Private Education Center

From my work and continued reading/research around the topic and discipline of Learning Technology I have come into contact with some wonderful people, and some even more amazing ideas. Ive mentioned some of my work in previous blog posts, notably the following:

• CMALT: A beginning (July 2009)
• What is a Learning Technologist (pt3) (June 2011)

So, if I started the process in 2009, why has it taken so long to get to where I am today? There is no simple answer, there could be plenty of excuses, and a few reasons. Ultimately it has just been about time and motivation by the time I have the motivation I have no time left, despite filling in my calendar with specific slots to dedicate to it.

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There are plenty of articles about education floating in cyberspace. It’s the stuff of afternoon talk shows and challenging documentaries. Everyone is chattering about what is wrong – budgets, classroom sizes, teacher education – and the message of why can be lost. Why does education need to change? What kind of challenges are children facing today that are unique to their generation?

The following video is an animated talk by Sir Ken Robinson. He argues that the current system is out of date. The brainchild of the Enlightenment Era and funded by the Industrial Age, the education model views the world as full of academics and non-academics.

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By now I hope you’ve had time to check out a story I did recently about some interesting new groups that are trying to give teachers avenues for shaping policy decisions on the issues that most affect them.

As I stated in the story, all of the groups have very different origins, purposes and philosophies. Some of the newest, such as the Los Angeles-based NewTLA, a caucus within the teachers’ union, are still working out the positions they want to take and what they want to accomplish.

But the bottom line is that it’s significant to see teachers getting so involved at the macro-level where policy is made. After all, teachers are already all but consumed by the demands of their own individual classrooms and students, so belonging to these kinds of organizations really means something.

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As the summer comes to a close and students return to school, it is time to consider the tax consequences of their summertime work. This can impact the tax treatment of part-time jobs during the school year. In addition, as tax preparation courses reveal, taxes for this year affect potential tax penalties next year.

A tax professional willing to provide advice at this time of year is likely to gain clients for paid tax preparation after year-end. Helping people with the tax impact of work for their student children may only scratch the surface of tax preparer job opportunities with these families.

Taxes for a student job are affected by withholding based upon the W-4 provided to an employer. If income is below the filing requirement threshold, the student should request no income tax withholding.

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As Secretary of Education Arne Duncan says, the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) “is creating a slow-motion train wreck for children, parents and teachers.” This is due particularly to NCLB’s unrealistic, ineffective, punitive and harmful accountability requirements. States must bring virtually 100% of students to academic “proficiency” by 2014. Schools that fail to reach the increasingly high interim percentage targets for all groups of students are labeled failing. And if they fail for two or more consecutive years, they must implement escalating sanctions such as staff replacement, charter school conversions or state takeovers.

As the number of schools deemed failing skyrockets — already about 38,000 schools in 2009-10, projected to increase to about 85,000 of our 100,000 schools by 2014 — states object to the accountability system and lack the capacity to comply. Read full post…

While many of the recent debates about for-profit companies in K-12 and higher education have reflected traditional ideological divisions between Democrats and Republicans, a closer look at federal education policy, congressional politics, and public opinion reveals that these lines in the sand are far from constant, particularly when it comes to the Democratic position.

In More Than Meets the Eye: The Politics of For-Profits in Education, the second report of AEIs Private Enterprise in American Education series, AEI research fellow Andrew P. Kelly, who was recently named one of sixteen next-generation leaders in education policy, illustrates how the typical political divides do not tell the whole story when it comes to the appropriate role of for-profits in education.

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