Sometimes I think those that claim to be looking out for poor and minority students cause the greatest damage. This San Francisco Chronicle story is a great example.
De facto segregation is alive and well in public schools in virtually every state, but is more common in charter schools - an educational option increasingly endorsed in state and national reform efforts, according to a national study released Thursday.
The trend is particularly severe for African American students, the UCLA researchers found.
Nearly 3 out of 4 black students who attend charters are in "intensely segregated" schools with student populations that are at least 90 percent minority, according to the study by the UCLA Civil Rights Project. That's twice the rate of regular public schools.
Almost a third of those black students are in what the researchers called "apartheid schools," where 0 to 1 percent of their classmates are white. Charter schools in the Bay Area and California have similar rates of racial isolation.
These are "the very kind of schools that decades of civil rights struggles fought to abolish in the South," researchers said.
“When there is an achievement gap, there is often a safety gap and a student-engagement gap,” Austin said. “We are dealing with perceptions. But perceptions are real.”
Schools nationwide struggle with an achievement gap between higher-performing groups of white and Asian students and their lower-performing black and Hispanic counterparts. For example, about two-thirds of white and Asian 10th-graders in San Diego County scored proficient or better on state standardized English exams last year. Black and Hispanic scores were roughly half that.
The new state workbook aims to close the gap among ethnic groups, special-education students and among students in migrant education programs.
The workbooks include results of the voluntary surveys that were given to school employees and students in grades five, seven, nine and 11. The data show the disparity in how students and school employees perceive everything from expectations and academic rigor to campus safety and discipline problems.
I thought this quote from Larry Schumway, Utah's Superintendent of Schools represented a feeling that a few more Superintendents should share.
“I hope you you’ll come away from this meeting with a knot in the pit of your stomach about how far we have to go. It should keep you up at night.”
-Larry Shumway, Utah Superintendent of Schools
CaliforniasCapitol.com is reporting that Secretary of Education Glen Thomas is resigning so he can take care of his aged mother.
In explaining his departure, Thomas said:
“My 96-year-old mother is not well. Twenty-four years ago I cared for my father and I told my mother that when the time came I would do the same for her. It’s been the highest honor to serve in the administration but family is always first priority.”
With my own 79-year-old father's recent health problems, I can relate and appreciate Glen's decision. It is a lot better reason that some of the previous education secretaries. Here's a quick recap of the ones I can remember from the current administration:
- Richard Riordan (2003-2005) left because he lost interest.
- Alan Bersin (2005-2006) left to go serve on the San Diego Airport board.
- David Long (2007-2009) left to pursue an unnamed opportunity which turned out to be with the California School Board Association (CSBA).
- Glen Thomas (2009-2010) left to take care of his aged mother.
With the Governor a lame duck at this point, he is going to have a hard time finding anyone who will take the job. I'm thinking that he's going to need to post it on Craigslist at this point. Read the rest of this post!
I just finished reading Crazy Like a Fox: One Principal's Triumph in the Inner City. I've been an admirer of the work Ben Chavis has done at American Indian Public Charter for some time. He took a school which was going to be closed for poor academic achievement in 1999 and turned it into one of the highest scoring schools in the state. Last year, 88.1% of the school's Hispanic students scored at grade-level on the Language Arts and Math CSTs. At the school, 100% of 8th graders take Algebra I. Last year 100% of those students were proficient on the Algebra I CST. Read the rest of this post!
As a semi-disenfranchised Republican voter, it was refreshing to read these comments from Scott Baugh, the Chair of the Orange County Republican Party. I feel abandoned by both parties, but certainly the Republican Party gets a large portion of my disgust given their complete abandoning of what I thought were their core principals of smaller government and more individual liberty.
You would think that after running up this massive debt our politicians would stop spending and living beyond our means, but they don’t. They are addicted to power and spending. They will say and do anything to keep feeding their addictions. How often do you hear our politicians say they are fiscally prudent and then vote for more spending?
This is not to say that all politicians are bad. We have many honorable elected representatives and patriots in Washington and Sacramento today. I do mean to say, however, that the spending addictions we see in Washington, Sacramento and in cities throughout Orange County know no party affiliation.
Many Republicans have been just as guilty as Democrats. In point of fact, under George Bush’s presidency – with a Republican Congress for six of those years – our government grew, entitlements expanded, and our national debt was nearly doubled!
This is a very inconvenient truth for Republicans. And, this is precisely why a recent Rasmussen poll revealed that 75% of registered Republican voters believe elected Republicans are out of touch.
I've wondered before whether the time students spend in school gardens is the best use of classroom time. It was very interesting to read this Atlantic piece that presents a view on school gardens that seems to go against the mainstream thinking.
Imagine that as a young and desperately poor Mexican man, you had made the dangerous and illegal journey to California to work in the fields with other migrants. There, you performed stoop labor, picking lettuce and bell peppers and table grapes; what made such an existence bearable was the dream of a better life. You met a woman and had a child with her, and because that child was born in the U.S., he was made a citizen of this great country. He will lead a life entirely different from yours; he will be educated. Now that child is about to begin middle school in the American city whose name is synonymous with higher learning, as it is the home of one of the greatest universities in the world: Berkeley. On the first day of sixth grade, the boy walks though the imposing double doors of his new school, stows his backpack, and then heads out to the field, where he stoops under a hot sun and begins to pick lettuce.
It’s rare for an immigrant experience to go the whole 360 in a single generation—one imagines the novel of assimilation, The White Man Calls It Romaine. The cruel trick has been pulled on this benighted child by an agglomeration of foodies and educational reformers who are propelled by a vacuous if well-meaning ideology that is responsible for robbing an increasing number of American schoolchildren of hours they might other wise have spent reading important books or learning higher math (attaining the cultural achievements, in other words, that have lifted uncounted generations of human beings out of the desperate daily scrabble to wrest sustenance from dirt). The galvanizing force behind this ideology is Alice Waters, the dowager queen of the grown-locally movement. Her goal is that children might become “eco-gastronomes” and discover “how food grows”—a lesson, if ever there was one, that our farm worker’s son might have learned at his father’s knee—leaving the Emerson and Euclid to the professionals over at the schoolhouse. Waters’s enormous celebrity, combined with her decision in the 1990s to expand her horizons into the field of public-school education, has helped thrust thousands of schoolchildren into the grip of a giant experiment, one that is predicated on a set of assumptions that are largely unproved, even unexamined. That no one is calling foul on this is only one manifestation of the way the new Food Hysteria has come to dominate and diminish our shared cultural life, and to make an educational reformer out of someone whose brilliant cookery and laudable goals may not be the best qualifications for designing academic curricula for the public schools.
School gardens are very popular among educators. I think in many ways it is similar to the discussion of the value of arts and music in schools. They, like the school gardens, enrich the educational experience and perhaps for some students are an important part of the school experience. I guess the question is whether it is more important to focus a school's limited instructional time on a garden than on instruction in basic skills such as reading, writing and mathematics. For students who are struggling, does the garden provide an important relief from the pressure of classroom instruction or is it simply a diversion that takes up valuable classroom time? Read the rest of this post!
I thought this story from FoxNews was kind of humorous.
Authorities say a San Diego middle school was evacuated when a student's science project was mistaken for a bomb.
A Fire-Rescue spokesman says a concerned vice principal prompted the evacuation of Millennial Tech Magnet Middle School yesterday afternoon.
He says an arson team took photos and X-rays of the empty plastic bottle with wires and determined it was harmless.
He says the 11-year-old was trying to build a motion detector with instructions he found on the Internet and parts he bought online. His parents helped him buy the parts. They say they didn't realize the experiment looked threatening.
This is a kid who needs some attention. Any kid who is trying to build a motion detector at 11 could be the next Thomas Edison. I hope that this experience doesn't discourage him from continuing his experiments. If he gets the education that he deserves, we could be reading about his inventions on the web in another 10 years. Read the rest of this post!
The lengths that our politicians will go to protect us from ourselves is incredible. I saw this Chris Reed piece and heard about it on KFI's John and Ken Show. Apparently, the California Air Resources Board has decided that the state's Global Warming law AB32 allows them to require vehicle owners to keep their tires inflated.
I read the proposed rules and I think the concerns of the California New Car Dealers Association are spot-on:
CARB is proposing to require every repair dealer to check the inflation of every tire during repair to improve mpg for all vehicles which, in theory, is meritorious.
However (the) regs. CARB’s pushing through (released this week and subject to a 15 day comment period) ... provides that the only times that consumers may decline a check and inflate service—they can never decline the service if it’s offered for free—is when they are charged for services AND if they can PROVE (with DOCUMENTATION!) that they’ve had their tires checked and inflated in the last 30 days, or if they WILL do so within the next week. It is unclear, but possible, that CARB could take enforcement action against the consumer if they don’t follow through with their promise?!
I saw mention of this quote on both and EIA Online. I was blown away by the arrogance of California Federation of Teachers (CFT) leaders as evidenced by their phony concern.
Race to the Top legislation update
The state Legislature is working frantically to pass two linked bills related to Race to the Top federal funding. If passed, these bills would supposedly help the state qualify for up to $700 million dollars. Two catches: The total in Race to the Top dollars will be about one-twentieth of the amount cut over the past two years from the state education budget and will come into the state over the next four years; and the changes would likely not improve instruction, but rather offer more opportunities to scapegoat teachers for "failing schools." In particular, SBX5 4 provides for two provisions that CFT has opposed: a "parent trigger" and an open enrollment provision. Under the parent trigger (or lynch mob provision) if 50% of the parents at a school or feeder schools of a low performing school sign a petition, the school board must hold a hearing to accept that petition or provide an alternative governance change, which could include closing the school, turning it into a charter school, or reconstituting the school. The open enrollment portion would label the lowest 1,000 API scoring schools every year as "open enrollment schools" (and exempt charters from this provision). Being labeled "open enrollment" requires that the district must allow any student in that school to transfer to another district. Click here to tell your legislators to reject SBX5 4, which is being used by the governor and anti-education legislators to draw attention away from their failure to fund schools properly through fair progressive tax policies.
Really? A "lynch mob"? While I've said for quite a while that I thought what California public education needed was a few more groups of parents with pitchforks and torches standing outside their local school district demanding action, I don't recall reading any media reports of those sort of events. The reality is that the use of the term "lynch mob" is intended as a scare tactic and to belittle those who supported SB5X 4.
The good news is that despite CFT and their wealthy cousin CTA's best efforts, the California legislature showed evidence of a backbone and passed the bill. The Governor, finally acting like the Governator that we all had hoped to see, signed it and it is going to become state law.
Personally, I'm really excited to see whether parents will be empowered by this change and whether school districts will see it as encouragement to act in making real changes in failing public schools. Let's see what parents do with their new found influence over their local public schools. Read the rest of this post!
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