The State Legislature and the Governor have banded together to do a favor for the California Teachers Association (CTA). The Governor is expected to sign legislation that would end student performance testing - no academic achievement testing (API) and no school performance evaluations.
most of us hate the gridlocked traffic that defines our daily lives. More people would happily park their cars if public transit were more accessible. Access means easy to use – close to home and destination, affordable, and on a continuous loop rather than on a time-consuming schedule.
“rush hour” extend right into the “lunch rush”? Just the other day as idled through several lights before being able to turn from one gridlocked street onto another, I had a vision of a different kind of American city - a city a little more like Down Town Disney than Los Angeles. A walkable city is not just the product of my imagination. It is the latest fashion in urban planning – the urban village.
We have one walking school bus in a nearby neighborhood. The kids and parents really enjoy it. The walking school bus works just like the yellow school bus - that’s been budgeted out of existence - except that the children join a walk to school rather than boarding a bus.
I don’t think we can deny the obvious any more. Global climate change is here. It’s now, and we humans have more than a little to do with it.
Over the last 40 years instead of nurturing our students, we’ve been nurturing our teachers unions. Albert Shanker, American Federated Teachers (AFT) President 1974-1998, is reputed to have declared "when schoolchildren start paying union dues, that’s when I’ll start representing the interests of school children”. Teachers’ union dues became a guarantee of job security regardless of performance.
There is absolutely NO reason to keep testing the proficiency of our students year after year if the results do not lead to reform.
Governor Brown stands at a crossroads. Will he challenge the “education establishment” to “step up”? Or will he continue to support the “experts” -- his powerful political ally, the California Teachers Association – allowing our children to remain ranked 44th of 50?
Elected member of Campbell school board told me she couldn’t “tell” me “what Common Core is” except to say it had something to do with more oral communication, more oral reports delivered by the kids in front of their classmates. Common Core begins in August,2013 - Amazing! Unbelievable! Scary!
The child’s ecosystem is a community of interests that surround our children. While some of these interests may be well intentioned, collectively they’ve objectified our children.