New Jersey school board reduces weight of test scores on teacher evaluations
AUGUST 6, 2014, 7:40 PM LAST UPDATED: WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 6, 2014, 7:40 PM BY HANNAN ADELY STAFF WRITER THE RECORD
The state Board of Education has taken steps to reduce the use of student test scores to judge teachers, weeks after Gov. Christie announced a compromise with educators outlining changes to teacher evaluations.
The board’s proposal came after lawmakers and educators argued it was unfair to use student scores because the online tests were based on new standards and schools needed time to adjust. The plan still must get final approval after a public comment period, but districts have been instructed to use the new evaluation system, officials said.
Under the new system, the impact of scores of the new standards-based tests will drop from 30 to 10 percent for math and reading teachers who give them.
Another 20 percent of evaluations will be based on “student growth objectives” — academic goals set by teachers with input from supervisors to measure their effectiveness. They can be based on a combination of measures, including final exams, advanced placement tests, and student projects and portfolios.
The weight of those measures was raised from 15 percent, but the board also made it easier for teachers to appeal those scores
Join the celebration of Kilwins Grand Opening of Kilwins Chocolate, Fudge and Ice Cream Shop located across from Memorial Park at Van Neste Square,
121 E. Ridgewood Ave.,
Ridgewood, NJ 07450.
201-445-4837
Try the world’s best Mackinac Island fudge, original recipe ice cream lots of fresh caramel and chocolate treats and caramel
apples…”Sweet in every Sense since 1947.
Bring the kids and meet…KILWIN the MO– USE.
Philip and Mary Davis and the entire Kilwins
Ridgewood team.
BACK-TO-SCHOOL INFO: Parents and guardians will be receiving a detailed letter on or about August 11 about updating emergency contact information, reviewing various district policies and granting certain permissions. This Mandatory Annual Online Re-registration process takes place through Skyward Family Access between August 11 and September 12
August 5, 2014 –In preparation for the start of the 2014-2015 school year, all parents and guardians of students in the Ridgewood Public Schools must complete the Mandatory Annual Online Re-registration process through Skyward Family Access between August 11 and September 12.
New this year is a section on the 1:1 Chromebook initiative, in which parents and guardians of high school students will be required to review the new Chromebook policy and procedures, complete the agreement form and fund the annual insurance fees.
Re-registration also involves updating emergency contact information; completing the All-Media Permission Form; reviewing district policies and codes; authorizing food service accounts and administration of over-the-counter medications; and applying for the optional NJ FamilyCare insurance program.
Detailed instructions on Mandatory Annual Online Re-registration will be mailed to homes on or about August 11. To re-register, parents and guardians should go to the district website at www.ridgewood.k12.nj.us, choose Skyward Family Access under the Parents tab, log in with their username and password and select Mandatory Annual Online Re-
Registration under Home. Anyone who has forgotten their login and/or password information may request a password reset by selecting the Forgot Login/Password link on the log-on page. Further assistance may be requested by sending an email to [email protected].
AUGUST 7, 2014 LAST UPDATED: THURSDAY, AUGUST 7, 2014, 1:21 AM BY CHRIS HARRIS STAFF WRITER THE RECORD Print
RIDGEWOOD — Traffic in the village will likely increase with the development of three multifamily housing projects downtown, the Planning Board’s traffic expert testified this week.
Jahr testified at the Planning Board’s meeting Tuesday night that zoning regulations permit a myriad of commercial uses at the three properties being eyed by developers for high-density housing.
Jahr’s findings align with those presented previously by the developers’ traffic experts.
Jahr’s analysis on Tuesday will play into the board’s consideration of a master plan amendment that would potentially permit such developments in Ridgewood.
ROAD WORK, UTILITY EMERGENCY, ROAD CLOSURE OR CONSTRUCTION
Below, please find the road details and permits, which could cause traffic delays, for today, August 6, 2014:
NJ Transit – West Glen Avenue Trestle Painting Project. NJ Transit anticipates the work will require alternating lanes of traffic (one lane closed to do the work). Each lane closure should take no more that 1 ½ weeks, for a total of 3 weeks of lane restrictions. Work will begin at 8 am to 4:30 pm, Monday – Friday, though some Saturday work may be required to keep to the schedule.
Police officers will be used for traffic control.
PSE&G Energy Strong gas main work– Vesta Court/Meadowbrook (Crew 1) Starting at 7:30 am. (Ferriera Construction) This will be ongoing for many weeks.
PSE&G Energy Strong gas main work – and Rose Court (Crew 2) –
Cablevision starting at and meeting at the train station 8 am, corner of Franklin and North Broad.
PSE&G (Electric) East Ridgewood Ave/Duck Pond. Starting at 8 am
PSE&G (Gas) – 274 East Glen Avenue – 8 am – 3 pm. Two (2) police officers assigned.
Meter Closing:
Cottage Place – Meter Numbers: 198 and 199 (This is scheduled to go through August 15th).
News outlets are running stories about the rise in corporate tax inversions. Inversions are financial reorganizations that place U.S. firms under foreign parent corporations. They are one of the many ways that companies are responding to America’s uniquely high corporate tax rate.
Liberal policymakers and pundits are outraged by inversions because they fear that the government will be starved of revenues. Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew has demanded new rules to stop inversions because “allowing these transactions to continue, we run the risk of eroding our corporate tax base and undoing the progress we have made to reduce our budget deficits.”
However, it is our high 40 percent tax rate that is eroding our corporate tax base. If we chopped the rate substantially, tax avoidance would fall and U.S. investment would rise. Over time, more income would be reported to the government, with the result that the government would probably not lose any money, and it could even gain some. Governments, businesses, and workers would all win from a corporate tax rate cut.
Here is some evidence that the government would win. For 19 OECD countries for which there is good data back to the 1960s, I plotted the average corporate tax rates and average corporate tax revenues. The chart illustrates the Laffer effect of cutting high statutory tax rates on a very mobile tax base.
By Amber Sutherland, Daniel Prendergast and Chris Perez
August 5, 2014 | 8:54pm
Bacon lovers are getting socked in the piggy bank.
City butchers and restaurateurs are beginning to squeal for mercy after the price of bacon rose to the highest it’s been in nearly 30 years — thanks to high demand and a shortage of healthy pigs.
“We’ve had to raise the prices in small increments in the last month,” said Vincent Santiago, an employee at Staubitz meat market in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn.
The pork surge began last year when a virus swept through US farms in about 30 states and killed millions of pigs.
Bacon prices have shot up around 10 percent this year alone and reached an all-time high of $6.11 per pound, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Santiago said a half-pound slab of bacon now costs about $3.99, as opposed to last month when they were about a dollar cheaper.
“We don’t like to raise prices, but this is what we do for a living,” he added. “People are still buying it.”
Ridgewood Guild Presents Movies in the Park Finding Nemo
Tonight August 6, 2014 The Ridgewood Guild Presents Movies in the Park Finding Nemo – Sponsored by Backwoods.
Movies in the Park returns for the summer season. Memorial Park at Van Neste Square at 8:30PM – Bring a blanket or chair and enjoy this free movie presented by the Ridgewood Guild .
1,000-member secretive progressive journalist group uncovered
August 6, 2014 MEDIA TRACKERS
Media Trackers is dedicated to media accountability, government transparency, and quality fact-based journalism. Archive »
WASHINGTON, D.C. – A prominent CNN commentator, the top two political reporters for The Huffington Post, a Reuters reporter, the editor of The Nation magazine, a producer for Al Jazeera America television, a U.S. News & World Report columnist, and approximately two dozen Huffington Post contributors are among the more than 1,000 members of Gamechanger Salon.
Founded by leftwing activist Billy Wimsatt, the group is a secretive digital gathering of writers, opinion leaders, activists and political hands who share information, ideas and strategy via a closed Google group.
The group’s existence was discovered by Media Trackers through an open records request filed with a University of Wisconsin professor who happened to be a member of the network.
Sally Kohn, formerly a Fox News contributor, now works for CNNreliably echoing pro-Obama Administration talking points and championing leftwing ideas as a network commentator. Kohn is also a member of Gamechanger Salon, and e-mails show that she occasionally approached the group’s membership and asked them to promote her television appearances.
“I’m guest co-hosting CNN’s Crossfire tonight at 6:30pm EST, with fellow co-host Newt Gingrich. I would be grateful for folks (a) helping spread the word on Facebook, Twitter, etc to encourage people to tune in; and (b) tuning in and live tweeting during the show,” Kohn wrote to the group on January 14 of this year.
In another e-mail, Kohn pitched her TED talk about working as a liberal at Fox News. “I would be grateful for any shares and reactions. Here is a straightforward, sample tweet[:] Watch @sallykohn’s amazing TED talk on emotional correctness: on.ted.com/Kohn” she wrote. “Thanks for everything all of you do every day to make the world a better place!” she signed off.
Amanda Terkel, the “Senior Political Reporter and Politics Managing Editor at The Huffington Post,” is a member of Gamechanger Salon along with The Huffington Post’s Washington bureau chief, Ryan Grim.
Stimulus ‘boondoggle’: School board member details disastrous school computer giveaway
August 6, 2014
HOBOKEN, N.J. – When the Hoboken school leaders decided in 2010 to use a windfall of federal stimulus money to purchase laptops for all students in the city’s junior-senior high school, former board member Maureen Sullivan was the only one to vote against the measure.
Four years later, the district’s superintendent Mark Toback has deemed the initiative “unsustainable” and canceled the program, leaving school officials to explore options for recycling dozens of machines that are now collecting dust in a school storage closet.
“It was clear it was going to be a boondoggle and a disaster and that’s what it turned out to be,” Sullivan told EAGnews.
“The stimulus money came and it had to be soaked up … It was like, ‘It’s free money, let’s just spend it,’” she said of the board’s rush to dole out computers, which her colleagues on the board viewed as an opportunity to help the district’s mostly poor students keep up with their wealthier peers.
“There was just no planning or thinking things through logically,” she said. “In general, that’s how the school board operates.”
Before the plan was approved, Sullivan repeatedly highlighted the district’s already struggling tech staff, the costs to repair and maintain hundreds of computers, licensing fees for software, and the lack of a strategic plan for training teachers, but “it was just shluffed off like ‘Don’t worry about it, these things take care of themselves,’” Sullivan said.
“I asked what happens when the stimulus money goes away and they were just like ‘Our taxpayers will see the value … and pay,’” said Sullivan, a mother of two high school students.
“You didn’t have to be a genius to figure out it was going nowhere fast. They never wanted to hash out the negatives, they only wanted to talk about the positives,” she said. “Anyone with common sense knows you can’t just give a 12-year-old a laptop.
“Kids have all the time in the world to figure out how to mess them up,” Sullivan said.
And that’s exactly what happened.
According to the Hechinger Report:
By the time Jerry Crocamo, a computer network engineer, arrived in Hoboken’s school system in 2011, every seventh, eighth and ninth grader had a laptop. Each year a new crop of seventh graders were outfitted. Crocamo’s small tech staff was quickly overwhelmed with repairs.
We had “half a dozen kids in a day, on a regular basis, bringing laptops down, going ‘my books fell on top of it, somebody sat on it, I dropped it,’ ” said Crocamo.
Screens cracked. Batteries died. Keys popped off. Viruses attacked. Crocamo found that teenagers with laptops are still… teenagers.
“We bought laptops that had reinforced hard-shell cases so that we could try to offset some of the damage these kids were going to do,” said Crocamo. “I was pretty impressed with some of the damage they did anyway. Some of the laptops would come back to us completely destroyed.”
Crocamo’s time was also eaten up with theft. Despite the anti-theft tracking software he installed, some laptops were never found. Crocamo had to file police reports and even testify in court.
That was only the beginning.
Students also learned how to circumvent software installed on the machines intended to prevent them from visiting pornography, social media, and other inappropriate websites. Crocamo disabled the computers’ webcams, but students learned to undo those controls, as well.
The added software also dragged down the computers’ processors, which prevented them from effectively running educational software.
“We didn’t really do much on the computer,” Michael Ranieri, a junior at Hoboken high school, told the Hechinger Report. “So we kind of just did games to mess around when we had free time. I remember really big was Crazy Taxis that we used play. If we found solitaire online, we used to play it.”
Many folks in the community also learned the district’s username and password and eventually overwhelmed the high school’s wifi network.
Are Public Schools Collecting Too Much Data on Your Kids?
Mary Tillotson / @Watchdogorg / August 05, 2014
Parents are increasingly voicing concern that public schools are collecting massive amounts of personal data on students, storing it and distributing it to third parties without their consent.
Dawn Sweeney, a Pennsylvania mother, has two children in public schools and home-schools her younger three. She had planned to enroll them in public schools when they reached seventh grade, as she did with her two oldest. But because of the data collection, she’s now reconsidering.
“Nobody can say exactly what is being collected, but it’s a lot, and it concerns me that every time my kids are on the computer, their person is connected to data,” Sweeney said. “You don’t need parent permission for that. However, you do need parent permission to hang artwork in the hallway.”
That data collection makes plenty of parents nervous and is one reason more parents home-school their children, said Will Estrada, staff attorney and director of federal relations for Home School Legal Defense Association.
Other concerns include identity theft, data security, a child’s physical safety if a sex offender gains access to the data, and the government or big businesses’ having access to the data.
Emmett McGroarty, executive director of the Preserve Innocence Project at the American Principles Project, said if government is able to collect information in an unfettered manner on individuals, it will change their relationship.
“If you’re walking around knowing this guy is collecting this information and is keeping it on you and your children, it’s going to bother you, and it’s going to intimidate you,” he said. “If you and I ever enter into a dispute down the road, you’re really going to be at a disadvantage.”
In late July, parents who had worked to take down inBloom, a pilot project involving massive student data collection, formed Student Privacy Matters, a coalition to push for better privacy protections at the state and federal level.
New Evidence Exposes Hamas Passing Off Terrorist Deaths As Civilian Deaths
IN NEWS, POLITICS, WORLD NEWS / BY SEAN BROWN / ON AUGUST 5, 2014 AT 2:49 PM /
It’s been widely reported that the majority of the deaths in the Gaza Strip have been civilians, with figures from Palestinian officials saying that 80% of the roughly 2,000 deaths during Operation Protective Edge have been non-combatants. However, Israel is now claiming they have proof that at least half of the people who have died were militants.
“There is research being done in the military, very professionally and reliably, (whose) conclusion is that at least 47% of the fatalities are terrorists, with photographs and names,” prominent former politician Tzachi Hanegbi said.
Hanegbi was speaking on Israel’s Channel Two Television about how their analysis of the death toll is far different from what the UN is reporting. He explained that Hamas fails to differentiate between civilian and militant deaths.
An analyst for the pro-Israel group The Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA), Steven Sotsky, backed that claim, pointing out that there’s a disproportionate amount of Palestinian deaths with men aged 17-30. Sotsky said that while that age range for men only accounts for 10% of the total Palestinian population, it accounts for 44% of the fatalities thus far.
According to Sotsky, that trend wouldn’t exist if Israel were indiscriminately bombing civilians:
“Analyses of the casualties listed in the daily reports published by the Palestinian Center for Human Rights, a Gaza-based organization operating under Hamas rule, indicate that young males ages 17 to 30 make up a large portion of the fatalities, and a particularly noticeable spike occurs between males ages 21 to 27, a pattern consistent with the age distribution typically found among combatants and military conscripts.”
He details his analysis further by saying, “Data gleaned from the daily reports of the PCHR show that from July 8, the start of Israel’s ‘Operation Protective Edge,’ through July 26, 404 out of 915 fatalities tallied from daily reports in which the ages were identified occurred among males ages 17 to 30, comprising 44% of all fatalities among a group representing about 10% of Gazans.”
Sotsky then notes that while females make up 25% of the population they only account for 10% of the casualties, and children make up 50% of the population but only account for 20% of the casualties.
Matt Rooney of The Save Jersey Blog interviews NJ Senate Candidate Jeff Bell Aug. 05 By Matt Rooney | The Save Jersey Blog
Jeff Bell dropped by my law offices on Monday, Save Jerseyans, en route to participate in the organized protest of Harry Reid’s Cherry Hill fundraiser for Donald Norcross.
I could talk to this guy for hours. He’s an unapologetic public policy wonk and rich depository of political knowledge going back to his years with the Reagan campaign. We did our best to drill down on a few important issues at play in 2014, the state of the race itself, the contrast between Bell and the incumbent Cory Booker (D-Twitter), and how he hopes to win this classic David v. Goliath struggle…
The NY Post says he’s surging. The most recent public poll shows him in single-digit territory. All we can say for sure is that the 2014 cycle is no time to count any good Republican out…
Readers asks , yeah what about the rats in village hall?
News 12 has just reported that the rats are on the move….it’s understood that they are moving back home after a short jaunt on Howard road….chief
John ward has stated “we’ll keep the back door open So the mayor and council can get back in….but once there in….that’s it….no more unauthorized travel.”
Where is our Mayor with the photo op. Let see if he get his buddy over at the record to put a positive spin on this. Maybe we should tighten up the borders around so that the illegal aliens rats don’t come across.
Ridgewood NJ, On July 30, 2014 at 6:18 PM Ptl. Anthony Mormino responded to Station Plaza for a welfare check. He found an intoxicated male lying on the ground. While investigating the incident the male party became disruptive. He was found to be in possession of an open container of alcohol as well as marijuana. The accused James Moore 45 of Fairlawn was arrested and charged with Disorderly Conduct, Possession of Marijuana and Open Container in Public.
On July 31, 2014 Detective Douglas Williams concluded an investigation into sexually explicit emails being sent to a Village resident. A search was conducted by Det Williams and McDowell, with the assistance of the NJ State Police, to a Liberty Township residence. The warrant resulted in the arrest of Brandon Kuhl 30 of Liberty Township NJ. The accused was charged Cyber Harassment. The accused was released pending a first appearance in Ridgewood Municipal Court. The investigation is ongoing pending a forensic analysis of the computers seized during the search warrant.
On July 31, 2014 a Garber Square resident reported that a package had been stolen from his mailbox. The matter is under investigation.
On July 31, 2014 a Fairlawn resident reported that her vehicle had been damaged while it was parked at Kings Plaza on North Maple Avenue. The matter is under investigation.
On August 3, 2014 at 6:53 PM Patrol responded to a dispute on Prospect Street. While investigating the dispute it was determined that the accused was in possession of marijuana and drug paraphernalia. Matthew Decesare 22 of Ridgewood was arrested and charged with possession of marijuana and paraphernalia. He was released after posting bail.
All defendants are considered innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.
