I’ve got a busy day ahead of me, what with parents pushing for California to go for more stimulus dollars and San Diego Unified fielding your suggestions at a budget town hall. If you want all the gory details, follow me on Twitter! If not, just hunker down with the newsblitz:
- We blog that bond overseers are trying to safeguard the schoo’ from the ‘brary if the schoobrary comes to pass, by hammering out guidelines for the deal between San Diego Unified and the city for the library school lease.
- Record numbers of students applied to the local California State universities, the Union-Tribune reports. KPBS provides the numbers too. Yet Capitol Weekly reports that California might still face a brain drain of college students.
- Marsha Sutton at SDNN runs down the daily events on her Teachable Moments blog: The state superintendent is in town and visiting Madison High, San Diego Unified officials are on that China trip we blogged about a while back, and the University of California system has extended its application deadline.
- If you’re confused about what all the fuss is about Race to the Top, the national competition for more school stimulus dollars, Education Week does a great job of breaking down the debate in California over whether or not it should alter its laws for a better shot at the money.
We’ll have guest bloggers on this issue later in the week — stay tuned!
- How close is California to finishing up its application for a second dose of school stimulus dollars? Educated Guess blogs about why the state is mum on that question.
- The Contra Costa Times writes that in Berkeley, a commemoration of the Free Speech Movement at the university was taken over by students protesting budget cuts.
- Long Beach schools may offer teachers a golden handshake, the Press-Telegram writes.
- Teachers are much less likely than students and parents to say that high school is primarily for preparing kids for college, a survey by the accounting giant Deloitte found. But the Orange County Register dissected the findings, some of which suggest that attitudes aren’t quite as different as it might seem.
- The Washington Post writes that some schools in the D.C. area are specifically catering to students with mild autism, who usually attend mainstream schools with non-disabled classmates.
- Teacher Beat blogs that in Arizona, seniority is no longer the basis for layoffs.
- Speaking of Arizona, the Associated Press reports that a school employee there got fired for searching for aliens. You read that right.
- Claus von Zastrow blogs that saying schools put adults over children is “an intellectual easy chair.”
- Four struggling schools may be closed in New York City as part of its reform efforts, the New York Times writes.
If you missed this earlier column from Jay Mathews at the Washington Post, he explains why he thinks shutting down bad schools — specifically bad charter schools — is the best tack for President Obama.