Check our blog later this morning for more on the teachers’ agreement with San Diego Unified and a final guest blog from Bey-Ling Sha. But first, your daily newsblitz:
- We zoom in on John Muir School, which uses a rare method called Paideia that eschews lectures in favor of freewheeling discussions. It aims to hone critical thinking, something that both Obama and the local school board are keen to explore.
- And on Friday, we blogged that San Diego Unified may turn to a different funding source — redevelopment money specifically earmarked for downtown schools — to pay for the schoobrary, freeing up bond funds.
- The Union-Tribune writes about how bad it’s getting, budget-wise, for schools across the county.
- Also in the U-T: The San Diego Unified teachers union has reached a tentative agreement with the school district. And racial tensions are flaring even more at UCSD after a student hung a noose in the library.
- KPBS reports on the demands of minority students at UCSD.
- SDNN asks a Gompers Charter School leader to reflect on the school’s conversion to a charter, five years later.
- The Sacramento Bee reports on a slew of protests against education cuts across the state on Thursday. The San Francisco Chronicle notes that some are worried about violence at the statewide events.
- Also in the Bee: Teachers around Sacramento are bracing for layoffs.
- New software can allow students to share computers at a lower cost, the San Francisco Chronicle writes.
- Educated Guess blogs about how education historian Diane Ravitch came to repudiate the same ideas she once championed.
- Chicago is closing schools so that they can be reopened and turned around, but many parents and community members are skeptical they’ll be any better, the New York Times reports. Such turnarounds are a key part of the Obama education agenda, so Chicago is a place to watch.
- Also in the Times: Middle schools are increasingly asking kids to make individual learning plans to help chart out their courses and goals.
- Education Week reports that some critics are leery of tying federal money for disadvantaged students to new standards for states in education, calling it federal overreaching.
- A testing skeptic writes in the Washington Post about why using test scores to evaluate teachers may not be such a great idea.
- And here’s an interesting interview with Pedro Noguera, a sociologist at New York University, about education reform.
— EMILY ALPERT