A Step Towards Defining School Reform
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Posted: Tuesday, June 14, 2011 2:39 pm |Updated: 7:39 pm, Tue Jun 14, 2011.
San Diego Unified took a step toward hammering out its school reform ideas today, laying out specific skills it expects students to master.
Many of its reform ideas have been just that — ideas — so far. Principals and teachers have been largely in the dark about them. The school district hopes the guidelines, approved by the school board today, will start to change that. The lengthy list of expectations, and how to gauge them, is a crucial step towards making its reform plans a reality.
San Diego Unified announced a new plan for fixing schools more than a year ago, under pressure from some parents and outside critics like San Diegans 4 Great Schools, who
The big battle in San Diego Unified right now is whether to tear up pink slips for teachers and other school workers. The school board has pressed its unions to take more unpaid leave and put off promised raises, saying it could then afford to spare some jobs in the long-term.
The teachers union turned down that proposal last week, arguing it was an unnecessary concession that tried to pit teachers against one another. Almost all teachers that I've heard from loathe the idea, saying that San Diego Unified can just cancel the layoffs now that state financial projections have improved.
So I was intrigued to get this email from Sarah Mathy, a pink-slipped teacher who says the union is protecting senior members at the expense of junior ones. It's a letter that she sent earlier this month to Bill Freeman, the president of the San Diego Education Association. (That's abbreviated in the letter as SDEA.)
