Wake up and smell the education news! We blog that the teachers union is backing the new biliteracy policy in San Diego Unified but questioning how it will impact teacher workloads. KPBS reports that Superintendent Terry Grier says that like California, San Diego Unified is unlikely to get added stimulus money because there is little support for using student scores to evaluate teachers.
Then again, if the whole state is in jeopardy of losing out on those dollars, would it matter if San Diego Unified felt differently?
Elsewhere in California, the mayor of Los Angeles wants to allow outside groups to bid for control of public schools, the Los Angeles Times reports. . It also offers up a commentary by historian Diane Ravitch, who criticizes the move towards private sponsors, arguing that charters are not inherently better than district schools and could be worse. The Associated Press writes that California approved 10 digital textbooks for use in math and science classes could be worse.
And, as I Tweeted yesterday, this Steve Lopez column on the Los Angeles teachers union has stirred up a lot of comments.
In national news, the Boston Globe finds that charter schools in Massachusetts serve fewer English learners and often fewer students with disabilities than do other public schools. The charters say the problem is they don’t get mailing lists of district students. The Teacher Beat blogs on the tensions within teachers unions at the state and national level.
And Gotham Schools reports that New York, like California, is arguing that it actually is eligible for more stimulus money despite laws that restrict how test scores can be used to evaluate teachers.