Education Guide

Collier County Schools Technology Department head Tom Petry has been reprimanded and will undergo coaching and training for at least three months as the department is evaluated and improvements made.

A personnel file made public this morning describes complaints by department staff and then identified as areas of serious concern by the school systems Office of Labor Relations, Legislation and Employee Investigations. Among them were a preponderance of evidence regarding:

- A relationship with a vendor, United Data Technologies, a hardware reseller, with the appearance of impropriety that raised a reasonable question about conflict of interest.

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Tags: Schools, Schools Reprimanded

Kenneth French (“Investments”) has published numerous papers in collaboration with the famous Eugene Fama of the Chicago Booth School of Business, who is widely recognized as the “father of modern finance.” French is notable in his own right, however, and was elected to head the American Finance Association in 2007. His popular “Investments” course is a “must take,” according to students we interviewed. “People really enjoy that class,” a second-year student emphasized to mbaMission. In fact, approximately 50% of each class enrolls in the course. Given the demand fo

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Tags: Business, Kenneth French

Applications for the U.S. Department of Education’s fifth cohort of Teaching Ambassador Fellows opened on January 21^st and are scheduled to close on February 22^nd, 2012. Since 2008, this highly competitive program has enabled a total of sixty-nine outstanding teachers, each with a record of leadership, strong communication skills, and insights into educational policy based in classroom expertise to work with the Department on a full or part time basis.  For more information about the application process, you can visit our program page at or go directly to the applications for the  Washington, Classroom, and/or Regional Fellowship on .

The Teaching Ambassador Fellowship was created because we believe that teachers should have meaningful opportunities to both contribute to and understand the policies that impact their students and school communities. Also

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Tags: Open, Teaching Ambassador

Plans to use a scorecard to rate the 24 applicants for Palm Beach County schools superintendent didn’t go too smoothly, says School Board Vice Chairwoman Debra Robinson.

She had hoped a community group would have been able to rank the strongest candidates based on a set of more than 30 factors, on a system called a rubric.

But they found it became impossible to obtain data for all of the applicants, preventing a completely fair comparison.

“There’s a lot of blanks where we couldn’t find the information,” Robinson said Tuesday night upon the release of the scorecard results, which do not show overall point totals. “It’s not comparing apples to apples.”

The applicants, who responded to a national search, are waiting on the School Board to settle on four finalists during a meeting planned for noon Wednesday.

Robinson says she’ll present her information with the hope that the rest of the board would consider it. The other board

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Tags: Beach County School, Board, County School, School Board

After I graduated from college, I took the summer off and backpacked through Europe because I figured that it might be the last time I could travel without time constraints (of course, I was right about this).  Not being able to speak the native languages provided some funny and not-so-funny incidents. In any case, I am sure most of you have been in a situation where the discussion is hampered by the two people not speaking the same language. It can be frustrating at times and shows how simple things can become so complicated.

A few weeks ago, I described an education reform program I attended,  Rethinking Education Governance for the Twenty-First Century, which was sponsored by the Fordham Institute.  The presenters were for the most part academics with impressive credentials. For those who have been part of public education for a while, some of these concepts may just turn your world upside down. Th

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