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Here are some interesting articles we received and discovered this past week…

ENJOY!

Maybe We Should Stop Telling Kids to be quiet

Quote from Article:

A week ago, I sat with a group of students and asked them what the number one rule of the school was. Without hesitation, they said, “be quiet.”

It’s a distressing answer for a bunch of reasons, least of all that I bet it’s pretty common. Our students, all over, are being told to be quiet, and it sucks.

Sure, we aren’t telling kids not to talk anywhere, or ever, but the fact that my students answered, instantly and unanimously, that “quiet” was the number one rule means it is the rule that they most often bump against.

It’s the reason they’re most often called out or get a call home. It’s the reason they don’t like school, or don’t like school as much as they could.

Quiet in the hallways, please, and not too loud at lunch, even. Quiet on the bus and on the way into school. Quiet when class starts, when the teacher is talking, when another student is talking, when it’s work time, when the bell is going to ring. We enforce quiet all day long for a bunch of reasons, and some of them are good.

and…

I walked by a group of students who were sitting in a loose circle talking and laughing loudly. No pen, no paper in sight, looking, for all the world, like kids doing nothing. On my way over to “blahblahblah” at them though, I stopped myself, and only because of that other conversation, and decided to listen instead. You know what? They were working on exactly the thing they were supposed to be working on, talking through a story they would film together, workshopping and expanding ideas. Their loud was super-good loud.

and…

In fact, all the best moments of learning in my classroom have been loud. All the best moments of learning in my life have been loud. All this quiet is telling us that there is something wrong, if only we could hear it.

District Deeds Synopsis:

Good insights by a Teacher who decided to take a step back and allow himself to evaluate the learning environment he had created for his students..and was willing to change his point of view.

Refreshing and well worth reading.

LAUSD Plans to Use Same Search Firm to Find a New Superintendent  – and it Gets a Break on the Cost

Quote from Article:

Before the afternoon closed session on Tuesday, members of the HYA team were spotted waiting to meet with the board. At the moment, HYA has 20 ongoing superintendent searches, but only five are districts with more than 10,000 students — the largest is Linn Benton Lincoln Education Service District in Albany, Oregon, with 35,000 students.

García didn’t see the multiple other searches as a problem for HYA and said, “They’re busy for a reason. They did good work for us before.”

The firm has placed 45 superintendents in the nation’s 100 largest school districts, and HYA President Hank Gmitro said previously that about 60 percent of the searches in larger school districts end up picking someone from outside the district. But he pointed out that if a district knows who they’re going to pick internally, they generally don’t go through a formal search process, which is what happened the last two times before King.

District Deeds Synopsis:

WOW!!!

The LAUSD BOord of Education actually pays a well regarded and experienced professional search firm to identify and select the very best candidates nationwide for the LAUSD Superintendent positon!!!

We are SHOCKED (not) that the LAUSD Board of Education didn’t decide to forego the nationwide search using professionals and instead decided to pick a crony suck up Elementary School Principal with virtually no large school district credentials.

SHOCKING!

Oh…that’s right…only educational leadership “geniuses” like San Diego Unified Trustees Richard “Tricky Dick” Barrera, Kevin “Dismissal with Prejudice” Beiser, John “You Can’t Handle the Truth” Evans and disgraced ex trustee Meddlin Marne Foster’ would have ever come up with that harebrained and totally corrupt decision.

The good news:

The SDUSD saved $160,000 by not using a professional search firm.

The bad news:

It cost all the SDUSD  stakeholders and taxpayers over $200 million in budget deficits and deep cuts in critical student services over the last 4 years by their hand selected incompetent flunky…Superintendent Cindy Marten.

Narrowing the Gifted Gap for Disadvantaged Students

Quote from Article:

The United States wastes an enormous amount of its human capital by failing to cultivate the innate talents of many of its young people, particularly high-ability girls and boys from disadvantaged and minority backgrounds. That failure exacts a great cost from the nation’s economy, widens painful gaps in income, frustrates efforts to spur upward mobility, contributes to civic decay and political division, and worsens the inequalities that plague so many elements of our society.

All of this was reinforced in a widely noted recent study by Alex Bell, Raj Chetty, and colleagues at the Equality of Opportunity Project, which highlighted the inexcusable number of “lost Einsteins” among American students, most of whom come from disadvantaged backgrounds.

Their team found that, as early as third grade, math scores help to predict who will be awarded patents in later life—that’s the metric they used for “Einsteins”—but also that such scores explain less than one-third of the “innovation gap” between those growing up in high- versus low-income families. Because this gap grows much wider in the later grades, Bell and Chetty suggest that “low-income children start out on relatively even footing with their higher- income peers in terms of innovation ability, but fall behind over time, perhaps because of differences in their childhood environment.”

Here is the Study: Is There a Gifted Gap? Gifted Education in High-Poverty Schools

District Deeds Synopsis:

This article made District Deeds think about all the “lost Einsteins” we currently have in the SDUSD due to cuts in key programs caused by gross budget mismanagement.

As we pointed out in “College Access Inequity for Students South of I-8“, there is a huge gap for the most disadvantaged students that have the least number of AP classes available to them as illustrated by the chart below:

In addition, Gifted and Talented Education (GATE) funding has been slashed to the bone and really only exists in the richest schools that have well-funded foundations to pay for those supports.

This article and accompanying study could have described exactly what is happening now in the SDUSD.

It is horrifying to think how many “lost Einsteins” WE have in the SDUSD under our inept educational leadership regime.

It is even MORE horrofying that our inept educational leadership regime under Marten does not even realize it.

Now for our Quote of the Week:

“Until we get equality in education, we won’t have an equal society.” – U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor

Have a great week!!!

__________________________________________________________

IF

  • Your family has been injured by the San Diego Unified School District, go to the District Deeds Complaint Forms page to find instructions to fight for your Civil Rights!
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Please Click the Link Below and sign the Petition Today and READ the COMMENTS to Support the REMOVAL of Marten by SDUSD Stakeholders!

FIRE San Diego Unified School District Superintendent Cindy Marten Immediately!

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