The Morning Report
Get the news and information you need to take on the day.
The saddest thing about Friday is knowing that you’ll go two days without a blitz of school news. Right? We profile parent leader David Page, who has become a human encyclopedia on the rules on federal funding for disadvantaged kids and break the news that school board President Shelia Jackson is running for County Supervisor. The Union-Tribune reports on a program that exposes visually impaired students to robotics and computer programming. The newspaper also provides more details on the supervisor race that Jackson is jumping into.
Budgets, budgets, budgets: The Los Angeles Times zeroes in on the back-and-forth in state budget talks over whether n and how n to suspend a state law that guarantees minimum funding for schools. The Mercury News gives some great analysis of what, exactly, those changes could entail and why they’re so sensitive.
The Sacramento Bee reports on the brain drain in career technical education as teachers skilled in electrical engineering and digital media retire. And the San Francisco Chronicle asks whether it’s good for parents to choose their kids’ teachers. This issue has also come up in San Diego Unified, where the superintendent has posed another question: Is it fair to kids if some parents are more comfortable asking than others?
And in national news, the Washington Post has a dynamite article about the strategies that schools there have used to boost test scores, such as focusing help on the kids who are just shy of a proficient score. But critics ask if the point to help the kids or make the adults look good. School districts nationwide are trying to expand charter schools, partly to snap up stimulus money, the Wall Street Journal reports. And the Associated Press writes about the problem of abuse and neglect of foreign exchange students.