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That's why Fight Crime: Invest in Kids, California - an organization made up of hundreds of police chiefs, sheriffs, district attorneys and violence survivors - supports Senate Bill 1357 by Sens. Darrell Steinberg, D-Sacramento, and Elaine Alquist, D-San Jose. Their legislation, approved Thursday and sent to the governor, would help California schools identify students most at risk of dropping out at school while there's still time to steer them right.
"An early warning system," San Bernardino County District Attorney Michael A. Ramos calls it. He is among the 400-plus members of Fight Crimes: Invest in Kids, California, as are Sheriff Rod Hoops, San Bernardino Police
STOCKTON - They come from all walks of life for little or no pay and usually with no experience at running organizations that handle hundreds of millions of dollars and affect the futures of society's most precious natural resources.
When a school board is operating well, all those involved - parents, students and staff - are able to focus on the core goal of maximum academic achievement.
But when a school board falters, the troubling results can range from academic woes to ill-advised selections of superintendents to athletic scandals.
• Remember that your job is to set policy, not to carry it out.
• Have one foot in the now and one foot in the future.
• Build on programs that are working.
• Support risk-taking and innovation.
• Ensure that there are opportunities for stakeholder perspectives to be incorporated into the district's beliefs and vision.
• Provide support while the superintendent and staff develop and implement action plans to accomplish the district's goals.
• Evaluate the superintendent based on progress on goals.
— Source: California School Boards Association
And children pay the biggest price.
"Having a well-functioning board can make all the difference in the world for a school district," said Deputy Superintendent Gary Dei Rossi of the San Joaquin County Office of Education.
With this in mind, the county office joined forces with the San Joaquin Business Council and University of the Pacific to arrange two training sessions to help prepare current and prospective school trustees for their complicated and crucial job.
The opening three-hour session was five nights ago at Pacific's Janet Leigh Theatre.
The second session is 6 to 9 p.m. Monday at the same site. The focus in the second training session will be on student achievement and on building strong relationships with the community.
The topic at the opening gathering was different - a discussion of the separation of board and superintendent duties. Sixty-five people attended, including current and prospective board members. Twenty-eight of the county's 81 seats on education boards will be contested in the November election.
California needs a better method of evaluating teachers than infrequent, pre-announced classroom visits by school principals. School districts should provide more comprehensive and valuable teacher assessments by including student test scores, as well as less objective measurements, in that process.
News reports this month that analyzed test scores to grade teachers in Los Angeles put the issue directly in the public spotlight. Not surprisingly, some teachers excelled while others lagged.
More troubling than the results of that analysis, however, was the revelation that the Los Angeles Unified School District had the same information, but did not use it in evaluating teachers. Superintendent Ramon Cortines said last week the district would develop a method for incorporating test scores into teacher assessments, though the teachers union would have to agree to any such approach.
But there is no good reason to exclude testing data from teacher evaluations.
The three-day series takes an in-depth look at education in Santa Cruz County in a time of unprecedented financial hardship |About the series
WATSONVILLE
During the next three years, Calabasas Elementary School will get $2 million in federal money to improve student achievement.
The extra money will pay for three additional teachers to boost the literacy skills of struggling students and to organize and train parents to help out at school and with their children's assignments at home.
Principal Terry Eastman also will pay classroom teachers to work longer so they can help colleagues in an after-school program reinforce lessons taught earlier in the day. There's also money to provide teachers with training and coaching.
"I'm thrilled," Eastman said after the grant was announced Wednesday. "This is going to help us a lot."
But Calabasas, which was eligible for the grant because in March
Our formula is as simple as it is sweeping: The federal government has no constitutional authority to be involved in school curricula or to control jobs in the workplace. That is why we will abolish the Department of Education and end federal meddling in our schools..."
— The Republican platform, 2000.
Yes, times do change. Last week it was mainly Republicans and conservative organizations that were lambasting Maine's failure to obtain federal Race to the Top funding for the state.
It's hard to imagine a more meddlesome, top-down, heavy-handed government program than this one.
The Department of Education dangles the usual carrot — money — and the states, badly in need of money, must comply with detailed guidelines to obtain it.
In the midst of a controversial LA Times series linking teacher performance in that district to test scores, a new briefing paper was released today by the Economic Policy Institute cautioning against the use of test scores, the Value Added Model, to judge teacher performance.
The 27-page paper — by a blue ribbon collection of educaion researchers including Eva L. Baker, Paul E. Barton, Linda Darling-Hammond, Edward Haertel, Helen F. Ladd , Robe rt L. Linn, Diane Ravitch, Richard Rothstein, Richard J. Shavelson, and Lorrie A. Shepard - lists many negative impacts from judging teachers largely on student test scores. They also point to studies that cite the unreliability of scores.
My first response to this paper is wonder if there is any school system with the time, resources or staffing to conduct the thoughtful and deeper evaluations that these researchers recommend. The comprehensive evaluation model they suggest could be applied in many professions, except that it calls for resources and time that I don’t think too many companies have any longer. And I certainly don’t think schools do in this current bleak climate that will likely persist for a few more years.
Here are key passages, but please read the entire paper. I think many of you will be applauding
About 6,000 Los Angeles elementary school teachers and 470 elementary schools are included in The Times' database of "value-added" ratings.
Third-, fourth- and fifth-grade teachers who taught at least 60 students from the 2002-03 through 2008-09 academic years were evaluated in the Times analysis. Most of Los Angeles Unified School District's elementary schools are included. Test scores for charter schools that do not report directly to the district were not available.
A teacher's value-added rating is based on his or her students' progress on the California Standards Tests for English and math. The difference between a student's expected growth and actual performance is the "value" a teacher added or subtracted during the year. A school's value-added rating is based on the performance of all students tested there during that period.
Although value-added measures do not capture everything that goes into making a good teacher or school, The Times decided to make the ratings available because they bear on the performance of public employees who provide an important service, and in the belief that parents and the public have a right to the information.
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