Tags
San Diego Unified Board of Education, San Diego Unified School District, San Diego Unified School District Superintendent Cindy Marten, SDUSD Trustee Richard Barrera
Here are some interesting articles we received and discovered this past week…
ENJOY!
School Districts Set Poor Example for Students
Quote from Article:
There’s bitter irony in the loud complaints from California school officials and unions – particularly in large urban districts – about not having enough money.
Schools are supposed to be teaching our children how to become productive and responsible adults, but by overspending revenues, blaming others for their fiscal problems and demanding bailouts, they are setting poor examples.
We just saw a prime – but, unfortunately, not isolated – example in Los Angeles Unified, the state’s largest school system.
LA Unified’s teachers union struck, demanding salary increases, lower class sizes and other costly items, even though the district was already projecting multi-billion-dollar deficits.
And…
Characteristically, district officials and United Teachers of Los Angeles blame others for the widening gap between income and outgo, particularly a burgeoning charter school movement that has lured about 150,000 students, and their financial support, away from LA Unified.
The school board called for a moratorium on new charters – ignoring the simple fact that parents turned to charters because their children were not succeeding in LA Unified’s schools. Civil rights groups, meanwhile, warned the board not to finance the new contract with funds specified to raise the academic performances of poor and other “high-needs” students.
And…
And then there’s San Diego Unified. Last year, to partially close a looming budget deficit, it tapped into one-time funds, much like LA Unified is doing to finance its new contract, even though the district’s official policy is not to employ that irresponsible practice.
And…
By example, school officials and school unions are teaching students that it’s all right to run up credit card bills, blame others for overspending and then cross their fingers that someone will bail them out.
District Deeds Synopsis:
This article exposes what all San Diego Unified School District (SDUSD) Stakeholders already know…that the Superintendent and Board of Education are totally “irresponsible”.
Elementary School Superintendent (ESS) Cindy Marten’s gross incompetence in managing the budget and having to break established district policy to balance the budget does harm to all Students. The SDUSD Board of Education is just as guilty of harming Students by not providing their publicly sworn duties and for not firing the incompetent and pathetic Marten.
As the article mentions, Trustee Tricky Dick Barrera and his fellow trustee flunkies constantly whine about getting more money and have conspired to undermine Charter School applications even though they have no clue how to manage the budget that they have.
Why would any SDUSD Stakeholder that knows of their incompetence and corruption ever want to give them MORE money to mismanage?
The article is right…the pathetic Marten, Tricky Dick Barrera and their cronies are a huge disgrace and a horrible example for ALL SDUSD Students.
School Needs a Redesign, and Educators Can Lead the Way
Quote from Article:
Imagine yourself back in a classroom. You’re not taking English or history or pre-calculus; the sign on the door says “Obstacles.” You enter and on the board is your first assignment: create something—a drawing, a model of a house, a sketch of a new product, a sculpture. You do, and then as you step back, the teacher steps forward and smashes your creation. And tells you your next assignment is to pick up the pieces (including yourself) and make something new.
How would this course impact you? You wouldn’t be absorbing a trove of new content, but you would be learning skills critically important to thriving in our rapidly changing economies. You’d be learning to step away from perfectionism and ego-based solo creation. You’d be learning to step toward resilience, agility, designing with others, creative collaboration.
And…
Meow Wolf isn’t alone in looking for creatives. LinkedIn recently crunched its very large data set and concluded that the soft skill most sought by employers in 2019 is creativity. Soft skills are needed to take on the complex problems we face today, problems that largely can’t be solved by individuals working alone, but rather by teams with diverse expertise and strengths working within specific institutional contexts.
And…
This work is being supported by Excellent Schools New Mexico, a local nonprofit committed to improving the quality of educational experiences for traditionally overlooked students. Excellent Schools New Mexico will fund ongoing school redesign work for these five teams, who have committed six months of their time, labor and expertise to exploring three fundamental questions:
- What are our students’ aspirations and what needs to be done to achieve them?
- Why must we reimagine school?
- How might educators, with their domain expertise, become the designers of these changes?
And…
Insight 1: Educator-designers look at problems as design issues.
They don’t blame students for failure, and they don’t blame themselves or the system either. Instead, they empathize with students and themselves—and then own the problem. They look at their teaching practices, their classrooms, their schools as malleable.
Insight 2: Educator-designers need agency.
They need to feel empowered and entrusted to define problems, design pilots and test possible solutions. They need the participation and support of school-based administrators as well as central office leaders, be they district, charter or state.
Insight 3: We need a new type of professional learning experience that gives educator-designers the tools, processes, time and space, and networks to redesign their schools.
There is a large body of evidence, both anecdotal and research-based, on the ineffectiveness of our current model of professional development. There’s also a large body of evidence on how our schools are not serving all students in a rapidly changing world.
What if, instead of traditional PD, we borrowed a page from industry and academia, and educator learning became “learning by doing,” where teams embarked on medium- and long-term design journeys to solve problems relating to the core design of school?
District Deeds Synopsis:
This approach to School Redesign really looks like a great model for any school district to implement.
Unfortunately the SDUSD is not just any school district.
For example, “Insight #2 – Educator-Designers Need Agency” is currently non-existent and impossible in the SDUSD under pathetically insecure ESS Marten. As most incompetent leaders do, ESS Marten holds her power tightly and generally hires/promotes senior staff dumber than she is and totally compliant so they don’t pose a threat. Marten is not about to empowering anyone to implement change except herself which has created the current toxic SDUSD work environment…the reason why all the highly skilled and credentialed leadership has left.
All we can hope is Marten will again present another budget disaster this year and the State will have to step in and manage the SDUSD. Until then all the SDUSD Stakeholders will continue to suffer.
One Step Closer to a Statewide Educational Data System
Quote from Article:
Governor Newsom’s recently proposed budget includes $10 million in one-time funding for the planning, creation, and implementation of a statewide longitudinal data system—including early childhood education, K–12, higher education, the workforce, and health and human services. As we wrote in a recent PPIC report, this idea holds a lot of promise. An integrated data system could allow for improved feedback for educational institutions, more efficient use of public funds, and better evaluation and coordination for the state. The idea also has support in the state senate, where Senators Glazer and Allen proposed a similar system (SB 2) last December.
And..
The governor’s budget summary also suggests that the data system could be used to improve K–12 measures of career and college readiness. Current measures are based on high school test scores and high school course-taking. But connecting K–12 data to higher education and employment data could lead to more meaningful measures of whether students are able to take and succeed in college-level courses, or whether they work in a job with a living wage.
PPIC Study link: Modernizing California’s Education Data System
District Deeds Synopsis:
This is GREAT NEWS! Governor Newsom is supporting the creation of a data system that will prove a number of items that SDUSD Parents already know…but can’t prove.
Being able to track and review what students fail and succeed after high school in college and the workplace will enable parents to directly identify the schools that are working and the ones that are not.
Having access to that data will also force a large degree of transparency on the SDUSD overall performance by exposing the results of the fake graduation rate we have talked to our readers about throughout the tenure of pathetic, incompetent ESS Cindy Marten.
Now for our Quote of the Week:
“I believe that transparency is the solution to our problem on corruption. Grace Poe
Have a great week!!!
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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!
- YOU ARE TIRED OF THE COVER UPS AND LIES BY SUPT. CINDY MARTEN…
Please Click the Link Below and sign the Petition Today and READ the COMMENTS to Support the REMOVAL of Marten by SDUSD Stakeholders!
District Deeds 