A daily compilation of education news coverage of statewide interest provided by
UCLA's Institute for Democracy, Education and Access.

Top Stories and Commentary for Tuesday, January 12, 2010

The president of the American Federation Teachers is putting the sensitive issue of due process on the education reform table, with a pledge to work with districts to streamline the often-cumbersome procedures for dismissing teachers who fail to improve their performance after receiving help and support. She has also commissioned an independent expert to help revise due process for those teachers accused of misconduct. “We recognize that too often due process can become glacial process,” Ms. Weingarten said this morning here at the National Press Club. “We intend to change that.” The pledge—a formal acknowledgment by the AFT that due process, a hard-won labor right, could benefit from some revisions—comes with a caveat: Districts must agree to work with unions to devise fair, meaningful systems to evaluate teacher performance and to help ineffective teachers improve, as part of any plan to reform due-process procedures. (more...)

Also: USA Today

The president of the American Federation of Teachers says she will urge her members to accept a form of teacher evaluation that takes student achievement into account and that the union has commissioned an independent effort to streamline disciplinary processes and make it easier to fire teachers who are guilty of misconduct. In a speech to be delivered Tuesday in Washington, Randi Weingarten plans to call for more frequent and more rigorous evaluations of public schoolteachers, and she says she will assert that standardized test scores and other measures of student performance should be an integral part of the evaluation process. The use of student test scores to measure teacher performance has been anathema to many teachers. Ms. Weingarten is not proposing that they be the only — or even the primary — element in determining teacher quality. (more...)

Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, likes surprises. In a speech scheduled for this morning, she provides several, starting with what was, at least for me, an intriguing question she asked her members last summer: "When your union deals with issues affecting both teaching quality and teachers' rights, which of these should be the higher priority--working for professional teaching standards and good teaching, or defending the job rights of teachers who face disciplinary action?" Weingarten said 69 percent chose good teaching, while 16 percent said job rights. I find that surprising, though not because the teachers endorsed professionalism. Most of the teachers I know think of themselves in that way and those that don't probably knew what was the politic answer. What I didn't expect was a union leader willing to ask such a question in the first place. (more...)

Hundreds of parents whose children enjoyed the opportunities of Beverly Hills' coveted schools are finding out whether they can stay enrolled, as the school board votes on a controversial proposal to boot out almost 500 out-of-district students. A huge crowd is expected to attend the meeting Tuesday night where the Beverly Hills Unified School District board will decide whether to notify 484 so-called "permit students" that they must enroll elsewhere because of the district's new financing formula. "These kids have their lives invested in Beverly Hills schools," said Michelle Kahn, a 19-year-old Beverly Hills High School graduate whose two brothers would be forced out of the district. "It seems like it's not taking the lives of the students into account." (more...)

For the first time since the program began 14 years ago, a California governor is planning on spending significantly less on California’s popular, but expensive, class-size reduction program than in previous years. In his budget released last Friday, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is projecting spending $340 million less than anticipated during the current school year, and $550 million less in the school year beginning in September. Together, the reductions would save the state nearly $900 million. This would mark a huge rollback of the program which now costs the state about $1.8 billion a year. Since 1996, California has spent more than $22 billion on the program, making it the most expensive education reform program in California’s history. Schwarzenegger administration officlals say they are just responding to decisions made by local districts which have already increased K-3 class sizes this year, or plan to next year, and therefore qualify for a reduced subsidy from the state. (more...)

The State Department of Education updated its list of districts participating in the state’s Race to the Top application on Monday. And it turns out, the response was much greater than officials had reported two days before. A total of 745 school districts, county offices of education and charter schools — more than 90 percent of the 798 districts and schools that had said they’d participate — did follow through. And at least 115 union leaders ignored the advice of the leadership of the California Teachers Association and signed on with their superintendents and school board presidents. That’s impressive, considering the CTA’s opposition. (more...)

California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger signed education reform legislation on Jan. 7 that will give unprecedented power to parents whose children attend the worst-performing public schools. Under a provision known as the "parent trigger," if 50 percent of parents at a given school sign a petition, the school board must choose among several options, including closing the campus, converting to a charter, or replacing the principal and other administrators. Advocates of the controversial measure hope that it will make the state more competitive for Race to the Top money, in addition to improving education; opponents, such as the California Teachers Association, are concerned that the approach is too punitive. (more...)

Krista Tippett, host: I'm Krista Tippett. Today, "The Meaning of Intelligence," a conversation on work, education, and civic imagination with Mike Rose. He's animated by the question "What kind of education befits a democracy?" We explore the link between education and human possibility, and what Mike Rose calls "The Mind at Work. Mr. Mike Rose: What emerges that bespeaks of intelligence, what goes on right under our noses that bespeaks of some kinds of smarts? So the plumber who reaches up inside of the wall of an old building, feeling rust, feeling moisture if there's any, feeling the way the thing is structured, he's visualizing and then bringing a knowledge base to bear on trying to figure out what the problem may be. Think of what a complex set of mental operations are involved in that. (more...)

Let the war over tax hikes begin. And score the first battle Democrats yes, Republicans no – just like last year. Legislation to impose a new severance tax on oil and natural gas extraction to help bolster higher education funding passed the Assembly's Revenue and Taxation Committee by a party-line vote Monday. The action came just three days after Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger released a new state budget plan relying largely on spending cuts and hoped-for federal revenue to bridge a projected $19.9 billion shortfall by July 2011. Democrats, by their committee vote, signaled a willingness to press for targeted tax increases, even though 2010 is an election year and odds are slim of winning the necessary two-thirds legislative super-majority to pass such measure. (more...)

The woman overseeing Race to the Top for the Obama administration said Monday that federal Department of Education officials have been “stunned” by the impact of the program. Before even a dollar has been handed out, states competing to win a share of the $4.3 billion program have enacted reforms on a level not seen before, Joanne Weiss, director of Race to the Top, told a conference at Stanford on turning failing schools around. To boost the chances of winning money, states have eliminated limits on charter schools, changed methods for evaluating teachers and principals and enacted aggressive rules on intervening in failing schools. By removing the ban on using standardized test data for teacher evaluations, California took care of a prerequisite to applying for the money. (more...)

A law adopting statewide high school exams for graduation took effect in Pennsylvania on Saturday, with the goal of ensuring that students leaving high school are prepared for college and the workplace. But critics say the requirement has been so watered down that it is unlikely to have major impact. The situation in Pennsylvania mirrors what has happened in many of the 26 states that have adopted high school exit exams. As deadlines approached for schools to start making passage of the exams a requirement for graduation, and practice tests indicated that large numbers of students would fail, many states softened standards, delayed the requirement or added alternative paths to a diploma. People who have studied the exams, which affect two-thirds of the nation’s public school students, say they often fall short of officials’ ambitious goals. (more...)

Also Noted for Tuesday, January 12, 2010:

The Los Angeles city school district on Monday began receiving applications from inside and outside groups seeking to take over 30 new or struggling campuses. Groups that filed letters of intent to apply for the schools in the fall had to file their requests electronically before midnight tonight. The district is scheduled to announce how many applications they received today. The Los Angeles Unified Board of Education voted in August to allow outside operators, including charter schools, to apply for control of 18 new and 12 low-performing campuses. Groups of teachers have prepared applications for some schools, and United Teachers Los Angeles has filed a from taking over the new campuses. (more...)

Minerva Espejo remembered her own rocky start in English after moving from Mexico to San Diego as a teenager. English classes were bewildering; a bilingual class taught by a teacher who barely understood Spanish was even worse. She improved her English at home by pulling out a dictionary night after night to pick up the vocabulary that helped get her to college. She didn't want the same troubles for her children. Soured by her own experience, she rejected the idea of a bilingual class and enrolled her kids in a different program until she found out about Sherman Elementary, where kids spend half the day in English and half in Spanish. Her son, who just finished up first grade at Sherman, can explain his homework in English and read to his grandfather in Spanish. "It's no good to lose your Spanish and then have to take Spanish classes in high school," Espejo said. She believes that her children shouldn't have to give up one language to learn another. (more...)

Learning more than one language is hard and takes years to master. School officials here want to reward that time and effort with a "seal of biliteracy" for high school students who graduate with proficiency in more than one language. At its board meeting Thursday, Ceres Unified School District trustees are set to approve the seal, which would be affixed to diplomas and transcripts. The recognition is for students who learn a language in addition to English — Spanish or German — and for those who learned English as a second language. "It's a feather in a student's cap to have mastered two or more languages," said Mary Jones, assistant superintendent of educational services at Ceres schools. "It opens up options for them in college and the working world." To prove mastery, Ceres students need to take four years of a foreign language and earn a B grade or better each year. They also need to pass the Advanced Placement exam, Jones said. (more...)