Tuesday Open Thread
Got a middle-schooler? Is he/she "flipping waterbottles?" I have to say this one makes me smile for all its low-tech fun.
Good article from the News Tribune about public disclosure requests made in Washington State. A survey was put out in August that raised many eyebrows.
Interesting article out from the Spokesman-Review in Spokane about schools using "Core Knowledge" curriculum. I had not heard of this curriculum before.
What's on your mind?
Good article from the News Tribune about public disclosure requests made in Washington State. A survey was put out in August that raised many eyebrows.
But the biggest headline from the report was a number: $60.9 million. That was the total cost of responding to records requests, spread across 541 local and state agencies that responded.My comment is that if many government entities had the most basic of information on their websites- minutes, agendas, etc from all meetings - they would probably see their requests drop.
Backers of proposed revisions to the records law say it demonstrates the growing burden and expense of responding to large-scale requests in the digital age. Critics question the report’s methodology and cite information gaps that create misleading impressions.
The survey found that media organizations represented only 3 percent of total requests received. Most came from individuals and law firms. Cities and towns reported receiving the most requests, the report found. State agencies and counties came next, and school districts came last.
Interesting article out from the Spokesman-Review in Spokane about schools using "Core Knowledge" curriculum. I had not heard of this curriculum before.
Balboa Elementary is one of three schools in Spokane using a curriculum called Core Knowledge, which focuses on integrating reading and writing with science and history. The idea is to precisely specify the things students need to learn in each grade so they can build on that knowledge year by year.Great story from KING-5 about student athletes in Sammamish who mentor kids with disabilities.
Bettinson said the curriculum helps neutralize class differences between children. "It’s the great leveler because these are topics none of the kids really know about,” she said.
Instead, once a week for about 90 minutes, they get to hang out with a high school athlete. It’s someone who’s close to their age, but someone who is also viewed in a favorable light.I'm sure you heard about the shooting at a South Carolina elementary school last week. A teenage boy killed his father at home and then, for whatever reason, went to an elementary school and shot a teacher and several children. The most seriously injured boy - a first-grader named Jacob Hall - died on Saturday. Deepest sympathies to his family and his school, Townville Elementary School.
“They look at their high school mentor as if they’re a rock star,” said King.
What's on your mind?
Comments
1. Out of date
2. Wrong
3. Manipulated
4. Incomplete
5. Misleading
If the FOIA would include a penalty against bureaucracies for any of the above, then perhaps we might have more trust in bureaucracies web-sites.
More FOIA
Libertarian presidential nominee Gary Johnson suggested on Tuesday that the United States would be less likely to engage in foreign conflicts if its president did not have a firm grasp on world geography.
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Perhaps this is why world geography has been cut from middle school curriculum?
-McClureWatcher
My chronically-ill child is in a school where the nurse is so overloaded that she is struggling to safely care for the children in her charge. Wondering which other schools have nurses who are overwhelmed or do not have nursing care enough of the time. I would like to put together some info for the Board, even if it's anecdotal, for them to be aware of this critical issue.
Does your school have a nurse? Is s/he able to provide a safe environment for the health of the kids in your school? If not, what are the issues?
T1D
I had no idea it was a national trend. Interesting.
-StepJ
Developed by E.D. Hirsch
http://coreknowledge.org/
-- Dan Dempsey
Hirsch has shown that the greatest factor in a student's ability to comprehend a reading passage is the reader's previous knowledge of the subject matter.
This is definitely a different line of thinking than the big emphasis on process over content so prevalent in recent years.
The Common Core State Standards for math are often times distorted with a huge emphasis on the Standards for Mathematical Process at the expense of appropriate emphasis on the content standards. This distortion will not happen in a Core Knowledge school.
-- Dan Dempsey
Please consider contacting the City Council. I have to stand with Tim Burgess on this one:
http://us12.campaign-archive1.com/?u=11a79978ca7225050bfabf7ad&id=afd02ddf3d&e=6e7bc4c229
-parent
Double Standards