Posted on 05/30/2003 11:25:32 AM PDT by Gopher Broke
Education Insider A weekly review of progress on the Quality Public Schools Agenda and other legislation that impacts our students, classrooms, and public education.
May 30, 2003
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Congress Returns from the Memorial Day Recess
IDEA "On your mark?get set?the next round is about to begin!" The Senate's IDEA reauthorization bill has been in the wings since the House bill passed on April 30. The long-awaited Senate bill may be introduced in early June.
The 'highly qualified' definition: The House bill imported from the "No Child Left Behind Act' the definition that requires all teachers to have a degree or pass a subject matter test in each academic subject they teach. This definition fails totally to recognize the multiple subject matter teaching assignments of thousands of special educators. These special education teachers who competently teach core academic subjects under a student's IEP would be declared 'unqualified.'
The Senate must "fix" this definition. NEA believes teachers licensed under state law as special educators should be deemed 'highly qualified.'
Time Sensitive Urge your Senator to oppose any provision that would simply copy for special educators the NCLB "highly qualified" definition and to support defining a special education teacher with state special education certification or licensure as "highly qualified."
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Paying to Teach -- Out-of-Pocket Costs State fiscal woes and education funding shortfalls mean more frozen supply budgets and school employees digging deeper into their pockets for classroom materials.
The current deduction for out-of-pocket classroom expenses allowing educators inclusively -- teachers, counselors, principals, and education support professionals -- to recoup at least some of what they spend, expires this year.
H.R. 785 [Camp (R-MI), Pryce (R-OH) and Tanner (D-TN)] would:
Make permanent the above-the-line deduction [Above-the-line deductions apply whether or not a taxpayer itemizes.]
Increase the maximum deduction from the current $250 to $400, and
Expand allowable expenses to include professional development. The 10-year benefit to educators would total $3 billion.
Time Sensitive! To move the bill forward, we need to maximize support now. Is your Representative a cosponsor? (123 to date) If not, ask your Representative to support tax relief for teachers and education support professionals by becoming a cosponsor of HR 785.
If yes, please send your thanks. ?
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Government Relations 202-822-7300 http://www.nea.org/lac 1201 16th Street, NW Washington, DC 20036
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But then they SUPPORT higher tax cuts via special deductions for teachers...and urge their members to lobby for it!!
This report provides a comprehensive overview of the educational performance of the New York City public schools over the past five years. It finds that educational performance has not improved during thatperiod. Among its specific findings are:*
Only 70 percent of students complete high school, either by obtaining a diploma (60%) or aGED (10%) within seven years of initial enrollment.
Only 50 percent complete high school,either with a diploma (46%) or GED (4%) within four years of initial enrollment.
Thesefigures are unchanged from the beginning of the 1990s.*
Only 44 percent of black students, and only 39 percent of Hispanic students, complete highschool within four years.*
While passage rates on the State's Regents exams have increased since 1995, fewer than 50 percent of City students pass even one of these challenging exams. Only a maximum of 19 percent of City students could have passed five exams last year, based on low passage ratesfor Biology (16%) and Earth Science (19%). Since students will have to pass five of these exams to graduate from high school by 2005, City high school graduation rates may dropprecipitously in the near future.*
City elementary and middle school students are also not learning what they need to. Only 41 percent of these students scored at an acceptable level on the citywide reading tests in 2000, while only 34 percent scored at an acceptable level on the citywide math tests.*
One in five City elementary and middle school students scored at the lowest level on thereading tests, and nearly one third of these students scored at the lowest level on the citywidemath tests.
Many areas of the City are virtual educational dead zones. Seven entire districts (23, 19, 12, 7, 5, 9 & 85)have fewer than 30 percent of students passing the city's English exam, and fourteen (the seven above plus17, 13, 8, 4, 6, 10 & 16) have fewer than 30 percent of student passing the city's Math exam.
It would be unbelievable if they were for ANYTHING BUSH is for, they are DEMONCRAT shills, just like AFSCME. Public Employee Unions shouldn't even be legal, unlike real businesses, governments have no way to resist Unions, and why should they, it's not their money, IMHO.
This board is not as good as FreeRepublic.com but please bookmark and visit often.
These teachers need some conservative opinions...after hanging out with fellow liberals and DemocRATS all the time.
Think of it as "missionary" work.
Warning...if you are TOO conservative in your posts, they will block your IP address...trust me on that!
Ouch! there's a visual I could have done without! :-)~
I despise teachers unions and all public sector unions. They are scumball parasites who manipulate the hack politicians and the political process to get their way. To get outrageous wage and benefit packages while poor mouthing themselves. Many years ago it was strictly verboten for public employees to go on strike and agitate for their self interests. My, have times changed
I respect private sector unions since they know if they push too far the company goes broke and they're unemployed. And they don't thieve from the taxpayer as do 75% of public sector employees.
In the next few days, I'll post the information so we can organize a counter-protest by email on June 9 and 10 so that their emails don't even get through.
Does anyone know if there is a way to forward a posting about this to all Massachusetts freepers? I'd really like to get this going so we get as many emails (at least) as they do.
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