Tidbits from the last three weeks:
Half of all art & music positions will be eliminated next year, and the remaining ones will be cut the year after. In 2012, there will be no art, music, dance, or theater teachers in LAUSD.
A teacher who went down to file paperwork at Beaudry (the district-owned skyscraper downtown) told [...]
Posts under ‘Education Reform’
Ugh!
Literacy in the 21st Century
Tonight I was over on Tom Vander Ark’s blog. TVA, you might remember, was formerly of Bill Gates’ ed foundation and one of the short-listed candidates in the last LAUSD Superintendent search–the one that yielded. . . da-da-da-dah. . . Admiral Brewer. He’s posted a bit from Fareed Zakaria’s interview of Eric Schmidt, the CEO [...]
Resegregation: What I Worry About
Anthony Cody, a National Board-certified teacher in the Bay Area, has launched a project to get teachers to write to President Obama. He’s planning on gathering the letters and mailing them to the White House on November 23rd. Here’s mine:
Dear President Obama,
I’m not a worrywart by nature. I teach 5th grade in a high-poverty school [...]
Ever More Bureaucrats
This week teachers learned the district is thinking of:
1. cutting days out of the school year
2. increasing class sizes in January
3. cutting the number of teachers again.
And then the following landed in my inbox:
Position/Title: Director of Operations
Organization: The Partnership for Los Angeles Schools
Organization Description: Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa has made education reform of [...]
Teacher Misconduct?
A few weeks ago the LA Times did an expose on a teachers being kept out of the classroom at full pay because of misconduct or allegations of misconduct. Here’s a new movie coming out on the NY equivalent. While the cases in the LA Times story seemed to show misconduct, there is also the [...]
Health Care & Education, Part 2
According to the NYTimes, Obama’s been reading the same NYer article I wrote about last week:
President Obama recently summoned aides to the Oval Office to discuss a magazine article investigating why the border town of McAllen, Tex., was the country’s most expensive place for health care. The article became required reading in the White House, [...]
Health Care v. Education, Part 1
This week’s New Yorker has a great piece on health care costs. Want to know where the US Gov. spends the MOST money per capita on healthcare?
That would be McAllen, TX in the Rio Grande Valley. Lat year Medicare spent $15,000 per enrollee there, 2x the national average.
Where the heck did all that money go [...]
More LAUSD Waste and Mismanagement
NBC Los Angeles recently aired a great report on ways to save the classrooms:
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Cost Cutting 101
Today’s LA Times led a piece on the battle over Birmingham High School with the heading, “The outcome of a battle over reform at the Van Nuys campus might shape the future of L.A. Unified.” The mayor’s reform branch (I-Division), a magnet within the school, and a charter supported by some of the teachers are [...]
Mar Vista Moms
Here’s another grassroots campaign that came to my attention. A group of moms in Mar Vista have banded together to create video to promote the changes taking place at Webster Middle School. Mar Vista Moms @ Webster Middle School
What a great way to let people visit a school!
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