I don’t know if it’s good news or not–it will depend on the final decisions. I think there will be a lot of hard feelings, but a lot of potential for improvement.
For us, it doesn’t matter. At worst NSA becomes grades 6-8, and I’m assuming that they wouldn’t just boot the North Star kids back to their own neighborhood schools, but grandfather the lower grades and simply not add any new classes in grades 3-5. If they do boot the kids, we’ll put our youngest back into private.
Selby Lane becoming a school of choice could be good for our property values as Henry Ford would most likely become our neighborhood school.
Sara Jorve, 43 years old, protested alongside other Oklahoma teachers last spring for better pay and classroom conditions. But the fifth-grade math and science instructor in Oklahoma quit in May after a dozen years in the profession. Ms. Jorve, a single mother, said her pay was so meager she was forced to rely on her parents for financial assistance.
In the summer, she returned to school to become a cardiovascular ultrasound technician.
Not a bad summary. The claim that SF is cherry picking #'s is probably true, but I still think that even if they had real hard data, they would not be accounting for people who are leaving the district either moving or to a private school, and they will never have an apples to oranges comparison.
I’m glad the recommendation isn’t mandatory. That did not come clear in the draft, I have to be honest.
This is true of Redwood City - 90% Hispanic. And I would add - I think that testing is only in public schools. So whatever data they’re seeing is only from the remaining students in public schools.
Depends where the money is spent - there’s a big difference between cutting down class size from 30 to 20 and doubling the number of non-teaching district staff.
I’ll say it 100 times - small class size is absolutely essential to good learning. Cutting class size in half cuts out more than twice the misbehavior. 15 kids and 30 kids is the difference between two kids quietly chatting and the entire back of the class playing football with a kid’s binder.
In the sixties we had double shifts and 35 kids per class. Public schools then out performed today’s schools. Today teachers are burdened with diversity, special needs kids, political correctness, angry invasive parents, crazed public opinions, political agendas on curriculum, school shootings. Unfortunately lots of problems besides class sizes. Society has gone ape.
Schools are ill equipped to solve that problem.
And some education specialists say the framework would hurt historically marginalized students the most by injecting too many social justice related topics that distract from the math.
“The way you get social justice in mathematics is to teach the kids math,” said Tom Loveless, a retired math education expert who worked for the Brookings Institution, a national think tank. “It’s not by dressing up mathematics in social justice.”
This is exactly whats wrong with the California school system - the inclination to take a subject that has concrete definitions and methods that cross all languages and peoples and to inject politics into it.
So frustrating. The FDA reviewers approved Pfizer for ages 5-12 for kids in high-risk situations not so that they could be mandated. There were multiple people who had concerns over them being mandated, but wanted them available to transplant patients and those with other high-risk situations. Why Newsom is pushing to prevent people from opting out of something that is still under EUA is really beyond me, especially since it’s rumored that his booster made him very sick.
One reviewer also mentioned that the CDC thinks that 50% of kids already have some sort of immunity… Others pointed out that the adults should be getting vaccinated to shelter the kids, not the other way around.
True, but in this case, there’s not even equal attempts at schooling and some pretty abysmal outcomes because of it. Most private schools either had full-time in-person school or small enough classes that being on Zoom wasn’t an issue, and the parents probably had reliable fast internet. In some of the poorer public school districts, they didn’t have computers or hotspots to give the kids at all, and multiple months of the “at-home schooling” were a complete loss.
For my kids,
my eldest in an independent private high school had a seamless transition to Zoom schooling with teachers using ipads as whiteboards and keeping the same schedule as they did during school. No instruction time was lost at all. Not even one day off.
My 7-8th grader in public was handed a lot of assignments and maybe had a handful of lectures in Spring 2020 but because they already had chromebooks, were using online courses and Google classroom, the kids were assigned a lot of the online stuff they were used to. It was half the work as before. 2020-2021 they had half the instruction time…
My 4-5th grader’s teachers were MIA in Spring 2020 (literally, they met with the kids maybe 2-3 hours a week which was mostly spent with the kids chatting while the teacher tried to do office hours) and then 2020-2021 was more organized, but still half as many lecture hours.
Most private schools either had full-time in-person school or small enough classes that being on Zoom wasn’t an issue, and the parents probably had reliable fast internet. In some of the poorer public school districts, they didn’t have computers or hotspots to give the kids at all, and multiple months of the “at-home schooling” were a complete loss.