Another day, another dose of education news.
San Diego State has closed some classes early to keep its costs down, the Union-Tribune reports. The San Diego Organizing Project drums up a group to protest state budget cuts that will hurt kids — here’s the rundown from both the Union-Tribune and from SDNN. NBC reports that an Oceanside teacher is training kids with autism how to box, and seeing improvements in their writing skills. And back at VOSD, my coworker Rani Gupta reports that San Diego Unified is now talking about making the schoobrary a charterbrary, and I give you updates on the status of the project labor agreement and those stimulus plans that schools wrote up in a hurry a few weeks ago.
In the rest of this great state of ours, Los Angeles kids could be spending up to three hours on the bus if state cuts to transportation funding for schools go through. The Sacramento Bee reports that Schwarzenegger is pushing the idea of digital textbooks statewide, but some schools are nervous about whether they’re prepared for the switch. And the Capitol Weekly reports that a survey finds that Californians are now less concerned about education, once their top priority, than they are about the economy and public safety.
On the federal level, Democrats are uneasy about all the money going to pay-for-performance plans, commonly known as merit pay, for teachers in the Obama edu-budget, Education Week reports. But here’s an experiment that teachers might get behind: A New York charter school is testing what happens if you get a dream team of teachers and pay them $125,000 a year. And this bit from Slate is not education news, but it ties into the Q&A I did last weekend with local food activist Jill Richardson, who mentioned that Michelle Obama’s organic garden was “fighting words.”