Wednesday, January 27, 2010

Obama's first State of the Union: What he will say vs. what he should say Los Angeles Times

Obama's first State of the Union: What he will say vs. what he should say

So tonight Barack Obama gives his first State of the Union address to a joint session of Congress before millions at home muttering back at their TV's and a predictably partisan audience of House and Senate members following or ignoring the signals of the woman up front, this time likely wearing power red, Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California.

We're predicting the administration's dresser goes with a blue tie tonight for VP Joe Biden, leaving the bolder red to his boss.

Pelosi will be sitting behind the president's left shoulder and, according to her past practice, will be jumping up and sitting down like a set of pistons at 5,000 RPM's applauding enthusiastically, with Biden following suit but more slowly because he's seen so many of these shows since 1972 when Obama was only 11.

State of the Union speeches are democratic rituals and grand political theater that end up meaning very little. A Gallup study shows the 50 minutes or so of presidential palaver (yes, we'll be....

...live-blogging it here and will have the full transcript as always, plus the ensuing Republican response by Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell) rarely have any detectable or lasting effect on public opinion.

Only Bill Clinton among modern chief executives enjoyed a poll bounce of a modest 3% average and short duration, despite all the contemporary attention focused on the remarks and the frequent interruptions for (Applause).

Daily 49er - Oil tax to support CSU currently off the table

The Assembly Appropriations Committee took action against Assembly Bill 656 on Thursday, halting the bill for this legislative cycle.

Introduced last February, Assembly Bill 656 was created by Assembly Majority Leader Alberto Torrico, D-Fremont, to fuel California’s education system by placing a 12.5 percent severance tax on oil and gas produced within California and creating a California higher education fund.

The committee removed the tax portion of the bill allocated for the University of California, California State University and California Community Colleges systems. It was replaced with an amendment requiring that the state board of equalization report annually to the Legislature the amount of revenue that would have been generated if the oil and gas tax had been implemented.

According to the California Faculty Association, which represents CSU faculty, the bill’s potential costs to the state general fund, as well as the inability to collect a two-thirds vote required for Assembly passage — only possible with the support of Assembly Republicans — directly led to the amendment.

Opinion: Race to the Top -- President Obama's Quiet Education Revolution - AOL News

Opinion: Race to the Top -- President Obama's Quiet Education Revolution - AOL News:

"(Jan. 26) – A week ago, President Obama announced that he is planning to spend $4.4 billion on his Race to the Top education program. If you missed the news, don't kick yourself. Obama's entire education reform plan had been largely overshadowed by the yearlong health care debate, the economy, Afghanistan and other big-ticket news items.

It's unfortunate, since this may be the most impressive reform his administration has accomplished in the past year.

Obama announced Race to the Top in July. The program awards grant money to states on a competitive basis, based on their implementing education reforms that include assessment standards, turning around worst-performing schools, and recruiting and rewarding quality teachers.

Education Secretary Arne Duncan has met with education leaders throughout the country, working tirelessly to get state education leaders and providers, legislators, reform groups, unions and others to support reforms that will bring true accountability and competition to our nation's public school systems."

Report Calls Governor's Proposed Amendment 'Ill-Conceived' - The Daily Californian

A proposed constitutional amendment hailed as a first step toward a renewed state commitment to higher education is out of step with California's fiscal realities, according to a Legislative Analyst's Office report.

The report urges the California Legislature to reject a proposed constitutional amendment guaranteeing 10 percent of the state's budget for higher education, calling it an "unnecessary, ill-conceived measure that would do serious harm to the budget process."

The office, which provides nonpartisan fiscal and policy advice for the Legislature, questions the necessity of a constitutional amendment. According to the report, the state already has ample authority to increase funding for higher education and a constitutional guarantee would only tie the Legislature's hands.

"Locking up a tenth of the state budget on UC and CSU, in combination with similar funding guarantees already in place, would constrain spending choices for over half of the budget," the report reads. "This could make it more difficult for the legislature to shift funding to cover new cost demands in other areas that may be a legislative priority, such as social services, health care, the judiciary or infrastructure."

Primary-grade classes of 20-to-1 on the chopping block - San Jose Mercury News

When San Jose Unified took the unpopular step of increasing K-3 class sizes to 30 for this school year, it had little company in abandoning one of California's most cherished education reforms.

Now, faced with cutting budgets yet again, districts throughout Santa Clara County are targeting once fiercely protected student-teacher ratios of 20:1 in kindergarten to third grade. The Oak Grove School District in San Jose plans to go to 23 students next year, Campbell has targeted 24, Alum Rock and Mountain View are considering 25.

And in the Cupertino Union School District, classes may balloon to 30 students in the fall, outraging parents in a community proud of its schools and high test scores.

The mass move toward bigger classes illustrates the depth of the state's school funding crisis.

Cal State aims to boost graduation rates - latimes.com

Cal State aims to boost graduation rates - latimes.com:

"Despite budget cuts, the system intends to get more students degrees, and faster. One way would be to reduce general education requirements, which not everyone thinks is a good idea"

California State University is embarking on an ambitious initiative to raise its graduation rates and help more low-income and minority students earn degrees, even as it faces perhaps the grimmest budget outlook in its history.

The university is setting a goal of boosting its six-year graduation rate by 8% by 2016, bringing it to 54%, in line with the top national averages at similar institutions. University leaders say they hope to raise graduation rates for underrepresented minority students by 10%, cutting in half what has been a thorny achievement gap in degree completion compared with white students.

The university is scheduled to unveil the initiative today at a meeting of its Board of Trustees in Long Beach. The plan is part of a nationwide project by a consortium of public university leaders, the National Assn. of System Heads and the Education Trust, a nonprofit advocacy group.

Cal State University Chancellor Charles B. Reed, who is also president of the system heads group, previewed the initiative for U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan last week.

Cal State is the nation's largest university system, with 450,000 students and about 90,000 graduates each year. The goal of the new project is to increase the number of graduates by 7,000 or 8,000 students annually.

Schwarzenegger launches second phase of free digital textbook initiative

Schwarzenegger launches second phase of free digital textbook initiative:

"LOS ANGELES, Jan. 26 (Xinhua) -- To promote education and provide as many resources as possible to teachers in the classroom, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger on Tuesday launched the second phase of his first-in-the-nation free digital textbook initiative.

'Resources like digital textbooks play a critical role in our 21st century educational landscape, and expanding my first-in-the-nation initiative will provide local school districts additional high-quality free resources to help prepare California's students to compete in the global marketplace,' Schwarzenegger said.

The second phase, he added, calls on content developers to submit high school history/social science and higher-level math course textbooks for review against California's academic content standards."

Governor's constitutional amendment idea hit

Governor's constitutional amendment idea hit:

"A proposal by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to require the state to spend more on higher education than on prisons 'is an unnecessary, ill-conceived measure that would do serious harm to the budget process,' says a new study by the state's independent legislative analyst."

The amendment to the state Constitution would prohibit spending more than 7 percent of the general fund on prisons beginning in 2014, while requiring at least 10 percent go to the University of California and the California State University.
Current spending has that in reverse. Nearly 10 percent, or about $8 billion, of the general fund goes to the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.
By contrast, nearly 6 percent, about $5 billion, goes to UC and CSU, according to the study released Tuesday.
Schwarzenegger denounced that trend earlier this month in his State of the State speech, to the applause of UC and CSU leadership.

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/01/26/BASC1BNR8J.DTL#ixzz0dolSR0bq

Schwarzenegger’s Novel Spending Cut: Send Inmates South - Washington Wire - WSJ

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger says he has a novel way of cutting California’s budget: Ship all the state’s inmates who are illegal immigrants to prisons in Mexico.

But is he really serious? A spokesman says that wasn’t a formal proposal, just an idea of “a creative solution” Schwarzenegger thinks is needed to help curb state spending.

Schwarzenegger was asked by a reporter at a Sacramento Press Club appearance Monday for some examples of reckless state spending he would like to curtail. The Governator’s snap response: send the 20,000 illegal immigrants currently behind bars in state prisons south of the border, for a savings of an estimated $1 billion.

“Think about it,” Schwarzenegger said. “California give Mexico the money… We pay them to build a prison down in Mexico and then we have those undocumented immigrants be down there in a prison and with their prison guards and all this. It will halve the costs to build the prisons and halve the costs to run the prisons. That is money — again, a billion dollars right there — that can go into higher education.”

Quick Takes: California Budget Idea -- Praised by Higher Ed -- Criticized - Inside Higher Ed

Quick Takes: California Budget Idea -- Praised by Higher Ed -- Criticized - Inside Higher Ed:

"California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger pleased higher education leaders this month by proposing that the state's Constitution be amended to ensure that the state's two major public university systems receive no less than 10 percent of the state's operating funds each year, with the additional funds coming from cuts in spending on prisons. Now the plan is getting tough criticism from the nonpartisan Legislative Analyst's Office. A new report from the office says that the plan 'would unwisely constrain the state’s ability to allocate funding where it is most needed each year.' The office doesn't come out against the idea of more higher education spending but notes that 'the state already has the ability to shift funding among programs without this constitutional amendment.' The University of California issued a statement denouncing the legislative analysis as 'a business-as-usual approach,' adding that 'the road to economic recovery and a brighter future for California runs straight through its great public universities, and Californians can't stand by and let them wither for lack of adequate support from the state they serve.'"

Parent Power | Bill Boyarsky | Jewish Journal

Parent Power | Bill Boyarsky | Jewish Journal

“Raw power, an unabashed transfer of political power to parents.”
That’s how Ben Austin describes Parent Revolution, the organization he founded and heads up, which aims to shake up Los Angeles’ public schools. It aims to remove the administration and faculty from low performing schools, and, if the parents desire, convert them to charter schools, which are independently operated, without strong unions, and financed by LAUSD.

Austin is a parent whose daughter will enter the Los Angeles public school system after she graduates from Temple Israel of Hollywood’s preschool. He has served as a political aide in the Clinton White House and in Richard Riordan’s City Hall. Public education reform is one of Riordan’s big interests, and after Austin left city hall in 2001, he continued to work on his old boss’ issue, independently and with Riordan and others interested in education. In fact, Austin planned to run for the school board in the Westside district in 2008, but had to drop out after a campaign assistant fouled up gathering the signatures needed to get him on the ballot.

A few months later, with backing from the private nonprofit foundations of arts and education philanthropist Eli Broad and Casey Wasserman (a philanthropist and the grandson of entertainment scion Lew Wasserman) and others, Austin and a few other parents created Parent Revolution, for which he serves as executive director. He also is a part-time prosecutor in the city attorney’s office. Parent Revolution, which now has an annual budget of about $500,000, began by organizing parents of students at Garfield High School in East Los Angeles and Mark Twain Middle School in the Mar Vista-Venice area. It plans to move on to other schools.

“We represented half of the parents in the enrollment boundaries,” he said. “After that, more parents came to us.” Then they sought help from L.A. Mayor Villaraigosa and allies on the school board. Last spring, members of the group met downtown and went to the school district headquarters. The result of this activity was a plan, presented by the mayor in 2009, which called for 250 school campuses, including some new ones, to be turned into charter organizations or other nonprofit groups. The teachers union, United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA), opposes the idea. But in a surprising defeat for the usually powerful union, the school board adopted the plan. Last month the teachers union filed suit to block its implementation.

Tuesday, January 26, 2010

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger "Folsom Prison Blues"

Brouhaha in Brooklyn: Live-blogging the PEP’s school closure vote | GothamSchools

Brouhaha in Brooklyn: Live-blogging the PEP’s school closure vote

by Philissa Cramer

Tonight’s school closure vote is underway in Brooklyn. Anna and Maura are on the scene and will be providing dispatches until the meeting’s bitter end.

12:45 a.m. I’m just going to go ahead and say it: Don’t expect Remainders tonight.

12:40 a.m. Just a reminder that there are a number of items on the PEP’s agenda that don’t involve school closures. One of those is the space plan for PS 15 and PAVE Academy in Red Hook. Julie Cavanagh, the PS 15 teacher who tried to win the right to picket outside Mayor Bloomberg’s house last week, explained why she’s still out on a school night: “I am going to make them look me in the eye when they vote.”

It may take a lawsuit to preserve schools

It may take a lawsuit to preserve schools:

"On Tuesday night at the San Francisco Board of Education meeting my administration brought forward a preliminary budget proposal that encompassed the next two fiscal years and contains cuts of a magnitude never seen in California public education to date. To say it is a bleak outlook would grossly underestimate the size of the tsunami that is about to hit not only San Francisco's schools but the entire state education system. Yes, these cuts will be greater than those imposed after Prop. 13 and even greater than those experienced during the Great Depression."

To provide some perspective, here simply is our situation: SFUSD has an unrestricted general fund budget of approximately $400 million. Due to the actions taken in Sacramento over the last 18 months, our projected deficit over the next two years will total $113 million, or $1,365 less per student. This means we will be getting $4,977 per student instead of $6,342 per student. So we face 21 percent less for teachers and counselors, for books and math texts, for computers and art classes, and for field trips and science labs.

Sacramento has presented us with this problem and no new math can help us. School districts throughout the state are required by law to make the numbers work or face being put under state receivership. California school districts have been fiscally prudent; this is not a problem created by educators. We've tried to do more with less in a state whose dwindling commitment to education has gotten so bad that by next year we will rank dead last in the country for how much we spend per pupil. How is it possible that the eighth richest economy in the world can have the lowest per-pupil expenditure in the

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/01/26/ED9H1BNOE4.DTL#ixzz0dmZJzWXm

President Obama to Propose Freezing Spending on Some Programs - Politics K-12 - Education Week

President Barack Obama's fiscal year 2011 budget will propose freezing some $447 billion in discretionary programs. The change will save about $15 billion next year (or to put in perspective, a little more than the federal government spent on Title I grants to districts last year).

The freeze doesn't apply, apparently, to military and veterans programs, as well as programs such as Social Security. And it likely would not apply to programs covered under the health-care-overhaul bill, the future of which is pretty uncertain. And it won't apply to any spending put into a "jobs bill," such as the $154 billion measure the House approved late last year, which included some substantial education spending.

It's not clear yet whether, and which, K-12 education programs will be subject to the freeze, since it is for overall spending levels not individual programs. (We know that at least one program, the $4 billion Race to the Top competition, will be slated for an increase of $1.35 billion and opened up to school districts).

But it certainly sounds as if programs such as Title I grants to districts and special education, or smaller Education Department programs, such as TRIO, could be in the mix for cuts or freezes. And if they see even a small increase when everything else is level-funded, that will be a big deal, symbolically.

But, at the same time, symbolism may not mean much to cash-strapped districts, which are still making program and staff cuts despite the $100 billion in

Eduflack: The NYC HIgh School Improvement Experience

Whenever Eduflack writes about the "successes" of New York City's school improvement efforts under Chancellor Joel Klein, I get publicly flogged by some audience or another. Most take significant issue with my conclusions that NYC Department of Education has improved the quality of the public schools. Others take issue with giving Klein (and NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg) credit for such school improvement. And even if I can get the opposition to acknowledge an uptick in student achievement in NYC, they will immediately retort that the gains are minimal, and not nearly enough to declare turnaround efforts in New York a success.

My responses to such criticism have been relatively simple. The test scores, at least on New York's state exams, do show gains in both reading and math in NYC. If you don't believe the final tallies coming from Albany, you should at least acknowledge that NYC has won the Broad Prize, and that Broad similarly crunched the numbers and found academic gains across the city. And if the gains aren't big enough for you yet, first, give it time. Then remember how large the NYCDOE truly is. Upticks in a system that size are worthy of praise.

Always a glutton for punishment, Eduflack is going to raise the NYC achievement flag again. Today, we're going to reflect on a forum hosted yesterday by the Alliance for Excellent Education. Offering a multi-hour symposium yesterday under the banner of "Informing Federal Education Policy Through Lessons from New York City," the Alliance also put a spotlight on a new report it has released, "New York City's Strategy for Improving High Schools."

Villegas to resign from Southwest ISD

Villegas to resign from Southwest ISD:

"The Southwest Independent School District will soon be looking for a new chief after Superintendent Velma Villegas announced her retirement, effective June 30, during a Jan.18 school board meeting.

“This decision is one that has mixed emotions for me because I have come to love the Southwest community and my work as your superintendent,” she said in a letter to the board.

Villegas said she plans to spend more time with her family and do some consulting work, including helping Texas A&M-San Antonio develop its teacher preparation program.

A Texas native, Villegas has led the district since 2005. She previously was an assistant superintendent in Spring Branch ISD near Houston."

Daily Media Use Among Children and Teens Up Dramatically From Five Years Ago - Kaiser Family Foundation

DAILY MEDIA USE AMONG CHILDREN AND TEENS UP DRAMATICALLY FROM FIVE YEARS AGO

Big Increase in Mobile Media Helps Drive Increased Consumption

Most Youth Say They Have No Rules About How Much Time They Can Spend With TV, Video Games, or Computers

WASHINGTON, D.C. – With technology allowing nearly 24-hour media access as children and teens go about their daily lives, the amount of time young people spend with entertainment media has risen dramatically, especially among minority youth, according to a study released today by the Kaiser Family Foundation. Today, 8-18 year-olds devote an average of 7 hours and 38 minutes (7:38) to using entertainment media across a typical day (more than 53 hours a week). And because they spend so much of that time ‘media multitasking’ (using more than one medium at a time), they actually manage to pack a total of 10 hours and 45 minutes (10:45) worth of media content into those 7½ hours.

The amount of time spent with media increased by an hour and seventeen minutes a day over the past five years, from 6:21 in 2004 to 7:38 today.  And because of media multitasking, the total amount of media content consumed during that period has increased from 8:33 in 2004 to 10:45 today.
Generation M²: Media in the Lives of 8- to 18-Year-Olds is the third in a series of large-scale, nationally representative surveys by the Foundation about young people’s media use.  It includes data from all three waves of the study (1999, 2004, and 2009), and is among the largest and most comprehensive publicly available sources of information about media use among American youth.
Mobile media driving increased consumption.  The increase in media use is driven in large part by ready access to mobile devices like cell phones and iPods. Over the past five years, there has been a huge increase in ownership among 8- to 18-year-olds: from 39% to 66% for cell phones, and from 18% to 76% for iPods and other MP3 players.  During this period, cell phones and iPods have become true multi-media devices: in fact, young people now spend more time listening to music, playing games, and watching TV on their cell phones (a total of :49 daily) than they spend talking on them (:33).
Parents and media rules.  Only about three in ten young people say they have rules about how much time they can spend watching TV (28%) or playing video games (30%), and 36% say the same about using the computer.  But when parents do set limits, children spend less time with media: those with any media rules consume nearly 3 hours less media per day (2:52) than those with no rules.
Media in the home.  About two-thirds (64%) of young people say the TV is usually on during meals, and just under half (45%) say the TV is left on “most of the time” in their home, even if no one is watching.  Seven in ten (71%) have a TV in their bedroom, and half (50%) have a console video game player in their room. Again, children in these TV-centric homes spend far more time watching: 1:30 more a day in homes where the TV is left on most of the time, and an hour more among those with a TV in their room.

“The amount of time young people spend with media has grown to where it’s even more than a full-time work week,” said Drew Altman, Ph.D., President and CEO of the Kaiser Family Foundation.  “When children are spending this much time doing anything, we need to understand how it’s affecting them – for good and bad.”Heavy media users report getting lower grades.  While the study cannot establish a cause and effect relationship between media use and grades, there are differences between heavy and light media users in this regard.  About half (47%) of heavy media users say they usually get fair or poor grades (mostly Cs or lower), compared to about a quarter (23%) of light users.  These differences may or may not be influenced by their media use patterns. (Heavy users are the 21% of young people who consume more than 16 hours of media a day, and light users are the 17% of young people who consume less than 3 hours of media a day.)

Black and Hispanic children spend far more time with media than White children do. There are substantial differences in children’s media use between members of various ethnic and racial groups.  Black and Hispanic children consume nearly 4½ hours more media daily (13:00 of total media exposure for Hispanics, 12:59 for Blacks, and 8:36 for Whites).  Some of the largest differences are in TV viewing: Black children spend nearly 6 hours and Hispanics just under 5½ hours, compared to roughly 3½ hours a day for White youth.  The only medium where there is no significant difference between these three groups is print.  Differences by race/ethnicity remain even after controlling for other factors such as age, parents’ education, and single vs. two-parent homes.  The racial disparity in media use has grown substantially over the past five years: for example, the gap between White and Black youth was just over two hours (2:12) in 2004, and has grown to more than four hours today (4:23).
Big changes in TV. For the first time over the course of the study, the amount of time spent watching regularly-scheduled TV declined, by 25 minutes a day (from 2004 to 2009).  But the many new ways to watch TV–on the Internet, cell phones, and iPods–actually led to an increase in total TV consumption from 3:51 to 4:29 per day, including :24 of online viewing, :16 on iPods and other MP3 players, and :15 on cell phones.  All told, 59% (2:39) of young people’s TV-viewing consists of live TV on a TV set, and 41% (1:50) is time-shifted, DVDs, online, or mobile.

Effective Teaching Campaign grades contract | Philadelphia Public School Notebook

The Effective Teaching for Every Childcampaign gave the new teachers' contract mostly high marks in a report card, but said that it does not provide enough incentives to recruit and keep teachers in hard-to-staff schools.

While progress was made in site selection, teacher standards and evaluations, and tailoring professional development to the needs of specific schools, "we also see a larger missed opportunity," said Lauren Jacobs of the Cross City Campaign for School Reform, a coordinator of the campaign. More should have been done to make these schools more attractive places to work, she said.

At a rally and press conference in front of School District headquarters, about 60 students, parents and teachers gathered to express their opinion on the contract. To express their mixed feelings, they chanted, "Way to go, more to go."

The campaign is urgently concerned about distributing effective and experienced equitably across the system and creating stable staffs at the neediest schools. It gave the contract a D on incentives because:

Do you keep pushing when others can’t (or won’t) ’see’ your vision? � EducationCEO's Blog

Do you keep pushing when others can’t (or won’t) ’see’ your vision? EducationCEO's Blog

Approximately 1.5 years ago our organization, Millennium Scholars Academy (MSA), submitted a charter petition to the Gwinnett County Board of Education. We proposed to open the first K-12 Visual and Performing Arts (tuition-free) charter school in the county. At the time that we submitted our petition, we had enrollment commitments for 160 students, ranging from grades K-9; we even had parents whose children were not school-age who asked us to consider adding a Pre-K program!
The board denied our petition, citing several reasons, including the following: (1) looping/multi-year classrooms were already being implemented in schools throughout the county; (2) our plans for the arts program was too extensive to do during the traditional school day (Kennedy Center Arts Edge Standards); and (3) Understanding by Design was not research based. As required by the state, I responded to the board’s deficiencies. I even went so far as to imply that looping implementation must be based on the zip code of the

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Wednesday, January 27, 2010