School districts are beginning negotiations with their unions based on their 2010-2011 budget numbers, which are depressing.  If it’s impossible to draw blood from a turnip, just try to wring money from state legislatures for education.

The Colorado legislature is about to claw back $250 million+ from public schools for the ‘10-’11 year.  It will probably take back just as much, if not more, for ‘11-’12.  If school districts don’t have enough reserves, and no one does, they will be going backwards in funding for years.

Money saving tricks

Some districts are freezing salary - no COLA, no steps and levels.  Others are doing furlough days.  Others are charging for transportation.  Others are ending all technology purchases.  Others are emptying administration - no more professional development for teachers or curriculum support!  Others are increasing classroom size by one, two, or three children.  Last but not least, some districts are closing buildings.

No more investing in education!

Investment in education has stopped.  Districts that have made progress in student achievement will probably freeze in place or will start drifting backwards.  After all, if no one is in charge any more of managing the voluminous data underlying each student’s progress, how will the analytical process thrive that supports achievement?

Schools going backward in funding

The largest district in Colorado is about to cut $60 million from a $670 million budget.  The district estimates it will make the same size cut in ‘11-’12, and possibly again in ‘12-’13.  That means that by ‘13-’14, unless miracles happen, the district will be at a budget starting point roughly $180 million below where it is today.  And yet the District is supposed to get every student to meet annual growth targets.

Colorado calculates annual growth against student peers.  Proficient students are measured against proficient students, barely proficient against barely proficient, etc.  So the only good news for schools is that all students in the state are in the same hole, so the lack of annual achievement growth should be relatively similar.  This prediction will assure funding remains at about the same dismal level for all schools in the state.

Not enough tax dollars for education today

Colorado is almost last in state funding per student, at about $7300, even though the state has one of the highest college education levels.  This “Colorado paradox” happens because educated out-of-staters like to come and live here for the mountains.  The state is also reasonably affluent.  But like other western states, including California, citizens prefer to keep their money in their pockets.  Colorado has one of the lowest state income tax and sales tax levels in the country.

How’s that Obama money doing?

ARRA money has bailed districts out in 2010, but now everyone is headed towards a cliff.  What kind of help is the Obama administration offering?  Race to the Top, of course, or as some wags say, slow jog to nowhere.  Really, the $4 billion will go to schools doing education Arne Duncan’s way, which means pay-for-performance and closing non-performing schools or turning them around or starting over.

What does any of that do to help districts whose schools aren’t completely in the doghouse yet (but may be after two or three years of these budget cuts)?

What would you do if you could?

And will pay-for-performance really do the trick with teachers? Schools definitely need something beyond steps and levels, but what should that look like?  Do schools need a more streamlined way to move bad to mediocre teachers out?  Yes.  Do schools need more money for entry level teachers, so education can compete at least marginally with law and medicine for top graduates? Yes.  Do schools need a way to pay off student loans to encourage teachers to work in challenging schools?  Yes.

How about a little extra money for some teacher career tracking - giving teachers money for online course development, professional development of peers, etc.

Get your 30 in and retire

It’s true that some relationship needs to exist between compensation and how well kids learn, but that’s not the whole package.  And frankly, in Colorado, teachers and districts are going to be so busy plowing money into their PERA pension fund, they may not get a raise for years.  They are mostly going to be working for that glorious final moment when they stagger over the 30 year finish line and can get out of education altogether.  Not very pretty, is it?

Why would I feel better when the guy walked into my class while I was teaching and said, “How are things going today?”  Can you believe how obtuse that was?

What was I supposed to say, “Oh fine, and how’s your day?” while holding up my hand to indicate wait to the child who was waving furiously for me to come help and accepting the letter in my other.  As if receiving a RIF notice was going to make my day.

After school when I calmed down, I thought he could have said, “Hello, I’m glad to meet you even if I’m the bearer of bad news.  Please know I’m sorry we are in such a bind.”  At least it would have been admitting the quandary.

Here is what the teachers in California are doing.  It started last fall when University of California students, initially over tuition increases, decided to have demonstrations up and down the state on March 4, 2010.  Then the State University students joined in, angry about all the cuts to state university public education.

Then the news came out that San Francisco schools would have a $113 million deficit beginning next year.  Parents began to devise ways to raise money. The usual: another parcel tax measure, asking businesses to match funds raised by PTA’s, a surcharge on movie tickets.  I laughed reading San Francisco  legislator Tom Ammiano’s pitch for regulating and taxing marijuana purchases to raise money for schools.

Of course, the district is doing the same as my district: layoffs, furlough days, no professional development, summer school cuts.

Same ole, same ole.  Too bad.

But teachers and students in public universities and community colleges and teachers in public elementary and high schools throughout the state and across 2 dozen other states according to the San Francisco Chronicle are demonstrating on Thursday.

In colleges, there will be marches.  I did my undergraduate work at San Francisco State and I’ve heard students there have built giant puppets, La Llorona weeping for her students and a skeleton with a graduation cap to show that students will still be paying off their fees when they’re dead.  I suppose humor helps you laugh instead of cry.

At our elementary school we will all wear black to signify the loss of school staff and support for students.  During social studies the fourth grade classes who, remember, study California history and government will have a lesson on how schools and libraries and the police and fire departments are paid for.  During the time for writing, they will compose letters to the governor describing which services are important to them and offering ideas to help the government.  Fulfills several grade 4 standards, but most important students are analyzing what they know to synthesize new ideas and write them down.

After school, I’ve heard many teachers will join demonstrations at city halls or along well-traveled intersections on the peninsula, but as of this post I’m not sure where my union will participate.

By the June primary elections I tell you, people are really going to be furious as cuts get worse and services collapse.  Even though initiatives are troublesome to me, seven likely to be on the ballot aim to increase funds to support schools and other social services.  All because so far the legislature has not found a way to finance support for state services or schools that used to be the best in the United States.

CA suburban middle school

Today, Wednesday, February 24, 2010, the Wall Street Journal front page reported disaster for San Mateo County school districts, elementary to community college, affecting high and very low-performing schools with layoffs up and down a beautiful part of the San Francisco peninsula.

The superintendent of well-to-do Lafayette School District states “districts across the state are increasing class sizes, decreasing the length of the school year, eliminating professional development, and eviscerating art, music, athletic and summer school programs.”  See “Complacency has added to our crisis in education” by Fred Brill, San Francisco Chronicle, February 19, 2010.

The catastrophe for students is the procedure whereby huge cuts balance a short term budget, i.e. layoffs aka RIF-reduction in force.

“Increasing class size” means teacher layoffs.  “Eliminating professional development” means teachers providing the service disappear.  No “art, music, athletics and summer school” means RIF.  Furthermore, furloughs and decreases in the number of school year days forewarn that teachers decamp in hopes of a better salary elsewhere-maybe to booming Wyoming.

It may be that school districts are caught in the middle of the state’s fiscal debacle, especially in California.  However, Jeffrey Pfeffer in ‘Lay Off the Layoffs” Newsweek, February 15, 2010, quoted a head of human resources, “If people are your most important assets, why would you get rid of them?”

It’s a business quote, let’s be honest, not a school district’s.  First thing that will come to the reader’s mind is school districts are not businesses.  Agreed.  This blog often says that.  Nevertheless, think about why layoffs sabotage the goals for student achievement.

Immediately, the unemployment benefits that the county will pay cuts into money available for schools.  Money spent when people are rehired cuts into supposed savings.

Next, morale of the remaining staff goes down.  Teachers are redistributed, and there is a direct and indirect cost to resettle in a different school, much less learn the “school climate” at the new location or new grade level.  That’s why the strongest schools have few teachers moving in and out and students remaining at the school from grades K-5.

Another indirect cost is loss of institutional memory.  Especially in low-performing schools where young teachers are often the first to be sent packing, every year the few remaining teachers must spend at least a month of instructional time training new teachers who inevitably are brought in as student demographics shift.

Next, productivity is reduced.  Fatigue sets in.  With substantial layoffs, too few teachers must take on extra duties that had been distributed among more employees.  They get sick.  More teachers take days off and the district must pay for substitutes-another cost.

This blog has no “magic bullet” to avoid projected layoffs for 2010-2011, other than to hope more stimulus money is authorized by Congress.  However, state and local school boards should think “long term.”

How about working through the county to gain volume and thus reduce the substantial cost of supplies per school district?  Right now each school district makes deals, not nearly large enough in volume to save the money required.

The state department of education should advocate for the revised federal health care plan, thus cutting costs for teacher benefits and Medicare, after salaries a major cost to school districts.

County boards of education should strongly advocate for combining small districts into one larger district to save the cost of multiple superintendents and district personnel.  Maybe the goal should be 10-20,000 students per district.  Contentious, but cost-cutting.

Finally, this blog has advocated for the proposal developed two years ago “Getting Beyond the Facts: Reforming California School Finance” that suggests a plan to reorganize the funds available to the state so that money is allocated where it’s needed.

Why should teachers (and so students) be the first to pay the price for a poor economy and state inability to manage its finances?

We’re back to Elementary and Secondary Education Act aka ESEA, the original title of the legislation, in an effort to abandon the stigma attached to the NCLB revisions in 2001.

Heading the list of disliked provisions was distaste for “top down” mandates.  Seen as an especially noxious feature of NCLB legislation were mandates required by Congress with no money attached.  Even now, as word gets out about negotiations on ESEA revisions, the fear is for more top down requirements with no $$ attached.  As most states are currently in the middle of terrible fiscal times, all eyes are on m-o-n-e-y.

Looking at current deficits, states can’t bear to rewrite state tests, put new evaluation procedures in place, provide colleges adequate funds to train teachers, much less support school districts to turn around failing schools-even though, in the long term, all those revisions must occur to close the achievement gap among student groups, the top of the top priorities for ESEA revision.

On the other hand, states might as well face the facts.  The Obama administration has insisted on accountability, but no longer with a NCLB type of yearly test geared to state standards that are set to increase levels of proficiency to 100% by 2014.

As before, each state will set its own standards and choose its own test, but everyone in the education world knows how that worked under NCLB.  Lowered standards and simplified tests made the state look like it was making its benchmarks.

The overview of the ESEA legislation revisions have stressed the U. S. Department of Education’s insistence on data to show student growth and school progress over time with the plan to reward gains in closing the achievement gap among the students left behind in the ordinary school setting.

So now the focus is on the National Governor’s Association and Council of Chief State School Officers to design common standards that become the core of each state’s plan for accountability.  This blog’s bet is that researchers at, for example, Education Trust will be comparing each state’s standards and tests so that low-performing schools are not left to fail.

As most school districts are just trying to get by for another year, such a big change in thought and structure for school reform requires investment.  Like flowers from a magician’s hat, the Race to the Top competition energized 48 states to think about change for high schools, and Title I School Improvement Grant competition sets those states to structure elementary education reform.

Get over it.  Whether a group of charter schools or a public high school district or a tiny rural public school district, someone is at the top.  Here’s the question: is the figure at the top looking ahead or keeping his/her head lowered?  Those are the stakes for legislative reform in the Elementary and Secondary Education Act.

Where do you stand?  Paralyzed?  Or willing to grab this formidable bull of reform by the horns and wrestle it down?

Pension fund deficits hurting budgets

On top of budget cuts, Colorado’s state pension fund (PERA) is underwater by about $30 billion over 30 years.  If left unchanged, the fund will go broke in 2032, which is not a problem if you’ll be dead within the next 22 years, but a challenge if you intend to live past that.

Colorado’s SB10-001, a bipartisan bill to square up the pension fund, will reduce the automatic annual COLA increase of 3.5 down to 2.0, and will increase employee contributions by 2 percent and employer contributions by 2 percent.

Salary freezes, furlough days, and larger classrooms on horizon

At the same time, many districts are looking to freeze salary steps and levels right now to balance their short-term budgets.  The freeze in Colorado teacher salaries could extend over two or three years, depending on state and local property tax revenues.

These facts leave boards and all school employees between a desk and a hard place.  It’s difficult to picture how school districts will provide any staff raises in the near future.  Starting teachers in the $30 thousand range may be stuck, sliding farther behind workers in other professional fields, such as investment banking.  New college graduates may struggle to figure out how public school teaching can ever provide enough of a living to be worthwhile.

While taxpayers certainly feel the pinch in this recession, schools are doubly hit as the budget crisis proceeds.  If a salary freeze occurs in ‘10 -’11, budget balancing in ‘11-’12 will require larger classrooms and layoffs.  By the third year out, budgets may be so drained that furlough days will be piled on salary freezes and increased classroom size.

High quality education at stake

Meanwhile, schools try to bring the highest quality education to kids, including all the technology necessary to keep students technologically literate.  They’re asked to reduce the learning gap between ethnic groups.  They need to get kids up to speed in reading, math, writing, and science.

Schools have so many fingers in the dykes that it’s inevitable that a New Orleans style flood is on its way, drowning kids in inadequacy and insufficiency.  School districts will need to offer their best arguments to their constituents to bring more money into the system.  But communities will also have to step up to avoid Hurricane Katrina destruction in classrooms across the nation.

*Serious discussion needs good communication to promote successful solutions for the school community.  See the website with this blog for a possible support program.

Looks like all is fine and dandy.

However, as my BTSA (Beginning Teacher Support and Assessment) consultant says when I ask for advice, it’s year 2 problems of which suddenly you are aware.  The first year was such a rush.  Now you worry about the girl who won’t finish her work and keeps begging for help without following the steps you’ve laid out and reviewed over and over to avoid this problem.  It seems I’ve tried every ‘trick’ in the book.  For instance, I ask how she’s feeling when I see her working well with her partners, but the one that has worked best is the old-time stickers on a card for specified behaviors that goes home weekly for reward time at the computer and so on.

I’ve mentioned the money difficulties for my district and they are not any better.  At every budget meeting, in fact, more funds disappear.  The second year teachers have all been told to expect “pink slips” and it’s only February.

I’ve been reading about the lickety-split passage of education legislation by the legislature in order to pick up federal funds as if $700 million is going to save California.  We know schools need every penny, but the teachers in my district have been warned that the money will not appear at our door.  Our students are high-achieving and most of the money is for the lowest of the low-performing schools.

It is amazing though.  My father passed on that an acquaintance in Los Angeles, well-versed in education issues, said that so many states have already revised their education legislation, it’s one of the biggest positive moves brought on by the Obama Administration in the past year.  I wonder how long before such news hits the media.  Or is it only the complainers who will be heard.

Still some of the legislation and some of the money will foster changes to teacher evaluation and changes to the pay structure I’m already used to.  Honestly, in these days of recession one advantage of teaching is a salary and benefits that can be counted on.

I know that several large school districts like Washington DC have had completely new evaluation plans handed out by the superintendent with no negotiations from the teacher’s union.  I can’t imagine that will happen in California.

There is, however, the plan to revise California standards and benchmarks which is a good idea.  But when we talk at lunchtime, we all know it will not be next year that the standards are ready or that evaluation changes will be negotiated, much less that pay will be determined by how high your evaluation ‘number’ is.  And who decides, the state, the district?  That’s a red hot issue.

June?  With the pink construction paper already gone from the supply room in February, is that an omen of where I’ll be?  One of 102 teachers from my school district standing in the unemployment office, laid off, pink slip in hand?

California elementary charter school

Why do some praise charter schools as the savior of education in the United States?

Why are others cautious, if not outright antagonistic?

The charter school movement came to life in 1988 in Minnesota with the idea to design schools with “renewable licenses to innovate, free of most school district rules.” (John Merrow, “When Roads Diverge…”edweek.org) In 1992 the first charter school opened in Minnesota, followed soon by California after passage of the Charter School Act of 1992 and which now is #2 in the list of schools chartered.

Still charter schools have not, so far, swept over the country.  Let’s look at more numbers.  There are 4000 charter schools in 40 states and DC with 1.3 million students.  Minnesota has the most schools and California in 2009 has 700 charter schools out of 10,000 public schools with 4% of the 6.3 million students.

Even so, Michelle Rhee, superintendent of Washington DC schools, Antonio Villaraigosa, mayor of Los Angeles, and Michael Bloomberg, mayor of New York, all are doing their best to restructure their school districts by closing low-performing schools and reopening with smaller charter schools, often in the same building.

Why so?

Money.  State regulations for licensing charter schools have been revised in pursuit of federal Race to the Top funds geared mostly toward low-performing high schools, a desperate problem in large urban areas.  Limited data available does show that charter high schools outperform similar traditional high schools.  In addition, in California at least, charter high schools attract more disadvantaged Hispanic students, one of the groups the state must target for academic help.

Strong teachers and administrators who want to get away from the system of traditional public schools with union contracts that were needed for a long while, but now restrict change, love the idea of starting over with a new school.

In addition, high-performing charters are small schools (average 350 students) with longer school days and year, more time devoted to English language study, a clear academic mission, a moderate discipline policy.  Those schools do well on the assessments to ensure a license renewal.

Top charters really have tried to innovate.

K-5 Conservatory Lab Charter School in the Boston area led by Diana Lam, long time administrator, uses a curricular model called Learning Through Music to support students who must improve their academic achievement.  Teacher contract innovation also is a goal.  A management team is designing the pay formula based on 5 levels of teacher performance, each level geared to identify a teacher as s/he becomes more experienced.  In addition, the teachers collaborate, using the Cycle of Inquiry model to assess, analyze, and modify teaching strategies.

City Arts and Technology High School set in a working class San Francisco neighborhood is one of Envision Schools, a non-profit group of model charter high schools.  The curriculum is rigorous, students collaborate on learning projects, and support is available to ensure all 365 students do well on state exams.

What’s wrong?

Nothing, except those exceptional schools are having difficulty being replicated across the country and time is of the essence.  For instance, in California, elementary charter schools are less likely to serve minorities, English Language Learners, and low-income students.  The schools are small, not reaching enough children.  Studies of outcome data for many charter schools have not shown better results than traditional public schools.

Often said, the parent buyer must beware.  Disinformation has been generated about charter schools, emphasizing their good qualities, denigrating perfectly good public schools, and hiding the fact that 14% of charter schools lose their licenses, just like traditional public schools fall into the low-performance abyss.

Finally, a number of professionals associated with the education field see charter schools as a way to privatize education, paid for with public money.  Others who praise charter schools do so because they hope to drag down teachers’ unions that are accused of holding onto a fixed pay structure which offers no incentives to excel.

Looking again?

Teacher’s pay structure is being re-evaluated, but the public must support the thousands of public schools looking for a model to help students achieve, instead of antagonizing the very highly-qualified teachers needed to close the achievement gap.

Who, though, is thinking about the legislation just passed in California and many other states so that real in-school change in education practice takes place?

Let’s start with one issue that brings a frown to every teacher in the country: teacher evaluation.  The federal Department of Education, ready to revise the Elementary Secondary Education Act (ESEA), is thinking about this aspect of school reform.

Whether you like the bill or not, the 8 year old NCLB legislation calling for highly-qualified teachers has shown the disparities from state to state in teacher preparation, professional development, and evaluation procedures.  If you look carefully at the new priorities, evaluation is for everyone involved in the education of public school students, not only the teacher in the classroom.

Even California has passed legislation to conform with new priorities, in spite of the teacher’s union (CTA) long-standing argument about unintended consequences of using student testing scores to evaluate teachers.  AFT’s current president gave a recent speech advocating for basic professional teacher standards, defining what a highly-qualified teacher should know and be able to do; and for serious analysis of well-designed tests to determine yearly growth that shows where to improve the program.

The old view.

Albert Shanker, the long-time AFT president, once noted schools have been seen as factories with teachers on the assembly line popping students out after 13 years.  In fact, many school reform solutions have elaborated on business models that increase productivity, thus cutting personnel, revising pay, adjusting the day, and so on, all to save money.  Teacher evaluation?  To be blunt, it was “pay for play.”

Now, in the effort to “make teaching the revered profession it should be,” (Arne Duncan, “Elevating the Teaching Profession” neatoday), money must be provided, this blog’s often-used comment.  However, in a poor economy, budget deficits, and legislator’s recalcitrance, it is difficult to see any dollar signs at the end of the tunnel.

So what’s new?

If you had looked at an economic model devised in the 1960’s by William J. Baumol and William G. Bowen from New York University, you would find that some institution’s costs can only be refined down.  They will still rise, but not recklessly.  Teacher evaluation in a public school is one such institution.

Here are examples.

Highly-qualified teachers should have access to technology to save costs.  For instance, some schools use a computer-generated test to determine reading improvement.  Many students can use the same equipment, the computer spits out the score and the tested items, saving time, so teachers can analyze for the next teaching steps.  Still a teacher must boot up the program, supervise students, and keep the equipment, not cheap, in shape.  Outcomes are improved, a teacher evaluation goal, but independent of cost.

In addition, professional development is essential to support excellent teachers and there are good technologically sound training DVD’s, for example, that can be used on-site, over and over, with large groups or small, therefore an efficient and effective staff development tool.*  Still, teachers need to be paid, the computers must be maintained–all costs that remain the same, though the benefits rise.

Many schools, to insure student and program improvement, use a business model called “cycle of inquiry” to set goals, examine how the plan is working, make adjustments, decide on next steps, all an efficient, effective, analytical way to assess progress.  Of course, labor costs aren’t saved by using this procedure in the school, even though good teachers will use these decisions for the student’s benefit.

The point is that schools must find ways to improve the infrastructure, the pay schedule, the way time is spent in schools, teacher evaluation, but the costs won’t go down.  Over time, they will rise less rapidly, but there are a fairly consistent number of students and highly-qualified teachers needed to teach them in a safe facility which will need money.

Think about it.  When calculating costs and benefits of their teachers,  state legislatures would do well to look at this view of the education world.

(*Take Care! is an example, found on the website for this blog.)

a California high school

Amazing in itself, two bills (SBX5 1 and SBX5 4) passed January 7, 2010, in the California legislature and were signed by Governor Schwarzenegger, aiming to get $700 million from the federal Race To The Top (RTTT) funds.

What will that money be used for?  Most of the California education world only expects it to shore up the fiscal crisis, allowing legislators to say “See, we didn’t take any more money from schools.”

Such manipulation does nothing to address the real crisis in California, the governor and his party’s refusal to consider taxes, the Democratic majority’s inability to pass legislation anyway because of the supermajority (2/3) needed by the legislature and/or from the voters in an election for any tax or finance legislation.

Meantime, the onslaught against teachers continues, pay cuts, furlough days, increases in student/teacher ratio, all of which really are to the detriment of students for whom RTTT funds are supposed to benefit.

Round and round we go, where we stop…

Actually, anyone who studies school reform knows where to stop.  At schools in deep failure, low-performing on exams; poor, poor, poor facilities; unsupported teachers; distracted parents consumed by pay and food for their children.  Whether tax haters like it or not, systemic failure needs money to reverse itself.  This blog has reported suggestions to reorganize without cost, but in the end, it’s dollar bills, used effectively and efficiently.

The legislation is geared to help the lowest-performing schools turn around, but two big issues dominate the legislation.

First, a bill component allows the linkage of school data to teacher evaluation, an ongoing concern with many competing ideas to put such a system in place. Randi Weingarten, AFT president, on Tuesday, January 12, 2010, offered a model in which teachers and other school personnel are part of the team designing the plan.  In the California legislation, collective bargaining is part of the process.

Second, the bill establishes a commission to update the state’s student content standards, not revised since the mid-1990’s.  No plan for teacher evaluation or changes to state testing would occur until the standards are revised.

Another aspect of the legislation has received strong support and strong condemnation. The provision allows parents to petition and state officials to force a school district to overhaul bad schools.

It’s true already that California State officials take over school districts, from community college to urban K-12.  Sometimes parents develop a charter school, so that’s already happening.  What will likely cause the uproar is allowing students to choose any school in the state to attend.

“Open enrollment” offers that possibility.  RTTT suggests that open enrollment policies to allow students to transfer out of schools that fail to raise state test scores high enough, quickly enough, will help.  Bruce Fuller, education and public policy professor UC Berkeley, says it’s just shifting chairs around on the sinking Titanic. (SFChronicle, January6, 2010)

Sounds good for the student, but what about the transportation costs, the cost to the receiving and sending school districts.  Who puts up the money to make it happen?

While teacher’s unions have been wading in to advocate for a number of these provisions, after making sure their objections have been heard, the California Teachers Association (CTA) is adamantly opposed to the “open enrollment” part of the legislation.

It’s not hard to imagine the unintended consequences of the proposal.  It will bring chaos to many school districts, like schools with high transient rates and low test performance, without offering any model for improvement.

Is that the answer to fix failing schools?

(Image by SHM)

Part of my gloom comes from the continuing bad news from the district office, preparing teachers for the sad, sad state of affairs in the district’s school budget for next year and probably for this year at “pink slip” days in March.  So far, the gap has widened by another $500,000 just since September.

A letter from our superintendent just before the holidays, illustrating the funding dilemma, suggested going to the Education Coalition website, supported by all the education organizations in the state, to see news from California’s 989 school districts, almost all concerning school finance.  What else to talk about?

I read an article in the Sunday paper that named “public schools, once the nation’s best, … now among the worst” as the first of many problems facing this state.  I think, like ours, most school districts are just trying to stay afloat, reducing the number of teachers, custodians, classified staff; cutting summer school and special programs like GATE; using the parcel tax funds agreed to by the local community to offset huge state budget cuts; then cutting counselors and library funds.

The article advocated a constitutional convention to reorganize the state government, the goal being to untangle the horrible budget fight in the legislature that takes up almost the entire session each year.  Trouble is we have to wait until the November 2010 election to vote just to agree to have a convention.  In the meantime, the fury over public schools keeps building.

(See “”Time for a constitutional convention?” by John Grubb, San Francisco Chronicle, January 3, 2010.)

I suppose the best thing is to remember the humorous picture book I read to my class by the well-known New Yorker cartoonist James Stevenson called “It Could Be Worse!”

With that aphorism in mind, my class is in the middle of studying California missions, certain to lift the gloom of January.  Almost every 4^th grader takes a field trip to a mission and learns how California grew into the wealthy agriculture and cattle country of the west, even before gold was discovered.

It’s a wonder how wealthy California now finds itself in such an abysmal fix.

Before the holiday, we finished studying functions, pre-algebra preparation.  Now we’re in the middle of the practical mastery of 2 and 3 digit multiplication, learning to estimate to see if the answer is reasonable.

Should I tell my students that the school district budget is an estimate? Maybe a sudden unrestricted grant will be passed on to our district, resolving some of the bad decisions we must make.

Maybe a rich uncle will endow the district.

Maybe the state legislature will learn to cooperate, like 4^th graders are asked to do every day.