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 ‘Politics’
Ugh!
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 [...]
Where Your Taxes Go (War v. Education 2)
Is this where you want them to go?
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LAUSD’s Inner Nazi
This last week two incidents highlighted the district and its administrators’ disregard of freedom of speech.
First, 15 8th graders at Liechty Middle School were denied their diplomas when they turned their backs on their graduation keynote speaker, LAUSD Board President Monica Garcia. They were protesting increased class size and teacher layoffs. As they demonstrate in [...]
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 [...]
War v. Education
From the American Friends Service Committee. Hurrah for Quaker simplicity…
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The Keeper of the Testing Papers (LAUSD Waste, cont’d.)
Teachers are cut. Class sizes go up. Summer school goes away.
But somewhere, perhaps on a campus near you, sits a person paid to watch tests. I’m not sure which tests: CELDTS go to Sacramento, as do CSTs (I think). Maybe it’s the forms and affidavits teachers sign before administering the tests? [...]
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, [...]
Funny Things About Federal Funds
In today’s LA Times Maria Elena Durazo, executive secretary-treasurer of the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor, AFL-CIO, and Steve Zimmer, board member-elect of the Los Angeles Unified Board of Education, called on teachers to take a pay cut to save the district $45 million.
In response I offer the following federal stimulus and bailout headlines:
Stimulus [...]
Teachers & Money
There’s a lot of talk out there to link individual teacher pay to test scores. While I’d be thrilled to get a pay raise (and in an earlier post, I shouted, ‘Bring it on!’), here’s why I don’t think this is a good idea.
First all the usual reasons: teachers will teach to the test and [...]
