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'Race to Top' Guidelines Stress Use of Test Data
By Michele McNeil

The U.S. Department of Education’s proposed guidelines for awarding $4 billion in Race to the Top money send a strong message that any state hoping to land a grant must allow student test scores to be used in decisions about teacher compensation and evaluation.

According to draft plans outlined by department officials on Friday, states would be judged on 19 education reform criteria, from how friendly their charter school climates are to whether they cut state K-12 funding this year.

But only two criteria would be absolute requirements: States must have been approved by the Education Department for stabilization funds from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (most already have been), and states must not have any laws in place barring the use of student-achievement data for evaluating teachers and principals.

States not meeting those two absolutes would be ineligible to compete for aid from the Race to the Top Fund, a small but highly coveted slice of some $100 billion in federal economic-stimulus aid for education. That policy could eliminate California and New York—big states with powerful congressional delegations and a lot of students, but with legal firewalls between student and teacher data.

Being able to link teacher and student data is “absolutely fundamental—it’s a building block,” U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said in an interview. “We believe great teachers matter tremendously. When you’re reluctant or scared to make that link, you do a grave disservice to the teaching profession and to our nation’s children.”

www.edweek.org/...37race.h28.html - Preview

09 Jun 09

Top News - Google Wave has great potential for education

Google Inc. later this year will unveil Google Wave, a new species of eMail and instant messaging that lets people communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, and videos--and it could have broad implications for how students use and develop collaborative skills.

The company says the free feature is "a new model for communication and collaboration on the web." Google Wave runs in a web browser and combines elements of eMail, instant messaging, wikis, and photo sharing in an attempt to make online communication more dynamic.

"We started out by saying to ourselves, 'What might eMail look like if it had been invented today?'" said Lars Rasmussen, who worked on Wave in Australia with his brother Jens and three other Google employees. The Rasmussens contend that eMail hasn't changed that much since its invention during the 1960s.

www.eschoolnews.com/...top-news - Preview

Top News - Lawsuits test free speech in internet era

A federal appeals court in Philadelphia must decide whether a Pennsylvania middle school can suspend a student who, at home on her own time, created a lewd MySpace page aimed at her principal.

The web page, which used a fake name but an actual photo of the principal, was purported to have been posted by a 40-year-old Alabama school principal who described himself, through a string of sexual vulgarities, as a pedophile and sex addict. The internet address included the phrase "kids rock my bed."

The case, argued in the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals last week, raises broad issues about the limits of school discipline for off-campus behavior that affects the atmosphere at school. A rash of similar cases have surfaced across the country, with mixed rulings, but so far none has reached the U.S. Supreme Court. (That could change, however, pending the outcome of this 3rd Circuit case.)

www.eschoolnews.com/...top-news - Preview

06 Jun 09

Local Business Center

a new dashboard feature we're launching in the Local Business Center (www.google.com/lbc). The LBC is a free tool that enables business owners to control the content of their business listings as they appear in Google Search and Google Maps. All you have to do is claim your listing in the LBC and go through a quick verification process to get access to the following kinds of data:

* Impressions: The number of times the business listing appeared as a result on a Google.com search or Google Maps search in a given period.
* Actions: The number of times people interacted with the listing; for example, the number of times they clicked through to the business' website or requested driving directions to the business.
* Top search queries: Which queries led customers to the business listing; for example, are they finding the listing for a cafe by searching for "tea" or "coffee"?
* Zip codes where driving directions come from: Which zip codes customers are coming from when they request directions to your location.

The new dashboard will also let you dig into that data using all kinds of lists, maps, and graphs like this one, which measures impressions and actions for a hotel's business listing:

When you sign in to the LBC today, you'll find that we've already populated the dashboards for claimed listings with data from the last 30 days. After that, new information will be added every day, so you can check in often to see how things are going. We're also working hard to add more historical information, and to make this available for businesses outside the U.S. All the data we share through the dashboard will be anonymous and aggregated, to protect the privacy of Google users.

We're really excited to be able to open up this data to local business owners. Before now, you could track usage metrics on your website using a tool like Google Analytics, but data about how customers found you in other ways never got back to you. That all changes today, and we think business owners will really get a lot out of

www.google.com/...ServiceLogin - Preview

02 Jun 09

Education Week: Preventing High School Dropouts Can Start in 4th Grade

Preventing High School Dropouts Can Start in 4th Grade

Strathman says the one thing that she consistently finds is that "the last time these students felt successful was the fourth grade."

That's right: Fourth grade. Which means parents and teachers may be ignoring years of red flags.

"Dropping out of school is often the result of a long process of disengagement," agreed Stuart Udell, chairman of the National Dropout Prevention Center, based at Clemson University in South Carolina. And typically, he added, kids have multiple risk factors rather than one simple problem. Here are a few of the issues related to teenage dropouts:
—Adult responsibilities, from work to child-rearing.—Truancy, learning disabilities and mental health problems.—Boredom. —Lack of extracurricular activities.—Finally, experts say, we mustn't give up on kids who drop out, no matter how difficult their circumstances.

www.edweek.org/...parentingteensdropouts_ap.html - Preview

10 May 09