Yesterday, Senate Bill 355, otherwise known as “The Cleveland Plan,” was under the microscope again. In an intense and passionate Senate hearing, Ohio lawmakers heard various perspectives on Cleveland Mayor Frank Jackson’s plan to reform Cleveland schools. More than 100 advocates, both in support of and against the plan, packed the hearing room.
After the testimony of spokespeople from various activist groups and community-based organizations, Chairwoman Peggy Lehner finally allowed Cleveland’s children to speak. Arguing in favor of Mayor Jackson’s plan to reform their schools, these students offered compelling appeals for policy changes that would ensure high-quality teachers and enable high-quality schooling options.
As Senator Turner advises, we can all learn from the testimonies of students like David Boone and others (including several students from the Citizens Leadership Academy, a Cleveland charter school covered in Fordham’s report “Needles in a Haystack”.) These students would most clearly understand the pressing urgency of Mayor Jackson’s plan—it’s their futures and their peers’ futures that depend on it. And lawmakers would be r
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MONTGOMERY, Ala. House budget committee Chairman Jay Love has devised an education budget that would cut fewer teachers’ jobs than the one passed by the Alabama Senate.
The Republican from Montgomery outlined his proposed budget for the House Ways and Means-Education Committee on Tuesday. The committee will vote on the budget Wednesday, and the House could consider it Thursday, legislative leaders said.
The Senate’s version of the $5.5 billion education budget for the 2012-2013 school year was about $150 million smaller than this year’s budget. It included eliminating more than 600 teaching positions for the new school year starting in August. Love’s version sets the job losses to about 350.
He did that, in part, by taking out $20 million that was originally allocated for bus purchases. In his plan, the state would sell $30 million in bonds to buy buses instead of using current revenue.
Love said selling bonds to buy buses is not something he would normally want to do, but it’s appropriate when education spending is being reduced.
The teacher reduction will be handled by increasing class size. Gov.
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For the second consecutive year, state Superintendent Tony Evers has used his bully pulpit at the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction to imply that the Badger State is throwing more money at a voucher program that is inferior to a traditional school system which is receiving less. But a closer inspection of Mr. Evers’s gamesmanship reveals the tricks he employs to attack a program he once called “morally wrong.”
Just like last year, Evers distributed a press release this week asserting that students in the Milwaukee and Racine voucher programs scored no better, and in some cases worse, than district students on Wisconsin’s standardized test. We all know that such comparisons are problematic because of “selection bias” since nobody can be sure whether kids using vouchers and those using the public schools differ in important ways. (The former might, for example, have fled bad districts precisely because they were doing poorly there.)
Especially galling was Evers’s use of the Racine data.
His press release claims that far more district students in that city scored at grade level or better in reading and math than did Racine students who chose the private school voucher, barely half of whom were rated proficient in either subject.
But what the superintendent failed to note was that voucher recipients had been in their chosen private schools for only two months before taking the test. In other words
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PITTSBURGH A university has stepped in to fill a difficult role delivering basic health care and medications in a poor inner city neighborhood.
Dusquesne University has opened a pharmacy to serves its neighbors in Pittsburgh’s Hill District, which hadn’t had one for years. School officials say the program is the first of its kind in the nation, and they hope it will be a model for other inner cities.
“It’s not a browse-the-aisles pharmacy” with soft drinks and candy for sale, said J. Douglas Bricker, dean of the Duquesne School of Pharmacy. Instead, the focus is solely on patient care.
“It’s up-front counseling,” said Terri Kroh, the pharmacy director. That means that when a new patient comes in with a prescription, he or she will first go with a staff member to a private room for a review of personal health issues. That way the pharmacy takes on a more active role in supporting both the primary care doctor and the patient.
“We do a lot of cholesterol screening, and then counsel patients on healthy diet, healthy lifestyle,” all for free, Kroh said.
“It’s wonderful. I don’t think I can say more about them,” said Barbara Strothers, a longtime area resident.
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Today’s GMAT tip comes from test prep firm ManhattanGMAT. In this article, they provide helpful insight into the new Integrated Reasoning section of the GMAT. Read on to see what they have to say!
The launch of the Integrated Reasoning section is getting close! The last administration of the old version of the GMAT will be on 2 June; the next-generation GMAT will launch on 5 June. It’s not too late to study for the old version, but it’s also not too early to start thinking about studying for the next-gen test, including IR.
So let’s talk about one of the four IR question categories: Graphics Interpretation. IR in general is a mix of quant and logical reasoning, so expect to bring your critical reasoning and reading comp skills into play on this section.
Before we dive in, just a note: a new Official Guide was just published; it has an IR section along with an additional IR resource online . I would guess that most test prep companies will also be releasing their IR study materials next month .
Try the problem
Note: when you are done, do NOT click the “next” button. Just leave i
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