The Education Newsblitz: Putting Preschools Through the Wringer

San Diego Unified is keeping me busy today! Keep checking my blog and Twitter for updates on what the school board is up to. Now for the newsblitz:

• Some preschools in San Diego County are being rated on everything from how often children wash their hands to how educated their teachers are — and they’re being paid more if they score high, we write. The system is an experiment and California could follow suit. But so far, the ratings haven’t been advertised to parents.
• KPBS reports that the population of homeless students in Vista has quadrupled over the past three years.
• Kaplan College has apologized after one of its instructors said Spanish couldn’t be spoken in class, the Union-Tribune reports.
• In Vista, some members of a school committee on English learners asked their president to step down, the North County Times writes.
• Also from KPBS: The school year will end early in San Diego Unified next year.
• SDNN highlights a drive to collect musical instruments for schoolchildren.
• The Oakland Tribune highlights a program that matches donors with kids who need college scholarships. Is there anything like this in San Diego?
• The controversial chancellor of the D.C. school system, Michelle Rhee, made a plug for mayoral control of schools in a stop to Sacramento, where her fiancée is the mayor, the Bee writes. The same idea has been batted around here.
• A Bay Area town is weighing a parcel tax for schools, and if it doesn’t pass, the superintendent warns that half of the schools in town would close, the San Francisco Chronicle reports. It’s worth watching how all these parcel taxes fare as San Diego Unified explores whether to ask voters for one, too.
• Educated Guess blogs that most teachers unions in California balked at signing up for the second round of Race to the Top, a competition between states for more stimulus money.
• The Associated Press reports that across the country, school districts are cutting back on summer school. San Diego Unified is rare in having spared it.
• Another interesting one from the Associated Press: Preschools in the forest are becoming more popular.
• A cognitive scientist guest blogs in the Washington Post that kids need to focus, not to multitask.
• Also in the WaPo blogs: Remember that cutting New York Times Magazine piece about unions and reform in Race to the Top? A blogger puts it to a fact check.
• And Claus von Zastrow blogs about the problem with making teacher seniority a bad word.

— EMILY ALPERT