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WPCNR SCHOOL DAYS. From the New York State Education Department. February 11, 2014:

The State Board of Regents P-12 Education and Higher Education Committees today adopted several measures presented in a report from a Regents’ work group to adjust the implementation of the new Common Core Standards.

The full Board is expected to act on the Committee reports tomorrow (Tuesday, February 11th). Included are changes that will delay the impact of Common Core-related state assessments on educators and students, and reduce the level of local school district testing associated with the new teacher evaluation law and higher standards for teaching and learning.

“We have listened to the concerns of parents and teachers,” Board of Regents Chancellor Merryl H. Tisch said.

“We’ve heard the concerns expressed at the hearings and forums, and we regret that the urgency of our work, and the unevenness of implementation, have caused frustration and anxiety for some of our educators, students, and their families. This report is designed to make significant and timely changes to improve our shared goal of implementing the Common Core. We have heard strong support for higher standards, but we have also heard a desire for more time. The Regents work group put together a series of strong adjustments that will help improve implementation without sacrificing the high standards we’ve set for our students. These changes will help give principals, teachers, parents and students the time to adjust to the new standards without stopping our progress toward the goal we all share: college and career readiness for every student.”

“Any major shift – especially one involving 700 school districts, more than 4500 schools, and millions of students—is going to require adjustments and course corrections along the way,” Education Commissioner John B. King, Jr. said. “The implementation of the higher standards has been uneven, and these changes will help strengthen the important work happening in schools throughout the state. As challenging as implementation has been, we have to remember one important fact: the old standards were not adequate. Every year, despite our state’s many excellent districts and schools, 140,000 students leave high school without the skills they need for college and career success. We have to stay focused on giving all of our students the preparation they need to succeed after high school.”

Rochester area Regent Wade Norwood chaired the work group.

“When the Board approved the shift to the Common Core four years ago, we knew we would have to make adjustments as the standards rolled out,” Norwood said. “The work group balanced the concerns all of us have heard with the progress we’ve made toward raising the bar for our students. The changes we’ve made protect teachers and students from unforeseen and unintended consequences of the implementation without damaging the foundation we’ve built to help our students succeed in the 21st century.”

Under the changes, the requirement to pass Common Core-based Regents exams at the college and career ready level will be extended. The class of 2022 will be the first to face the new higher graduation requirements, 12 years after the adoption of the standards in 2010. To ensure that students are not unfairly penalized by the transition to higher standards, the requirements for Academic Intervention Services (mandatory tutoring for struggling students) will be adjusted and guidance will be issued to districts making clear that the State Education Department (SED) neither requires nor encourages districts to make promotion or placement decisions using student performance on state assessments in grades 3-8, but if districts choose to do so, they should make adjustments to ensure students are not negatively impacted by the Common Core transition and should use multiple measures – not grades 3-8 state assessment results alone.

The State has not created any additional tests as part of Common Core implementation. All required state tests other than two high school social studies Regents exams – including all grades 3-8 assessments and high school exams in English, Math, and Science – are required by federal law. However, King noted, the Board recognized that a variety of pressures at the state and local level may have resulted in students in some districts being tested more than needed or rote standardized test preparation that crowds out quality instruction. The measures approved by the two committees today will reduce local testing by:

• Increasing flexibility for districts to reduce local testing used to inform teacher evaluation
• Creating an expedited review process for districts that propose to amend their teacher evaluation plans to reduce local testing
• Eliminating local traditional standardized tests for K-2 used to inform teacher evaluations (The State does not administer traditional standardized tests in K-2.)
• Capping at 1% the instructional time that can be used for local assessments used to inform teacher evaluations (The federally required State assessments in grades 3-8 English Language Arts and Mathematics account for less than 1% of instructional time.)

In addition, the Board and SED will support reducing standardized testing by local school districts through “Teaching is the Core” grants that require districts to review their local assessments and eliminate any unnecessary or duplicative assessments. King noted that New York’s participation in the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) will be limited to field testing only during the 2013-14 and 2014-15 school years. Although only 1 percent of teachers were rated ineffective in the first year of statewide teacher evaluations, the measure approved by the committees today will provide added protection for educators by approving an emergency regulation to protect teachers and principals from unfair termination based on 2012-13 and 2013-14 assessment results in districts that did not timely implement the Common Core by providing adequate professional development, guidance on curriculum, or other necessary supports.

King also announced the State has delayed the launch of the data dashboards related to inBloom to allow SED to work with legislators to address concerns about data security and third party providers used by the State and districts.

The P-12 committee also approved SED applying to the U.S. Department of Education (USDOE) to renew the State’s waiver from No Child Left Behind (the Elementary and Secondary Education Act). As part of the waiver renewal, SED will ask USDOE to allow students with severe disabilities who are not eligible for alternate assessments to be tested at their instructional level rather than their chronological age level, and allow English Language Learners to be tested in their native language for their first two years of assessments. In addition, the work group reaffirmed the Board’s request to the legislature to fund a three year, $525 million Core Instructional Development Fund aimed at providing increased professional development for Common Core implementation, and to provide increased funding to reduce field testing, allow for the release of more test items, and support the development of native language arts assessments for English Language Learners.

Earlier this year, USDOE approved the request for a waiver from the Elementary and Secondary Act (ESEA) requirement that students who take Regents exams in mathematics when they are in seventh or eighth grade to also take the state mathematics assessment. The waiver will effectively end the “double-testing” of approximately 50,000 students, beginning with the spring 2014 assessments.

The full report of the Work Group is available at:
http://www.regents.nysed.gov/meetings/2014/February2014/214p12hea3.pdf

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WPCNR MILESTONES. February 11, 2014: 

Was Thomas Edison America’s greatest entrepreneur?

He was born today in Milan Ohio in 1847, the seventh child. He was homeschooled by his mother, Nancy Matthews Elliot. His father was Samuel Ogden Edison, Jr.

Thomas Edison was born on February 11, 1847 in Milan, Ohio.  His parents were Samuel Ogden Edison, Jr. and Nancy Matthews Elliott. Thomas was their seventh child. He started school late due to a childhood illness and was thrown out of school three months after he started. Teachers said his mind wandered, and his teacher called him “addled.”

His mother home-schooled him and taught him to read and encouraged him to experiment.

He was partially deaf and his first job was as a telegraph operator after he saved the child of a railroad official from being hit by a train. J.U. Mackenzie of Mount Clemens, Michigan the father of the child made Edison an apprentice and taught him to operate a telegraph.

Edison drifted to various railroad towns as a telegrapher, eventually coming to the metropolitan area where he created his first invention, an improved stock ticker, for which he was paid $40,000

Greatest inventions

His inventions include:

• Electrographic vote recorder, which was Edison’s first patent, through a “yes” and “no” switch
• Simplified telegraph, which didn’t require manually tapping out the message at the receiving end
• Faster electric telegraph, which had faster signal speeds than earlier models
• Stencil pen, which is the predecessor to tattoo pens
• Phonograph, which recorded and reproduced audible sounds using metallic foil on a cylinder
• Carbon transmitter, which became the basis of telephone transmitters for more than a century
• Practical electric lamp, as Edison’s carbon filament light bulb was the first commercially viable electric light. Previous versions weren’t as durable, and used more expensive materials, such as platinum
• Electric lighting system, which was designed to maintain the same amount of electricity throughout the device
• Motor that regulates electricity, controlling the supply of electricity between devices such as lamps
• Fruit preserver, sucking oxygen out of glass jars, producing vacuum-sealed jars of fruit
• Electro magnetic brake, which was designed to stop vehicles on a railroad
• Incandescent chandelier, which is the grouping of several incandescent lamps to create the candelier
• Turn table for electric railway, which is an electric current that ran through the rails to reduce the chances of a short circuit
• Ore separator, which separates magnetic and non-magnetic materials
• Kinetographic camera, which showed successive photos in a rapid speed so as to make them appear to be moving
• Rock crusher, using 2 hard rollers to crush rocks
• Alkaline battery, which produced an longer-lasting battery
• Fluorescent electric lamp, which used tungsten of calcium and strontium
• Improved automobile, designing an automobile whose wheels were better aligned with the car

Family

On December 25, 1871, he married Mary Stilwell, and they had three children, Marion Estelle Edison, Thomas Alva Edison, Jr., and William Leslie Edison. His wife Mary died in 1884. On February 24, 1886, he married 19 year old Mina Miller. They had an additional three children, Madeleine Edison, Charles Edison (who took over the company upon his father’s death) and Theodore Edison.

Edison, who made the famous quote, “genius is 99% perspiration; 1% inspiration” eventually invented the light bulb:

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WPCNR TALK OF TEATOWN. February 11, 2014:

Letter to the Editor:

Last weekend illustrated vividly some of the incredible juxtapositions of life in our community.

People from near and far traveled to Croton Point Park and nearby locations to attend Teatown’s 10^th Annual Hudson River EagleFest to celebrate the re-emergence of bald eagles in the Hudson Valley.

At the same time, the sponsor of that event, Teatown Lake Reservation, a 875-acre nature preserve in the towns of Yorktown and Cortlandt, was completing a three-week deer baiting program, and, the night before Eaglefest, began a program of hiring sharpshooters to kill 75 white tail deer.

Since the deer baiting/killing program had never been made public, visitors to Eaglefest were shocked and dismayed to learn of it there because of a rally by animal lovers at Croton Point Park during the event.

In a recent article in Psychology Today, Marc Bekoff, Ph.D.,  former Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and co-founder with Jane Goodall of Ethologists for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, writes about the problem and how it is being handled in a nearby village in the Hudson Valley, Hastings on Hudson:

“Urban deer have become a “problem” in many different communities across the United States because there are simply too many of them.

“Many communities have resorted to “humanely” killing deer but now there’s an option that I hope will be widely adopted. In a recent essay in the New York Times called, “A Kinder, Gentler Way to Thin the Deer Herd” by Lisa Foderaro, Hastings-on Hudson’s (New York) Mayor Peter Swiderski “has settled on a less violent approach: birth control. In an experiment to be undertaken with assistance from Tufts University’s Center for Animals and Public Policy, Hastings hopes to become the first suburb in the United States to control deer through immunocontraception, using the animal’s own immune system to prevent it from fertilizing offspring.”

“Dr. Alan Rutberg, the director of Tuft’s center, calls the idea “brilliant.” He has successfully used immunocontraception in self-contained areas such as Fire Island and elsewhere resulting in a 50% decrease in deer numbers over five years. Dr. Rutberg notes, “Deer have entered our backyards and essentially become unruly guests … We are bound by suburban rules in dealing with them, and violence is not how we deal with neighbors we don’t like.”

“…Peaceful coexistence needs to be the way in which we live with urban neighbors and birth control is a wonderful alternative to killing these magnificent animals.”

Teatown’s refusal to seek less violent alternatives, the lack of public information or opportunity for input casts a big shadow over their mission  and reputation going forward;   more than 1300 people have signed a petition to have the bait/kill  program stopped. ( http://chn.ge/1dzcmrV)

Linda Conte

Croton-on-Hudson, NY

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WPCNR THE POWER NEWS. February 10, 2014:

Local Con Edison customers got a rude shock Saturday when Con Edison electric bills arrived.

The charge per kilowatt hour went from 8.1 cents in December to 19.1 cents in January.

The explanation from Con Edison’s Elizabeth Matthews to WPCNR: the high cost of gas and cold weather. Delivery charges per kilowatt hour went down half a cent per kwh.

Ms. Matthews told WPCNR: “We are willing to work with customers (on spreading out  their bills over the course of a year)”:

According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration,

“Natural gas supply into New York City remained constrained during colder-than-normal temperatures as evidenced by the price spikes in mid-December and early January. Spot natural gas prices reached as high as $47.80/MMBtu, higher than in New England—likely because New England was able to meet part of its natural gas demand with imported supplies of liquefied natural gas (LNG) and Canadian offshore natural gas production. Power prices hit $233.59/MWh on January 8.

Several major natural gas pipeline projects came in service ahead of the 2013-14 winter, including theNew Jersey to New York expansion of the Texas Eastern Transmission and the Algonquin Gas Transmission pipelines, which will deliver additional natural gas supplies, particularly from the Marcellus region, into the New York City area, the main demand center of the New York electric system. Despite these developments, natural gas supply into the New York region remains constrained during high demand periods.

An additional strain on the New York system came from the unplanned outage of Entergy’s Indian Point Unit 3 nuclear reactor located near New York City, which went offline on the evening of Monday, January 6. The loss of the 1,044-megawatt (MW) capacity baseload unit required additional higher-cost generators to be brought on line, which put further pressure on power prices.”  (Editor’s Note: Unit 3 was returned to service on January 8, according to the Entergy website.)”

According to a news release on the Con Edison website released January 29:

Con Edison is reminding customers that they can spread their energy costs out over 12 months to ease the impact of gas and electric supply prices, which shot higher in January due to the extreme cold weather.

The company also urges customers to take simple energy-saving steps to reduce their bills while staying comfortable.

Natural gas costs climbed in January, as the region has experienced colder-than-anticipated weather. The high gas prices are also driving up the cost of electricity, since gas is the fuel used in the generation of most electricity in New York.

Con Edison does not control the price of natural gas or electricity and makes no profit on either commodity. The company uses a variety of buying strategies to get the best price possible and then provides the energy to customers at cost.

Con Edison offers level-payment plans and other options to help customers manage their bills. For more information, go here: http://www.coned.com/customercentral/managemybill.asp

Under the level-payment plan, Con Edison will estimate the customer’s energy usage for a 12-month period and then spread those costs out over 12 months. After 12 months, the company will reconcile the estimates with the customer’s actual energy usage.

Con Edison estimates that a typical residential gas heating customer using 215 therms will have a February 2014 bill of about $388, which is $55, or 16.5 percent, higher than the February 2013 bill. Actual bills could be higher, depending on a customer’s usage.

The rise in gas prices is affecting the electric charges for customers who receive their bills in late January and early February.

A typical New York City residential customer who receives an electric bill this week for 300 kilowatt hours of usage will pay about $118, an increase of $21, or 21.6 percent, over the bill for the same period last year. Con Edison projects that bills sent in early February will include similar increases.

For a Westchester customer using 450 kilowatt hours, that late January bill is about $151, an increase of $27, or 21.8 percent, over last year. 

(Editor’s note: Where WPCNR is located, we used 718 KWH at 19.1 cents a kwh for a supply charge of $137.15  as opposed to $53.75 in December.)

Residential customers can save up to $1,000 and cut heating costs up to 30 percent with Con Edison Green Team rebates. The rebates encourage customers to do simple things like replace older equipment with efficient technology and seal leaks in their home heating systems. For energy tips and information on our Green Team programs visit: www.coned.com/greenteamor call 1-877-870-6118.

Customers also can save money with these tips:

• Set your thermostat at 68 degrees during the day and 60 degrees at night and when no one is home. Each degree over 68 can increase by 3 percent the amount of energy you use for heating.
• Install a programmable thermostat and set it to lower the heat at night and when no one is home.
• Inspect ducts to ensure adequate air flow and eliminate loss of heated air.
• Keep drapes and furniture away from radiators and baseboard heaters so heat can flow freely.

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Head for the Hills.

WPCNR ENVIRONMENTALIST. February 8, 2014:

The Journal News reported this morning that Judge Lester Adler has made a decision that allows Teatown Lake Reservation, the private teaching pereserve and nature center in the northwest part of Westchester County to proceed with a deer kill, allowing sharpshooters from the government to lure Teatown deer at night into an ambush and kill up to 75 deer in the month of February.

Westchester County Government does not have authority to stop the Teatown policy deer kill (adopted to cut back on deer destroying young seedlings in the Teatown forest by eating them), because Teatown is private property.

A group of neighbors and members of the Teatown are holding a protest against the kill in Croton Point Park this morning at the Eaglefest celebration. Linda Conte, a spokesperson for the group told WPCNR this morning, the group attorney David  Bernheim feels he will appeal the decision.

To date the leaders of Teatown have declined to address protests of hundreds of Reservation members who are against the Teatown kill policy.