December 14, 2008

Youth Activist Award

As you may or may not know, the NEA Peace & Justice Caucus initiated an annual award project last year called the Paul Mann Youth Activist Award, in honor of the late Paul Mann, a Des Moines, Iowa teacher who was a dynamic Peace & Justice member whose premature death two years ago was a devastating blow to our cause. Last year's award went to an outstanding Des Moines student named Romen Borselleno, but this year there will be far more nominees from all over the country. There are many great and deserving students throughout the Midwest who deserve to be recognized for their efforts toward peace.

Please nominate a youth organization or individual youth activist who has been outstanding in the struggle for human rights, social justice, peace, and/or youth empowerment. You may nominate a young person, elementary through high school age. The student selected will be invited if possible to the 2009 NEA Representative Assembly in San Diego, CA, or to the sponsoring state education association affiliate’s Representative Assembly to receive their award during their 2009 RA.

Click here to access the application for the Paul Mann Youth Activist Award.

December 12, 2008

December 8, 2008

Linda Darling-Hammond Bio

Contact Barack Obama to recommend Linda Darling-Hammond as the next Secretary of Education. It is important that he hears from classroom teachers and ESP's. Below is Linda Darling-Hammond's Bio. Click her for her Resume.

Linda Darling-Hammond is currently Charles E. Ducommun Professor of Education at Stanford University where she has founded and oversees the School Redesign Network, which works across the nation to transform schools to teach 21st century skills and to support student success through innovations in district and school redesign, as well as in curriculum, teaching, and assessment. She has also founded and co-directs the Stanford Center for Opportunity Policy in Education, which conducts research and policy analysis on issues affecting educational equity and opportunity.

Darling-Hammond’s research and policy work have focused on issues of school reform, teaching quality, and educational equity at the federal, state, and local levels. Beginning with her work as Senior Social Scientist and Director of the RAND Corporation’s Education policy program, and extending through appointments at Columbia’s Teachers College and Stanford, she has conducted research on a wide range of policy issues affecting teaching and schooling while advising policymakers at all levels of government. She has led the development of new standards and assessments for students and teachers, launched innovative schools, redesigned teacher training programs, and designed policies that have supported greater opportunities for children and youth.


From 1994-2001, Darling-Hammond served as executive director of the National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future, chaired by Governor James B. Hunt, a blue-ribbon panel whose 1996 report, What Matters Most: Teaching for America’s Future, led to sweeping policy changes affecting teaching and schooling. The Commission developed state and local partnerships in more than 25 states to promote legislative changes and organizational reforms. In 2006, this report was named one of the most influential affecting U.S. education and Darling-Hammond was named one of the nation’s ten most influential people affecting educational policy over the last decade.

While William F. Russell Professor at Teachers College, Darling-Hammond co-founded the National Center for Restructuring Education, Schools, and Teaching (NCREST), which supported a range of school reform initiatives in New York and nationally. Darling-Hammond has been deeply engaged in efforts to redesign schools so that they focus more effectively on learning and to develop standards for teaching. As Chair of New York State's Council on Curriculum and Assessment in the early 1990s, she helped to fashion a comprehensive school reform plan for the state that developed new learning standards and curriculum frameworks for more challenging learning goals and more performance-oriented assessments. This led to an overhaul of the state Regents examinations as well as innovations in school-based performance assessments and investments in new approaches to professional development.

As Chair of the Model Standards Committee of the Chief State School Officers’ Interstate New Teacher Assessment and Support Consortium (INTASC), she led the development of licensing standards for beginning teachers that reflect current knowledge about what teachers need to know to teach challenging content to diverse learners. These were ultimately incorporated into the licensing standards of more than 40 states and became the foundation for a new generation of teacher certification tests. She has been instrumental in developing performance assessments that allow teachers to demonstrate their classroom teaching skills in authentic ways, as an early Board member of the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards and, later as a co-founder of the Performance Assessment for California Teachers.

Darling-Hammond has been active in developing innovative schools. She began her career as a public school teacher and has co-founded both a preschool / day care center and a charter public high school serving low-income students of color in East Palo Alto. In a community where only a third of students were graduating and almost none were going onto college, this new Early College High school – an open admissions school which admits students by lottery – has created a pipeline to college for more than 90 percent of its graduates. The school, along with seven others, is a professional development school partner with the Stanford Teacher Education Program (STEP), which prepares a leadership corps of teachers for high-needs schools. Darling-Hammond led the redesign of the STEP program for this new mission, and its successes have been acknowledged through recognition in several studies as one of the nation’s top programs.

Darling-Hammond has worked with dozens of schools and districts around the nation on studying, developing, and scaling up new model schools -- as well as preparation programs for teachers and leaders -- that enable much greater success for diverse students. She has also worked with civil rights and community-based organizations to leverage changes in state and local level policies and practices that promote greater equity in educational opportunity and access for traditionally underserved students. For this work, she has been awarded, among others, the Charles W. Eliot Award for Outstanding Contributions to Education, the Asa G. Hilliard Award for Outstanding Achievement in Racial Justice and Education Equity, the Founder’s Award from the National Commission on African American Education, the Woman of Valor Award from Educational Equity Concepts, and the Distinguished Service Award from the Council of Chief State School Officers.

Darling-Hammond is past president of the American Educational Research Association, a two-term member of the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards, and a member of the National Academy of Education’s executive committee. She has served on many national advisory boards, including the White House Advisory Panel's Resource Group for the National Education Goals, the National Academy's Panel on the Future of Educational Research, the Academy’s Committee on Teacher Education, and on the boards of directors for the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, the Spencer Foundation, the National Foundation for the Improvement of Education, the Center for Teaching Quality, the Alliance for Excellent Education, and the National Council for Educating Black Children.

Darling-Hammond is author or editor of 14 books and more than 300 journal articles, book chapters, and monographs on issues of policy and practice. Among her books are The Right to Learn: A Blueprint for Creating Schools that Work (awarded the Outstanding Book Award from the American Educational Research Association in 1998), Teaching as the Learning Profession: A Handbook of Research and Policy (co-edited with Gary Sykes, and awarded the Outstanding Book Award from the National Staff Development Council in 2000), and Preparing Teachers for a Changing World: What Teachers should Learn and be Able to Do, a project of the National Academy of Education (co-edited with John Bransford and awarded the Pomeroy Award by the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education in 2006).

Darling-Hammond received her B.A. (magna cum laude) from Yale University in 1973, and her doctorate in Urban Education (with highest distinction) from Temple University in 1978. She holds honorary degrees from many universities in the U.S. and abroad and has received numerous awards for her research contributions including the Council of Scientific Society of Presidents’ Education Award, the American Educational Research Association’s Awards for Research into Practice and Review of Educational Research, as well as its Fellowship for Excellence in Scholarship, and the Margaret B. Lindsay Award for Distinguished Research in Teacher Education.

Fair Test Video

A short video challenging the use of high-stakes standardized tests to judge students and schools. Produced for the non profit organization FairTest. www.fairtest.org


December 5, 2008

Obama's weekly address

The following is from Iowa Peace and Justice Chair, Carol Kula.

I wanted to share this week's address to the nation from President-elect Obama as he mentions federal investment in improving infrastructure and technology in our public schools as part of his immediate economic stimulus plan-at about 3 minutes he begins to discuss public school investment.

December 4, 2008

'End the War in 2009'


In February of 2008, Barack Obama promised to end the War in Iraq in 2009 if he was elected president. See here.

Fill out the survey at Barack Obama's website and let him know that as people who supported him that we expect that he hold to this promise and others he made to us.