San Jose teachers extend day gratis
Posted in Program innovation, State Budget, payThe teachers in San Jose Unified have agreed to extend the school day without extra pay permanently, starting next year.
That gesture on students’ behalf would be noteworthy any time. But coming in a catastrophic budget year, when teachers are being asked to enlarge classes and take pay cuts, it is quite remarkable.
I mentioned this development last week, in the middle of a column on furloughs. It bears repeating and further explaining, since skeptics have told me I must have missed something; unions don’t give up anything for free.
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That gesture on students’ behalf would be noteworthy any time. But coming in a catastrophic budget year, when teachers are being asked to enlarge classes and take pay cuts, it is quite remarkable.
I mentioned this development last week, in the middle of a column on furloughs. It bears repeating and further explaining, since skeptics have told me I must have missed something; unions don’t give up anything for free.
(Read more and comment on this post)
Is common core good for California?
Posted in Common Core standards, Race to the Top, Standardized testsDraft common-core standards got a boost this week when the respected Thomas B. Fordham Institute gave it a solid thumbs-up. Fordham’s evaluators called thestandards “a clear, ambitious, and actionable depiction of the essential skills, competencies, and knowledge that our young people should acquire in school and possess by the time they graduate.”
Fordham will be encouraging states to adopt the math and English language arts standards. But interestingly for California was a sentence inserted in a draft of the report earlier this month: “Still, it’s likely that a handful of states—Massachusetts and California come to mind—will decide they’re better off with the standards they’ve got today.”
So now that Fordham has brought the question out into the open — or almost did (the specific references to California and Massachusetts were actually cut from the report’s final version) – it’s time that California’s education community addressed it: Should California go ahead and adopt common core later this summer? A good argument can be made that it shouldn’t. The answer, however, is inextricably tied to decisions related to Race To The Top.
(Read more and comment on this post)
Fordham will be encouraging states to adopt the math and English language arts standards. But interestingly for California was a sentence inserted in a draft of the report earlier this month: “Still, it’s likely that a handful of states—Massachusetts and California come to mind—will decide they’re better off with the standards they’ve got today.”
So now that Fordham has brought the question out into the open — or almost did (the specific references to California and Massachusetts were actually cut from the report’s final version) – it’s time that California’s education community addressed it: Should California go ahead and adopt common core later this summer? A good argument can be made that it shouldn’t. The answer, however, is inextricably tied to decisions related to Race To The Top.
(Read more and comment on this post)