Ever wonder why school media specialists had to first be licensed to teach in an appropriate subject area? In Washington State, the matter is being put to the test. In the schools of Bellevue, secondary school librarians are being reassigned to classroom teaching and are being replaced with aides at the middle schools and high schools. (Source: LISNews.org)

Getting Students More Learning Time Online
Source: Center for American Progress

Internal and external forces are simultaneously transforming elementary and secondary education. Complementary changes within the K-12 education community are sweeping schools in the form of one-to-one computing, online learning for students and teachers, and differentiated instruction. Students can choose from among schools, courses, and powerful educational tools and resources that never before existed. As a result, education for many students today bears little resemblance to their parents’ education. This transformation is a positive change when students are connected with the tools and opportunities that meet their individual needs.
Local and national economic conditions, increasing ethnic and cultural diversity, and global forces are among the new and growing external pressures on American elementary and secondary schools. Schools alongside families form the foundation for successful participation in communities, the workforce, and our democracy, and their job has therefore grown more complex and challenging. American schools, when compared to other developed nations, appear to need new approaches that increase their capacity to prepare students academically.
Policymakers and educators alike have proposed using expanded learning time in schools as a means to improve student academic performance. Expanded learning time seeks to increase student learning by lengthening the school day and/or year, or by supplementing class time with extracurricular activities for students schoolwide. Early demonstrations of expanded learning time initiatives show success in raising student achievement, but can pose challenges to families and community stakeholders by requiring increased investment in spending and resources.

+ Executive Summary (PDF; 701 KB)
+ Full Report (PDF; 866 KB) (Source: Docuticker)

education.au has just completed a study involving  focus groups and interviews with teacher educators, student teachers and beginning teachers regarding ICT:  

It is possible to graduate from many Teacher Education courses without having any ICT component.
It appears that in some universities, pre-service teachers specialising in Primary, Junior Primary and Early Childhood Education are more likely to have  a [...] (Source: Education.au Blog)

Celebrity memoirs, declining libraries, the web and now the recession have all spelled bad news for publishing. Once thriving genres such as political and literary biography are ailing. Is it the end for quality non-fiction? Andy Beckett investigatesColin Robinson has been in publishing since 1976. He has worked for fusty companies and radical ones, for earnest independents and empire-building corporations, for Britons and Americans: as an editor, always involved in the slightly precarious business of putting out serious books. But recently he started noticing something about the way books are treated that disturbed him. “Here in New York” - Robinson lives in a fairly intellectual part of Manhattan - “books are quite often left out in the street. If people are moving, they don’t take their books with them.”There may be a harmless explanation. Manhattan apartments are small. Some people always get rid of books once they’ve read them. Yet Robinson has some cause to see the phenomenon as a symptom of something ominous. On 3 December last year, despite what he describes as an editorial list “filled with erudite, well-written books”, he abruptly lost his job at the American publisher Scribner.So many other editors were sacked in New York that day, it almost instantly became known in the closely connected worlds of American and British publishing as “Black Wednesday”. In recent months, such culls have become grimly routine in many industries. But among those who write, publish and sell serious non-fiction - the biographies, histories, travel and science books researched and written with a degree of subtlety for a general audience - the bad news seems to have been building up since long before the current recession.The range of titles stocked by British libraries has been falling for decades. The net book agreement, which in effect subsidised the British book business, has been dead for a decade and a half. …

AFT Releases New Report on Academic Workforce
Source: American Federation of Teachers

Year by year, various federal data sets are released, and document the steady growth of adjunct positions and decline of tenure-track jobs in the academic work force.
In an attempt to draw more attention to these shifts over time, the American Federation of Teachers is today releasing a 10-year analysis of the data, showing just how much the tenure-track professor has disappeared. The overall number of faculty and instructor slots grew from 1997 to 2007, but nearly two-thirds of that growth was in “contingent” positions — meaning those off of the tenure track. Over all, those jobs increased from two-thirds to nearly three-quarters of instructional positions.
The growth in these jobs — and the decline in tenure-track positions — was found in all sectors of higher education, but was most apparent at community colleges. However, one of the most notable shifts was at public four-year colleges and universities, where over the period studied, tenured and tenure-track faculty members went from being a slight majority to less than 40 percent of faculty members. At the end point of the AFT study, tenured and tenure-track faculty members do not make a majority of faculties in any sector.

+ Full Report (PDF; 1.85 MB) (Source: Docuticker)

The Education of Hopey Glass is the latest published work I’ve seen from Jaime Hernandez and it was one of the more enjoyable works I had the pleasure of reading (and re-reading) in the past year.
Jaime has been drawing comics since the early eighties.  He and his brother Gilbert (Beto) have been collaborating on the Love and Rockets comic book pretty much ever since.  But they’ve also been working independently of each other.  Gilbert’s stories usually center around the citizens of a fictitious central American town called Palomar.  While Jaime’s stories usually involve a group living in a Los Angeles area barrio.  Two of Jaime’s main characters are Maggie and Hopey.  And yes, I kind of fell in love with Maggie all those years ago.  So did Hopey.  So did Ray.
I never cared too much for Hopey, though.  Not just because she’s my rival for Maggie’s affection.  (For one thing, she’s a smoker– bleh).  Hopey always seemed to be the one who was causing trouble–just for the fun of it.  Maggie always seemed to go along, but she was never the instigator.  Maybe that’s just faulty memory on my part.  A lot of years have gone by and it shows in the characters.  These people have all changed with the passage of time– particularly Maggie (that “Snickers diet” really changed her). 
In this collection Hopey is now living with another woman, tending bar in the evening, and preparing to start a new job as a teacher’s assistant.  She’s also starting to realize that she, and everyone around her, is aging.  That doesn’t happen often in comics.  Her new job as a teacher’s assistant for a class of kindergarten kids is a change for her, where the teacher she is partnered with keeps insisting that Hopey must talk to the kids, rather than forcing her will upon them. …

Something’s lost in translation I’ve apparently blogged about this wonderful CD from Concordia before–at least I had the photo in my file. It’s the text and music of Luther’s Small Catechism narrated by Rev. Dr. Ken Schurb (1986). When we joined UALC in 1976, they weren’t using the regular small catechism for adults–and I don’t think that my kids got one either when they were confirmed in the early 80s. But now I have a nice hard bound copy. The explanations of the 10 commandments, the Apostle’s Creed, the Lord’s Prayer and the sacraments are really amazing–and he intended the explanation for fathers to teach their children and other family members. It is by far the clearest summary of Christian faith I’ve ever read, and I’ve seen a lot of Christian books–most full of “me, my, mine and myself.”What is interesting is that older translations from German to English read:“The Simple Way a Father Should Present it to his Household “but the modern English reads“As the head of the family should teach them in a simple way to his household.”Similar but not the same. Today, a head of the family could be a single mother–widowed, divorced, never married–or grandparent or foster parent, or anyone designated “head” in the census. But I don’t think that’s the one Luther meant–he meant fathers, not priests, not the church, not the Sunday School teacher, have the God given responsibility to train up the child. In 1529 many people didn’t know how to read, and even some of the priests were barely literate. I’ve been using this disc on my walks–the question/answer format of the catechism and the wonderful hymns keep it from getting boring. I believe Luther wrote all the hymns on the CD, although I’m not sure about the tunes. “These are the Holy Ten Commands” was written before the catechism in 1524. He even versified the Nicene Creed–not an easy task. …