Education Strategy

From our colleague Michael Dresser on the Maryland Politics blog:

When interim Maryland State School Superintendent Bernard J. Sadusky made a presentation before two House of Delegates committee Friday, he spelled out certain principles for flexibility under the Elementary and Secondary Education Act.

Alas, the folks at the Maryland State Department of Education showed a certain flexibility in spelling  “principle” as well. Time for a trip to the principal’s office?

See the photo of the presentation here

I was terminated from my previous job. Could my ex-employer say any negative things that will reflect on my chances on getting a job?

The Career Doctor responds:

Possible? Yes. Likely? No.

Given our litigious society, employers are getting more and more tight-lipped about what they say about former employees so that it does not come back to haunt them.

That said, most employers will state that you were terminated, and some may state whether you were fired for cause or simply terminated so, you need to face the fact that in many cases, a prospective new employer may very well know you were fired.

But I think you need to spend less time worrying about what a former employer might say about you and more time on how you are dealing with being fired and what you have learned from the experience.

From my work with job-seekers, I know that getting terminated whether for cause or downsized is tough on the ego, so you need to pick yourself up off the ground, shake off the termination, and go right back out there and seek new employment.

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By Watson Scott Swail, President & CEO, Educational Policy Institute/EPI International

Before the Christmas break, I wrote a piece called “Higher Education for Free” . This week I am providing a “Part Deux” due to emerging news and conversations on the topic.

This week, Apple announced two important announcements. First, an expansion of their iTunes U, which provides not only courses from higher education institutions around the world, but full courses. Second, the expansion of iBooks for textbooks.

These two innovations build upon our prior news of MIT opening its course content to the masses, giving people who complete MIT online courses an option of getting full course credit for their effort.

In the past few days, critics have crawled out of the woodwork to complain how Apple will be bad for higher education. As one

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  When she scored 25 points in one half earlier this season that was remarkable. Then when she capped a string of 20-point performances with a buzzer beater on New Year’s Eve she started to seem unstoppable.

But what Makenzie Brandon (Seattle) did Saturday night topped all of that.

The 5-foot-10 junior forward who’s already been named the SCIAC Female Student-Athlete of the Week twice this season, scored a career-high 36 points, leading the Occidental College women’s basketball team to a comeback win over Whittier College 73-67 in Southern California Intercollegiate Athletic Conference action on Saturday.

After a normal first half by her standards — nine points and two steals on 4 for 10 shooting — The SCIAC’s leading scorer went off, scoring 27 points in the second period to help the Tigers (12-2, 4-0) overcome a six-point halftime deficit.

“Sometimes they all just happen to drop and sometime they don’t,” Brandon said. “It

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