The Education Newsblitz: Including Kids with Disabilities

The newsblitz never works for the weekend. It yearns to come back:

• San Diego Unified schools are including more children with disabilities in ordinary classes more often, but principals, teachers and parents are worried about having enough staff to help include them effectively. Parents are also concerned by inconsistencies between schools.
• Perfect attendance won cars for two South County teenagers, the Union-Tribune reports. 
• School board member John de Beck writes in SDNN that extending the deadline for superintendent shows that the pool of candidates was meager.
• Also in the U-T: Oceanside teachers agreed to six furlough days to help balance their district budget.
• San Diego State students went to Tijuana to protest a CSU-wide ban on study and research there.
• The Los Angeles Times reports on how a Colorado law that ties teacher evaluation to student achievement could create momentum for more such laws across the country.
• Cupertino parents who brought in $2.2 million to avert school cuts are sharing their secrets, the San Jose Mercury News writes.
• California Watch is frustrated to see California lose a bid for another batch of school stimulus money, this time earmarked for improving data systems that track student progress over time.
• The Oakland Tribune highlights unusual ways that schools are saving money, such as, um, baking printer formatter boards?
• The Sacramento mayor is trying to make his mark on education, the Bee reports. This is an interesting contrast to San Diego, where the mayor has kept out of school district issues.
• Politicos on both sides of the aisle are concerned that the Obama Administration options for reforming failing schools are inflexible and may pose special problems for rural districts, Education Week reports.
• Texas isn’t the only state with lousy social studies standards, a Washington Post columnist opines. But she thinks the bigger problem is that kids are forced to memorize names and dates instead of learning how to analyze and think about history.
• And here’s an interesting comment on the times: High schoolers in Seattle use cursive so rarely that they’ve forgotten it, so a teacher is giving them a refresher course. We’ll probably see this in San Diego, too, as kids do more typing and less longhand.

— EMILY ALPERT