Tuesday, June 15, 2010

Sacramento City schools, teachers union reach deal - Sacramento News - Local and Breaking Sacramento News | Sacramento Bee

Sacramento City schools, teachers union reach deal

By Melody Gutierrez
mgutierrez@sacbee.com

Published: Tuesday, Jun. 15, 2010 - 12:00 am | Page 1B

A stalemate between the Sacramento City Unified School District and its teachers union ended Monday after officials signed an agreement with considerable concessions by the Sacramento City Teachers Association.

The givebacks include pay cuts over two years, changes in health benefit payments, increasing how many years employees must work before becoming vested, and giving the district more flexibility over the calendar.

The two-year agreement ends months of contentious negotiations, which had appeared to be deadlocked until the last two weeks. SCTA members will vote this week on whether to accept the agreement before it moves on to the school board for approval.

SCTA President Linda Tuttle said the union decided to give because it had "real concerns that schools stay open."

SCTA, known for its hard-line tactics, becomes the latest teachers union to offer concessions to cash-starved school districts. Earlier this month, Elk Grove Unified teachers overwhelmingly

Human-animal bond draws UC Davis students into veterinary medicine

By Hudson Sangree - Published: 11:36 am

Jessica McAfee remembers one case in particular among the many she saw in the past year. Her patient was a young Labrador retriever that was dying of kidney disease and suddenly had gone blind.

Year-round schools return to traditional schedule in Sacramento area

By Diana Lambert - Updated: Sunday, June 13 2010 - 4:00 pm

You've heard the debate for years: Year-round school vs. a traditional calendar with that nice long summer vacation built in – which is better for learning? How about for families?

Grant High program uses sports references to teach basics

By Melody Gutierrez - Updated: Saturday, June 12 2010 - 9:03 pm

Students in the Sports Health Academy at Grant High School are learning that they don't have to be a professional athlete in order to have a sports career.

Sacramento city schools, teachers may announce contract deal Monday

By Melody Gutierrez - Published: Saturday, June 12 2010 - 12:00 am

The Sacramento City Unified School District and the Sacramento City Teachers Association are expected to announce a two-year agreement Monday that preserves class sizes and saves pink-slipped teachers and counselors.

Jesuit High School president to step down

Published: Saturday, June 12 2010 - 12:00 am

The president of Jesuit High School informed board members and parents Thursday he will step down as head of the all-boys Catholic high school next year.

New York Charter Schools Attract Few Hispanics - NYTimes.com

New York Charter Schools Lag in Enrolling Hispanics

By JENNIFER MEDINA and ROBERT GEBELOFF

Librado Romero/The New York Times

Second graders at the Carl C. Icahn Charter School 1 in the Bronx.

Although Hispanics are the largest demographic group in the city’s public schools, there are almost twice as many blacks among the 30,000 charter school students.

Interactive Map: Comparing Schools

More Employers to Require Some College, Report Says

By JACQUES STEINBERG

Jobs requiring at least a two-year associate’s degree will outpace the number of qualified applicants by at least three million in 2018, according to a report set to be released on Tuesday.

Frank W. Ballard, Who Trained Puppeteers at UConn, Dies at 80

By MARGALIT FOX

Mr. Ballard helped introduce puppetry to the university curriculum.

Mike Klonsky's SmallTalk Blog: Exactly how many shares of BP does the Gates Fund really own?

Exactly how many shares of BP does the Gates Fund really own?

by Mike Klonsky

H/t to commenter David C. for telling me that I badly understated the BP stock holdings of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation which I reported first as 4 million

Bloomberg's N.Y. charters still excluding Latino & ELL students

by Mike Klonsky

Tuesday's New York Times reports that Bloomberg's privately-managed charter schools in N.Y. greatly under-enroll Latino and Spanish-speaking immigrant students.

Charter schools have proportionately fewer Hispanic students — as well as fewer students learning English, regardless of their ethnicity — than nearby schools, including schools that share the same building.

That's not big news. The news is that the equity gap between charters and

LA charter school operators face embezzlement charges | California Watch

LA charter school operators face embezzlement charges

by Corey G. Johnson

Corey G. Johnson

Los Angeles prosecutors have accused the Russian operators of a successful San Fernando Valley charter school with stealing more than $200,000 in taxpayer funds.
On Thursday, Ivy Academia's Eugene Selivanov, 38, and his wife, Tatyana Berkovich, 33, were charged with committing multiple counts of embezzlement, money laundering and filing false tax returns at the school from 2004 to 2009.
Ivy Academia serves roughly 1,100 students from preschool to 12th grade. The charter was started in 2004 by Berkovich and Selivanov.
The investigation by the Los Angeles County district attorney's office was triggered by the findings of a 2007 audit by LA Unified School District's Office of the Inspector General.
That audit found numerous instances where Selivanov transferred public funds from the charter to private businesses he and Berkovich controlled. The transactions were allegedly done online and were never recorded in

Harman, others in Congress hold stock in companies they oversee

by Chase Davis

Chase Davis

Members of California's congressional delegation have invested millions of dollars in companies that their congressional committees oversee, according to a Washington Post story that dropped yesterday.
The story specifically calls out Rep. Jane Harman, the California Democrat who is among Congress' most wealthy representatives:

Rep. Jane Harman (D-Calif.), for instance, served as chairman of a subcommittee responsible for overseeing technology-oriented efforts to improve homeland security, intelligence, information sharing and risk assessment in 2008. At the time, she disclosed more than $1 million in holding

Monday, June 14, 2010

Kyron Horman's disappearance casts pall on last day of classes at Skyline School | OregonLive.com

Kyron Horman's disappearance casts pall on last day of classes at Skyline School

Published: Monday, June 14, 2010, 8:25 PM Updated: Monday, June 14, 2010, 9:01 PM

Kate Mather, The Oregonian
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Torsten Kjellstrand/The OregonianCapt. Jason Gates of the Multnomah County Sheriff's Office addresses reporters Monday in what he called the last regularly scheduled news conference on the disappearance of Kyron Horman.

Classes end Tuesday at Skyline School with one second-grader noticeably absent from his desk in an otherwise cheerful light-blue room.

Kyron Horman's disappearance cast a pall over the final days of school as searchers crawled over the surrounding hillsides and roads looking for the missing 7-year–old with no success.

"Kids are being kids and laughing, but there's definitely a cloud over the school right now," said Portland schools spokesman Matt Shelby. "They're definitely concerned for Kyron and his family."

Authorities are now investigating the boy's disappearance as a criminal case and sent divers on Monday to Sauvie Island, where they were seen wading in waist-high water off the banks of the Multnomah Channel north of the island bridge. Others waded through a steep-sided ditch nearby.

The mystery of what happened to Kyron has captured national attention, though the investigation has centered on the immediate area around the small K-8 school in the rural northwest corner of Multnomah County.

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Kyron vanished from Skyline after showing off his science project on June 4. His stepmother snapped a photo of the boy in front of his project -- a picture now posted on store windows and bulletin boards throughout the region.

Shelby said Skyline is taking steps to provide support to their 300 students once school is out. Immediately after Kyron went missing, the school established a safe room filled with counselors.

"They've seen some different waves of kids coming in," Shelby said. "At the beginning of last week it was mostly younger students who didn't understand why Kyron wasn't in class, but toward the end of the week some of the middle school kids who didn't really know Kyron were having a hard time figuring out what they were feeling."

The services will be available to students throughout summer.

"We don't do this very often," Shelby said. "We have counselors that work with our students for a variety of things, but to have a missing classmate for this amount of time is pretty unprecedented for our folks. We don't know how it's going to play out

“A Missed Opportunity By Secretary Duncan…” | Larry Ferlazzo's Websites of the Day...

“A Missed Opportunity By Secretary Duncan…”

by Larry Ferlazzo

“A Missed Opportunity By Secretary Duncan…” is the title of a new post at my other blog, Engaging Parents In School.
It’s my commentary on a speech he gave over the weekend at the National PTA Convention in Memphis, including what I wished he had said, instead.

“Children living in areas where homicides committed have lower reading, verbal test scores” — Ya’ Think?

by Larry Ferlazzo

Blog U.: The Year-Later Evaluation - Confessions of a Community College Dean - Inside Higher Ed

The Year-Later Evaluation
By Dean Dad June 14, 2010 9:42 pm

Several alert readers sent me this piece from the Washington Post. It glosses a study conducted at the Air Force Academy that finds that
Professors rated highly by their students tended to yield better results for students in their own classes, but the same students did worse in subsequent classes. The implication: highly rated professors actually taught students less, on average, than less popular profs. Meanwhile, professors with higher academic rank, teaching experience and educational experience -- what you might call "input measures" for performance -- showed the reverse trend. Their students tended to do worse in that professor's course, but better in subsequent courses. Presumably, they were learning more.
The piece goes on to suggest that student evaluations are not to be trusted, because they reward entertainment, attractiveness, and/or easy grading. Instead, administrators should shuck their slavish dependence on shallow popularity measures and defer to faculty rank.
The argument collapses upon close examination, of course. If student evaluations had the implied effect, then these tougher and more effective teachers would never have had the opportunity to gain more experience, let alone get promoted to higher rank. The stronger performance of the senior group actually suggests that administrators are doing a pretty good job of separating the wheat from the chaff at promotion time (and of taking student evaluations with the requisite grains of salt). But never mind that.
- Mothering at Mid-Career: Summer Jobs
  By Libby Gruner June 14, 2010 9:28 pm
  
  The summer after my junior year of high school I got a summer job in a resort town in Maine. It wasn’t my first summer job — I’d worked previously as a day camp counselor and a babysitter — but it was my first summer job away from home. The job wasn’t glamorous: I worked four hours a day cleaning a restaurant. My brother got me the job; he was doing outside work at the same resort, and when their regular cleaner hurt her ankle he mentioned that he had a sister sitting at home with no job. A few days later I was on my way.
  Four hours a day didn’t keep me very busy, but I soon picked up another job as well, scooping ice cream. I happened into that job serendipitously, too: one hot day I was riding my bike around town and stopped into a hardware store to cool off in the air conditioning. The owner came by to see what I was up to, and when I confessed that I had just come in out of the heat he said I should buy something. “I would if I could afford to,” I said. It then came out that his

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Tuesday, June 15, 2010