Today’s Top Picks:

Alpine District may lose a popular Japanese teacher to visa problems.
http://goo.gl/XArn0 (PDH)

“In Our Mothers’ House” continues to pop up in the news.
http://goo.gl/SAFL7 (SLT)

Higher ed looks at Common Core teacher training.
http://goo.gl/eFnnd (Ed Week)

Have tax credits replaced vouchers in ed reform circles?
http://goo.gl/RuwJj (Ed Week)

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TODAY’S HEADLINES
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UTAH

Favorite Japanese teacher may lose job without sponsor

Anti-censorship group joins debate about book restricted in Davis County Schools » Coalition, ACLU of Utah express concerns to superintendent.

Former Provo officer appeals for his job after Speedo incident

Wong’s teaching license up for review next week

Utah students take fourth in national auto repair competition

Soon-to-be seniors from around U.S. gather at USU to learn about science, math

340 inmates earn high school diplomas

Cisco adopts Utah’s Instructure education software, adding 1 million students

Wasatch High team runs for cancer-stricken teammate

Women raise funds for elementary school, win a High 5

Celebrate Reading

Rockwell Charter High School enrollment/re-enrollment

OPINION & COMMENTARY

How many cheerleaders quit because of hazing incident?

Kudos to ACLU for supporting release of disputed book

Nobody loves standards (and that’s O.K.)

We Don’t Need No Education

STEM Education Is the Key to the U.S.’s Economic Future We need to encourage more students to pursue science, technology, engineering, and math

National PTA to Hear from ‘Too Much Homework’ Coalition

The students who pay for school lunch by fingerprint Biometric data recorded in schools — something that parents would accept?

NATION

Higher Ed. Assesses Training of Teachers for Common Core Illinois educators examine readiness

Tax Credit Strategy Fuels Private School Choice Push

In many statehouses, GOP confronts dissention

Administration sparing some from deportation

Sacramento woman named Teacher of Year loses job

In wake of budget cuts, Gwinnett Co. teachers offer work for free

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UTAH NEWS
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Favorite Japanese teacher may lose job without sponsor

Marissa Bellini, who teaches Japanese at both American Fork junior and senior highs, is a student favorite. But she might be out of a job because, as a noncitizen, she’s losing her visa and may not be able to get another one.
“She is extremely popular with her students,” parent Shelley Ver Steeg said. “My daughter is one of them. The kids are so upset.”
Alpine School District spokeswoman Rhonda Bromley said Bellini is still employed as a teacher, but her working visa is only good through 2014.
“She is trying to find a way to get a permanent working visa,” Bromley said. “Alpine School District does not use public funds to be a sponsor for a permanent working visa. The application alone is $10,000.”
http://goo.gl/XArn0 (PDH)

Anti-censorship group joins debate about book restricted in Davis County Schools » Coalition, ACLU of Utah express concerns to superintendent.

Controversy in the Davis School District over limiting student access to a book about a lesbian couple raising a family continued Thursday, when a national anti-censorship group asked school officials to reconsider a recent decision to place the picture book In Our Mothers’ House behind counters in elementary libraries.
The Kids’ Right to Read Project, a joint effort of the New York-based National Coalition Against Censorship and the American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression, wrote to Superintendent Bryan Bowles.
“Parents who object to the book could easily supervise their children’s reading choices,” the groups said, but restricting the access of others “diminishes the education value of the library whose primary role is to allow students to make choices according to their own interests, experiences, and family values.”
http://goo.gl/SAFL7 (SLT)

Former Provo officer appeals for his job after Speedo incident

PROVO — In a video played Tuesday during a hearing, one-time Provo cop Cody Harris walked through a high school office space wearing a skimpy green Speedo and a baggy hoodie. The image, taken from a cell phone, was grainy, but in the background there was a cacophony of laughs and hollering.
The May 2 incident cost Harris his job as the school resource officer for Provo High School. Harris is appealing his firing, and the video was played Tuesday as part of a lengthy hearing to evaluate that firing.
The commission charged with reviewing Harris’s appeal made no decision on Thursday, but anticipates ruling in writing some time in the future.
http://goo.gl/Q7NNW (PDH)

Wong’s teaching license up for review next week

PROVO — The Utah State Office of Education will hold hearings Wednesday and Thursday focusing on appeals from former Timpview High School football coach Louis Wong to be able to keep his teaching license, according to Provo School District interim superintendent Bob Gentry.
Carol Lear at the USOE office declined to discuss the nature of the hearings but said several witnesses have been called to testify.
http://goo.gl/Zh5UH (PDH)

Utah students take fourth in national auto repair competition

Riverton High School students Jordan Kearns and Chandler Adkins captured fourth place in the National Ford/AAA Auto Skills Competition in Dearborn, Mich., this week.
The competition pitted two-person teams from all 50 states against one another as they rushed to solve “real world” automotive repair challenges.
Kearns and Adkins and their instructor Jay Hales won the Utah competition earlier this year and earned the right to compete in the national contest held at the Ford world headquarters.
http://goo.gl/UnDUz (SLT)

http://goo.gl/n73S9 (Dearborn [MI] Press & Guide)

Soon-to-be seniors from around U.S. gather at USU to learn about science, math

One might think roasting marshmallows is only for fireplaces or roaring campfires.
But that’s not the case for high school students interested in math, science and engineering.
On the campus of Utah State University on Wednesday, at least one group of high school students could be found roasting the sweet treats on a solar panel, which they tested outside of the Engineering Building.
Testing a small solar panel was just one of the activities part of Engineering State, a USU-sponsored program now in its 22nd year that allows high school students to get hands-on experience in math, engineering, science and technology.
http://goo.gl/FzYKE (LHJ)

340 inmates earn high school diplomas

DRAPER, Utah – 340 Utah men and women finished their education while behind bars.
Inmates wore traditional blue or gold caps and gowns and received their diplomas from South Park Academy on Wednesday.
Speakers at the ceremony included Utah Dept. of Corrections Executive Director Tom Patterson, former BYU and San Francisco 49ers running back and current Canyons School District employee Jamal Willis and several graduates.
http://goo.gl/xr7qR (KSTU)

Cisco adopts Utah’s Instructure education software, adding 1 million students

Instructure, the Sandy-based education software maker, will add a million students to its Canvas product after Cisco Systems Inc. agreed to use the platform for its Networking Academy.
The multi-year deal will help Instructure grow its learning management system software from 2.9 million registered users, said Chief Executive Officer Josh Coates. Cisco’s Networking Academy is part of the company’s social responsibility program, helping to teach introductory information technology skills to people in 165 countries in 17 languages. Both companies declined to release the financial terms.
“We had a vision to deliver education over the internet,” said Amy Christen, Cisco’s vice president of corporate affairs, in a telephone interview. When Cisco first launched its education offering, it built its own software to help students and faculty interact. Ten years later the company decided to use Instructure’s technology so it can spend more resources on innovating in other education areas including interactive assessments, gaming and simulations, Christen said.
The Cisco deal is the largest for Instructure, which has signed up 189 other groups in the past 18 months that range from K-12 grade schools to universities.
http://goo.gl/sZICr (DN)

Wasatch High team runs for cancer-stricken teammate

HEBER CITY — While his friends enjoyed their senior prom, reveled in their final high school season of track and prepared for their lives after graduation, Evan Tayler engaged in a fight for his life.
“It’s been kind of tough,” said Tayler, who is a charming, articulate and active 18-year-old senior at Wasatch High who found out he had Hodgkin’s lymphoma in February. “I go in for chemo every two weeks and it wipes me out for a couple of days.”
It wasn’t even illness that sent Tayler to the doctor’s office. Frustrated and baffled by poor performances with his cross country ski season, his coach suggested a blood test.
http://goo.gl/eWTlz (DN)

Women raise funds for elementary school, win a High 5

DRAPER — This week’s High 5 goes to two women who helped raise a lot of money for students at Draper Elementary School and encouraged the kids to get fit in the process.
No more old-school Scantron bubble sheets at this school. With state testing now on computers, Draper Elementary couldn’t accommodate all its students, and funds for a second computer lab were put on hold.
Then two parents, Brenda Andrewsen and Erin Miller, went above and beyond to make things like a new computer lab a reality.
http://goo.gl/Zb9xt (KSL)

Celebrate Reading

Alpine School District is sponsoring “Celebrate Reading with ASD” for the summer. ASD employees will be reading with pre-school and elementary aged children in the local communities. Alpine School District is working in partnership with local libraries every Tuesday during the summer. Many employees will come dressed in character to the event. Any school-aged children are invited to attend. The reading events will take place on the following days and locations: June 19 – Eagle Mountain City Library, June 26 – American Fork City Library, July 3 – Orem City Library, July 10 – Saratoga Springs City Library, July 31 – Lehi City Library. All reading times will be from 10 to 11:30 a.m. with the exception of Orem City Library, which will be from 10:30 a.m. to noon.
http://goo.gl/YViXX (PDH)

Rockwell Charter High School enrollment/re-enrollment

Current Rockwell Charter High School students who want to attend RCHS during the coming 2012-13 school year are required to complete an Intent to Re-enroll form. Students, grades 7 through 12, who want to apply for admission to Rockwell Charter High School can access forms at rockwellhigh.net.
http://goo.gl/AQJkU (PDH)

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OPINION & COMMENTARY
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How many cheerleaders quit because of hazing incident?
(Ogden) Standard-Examiner letter from John Garner

Yet again, the Standard-Examiner has printed a front-page article concerning the recent cheerleader-hazing incident at Ogden High School (June 2, “Decision: No charges in hazing”).
I doubt that I am the only reader who noticed, however, that the emotional and moral center of the event was once again missing: How many of the physically and emotionally violated girls resigned their newly-appointed positions as cheerleaders as a result of their humiliating abuse? Surely, any such victim would, without hesitation, severed ties with the offending organization. How many, in fact, did so?
http://goo.gl/4trfA

Kudos to ACLU for supporting release of disputed book
(Ogden) Standard-Examiner letter from Thomas Priest

A thumbs up to the ACLU for challenging the Davis School District’s decision to limit access to a book that helps us learn to appreciate the diversity of the world we live in (June 14, “Superintendent, ACLU ‘in conversation’”) It seems like the Davis School District’s actions are a violation of the First Amendment of the Constitution.
“In Our Mothers’ House” by Patricia Polacco, should be allowed in a public school where children learn about individuals from different backgrounds.
http://goo.gl/xHpLS

Nobody loves standards (and that’s O.K.) Fordham Institute commentary by Robert Pondiscio, vice-president of the Core Knowledge Foundation

I don’t love standards. I doubt any teacher does.
I love literature. History. Science. I love grappling with ideas. I’m excited to know how things work and to share what I have learned with others, especially eager-to-learn children. Standards, by contrast, are unlovely, unlovable things. No teacher has ever summoned his or her class wide-eyed to the rug with the promise that “today is the day we will learn to listen and read to analyze and evaluate experiences, ideas, information, and issues from a variety of perspectives.”
“Won’t that be fun, boys and girls?!”
Well, no, it won’t. Standards are a joyless way to reverse engineer the things we love to teach and do with kids. Thus I understand and sympathize if beleaguered teachers view Common Core State Standards (CCSS) as just one more damn thing imposed on them from on high, interposed between them and their students. But if they do, that’s a shame. Because far from being just another compliance item on the accountability checklist, the Common Core State Standards, implemented well and thoughtfully, promise to both improve literacy and make teaching a lot more fun and significantly more rewarding.
In the essential primary grades, where most of our educational battles are won or lost, CCSS promise to return sanity to the work of turning children into readers, writers, speakers, and thinkers. David Coleman, the principal architect of the English language arts standards, recently said CCSS “restores elementary teachers to their rightful place as guides to the world.” He’s exactly right, and here’s why:
http://goo.gl/XaMXB

We Don’t Need No Education
New York Times commentary by columnist PAUL KRUGMAN

Hope springs eternal. For a few hours I was ready to applaud Mitt Romney for speaking honestly about what his calls for smaller government actually mean.
Never mind. Soon the candidate was being his normal self, denying having said what he said and serving up a bunch of self-contradictory excuses. But let’s talk about his accidental truth-telling, and what it reveals.
In the remarks Mr. Romney later tried to deny, he derided President Obama: “He says we need more firemen, more policemen, more teachers.” Then he declared, “It’s time for us to cut back on government and help the American people.”
You can see why I was ready to give points for honesty. For once, he actually admitted what he and his allies mean when they talk about shrinking government. Conservatives love to pretend that there are vast armies of government bureaucrats doing who knows what; in reality, a majority of government workers are employed providing either education (teachers) or public protection (police officers and firefighters).
So would getting rid of teachers, police officers, and firefighters help the American people? Well, some Republicans would prefer to see Americans get less education; remember Rick Santorum’s description of colleges as “indoctrination mills”? Still, neither less education nor worse protection are issues the G.O.P. wants to run on.
But the more relevant question for the moment is whether the public job cuts Mr. Romney applauds are good or bad for the economy. And we now have a lot of evidence bearing on that question.
http://goo.gl/QOdlY

STEM Education Is the Key to the U.S.’s Economic Future We need to encourage more students to pursue science, technology, engineering, and math U.S. News & World Report op-ed by John Engler, president of Business Roundtable and a former governor of Michigan

A close look at American unemployment statistics reveals a contradiction: Even with unemployment at historically high levels, large numbers of jobs are going unfilled. Many of these jobs have one thing in common–the need for an educational background in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.
Increasingly, one of our richest sources of employment and economic growth will be jobs that require skills in these areas, collectively known as STEM. The question is: Will we be able to educate enough young Americans to fill them?
Yes, the unemployment numbers have been full of bad news for the past few years. But there has been good news too. While the overall unemployment rate has slowly come down to May’s still-high 8.2 percent, for those in STEM occupations the story is very different.
http://goo.gl/X6mgj

National PTA to Hear from ‘Too Much Homework’ Coalition Education Week commentary by columnist Michele Molnar

A movement of individuals who protest the assigning of “too much homework” is gaining momentum with a petition that will be presented to the National PTA at its convention next week.
More than 16,000 educators, parents and policymakers have signed an online petition at Change.org in the past two weeks, urging the national parent-teachers group to adopt a set of homework guidelines that they say local schools can implement to realign homework policy and practice with research on student learning, health, and engagement.
Among the goals of the guidelines are increased educational equity and a narrowing of the achievement gap between students at well-funded and poorly funded schools; enhanced parental and family influence on and engagement with homework practices; and a rebalancing of students’ academic lives with their extra-curricular, family and community commitments and their developmental needs as children and adolescents.
http://goo.gl/ltPXQ

The students who pay for school lunch by fingerprint Biometric data recorded in schools — something that parents would accept?
ZD Net commentary by co9lumnist Charlie Osborne

To try and stop students losing or being relieved of their lunch money, some schools offered the option of swipe cards. Now, it’s being taken a step further — through the use of biometric technology.
Nova Hreod in Moredon and Isambard in North Swindon are introducing a new system on July 16, which will involve hundreds of students having their fingerprints taken in order to pay for school meals.
Students will register their biometric data a week before the system is put in place. According to reports, the schools are using the technology to try and make transactions and record-keeping “more efficient”.
The minister for schools, Nick Gibb, called the idea of implementing biometrics a “sensitive issue”, and believes that parents should have the right to opt-out of the scheme if they wish.
However, those using the system have stated the fingerprint images are turned into a mathematical algorithm so the information cannot be passed to third-parties, and once the student leaves the data is deleted.
http://goo.gl/PU33h

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NATIONAL NEWS
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Higher Ed. Assesses Training of Teachers for Common Core Illinois educators examine readiness Education Week

Bloomington, Ill. – Groups of teacher educators and other higher education officials met here last week in a gathering that essentially served as the first step in Illinois’ effort to ensure that education programs in the state produce young teachers capable of teaching to the common K-12 content standards adopted in all but four states.
Representatives from all 12 of the state’s public universities, from 35 independent colleges, and from 31 community colleges put tentative toes into the common-core pond at the meeting, beginning the difficult work of assessing how and where their current efforts to train teachers are stopping short of the standards’ goals.
Even after just one day, it was clear that the process involved some breakthroughs, occasional frustration, and a good degree of soul-searching. After all, preparing teachers to instruct in ways that help develop students’ ability to analyze and apply knowledge is a goal to which teacher preparation has long aspired, many of the attendees noted.
http://goo.gl/eFnnd

Tax Credit Strategy Fuels Private School Choice Push Education Week

The political climate in many states has become ripe for private-school choice, and few choice models are proving as popular as tax-credit scholarships. To supporters of those programs, the rationale for creating them is financial and legal, as well as educational.
Unlike traditional voucher programs, which award taxpayer money directly to students to attend private schools, tax-credit programs give individuals or corporations a break on their yearly bills if they contribute to organizations that award private school scholarships to students.
Backers of the programs say they give families, many of them impoverished, a broader range of school options. They also tout the programs’ financial benefits, predicting that states will save money, as sufficient numbers of students leave public schools to offset losses to state revenues from tax credits. In addition, supporters of the tax-credit models see them as more insulated from legal challenges than traditional voucher programs, which have been found to violate the constitutions of a number of states.
Yet the tax-credit models also have many detractors, who describe them as vouchers in disguise, and say that estimates of cost savings are speculative and likely exaggerated. Critics also say some states’ programs lack transparency, and include loopholes that can allow families and private schools to game the system, at a cost to taxpayers.
http://goo.gl/RuwJj

In many statehouses, GOP confronts dissention Associated Press

JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. — Republicans set out a bold conservative agenda after taking control of state capitols across the Midwest and South in the last general election. They wanted to cut taxes and spending, put new limits on labor unions, crack down on illegal immigrants and give parents more alternatives to traditional public schools.
But after a series of notable achievements last year, the largest Republican wave in statehouses since the Great Depression is now splintering and action on key issues is stalled despite little meaningful opposition from outnumbered Democrats.
http://goo.gl/hUDKV

Administration sparing some from deportation Associated Press

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration will stop deporting and begin granting work permits to younger illegal immigrants who came to the U.S. as children and have since led law-abiding lives. The election-year initiative addresses a top priority of an influential Latino electorate that has been vocal in its opposition to administration deportation policies.
The policy change, announced Friday by Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, will affect as many as 800,000 immigrants who have lived in fear of deportation. It also bypasses Congress and partially achieves the goals of the so-called DREAM Act, a long-sought but never enacted plan to establish a path toward citizenship for young people who came to the United States illegally but who have attended college or served in the military.
http://goo.gl/BXWgI

Sacramento woman named Teacher of Year loses job KXTV

SACRAMENTO, CA – Michelle Apperson just found out she was named “Teacher of the Year” for the Sacramento City Unified School District.
Despite that and the fact that she has taught at Sutterville Elementary School for the past nine years, she’s still losing her job due to budget cuts.
She received her final notice in May.
http://goo.gl/MoCvT

In wake of budget cuts, Gwinnett Co. teachers offer work for free WGCL

LAWRENCEVILLE, GA – Following a round of budget cuts that saw Gwinnett County school officials slice $89 million out of their operating costs, a group of teachers at Benefield Elementary School in Lawrenceville has banded together to give free reading classes for young students this summer.
The teachers’ group was organized by Benefield Elementary teacher Karon Stocks, who didn’t want her students to forget what they learned in the school year during their summer break.
Stocks said she put out an email, asking co-workers to volunteer with her.
“Within 15 minutes I had five people who’d already signed up,” she said. “We have about 40 to 45 teachers who are coming and volunteering three hours of their time.”
http://goo.gl/OQ9q8

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