Residents at Mehlville public forum focus on school district’s public relations – Call Newspapers

i.call
As for improving the district’s communication with residents, resident Linda Mooy proposed a cheaper alternative to using a public-relations department.

“Personally, I think you guys should take Communications 101 at the junior college rather than spending thousands of dollars on a PR person,” Mooy said.

Board Vice President Karl Frank Jr. responded that while he had, in fact, already followed through on Mooy’s suggestion, he supports paying UNICOM•ARC to assist with the district’s public-relations department for the good of residents.

“Ironically enough, I am taking Communications 101 at the community college,” Frank said. “But, in all honesty, we’re a publicly funded, democratic organization…click here to read on.”

A Little Humor for Today

Wow. I hope the Chinese aren’t watching. She sounds like me when I am trying to answer questions for Mike Anthony at the Call.

Just kidding Mike!

P.S. Ms. South Carolina is not a graduate of the Mehlville School District.

Congressman Offers Revisions to ‘No Child’ – washingtonpost.com – No Child Left Behind

Some change is better than no change, but in my opinion, this whole deal should just be scrapped. Regardless, I have yet to see any proposals offering additional funding to help schools meet the unattainable goals of No Child Left Behind.

Congressman Offers Revisions to ‘No Child’ – washingtonpost.com
Congressman Offers Revisions to ‘No Child’
Proposal Would Lessen Some Penalties

By Jay Mathews
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, August 29, 2007; Page A08

The leading House Democrat on education issues proposed revisions yesterday to the No Child Left Behind law that would ease the penalties for public schools that barely miss academic testing targets but tighten another rule that has helped the District and Virginia.

U.S. Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.), chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee and a leading sponsor of the law in 2001, called his proposal a work in progress. He and three other committee members were floating the ideas as they move toward introducing a bill likely to contain major changes to the controversial law. Miller has said he wants click here to read on…

Through Analysis, Gut Reaction Gains Credibility – New York Times

Dr. Gerd Gigerenzer, 59, is a social psychologist and the director of the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin. He has recently written a book on trusting your instincts in decision making. (I wish more people would have trusted their instincts on the Mehlville Messenger before we wasted over a year’s worth of good communication in the Journal.)

Through Analysis, Gut Reaction Gains Credibility – New York Times
A: In some situations, that demands too much information. Plus, it’s slow. When a person relies on their gut feelings and uses the instinctual rule of thumb “go with your first best feeling and ignore everything else,” it can permit them to outperform the most complex calculations.

In the 1990s, I was living in Chicago, where there are high dropout rates from the high schools. People often asked, “Is there a way to know which school has the lowest dropout rate?” There existed data measuring different cues of school performance: the pay of teachers, the number of English-speaking students in a class, things like that.

I wondered: could one feed these into a computer, analyze them and obtain a prediction on which high school produced the fewest dropouts? We did that. And we were astonished to find that computer-based versions of Franklin’s bookkeeping method — a program that weighed 18 different cues — proved less accurate than going with the rule of thumb of “get one good reason and ignore the rest of the information.”  Click here to read on…