Friday, February 10, 2006

DREAMS OF TEACHER QUALITY IN CALIFORNIA

Sorry to mention it but it's mostly people with very limited talents and options who will be willing to stand up in front of most California public school classes every day

Superintendent of Public Instruction Jack O'Connell, giving his third annual state of education speech Tuesday, called for a massive investment in boosting teacher quality as one of several efforts to maintain the state's position as an international powerhouse of technology and entrepreneurial innovation. In a sweeping speech touching on California's schools, economy and demographics, O'Connell described a huge gap between what students are learning today and the future demands of the job market. "The simple yet terrible fact is that the population of students that is growing the fastest in this state is the population that is lagging the farthest behind," he said, describing the performance of Latino students in English, math and science.

Hours before his speech began, opponents of the California High School Exit Exam announced that they are filing a lawsuit today challenging the test's legality. O'Connell, in his speech, said the state must stand by the high school exit exam as a graduation requirement. "We've held firm on demanding that a high school diploma actually mean something," he said. "The high school exit exam measures absolutely the least our students must know as they move on to their next step in learning and earning."

He addressed another controversy in education: the ongoing clash between the state's methods for measuring school performance and the federal process under the No Child Left Behind Act. The California system, known as the Academic Performance Index (API), measures student growth on test scores from one year to the next. The federal model, known as Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP), sets performance targets students must reach each year regardless of the previous year's scores. O'Connell, a Democrat, said he will work with the Schwarzenegger administration to align the two systems this year. "We simply cannot continue along the confusing and ultimately debilitating path of two separate models," he said.

It was a proposal that drew support from a group of business leaders that typically criticizes O'Connell's views on school accountability - California Business for Education Excellence. Jim Lanich, president of the group and a supporter of the federal accountability system, said melding the two systems would help students and teachers "know what is success, how to measure it and how to improve." "It's not necessarily about API and it's not necessarily about AYP," Lanich said. "It's about getting all kids to grade level in reading, writing and mathematics."

O'Connell said more must be done to recruit new teachers, train existing ones and encourage the best to work in the lowest-performing schools. Those are all changes supported by the Center for the Future of Teaching and Learning, which released a report in December describing an upcoming surge in teacher retirements. Alan Bersin, Schwarzenegger's secretary of education, said he agreed with O'Connell's focus on teacher quality and recruitment. "His priorities for this year are very much in accord with the governor's proposals," Bersin said.

Source






Teach students how to use skills to serve their community

The idea below is a good one -- as students do remember much better things that involve them in real life -- but it could very easily degenerate into a Leftist propaganda exercise

Those so-called 3 R's (reading, 'riting, and 'rithmetic) are not enough for pupils in United States public and independent schools. Our schools should be turning out small "d" democrats as well as readers and thinkers. And there's a step toward this goal that has been missing in teacher preparation for a couple centuries. Those studying to be teachers in the vast majority of US colleges and universities don't do any community service integrated with their course work. They don't learn the strong connection between helping to meet community needs and the study of civics. Nor do they learn how to integrate community service with the teaching of civics, and other academic subjects.

A teacher in a service-oriented large city public high school was the coordinator of the student community-service club, and because of the work connected with that activity, she taught only two classes a day: beginning and intermediate typing. She had never done any community service when she was in college preparing for her teaching career, and she had never had an instructor in civics ask her to study how some voluntary civic service should be integrated with the study of civics.

Twenty-three years after she began teaching, she signed up for a course I taught in the combining of course work and community volunteer service to meet license requirements. At the first meeting of this in-service course, she was asked by the instructor to tell about the types of civic service her typing students were doing. "None." Then she explained, "My course is rigorous, and every single student passes the typing test at the close of each course."

The instructor asked whether the teaching included how to make mailing labels, and learned, of course, that yes, it did. And before the instructor could say anything more, the typing teacher literally opened her mouth wide, flung both arms out to each side, and whispered, "Oh, my goodness, we could learn how to do this for a nonprofit that needs labels. Oh, my, we could have been doing this for the past 23 years!"

Those studying to be foreign language teachers are seldom asked to provide community service for those whose language they are learning, yet the opportunity to practice the language and to provide a needed civic service would go a long way to prepare them to guide their future students in that type of service-learning.

The student-teacher majoring in Spanish in California, Arizona, New Mexico, or Texas could, for example, spend time in a day-care facility at a courthouse, providing needed translation work. Or perhaps offer to help with translation - written or oral - at a community center. Or begin a pen-pal relationship with a native Spanish speaker in a local nursing home.

And why? These are activities their pupils will want to take advantage of to learn how the civil society in their local community works as a democracy, and to provide them with practice in their foreign-language course work.

The teacher who has never done any civic service, who has never integrated some form of community service with academic course work, and who commutes to the school site from a community with a radically different socioeconomic base, may be able to guide students to success with the three R's, but is not able to provide the US with learned citizens skilled in being democrats.

Why is it true, nationwide, that the 18-25 age group votes the least and does the least civic service? Aren't these our most recent high school graduates? They should be the first to serve and to vote. Integrating community service work into classroom lessons will help our schools turn out vibrant, participating members of civil society.

Source

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For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL schools should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the poor and minimal regulation.

The NEA and similar unions worldwide believe that children should be thoroughly indoctrinated with Green/Left, feminist/homosexual ideology but the "3 R's" are something that kids should just be allowed to "discover"


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