AM News: What Michelle Rhee's Been Up To Lately

Former D.C. schools chief busy lobbying, helping politicians WP:  More than a year after she resigned as chancellor of Washington, D.C., Public Schools, Michelle Rhee remains as high-profile as ever.

Break for School Funds Times Union: The New York State Education Department has apparently backed off its threat to "suspend" more than $5 million in grants to Albany and Schenectady school districts because they had not finished negotiations on a new evaluation system for teachers and principals.

New Teachers Reflect on Teaching in 2011 Huffington Post:  To wind down 2011, we asked some first-year public school teachers to tell us what they've learned now that they have some experience in the classroom.

Schools marred by testing scandals in 2011 USAT:  From Waterbury to Atlanta to Asbury Park, N.J., public schools came under fire this year from media and public officials after investigations found evidence of test tampering by educators. 

Mandarin immersion program flourishes at L.A. school LAT:  Broadway Elementary in Venice launched the effort to boost enrollment. The plan worked so well the principal is concerned that dual-language learners will outnumber students in regular classes.

In San Francisco Bay Area, New Ideas on Innovating Out of Dropout Crisis PBS: One of the toughest jobs in modern America has got to be running an urban school district. Superintendents of schools in big cities like Washington, D.C, Los Angeles and Oakland, Calif., don't have very good job security because if they are taking any risks, and messing with the status quo, it provokes controversy and opposition.

Experts call for more attention to bullying of special needs students Baltimore Sun: They say students are targets and need more protections.

 

 

Comments

[Bruce]

Re the success of Mandarin immersion in Venice: yet when I proposed a school offering Chinese to the L.A. school board in 2009, they turned me down flat, and Green Dot's ed team ridiculed the idea that any students would want to study anything other than Spanish as a second language. L.A. Unified has long resisted offering anything that might bring the middle class back into its schools, and so suffers from shrinking enrolment and continual job losses, as in the early stages of the debacle of Detroit's schools.

Schools must offer courses and programs that their surrounding communities want. When they do so, there is no end of students; when they don't, the students drop out more and more.

[CarolineSF]

Here in San Francisco, our district has been really good at launching language immersion programs, which are super-popular with the young incoming families (middle-class and up). SFUSD doesn't do it perfectly, but quite well. So it definitely has the impact @Bruce mentions and is luring many high-powered young families into our public schools who might well otherwise have gone private.

So do arts magnets. A young relative of mine went to LAUSD's Hamilton HS due to the arts magnet there -- the youngest of 3 sibs and the first to go public at all in that family -- though that's partly due to being tossed out of the Stephen Wise Temple school and rejected by the Michael Milken school because of dyslexia. It worked out well for the kid and he's now doing well at a prestigious college.

But anyway, my point is that the arts magnet is also attracting middle-class families -- -- I assume that LAUSD encouraged it as it had a benefactor.

Here in San Francisco

[Bruce]

Caroline's comment is a good indicator of the double standard LAUSD utilizes in approving magnet vs. charter schools. The magnet schools are runaway successes, judged from the standpoint of their popularity with families in LAUSD; but there are too few of them to serve the families on their long waiting lists. But while academic magnets exist and are successful within LAUSD, academic charter schools have no chance of getting approved; and so families continue to flee LAUSD for private schools or other cities, which goes a long way towards explaining how L.A. has been so radically transformed, in my view for the worse, in the last generation.

San Francisco is quite a different city, and better run, with a better school district (which is friendlier to charters).