Entries tagged 'education'

Monday, June 2nd, 2008

Hole-Y Cow!

I remember we used to have a cow like this at the University of Florida.

Basically, scientists and students can peer/reach directly into the cow’s stomach to analyze how it’s digesting.

It was one of the things students at UF did in some of their initial agriculture, farming, or veterinary classes.

Gross, sure, but ahh, the wonders of science.

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Thursday, May 29th, 2008

Teachers’ Protest Not a Good Idea

By now, everyone should know that I’ve been an outspoken opponent of nearly $5 billion in proposed budget cuts to public education in California. While I support their frustration, a planned school-time walkout by teachers in Los Angeles is not a good idea.

On Friday, June 6, the teachers plan to demonstrate in front of their local school sites for the first hour of the school day, leaving students in the care of aides and administrators. Los Angeles Unified has gone to court to try to prevent them from doing so, citing the potential danger to students from being able to provide only minimal supervision.

In some schools–particularly those where we’re talking about 2,500+ kids–the teachers are inviting chaos, instead of finding a more responsible time to hold such a protest, such as the numerous after school rallies that have occurred up here in San Francisco.

Superintendent David Brewer III put it simply and clearly.

“We’re trying to send a very strong signal to Sacramento that these cuts are unacceptable,” he said. “We’re not questioning the message. We’re just questioning the method.”

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Wednesday, May 28th, 2008

Recognizing Schools’ Place in Inequality

San Francisco Unified’s school board unanimously approved a new strategic plan for the district at a meeting Tuesday night.

That alone would normally not be news, except this time the planning was headed up by Tony Smith, deputy superintendent of instruction, innovation and social justice for the district.

Smith, who came to SFUSD from the superintendent post in Emeryville, came to his role with a strong appreciation for schools’ place in preserving much of the inequality that exists in society today. That belief is clearly evident in the new plan.

“For far too long, demographics, specifically the socio-economic, linguistic and racial backgrounds our our children, have often closely correlated to their success in school. We refer to this historical trend as the ‘predictive power of demographics,’” the plan states.

This admission alone is historic for a school district, as much of this predictive power comes from districts’ and states’ policies, which often disadvantage students of color or students from low-income neighborhoods.

Staffing policies that encourage the newest, least experienced teachers to teach students who most need the help are a prime example. The New Teacher Project’s report, “Unintended Consequences,” explained this phenomenon in much detail in 2005 and little progress has been made since in most major school districts.

The plan commits the district to rethinking all of its policies and practices from the viewpoint of having acknowledged its historical contributions, something that is undoubtedly going to be difficult and painful at times, but in the end should be a positive experience for the district and its students.

But Smith has been around long enough to realize that change will not come with words alone. Thus, he proposes assessing schools’ progress not on test scores alone, which is way too common nowadays, but on each school’s “ability to disrupt the historically predictive power of racial, ethnic, linguistic and socio-economic student attributes.”

That’s a much higher calling, but one the district (and the rest of the country) desperately needs.

(Photos from Flickr user dlemieux)

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Monday, May 26th, 2008

Rhee’s Questionable Budget Decision

Michelle Rhee, chancellor of D.C. Public Schools, announced last week on a district Web site that she was doing away with using a Weighted Student Formula-method of funding the district’s schools.

A Weighted Student Formula, or WSF, allocates funding to schools based the number of students a school serves and on characteristics of those individual students, such as:

• Whether a student receives free- or reduced-lunch
• Whether a student is an English Language Learner
• Whether a student has a learning disability

WSF seems like common sense, but is not nearly universal. In many states, including California, groups have been fighting for such a funding formula for many years. Professor Jon Sonstelie of the University of California, Santa Barbara, explains some of the key advantages for such a system in California in his Getting Down to Facts paper, Aligning School Finance with Academic Standards.

Rhee has shaken things up considerably since arriving in D.C. from the New Teacher Project, in most cases, clearing out cobwebs that had persisted for decades. Eric Osberg, in The Flypaper blog, questions whether this consolidation of budgeting power is a major misstep and a “giant step backward.”

While my first inclination is to agree strongly with Osberg, I recognize Rhee’s concerns over the budgetary skills of her principal corps. I do think, however, that Rhee’s decision will indeed, as Osberg claims, make it extremely difficult to recruit top educational leaders and that training school leaders in the necessary skills would be a significantly better option.

Nevertheless, I trust Rhee’s pedigree and decision-making history, for the moment. I hope this move is one that five years from now was shown as painful, but necessary. I hope that by that time, D.C. has successfully recruited cadres of high-quality school leaders and that those leaders have earned back the right to site-based budgeting.

And, more than anything, I hope Rhee continues to push the reforms D.C. needs to have an educational system worthy of our nation’s capital city.

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