text: The Team View full-size image < previous next > Is this photo a winner? "Our shirts were made for a team that was working in the Processing Center for Operation Christmas Child, an international relief organization that shares love and hope with children in countries effected by natural disaster, poverty, disease and despair. They do this through delivering gift filled shoe boxes to these children. Our team of 19 worked in the processing center in Charlotte, NC for 3 days and was a party of processing more than 400,000 of the 9.1 million shoe boxes that will be handed out this year." - http://www.samaritanspurse.org/occ - Suffolk County OCC Team (Dec 05, 2012) Share this photo on: Twitter Facebook Pinterest Similar Photos: charity | charlotte | green | NC | religious | processing center | operation christmas child | shoe boxes Feeling inspired? Visit the CustomInk Design Lab to start your own group order. Design Your Own


text:
Blood and Sand
USA, 1922 (MIFF 1978, American Silent Classics)
Director: Fred Niblo
Edited version.
When Juan Gallardo takes up bull-fighting in his native Spanish town, his family overcome their initial disapproval when they discover the financial advantages. Juan marries Carmen, his childhood sweetheart, but his auspicious career is threatened when he meets Dona Sol, the aristocratic daughter of a famous bull-breeder. Sexually voracious, she draws him into a reckless affair, which he tries in vain to end; she continually follows him and, when he is found in a compromising situation at his country house, treats his family with utter disdain.
Disturbed by these events, Juan goes into the bull-ring and dedicates a bull to Plumitas, a famous bandit whose practice of arbitrarily taking lives somewhat parallels his own in the ring. When Plumitas, now a spectator in the audience, is shot down by the police, Juan misses a stroke and is gored by the bull.
Taken to an ante-room, he is reconciled with Carmen before dying. Meanwhile the ring is cleared and cleaned for the next contest.

subset: commoncrawl


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California Governor Jerry Brown's State of the State address last week got the anti-reform crowd all atwitter (and a-Twitter) when he called for scaling back testing and reducing the federal and state roles in California education. Diane Ravitch swooned, writing in a blog post that Brown and his Sunshine State compatriots "may provide the spark that ignites a national revolt against the current tide of bad ideas." In one respect, both Brown and Ravitch have it right: Education Secretary Arne Duncan's Race to the Top and conditional NCLB waivers mark a high-water mark for federal intrusion in K-12 education and it is understandable for governors to chafe at such strong-arming from Washington. But California is hardly the place to look for good ideas. Its student achievement results trail other states' by a mile, and its poor and minority students are doing terribly compared to their peers in other, more reform-minded states. (Texas and Florida come to mind.) We have no qualms with mid-course adjustments to the reform agenda (getting test results back in an expedited manner, for example—something Brown championed). But let's not just toss all school reform efforts into the Sacramento River, either.
"Brown differs sharply from Obama on education policy," by Howard Blume, Los Angeles Times, January 20, 2012
Fresh off his South American adventure (seriously!), Rick reunites with Mike to catch up on what he missed: NCLB reauthorization, tough talk in New York, and the fall of Tim Tebow. Amber explains why the latest value-added study really is a big deal and Chris describes a teacher scandal that really will leave you asking, "What's up with that?"
The Long-term Impacts of Teachers: Teacher Value Added and Student Outcomes in Adulthood
Tune in next week to find out the answer!
Teacher masturbates in classroom over 10 years! via NBCChicago.com
In the discussion about ESEA reauthorization, people on both sides of the aisle have recognized the importance of setting rigorous standards aligned to college- and career-readiness expectations. The Obama Administration has, for instance, required that states adopt college- and career-ready standards as part of its ESEA waiver process. Similarly, Republican-sponsored ESEA reauthorization proposals (which Mike wrote about in a post yesterday) also ask states to set college- and career-readiness standards for students.
While this focus on setting clear and sufficiently rigorous standards is important, it is also insufficient. After all, if we've learned anything from 10 years of NCLB implementation, it's that the act of setting standards doesn't translate to increased student achievement unless those standards are meaningfully implemented in the classroom. And, one of the most important things for states to do to ensure strong implementation is to hold students accountable for actually learning the content laid out in the standards.
Unfortunately, over the past 10 years, too many states—even those with reasonably rigorous standards—have asked very little of students on statewide assessments. In fact, Fordham's 2007 "Proficiency Illusion" report found that "the central flaw in NCLB is that it allows each state to set its own definition of what constitutes 'proficiency.'" And so, as we look towards...
Ten years ago, George W. Bush signed the No Child Left Behind Act, the law that has dominated U.S. education—and the education policy debate—for the entire decade. While lawmakers are struggling to update that measure, experts across the political spectrum are struggling to make sense of its impact and legacy. Did NCLB, and the consequential accountability movement it embodied, succeed? And with near-stagnant national test scores of late, is there reason to think that this approach to school reform is exhausted? If not "consequential accountability," what could take the U.S. to the next level of student achievement?
Join three leading experts as they wrestle with these questions. Panelists include Hoover Institute economist Eric Hanushek, DFER's Charles Barone, and former NCES commissioner Mark Schneider, author of a forthcoming Fordham analysis of the effects of consequential accountability. NCLB drafter Sandy Kress, previously identified as a panelist, was unable to attend.
Democrats across and beyond the nation's capital—in the Administration, on Capitol Hill, in advocacy groups, and in think tanks—are up in arms about the ESEA reauthorizationproposals released by House GOP leaders on Friday. Or at least they are pretending to be. While they contained a few surprises, the House bills were pretty much as one would expect: significantly to the right of both the Senate Harkin-Enzi bill and the package put forward by Republican Senator Lamar Alexander and his colleagues. In the parlance that we've been using at Fordham for three years now, the House GOP embodies the views of the Local Controllers, Senator Alexander embraced Reform Realism, and Harkin-Enzi represents a mishmash of ideas from the Army of the Potomac and the System Defenders.
But while there are significant differences among the players, a clear path toward a workable, maybe even bipartisan, package is still visible. In short: all roads lead to Lamar. Not only does the Alexander package represent smart policy, it also serves as a sort of mid-point between the Senate bill that passed out of committee and the House GOP bill that is likely to do the same. Let's tackle the five big issues:
House Republicans have released two more bills in their effort to reauthorize the Elementary and Secondary Education Act piece by piece. The draft legislation proposed last week seeks to provide superintendents and state departments of education with more flexibility about how to spend federal dollars, dramatically remaking the American school finance system in the process.
The first gift the committee wants to give districts is increased flexibility to transfer categorical funds aimed at one underserved population into Title I. (You may recall that Mike called for something very similar more than a year ago.) This could wind up being a huge plus for children in these programs, enabling the funding of whole-school programs to address the needs of underprivileged youngsters without the mountains of red tape that currently accompany these dollars.
Second, the proposed law would repeal the so-called "maintenance of effort" requirement, which makes certain federal grant funds contingent on states and localities continuing to spend the same amount of their own money on education. This is becoming increasingly difficult to do in light of other budget pressures, including rising health care costs (both in Medicaid and on public worker payrolls).
Maintenance of effort requirements also hold federal grant-giving hostage to the fallacy that education simply costs what it costs, year in...
Tomorrow marks the tenth anniversary of the No Child Left Behind Act, and Fordham's redesigned website offered plenty of commentary and analysis this week to help make sense of the NCLB decade:
In other news…
Two months ago, Apple celebrated the 10th anniversary of the release of the iPod. Sunday, we will "celebrate" the 10th birthday of NCLB.
The iPod is universally seen as a game changer—something that not only transformed the way we listen to music, but that changed the music industry itself.
Few would say the same about the transformative power of NCLB.
Yet, what if the iPod hadn't evolved in the ten years since its initial release? What if, after Steve Jobs released the 2001 version—the first-generation iPod—the different divisions at Apple couldn't come to agreement about how it should evolve?
As one tech-expert explained:
The transformative power of the iPod was unleashed not by its...
The federal law that everybody loves to hate turns ten on Sunday. Here's what to think about it: