Latest News and Comment from Education

Monday, November 25, 2013

Many school districts are giving their report cards a facelift for Common Core | Pass / Fail | 89.3 KPCC

Many school districts are giving their report cards a facelift for Common Core | Pass / Fail | 89.3 KPCC:

Many school districts are giving their report cards a facelift for Common Core

Adolfo Guzman-Lopez/KPCC

Long Beach fifth grade teacher Gina Bonetati holds her old report card, left, and the new transitional report card issued by her district.
School districts across California are rewriting elementary school report cards to reflect new learning standards known as the Common Core.
Because the change is not dictated by the state, it's unclear how many schools are switching. But several superintendents in Southern California said they were in the process.
“These are local decisions, that obviously districts should think about as they think about Common Core and new assessments,” said Deborah Sigman, with the California Department of Education.
Long Beach Unified is farther ahead than many others.
The district has for years used a numbered system of 1-4 that represents student's performance from  “not proficient” to “advanced proficient.” Those numbers will remain, but the “proficient” language will be replaced with “areas on target” “areas of strength” and “areas of weakness.”
“After having parent conferences in the last couple of weeks, parents still have a hard 

As family and friends head to funeral, Joseph Gatto remembered as a gifted teacher
Joseph Gatto died at age 78 in Silver Lake.; Credit: Kent Twitchell Joseph Gatto made his students feel like there was nothing they couldn't do.  "He just had a way of being able to open these doors for us, to be able to kind of explore, and find our own voice," said artist Robert Vargas, who was a student of Gatto's at the Los Angeles County High School for the Arts in the early 1990s.