(sun-sentinel.com)The Broward Teachers Union held firm: Seniority outweighs student achievement when it comes to deciding who gets laid off.
The union contract mandates the last teachers hired are the first laid off. However, the school district in Aprilasked for flexibility in placing teachers at the three schools academically ranked in the bottom 5 percent statewide, as well as for magnet programs that require special training.
That would have applied to about a dozen of the 568 teachers who received layoff notices as the district grapples with a $130 million budget gap. But the union, which has been in bitter contract negotiations with the district since May 2009, dug in its heels.
A researcher from duke university, Tim Tyson, was arrested and charged with second degree trespassing according to wral.com for his actions of a Wake County Board of Education meeting Tuesday night.
Tyson was one of four people charged with second-degree trespassing after they interrupted the board’s meeting, locked arms and sang songs.
Rev. William Barber, president of the state chapter of the NAACP, Nancy Petty, a pastor at Pullen Memorial Baptist Church in Raleigh and Mary Debbin Williams, a Wake County parent staged what Barber called a “non-violent conscientious objection,” disrupting the meeting for about an hour to draw attention to a move by the board they believe will serve to re-segregate Wake County schools.
College professor Tyson is protesting the school board’s decision to go back to a community schooling model. According to wral professor Tyson have the following words of wisdom regarding the matter:
“If the anti-diversity coalition of the school board thinks I’m a pain in the neck wait ‘till they meet my mama who taught fourth grade for 40 years and knows what to do with people who don’t do their homework,”
(yahoo news) The University of Chicago Press turned to Ingram Content Group to help meet the demand of orders and interest in F.A. Hayek’s work The Road to Serfdom: Text and Documents–The Definitive Edition (ISBN978-0226320557).Orders for the book increased dramatically following a recommendation by talk show host Glenn Beck.
La Vergne, TN (Vocus) June 16, 2010 — To help meet the demand of orders and interest of F.A. Hayek’s work The Road to Serfdom: Text and Documents–The Definitive Edition (ISBN 978-0226320557), The University of Chicago Press turned to Ingram Content Group to maximize the availability of books sold and delivered to customers.
Orders for the book increased dramatically following a recommendation by talk show host Glenn Beck on June 8. By the next morning, the Ingram team was working with colleagues at The University of Chicago Press to help them capitalize on the title’s new popularity.
(Latimes) Thomas Shelden, a Los Angeles city schoolteacher who spent nearly two years outside the classroom with full pay and benefits while district officials investigated accusations against him, has been dismissed by the school board.
Shelden was a fourth-grade teacher at Charles White Elementary in Westlake when Los Angeles Unified School District officials removed him from the campus in May 2008. At that time, the district had about 160 employees assigned to administrative offices while claims against them were under review.
Under a long-standing practice, those employees are not given any assignments and receive their full wages and benefits.
(AP) NEW YORK – Hundreds of New York City teachers who are paid full salaries to do nothing while they await disciplinary hearings will be released from the city’s “rubber rooms” this fall, officials announced Thursday.
Mayor Michael Bloomberg and the teachers’ union announced a deal to reassign most of the teachers to administrative or nonclassroom work while their cases are pending.
About 650 educators, more than 500 of them teachers, are in the teacher-reassignment centers, costing the city tens of millions of dollars a year, including $30 million in salaries, officials said.
(Onlineathens) Cornel West revealed himself for what he is Thursday night in a talk at the University of Georgia’s Tate Student Center – a philosopher.
“The unexamined life is not worth living,” said West, drawing on sources that included not just Socrates and Sappho and latter-day voices such as James Brown and Bootsy Collins.
Famously controversial for his views on race in America – a country where white supremacy still is a dominant influence – West told his audience to look beyond the fact that the United States now has its first black president.
(LA Times) UC Berkeley’s Goodwin Liu will be nominated to the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, The Times has learned. Though he will face opposition from conservatives, he has admirers in that camp as well.
Reporting from Washington – President Obama will nominate UC Berkeley law professor Goodwin Liu to the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals on Wednesday, The Times has learned.
Liu carries credentials that some conservatives love to hate — including a leadership position in a progressive legal group and a record of opposing the confirmation of Supreme Court Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr.
(AP) HUNTSVILLE, Ala. – A woman opened fire during a biology faculty meeting at the University of Alabama’s Huntsville campus Friday, killing three people and injuring three others, officials said. The shooter was caught outside the Shelby Center, a science building, without incident, according to university spokesman Ray Garner. Local media reported the shooter was a faculty member, though Garner said he could not identify her. A man was also being detained.
All three of those killed and two of the injured were faculty members. The third injured person was a staff member. No students were involved in the shooting.
Huntsville Hospital spokesman Burr Ingram said two of the injured were in critical condition and the third was in stable condition.
Newswise — The environmental community is voicing concern after President Obama suggested Congress might move an energy bill forward without a carbon-trading system in place.
According to Rafael Reuveny, a professor at the Indiana University School of Public and Environmental Affairs in Bloomington, the entire negotiation in Congress is “politics as usual” and meant to stall or defeat vital climate change legislation.
“We are trying to win this fight for our lives through consensus. Such compromise will never materialize — not in this country and not internationally,” said Reuveny, co-author of Complex Transformations: Democracy and Economic Openness in an Interconnected System (Cambridge University Press, 2009). “No matter how often President Obama pleads for it, bipartisanship has become a joke. So, while the two sides continue this ridiculous game, Rome — read: the planet — is burning.”
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