Sunday, August 29, 2010

A $400 million error . . .

New Jersey was one of the states that didn't make the cut in round two of RttT, but was close.  Check out this Education Week article to see how it cost the state education commissioner his job.  It seems that he told the governor that the reason they lost precious points was due to a clerical error related to the submission of budget data by year.  He further said that they corrected the mistake in an August presentation to the federal panel judging the application.  A video of the presentation shared by government officials contradicts the commissioner's story.  Panelists asked for, but were not given the data for the correct years during the presentation and a progressive education commissioner is now out of a job.

It is now Sunday evening and I am still working on my Tuesday message.  I have the slides down to about 80, but still have not finished with transferring the story board to images and words.  I need to finish soon so that I can see how long it will take to deliver and make the necessary adjustments to align with the allotted time.  I guess I control the time so I could make it fit to almost any reasonable amount of time.  What would a reasonable amount of time be factoring in possibly 600+ people sitting on bleachers, in the high school gym, right after coffee and breakfast?  Should the message control the time, the time the message, or should I be thinking about it in another way? 

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