January 2010

Increasing student achievment is School Board’s top priority

01-13-2010

By James R. Riffel/San Diego News Network

The Board of Education of the San Diego Unified School District Tuesday night established six priorities around which to build a 2010-11 budget, and ordered staff to determine how much the package will cost. The list was narrowed from 15 priorities proposed last week for divvying up the general fund of about $1 billion. The original group was 14, but staff split one into two separate items. The top priorities range from the general, such as having a broad curriculum that includes activities outside the classroom, to the specific, like not increasing class sizes. The others were raising the achievement levels of all students, the top vote-getter; allowing diversity, integration and choice; providing a safe and supportive environment, and creating a high-tech 21st Century learning environment. (more...)

Putting Weingarten's comments on test scores in context

01-13-2010

Columm by Stephen Sawchuk /Education Week

The worst thing about being a blogger is having to feed the beast every day. But the best thing is knowing that there's always space to follow up on a story that deserves more time, attention, or nuance than there is room in the paper. Such is the case today with Randi Weingarten's Big Speech, which is quickly becoming something of an annual tradition for the American Federation of Teachers. • A lot of the coverage in the general press focused on Weingarten's remarks about incorporating test scores into teacher evaluations. Perhaps this is just representative of the difference between writing for a specialty publication and writing for a mainstream newspaper, but this is hardly news. Randi has been making the point for months. (more...)

State saves when districts ditch small classes

01-13-2010

Blog by John Fensterwald/Educated Guess

The state is counting on districts abandoning the class-size reduction program to help bail out the state budget this year and next. Gov. Schwarzenegger’s proposed budget assumes that it can save $340 million this year and an additional $200 million next year, because districts will find themselves too pinched to accept the state subsidy. The state’s declining expenditure is a cagey form of a cut. For 14 years, the state has provided money – up to $1,071 per child – if school districts agreed to a maximum of 20 students per class for kindergarten through third grade. This year, the Legislature loosened the rules, and agreed to pay a partial subsidy for classes with up to 25 kids. (more...)

Calif. schools brace for another year of cutbacks

01-14-2010

By Lesli A. Maxwell/Education Week

California’s financial crisis will continue to put the squeeze on already strapped public schools this year as state lawmakers work to close a $20 billion deficit and debate Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s new budget proposal. In his State of the State address earlier this month, Gov. Schwarzenegger, a Republican who will leave office at the end of this year due to term limits, vowed to spare K-12 and higher education programs that have been pummeled over the past two years by the state’s fiscal meltdown. But after he unveiled the $83 billion spending plan for fiscal 2011 two days later on Jan. 8, school officials said the governor’s words didn’t match reality. Though Mr. Schwarzenegger said his budget proposal meets the state’s Proposition 98 school funding guarantee, education officials said that would be the case only if the governor carries out a proposed change in the state’s revenue structure that would effectively lower the bar for what its obligation to K-12 schools and community colleges would otherwise be. (more...)

Educators respond to Governor and launch “Fight for California’s Future”

01-14-2010

By Marty Hittelman/California Progress Report

Governor Schwarzenegger is leaving a clear legacy – a legacy of saying one thing and doing the opposite. On Wednesday, he claims he is not going to cut education; but on Friday he proposes to reduce the Proposition 98 guarantee by $892 million in 2009-10 and $1.5 billion in 2010-11. The governor proposes to eliminate the sales tax on gasoline (which helps fund Proposition 98) and increase the fuel excise tax (which does not help fund Proposition 98). How does that protect education? The $892 million reduction in 2009-10 is more than the maximum that California could receive over four years in the Race to the Top funding, which the governor claims is so important to California. (more...)

L.A. schools paid $200 million more in salaries than budgeted

01-14-2010

By Howard Blume/Los Angeles Times

The Los Angeles school district paid $200 million more in salaries than it budgeted last year even as it laid off 2,000 teachers and hundreds of other employees, according to an internal audit. Auditors so far have unearthed no wrongdoing, but officials are puzzled, concerned and perhaps even a little embarrassed. "We've been in the process of cleaning it up," said L.A. schools Supt. Ramon C. Cortines, who said his staff is verifying the size of the discrepancy and will, over time, determine how much relates to incomplete accounting and how much to something more serious. The issue emerged in an audit, completed in December, on the arcane subject of "position control." (more...)

Governor's promise to 'protect education' rings hollow as schools look at fine print

01-14-2010

By Theresa Harrington/Contra Costa Times

Although Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger crowed about protecting education when he released his budget, he failed to mention a $1.5 billion cut planned for next year along with a decreased cost of living adjustment. "I question the statement he is protecting public education with his proposal," said Joe Ovick, superintendent of the Contra Costa County Office of Education. A San Mateo County school leader was more succinct. "It's clear at this point that it's completely untrue that the governor is protecting education," said Craig Baker, interim superintendent of the San Carlos School District. His district had braced for a $1.5 million loss but now anticipates losing at least $600,000 more. Other education officials statewide echoed those sentiments as they realized the budget proposal would mean cuts of more than $200 per student in most districts. (more...)

Learning from No Child Left Behind

01-14-2010

Edited by Robert Schlesinger/U.S. News & World Report

Signed to law in January 2002, NCLB marked a controversial landmark for the feder al government in education policy. It mandated high-stakes tests to measure student achievement. Schools that lag behind face penalties. With the law past due for reauthorization, U.S. News asked four experts to offer lessons that can be drawn from it. (more...)

Redefining achievement

01-14-2010

Column by Deborah Meier/Education Week

Dear Diane, Thanks you for that deft summary on charters! Once we forget the public purposes of education, it's easier and easier to forget about the defects of the marketplace as a way to address the common good. One of the concerns raised about the schools I founded was that such schools bred selectivity—even unintended cherry-picking on some subtle basis. At the time I argued that tracking within large neighborhood schools did much the same, and usually far less fairly. We need, I contended, to tackle issues of tracking under both approaches. The major concern I had was with the trade-offs between what were often called "magnets" and the preservation of neighborhood-rooted schools. Separating schooling from the political community might be more damaging for democracy than I recognized. (more...)

Mr. Obama: Kill NCLB

01-14-2010

Column by Jay Matthews/Washington Post

The anniversary of the signing of the No Child Left Behind last Friday reminded me that my long support for that landmark bipartisan law needs revision. The law has served its purpose. Instead of amending it, as the Obama administration and the Congress seem likely to do, let's dump it and try something different. I wouldn't make such a radical suggestion if I didn't think the law's main elements would survive without it. All the states have been forced to establish annual testing that identifies which schools are not serving their students, particularly those with family and personal disadvantages. Any politician who tries to junk those tests is going to lose the next election to an opponent who asks the simple question: "Don't you think our schools should be accountable?" (more...)

L.A. schools Supt. Cortines reiterates vow to strengthen teacher evaluations

01-14-2010

Blog by Beth Shuster and Jason Song/L.A. Now Los Angeles Times

Supt. Ramon C. Cortines, meeting this afternoon with Times editors and reporters, repeated his vow to strengthen the Los Angeles Unified School District's teacher evaluation system and get rid of ineffective instructors before they are granted tenure. Some teachers were given tenure and "we never wrote them up and we knew there were issues the first and second week they were a teacher," he said. He also criticized state law mandating that permanent status, which comes with numerous job protections, be granted to teachers after two years unless administrators oppose it. He said that time span is too short, especially when it is far longer for university professors. Cortines' statements mirror ones he made late last month when he acknowledged that the district has often done an ineffective job in evaluating instructors and ordered principals and other administrators to spend more time conducting evaluations. (more...)

Sacramento-area schools say Schwarzenegger wants cuts they're already making

01-14-2010

By Diana Lambert and Phillip Reese/Sacramento Bee

California school superintendents spent the early part of this week huddled with staff, trying to figure out what the governor's budget proposal means to their districts. Of the $1.5 billion Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger wants cut from the state's K-12 school districts next year, $1.2 billion would come from district administration. Targeting superintendents, school boards and other central expenses, he said he wants to spare more classroom cuts. California districts will be asked to reduce administrative costs 10 percent statewide unless they can show the cuts would leave then fiscally insolvent, state finance officials said late Wednesday. The governor has defined administrative costs broadly: His definition covers everything from the school board to heating and air conditioning. (more...)

Hundreds of students can't return to Beverly Hills schools

01-14-2010

By Carla Rivera/Los Angeles Times

Hundreds of students attending Beverly Hills schools will have to find new campuses in the fall after a unanimous school board vote late Tuesday ended special permits for many children who live outside the city. Following more than four hours of debate that lasted until almost midnight, the board agreed to allow all current high school students to continue applying for permits each year, an action that won applause from a packed, emotional but civil crowd at Beverly Hills High. Seventh graders will be allowed to graduate from middle school next year. But students in elementary school and eighth grade will not be allowed to return to district schools for the 2010-2011 academic year unless their families move into the city. (more...)

State budget could mean more devastating cuts for West Contra Costa schools

01-14-2010

By Shelly Meron/Contra Costa Times

West Contra Costa district officials may have to cut $10 million from next school year's budget despite promises from the state that education would be spared this time around. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's proposed budget, unveiled last week, could mean more program cuts, layoffs and larger class sizes for the district. One local official had some harsh words about it. "The governor is portraying this as a budget that's preserving funding for education, and that's simply not true," said Sheri Gamba, West Contra Costa Unified's associate superintendent for business services. "I find it very disingenuous. And to leave the burden on local officials to explain how that's not true — frankly, that's just wrong. I believe in telling the truth, and that is not the truth." Gamba described the proposed budget as "devastating," adding that employees in the district already have made "incredible sacrifices." (more...)

Charter school aimed at Hmong students sets off debate

01-14-2010

By Melody Gutierrez/Sacramento Bee

Sacramento City Unified School District Superintendent Jonathan Raymond said Wednesday he strongly supports a proposed charter school that would be geared toward Hmong students. Several school board members, however, are concerned the school is essentially calling for segregation. Proponents of the Yav Pem Suab Academy, who made their pitch at a special school board meeting Tuesday night, said the school will recruit all students, as required by law, and will simply focus on Hmong culture and language instead of the typical foreign languages of Spanish and French. "When we developed this charter, we didn't call it a Hmong charter," said Dennis Mah, president of the Urban Charter School Collective, which wants to open the school. "We will invite everyone." (more...)

PUSD parcel tax proposal moves forward

01-14-2010

By Brian Charles/Pasadena Star News

The Pasadena Unified School District board of education Tuesday inched closer to putting a parcel tax on the May ballot that could inject more than $7 million in annual revenue into school coffers for the next five years. With six board members in favor and one abstaining, the school board approved the annual tax to go to public hearing. The board will hold the public hearing on the parcel tax at its Jan. 26 meeting. After the public hearing, residents could be asked to vote by mail in May. A parcel tax of $120 on more than 59,000 properties in Pasadena, Sierra Madre and Altadena will raise more than $35 million over the next five years. Board members warned the parcel tax won't be a cure-all for the financially strapped district. (more...)

Perry won't let Texas compete for federal school money

01-14-2010

By Ericka Mellon/Houston Chronicle

Texas will not compete for a potential $700 million in federal grant funding for schools, Gov. Rick Perry said Wednesday, because it could give Washington too much say in deciding what the state's students should learn. His decision to forgo the money available in the Race to the Top grant competition defied pleas from local school leaders who said their districts could use it. But Perry, joined by state Education Commissioner Robert Scott, said the funding came with too many federal strings — such as having to adopt national curriculum standards. “Our states and our communities must reserve the right to decide how we educate our children and not surrender that control to a federal bureaucracy,” Perry said in Houston, where many superintendents had lobbied for his support of the grant. (more...)

Now 46th in nation in per student funding

01-15-2010

Blog by John Fensterwald/Educated Guess

California is still knocking about the bottom in per student K-12 spending at 46th among the states and Washington, D.C., according to Education Week’s much anticipated annual survey. That’s one better than the 47th ranking last year. It might have been spared 51st because Ed Week used data from 2007, before fiscal disaster struck. Ed Week adjusts spending to reflect regional costs of living, which is one reason why high-cost California ranks so low. In terms of unadjusted dollars, it ranked 24th, according to the last National Education Association survey. California spent $8,164 in adjusted dollars in 2007, according to Ed Week. That’s half of the $16,386 spent by top-ranked Wyoming, and $2,400 less than the national average. Beating California to the dubious honors were Arizona ($8,010), Texas ($7,934), Nevada ($7,845), Tennessee ($7,756) and Utah ($6,228). (more...)

Experts weigh in on 'Race to Top' testing rules

01-15-2010

By Catherine Gewertz/Education Week

Experts enlisted to help the U.S. Department of Education shape its $350 million Race to the Top assessment competition urged the agency this week to make sure that states seeking the money share a clear vision of the testing systems they aim to design, are fully committed to the lengthy project, and carefully delineate responsibilities for getting the job done. But exactly how the Education Department would be able to discern all that from states’ applications for the money remained unclear. And dozens of other unanswered questions cropped up at hearings Jan. 13 and 14, organized by the department to seek expert advice on how states applying for the funds should organize themselves and how states’ procurement rules could affect the process. (more...)

U.S. common-standards push bares unsettled issues

01-15-2010

By Sean Cavanagh/Education Week

It is one of the simplest ideas in American education—and one of the most confounding: Elected officials and educators have been talking about establishing national, or common, academic standards for at least a half-century. On its face, the logic of that goal seems incontrovertible. Why should students in one state be introduced to a topic such as fractions as 1st graders, to cite a common example, when their peers in other states won’t cover that mathematics topic until later? More broadly, why does the United States—a mobile society in a globally competitive era—maintain an education system that tests students, trains teachers, and churns out textbooks and classroom materials based on the myriad and often idiosyncratic demands of different states? In several higher-performing nations, a single set of national academic standards guides all or most of those decisions. (more...)

School boards will sue state this year

01-15-2010

Blog by John Fensterwald/Educated Guess

Sometime this year, the California School Boards Association will sue the governor and the state over the level of state funding for K-12 schools. During the organization’s Forecast Webcast on the state of the economy and its impact on education Thursday, CSBA Executive Director Scott Plotkin reaffirmed what he told me last fall. His message fit the mood of the annual event: one of gloom and frustration. Jannelle Kubinec, associate vice president of School Services of California, Inc., said that the coming school year could be the most difficult yet for school districts. Besides facing a $200 per student cut in funding under the governor’s proposed budget (maybe more after the Legislature is through with it), districts could face cash flow problems and the daunting legal burden of projecting balanced budgets over three years. (more...)

Best education blogs for 2010

01-15-2010

Column by Jay Matthews/Washington Post

Here we go. My blogging Post colleague Valerie Strauss of The Answer Sheet and I realize the weight of our decisions on the best education blogs for this year. These choices will undoubtedly alter the course of the Internet. We sought a mix of the serious and the sublime. We disqualified the legendary ed blogs we already display in the margins of our own blogs. We divvied up the descriptions, but we both endorse every selection. I said earlier this week, as the excitement mounted, that once you have reviewed our choices, you are obliged tell us where we went wrong. There is always next year. (more...)

Teachers union gets a jump-start on strike vote

01-15-2010

Blog by Katy Murphy/Oakland Tribune

On Wednesday evening at Oakland Technical High School, Oakland teachers will vote on whether to authorize its leadership to call a one-day strike — not now, but in a month or two. When I first saw a flier advertising the membership meeting (which, ahem, includes an unattributed Tribune photo apparently lifted from the Web), I was confused by what I read. Why a vote at this stage, weeks before a strike is legal? Before the union can strike, both sides must agree on a neutral representative for a three-person “fact-finding” panel (along with representatives for the union and for the district administration). A hearing is held, usually within 10 days. Within 30 days of the hearing, the panel comes out with a report and a non-binding opinion. (more...)

Santa Cruz school boards gather to discuss budget cuts

01-15-2010

By Megha Satyanarayana/Santa Cruz Sentinel

The message at a Thursday night meeting of school leaders from across Santa Cruz County was to prepare for the pain of budget cuts, but to try to fight them. "Tell your stories to your local legislator, talk about the pain local communities are feeling. You're not going to keep it business as usual," said Chris Ungar, California School Board Association Region 9 director, which includes Santa Cruz, San Benito, Monterey and San Luis Obispo Counties. Ungar along with former Assemblyman John Laird and Rick Pratt, assistant executive director of governmental relations for the California School Board Association, chaired a panel discussion at Scotts Valley High School on the governor's proposed budget, which he said would preserve education funding. (more...)

School trustee explains why district says no To ‘Race’ funds

01-15-2010

By Ana Tintocalis/KPBS San Diego

The San Diego Unified School District board president says there are legitimate reasons why the district is not competing for federal stimulus dollars tied to the Race To The Top program.The federal education program is dangling millions of dollars in front of states and school districts to encourage them to sign on to major education reforms. Those reforms include linking teacher evaluations to student test scores, letting parents petition to turn around a failing school, and giving parents more leeway in choosing schools. School board president Richard Barrera understands why some people are upset with the district, but he says its unclear how all these federal and state reforms might affect the district as a whole. (more...)

Applicants to UC smarter, more diverse

01-15-2010

By Nanette Asimov/San Francisco Chronicle

Students vying for a spot at the University of California next fall are brainier, more diverse and less well-to-do than in the last couple of years, according to new data showing a record number of applicants to the prestigious public school. Even as UC charges students more money while offering fewer courses, the number of undergraduate applicants rose by 7,328 students over last year, a nearly 6 percent increase, with transfers making up two-thirds of the boost. In all, a record 134,029 hopefuls have applied to UC: 100,320 for a freshman spot, and 33,709 asking to transfer in. Despite student interest, California's financial crisis could mean a smaller freshman class next fall than in the current year - which is already smaller than last year's."It's likely that we'll again curtail enrollment for fall 2010, most likely at the freshman level," said Susan Wilbur, UC's director of undergraduate admissions, who released the new figures Thursday. (more...)

Schools fear cuts to campus repairs

01-19-2010

By Melody Gutierrez, Diana Lambert and Phillip Reese/Sacramento Bee

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's plan to cut education by $1.5 billion next year will lean heavily on school districts' funds for campus maintenance and repairs. The governor said he wants districts to cut central administration to avoid hits to the classroom, but a Bee analysis of the funds that Schwarzenegger considers "central administration" shows the largest category is plant maintenance, covering everything from the salaries of electricians and plumbers to buckets of paint and boxes of nails. School district administrators say cuts to facility maintenance and repairs would be devastating, especially for aging schools. "Most of our schools are over 50 years old," said Trinette Marquis, spokeswoman for the Twin Rivers Unified School District. (more...)

Obama to seek $1.35 billion more for Race to the Top program

01-19-2010

By Michael A. Fletcher/Washington Post

President Obama is slated to visit a Fairfax County school Tuesday to announce plans to seek $1.35 billion in his next budget to expand his signature education initiative to improve schools. Obama plans to go to Graham Road Elementary School in Falls Church, which the White House calls a low-income but high-achieving school, to signal his intention to expand his Race to the Top program. The federal initiative uses the lure of grants to encourage school districts to raise standards, make better use of data to track student achievement, and take more forceful steps to intervene in failing schools. The $4.35 billion effort was enacted last year as part of the $787 billion economic stimulus plan, marking one of the largest federal expenditures ever on the nation's public schools. (more...)

Education grant effort faces late opposition

01-19-2010

By Sam Dillon/New York Times

The Obama administration’s main school improvement initiative has spurred education policy changes in states across the nation, but it is meeting with some last-minute resistance as the first deadline for applications arrives Tuesday. Thousands of school districts in California, Ohio and other states have declined to participate, and teachers’ unions in Michigan, Minnesota and Florida have recommended that their local units not sign on to their states’ applications. Several rural states, including Montana, have said they will not apply, at least for now, partly because of the emphasis on charter schools, which would draw resources from small country schools. (more...)

Market fixes for California's schools

01-19-2010

Opinion by Bruce Fuller/San Francisco Chronicle

Ronald Reagan must be grinning in his grave. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger sends to the White House this week a colorful pastiche of education fixes, hoping to score $700 million in federal dollars. Sacramento's plan echoes Washington's own reform strategy - built on President Obama's surprising faith in market remedies for the ills facing schools. Oddly mimicking Reagan's game plan of a generation ago, Sacramento's agenda relies on market competition by seeding more charter schools, allowing parents to shutter lousy schools and rewarding teachers who boost student performance. "This is about parental choice in public education," said state Sen. Gloria Romero, D-Los Angeles, a chief architect of the bipartisan plan. (more...)

The Governor’s school budget: The race to mediocrity

01-19-2010

Column by Peter Schrag/Fresno Bee

On Friday, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and other state officials signed California’s grand, ambitious, 550-page application for federal Race to the Top (RTTT) education funding. It came just a week after the governor submitted a budget plan for the coming year that’s so riddled with holes, misrepresentations and improbabilities that you’d never know they applied to the same state. The application for RTTT funding boasted that despite the California’s fiscal crisis, the “State has made education funding a priority over the last several years.” But it does not tell the federal reviewers that California is among the lowest three or four states in the nation in what spends per pupil in school funding, and perhaps the lowest and that it’s done almost nothing to change it. (more...)

Raising the education bar

01-19-2010

Opinion by Marcus Winters/Los Angeles Times

What percentage of Georgia's fourth-graders are good readers? It seems to depend on whom you ask. The state will tell you that 85% met or exceeded the proficiency benchmark on its 2007 test. On the other hand, that year only 28% scored high enough to be considered proficient on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP, an exam administered by the U.S. Department of Education that is usually regarded as the gold standard. The big difference results from where the two tests set their proficiency bars. Georgia sets its bar pretty low -- so low that barely literate students can score high enough to be deemed proficient. On the NAEP, a student labeled "proficient" by Georgia could fail to score above "basic." Unfortunately, five states have even lower standards than Georgia's, and eight others are at about the same level. (more...)

How the media garbled Randi's message

01-19-2010

Column by Diane Ravitch/Education Week

Dear Deborah, I am sure you were as surprised as I was to read the headlines in the newspapers saying that Randi Weingarten proposed that teachers should be evaluated by their students' test scores. This is a contentious issue. In New York, at Randi's urging, the state legislature passed a law preventing districts from doing exactly this. Now, to qualify for the so-called Race to the Top, the state must roll back this legislation. We know the downside of evaluating teachers by student scores. It is neither a fair nor an accurate way to judge teachers, and it produces unintended negative consequences. It compels teachers to teach to the test. This in turn narrows the curriculum to what is tested. As Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has acknowledged, the current tests should be replaced by better tests; why then use them for high-stakes decisions? (more...)

An unusual man, an unusual job

01-19-2010

By Emily Alpert/Voice of San Diego

A small group of school officials looks grimly over stacks of spreadsheets in a conference room. The whiteboard lists the sum that San Diego Unified has to cut from its budget -- $93 million. And Phil Stover is talking about a baobab tree he once saw in Africa. "Kids sat with slates and chalk" underneath the tree, he is saying. "And I'm telling you, those kids learned to read and write." San Diego Unified has to get closer to the baobab than it is now, Stover says. It must pare back on its scattered offices and its thousands of employees, who are all anxious about what happens in this room. They must decide what the absolute basics are to run schools. And anything they don't choose could be cut. Stover is an unusual man in an unusual job. (more...)

LA Unified to pilot 2-year kindergarten

01-19-2010

Blog by John Fensterwald/Educated Guess

In most states, children must turn five by June 1 or Sept. 1 to enter kindergarten in the fall. To its disadvantage – and against the advice of many educators – California has a late starting date of Dec. 1, with kids as young as four years and nine months starting kindergarten. Recognizing that many children that young are not developmentally and emotionally ready for elementary school, Los Angeles Unified will start a two-year kindergarten next fall on a limited basis. There will be one program in each of the district’s eight districts.That’s a sound idea, but it’s also a more expensive alternative to what others have proposed for years: pushing up the cutoff date to Sept. 1 and plowing the initial cost savings into pre-school for low-income children. (more...)

Time for parents to have power in the classroom

01-19-2010

Opinion by Gloria Romero/San Francisco Chronicle

California leads the nation in public school dropouts, and everyone pays for the persistent failure of the lowest-performing schools. And it's not just the billions of dollars spent in failed restructuring efforts; it's the cost in welfare payments, jail cells, prison beds and our state's and nation's competitiveness in a global economy. Finger-pointing abounds, but today's third-graders will be tomorrow's dropouts by the time we ever agree. Yet there have been signs of recent progress. California's Race to the Top reforms, approved this month and submitted to the Obama administration in time for Tuesday's deadline, make adults accountable, make moms and dads responsible, and offer hope for real change at our public schools by empowering parents. (more...)

'Race to the Top' - the view from Oakland

01-19-2010

By Betty Olson-Jones/San Francisco Chronicle

We applaud Oakland Mayor Ron Dellums for refusing to join the Race to the Top parade by not signing the letter by Sacramento Mayor Kevin Johnson ("Dellums ducks out of mayors coalition," Chip Johnson, Jan. 5). Dellums should not be whipsawed into the frenzy just to run after more federal and state dollars that will do little to address the major issues of educational equity that we need in Oakland. I was asked for the Oakland Education Association's opinion on the proposed letter and concurred with others that it would be a mistake to sign it. The lure of a minuscule amount of money is not justification for further decimating a compromised program in Oakland schools, especially when that money comes with serious strings attached. (more...)

What should high school history teach on hip-hop? Immigration? Texas board debates

01-19-2010

USA Today

Texas' board of education tackled high school history Friday, debating hip-hop and deciding how McCarthyism and immigration would be taught under new standards for teaching social studies that could affect students nationwide. The State Board of Education was expected to take a first vote on the guidelines later Friday, after several days of discussion on topics such as which historical figures to hold students accountable for learning and whether second graders should be taught Aesop's Fables. A final vote was due in March. On Friday, the board waded through amendments for a third day, declining to strike the "Red Scare" from a high school history class and adding a reference to the Venona Papers, research that "confirmed suspicions of communist infiltration in U.S. government." (more...)

Colorado promises to adopt merit pay for teachers

01-20-2010

By Colleen Slevin/San Diego Union Tribune

Colorado vowed Tuesday to expand merit pay for teachers, change how educators are evaluated, and hire more Teach for America national service recruits as it tries to win $377 million in federal funding for schools. Colorado made the promises as it seeks part of a $4.3 billion grant package created by the administration of President Barack Obama. Known as the "Race to the Top" fund, the money is available to competing states that amend education laws and policies. The funds were included in the $787 billion economic stimulus program. The bid was backed by more than two-thirds of Colorado's public school districts, which account for 94 percent of its 802,000 kindergarten through 12th grade students, along with the teachers union. (more...)

Monterey County schools would lose millions under governor's budget proposal

01-20-2010

By Maria Ines Zamudio/Salinas Californian

Salinas teachers and administrators are keeping a close eye on the governor's budget proposal. The financial blueprint, which Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger released Jan. 8, would cut deep and wide across California public education. Funding for school district administration would drop by $1.2 billion, for county offices of education by $45 million, and the state's class-size reduction program would lose $550 million, in addition to other cuts. The pain would find its way to the Salinas area. If the budget were approved as it is now, the Monterey County Office of Education would lose 8.2 percent of its funding, or $750,000, said Gary Bousum, MCOE associate superintendent. County schools would also lose $14.6 million from cuts to be carried over from the previous year — about $201 per student annually, Bousum said. (more...)

All Beverly Hills students soon may be required to prove their residency

01-20-2010

By Carla Rivera/Los Angeles Times

One student enrolled in Beverly Hills High School this year using a virtual address obtained on the Web. Other Beverly Hills students have falsely claimed to live with grandparents or cousins who reside in the city. Unethical owners of Beverly Hills properties have even sold mailing addresses to out-of-area students. The use of fraudulent addresses to enroll in the city's acclaimed schools is an age-old problem, according to officials with the Beverly Hills Unified School District who recounted these examples. But such deceptions soon may be harder to carry out under a proposed plan to recertify every family in the 4,900-student district and expel those who have been lying about where they live. The district already has a full-time employee who investigates cases of questionable residency, and about 150 students annually are asked to leave. (more...)

Capistrano district can survive, with pay cuts, chief says

01-20-2010

By Scott Martindale/Orange County Register

The Capistrano Unified School District faces at least a $21.5 million deficit over the next 18 months, but stands poised to close its budget gap through sound financial planning and aggressive cost-cutting measures, including seeking deep pay cuts from employees, Interim Superintendent Bobbi Mahler said Tuesday night. Speaking at a town hall meeting at Dana Hills High School in Dana Point, Mahler said Orange County's second largest district has been able to reduce its projected 2010-11 budget deficit by about $4 million over the past few months by reorganizing its various departments and fine-tuning its spending plan. Even so, Capistrano must continue to push hard for permanent, 10 percent pay cuts from its teachers and other employees, and brace for up to $12.5 million in additional cuts in 2010-11, based on Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's current budget proposals, the interim schools chief said. "We are all going to have to make tough concessions," Mahler told an audience of about 50 people. " (more...)

Race for education funding poses a test for states

01-20-2010

Race for education funding poses a test for states

Billions of dollars are about to come available in new federal education spending, pitting states against one another for a piece of the pie. John Merrow reports. GWEN IFILL: Now: Billions of dollars are about to come available in new federal education spending, and states are competing for a piece of the pie. The money, part of the government stimulus package, is designed to give public school systems a leg up. But there's a catch. JOHN MERROW: President Obama visited a school in Falls Church, Virginia, today to promote his major education initiative known as Race to the Top. The program offers a shot at new funding. But the president was quick to remind the states that not all of them would win the money. (more...)

Will AFT teacher evaluation effort succeed?

01-20-2010

National Journal

American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten stirred education circles with a recent speech in which she called for a new template for evaluating public school teachers, including changes to the procedures for dismissal, formally known as due process. "Too often due process becomes glacial process," Weingarten acknowledged. "We intend to change that." The AFT tapped a top-notch attorney, Kenneth Feinberg, to oversee the effort to revise due process. In addition, Weingarten has reached out to key groups -- including the National Governors Association, the Council of Chief State School Officers, and the American Association of School Administrators, among others -- to create a forum for improving relationships between labor and management. (more...)

All but 10 states throw hats into Race to Top ring

01-20-2010

By Michele McNeil/Education Week

Forty states and the District of Columbia applied for the first round of $4 billion in the Race to the Top Fund competition, which pits states against each other for desperately needed money, bragging rights, and leverage to implement controversial education reforms such as merit pay for teachers. The 10 states that did not apply by the first round’s Jan. 19 deadline were: Alaska, Maryland, Maine, Mississippi, Montana, Nevada, North Dakota, Texas, Vermont, and Washington. Those states that did not apply, and any losing states from the first round, will be able to compete in the second round of competition, which is set for June. “This exceeded our expectations,” U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, who has made Race to the Top the most high-profile piece of his education reform agenda, said in a statement. “We received word from 40 states that they intended to apply, and thought there might be some drop-off. There wasn’t.” (more...)

Race to the Top: Where the money might go if it were purely political

01-20-2010

Blog by Alyson Klein/Education Week

Let me say from the outset, that despite my headline, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has made it very clear, repeatedly, that he doesn't think politics are going to play any kind of role in deciding which states snag one of the highly coveted Race to the Top grants. He's lining up "disinterested superstars" and has a very detailed rubric determining how grants will be doled out, probably in part to avoid those sorts of accusations. However, it's interesting to speculate on who would have an edge if Race to the Top were purely, or even partly, political. And, despite the department's best efforts, if certain states get grants, I'm sure some folks out there will wonder whether politics had any sort of role in that decision. (more...)

A Wonderland formula funds California schools

01-20-2010

By Dan Walters/Sacramento Bee

When Lewis Carroll's Alice tumbled down the rabbit hole into Wonderland, she was ensconced in a bizarre world where nothing was what it seemed. Anyone who ventures into California school finance enters a similarly confusing parallel universe, where day is night, black is white, up is down, and square is round, to pen a bit of doggerel. It centers on Proposition 98, a 1988 ballot measure purported to give schools a "fair share" of revenue. It's so complicated that its principal drafter, education consultant John Mockler, often joked – perhaps truthfully – that he deliberately made it obtuse so that stakeholders would hire him to interpret it, thereby allowing his children to attend expensive universities. (more...)

If state fails, districts can chase Race to the Top

01-20-2010

Blog by John Fensterwald/Educated Guess

Take heart, innovators in Long Beach Unified and union reformers and charter operators in Los Angeles. If California’s Race to the Top application flames out, there will still be opportunities for you. On the day that California, 39 other states and the District of Columbia submitted their plans for the $4.3 billion grant competition, President Obama proposed adding another round – just for school districts. Assuming that Congress goes along, districts will compete for an additional $1.3 billion Race to the top grants later this year or early in 2011. That way, innovative districts won’t be cheated by governors, like Rick Perry of Texas, who refused to compete for the money – dismissing Race to the Top as a federal intrusion – or states that submitted pedestrian applications that were denied money. (more...)

State-federal tensions loom in standards effort

01-20-2010

By Michele McNeil/Education Week

In the latest push for common academic standards, coming up with the standards themselves may be the easy part: The political sensitivities that scuttled virtually every previous attempt are very much on the minds of those leading the effort this time around. How much of a federal role is appropriate—or even legal—in a quest for common standards nationwide? Is local control in education an outdated tradition or an immutable political reality? And to what extent is there societal consensus about the skills and knowledge every student should be expected to master? In the 1990s, Republican President George H.W. Bush and Democratic President Bill Clinton both ran into state, school district, and congressional opposition on just those issues as they tried to steer the country toward national standards. Aware of that history—and the lesson that a push for nationwide standards will not work if it stems from the federal government, no matter which political party is in charge—the nation’s governors and chief state school officers are proceeding cautiously. (more...)

Schwarzenegger budget projects less spending for class-size reduction

01-20-2010

By Louis Freedberg and Hugo Cabrera/Oakland Tribune

For the first time since the program began 14 years ago, a California governor is planning on spending significantly less on California's popular, but expensive, class-size reduction program than in previous years. In his budget released Jan. 8, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger projected spending $340 million less than anticipated during the current school year, and $550 million less in the school year beginning in September. Together, the reductions would save the state nearly $900 million. This would mark a huge rollback of the program that now costs the state about $1.8 billion a year. Since 1996, California has spent about $22 billion on the program, making it the most expensive education reform program in California's history. (more...)

Our education disaster

01-25-2010

Blog by Marina Park/San Francisco Chronicle

As reported in yesterday's Chronicle the recession is hitting kids hard. There's less at school and less at home. The article quotes the recently published California Educational Opportunity Report: "one in four California students lives in poverty and is likely attending a school with reduced funding, larger classes and fewer instructional materials." But what's the solution? The middle class is struggling too. . . The key point in the Report for me is this: "The short term is crucial for the millions of students who can't wait for the economy to improve. They only get one chance to have a high-quality and equal education." I think we are blowing that chance. In their inspiring book, Half the Sky, Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn share a Hawaiian parable about a boy walking along a beach. Thousands of starfish have washed ashore and their chances don't look good. As the boy picks up a starfish and throws it back into the water a man asks - why bother, there are too many for you to possibly make a difference. The boy answers, "It sure made a difference to that one." (more...)

Sacramento, leave our schools alone

01-25-2010

Editorial/The Desert Sun

Education is the key to prosperity. If the trend of reducing the amount California spends on schools continues, the state and Coachella Valley in particular are in for tough challenges. In another year when the Legislature is looking for budget cuts, we implore legislators to look elsewhere. It was disturbing to read November's report from the California Education Department that literacy rates in the Coachella Valley were below the state average — especially considering that from 1992 to 2003 California's below-basic literacy went from 15 percent to 23 percent. That's the highest in the United States. The national average has shown little change, hovering around 14 percent. (more...)

Berkeley High may cut lab classes to fund programs for struggling students

01-25-2010

By Maria L. La Ganga/Los Angeles Times

Aaron Glimme's Advanced Placement chemistry students straggle in, sleepy. It is 7:30 a.m. at Berkeley High School. The day doesn't officially begin for another hour. They pull on safety goggles, measure out t-butyl alcohol and try to determine the molar mass of an unknown substance by measuring how much its freezing point decreases. In the last school year, 82% of Berkeley's AP chemistry students passed the rigorous exam, which gives college credit for high school work. The national passing rate is 55.2%. The school's AP biology and physics students are even more successful. Most districts would not argue with such a record, but Berkeley High's science labs are embroiled in a debate over scarce resources with overtones of race, class and politics. (more...)

Sac City schools ripe for a new era

01-25-2010

Editorial/Sacramento Bee

In just six months, Californians have seen a welcome shift in the public education landscape. President Barack Obama's Race to the Top challenge provided the impetus for California lawmakers, school superintendents and boards, parents, teachers and civic leaders to join forces in new ways to improve public education. In coming months, a prime area for action at the local level will be getting the right teachers to the right schools and creating schedules that meet the needs of today's students. That includes getting beyond 19th-century farm economy scheduling to a longer school day and year. It also means challenging everybody to think differently about the role of unions in public education. As U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said in a speech last year, teachers unions are at a crossroads. Policies created over the past century, he said, "protect the rights of teachers, but they have produced an industrial factory model of education that treats all teachers like interchangeable widgets." (more...)

Parcel tax initiative needs signatures

01-25-2010

Blog by John Fensterwald/Educated Guess

Twenty-two of state Sen. Joe Simitian’s colleagues in the Senate are co-sponsoring a proposed constitutional amendment that would allow lower the threshold for passing a local school parcel tax from two-thirds to 55 percent.That’s an impressive number, except that Simitian, a Democrat from Palo Atlo, needs 27 votes – two-thirds of Senate – to move SCA 6 forward. And so far, as in years past, he can’t find one Republican willing to let voters decide for themselves. Not willing to wait any longer, a new Bay Area-based group, Californians for Improved School Funding, has started circulating an initiative that would achieve the same thing. The organizers, led by Don Gibson, a trustee of the Sequoia Union High School District, are calling it Local Control of Local Classrooms Funding Act. (more...)

Experts urge districts to do more with less

01-25-2010

By Dakarai I. Aarons/Education Week

The nation’s school districts are facing a budget crisis that is expected to only get worse as the effects of the recession linger. But some thought leaders are insisting that schools and districts can and should use the opportunity to target resources in a way that serves their students better. A conference this month, “A Penny Saved: How Schools and Districts Can Tighten Their Belts While Serving Students Better,” sponsored by the American Enterprise Institute and the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, highlighted what the organizers see as fresh thinking on education spending. Education has enjoyed a “privileged position” for many years, consistently taking in more revenue each year than the rate of inflation, said James W. Guthrie, a senior fellow and the director of education policy studies at the Dallas-based George W. Bush Institute and a professor of public policy and education at Southern Methodist University. But that is changing, and schools will be forced to adapt, he said. (more...)

California schools angry over even more cuts

01-25-2010

By Sharon Noguchi/San Jose Mercury News

Despite Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger proclaiming this month that his proposed budget "protects education," school administrators say they will actually lose about $200 per student under Sacramento's version of new math. Already distraught about having to make significant cuts, largely because of the loss of one-time federal stimulus funds, school administrators are furious about what they see as the governor's false promise. "His idea of no cuts to education is baloney," said Superintendent Marc Liebman of the Berryessa Union School District. "We're looking at deficits of almost $8 million." The numbers are similar for other districts dependent on Sacramento for the bulk of their revenue. The Cupertino Union School District faces cutting an estimated $8.8 million, Gilroy Unified $6.3 million and San Jose Unified $10.5 million. The governor's office maintains he is keeping his promise. (more...)

Cuts needed amid S.F. schools' $113 million gap

01-25-2010

By Jill Tucker/San Francisco Chronicle

San Francisco schools are facing a $113 million budget shortfall over the next two years - a staggering figure that would mean layoffs, cuts to popular programs like summer school and increases in class size. Superintendent Carlos Garcia announced the projections Wednesday in a letter to San Francisco Unified School District staff and at a teachers union meeting. Garcia said there will be layoffs, but the number of teachers and staff members released will depend on what else is cut. Given the shortfall, however, the district can't avoid pink slips. "Inevitably you're not going to cut $113 million without a single person laid off," he said Thursday. "We want to get it down to as few people as possible." T he district's projected shortfall is $30 million more than previous forecasts and reflects the latest numbers in the governor's proposed budget. (more...)

Study links rise in test scores to nations' output

01-25-2010

By Erik W. Robelen/Education Week

Relatively small improvements in the skills of a nation’s workforce can have a big effect on its future economic well-being, concludes a new international study that seeks to quantify those benefits. For the United States, the research suggests, modest gains in student achievement as measured by one international assessment could cumulatively boost the country’s gross domestic product by tens of trillions of dollars over the coming decades. “There’s almost a one-to-one match between what people know and how well economies have grown over time,” Andreas Schleicher, the head of indicators and analysis for the education directorate at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, said at a briefing held here last week to discuss the findings. “It’s not the quantity of schooling that drives success in countries, it is the quality of [learning] outcomes that we see that is explaining the relationship.” (more...)

San Diego schools' new testing idea: No child left unmeasured

01-25-2010

By Emily Alpert/Voice of San Diego

Tom O'Malley knew that the fourth grade classes at Birney Elementary had been a success -- but the numbers said it had failed. O'Malley said two years ago, he and a fellow teacher got a crop of children who were badly behind. They helped the students improve, making even bigger gains than the last classes they taught. But because the kids didn't do as well as the earlier class, who came in ahead and scored higher, test scores seemed to drop. "I felt like a failure as a teacher," O'Malley said, shaking his head. "I'm not one of these teachers who are scared to be held accountable. I just want to be held accountable for what I actually do." His story underscores a nagging problem with test scores, especially under No Child Left Behind: Schools are gauged by how well they do from year to year, but nobody is comparing the same children. (more...)

Investing in brains

01-25-2010

The Economist

In California the students are revolting—not against their teachers, but in sympathy with them. The state’s governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, has cut $1 billion, some 20% of the University of California’s budget, as he tries to balance the state’s books. Fees may rise by a fifth, to over $10,000. Support staff are being fired; academics must take unpaid leave. That is part of a global picture in which cash-strapped governments in the rich world are scrutinising the nearly 5% of GDP they devote to education. Those budgets may not be the top candidates for the chop, but they cannot fully escape it. Just before Christmas the British government said it planned to reduce spending on higher education, science and research by £600m ($980m) by 2012-13, just as a chilly job market is sending students scurrying to do more and longer courses. (more...)

Teachers push Gardena High reforms

01-25-2010

By Melissa Pamer/Los Angeles Daily Breeze

In response to a reform mandate from the Los Angeles school board, teachers and administrators at Gardena High have come up with a plan they hope will get the troubled school back on track. But the proposal, drafted to comply with a closely watched board initiative that lets groups inside and outside of the Los Angeles Unified School District bid for control of 30 campuses, has met with mixed reactions and some befuddlement. Next week, thousands of parents at Gardena and its feeder schools will be asked to take a yes-or-no vote on the 43-page plan, which aims to improve academic achievement, increase campus safety, boost family involvement and give teachers a greater voice. Supporters characterized the document as a plan to "keep Gardena, Gardena." (more...)

After 10 years, federal money for technology in education

01-25-2010

By Elizabeth Jensen/New York Times

More than a decade ago, Lawrence K. Grossman, former president of both NBC News and PBS, and Newton N. Minow, the former chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, were asked by several foundations to explore how nonprofits like schools, libraries and museums could tap into emerging digital technologies. Their bold recommendation in 2001 was to set up a multibillion dollar trust that would act as a “venture capital fund” to research learning technology. After a tortuous journey — “It’s been one ‘starting all over again’ after another after another after another,” Mr. Minow said — their organization, what is now being called the National Center for Research in Advanced Information and Digital Technologies, finally has Congressional appropriation through the Education Department and will be introduced Monday. (more...)

UCLA IDEA: Working families and public schools suffering since economic crisis

01-26-2010

By Emily Henry/Intersections South Los Angeles

At Gratts Elementary School just north of downtown Los Angeles, Principal Titus Campos saw a young girl putting a bag of carrots into her pocket. As he watched the children eating their lunch, she circled the cafeteria, asking the other students: "Are you going to eat that?" She took their discarded fruits and vegetables, and tucked them away. When Campos confronted the girl, wondering about her strange behavior, she gave him a nervous look. "Are you hungry?" he asked her. "Do you want me to get you some more food?" She told him that she was taking food home for her younger brother. Her parents were going through a hard time. Campos paused as he retold the tale, holding back tears. "I have mixed feelings coming here," Campos told the audience who gathered Friday to hear UCLA IDEA leaders present their annual report on educational opportunities in California. "I'm honored to be here speaking, but to share some of these stories... it's sad. It really is." Hearing the dismal facts in the "California Educational Opportunities in Hard Times" report, Campos said, has also hit him hard. (more...)

Top teachers hindered by No Child Left Behind act, UCR study finds

01-26-2010

By Dayna Straehley/Riverside Press-Enterprise

The best teachers don't like the effects of the No Child Left Behind act, saying it hampers creativity in the classroom and makes it harder to teach students to love learning, a UC Riverside study has found. In the study, "Does the No Child Left Behind Act Help or Hinder K-12 Education?" published by UCR today in Policy Matters, the authors surveyed 740 national board certified teachers in California. They found that 84 percent reported overall unfavorable attitudes about the act. The National Board for Professional Teaching Standards certifies advanced knowledge, experience, judgment and practice by experienced teachers. Jennifer Higgins, a sixth-grade teacher at Kennedy Elementary in Riverside, says the federal law makes it harder to create fun lessons that inspire children to learn.Teachers in the study told researchers that too much class time is devoted to teaching what's on the state tests, and there's little time left for creative and fun lessons, said co-author Steven Brint, sociology professor and associate dean at UC Riverside. (more...)

Let's have more straight talk on school funding

01-26-2010

Editorial/San Jose Mercury News Editorial

The idea that schools would emerge unscathed from this year's $19.9 billion state budget deficit ranks right up there with the tooth fairy. The only mystery is why Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger made the claim in his budget message. Now everybody's just madder. The governor said the state would not suspend Proposition 98's school funding guarantee, which technically could be true. But he's tinkered with the formula, and schools figure they'll get $200 less per student. The state legislative analyst also disputes the governor's claim that schools will get the same allocation as last year. This budget is going to be a disaster on many fronts. Although schools are likely to fare better than social services and health care, the cumulative effects do not bode well for the next generation's entry into a knowledge-based economy. (more...)

Large high schools in the city are taking hard fall

01-26-2010

By Sharon Otterman/New York Times

The boos cascaded over the auditorium as a city education official read out the case against Christopher Columbus High School, one of the last remaining large high schools in the Bronx. Columbus has had a “long history of sustained academic failure” and “chronically poor performance and low demand,” Santiago Taveras, a deputy chancellor, told the standing-room crowd. As a result, he said, it should be closed. But the frustrated teachers, soft-spoken students and former football players who stood up at the hearing said otherwise. They described a school that had served some students well, despite the difficult circumstances faced by many. They told of a school that, even after the city identified it as struggling, continued to receive an increasing share of the city’s most demanding students — the very students that needed the most help. (more...)

Female teachers may pass on math anxiety to girls, study finds

01-26-2010

y Karen Kaplan/Los Angeles Times

Girls have long embraced the stereotype that they're not supposed to be good at math. It seems they may be getting the idea from a surprising source -- their female elementary school teachers. First- and second-graders whose teachers were anxious about mathematics were more likely to believe that boys are hard-wired for math and that girls are better at reading, a new study has found. What's more, the girls who bought into that notion scored significantly lower on math tests than their peers who didn't. The gap in test scores was not apparent in the fall when the kids were first tested, but emerged after spending a school year in the classrooms of teachers with math anxiety. That detail convinced researchers that the teachers -- all of them women -- were the culprits. (more...)

Analyst slams governor's prisons-vs.-universities plan

01-26-2010

By Matt Krupnick/Contra Costa Times

A plan by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to shift state money from prisons to universities is "simplistic" and a bad idea, the Legislative Analyst's Office said Tuesday. The proposed constitutional amendment, introduced in a speech earlier this month, would place dangerous restrictions on a state budget already plagued by spending limits, the nonpartisan office said in the report. Lawmakers should reject the reform, which has not yet been formally proposed, the report said. Schwarzenegger raised the idea Jan. 6 in his State of the State address. The amendment would guarantee the California State University and University of California systems at least 10 percent of the state budget, gradually scaling back prison spending to reach that number. The universities get about 5.7 percent of the state's $90 billion budget, according to the analyst's office, down from 11 percent in 1984-85. (more...)

Scholars identify 5 keys to urban school success

01-26-2010

By Debra Viadero/Education Week

Offering a counter-narrative to the school improvement prescriptions that dominate national education debates, a new book based on 15 years of data on public elementary schools in Chicago identifies five tried-and-true ingredients that work, in combination with one another, to spur success in urban schools. The authors liken their “essential supports” to a recipe for baking a cake: Without the right ingredients, the whole enterprise just falls flat. “A material weakness in any one ingredient means that a school is very unlikely to improve,” said Anthony S. Bryk, the lead author of Organizing Schools for Improvement: Lessons From Chicago, which was published this month by the University of Chicago Press. “Often what happens in school reform is that we pick just one strand out, and very often that becomes the silver bullet.” (more...)

Teachers at Capistrano Unified stage work slowdown

01-26-2010

By Adolfo Guzman-Lopez /KPCC

The union that represents more than 2,000 San Juan Capistrano teachers ends a work slowdown today as mediators try to thaw a labor contract out of a months-long impasse. The Capistrano Unified School District teachers union said it wanted to show the school district how much extra work teachers put in. So for one week, union leaders urged members to “work to the contract.” That meant no grading papers, tutoring students or returning parents’ calls on teachers’ personal time. Capistrano Unified is negotiating a teachers’ contract as it faces a $34 million budget deficit for the next fiscal year. A school district spokeswoman said administrators proposed a 10 percent cut that could come from teacher salaries and benefits.The teachers union accuses administrators of mismanagement, and of working against teachers’ interests. (more...)

Silicon Valley’s great divide

01-26-2010

Blog by John Fensterwald/Educated Guess

In Silicon Valley, where some of the world’s smartest people live, many of the best young minds are wasting. The dichotomy is as stark as the Route 101 divide – a geographical shorthand for class and race (east, poor; west, rich) – separating them. A youth unemployment rate that one workforce nonprofit executive estimates at 35 percent; A high school dropout rate of about 27 percent; A minuscule number of Hispanic students in a six-county area – 182 out of 13,700 – to pass the CSU Early Assessment Program in math. For seven hours last week, more than 100 school, business and non-profit leaders in the valley heard leaders’ pleas to reach out to disengaged youths, and discussed how to do so at a conference co-sponsored by Cisco Systems, the Silicon Valley Education Foundation, James Irvine Foundation and the Harvard Graduate School of Education. (more...)

Spending to be rolled back in San Juan school district

01-26-2010

By Bill Lindelof/Sacramento Bee

In anticipation of the state withholding money, the San Juan Unified School Distict is tightening its belt. The suburban Sacramento district's newsletter said that San Juan will reduce all budgets to spending levels of the 2008-09 school year and only hire employees critical to the "instructional mission." District officials said the move is necessary as word comes that the state plans to withhold 25 percent of local school districts' funding until August to meet California's own budgetary needs. That places many districts in the position of running low on cash in June, the district said. The austerity measure will help San Juan avoid the need to borrow funds until repaid by the state. (more...)

Controversy growing over Riverside school district decision to ban dictionary

01-26-2010

By Maggie Avants/San Diego News Network

Students in some Riverside County schools are now without certain dictionaries, as the district banned them. Officials with the Menifee Union School District say the growing controversy over the removal of a dictionary from the classroom has led to the misconception that all dictionaries have been pulled. The district is responding to the controversy that is attracting national and international media coverage after officials temporarily removed copies of Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary Tenth Edition for containing graphic terms like “oral sex.” A parent volunteer working in her son’s classroom came across the term, according to Betti Cadmus, and submitted a written complaint to the school’s principal, who contacted the assistant superintendent of curriculum. (more...)

Think our teachers are doing a lousy job? You try doing it

01-26-2010

Column by Arthur Salm/San Diego News Network

Imagine that you’re going to design an ideal society. You get to decide how much people will be rewarded for the kind of work they perform, and what their place will be in the social structure. Well, first off, you’d want to assure that teachers make middle-class wages at best, and that they’re continually demonized by the press, demoralized by layoff threats, burdened by ever-increasing workloads, and generally characterized as can’t-do losers kicking back and wallowing in what amounts to a government dole. Because, after all, what they’re doing really isn’t all that important. Sorry, but sarcasm seemed the only place to start, because the hostility we’re currently seeing toward teachers — generated at least in part by the current budget crunch — is so profoundly misguided, inappropriate, and downright odd; just trying to get your mind around it can be disorienting. These are truly dedicated people to whom we turn over our children for the better part of the day, five days a week, about eight months a year, from ages five to 18. (more...)

UCLA study outlines recession's toll in state's classrooms

01-27-2010

By Jamie Oppenheim/Merced Sun-Star

Paula Heupel, principal at Chenoweth Elementary School in Merced, said the effects of the economic crisis have seeped into the school -- from students to teachers, the signs of stress haunt the halls. Recession-related strains have dramatically worsened existing problems in California public schools, according to a report released last week by UCLA's Institute for Democracy, Education and Access (IDEA). Problems include failing to narrow the achievement gap, overcrowded classrooms and raising per-pupil spending. Last summer, UCLA researchers interviewed 87 principals from schools in 32 counties across the state. They asked how the economic crisis affected the principals' schools. The selected schools varied in size, in various parts of the state and represented a diverse student population. (more...)

Obama to promote more education spending in State of the Union speech

01-27-2010

By Nick Anderson and Michael D. Shear/Washington Post

President Obama will propose a major increase in funding for elementary and secondary education for the coming year in Wednesday's State of the Union address, one of the few areas that would grow in an otherwise austere federal budget, officials said. The proposal to raise federal education spending by as much as $4 billion in the next fiscal year was described by administration officials Tuesday night as the start of an effort to revamp the No Child Left Behind law enacted under President George W. Bush. Obama will highlight his school reform agenda Wednesday in the address. The funding would include a $1.35 billion increase in Obama's "Race to the Top" competitive grants for school reform. It would also set aside $1 billion to finance an overhaul of No Child Left Behind, according to aides who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the budget proposal before its release next week. (more...)

Report reveals negative reaction to No Child Left Behind

01-27-2010

By Canan Tasci/San Bernardino Sun

More testing and shortened instructional time is what some teachers are facing as a result of the approval of the No Child Left Behind Act. The legislation fundamentally changed teaching and education in U.S. schools by requiring annual testing of school children and "adequate yearly progress" for every subgroup of students. The act also requires schools to provide after-school tutoring and other services for poor-performing students and mandates that schools hire only "highly qualified" teachers. In a study, "Does the No Child Left Behind Act Help or Hinder K-12 Education?" released by UCR on Tuesday, the authors surveyed 740 national board certified teachers in California to assess the effectiveness and unintended consequences of NCLB. They found that 84 percent reported overall unfavorable attitudes about the act. (more...)

LAUSD may face a bigger budget hole

01-27-2010

By Connie Llanos/Los Angeles Daily News

Already reeling from a series of financial hits in the past year, Los Angeles Unified School District officials recently learned that Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's new state budget plan could chop an additional $200 million from the district next year. LAUSD was already facing an expected budget deficit of $470 million next year. But officials found tucked in the fine print of the governor's budget an additional, unexpected cut of $250 per student for 2010-11, potentially raising the district's deficit to $670 million. The discovery comes just six weeks before the district faces a state deadline to begin handing out pink slips to teachers and administrators who could be laid off next year. (more...)

Like germs, math phobia spreads in 1st grade

01-27-2010

Blog by John Fensterwald/Educated Guess

A study that found that math-anxious female teachers pass on their fears to young girls underscores the need for more teacher training programs like Intel Math and, even better, the hiring of math specialists in early grades. The Los Angeles Times reported on the study, which was published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Two University of Chicago psychologists interviewed seven female first and second grade teachers who displayed a discomfort and expressed a lack of confidence in their math abilities. Their students were tested at the start and end of the school year. By spring, girls in those classes ended up believing the myth that boys are naturally better than girls in math, and their test scores had fallen relative to the boys in their class. (more...)

Community weighs in on impact of recession on K-12 schools, students

01-27-2010

By Mel Bertrand/UCLA Today

Summer school canceled. Severe cutbacks to classroom supplies. Massive teacher layoffs and swollen class sizes. All this on top of rising poverty and hunger among students and their families. Legislators, parents, community organizers, principals, students and their families gathered at a public briefing on the findings of a recent report by UCLA's Institute for Democracy, Education and Access. These were just some of the raw realities discussed by a cross section of speakers who attended a Jan. 22 community briefing that focused on the results of a report released last week by UCLA’s Institute for Democracy, Education, and Access (IDEA). Entitled “Educational Opportunities in Hard Times,” the report, based on interviews with 87 K-12 principals around the state, shows that conditions in schools have worsened since the recession tightened its grip on families and prompted widespread education budget cuts. (more...)

L.A. groups bid to run 30 schools

01-27-2010

By Howard Blume/Los Angeles Times

So you think you can run a Los Angeles school? Make your case. You've got 10 minutes. Would-be school operators are taking part in a kind of Los Angeles Unified School District reality contest, presenting proposals this month at forums on campuses across the district. It's the next step in an unfolding process through which groups inside and outside the system are bidding to operate 12 low-performing schools and 18 new campuses, serving some 40,000 students. The Board of Education approved the strategy in August, and the winners for each school will be chosen before March. Amid intense competition, the bidders are determined to add popular support to their portfolios. Parents will vote for their favorite bidders, although their choices won't be binding on district officials. At Jefferson High south of downtown, at least 400 people braved last week's storms to hear staff members offer their plans for revamping the campus. (more...)

It may take a lawsuit to preserve schools

01-27-2010

Opinion by Carlos Garcia/San Francisco Chronicle

On Tuesday night at the San Francisco Board of Education meeting my administration brought forward a preliminary budget proposal that encompassed the next two fiscal years and contains cuts of a magnitude never seen in California public education to date. To say it is a bleak outlook would grossly underestimate the size of the tsunami that is about to hit not only San Francisco's schools but the entire state education system. Yes, these cuts will be greater than those imposed after Prop. 13 and even greater than those experienced during the Great Depression. To provide some perspective, here simply is our situation: SFUSD has an unrestricted general fund budget of approximately $400 million. (more...)

Is San Diego really out of 'The Race to the Top?'

01-27-2010

By Emily Alpert/Voice of San Diego

Statement: School district officials have repeatedly said that even though San Diego Unified hasn't joined the bandwagon for Race to the Top, a competition between states for more school stimulus money, it could still get some of the funds. For example, spokesman Bernie Rhinerson told SDNN:"Should the state be awarded any [Race to the Top] money, which I think is a question in and of itself, I would hope that it's available to all districts who qualify and not just the ones who signed the MOU." Determination: Mostly True Analysis: It's true that if California wins any of the Race to the Top funding, San Diego Unified could still get a cut of the money. But it doesn't look very likely -- at least not where things stand now. Why? There's a sticking point. (more...)

Primary-grade classes of 20-to-1 on the chopping block

01-27-2010

By Sharon Noguchi/San Jose Mercury News

When San Jose Unified took the unpopular step of increasing K-3 class sizes to 30 for this school year, it had little company in abandoning one of California's most cherished education reforms. Now, faced with cutting budgets yet again, districts throughout Santa Clara County are targeting once fiercely protected student-teacher ratios of 20:1 in kindergarten to third grade. The Oak Grove School District in San Jose plans to go to 23 students next year, Campbell has targeted 24, Alum Rock and Mountain View are considering 25. And in the Cupertino Union School District, classes may balloon to 30 students in the fall, outraging parents in a community proud of its schools and high test scores. The mass move toward bigger classes illustrates the depth of the state's school funding crisis. (more...)

Fired schools chief sues Capistrano Unified for $5.5 million

01-27-2010

By Scott Martindale/Orange County Register

Fired Capistrano Unified schools chief A. Woodrow Carter has filed a $5.5 million breach-of-contract lawsuit against the school district alleging his termination has resulted in "future lost salary" and benefits, his second such attempt to be compensated since he was let go nearly a year ago. Carter says Capistrano's school board violated the terms of his employment contract when he was fired in March 2009, according to a filing last week in Orange County Superior Court. The school board neglected to "refer promptly all criticism, complaints and suggestions" to Carter for "his information and for study and recommendation," the lawsuit says. "At all times herein relevant, (Carter) substantially performed his job duties except where his performance was excused or prevented by respondent's board of trustees or otherwise," the lawsuit says. (more...)

Primary-grade classes of 20-to-1 on the chopping block

01-27-2010

By Sharon Noguchi/San Jose Mercury News

When San Jose Unified took the unpopular step of increasing K-3 class sizes to 30 for this school year, it had little company in abandoning one of California's most cherished education reforms. Now, faced with cutting budgets yet again, districts throughout Santa Clara County are targeting once fiercely protected student-teacher ratios of 20:1 in kindergarten to third grade. The Oak Grove School District in San Jose plans to go to 23 students next year, Campbell has targeted 24, Alum Rock and Mountain View are considering 25. And in the Cupertino Union School District, classes may balloon to 30 students in the fall, outraging parents in a community proud of its schools and high test scores. (more...)

Mt. Diablo school board approves about $3 million in cuts

01-27-2010

By Theresa Harrington/Contra Costa Times

After listening to numerous people opposed to the idea of eliminating the positions of 23 school office secretaries, the Mt. Diablo school board did not vote on that proposal Tuesday. Instead, Interim Superintendent Dick Nicoll said he withdrew that idea and planned to meet with school office staff to come up with other ways to save nearly $2.4 million in the next two years. Trustees approved the elimination of several other positions however, including the assistant superintendent for secondary education. Nicoll said incoming Superintendent Steve Lawrence has experience in this area and has agreed to take on additional responsibilities. The board also eliminated the positions of two custodian supervisors instead of cutting the positions of custodians at every high school. (more...)

States said to lag in using data systems well

01-29-2010

By Dakarai I. Aarons/Education Week

States have made progress in building data systems that track student performance over time, but are behind the curve in sharing the information in a way that leads to meaningful decisionmaking, according to a national survey released today. The Data Quality Campaign, a foundation-funded organization in Washington that promotes and tracks the use of data in education, has been focused since 2005 on identifying the key components of state data systems and pushing for their development. Now that much of that work is under way, the group is shifting its focus to describe and promote the use of the data. (more...)

New teachers facing tough times

01-29-2010

By Linda Lou/Riverside Press-Enterprise

Jeri Bravo, 34, expects to receive her special education teaching credential in June. She isn't expecting a job offer by then. "I am pretty nervous about trying to find a job for the fall," Bravo said. "I am nervous and hopeful at the same time. I am going to keep trying until a door opens." Prospective teachers can attend a job fair at Cal State San Bernardino on Saturday. The university's Career Development Center is helping people such as Teryn Andersen, left, Carol Dixon, Angela Gallegos and Jeri Bravo. Just two years ago, 86 employers showed up at Cal State San Bernardino's annual education job fair. Carol Dixon, interim director of the university's Career Development Center, said the number was down to 40 last year. This year, only about 30 employers are attending the fair Saturday, and three large school districts that usually visit -- Los Angeles Unified, Riverside Unified and Colton Joint Unified -- will be absent, Dixon said. (more...)

Experts say a rewrite of nation’s main education law will be hard this year

01-29-2010

By Sam Dillon/New York Times

In his State of the Union address, President Obama held out the hope of overhauling the main law outlining the federal role in public schools, a sprawling 45-year-old statute that dates to the Johnson administration. But experts say it would be a heavy lift for the administration to get the job done this year because the law has produced so much discord, there is so little time and there are so many competing priorities. In 2001, when Congress completed the law’s most recent rewrite, the effort took a full year, and the bipartisan consensus that made that possible has long since shattered. Today there is wide agreement that the law needs an overhaul, but not on how to fix its flaws. (more...)

Education is where Obama can claim success

01-29-2010

Blog by John Fensterwald/Educated Guess

President Obama admitted mistakes, and issued a few mea culpas in his State of the Union address this week. But he also rightfully took credit for a fundamental change in approach to federal education policy, and promised more of the same. Obama’s approach to education hasn’t been bipartisan as much as it’s been entrepreneurial. With Race to the Top, Obama used a relative pittance when it comes to federal spending — $4.3 billion out of $70 billion in last year’s stimulus package for education – as bait to drive some big changes in the states.
In doing so, challenged two of the Democratic Party’s biggest allies, the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers, over expanding charter schools, using test scores to evaluate teachers, and replacing teachers and principals as one options in kick-starting failing schools. (more...)

Obama to seek up to $4B in new education spending

01-29-2010

By H. Darr Beiser/USA TODAY

President Barack Obama said Wednesday his administration will work with Congress to expand school improvements across the country, saying the success of children cannot depend on where they live. As he prepares to ask Congress for billions of dollars in new spending for education, Obama said the nation's students need to be inspired to succeed in math and science, and that failing schools need to be turned around. In his State of the Union speech, Obama also called on Congress to finish work on a measure to revitalize community colleges. And he called for a $10,000 tax credit to families for four years of college, and an increase in Pell Grants. "This year, we have broken through the stalemate between left and right by launching a national competition to improve our schools," he said. "The idea here is simple: instead of rewarding failure, we only reward success. (more...)

New critiques urge changes in common standards

01-29-2010

By Catherine Gewertz/Education Week

A draft of grade-by-grade common standards is undergoing significant revisions in response to feedback that the outline of what students should master is confusing and insufficiently user-friendly. Writing groups convened by the Council of Chief State School Officers and the National Governors Association are at work on what they say will be a leaner, better-organized, and easier-to-understand version than the 200-plus-page set that has been circulating among governors, scholars, education groups, teams of state education officials, and others for review in recent weeks. The first public draft of the standards, which was originally intended for a December release but was postponed until January, is now expected by mid-February. (more...)

L.A. schools worry about toxic playgrounds

01-29-2010

By Elizabeth Banikci/Courtroom News

Los Angeles Unified School District says the company it hired to install artificial turf on school playgrounds did not inform it that it would underlay the turf with carcinogens - carbon black and lead, in crumb rubber - that would come into direct contact with children. LAUSD hired Forever Green Athletic Fields of the West in 2005 to artificial turf systems on playgrounds and playing fields at 13 schools. In its Superior Court complaint, the school district says it knew that one of the materials used would be crumb rubber, which contains lead and carbon black. But LAUSD says it did not know that the chemicals would be in direct contact with children who play on the turf. The state of California says lead and carbon black are known to cause cancer, reproductive harm, neurological harm, decreased IQ and developmental toxicity. The chemicals can be inhaled or absorbed through the skin. (more...)

$113 million, 2-year, S.F. schools cut asked

01-29-2010

By Jill Tucker/San Francisco Chronicle

San Francisco's school Superintendent Carlos Garcia laid out his plan Tuesday to bridge an expected $113 million budget shortfall over the next two years, describing it as a long list of "horrible and deplorable" cuts that rival those experienced during the Great Depression. It's that bad, Garcia said. His plan, presented to the school board Tuesday night, would eliminate up to 400 district positions, including 100 teachers resulting from an increase in K-3 class size, from 22 students to 25. Garcia also called for decimating summer school, teacher training and other programs; shrinking paychecks across the board through unpaid furloughs; and cutting busing, especially for high school students. "I absolutely take no pride in what I'm going to share with you," he said earlier in the day. (more...)

Fresno's charter plan sparks conflict-of-interest concerns

01-29-2010

By Corey G. Johnson/California Watch

Fresno school officials made an announcement this week that has raised eyebrows up and down the state: The public school district wants to go into the private charter school business. As reported on Tuesday and Wednesday in the Fresno Bee, the Fresno Unified School District is seeking to use taxpayer funds to create a charter that would be managed by a district-created, nonprofit organization. The school would be open to children in kindergarten through 5th grade. The charter's proposed management board would include the superintendent, Michael Hanson, two board trustees and two parents. None of the school's teachers would belong to a union. The district will ask their trustees to approve the plan on Feb. 10. (more...)

Possible teacher layoffs would have big impact

01-29-2010

By Jennifer Medina/New York Times

For more than three decades, New York City schools have soldiered on through turmoil, politics, recessions, budget crises and a changing cast of mayors and chancellors. But since 1976, the system has never carried out significant layoffs of teachers. That may soon change. Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg has said that if the city does not wring pay concessions from the teachers’ union and all of Gov. David A. Paterson’s proposed budget cuts are approved — a worst case — the city may have to get rid of 11,000 of its 79,000 teachers. Last year, about 3,800 were lost through attrition, mostly retirement, so if similar numbers are recorded this year, several thousand could receive pink slips. (more...)

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Sections

January 2010

Increasing student achievment is School Board’s top priority

Putting Weingarten's comments on test scores in context

State saves when districts ditch small classes

Calif. schools brace for another year of cutbacks

Educators respond to Governor and launch “Fight for California’s Future”

L.A. schools paid $200 million more in salaries than budgeted

Governor's promise to 'protect education' rings hollow as schools look at fine print

Learning from No Child Left Behind

Redefining achievement

Mr. Obama: Kill NCLB

L.A. schools Supt. Cortines reiterates vow to strengthen teacher evaluations

Sacramento-area schools say Schwarzenegger wants cuts they're already making

Hundreds of students can't return to Beverly Hills schools

State budget could mean more devastating cuts for West Contra Costa schools

Charter school aimed at Hmong students sets off debate

PUSD parcel tax proposal moves forward

Perry won't let Texas compete for federal school money

Now 46th in nation in per student funding

Experts weigh in on 'Race to Top' testing rules

U.S. common-standards push bares unsettled issues

School boards will sue state this year

Best education blogs for 2010

Teachers union gets a jump-start on strike vote

Santa Cruz school boards gather to discuss budget cuts

School trustee explains why district says no To ‘Race’ funds

Applicants to UC smarter, more diverse

Schools fear cuts to campus repairs

Obama to seek $1.35 billion more for Race to the Top program

Education grant effort faces late opposition

Market fixes for California's schools

The Governor’s school budget: The race to mediocrity

Raising the education bar

How the media garbled Randi's message

An unusual man, an unusual job

LA Unified to pilot 2-year kindergarten

Time for parents to have power in the classroom

'Race to the Top' - the view from Oakland

What should high school history teach on hip-hop? Immigration? Texas board debates

Colorado promises to adopt merit pay for teachers

Monterey County schools would lose millions under governor's budget proposal

All Beverly Hills students soon may be required to prove their residency

Capistrano district can survive, with pay cuts, chief says

Race for education funding poses a test for states

Will AFT teacher evaluation effort succeed?

All but 10 states throw hats into Race to Top ring

Race to the Top: Where the money might go if it were purely political

A Wonderland formula funds California schools

If state fails, districts can chase Race to the Top

State-federal tensions loom in standards effort

Schwarzenegger budget projects less spending for class-size reduction

Our education disaster

Sacramento, leave our schools alone

Berkeley High may cut lab classes to fund programs for struggling students

Sac City schools ripe for a new era

Parcel tax initiative needs signatures

Experts urge districts to do more with less

California schools angry over even more cuts

Cuts needed amid S.F. schools' $113 million gap

Study links rise in test scores to nations' output

San Diego schools' new testing idea: No child left unmeasured

Investing in brains

Teachers push Gardena High reforms

After 10 years, federal money for technology in education

UCLA IDEA: Working families and public schools suffering since economic crisis

Top teachers hindered by No Child Left Behind act, UCR study finds

Let's have more straight talk on school funding

Large high schools in the city are taking hard fall

Female teachers may pass on math anxiety to girls, study finds

Analyst slams governor's prisons-vs.-universities plan

Scholars identify 5 keys to urban school success

Teachers at Capistrano Unified stage work slowdown

Silicon Valley’s great divide

Spending to be rolled back in San Juan school district

Controversy growing over Riverside school district decision to ban dictionary

Think our teachers are doing a lousy job? You try doing it

UCLA study outlines recession's toll in state's classrooms

Obama to promote more education spending in State of the Union speech