It's back-to-school time.
And this year, the roster of teachers that greet students at your neighborhood school could look notably different when the doors fly open on that first day.
San Diego Unified has laid off hundreds of teachers. Now it's rehiring a bunch more. As our reporting has detailed over the years, the process for picking who stays, who goes and who ends up at which school can seem more Rube Goldberg than Albert Einstein.
Test scores have been rising across California. But one testing expert believes that the gains have been inflated because more students with disabilities are taking an alternative test.
If fewer students who score poorly take the test, that could increase the percentage of kids doing well, notes John Fensterwald, a blogger and former San Jose Mercury News editorial writer.
The alternative test is permitted by the U.S. Department of Education as a different way to assess special education students, Fensterwald writes. It is only given to students who do very poorly on the ordinary state test. He reports that the alternative test has gradually been introduced for more grades, expanding the number of kids who take it from 39,000 to 184,000 statewide in four years.