National Institutes of Health-funded research on BPA-free plastics.
A new generation of BPA-free plastics research suggests some of these contained synthetic estrogens, too.
CertiChem and its founder, George Bittner, who is also a professor of neurobiology at the University of Texas-Austin, had recently coauthored a paper in the NIH journal Environmental Health Perspectives. It reported that “almost all” commercially available plastics that were tested leached synthetic estrogens—even when they weren’t exposed to conditions known to unlock potentially harmful chemicals, such as the heat of a microwave, the steam of a dishwasher, or the sun’s ultraviolet rays. According to Bittner’s research, some BPA-free products actually released synthetic estrogens that were morepotent than BPA.
Tag: Find K12 Schools
NYT The Learning Netwotk: Songs in the Key of Lit: Ways to Use Music to Study Literature
NYT The Learning Netwotk: Songs in the Key of Lit: Ways to Use Music to Study Literature
Overview | How can music help illuminate literature? And how can literature teach us about music? In this lesson, students read a review of a musical performance based on Plato’s dialogues and then set a literary work they have studied to music in order to bring out or enhance its meaning.
http://learning.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/11/04/songs-in-the-key-of-lit-ways-to-use-music-to-study-literature/?_r=0
AROUND THE WEB
Leonie Haimson: The Woman Who Stopped Bill Gates, Rupert Murdoch, and the Ed Profiteers
Diane Ravitch’s blog
Leonie Haimson: The Woman Who Stopped Bill Gates, Rupert Murdoch, and the Ed Profiteers
Below is a letter from Leonie Haimson, who was previously added to the honor roll of this blog for fighting for students, parents, and public education.
Leonie almost singlehandedly stopped the effort to mine student data, whose sponsors wanted confidential and identifiable information about every child “for the children’s sake.” Leonie saw through that ruse and raised a national ruckus to fight for student privacy. privacy of student records is supposedly protected by federal law (FERPA), but Arne Duncan weakened the regulations so that parents could not opt out of the data mining.
It is not over. The Gates Foundation and Carnegie Corporation put up $100 million to start inBloom, and Rupert Murdoch’s Wireless Generation got the contract to develop the software, and amazon.com pans to put it on a “cloud.” They will be back. We count on Haimson and the many parents she has inspired to remain vigilant on behalf of our children. As a grandparent of a child in second grade in a Brooklyn public school, I have a personal interest in keeping his information private.
Here is Leonie’s letter, written 12/20/13:
Dear folks,
I have good news to report! Yesterday, Sheldon Silver, Speaker of the NYS Assembly, along with Education Chair Cathy Nolan and fifty Democratic Assemblymembers sent a letter to Commissioner King, urging him to put a halt to inBloom.
“It is our job to protect New York’s children. In this case, that means protecting their personally identifiable information from falling into the wrong hands,” said Silver. “Until we are confident that this information can remain protected, the plan to share student data with InBloom must be put on hold.”
Why is this important? Because Speaker Silver and the Democrats in the Assembly appoint the Board of Regents, as the Daily News noted. The Regents control education policy in New York, and appoint the commissioner.
We have begun to make real headway in the past year against inBloom, but we need your support so we can continue the fight for student privacy and smaller classes in the public schools.
We count on donations from individuals like you as our main source of funding. If you appreciate our work and want it to continue and grow stronger, please give a tax-deductible contribution right now by clicking here: http://www.nycharities.org/donate/c_donate.asp?CharityCode=1757 or sending a check to the address below.
I am proud to have been called “the nation’s foremost parent expert on inBloom and the current threat to student data privacy.” We were the first advocacy group in the nation to sound the alarm about inBloom’s plan to create a multi-state database to be stored on a vulnerable data cloud run by Amazon.com with an operating system built by Rupert Murdoch’s Amplify. The explicit goal of inBloom was to package this information in an easily digestible form and offer it up to data-mining vendors without parental consent.
In February, inBloom formally launched as a separate corporation, and nine states were listed as “partners.” We worked hard to get the word out through blogging, personal outreach to parent activists and the mainstream media. After protests erupted in states throughout the country, inBloom’s “partners” pulled out. Now, eight out of these states have severed all ties with inBloom or put their data sharing plans on indefinite hold.
Sadly, as of yesterday, New York education officials were still intent on sharing with inBloom a complete statewide set of personal data for all public school students– including names, addresses, phone numbers, test scores and grades, disabilities, health conditions, disciplinary records and more. To stop this, we helped to organize a lawsuit on behalf of NYC parents which will be heard in state court on January 10 in Albany (note the new date), asking for an immediate injunction to block the state’s plan. (The state has delayed the hearing in order to gain more time to respond to our legal briefs.)
In addition, we will continue our work on the critical issue of class size. As a result of our reports, testimonies and public outreach, we have been able to shine a bright light on what many consider to be the most shameful aspect of Mayor Bloomberg’s education legacy: the fact that class sizes in NYC have increased sharply over the last six years and are now the largest in the early grades since 1998. More on this issue is in my Indypendent article just published, called Grading the Education Mayor
Class sizes have increased every year, despite the fact that the Campaign for Fiscal Equity case was supposedly “settled” by a state law in 2007 that required NYC to reduce class sizes in all grades. As a result, 86% of NYC principals say they are unable to provide a quality education because classes are too large. Parents say that smaller classes are their top priority according to the Department of Education’s own surveys. There is no more critical need than smaller classes if the city’s children are to have an equitable chance to learn.
But class size is not just a critical issue in NYC public schools. Because of budget cuts, class sizes have risen sharply throughout the state and the nation as a whole. In more than half of all states, per-pupil funding is lower than in 2008 and school districts have cut 324,000 jobs.
At the same time, more and more money is being spent by billionaires and venture philanthropists on bogus “studies” to try to convince states and districts that class size doesn’t matter and public funds should be spent instead on outsourcing education into private hands – despite much rigorous research showing the opposite to be true.
With vendors trying to grab your child’s data in the name of providing “personalized” instruction – a euphemism that really means instruction delivered via computers and data-mining software in place of real-life teachers giving meaningful feedback in a class small enough to make this possible — our efforts are more crucial than ever before.
Please make a donation so that our work can continue and be even more effective in 2014.
Thanks for your support and Happy New Year,
Leonie Haimson
Executive Director
Class Size Matters
124 Waverly Pl.
New York, NY 10011
212-674-7320
Big Data, Internet Surveillance, and 4th Amendment.
parents and eligible students annually of their rights underFERPA
www.edu-cyberpg.com/Technology/Big-Data.html
Privacy Concerns over selling K-12 Student Data information is a common practice.
Department’s experience administering FERPA and the current
www.edu-cyberpg.com/Technology/PRIVACY_INFORMATION.html
Untitled Document
Institutions are beginning to explore the connection between FERPA
www.edu-cyberpg.com/Internet/Distance-Learning-Higher-Ed-Faculty-Obligati…
Educational CyberPlayGround: Children’s Rights and K-12 Students rights to…
Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) http://www.epic.org/privacy/
www.edu-cyberpg.com/Teachers/children-rights.html
New Teacher Resources and Training: Back to School
Act of 1974 (FERPA).. more] Bill Gates arrested in 1977 for
www.edu-cyberpg.com/Teachers/newteacher.html
K-12 Eductaion School Administrators fail to understand the proper use of…
FERPA does not give permission to teachers to give children’s
www.edu-cyberpg.com/Teachers/admin.html
Artist Armand Mednick one of the best Art Teachers in the world
Artist Armand Mednick one of the best Art Teachers in the world.
The art and life of Carol Saylor and Armand Mednick
Armand Mednick Love’s sweet touch
Allens Lane Art Center
Allens Lane Art Center
They’re 75 and 80, they met at an art class for the blind, and they see clearly that life is passionate and precious.
The sculpture class at Allens Lane Art Center in Mount Airy is in full swing. One student is glazing. Another is wedging clay to remove air bubbles.
Occasionally the group walks around to look at one another’s work, although “look” in this case means gently feeling it with their fingers. It is a tactile experience by necessity: All the participants in this class are legally blind or visually impaired.
While the class is a story in and of itself – it has been offered for 57 years, now in its third venue – this is not a tale about how blind artists find their way around an art studio. It is, however, about how a student and teacher found each other, “about falling madly, totally in love when I thought it could never happen again,” says Armand Mednick, 80, the class’ co-instructor.
He is referring to Carol Saylor, 75, a watercolorist until she started to lose both her sight and her hearing in her mid-40s. Saylor is now a sculptor. Both she and Mednick graduated from Tyler School of Art in Elkins Park, but at different times – Mednick in 1958 with a degree in graphics and ceramics, and Saylor in 1976 with a degree in painting – and they had never met until Saylor showed up for class in October.
The sculpture class at Allens Lane Art Center in Mount Airy is in full swing. One student is glazing. Another is wedging clay to remove air bubbles.
Occasionally the group walks around to look at one another’s work, although “look” in this case means gently feeling it with their fingers. It is a tactile experience by necessity: All the participants in this class are legally blind or visually impaired.
While the class is a story in and of itself – it has been offered for 57 years, now in its third venue – this is not a tale about how blind artists find their way around an art studio. It is, however, about how a student and teacher found each other, “about falling madly, totally in love when I thought it could never happen again,” says Armand Mednick, 80, the class’ co-instructor.
He is referring to Carol Saylor, 75, a watercolorist until she started to lose both her sight and her hearing in her mid-40s. Saylor is now a sculptor. Both she and Mednick graduated from Tyler School of Art in Elkins Park, but at different times – Mednick in 1958 with a degree in graphics and ceramics, and Saylor in 1976 with a degree in painting – and they had never met until Saylor showed up for class in October.
Holocaust Testimony of Armand Mednick: Transcript of Audiotaped Interview
Mr. Mednick, named “Avrum” by his Yiddish-speaking parents, was born in 1933 into a close, extended family in Brussels, Belgium. He grew up as a stranger in a non-Jewish neighborhood, often taunted by antisemites influenced by the fascist Rex Party. At age six, he was hospitalized with tuberculosis until May, 1940, when his father, an active political leftist, fled with his family to France. His father was drafted into the French Army, deserted and placed his son, renamed “Armand”, in a sanitarium at Clermont-Ferrand in the Auvergne Mountains. Armand’s father, mother and baby sister hid nearby in Volvic, where they passed as Christians. When Armand recovered, he joined his family and attended Catholic school.
Armand Mednick, 75 , with the book
“The Secret Seder” by Doreen Rappaport, who was inspired by his father’s memoir.
Artist Armand Mednick one of the best teachers in the world.
One of my favorite people is Armand Mednick. He is and artist and taught us how to throw pots on the potters wheel, glaze them, fire them up in a kiln and feel great about this. My pots made me happy, and Armand (yes we were allowed to call him by his first name) was one of the best teachers I ever had in my whole life!
Armand was very exotic, had a very dark curly beard, walked around in loose fitting, stained messy clothes, rough and ready, with bright shiny kind eyes, a smile speaking with a french accent.
Armand was probably one of the first older men who I trusted, because I knew he told me/us the real truth about how the world worked. Not the lies told to children to spare them the ugliness we know is all around us, but the truth that confirmed the realities of the world.
There were times when all we did in art class was sit there while he told us stories about his life in Europe during world war two and how he struggled to stay alive, and fought in the underground against Nazi’s.
I don’t remember any other adults telling us serious personal stories about people, places, politics, and war. Armand was genuine, he was sincere. I connected to a Culture Keeper, with the Oral tradition who told us the truth.
This was a teacher!
Philadelphia Inquirer article Daniel Rubin: History comes calling for boy in the woods
Contact Daniel Rubin at 215-854-5917 or dr****@********ws.com.
It’s almost impossible to have graduated from Oak Lane without hearing this story.
This was Armand Mednick’s signature tale. You can imagine how astonished he was to
get a phone call from his sister in Florida last spring and learn of a book called
The Secret Seder, about a boy who sneaks into the woods to celebrate Passover.
It’s Armand Mednick’s story. Author Doreen Rappaport had read about it in Mednick’s
late father’s 1997 memoir, Never Be Afraid: A Jew in the Maquis.
But many of Rappaport’s details are different from what Armand Mednick remembers.
That’s because Rappaport had been unable to track down the young protagonist,
who had shortened his last name from his father’s Mednicki.
Last spring Oak Lane music teacher Marlis Kraft-Zemel e-mailed Rappaport to tell her of
Mednick, who for 48 years has taught at the Blue Bell private school in an attempt,
he says, to recapture his lost youth.
At a reading of The Secret Seder held in the school last month,
Rappaport described her reaction to the news:
“I ran screaming through the house, shouting for my husband . . . ‘He’s here!
I’ve found him. The Secret Seder boy. He’s alive!’ “
I sat with that boy, now 75, one day last week in the barn where he
throws pots and teaches art history. <snip>
Doreen Rappaport
read Bernard Mednicki’s account that became the inspiration
for her children’s book, The Secret Seder.
She is known for writing about issues of social justice and the lives touched by this.
Doreen Rappaport will meet Armand Mednick who was the little boy she wrote about and honor his
story.
For those of you who love a good story, here is one for the books-literally!
This is the story of a young boy who would grow up to become a beloved art teacher.
As a young child during WWII, Oak Lane Day School’s art teacher, Armand Mednick lived with his family in
France hiding from the Nazis under an assumed name. During that time, Armand and his father
attended a secret Seder, which Armand’s father would later describe in his memoirs.
Doreen Rappaport is an accomplished author living in New York whose books include the Caldecott Honor Book.
LEARNING GUIDE:
The Secret Seder
- Why does Jacques cross himself in front of the church?
- Why does Jacques want to go to the Seder?
- Why do the men have to celebrate in secret?
- What does the old man mean when he says, “This is a dark time for our people?”
- When the men say, “Next year in Yerushalayim.” what are they hoping for?
- How do you think Jacques felt walking down the mountain with his father?
- Was Jacques brave to go to the Seder? Explain why or why not.
- How do the illustrations help tell the story?
- What differences are there between the illustrations in the village and the illustrations at the Seder?
- Explain the meaning of: Seder; “black boot men”; prophet; matzah; Pharaoh; Holocaust.
Other Famous people associated with Oak Lane Day School
On December 7, 1928, Avram Noam Chomsky was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
He attended Oak Lane Country Day School, and later Central High School.
About Oaklane Day School – formally Oaklane County Day School
The present-day Oak Lane Day School, located in Blue Bell, Pennsylvania,
was founded in 1916 in Cheltenham Township, under the name Oak Lane
Country Day School, by a group of parents and educators interested in
the Progressive Education movement. Originally organized as a coeducational,
non-sectarian, kindergarten through grade 12 school, Oak Lane evolved into
a pre-kindergarten through grade 6 elementary school. Initially affiliated
with the University of Pennsylvania as a “school of observation,” Oak Lane
was acquired in the 1930’s by Temple University, which continued the
school as part of its teacher training program, a relationship that would
last until 1960. The ideal of individualized education to serve a diverse
and inclusive student population has shaped Oak Lane to this day.
Our teaching heritage includes a strong emphasis on the arts and music.
In 1960, no longer associated with Temple, Oak Lane was renamed and
incorporated as an independent school by dedicated and tenacious parents,
faculty and staff at a leased building in Glenside, and moved to its present
30-acre site in Blue Bell in 1964. Oak Lane Day School is accredited by the
Pennsylvania Association of Independent Schools, and is a member of the
National Association of Independent Schools and the
Association of Delaware Valley Independent Schools.
Oak Lane is nestled on a 30-acre country campus in Blue Bell, Pennsylvania.