By Katy Murphy
Friday, December 9th, 2011 at 5:16 pm in charter schools, teachers.
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| Your New Evaluator or Your New Job? (Image from Flickr, Senor Codo) |
In the face of declining federal funds, Los Angeles school officials stripped about two dozen campuses of aid that has been used to improve the academic achievement of low-income students.
The move, approved at Tuesday’s Board of Education meeting, was angrily opposed by school board member Tamar Galatzan. She represents the west San Fernando Valley, where eight schools are projected to lose the funding.
The students losing services are “just as deserving as students at other schools,” Galatzan said. Some schools facing sharp reductions are blocks from similar schools that will retain the extra aid. Galatzan also complained
The Los Angeles Board of Education on Tuesday passed a resolution that would ban charter schools from offering admission to families in exchange for volunteer work or other services. The admission preference had been offered by two charter schools overseen by the Los Angeles Unified School District.
One, Larchmont Charter School, ended the practice recently. The other, Los Feliz Charter School for the Arts, was headed toward dropping the preference when the school board acted.
Critics have called such preferences inappropriate, noting that the law provides for a lottery when there are more applicants than spaces at a charter school. They said skirting the lottery could lead to abuses, such as families getting into schools because of connections or because they promised substantial donations or other valuable
My team teacher and I were standing in the hallway this morning when she walked over and whispered, “If I were a kid with all this testing, testing, testing, I wouldn’t want to come to school either.” Gasp! No, actually, I know exactly what she means, school has become the most boring place in the universe for these poor kids.
A large percentage of our students are bored with school. Standardized testing is a huge culprit, along with its accomplice, data. When this is the focus of your classroom, hmmm…
This was chilling to read:
One of the most consistent findings in educational studies of creativity has been that teachers dislike personality traits associated with creativity.
This comes from from Creativity: Asset or Burden in the Classroom?, a review paper on the research. As much as I wish I could say this doesn’t apply to me, I know that sometimes it does. On my best days, my favorite students are those who subvert my assignments, challenge me and others, and do so with sass and attitude. But on my worst days, I just want those students to shut up so I can move forward with what I have planned. This realization is something that will stick with me for a long time.
The entirety of the paper is worth reading, as is the post on the Marginal Revolution blog that led me to it. This
