Category: Education

By Matthew Wood

The area around Ocean Beach Elementary School is about to get a little bit safer.

Work on the proposed crosswalk on Santa Monica Avenue just outside the school is expected to begin in the next few weeks, according to John Ly, a council representative and policy adviser for Councilmember Kevin Faulconer’s office.

In an e-mail, Ly said construction on a street light – a step necessary to stay within city code for crosswalks – would begin Dec. 23, the first official day of winter break for the school. He said he expects work on the street light to be completed by the time students return on Jan. 6, at which time work can begin on cutting curbs for the crosswalk.

As I reflect on Mandela’s passing I’m reminded of how the struggle of his people has played an important role in my development as an educator, starting back in ’57 or ’58 before I had taken my first “How to Teach” course at the University of Arizona.

At the time I was writing a research paper and found some essays on South Africa and the word “apartheid” leapt off the pages at me and I discovered that my struggle in Southern Arizona was so similar to what blacks were going through in the southern tip of the Dark Continent.

Of course, apartheid was more brutal. I didn’t have enough time to dwell on the subject so I just tucked my new found information away and got back to a life of pop quizzes and mid-terms and the like.

But, I didn’t know how much I had internalized what I had learned until the next year when I was in a class listening to a glowing lecture on South Africa that highlighted the country’s sparkling beaches and stunning countryside and rugged mountains and rich resources.

By Jim Miller

Just as he did last summer during the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington, President Obama addressed the issue of economic inequality last week during a speech on the minimum wage and health care, which he delivered in one of the poorest neighborhoods in Washington D.C. His message was stark and pointed as he told the crowd that, “The combined trends of increased inequality and decreasing mobility pose a fundamental threat to the American dream, our way of life and what we stand for around the globe.”

Sounding a populist note, Obama decried the fact that American workers at the bottom end of the pay scale are continuing to “work their tails off and …”

By Ernie McCray

On November 22, 1963, I was a twenty-five year old sixth grade teacher enjoying my second year serving students at Perry Elementary. Before recess that day we had gotten the news that the president was shot.

The radio in our classroom verified what we had heard with the words “President John Fitzgerald Kennedy is dead.”

OB Historical Society Presents:

Landscapes Rediscovered

Featuring John DeBeck

—Thurs., Nov. 21st at 7PM

at P.L. United Methodist Church,

1984 Sunset Cliffs Blvd., O.B.

John DeBeck, former long-time School Board Member will present a program on the recovered San Diego Unified School District art collection, an extraordinary project he accomplished that benefits historians, school children and all San Diegans.

Crosswalk Coming to the Mid-Block on Santa Monica Avenue – Eventually

By Matthew Wood

The city is putting in a much-needed crosswalk on Santa Monica Avenue outside Ocean Beach Elementary School, just not as soon as teachers and parents were hoping. In the meantime, a group of concerned fathers have taken up the cause to ensure safety for kids going to and from school.

According to John Ly, a council representative and policy advisor for Councilmember Kevin Faulconer’s office, funding has been secured and the project is set to be completed by the end of the fiscal year, which is June 2014. He said part of the holdup comes from

By John Lawrence

Saturday, Sept. 28, will go down in San Diego history as the day the much awaited central library opened in San Diego.

The opening ceremonies started at 11 a.m. and lasted for about an hour. All sorts of dignitaries were seated on the platform, and many of them spoke. The event was presided over by Mayor pro tem Todd Gloria.

By Joe Flynn

Odd isn’t it? The self professed “cheerleaders” for San Diego – the editors of the U-T San Diego – preview the grand opening of the new library with this article puffed up with a quote from San Diego’s Dr. No, Richard Rider, libertarian. I wanted to get the spelling right, but after reading his remarks no one will mistake him for a librarian.

Richard Rider, a local libertarian, called the new library “a monument to an era that is ending — a structure that in a few years will have little more utility value than a Pharaoh’s pyramid in Egypt. The only difference is that the library will have high operating costs — the pyramids need no such annual funding.”

–UT San Diego article “New library: Is this monument necessary?”

By Jim Miller

Finally, there was a measure of good news for schools in California with Proposition 30 creating a budget surplus that had plugged some of the gaping holes that years of budget cuts had made in our state’s public education system.

But it didn’t take long for Governor Brown to betray us. Indeed, the Courage Campaign has done a great job in recent weeks taking the Governor to task for seeking to raid the Proposition 30 surplus to fund prison expansion.

That’s right, you heard it: prison expansion.

By Jim Miller

Last week I outlined the plight of the City College of San Francisco (CCSF) noting that CCSF had become the “Chicago of Higher Education” as the college and their community allies were engaged in a struggle to stop the loss of its accreditation at the hands of a corrupt commission that was driven by a misguided corporate education reform agenda.

By Jim Miller

This summer few people outside of the Bay Area probably noted what was one of the most important stories about higher education in America: City College of San Francisco (CCSF) is losing its accreditation.

After years of wrangling, the Accrediting Commission for Community and Junior Colleges (ACCJC), one of the seven regional accreditors in the western United States whose job it is to ensure the quality of higher education programs announced that CCSF was losing its accreditation in July of 2014.

Why should you care? Because ACCJC’s decision had very little to do with the quality of instruction and much more to do with imposing a new business model on community colleges that narrows their mission and opens the door to more privatization in American higher education. And San Francisco is being used as an example to intimidate other colleges to fall in line with ACCJC’s questionable “reform” agenda. Thus, what happened in San Francisco could happen in San Diego.

The reaction to this extreme punishment for CCSF, an institution that serves 90,000 students, many of them working class, immigrant, or in adult education, and had never been sanctioned before last year, was outrage.

by Paul Buchheit/ Common Dreams

Some of America’s leading news analysts are beginning to recognize the fallacy of the “free market.” Said Ted Koppel, “We are privatizing ourselves into one disaster after another.”Fareed Zakaria admitted, “I am a big fan of the free market…But precisely because it is so powerful, in places where it doesn’t work well, it can cause huge distortions.” They’re right. A little analysis reveals that privatization doesn’t seem to work in any of the areas vital to the American public.

Health Care

Our private health care system is by far the most expensive system in the developed world. Forty-two percent of sick Americans skipped doctor’s visits and/or medication purchases in 2011 because of excessive costs.