In This Issue:
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EAGLE ROCK HIGH (& others!) HOSTING FREE CLINIC OFFERING WHOOPING COUGH VACCINATIONS FOR INCOMING 7TH GRADERS. |
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PLAN TO SPLIT CARSON HIGH INTO 3 SCHOOLS RILES PARENTS, TEACHERS |
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LAUSD TO BEGIN PHASING IN COMMON CORE CURRICULUM STANDARDS |
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WHY SCHOOL REFORM WILL CONTINUE TO BE SO HARD |
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HIGHLIGHTS, LOWLIGHTS & THE NEWS THAT DOESN'T FIT: The Rest (but
not necessarily the best) of the Stories from Other Sources |
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EVENTS: Coming up next week... |
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What can YOU do? |
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Featured Links:
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In honor of The Shortest Summer Vacation Ever: the shortest 4LAKids rant ever.
School starts week after next, on Monday the 13th for teachers, on Tuesday the 14th (Did I say “of August?”) for students.
How well this early start will go remains to be seen. How well the air
conditioners in the Valley schools – and the increased peak load on the
power grid - will hold up remains to be seen. Fritz and Garth and all
the weather bookies are offering up continued heat …while the (Iced) Tea
Partiers deny Global Warming. One only hopes that Everybody’s Wrong*.
And that the PE teachers heed (or even understand) the Heat Episodes
Bulletin 961.1 [http://bit.ly/QtF6oP]
.The author of the bulletin and the contact person listed on the
District website are no longer with LAUSD. When you see the kidlets
running laps in 95° heat call the principal. I’ll be calling Child
Protective Services.
If you are an incoming 7th grader – or the parent thereof – make sure
you have that TDAP booster – and that you can prove it on the first day
o’ school.
To fill up the time you’ve saved with this shortened edition of 4LAKids
click on the link following and see how much your school will get when
Prop 38 passes.
Now go to the Prop 30 site to see what your school gets if Prop 30 passes.
OK, I was being sarcastic. If Prop 30 fails next year’s summer vacation will be the longest ever. And not in a good way!
¡Onward/Adelante! – smf
* Gratuitous Buffalo Springfield lyric reference.
EAGLE ROCK HIGH (& others!) HOSTING FREE CLINIC
OFFERING WHOOPING COUGH VACCINATIONS FOR INCOMING 7TH GRADERS.
Also: ZELZAH NURSING CENTER, BRETT HARTE PREP, AND MARK TWAIN, WILMINGTON & EDISON MIDDLE SCHOOLS
NEW STATE LAWS REQUIRE BOOSTER SHOTS AGAINST THE ILLNESS.
By City News Service from Eagle Rock Patch | http://bit.ly/MXrMJW
July 30, 2012 - 5:00 am :: The first day of school in the mammoth Los
Angeles school district is 15 days away, and the district today reminded
parents that all incoming seventh graders in California must now be
vaccinated against whooping cough.
New state laws require booster vaccinations against whopping cough, also
called pertussis, before they may enter a seventh grade class. Most
toddlers are given such shots, but their effectiveness against the
very-contagious, severe malady can wane with time.
LAUSD officials have been calling, mailing and Twittering parents all
summer, but said they expect some students to arrive for the first day
of classes without their certificates.
Free clinics to administer the pertusis booster shots, which are called a
"tdap" shot, will be held from 7:30 a.m. to noon and again from 1 to
1:30 p.m. on the following schedule:
• Monday at the Zelzah District Nursing Clinic, 6505 Zelzah Ave.,
Reseda; and at the Bret Harte Prep Middle School, 9301 S. Hoover St.,
South Los Angeles;
• Tuesday at Eagle Rock High, 1750 Yosemite Dr., Eagle Rock; and at Mark Twain Middle School, 2224 Walgrove Ave., Mar Vista;
• Wednesday at the Zelzah District Nursing Clinic, 6505 Zelzah Ave.,
Reseda; Wilmington Middle School, 1700 Gulf Ave., Wilmington; and Edison
Middle School, 6500 Hooper St., South Los Angeles;
• Thursday at Bret Harte Prep Middle School, 9301 S. Hoover St., South Los Angeles; and
• Friday at Bret Harte Prep Middle School, 9301 S. Hoover St., South Los
Angeles; the Zelzah District Nursing Clinic, 6505 Zelzah Ave., Reseda;
and Edison Middle School, 6500 Hooper St., South Los Angeles.
PLAN TO SPLIT CARSON HIGH INTO 3 SCHOOLS RILES PARENTS, TEACHERS
By Rob Kuznia Staff Writer. Long Beach Press Telegram | http://bit.ly/T9XeUA
08/04/2012 05:25:13 PM PDT An imminent plan to split Carson High School
into three separate schools is raising red flags for some parents,
school affiliates and even City Council members, who say they were never
consulted on the matter and worry that the move will encourage a form
of academic segregation.
The critics fear that the new configuration will take a toll on the
school's celebrated diversity because one of the two splinter schools -
the Academy of Medical Arts at Carson High - could potentially siphon a
disproportionate number of the school's highest achievers, many of whom
are Filipino.
"My personal view is a lot of the high scores will be leaving Carson
High," said Pamela Baysa, a parent at the school who has attended many
of the community meetings about the coming change, which officially
takes effect on Aug. 14, the first day of school.
But there is also a more general wariness, a concern that the Los
Angeles Unified School District is tinkering with a local institution
from afar.
"There's a lot of civic pride around that school," said Gary King,
executive director of a mentoring and tutoring program at the school
targeting mostly students of Pacific Islander descent. "I think it's
something where, when you split that up and it becomes something else,
there's always a chance that things can go awry."
For their part, LAUSD officials say they are doing their best to ensure
that the demographic makeup of the three schools is balanced, though
they acknowledged there could be some "growing pains." But they say the
plan to create three separate schools with three separate principals on
the same campus - which will be known as the Carson Complex - will
produce smaller learning environments that better prepare students for
colleges and careers.
"I think Carson High is going to be on the forefront of innovation in
the South Bay area," said Rosie Martinez, the instructional director for
LAUSD's Intensive Support and Innovation Center.
The initiative is part of a wider effort by the district to get students
on a career track - or at least get a taste of one early on. Over the
past six years, LAUSD has created 37 such pilot schools, counting the
two new ones in Carson, Martinez said.
"Better to go through high school with a free education and know if
that's what you want to do in college or not, than to wait for college
to find out," Martinez said.
The Academy of Medical Arts at Carson High will focus on the health care
profession. The other new academy - Academies of Education and
Empowerment - aims to prepare students for the teaching profession. Each
will enroll about 500 students.
In some ways, students won't notice much of a difference.
For one, they'll all take classes on the campus, though each school will
have its demarcated areas. All 2,800 students at the Carson Complex
will share the cafeteria and be eligible to play on the same athletic
teams. They will appear in the same yearbook and go to the same prom.
More to the point, both academies have long existed within Carson High School in the form of "small learning communities."
The difference is that now, each will be headed by a separate principal.
And each will also have its own Academic Performance Index (API) score,
which is that number between 200 and 1,000 assigned to every California
public school based on the testing results of its students - and upon
which all schools in this state are judged.
This is a key area of concern.
Although students need not have a minimum GPA to get into either of the
new academies, some critics worry that they will self-segregate, as they
have already been doing for the school's medical program.
"Kids don't always pick academies or SLC's (small learning communities)
based on what's best for themselves," Baysa said. "A lot of times they
follow their friends."
The fear is that, should that happen this year, Carson High could lose
some of its recent API gains. Granted, the school's recent scores aren't
exactly impressive; they've generally fallen in the bottom 20
percentile - not only when stacked against all schools statewide, but
also all California schools with similar demographics. Still, Carson
High's API has crept up in two years from 611 to 652, and educators are
expecting a sizable jump in the next release of scores later this month.
(The state-set goal is 800.)
Also casting a critical eye on the upcoming changes are some members of the Carson City Council.
"We have one of the most diverse communities in California," said Carson
City Councilman Mike Gipson. "We support the inclusion of people, not
trying to separate people."
Gipson added that his son graduated from the school in 2007.
"It was a blended, very diverse campus," he said. "To do away with that would be devastating."
Mayor Jim Dear was also initially taken aback by the plan, in part because it seemed to come out of nowhere.
"I was a little surprised there wasn't more forewarning," he said. "The
Carson community has had a very good relationship with LAUSD. ... It was
kind of out of character as far as what we are used to."
But Dear said some of his concerns were allayed after meeting with
LAUSD's Tommy Chang, who, as superintendent of the district's Intensive
Support and Innovation, oversees all pilot schools.
"At first I was skeptical, but I have more confidence now," Dear said. "But I'm going to be watching them very carefully."
In a sense, the new configuration, which was created by teachers but
approved by LAUSD, has reopened some old wounds in Carson, which tried
without success about a decade ago to secede from the nation's
second-largest school district.
"It seems they don't really make any commitment to our parents or
community," said Sai Momoli, chairman of Pacific American Student
Services, a nonprofit group that works on the campus to support the
school's Pacific Islander Club and students. "The arrogance of LAUSD is
(this notion that) they are professionals and don't need community
input."
But the leaders of the new academies are not political people. Their
reason for breaking off from Carson High is relatively simple: They want
the autonomy to create the best schools possible.
For instance, the medical academy is big on field trips and job
shadowing at places like Harbor UCLA and the VA Long Beach Healthcare
System. Under the new format, students will be off-campus at least twice
a week, said the new principal, Leah Levy.
Similarly, students in the education academy - headed by new Principal
Michelle Bryant - will spend many days at Dolores Street Elementary in
Carson, where they will co-teach a class a couple times a week.
Meanwhile, Windy Warren, principal of Carson High School - which itself
will be divided into three small learning communities - said she
understands people's concern but is excited to get started on the new
setup.
"Change is hard," she said. "In the process of change, people get
nervous of the unknown, so we speculate: `What if this, what if that.'
... But the data has shown that smaller is better."
LAUSD TO BEGIN PHASING IN COMMON CORE CURRICULUM STANDARDS
By Barbara Jones Staff Writer, from the San Gabriel Valley Tribune | http://bit.ly/Ncrtrg
08/04/2012 01:44:53 PM PDT :: The way that teachers teach and students
learn is about to undergo a radical transformation at school districts
nationwide.
Students will start learning basic algebra and geometry skills in
kindergarten. [ ••smf: This has been embedded in the California
Standards for a decade.]
Multiple-choice tests will be replaced with complex essays, taken and
scored by computer. [ ••smf: Many LAUSD classroom computers are not new
enough to support this functionality, whether the District and many
school sites will have adequate bandwidth and network capacity at test
time remains to be seen.]
And across every grade level, students will be confronted with tougher reading lessons and more difficult writing assignments.
California, 44 other states and the District of Columbia have adopted
the Common Core State Standards - the first-ever national framework that
outlines what every public school student should know.
While plans call for implementing the reforms in fall 2014, Los Angeles
Unified and a handful of other districts will begin phasing in the
standards during this upcoming school year.
"Common Core creates a set of expectations for student learning
throughout the entire country," said Jaime Aquino, LAUSD's deputy
superintendent for instruction.
"It's not going to matter the ZIP code of where you live. We're going to expect the same out of every student."
The Common Core standards are considered more rigorous than most of the
states' current requirements, and are designed to help students master -
not simply memorize - academic subjects and sharpen their
critical-thinking skills.
By using the math and English-language arts lessons as building blocks, educators hope to create a solid foundation
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from which high school graduates can enter college or launch a career.
"In our teacher-training sessions, I say, `Can our kids do this?' and
they say, `Yes!"' Aquino said. "I say, `Are you sure?' They say, `They
can't do it right now because we haven't taught them this way.'
"So we need to make sure that we begin changing the way we teach."
The Common Core State Standards Initiative was launched in 2009 by the
National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School
Officers, with the goal of preparing every U.S. student for college or a
career.
In June 2010, the group adopted a slate of grade-level benchmarks for
math and English-language arts (which includes history, social studies,
science and technical subjects).
California education officials are now refining the standards' structure
and content and reviewing instructional and testing materials. The
state Board of Education can't sign off on the plans until next July.
Aquino and other supporters insist that Common Core does not mandate how
teachers should structure their lessons or dictate the classroom
techniques they should use.
However, the new standards do take a dramatically different approach to instruction.
Reading and writing will be integrated, instead of being treated as
separate subjects, and also will be incorporated into math lessons. In
addition to narrative essays, students will learn argument and
informative writing, with an emphasis on using technical vocabulary.
Reports, speeches, manuals and similar material will comprise half of
the reading material in elementary school. Reading at the high-school
level will be just 30 percent literature and 70 percent informational
text.
"Unless you're going to be an English major, most of the text that one
is going to read in the workforce or college is not literature," Aquino
explained. "It's informational text, and it's much harder to read.
"Literature obviously has its place. We're just making sure students are able to read and make meaning of information."
That means that kindergartners will be taught to ask and answer
questions about texts that are tougher than the children's stories
they're used to. Reading, writing, speaking and language skills will be
developed in subsequent years so that high-school students will be able
to research and write a comprehensive analysis of complex material.
"Students will be able to access information and decipher what it
means," said Evan Bartelheim, deputy superintendent in the Las Virgenes
Unified School District. "It builds on them being responsible, digital
citizens."
When it comes to math, differences between California's current standards and Common Core will be even more pronounced.
Kindergartners will have to know how to count to 100, but also how to
solve word problems - the bane of math students everywhere. They'll also
have to add pairs of numbers to equal 10 - equations - taking a baby
step on the long and bumpy road to algebra.
And as students progress to geometry and statistics, they'll also learn
to build arguments and critique their classmates' reasoning - again in
preparation for real-world challenges.
At the same time, there will be fewer skills for students to master in
each grade so teachers will have more time to help students understand
the more difficult material.
Aquino said the new approach will be especially effective in teaching
English-language learners, who comprise nearly one-fourth of
California's public school students.
"The current standards in California tried to cover too much, so
learning was a mile wide and an inch deep," Aquino said. "Teachers will
now be able to slow down and spend more time on essential concepts that
students need to master."
In crafting the new benchmarks, the Common Core authors looked to the
standards set by high-performing countries in Asia and Europe, where
students are performing better than their U.S. counterparts in math and
language arts.
"I'm not one of those who advocates adopting the educational system from
a foreign country," Aquino said, but I am one who says, `Let's learn
from what they're doing."'
Along with the whole new way of teaching will come a whole new way of testing.
The current California Standards Tests will be replaced by computerized
exams that can adapt immediately to a student's performance. A student
who answers a question correctly will then receive a more challenging
problem, while an incorrect answer will generate an easier question.
These new tests will include "performance tasks," in which students
apply newly learned skills to examples of real-world challenges. A
high-school math student, for instance, might have to review a financial
report, conduct a series of analyses and write an evidence-based
conclusion.
"Assessment drives instruction, so teachers are inclined to teach to the
test," Aquino said. "The CST is almost all multiple choice, but that's
not going to be the case with the new assessment. It's going to be a lot
of writing."
Although the new tests will rely heavily on essays and explanatory
answers, they'll be graded by computers that will scan for key numbers
or phrases and will even be able to check for grammar and punctuation.
"The tests are groundbreaking in that regard," said Jose Ortega,
administrator of the Education Technology Office for the California
Department of Education. "The automation and computerization will make
the tests machine-readable. (Grading them) will be quite comparable to
human consistency."
Most of the concern about the Common Core standards is centered on the
cost of implementation and whether the technology will be ready in time.
California adopted Common Core in the hope of getting a federal Race to
the Top grant, which would have provided millions of dollars to help
implement the reforms. However, the state wasn't among the winners,
which means that California - and its cash-strapped school districts -
must reach deep into their own pockets for funding.
Ortega said that money now used to administer the CSTs can be shifted to
the Common Core, although officials are unsure whether that will cover
the expense.
A Fordham Institute study estimates it could cost California from $380
million to $1.6 billion to implement Common Core, with savings coming
from the use of shared technology and resources.
And there is a backup plan that would provide pencil-and-paper
assessments if districts lack the appropriate Internet or Wi-Fi
technology.
To help ensure that Los Angeles Unified is prepared, San Fernando Valley
school board member Tamar Galatzan last fall pushed to get nearly $100
million in bond revenue reallocated to install wireless networks in the
138 district schools that lacked Internet access.
And, Aquino said, Superintendent John Deasy is lobbying tech companies
to donate computer tablets or netbooks for every LAUSD student by
2013-14.
"Technology is integrated into the learning of reading, writing and
math," Aquino said. "It's not just assessments, but learning every day."
Aquino designed Los Angeles Unified's Common Core implementation plan
and has been helping to train administrators, principals and teachers.
He said he's met little resistance from educators as they become more
familiar with the reforms.
"They say, `This is the way we would like it to be. It's not perfect, but it's much better than what we have now."'
The head of Los Angeles Unified's teachers union however, is questioning
whether educators will receive sufficient training and professional
support, given the enormity of the reforms.
"This is a huge change in the structure of curriculum, with almost no
financial support from the state," said Warren Fletcher, president of
United Teachers Los Angeles. "I'm worried that they're going to try to
implement this complex and expensive change on the cheap."
With the challenge of implementing Common Core in more than 1,000
campuses, Los Angeles Unified is phasing it in, starting with K-1, sixth
and ninth grades.
Thousands of teachers in those grades began Common Core training this
summer and will continue the professional development sessions after
classes start Aug. 14. Standards-based instruction will begin next
spring, although students will still take the CSTs.
Teachers in other grades, meanwhile, will be encouraged to begin shifts
to Common Core techniques, like using complex text in reading and
writing, and argument in math.
Bulky textbooks will likely be replaced in the future with interactive
lessons and even games that will reinforce what's being taught in the
classroom.
"Digital learning is designed to replace the textbook, not the teacher,"
said Judy Codding, a managing director of the Pearson Foundation, the
charitable arm of Pearson Education Inc., which is developing of Common
Core products and is piloting them in some LAUSD campuses.
"You can have games to reinforce skills - vocabulary usage and grammar
and math proficiency around all the concepts that kids have to master."
Other districts are taking a more conservative approach to implementing
Common Core. Las Virgenes and Burbank Unified, for instance, are
focusing this year on teacher training, and Las Virgenes is upgrading
its technology.
Still, with just two years before Common Core is implemented, it's clear there's still a lot of work to be done.
The 2012 Primary Sources survey funded by the Gates Foundation found
that 78 percent of more than 10,000 teachers polled were aware of Common
Core, but 27 percent felt unprepared to teach the new standards.
"This is not a one-year effort, it's an entire revamp of instruction,"
said Bill Honig, the former state superintendent who now chairs
California's Instructional Quality Commission.
"For the first time, we're talking about the right thing - the quality of education."
SAMPLE TEST QUESTIONS
Here is a sampling of questions devised by the Smarter Balanced
Assessment Consortium, which is developing Common Core tests for
California and 26 other states.
Literature question: Cite strong and thorough textual evidence from John
Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn" to support an analysis of what the poem
says explicitly about the urn as well as what can be inferred about the
urn from evidence in the poem. Based on a close reading, draw inferences
from the text regarding what meanings the figures decorating the urn
convey as well as noting where the poem leaves matters about the urn and
its decoration uncertain.
History question: Analyze how Abraham Lincoln in his "Second Inaugural
Address" examines the ideas that led to the Civil War, paying particular
attention to the order in which the points are made, how Lincoln
introduces and develops his points, and the connections that are drawn
among them.
Literature/Drama question:"In plays, no one arrives on or leaves from
the stage without contributing in some way to the complexity of the
play." Consider the author's choices of how to have characters enter or
exit in the section of the play offered here as well as in scenes from
two other plays you have studied and compare the significance and impact
of arrivals and departures from the stage.
WHY SCHOOL REFORM WILL CONTINUE TO BE SO HARD
By Peter Schrag, Ed Source Today | http://bit.ly/T9YF5s
July 31st, 2012 | Listening to even the best people in California’s
school reform discussions doesn’t leave much clarity about the direction
our money-starved education system should go or much confidence that
things will get perceptibly better any time soon.
Many of those good people know what’s needed. It’s just that they don’t
all know the same thing, or don’t know it at the same time. That much at
least was apparent once again at a forum in Sacramento last week on
school finance sponsored by PPIC, the Public Policy Institute of
California.
What they agreed on was that the fixes of the last 30 or 40 years – what
state School Board President Michael Kirst called “the historical
accretion” of programs – wasn’t working. It has become, State Sen. Joe
Simitian said, “the Winchester Mystery House” of school finance, rooms
added willy-nilly to solve one or another problem.
Neither the policymakers nor the reformers are entirely – or maybe even
mostly – to blame. In a state that now ranks in the bottom 10 nationwide
in school spending, and among the lowest in the ratio of teachers,
counselors, nurses, and librarians per pupil, there’s a long list of
suspects. When a questioner at the PPIC forum asked what we mostly
needed, someone stage-whispered, “more, more, more.”
But in a culture that must rank among the world’s leaders in
anti-intellectualism, and a society whose citizens can’t make up their
own minds about what they really want from their schools – about
standards, about testing, about social promotion, about evolution, and
about a thousand other things – money is hardly the only problem. “Money
matters,” Simitian said, “but it matters more if you spend it wisely.”
The current fashion, at least at the State Board and in the office of Gov. Jerry Brown, has two main elements:
Replacing the plethora of categorical state funding streams – the
biggest is class size reduction – with a “weighted student funding
formula” where every district gets a basic amount per student and
additional money for each low-income student and every English learner –
plus more for districts with high concentrations of such students. When
some districts and other school interests complained that the formula
was treating them unfairly, the formula was revised to reduce the extra
funding that would be provided for poor and immigrant kids. Here again,
the driver wasn’t any assessment of educational need, it was pure
politics.
More local control combined with local accountability under which
the state would replace its detailed monitoring of input with measures
of outputs.
But the problem, as Catherine Lhamon, a veteran civil rights lawyer at
the Los Angeles-based Public Counsel Law Center, pointed out, is how to
guarantee that the locals provide adequate resources – good teachers,
books, decent facilities, and all the rest – to schools with the poorest
children and others without the political clout to secure them.
Waiting until a district fails to deliver in measured student
achievement is to consign yet another generation to failure. Just a few
days ago, we learned that the state had reneged on the promises it made
years ago when it settled another suit brought on behalf of poor and
minority kids.
The fact that the governor has been blocking the further development of
the state’s educational data system doesn’t do much for confidence in
either the ability or the willingness of the state to hold the locals
accountable. Nor is there yet any clear idea of what the state would do
when the locals don’t perform. We’ve never known before, and we don’t
know now.
Making school improvement still more complicated – for schools and
teachers, for kids, for parents – is the shift to the national Common
Core standards and the new testing system that comes with them. As a
long-term pedagogical principle, Common Core, with its shift from
fact-based and formulaic learning to understanding, analysis, and
creativity, is long overdue. But the state has committed to making the
transition within the next year or two, at a time when school spending
is being cut, teachers are being laid off, and the teaching force is
already demoralized. And the state expects the locals to buy the
necessary materials. If this is not a sick joke, it’s close to it.
The “historical accretion” that Kirst talks about is the result of the
long-term failure of local districts, responsive as they always are to
pressure from influential parents and other interest groups, unions
among them, to allocate funds accordingly. It’s how we built that
Winchester Mystery House.
Given the special distrust of state government, local control always
makes for an appealing political slogan. But we have a long history in
which local control favored the privileged and short-changed poor and
minority kids: Southern school segregation, school funding, the drawing
of school attendance zones, the assignment of teachers to the nicest,
brightest, newest schools, and a host of other decisions.
Maybe this time it will be different, but there’s little yet in place
that provides much confidence that it will. Jerry Brown has never been
averse to the hair shirt. But almost always, it’s the poorest kids who
will have to wear the hairiest shirts.
P.S. Given all that, would it be better if we preserved the dismal
status quo by passing Gov. Jerry Brown’s inadequate tax hike in November
– and thus deferred for maybe five years any chance for anything
better? Or would the catastrophe following defeat of Brown’s initiative
finally wake the voters up? It’s not an easy decision.
•Peter Schrag is the former editorial page editor and columnist of the
Sacramento Bee. He is the author of “Paradise Lost: California’s
Experience, America’s Future” and “California: America’s High Stakes
Experiment.” His latest book is “Not Fit for Our Society: Immigration
and Nativism in America” (University of California Press). He is a
frequent contributor to the California Progress Report,, where this
column first appeared.
HIGHLIGHTS, LOWLIGHTS & THE NEWS THAT DOESN'T
FIT: The Rest (but not necessarily the best) of the Stories from Other
Sources
TWAIN MIDDLE SCHOOL'S BELL RINGERS BOUND FOR LONDON OLYMPICS: by Howard Blume LA Times/LA Now | http://lat.... http://bit.ly/QLM87U
HuffPo continues the mis/disinformation: LAUSD+UTLA AGREE TO INCLUDE STUDENT TEST SCORES IN TEACHER EVALUATIONS:... http://bit.ly/RpTMCj
Aug 14 is Back to School: LAUSD CALENDAR FOR THE NEW SCHOOL YEAR: Take note of important dates that affect your ... http://bit.ly/OF2tw2
INGLEWOOD UNIFIED TO ASK CALIFORNIA FOR A BAILOUT LOAN; WILL LEAD TO DISTRICT TAKEOVER: By Adolfo Guzman-Lopez P... http://bit.ly/Ol5i1e
UNDER PRESSURE, LA SCHOOLS POLICE CHIEF REASSESSES SCHOOL TICKETING POLICIES: By Vanessa Romo, KPCC 89.3 F... http://bit.ly/OjWf0F
The State of Preschool: CALIFORNIA AFTER THE BUDGET: by email from Preschool California by Catherine Atkin, P... http://bit.ly/QajEVH
Twitterpated: L.A. Unified Completes First Ever Social Media Survey - NEW MEDIA COULD IMPROVE CRISIS COMMUNICATI... http://bit.ly/QaN2KI
Asked+Answered: CAN KIDS BE TAUGHT PERSISTENCE?: By Jennie Rose in MindShift / KQED | http://bit.ly/PgMX4i
EVENTS: Coming up next week...
• LAUSD CALENDAR FOR THE NEW SCHOOL YEAR: http://bit.ly/OF2tw2
*Dates and times subject to change. ________________________________________
• SCHOOL CONSTRUCTION BOND OVERSIGHT COMMITTEE:
http://www.laschools.org/bond/
Phone: 213-241-5183
____________________________________________________
• LAUSD FACILITIES COMMUNITY OUTREACH CALENDAR:
http://www.laschools.org/happenings/
Phone: 213-241.8700
What can YOU do?
• E-mail, call or write your school board member:
Tamar.Galatzan@lausd.net • 213-241-6386
Monica.Garcia@lausd.net • 213-241-6180
Bennett.Kayser@lausd.net • 213-241-5555
Marguerite.LaMotte@lausd.net • 213-241-6382
Nury.Martinez@lausd.net • 213-241-6388
Richard.Vladovic@lausd.net • 213-241-6385
Steve.Zimmer@lausd.net • 213-241-6387
...or your city councilperson, mayor, the governor, member of congress,
senator - or the president. Tell them what you really think! • Find
your state legislator based on your home address. Just go to: http://bit.ly/dqFdq2 • There are 26 mayors and five county supervisors representing jurisdictions within LAUSD, the mayor of LA can be reached at mayor@lacity.org • 213.978.0600
• Call or e-mail Governor Brown: 213-897-0322 e-mail: http://www.govmail.ca.gov/
• Open the dialogue. Write a letter to the editor. Circulate these
thoughts. Talk to the principal and teachers at your local school.
• Speak with your friends, neighbors and coworkers. Stay on top of education issues. Don't take my word for it!
• Get involved at your neighborhood school. Join your PTA. Serve on a School Site Council. Be there for a child.
• If you are eligible to become a citizen, BECOME ONE.
• If you a a citizen, REGISTER TO VOTE.
• If you are registered, VOTE LIKE THE FUTURE DEPENDS ON IT. THEY DO!.
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