Dan Walters: California workers have little to celebrate on Labor Day - State Columnist: Dan Walters - The Modesto Bee

Dan Walters: California workers have little to celebrate on Labor Day - State Columnist: Dan Walters - The Modesto Bee:

"Even public worker unions are finding the going tough in these recessionary times. Furloughs have become common. The once-impregnable California Correctional Peace Officers Association is losing a battle against sharp cuts in prison spending. The California Teachers Association has been unable to block deep school reductions. Last month, trustees of the giant Los Angeles Unified School District, defying its teachers union, voted to massively expand charter schools.

As the 2009 legislative session comes to a close, unions are engaged on several fronts. While the Service Employees International tries to win ratification of a state worker contract that would limit furloughs, local government unions are pushing a late-blooming bill to make municipal bankruptcy (such as Vallejo's) more difficult and other labor groups are trying to raise long-frozen benefits for injured workers."

Report shows negative effects of dropouts on economy | TimesDaily.com | The Times Daily | Florence, AL

Report shows negative effects of dropouts on economy TimesDaily.com The Times Daily Florence, AL:


"The average annual income for a high school dropout in 2005 was $17,299, compared to $26,933 for a high school graduate.

Nationwide, more than 7,000 students become dropouts every school day. Annually, that adds up to almost 1.3 million students who will not graduate from high school on schedule.
In Alabama alone, an estimated 25,136 students from the class of 2009 failed to graduate on time.

'The state has a 40 percent dropout rate, which is absolutely unacceptable,' said Gary Dan Williams, Muscle Shoals Center for Technology director. 'It's everyone's problem, but with the standards in Alabama, the curriculum is designed strictly for college-bound students, and the bottom line is that many students aren't college-bound. The graduation standards are among the highest in the country, but we're letting those kids who can't handle the pressure get down about school and they're dropping out."

The picket line and America's workforce -- chicagotribune.com

The picket line and America's workforce -- chicagotribune.com:

"I was part of the mob.

Emotions ran high, as we were caught up in a hurricane of rage bearing down on one of the 'scabs.'

Everything that had been building inside me -- the frustration, the anger, the boredom -- came crashing down on me, then a 40-year-old history teacher.

It was 1987 and Chicago Public Schools teachers had launched what would be an almost monthlong strike against the Board of Education.

I had reported for picket-line duty with approximately 50 other Chicago Vocational High School teachers, just when school administrators and other workers who had decided to cross the picket line were filing into the building.

We booed and waved our signs as the principal and vice principal entered. But when two of our own followed, we crowded against the iron fence separating us."

Reeducating unions -- latimes.com

Reeducating unions -- latimes.com:

"Even with signs that the U.S. economy might be stirring, this is a strained Labor Day for the many Americans who are going without raises, and whose hours are being cut at the same time that they are asked to take heavier workloads -- and especially for those who are without employment.

Teachers find themselves in all these categories, across the nation and right here, where the dire financial condition of the Los Angeles Unified School District has led to layoffs or demotions from regular teaching to substitute, and where class sizes will be larger and other cutbacks will reduce salaries. On a bigger scale, the unions that brought teachers better pay, benefits and job security find themselves at a tipping point, their power under threat in ways that seemed barely possible a few years ago."

Face The Nation, 09.06.09

Duncan knocks No Child Left Behind

Education Secretary Arne Duncan knocked President George W. Bush's signature education bill, No Child Left Behind, saying that the bill is "very prescriptive" and discourages innovative teaching and that the state standards it calls for are often watered down and students that meet them are often nonetheless not college-ready.

The law is "desperately underfunded," Duncan said Sunday on CBS's "Face the Nation," and the $100 billion in stimulus funding has "staved off a catastrophe" of teacher and staff layoffs.

The push for national standards was a grass-roots movement, he said. "We are moving in the right direction ... to educate our way to a better economy."

"We have to raise the bar for everyone," he said. "We have to make sure that every student is college-ready."


http://www.politico.com/blogs/politicolive/0909/Duncan_knocks_No_Child_Left_Behind.html?showall

Cash-strapped California schools seek commercial sponsors to raise funds -- latimes.com

Cash-strapped California schools seek commercial sponsors to raise funds -- latimes.com:

"As strapped schools open across California, educators are turning to outside sources like never before in an attempt to ease the effects of multibillion-dollar cuts, giving rise to the new three Rs: retailing, raising money and recouping budgets.

Los Angeles Unified School District officials are courting the city's professional sports teams to blunt cuts to athletics programs. Beverly Hills trustees are considering logo T-shirts, hats and other apparel, counting on teenagers to snap up the merchandise because of the city's celebrity and the popularity of television's 'Beverly Hills, 90210.' San Diego County educators are selling the naming rights to two sixth-grade science camps. South Pasadena officials are wooing Hollywood producers to film TV shows at district headquarters."

Stop the Power Grab Update!

Sorry for crying wolf! this week.

I checked the agenda and the discussion of spending city dollars to fix the Mayor's initiative is not scheduled.

It's my understanding that the mayor made his loan a gift to avoid any further question of a conflict of interest on this issue.

We are expecting it to be on the agenda in the near future.

The agenda has to be published 72 hours before the meetings on Tuesdays.

I urge those of you who wish to be heard on this issue to visit the link below to keep track of the City Council's agenda. I'll be out of town next week and won't be able to raise the hue and cry.

Vigilance!

Thanks,

Stop the Power

http://www.cityofsacramento.org/clerk/council-agendas/

A good education starts at home | thestarpress.com | The Star Press

A good education starts at home thestarpress.com The Star Press:

"Parents, always remember that you are your children's' first and most important teachers. Most of what your children will ever learn, they learn from you before they ever start school. Even during the school week, three-fourths of every day -- and all of their weekends, holidays and vacations -- they spend in your care. The habits, attitudes and interests you teach -- and more importantly, model -- will always be the foundation of their sense of who they are, should be and can be.

Get to know, cooperate with and support your children's teachers. They have your children's welfare and learning at heart. They are dedicated professionals -- they didn't become teachers to get rich or even to get by. Of course they are only human; like you, they get tired and frustrated, they make mistakes, they have lives of their own with personal problems.

And they have not only yours, but whole classrooms full of other peoples' children, to handle. But together, you and they are your children's educational team, and educating children is a team sport. You can win only by team playing, and your score is what your children achieve. Treat your children's' teachers as you yourself would like to be treated."

Back to school: parental involvement is key to the best public schools

Back to school: parental involvement is key to the best public schools:

"What makes the best public schools? Here is a hint; it isn’t necessarily the wealth of the neighborhood. Again and again the answer seems to be parental involvement and participation.

When parents take the time to visit, communicate, volunteer or chaperone at their child’s school, it shows the teacher you take their jobs seriously. And, perhaps more importantly, you show your kid that “their job”, to work hard and do their best at school, is something that you expect and value highly.

In this day and age in many families, both parents work but you can still be involved. Conferences, Open House night, fund raisers, school plays and performances; any event that gets you in the school to see what your child sees everyday makes a huge difference."

Back-to-school tips: Parental involvement key to high performance - San Jose Mercury News

Back-to-school tips: Parental involvement key to high performance - San Jose Mercury News:

"Sixteen-year-old David Acosta hates to admit it, but said he knows why his mom helps him succeed in school: 'She gives me a hard time.'

The Options for Youth Hesperia student credits his mother's daily questioning with keeping him focused. He even confessed that her punishment — taking away his CD player and X box game system — helps him complete his assignments on time.

Educators across the Victor Valley insist that parental involvement is crucial to student success.

School spending would have to increase by $1,000 per pupil to achieve the same results that are gained with parental involvement, according to a University of New Hampshire 2008 study of more than 10,000 eighthgraders.

And there are simple ways parents help boost their child's performance — even for those commuting down the hill with hardly a minute to spare."

Cleanliness key to slowing swine flu

Cleanliness key to slowing swine flu

"OLEAN - Local school districts are looking at every measure possible to hold the H1N1 virus at bay. In the Olean district, even the spork will be deployed to fight swine flu.

“Swine flu has all of us thinking about how important it is to maintain a clean environment,” Olean Superintendent Dr. Colleen Taggerty said.
Cafeterias throughout the district will change the way eating utensils are distributed to minimize the chance of an outbreak.

“Sodexo, our cafeteria-management company, is looking into moving from plastic-ware dispensers, to sporks - spoon and fork in one - which will be individually wrapped,” she said.

Other precautions are being taken in area districts to prevent the spread of germs that could lead to an outbreak of H1N1."

CQ Politics | CQ Transcript: Education Secretary Duncan on CBS’s ‘Face the Nation’

CQ Politics CQ Transcript: Education Secretary Duncan on CBS’s ‘Face the Nation’

[*] SCHIEFFER: Today on “Face the Nation,” Education Secretary Arne Duncan on President Obama’s speech to school kids, swine flu, and fixing America’s educational system. President Obama’s upcoming speech to the school children Tuesday has created such an uproar that some schools are not going to show it. And some parents say they’ll keep their children at home.

What is going on? And are the schools prepared for the onslaught of swine flu this fall? Then to the deeper problems. We spend more per capita on students than any country in the world, yet our students lag behind those in most nations. Can our schools be fixed? Those are the questions for Education Secretary Arne Duncan .

Then, I’ll have a final word on a real mess of a summit. But first, Education Secretary Arne Duncan on “Face the Nation.”

Indoctrinating Our Children: Evolution (9/4/09)

In this segment from tonight's Fox News Special, Do You Know What Textbooks Your Children are Really Reading?, groups have been formed to counter the efforts of those who wish to teach creation over evolution.

http://www.foxnews.com

PREVENTING DROPOUTS IS EASY

PREVENTING DROPOUTS IS EASY:

"PREVENTING DROPOUTS IS EASY
By John Jensen, Ph.D."

"It is a good thing," my father told me, "to know what you are doing."

This thought is relevant to the unhappy condition of education in the US. We need look no further for the reason than the very focus of the just-released study about dropouts, “Graduating America: Meeting the Challenge of Low Graduation-Rate High Schools.” The three major factors, from which clues are extracted for understanding what practices to apply, are “patterns of geographic spread and concentration; state, district, and school characteristics; and socioeconomic, demographic, and political trends in the community.” That such effort has been applied to something so far off the mark is a symptom of the problem itself.

Studying correlations of external conditions with numbers of dropouts is nearly useless. If his peer group, or his mother, or his probation officer were such and such, or said this or that, what we really want to know is How did he respond?

If his probation officer was overheard saying, "I think he's on his way to a lifetime in prison," or his mother told him "No point in getting an education," or his peer group said "Hey, we got some really great stuff you'll like," the point isn't that we can correlate these messages with how many believe them and eventually lose their way. What's important is the difference between those and the others who say "All those people are screwed up. The guys in my class are screwed up. My mother is screwed up, and my probation officer is screwed up. I'm going to get my degree and get out of this sick place."

What's decisive isn't what happens to him or goes into him. What's decisive is how he personally responds. The implication of this is that we cease exploring among generalities and look at how we are guiding his particular response to external conditions.


http://www.docstoc.com/docs/10648603/The-High-Cost-of-High-School-Dropouts-What-the-Nation-Pays-for-Inadequate-High-Schools

Schools and scandal: Nothing Obama does is too dull to stoke the blogosphere’s outrage | Editorial | Chron.com - Houston Chronicle

Schools and scandal: Nothing Obama does is too dull to stoke the blogosphere’s outrage Editorial Chron.com - Houston Chronicle:

"Depending on which detractor you listen to, President Obama's planned speech to schoolkids this coming Tuesday is either “something you'd expect to see in North Korea or Saddam Hussein's Iraq” or an effort “to indoctrinate America's schoolchildren to his socialist agenda.”"

The speech's subject? It's a call to personal responsibility: Setting goals, staying in school, making good grades. Stuff that, if anyone else said it, would seem worthy and tedious, right up there with exhortations to cleanliness, politeness and flossing before bedtime.

But we're talking about Barack Obama. And to his dedicated opposition, nothing the president has ever done — starting with his birth — is too dull to inspire white-hot rhetoric. Next time he takes a deep breath, we expect to hear dark intimations that Mao and Hitler breathed, too.

Yes, the White House should have realized that in this super-heated climate, nothing is apolitical, and it should have done a better job vetting the optional lesson plans distributed to help teachers who choose to air the speech. The early version asked kids to write letters to themselves about what they can do to help the president achieve his goals. Someone should have noticed that “help the president” — even to achieve a goal as innocuous as improving kids' education — sounds entirely too political.

Boston school boss has bold new plans

Boston school boss has bold new plans:

"The district is launching Parent University, a leadership program to help parents work with their children on classwork and receive job support, including help with resumes.
The Shelburne Community Center in Roxbury will house a new “re-engagement center” where dropouts can get individualized help as they return to high school. Johnson wants to cut the drop-out rate by more than half, reducing it to 3 percent by 2012. Mayor Thomas M. Menino has faced criticism from other mayoral candidates over the city’s 7.2 percent rate.
“We know that it won’t be enough to say, ‘Go to your old high school,’ ” Johnson said. “We have to give them individual support.”

Some of the changes could encourage parents to remain in the city rather than opt for the suburbs or private schools, said Karen Daniels, executive director of Step UP, an organization founded by Menino that brings together five Boston universities and colleges to provide support to 10 underperforming Boston schools. The K-8 model and Montessori schools are more commonly found in the suburbs, she said."

Matthew Tully: Indianapolis Tests Out Education Reform - WSJ.com

Matthew Tully: Indianapolis Tests Out Education Reform - WSJ.com:

"But now, as the new school year begins, a confluence of events is making Indianapolis a test case for real reform. Reformers here have dared to introduce a modicum of school choice through charters and have tried to focus the system on the quality of instruction (not just dollars spent) through merit pay. Here, reformers are receiving a bipartisan assist from U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan, state and local policy leaders, and from a nonprofit organization that's filling the city with education entrepreneurs. The stars are aligned for reform, which means that if it doesn't happen now, and it doesn't happen here, it's hard to image how it could happen."

While Indianapolis teachers union President Ann Wilkins promises to fight any attack on seniority rules, Mr. Bennett agreed with Mr. White and told me, "The rules have to be challenged." He isn't alone in that belief. The New Teacher Project, a New York-based nonprofit that has studied Indianapolis Public Schools, recently surveyed district officials and found that 74% of teachers believe the district should consider more than seniority on key staffing decisions.

"That's big stuff," Daniel Weisberg, one the authors of The New Teacher Project's study, told me. It's also encouraging because it suggests support for education reform stretches from the White House to the statehouse to many of the classrooms in this city. That gives Indianapolis a rare moment to build a broad coalition for reform and enact substantial changes. But, Mr. Weisberg warned, the "window of opportunity is a small one." If reformers fail to capitalize on the moment, it will be lost. "Now is the time to think big," he said. "This is a once in a lifetime opportunity."

2,000 Washington State Students Report Signs of Swine Flu - NYTimes.com

2,000 Washington State Students Report Signs of Swine Flu - NYTimes.com:

"SEATTLE — At least 2,000 students at Washington State University have reported symptoms of the H1N1 flu virus, university and local health officials said, in what appeared to be one of the largest outbreaks of the virus on a college campus.

“It’s real,” Sally Redman, a registered nurse who works in student health services at Washington State, said Saturday. “We’ve had a constant stream of people.”

So far, the cases at the university have been relatively mild, although at least two people in the area who are not students were hospitalized. The university, based in Pullman, in eastern Washington near the Idaho border, has about 19,000 students at its main campus."

A Surge in Homeless Children Tests School Aid Programs - NYTimes.com

A Surge in Homeless Children Tests School Aid Programs - NYTimes.com:

"In the small trailer her family rented over the summer, 9-year-old Charity Crowell picked out the green and purple outfit she would wear on the first day of school. She vowed to try harder and bring her grades back up from the C’s she got last spring — a dismal semester when her parents lost their jobs and car and the family was evicted and migrated through friends’ houses and a motel."

Charity is one child in a national surge of homeless schoolchildren that is driven by relentless unemployment and foreclosures. The rise, to more than one million students without stable housing by last spring, has tested budget-battered school districts as they try to carry out their responsibilities — and the federal mandate — to salvage education for children whose lives are filled with insecurity and turmoil.

The instability can be ruinous to schooling, educators say, adding multiple moves and lost class time to the inherent distress of homelessness. And so in accord with federal law, the Buncombe County district, where Charity attends, provides special bus service to shelters, motels, doubled-up houses, trailer parks and RV campgrounds to help children stay in their familiar schools as the families move about.

State tells schools to teach Bible literacy but not how | News for Dallas, Texas | Dallas Morning News | Latest News

State tells schools to teach Bible literacy but not how News for Dallas, Texas Dallas Morning News Latest News:

"Vanda Terrell is still getting used to saying it.

'Let's open our Bibles,' the veteran Plano ISD teacher tells students daily at two public high schools in the district. And it's legal for her to do it. A new state law requires that Texas public schools incorporate Bible literacy into the curriculum."

But the law provides no specific guidelines, funding for materials or teacher training. So high schools are left scrambling to figure out what to teach and how to teach it. A handful of North Texas districts are offering an elective class, but most are choosing instead to embed Old and New Testament teachings into current classes.

Such broad parameters leave one of the most controversial topics in public schools virtually unregulated, say religious scholars and confused educators. They warn that the nebulous law may have thwarted its purpose – to examine the Bible's influence in history and literature.

"Asking a school district to teach a course or include material in a course without providing them any guidance or resources is like sending a teacher into a minefield without a map," said Mark Chancey, an associate professor of religious studies at Southern Methodist University and author of the report "Teaching the Bible in Texas Public Schools."