The newsblitz never works for the weekend. It yearns to come back:
- San Diego Unified schools are including more children with disabilities in ordinary classes more often, but principals, teachers and parents are worried about having enough staff to help include them effectively. Parents are also concerned by inconsistencies between schools.
- Perfect attendance won cars for two South County teenagers, the Union-Tribune reports.
- School board member John de Beck writes in SDNN that extending the deadline for superintendent shows that the pool of candidates was meager.
- Also in the U-T: Oceanside teachers agreed to six furlough days to help balance their district budget.
- San Diego State students went to Tijuana to protest a CSU-wide ban on study and research there.
- The Los Angeles Times reports on how a Colorado law that ties teacher evaluation to student achievement could create momentum for more such laws across the country.
Our school board candidates forum last night was phenomenal, thanks to all of you! We were amazed by the turnout and the energy in what is supposedly a sleepy race. I had to tell the crowd not to applaud a few times -- which is a heck of a lot better than having to tell them not to fall asleep.
Unfortunately, I forgot last night to thank reader and former school board member Frances O'Neill Zimmerman, who convinced me that we needed to do something like this. Thanks for the great idea!
If you didn't make it, we'll have the audio available on the website soon. In the meantime, you can check out this Twitter feed for commentary from parent Paul Bowers. I'm still sorting through the audio and my notes, but here are some quick impressions and points from the forum:
My readers are so smart. We've already been talking to school district officials about why San Diego scores on a national exam only grew slightly while state test scores jumped. Now you've chimed in with your thoughts:
•Sue Moore, a homeschooling mom who has a doctorate in educational leadership, argues the biggest problem with making sense of test scores, especially the state tests, is "the massaging of raw scores." Let me explain: What I and other reporters usually call state scores are actually a derived score from multiple tests that students take in California schools.
Moore says it's such a nightmare to understand -- and the way that data are reported has changed so often -- that it makes it difficult to draw valid comparisons from one year to the next.
Wondering why San Diego scores stagnated on a national test at the same time its state test scores jumped?
I sure was. Ron Rode, the research czar for San Diego Unified, gave us one theory: The national test just sets the bar higher than the state tests do. That's one explanation. Here are others from folks I chatted with:
• Nellie Meyer, the interim deputy superintendent for San Diego Unified, offered an intriguing version of Rode's theory. Not only is the national test more challenging, it measures different, deeper skills, such as interpreting and synthesizing a written text. So students could shine on a state test that measures simpler thinking at the same time they show few gains on the national exam.
Interestingly, this is exactly what the school board has been pushing for San Diego Unified to do: Focus more on creativity and critical thinking instead of the simpler skills that tests tend to measure.
"We need to stretch students' thinking," Meyer said.