Districts will have 2 years to spend all $1.2 billion
John Fensterwald - Educated Guess
Republicans and Democrats went through the motions of rejecting each other’s budgets Tuesday, leaving school districts still no closer, weeks into the new year, to knowing how much state money they’ll be getting this year.
But at least they can count on $1.2 billion in federal dollars coming their way soon. Before calling it quits, the Legislature passed an emergency appropriation by a two-thirds majority that will allocate and speed up distribution of the state’s share of the $10 billion “Keep Out Educators Working Act of 2010″ that Congress passed earlier […]
Welcome to EdGuess2.0: TOP-Ed
Don’t touch that dial. You got it right.
Welcome to the debut of Topics On Public Education or TOP-Ed, a forum on California education policy and the successor to Educated Guess. Besides a new banner and url – http://toped.svefoundation.org — followers of my blog will see that we’ve made room for more voices and new features. [...]
Kindergarten to shift to Sept. 1 start
After more than a dozen failed efforts over two decades, the Legislature has finally changed the start date of kindergarten from Dec. 2 to Sept. 1 for 5-year olds. Sen. Joe Simitian’s SB 1381 also establishes a transitional kindergarten for the 4-year-olds displaced by the earlier start date.
The bill squeaked by with only one vote [...]
No layoff help for troubled schools
Low-performing schools will remain vulnerable next year to layoffs that may decimate their teaching staffs.
Democrats, Republicans and silent voices on Tuesday defeated SB 691 (formerly SB 1285), which would have prohibited disproportionate teacher layoffs in roughly the state’s third poorest-performing schools. The bill failed to make it to the Assembly floor after it was defeated [...]
Coming soon to this site
The Educated Guess is about to grow.
Soon, when you click on this site, you’ll see that the blog has become part of a larger forum, with a name change to match. It’s a transformation that we at the Silicon Valley Education Foundation have been working on for months.
The main change is that there will be [...]
Report: No judging teachers on tests
The same day that the Los Angeles Times went public with an online database rating teachers’ effectiveness based on test scores, a Washington-based nonpartisan think tank released a paper strongly cautioning against such a use.
“Recognizing the technical and practical limitations of what test scores can accurately reflect, we conclude that changes [...]
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A Forum of Many Viewpoints
At Elmhurst Community Prep, the federal School Improvement Grant (SIG) has become a verb.
“Can you SIG an instructional coach?”
“Betlach, are we gonna SIG extra intervention teachers?”
“We need to SIG a whole new building.”
SIG (v): To use still hypothetical federal money to fill the gaps in
urban school funding and improve student outcomes.
It wasn’t always this way. [...]
In George Orwell’s masterpiece, Animal Farm, a group of farm animals led by pigs take over their farm from an abusive owner and decide to run it as a collective. They begin by writing a new set of laws, starting with “All animals are equal.” Later in the book, the pigs take over the farm, enslaving the other animals. One day, the other animals notice that the first rule has been changed to read, “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”
Orwell was making a point about the power of [...]
After two years of news articles about teacher layoffs, the average citizen may be wondering if we still need teachers. The question is not if, but where and in what subjects.
Despite a wave of teacher layoffs that is nothing short of tragic, California remains a world leader in science and technology, thanks to our – currently – highly skilled STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) workforce. But for how long?
In the heart of California technological innovation, more than half of Silicon Valley’s 200,000 students are below grade level in Math or Science. At the same time, nearly 16 percent of [...]
