Bright and Early

I’m still waiting on your entries for our best and worst worksheets contest! Send them in by this Friday via e-mail at emily.alpert@voiceofsandiego.org or fax at 619-325-0530. Now for your newsblitz:

• Swine flu is getting some parents riled about how the process by which their schools notify them if other kids are sick, 10News reports. The basic rule is that schools have to tell parents about an outbreak. But a case or two does not an outbreak make.
• KPBS reports that City Council will vote today on whether to put the downtown library school out to bid. An existing downtown charter school, KIPP Adelante, is organizing students to back the idea, saying that it helps them to have a new library and a new high school nearby.
• An assistant principal at Helix High, a charter school that has suffered repeated scandals involving its employees, was fired for giving a student a ride to the bus station. The administrator violated a policy that bars employees from having students in their vehicles, the Union-Tribune reports.
• A program to help students with special needs get work experience has had to get more creative as the economy slides, the North County Times writes. They’re selling coffee and tea to teachers during breaks, for example.
• The San Francisco Chronicle reports that some academics are questioning whether UC-Berkeley should keep subsidizing athletics as its budgets dwindle.
• Los Angeles Unified is nearly ready to throw dozens of its campuses open to outside operators, the Torrance Daily Breeze writes. But the pace and particulars of the plans are stirring up concerns with both the teachers union and charter school leaders.
• A New England boarding school is taking its school library digital, replacing books with electronic texts and giving students Kindles, USA Today writes. In somewhat related news, textbook publisher McGraw-Hill is losing dough as states such as California postpone getting new textbooks, MarketWatch reports.
• Claus von Zastrow tells the educonomists that teacher training and support can’t be ignored and question why they believe that “great teachers are born, not made.”
• The CEO of a Virginia-based system of charter schools is under fire over a memo he wrote urging that charter school boards should be tightly controlled by the company, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reports. That goes against a key idea of charters — that the schools should be independently governed by local leaders.
• Education Next blogs that school turnarounds are a bad idea. Instead, school systems should be closing bad schools and replacing them completely, a Fordham Institute fellow writes.
• And a Rhode Island education official dropped a bombshell on schools this weekend: Stop using seniority to decide where teachers should be sent, Now. The teachers union says they’re going to court over it, reports the Providence Journal.

— EMILY ALPERT