Here are some interesting articles District Deeds received and discovered during the past week…

ENJOY!

 

 Who Benefits From the Expansion of A.P. Classes?

Millions of federal and state dollars are spent each year on increasing the number of Advanced Placement classes in low-income majority black and Latino high schools. Is this a benefit to the students or a payday for the testing company?

Quote from Article:

From one viewpoint, the expansion has been successful. In 2005, only 6.4 percent of the nation’s high school seniors who took A.P.s were black; that figure increased to 9.5 percent in 2015. Hispanics’ participation grew to 20 percent from 13.4 percent. For low-income students, that figure doubled, to about 30 percent from about 15 percent.

But taking an A.P. class and succeeding at it are two different things. After class let out, Fuchs told me, with a note of frustration in her voice, how few of her students passed the A.P. exam at the end of the year. “I’ve got five to six kids reading on grade level, and three of those don’t show up,” she said. “The rest are significantly below grade level.” Fuchs, whose class meets for 85 minutes daily, works with her students through lunch periods and whenever she has a free moment. She took some of them canvassing out of state on weekends during the 2016 campaign to teach them about real-world politics. She buys them breakfast the morning of the A.P. exam. Many of her students are engaged and passionate. Still, she said, “for six years, the passage rate has always been completely flat.” Usually, only one or two students in her class score a 3 or higher.

Fuchs’s students are part of a broader trend. Nationally, over 70 percent of African-Americans and 57 percent of Hispanics who took an A.P. test in 2016 did not pass. (Over all, the failure rate was 42 percent.) And over the past two decades, although the percentage of students scoring between 2 and 5 remained fairly stable, the percentage of students scoring 1 has grown to 19 percent from 12 percent.

District Deeds Synopsis:

After the ridiculous lawsuit by the San Diego Unified School District against the College Board to try and cover up the gross mismanagement by the SDUSD Supt. Marten administration that we covered in July and August, this article made us wonder how much success the most disadvantaged students in the SDUSD actually have had in AP classes.

We don’t recall seeing any documents presented to SDUSD Stakeholders by Marten about the failure rate of the numerous Student demographic groups…just the constant bragging about how many MORE AP classes have been added for”rigor”.

This article digs deep and gives many of the pro’s and con’s about AP and the questions surrounding how much it really increases rigor and how many students are actually successful.  Definitely worth a read.

Analysis: When Unions Don’t Protect Teachers’ Jobs

 

Quote from Article:

One of the union’s primary purposes is to provide job protections for teachers. They are highly motivated to perform this function because it demonstrates the union’s value to other members. And because grievances generally do not require the services of an attorney and can be handled by a staffer (because they are procedural rather than legal), the task of filing a grievance is usually performed without undue delay.

If the district doesn’t respond by backing off from the discipline or dismissal action, it advances to arbitration or termination hearings, and the teacher normally requires some form of legal representation. This can be provided by a union attorney or a private attorney contracted by the union.

What isn’t commonly understood by the public, or even by teachers, is that the union has wide discretion to pursue, or not pursue, the defense of its members. If the union and/or its attorney determines that they are unlikely to prevail, or the costs may be excessive, they may counsel the teacher to resign, transfer, or accept a lesser punishment.

District Deeds Synopsis:

Very interesting article by pro-charter “The 74” that outlines what many San Diego Unified Teachers have described to District Deeds.

Per our Teacher contacts, in many cases it is impossible for the Teacher to get the union to proceed to arbitration, despite strong requests by the teacher to do so.  If the teacher decides to proceed anyway, they are abandoned by the union and must fight for their rights alone and out of their own pocket for legal representation.

The final paragraph in the article says it all:

“Unions constantly battle the public perception that teachers are guaranteed jobs for life. But they also benefit from the fact that their members have much the same perception. For many of them, job protection is what keeps them paying union dues year after year. It is only the small number of teachers who have to draw on that protection who discover its limitations.”

Public School Officials Are Artificially Inflating Graduation Rates. I’ve Seen It Myself

 Quote from Article:

In the age of accountability ushered in by the No Child Left Behind law in 2002 and continued under 2015’s Every Student Succeeds Act, many school officials are using fraudulent methods to inflate graduation rates.

As a direct result of a public thirst for schools to show progress, boards of education pressure superintendents, superintendents squeeze principals, principals ride teachers, and teachers stress students. The ultimate measure of progress for schools nationwide is high school graduation rates.

Public school officials use a variety of schemes to give the appearance of progress.

District Deeds Synopsis:

This article is basically a blueprint of the way Supt. Cindy Marten and Trustees Richard Barrera, Kevin Beiser, John Lee Evans, Mike McQuary and Sharon Whitehurst Payne colluded to fake the SDUSD Graduation rate.

Online Credit Recovery…Check!

Reclassifying General Ed students to Special Ed…Check!

Transfer or Push Out students to Charters…Check!

The author could have been writing this article about the current San Diego Unified Fake Graduation Scam that Marten continues to lie about!

Well worth reading!!!

Now for the Quote of the Week:

“It is not the young people that degenerate; they are not spoiled till those of mature age are already sunk into corruption.”

– Charles de Montesquieu

Have a Great Week!

 _______________________________________________________

IF

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