The 11th  AERO Online School Starter Course will begin on September 26th, 2016. That's less than a month away! It will run until January. Enrollment has already started. 

As we did last year, we will have a free school starters webinar on Thursday, September 8th at 9 PM Eastern Daylight time. This will work for east and west coasts of the USA but isn't great for Europeans. It actually works for Australians and Asians! The webinar will be live and people can ask questions. You can also e mail them in advance. Here is a link to last year's webinar. It will give you a LOT of information!

 

AERO has helped start more that 100 educational alternatives. You can see a partial list  here. Since AERO's mission is the Education Revolution, we try to help people create as many learner-centered alternatives as we can. This course has been the most effective way we have discovered to help people go from their dream and vision to the reality of a new, vibrant educational alternative.

 

The course is limited to 25 participating sites, although up to five people can participate from each site. Last year the course was quickly filled with an amazing variety of participants from around the country and around the world. This has been the case for the last few years, so you should  enroll quickly to guarantee a space. We still have some spaces left. 

 

The course is generally not in real time except for an occasional optional live Skype or Google chat. The course is on a dedicated website that you access as you have time, responding to each section as we open it and responding to the posts of other students in the course. The site has videos, audio interviews, book excerpts, etc. So you can access it as you are able from anywhere in the world.

 

The two instructors are  Jerry Mintz, director of AERO, and  Chris Mercogliano , author of How to Grow a School and long-time director of Albany Free School.  But the key to the course is the interaction between the students.

 

You can take the course for up to 3 graduate credits from Antioch University New England. The full course is now $1000 but will rise to $1200 shortly. It is now $1500 if you want graduate credit.

 

You can get more information about the course or sign up for it  here. It has already started to fill up for this year! Inquire if you need payments or scholarship help.

 

For an example of the types of subjects covered you can view the entirety of Jerry Mintz's school starters workshop from this year's AERO conference here.

If you have questions you can write to  Jerryaero@aol.com

Peter Gray just informed us that he can keynote the second AEROx Regional Conference!   

We will return to beautiful  Earthlands Preserve in Petersham, Massachusetts September 30 - October 2, 2016. This year you will be there for early Fall Foliage season! 

Space is limited to 35, so register soon.  The early bird rate is only $200, with $175 for students, and this includes registration, lodging, and meals from Friday night's dinner to Sunday lunch. E mail or call for child and group rates.  

Last year was a big success. There were just under 40 people with a great mix of youth and adults all learning from each other.  You can read more about last year's event here.

The event will also feature plenty of time for networking, forging relationships and impromptu discussion groups. 

Lodging is comfortable, rustic style shared rooms with mattresses on floors or bunks in off-the-grid, environmentally sustainable buildings.

People can also camp on the site.    

There has been a high demand for an additional AERO event that provides more local opportunities for networking, focused workshops , and action planning that keeps the inspiration and the work of AERO going. 

To register go here. See you there.   

Peter Berg

The NAACP unveiled strong new resolutions at its national convention in Cincinnati.  One of its loudest was a demand for a nationwide halt on new charter schools.

The NAACP has been opposed to charter schools for two years, but this year organization delegates voted for an outright moratorium on privately managed charter schools, after acknowledging what they consider to be numerous civil violations by charter schools' privately appointed boards.

Here's a Wikipedia biography 

Read Michael Mendizza's blog about Pearce  here .

By  Sarah D. Sparks & Alex Harwin

Corporal punishment has declined so rapidly in the United States in the last 15 years that many people think it's practically nonexistent in modern American public schools.

To the contrary, more than 109,000 students were paddled, swatted, or otherwise physically punished in U.S. classrooms in 2013-14, according to Education Week Research Center analyses of the most recent wave of federal civil rights data.

Most of the physical DVD sets and thumb drives of the conference presentations are gone, but we have one or two left. We can still send digital versions to your e mail. We're offering them at closeout prices. You shouldn't miss this opportunity to get such high quality recordings. 

You can order anything you want sent directly to your e mail. We can make a small thumb drive you can plug into your computer if you prefer that. 

Ongoing

Calendar