Category: Education

SANTA CLARITA, Calif. — A private company in Maryland has taken over public libraries in ailing cities in California, Oregon, Tennessee and Texas, growing into the country’s fifth-largest library system.

Now the company, Library Systems & Services, has been hired for the first time to run a system in a relatively healthy city, setting off an intense and often acrimonious debate about the role of outsourcing in a ravaged economy.

What makes someone in San Diego a local is sometimes debatable, but it’s hard to dispute the status of the folks who got together at the Bay View Restaurant at the Marine Corp Recruit Depot on Friday, Sept. 24. This was the 60th reunion of Point Loma High School’s class of 1950, a festive and feel-good gathering of folks who can out-local just about anybody on the Peninsula.

ALL DETAILS AND LINKS INSIDE:
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Liberty Station Pledge Up In Smoke (and mirrors)?
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OB Kindergarten In News
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Party benefit for Walk for the Cure at noon designs – Sept 22nd
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Celebrate the Cabrillo Festival – Sept 25-26
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Community-based School Reform – Town Meeting at PLHS – Oct 6th

AND MORE …..

At the hip school
they aren’t aware
and they don’t even care
about what their
test scores might be
because they’re much too busy
rolling up their sleeves
trying to keep up with the boys and girls
with their stash of electronic accessories,

If you’ve spent any length of time in an urban community in the U.S., I’m sure you’ve seen the ads on public transportation or heard the television commercials from schools where you can train to be a medical assistant or a computer technician. But before you or someone you know signs up for a “promising career” at one of those for-profit colleges, take heed!

For-profit colleges have been around for years. The University of Phoenix, …

SAN DIEGO San Diego Unified’s results on 2010 state tests show across the board gains for the fourth straight year, with more students than ever ranking “advanced” in their subject knowledge.

The results of the annual California Standards Test released today show the district has five straight years of overall gains in English language arts and science scores, while math continues a four-year climb. This good news is tempered by recognition that scores still show an “achievement gap” among ethnic groups. Data relating to the achievement gap – test scores among ethnic groups – is still being analyzed, but early results show the gap is narrowing in some areas, albeit slowly.

One of the great stories from Ocean Beach in the Seventies was the creation and development of what we used to call “people’s institutions” – or “alternatives” to mainstream institutions. OB activists started, for example, the OB Rag as an alternative to the mainstream press. Other alternatives included People’s Food Co-op as an alternative to Safeway and the lack of organic food. The OB People’s Free School was begun as an alternative to the at-times dullifying public schools. And then there was the Ocean Beach Childcare Project.

The OB Childcare Project was begun by activists and local parents and teachers who saw the great need then for day care or child care for working parents or single moms. At the time, there wasn’t any inexpensive day care around. Finally, locals negotiated with the School District which allowed them to take over the building on the same block as the OB Elementary School, clean it up, and initiate a child care center.

Nearly every chair was filled last night at the OB Town Council monthly general meeting. Many of the some thirty folks in the audience had come to hear Scott Himelstein speak about his group’s “reform” plans for City schools.

Himelstein had invited himself to deliver another spiel about “San Diegans 4 Great Schools” and was the night’s guest speaker. The group is going around town in an effort to get their message out to community groups. OB was the second stop on Himelstein’s rounds. Last week he had been in Tierrasanta.

The same guy who will be speaking about “education reform” at the next OB Town Council meeting on July 28th, spoke at a Tierrasanta community meeting Wednesday night (7/21/10). He wasn’t received all that well by local residents there.

Scott Himelstein, the leader of the newly named “San Diegans 4 Great Schools”, told the residents gathered at the Tierrasanta meeting that his group was disappointed with test scores in San Diego Unified schools and that “governance” was the problem. “Governance” is a cloaked term for “how the school board works”.

by John M. Williams / June 30, 2010
Section 1: Last re Working Here

I have achieved some goals and failed to achieve others during my six months in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, as an English teacher.

The most significant failure is in not being retained at the school where I taught for most of this past six months. It was my goal upon arrival to do well, and to work through a year at this one school. It even seemed possible to me that I might advance to a supervisory or administrative position as the year progressed.

As it is, I have become toxic, radioactive, a leper; not only removed from class overnight, but denied any contact at with students, to the extent that I was not even allowed to grade final exam writing papers.

Recently, while channel surfing on TV, I happened on a little repartee on the war in Afghanistan and I couldn’t help but notice in all the wit and pontification that Pakistan was barely mentioned since we’re there, too, chasing down al-Qaeda and the Taliban. With robots: Predator Drones.

This bothers me deeply because, with me, it’s all about the children …

Editor: Frank Gormlie recently posted his third in a series about “Left versus Right” and asked for feedback from OB Rag bloggers and friends. Nate responded with the following – and in doing so reminded us of some of our weak points in describing politics. Politics CAN be fun. OB political activists have enjoyed a lot of fun over the decades in being political. So, we asked Nate to tweak his response a bit and post it. So, please bear in mind, that we can benefit from this type of discourse with our fellow citizen journalists and wish to improve our communication skills.
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Let me preface this by saying that I once got a ‘D’ in a political science class. Yes, that’s right. I showed up to class, took notes, wrote entire papers, went to the final, and still got a D.

I’m gifted.

You see, I’m extremely talented when it comes to “filtering-out” things I find boring. Been doing it my whole life! When I was a kid, it was zoning-out during the commercials that interrupted my Saturday morning cartoons. Today it’s skimming past ads in the margins of a website. Call it ADD if you want. But I believe it’s just how I deal with the daily bombardment of information.