Antero Garcia, a teacher at Manual Arts High, writes:
It’s gotten to be somewhat of a tradition here at Manual Arts High School. My first Thursday back after a two-month vacation last week, and the principal summoned the faculty for a brief after school meeting. Standing before us, our principal announced that he has been granted a transfer request from the school. Our principal was leaving.
This is my fourth year as a part of the Manual Arts faculty. Once we have hired our new principal, it will be the fourth official principal to run the school. That’s not to mention the interim principals who fill the position while the job search and interviews are conducted, which takes several months.
Last Wednesday, there was a giddy, strange atmosphere at Manual Arts. The campus was abuzz with the news of President-elect Barack Obama’s victory. At the same time, it was our principal’s last day at the school. During our nutritional break, a brief farewell ceremony was conducted. I took the opportunity, before returning to class, to shake our principal’s hand and let him know that I had learned quite a lot from him during his time at our school.
That being said, our principal’s departure was not without mixed feelings. As he explained in his farewell speech, “The process for converting Manual to an i-Design school has been taxing, to say the least, and the vision that I have for our students and school community may not be aligned with that of the new partnership and the groups that are creating the new governance structure.” I know that in the various roles I’ve taken on while our former principal was at Manual Arts –- school site council member, small learning community lead teacher, dedicated classroom teacher –- I have not always felt that my voice was recognized or valued by the principal.
I have no illusions about the unique challenges of leading a school such as Manual Arts. One of the strengths of our staff is that they are not afraid of voicing opinions or challenging ideas. I also recognize that the students and parents rightfully expect their culture and community practices to be recognized. Our school deserves visionary, collaborative and lasting leadership. I hope the fourth time will be the charm.
(Jose Diaz of Downey has been attending Saturday classes for two years at the San Pedro Skills Center. The buildings are set to be torn down to make way for a proposed magnet school.)
Joe Janesic has been obsessed with the facts and figures of two World Wars he never saw since happening upon Ft. MacArthur as a curious high school kid.
The former military site near the port of San Pedro was built in 1914 and served as an Army post until 1974. Janesic became a founding member of the Ft. MacArthur museum more than two decades ago. Now he is upset that the area will soon lose some of its historic buildings. Los Angeles Unified School District has owned the land since 1979 and is planning to build an annex to San Pedro High School that will include the marine science and police academy magnet where some Fort MacArthur structures stand.
-- Corina Knoll
The state's education chief, Jack O’Connell, has invited California schools to apply for $2.1 million in federal funding for the Fresh Fruits and Vegetables Program.
“We know that hungry children don’t learn as well as well-nourished children,” O’Connell said in a statement. “In light of the current economic downturn, higher food prices and continued concern regarding childhood obesity, I am heartened to announce that additional federal funding is available to help schools find innovative ways to offer fresh fruits and vegetables to students for free at school, even right in their classrooms."
In July, O’Connell announced that 25 grantees were awarded $184,100 for the program. The additional $2 million comes from the federal 2008 Farm Bill, which established the program at some schools in all 50 states, with the funding growing over the next 10 years.
Eligible applicants for this round of funding include elementary schools with high proportions of students eligible for free and reduced-price meals. The program is intended to provide all the children in participating schools with a variety of free fresh fruit or vegetable snacks.
The program is already underway in some schools, including two in Santa Monica.
-- Mary MacVean
State Supt. of Public Instruction Jack O’Connell made the following statement in response to Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s proposed budget cuts:
"California’s fiscal condition is dire and all individuals, families, businesses, and institutions must tighten their belts and make sacrifices during these difficult times. Our public schools already have absorbed $3 billion in cuts that have directly affected students. From Siskiyou County to San Diego, districts have spent reserves, reduced staff, eliminated transportation, or increased class sizes over the past difficult year.
"The governor’s proposed additional $2 billion in cuts to K-12 education would not only create catastrophic disruption in our schools and harm to our students in the middle of the school year, they would damage our future economy. I applaud the Governor’s efforts to stimulate our state’s economy and his willingness to consider new revenues as well as budget cuts. I strongly urge the Republican members of the Legislature to follow his lead so we can protect our schools and the future workforce of our state.
"Nothing is more critical to getting our state back on track than investing in a well-educated workforce. Unless we continue to improve upon our efforts to close the achievement gap, our state’s economic outlook will remain bleak.”
-- Mary MacVean
A recent blog item about a discrimination lawsuit filed by Michael Hopwood against the Los Angeles Unified School District quoted from two versions of legal documents. Both documents are part of the public record, but the more recent one was filed to offer a cleaner, more strictly accurate version of events than the original.
One detail, in particular, was dropped from the later version. Hopwood's lawsuit no longer claims that local district Supt. Carol Truscott justified returning a suspected child molester from a desk job to a school site by saying that she didn't want a "non-productive" administrator.
The suit still accuses Truscott of transferring the employee to a campus even though Hopwood allegedly objected because of the molestation-related investigation.
Hopwood works as an operations coordinator for L.A. Unified.
The employee in question, Steve Thomas Rooney, was later arrested and currently faces molestation-related charges involving four students. He had denied wrongdoing.
For her part, Truscott also has denied wrongdoing and stated she would never knowingly do anything that would endanger children.
-- Howard Blume
Jimmy Biblarz, a student in the humanities magnet at Hamilton High School, writes:
I was recently elected to Hamilton High School's School Site Council. Most schools have SSCs, which are made up of parents, teachers, students, and other community members. The goal of the Council is to increase neighborhood involvement in schools, and to give all groups concerned about education (including students) a voice. The councils control schoolwide budgets, Title I funding, and various other issues relating to money and overall school well-being.
I was very excited to join School Site Council. I like that there is a body in which students are of just as much importance as teachers and administrators; where my vote counts just as much as my AP chemistry teacher's does! As I sat down at the first meeting, with my school-provided water bottle and turkey sandwich in hand, I began to read over the agenda. Hamilton recently received a $130,000 block grant, a special type of grant with fewer restrictions than other money schools receive. The only issue was that we had to spend the money by the end of the '08 school year (in all reality, April).
The assistant principal at the meeting told us that we should spend the money by December, worried that the national financial disaster could cause the district to renege on the grant. The principal had provided us with a list of things he thought were vital to improving Hamilton, and every item on the list resonated with me.
From supplemental textbooks to beautification efforts, the principal had provided us with an excellent list. I was so excited, as were the two other student representatives.
But instead of immediately spending the money, we had to take care of all the necessary administrative items. Elections of officers, formal introductions, etc., etc. And then we got to approval of the by-laws.
The district provides all SSCs with a by-laws template which I found to be perfectly reasonable. But some people did not. We spent the entire meeting (a meeting scheduled to be one hour that went on for
three) talking about the difference between an "alternate" and a "proxy," and whether alternates should have voting power or not.
While I can appreciate the importance of following Robert's Rules of Order and the necessity of having by-laws, I felt that our time would have been much better spent spending our Block Grant. This is the reason more parents and students and teachers don't get involved in things like School Site Council. They get so tied up in bureaucratic messes that the most important things take a backseat. SSC meets only once a month, meaning we have only two more meetings before we are ideally supposed to have spent the $130,000. Is it really necessary to debate for hours whether alternates should have voting privileges when there are teachers teaching without books and we have the power to stop that? Of course not -- it's ridiculous.
Election day at Chapman Elementary School in Gardena began with a schoolwide assembly. Michelle Valencia's fifth-grade class made presentations on the presidential candidates and the issues.
Students, ages 4 to 12, then went to the auditorium to cast their vote. Upon dropping their completed ballots in the box, they received an "I voted" sticker.
"It is never too early to learn about democracy and what it means to be a good citizen," said Principal Cindy Miller.
As the school day was ending, the students learned the results of their polling: Barack Obama received 332 votes; John McCain received 102. Their homework assignment: Watch the results of the national election to see how their opinions compared.
-- Mary MacVean
Photos courtesy of Cindy Miller
Jacob Adams, professor of Education at Claremont Graduate University, writes:
After years of hard work and hundreds of millions of dollars spent to raise the level of student performance, educators, politicians, civic leaders and parents have not produced the results they expect.
Now we know why. A basic flaw in these improvement efforts is that they look to the education finance system for solutions when the system itself is the problem, according to a five-year study of K-12 school finance by a large team of top education scholars from throughout the country. Our report, Funding Student Learning: How to Align Education Resources with Student Learning Goals was part of a recent presentation in Washington D.C.
Our conclusion is that education finance needs to be redesigned to support student performance. States will never educate all students to high standards unless they first fix the finance system that supports America’s schools. These systems dictate how much is spent, who gets what, how resources are used, and which outcomes are tracked. Unfortunately, the way they do these things no longer matches the results we expect from schools.
Funding student learning requires more than merely adjusting funding levels, tinkering with distribution formulas, creating new programs, imposing another sanction, or singling out hot-button issues. The system itself must be transformed so that resources can better support the ambitious learning goals the public now demands. The results will help elected officials and educators use resources more effectively to achieve the ambitious student learning goals that public consensus now demands.
Key ingredients in the recipe for fixing broken school finance systems are:
- Allowing dollars to follow students to their schools.
- Integrate resource decisions with instructional plans; measure and analyze results of different expenditures.
- Define and fund a research and development agenda that expands what we know about effective resource use.
- Make resource use and academic achievement central to financial reporting practices, and use funding contingencies to create fair and meaningful accountability.
In addition to myself, members of the working group included Christopher T. Cross, chairman, Cross & Joftus, LLC; Christopher Edley Jr., dean and professor, Boalt Hall School of Law, UC Berkeley; James W. Guthrie, professor, Peabody College, Vanderbilt University; Paul T. Hill, John and Marguerite Corbally professor and director, Center on Reinventing Public Education, University of Washington; Michael W. Kirst, professor emeritus, Stanford University; Goodwin Liu, associate Dean and professor, Boalt Hall School of Law; Susanna Loeb, Associate Professor, Stanford University; David H. Monk, dean and professor, Pennsylvania State University; Allan R. Odden, professor and co-director, Consortium for Policy Research in Education, University of Wisconsin, Madison; Joanne Weiss, partner and chief operating officer, New Schools Venture Fund.
The report was produced by the School Finance Redesign Project at the University of Washington’s Center on Reinventing Public Education.
The results are in: Barack Obama took the lion's share of the votes ... among people too young to cast ballots.
To encourage students to become voters, California Secretary of State Debra Bowen and Supt. of Public Instruction Jack O’Connell held a mock election on Oct. 30 among middle and high school students.
Nine hundred schools took part, and with more than 600 of them reporting so far, Obama received 73.5% of the vote, McCain received almost 21%, and other candidates got the rest.
Middle school students at Horace Mann in Beverly Hills were among the schools that took part, and its results were not far off the statewide totals.
Today, eighth-graders at Horace Mann, a K-8 school, are running an election for children in kindergarten through fifth grade. Students are being escorted into social studies teacher David Foldvary's class.
There they find a voting booth made by the kids. The students get "I voted" stickers. (It wasn't recommended that they try to use them for free coffees at Starbucks.)
Foldvary's final-period class will tally the results and announce them on Wednesday. In addition, he invited eighth-graders to an election-night party in his class, with CNN and pizza.
At another Beverly Hills school, El Rodeo, the sixth-graders chose Obama, 50 votes, over McCain, 35 votes. Teacher April Silva said the students were well informed and "had really strong reasons. A lot were focused on the tax breaks they would get with McCain."
At Cleveland High in Reseda and South Pasadena High, students voted for all the propositions as well as for president. Obama took 86% of the vote at Cleveland, and students voted "no" on Prop. 8, the proposal that involves same-sex marriage. At South Pas, where nearly 74% went for Obama, 17% for McCain and nearly 6% for Ralph Nader, librarian Shelee Wilkerson said: "The kids took it really seriously. It was a fun thing to do."
And at Manchester Avenue School in South L.A., fourth-grade teacher Michelle Adams said the fourth-graders voted 176 for Obama and 5 for McCain. "They're tired of all the commercials," she said. "Overall, I think the vote represented their parents."
At Crossroads School for Arts and Sciences in Santa Moncia, Michelle Merson, the academic dean of the middle school, said students appeared to really think about the propositions. On Prop. 4, for example, which is the parental notification measure, the school had 87% voter turnout. Students voted 66% for the proposition and 33% against it.
The election was just part of a two-month project that included voter registration and student projects. On the mock election day, voting machines jammed, and voters experienced other problems.
"We had a lot of misvotes, and we were able to say, 'This is what happens,' " Merson said.
At the Community Magnet Charter School, an elementary school in Bel-Air, fifth-grade teacher Alicia Suzukida held a vote. The results were unanimous for Obama.
If your school has results to report, let us know.
-- Beth Shuster and Mary MacVean
|
|
Jimmy Biblarz
Lance Chapman
Sophy Cohen
Antero Garcia
Nick Giulioni
Steven Hicks
Anum Khan
Lauren McCabe
Tim Schlosser
Erin Shachory
Phoebe Smolin