate profits for investors and fuel the company. Such a bill would likely result in shutting a growing number of public schools and concentrating the city. Eventually, this would bankrupt the public school district. Some of the best options for school improvement are outlawed in Sen.
For instance, Milwaukee. Yet under the proposed legislation, this school would be banned from opening more campuses, while privately run schools with much worse performance would be encouraged to expand. To truly improve education in Milwaukee, we must start with the assumption that poor children are no less deserving of a quality education than rich children. As such, the schools that privileged suburban parents demand for their children should be the yardstick we use to measure the adequacy of education in the city.
This means subjecting all schools. Debates on education policy draw an extraordinarily wide number of participants, including parents, students, and a broad assortment of nonprofit advocacy groups. Yet when examining which of the hundreds of education- related bills introduced actually become law, it is generally those backed by major corporate lobbies, such as the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), that advance furthest. Until the past decade, these lobbies paid scant attention to education policy. But as will be explained in greater detail later in this paper, in recent years they have become dominant players in school reform debates.
At their most ambitious, corporate advocates have recently sought to promote the replacement of public schools by privately run charters not on a school- by- school basis, but through the transformation of whole school districts. This strategy was first enacted in New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina, when the Bush administration refused to fund the reopening of public schools, and instead provided $4. Saulny 2. 00. 6). As the charter industry has grown and as corporate money has become increasingly influential in both state and local politics, corporate lobbyists have sought to replicate the New Orleans model in other poor cities.
In the process, the charter industry and the investors who profit from it are able to realize growth in leaps and bounds rather than school- by- school. When the Metropolitan Milwaukee Association of Commerce initiated the call to create an . As the following sections explain, there is no evidentiary basis for believing that substituting charters for public schools will, in itself, improve education in Milwaukee or any other city.
Furthermore, the education model of the Rocketship chain of schools, a company central to the education reform push in Milwaukee, is particularly ill- suited to providing the city. In reality, rather than a proliferation of small experiments, the last few years have witnessed a pattern of corporate consolidation. By 2. 01. 1 less than 1. The majority were overseen by corporations operating 1. Miron and Gulosino 2.
By far the fastest- growing sector of the industry has been online or virtual schools (Miron et al. As charter schools have grown over the past two decades, multiple studies have compared their performance with that of traditional public schools.
Their conclusion: There is no discernible difference. One recent meta- analysis reviewed the results of 8. In Indiana, nearly half the state. In Ohio, which has authorized charter schools in the state.
Indeed, one study found that, after controlling for poverty and other student demographics, public schools scored significantly higher on elementary school math tests (Lubienski and Lubienski 2. The largest national studies have been conducted by Stanford University.
Comparing math scores of charter and public school students, CREDO. Averaged across all schools, the impact of attending a charter school was a slight. On the whole, however, the authors report that .
Indeed, even the subgroups for whom charters appeared to have the most impacts showed very modest differences from their public school peers (Maul and Mc. Clelland 2. 01. 3). Figure ACharter schools’ math score gains as compared with those of public schools, 2.
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The data underlying the figure. Thus, there is no evidentiary basis for believing that substituting charters for public schools will, in itself, improve education in Milwaukee or any other city. Researchers have, however, pointed to several policies that would improve the performance of charter schools. First, charter performance is best in states that strictly limit the number of charter authorizers.
Second, charter schools do better in states that have relatively fewer of them. Finally, the single worst- performing schools are for- profit online charters (CREDO 2. Miron et al. Unfortunately, ALEC and the other major corporate lobbies are advocating for policies that run exactly counter to these findings: They call for expanding the number of both charter schools and charter authorizers, and they vigorously promote the growth of online education. Virtual schools are by far the most profitable sector of the charter industry, thanks to low production costs and to ALEC model bills requiring they receive the same amount of taxpayer dollars per student as traditional schools.
Yet their market is inherently limited, as the number of families who will choose to enroll their children in an entirely online curriculum. The profit margins of . For this reason, investment banks, hedge funds, and venture capital firms have increasingly looked to . Further, while it is difficult to gauge their true costs, as they have been supported to date by generous subsidies from both government and private donors, such schools are touted as a lower- cost alternative to traditional education (Horn and Evans 2. Thus, this model appeals to tax- cutting politicians as well as investors.
Rocketship Education is the leading pioneer of the . Moreover, it enjoys the backing of Milwaukee business leaders. Tim Sheehy, president of the Metropolitan Milwaukee Association of Commerce, sits on Rocketship.
Indeed, the company is so central to school privatization plans that, when the Wisconsin State Senate Education Committee first held hearings on a bill that would make it easier for charter companies to add more schools without need for public approval, one legislator reported hearing Committee Chairman Sen. Luther Olsen tell a colleague that . For all these reasons, it is important to evaluate the likely impact on Milwaukee students of a large- scale expansion of Rocketship.
The first step in creating a mass- production school is shrinking the curriculum to the basics: math and literacy. More recently, the company has added a modest amount of class time for science, social studies, art, and other . But none of these is taught by faculty certified in these fields, and these subjects are not generally taught as separate classes. Activities unrelated to literacy. No matter what theoretical job description an employee may be given, when she is told what determines her salary, that is the real job description she takes to heart. By linking salaries so tightly to math and reading tests, Rocketship implicitly instructs teachers to devote minimal attention to anything else.
Thus, it may be unsurprising that one family reported that, in three years of their daughter attending Rocketship. Here, students can read independently from a set of .
But the heart of the Learning Lab is online learning.