News Impacting CA School Districts through September 25
Federal News
In his first major speech, Secretary Duncan says the rewrite of ‘No Child Left Behind’ should start now; reauthorization can’t wait.
The Common Core State Standards Initiative released the first official draft of the college- and career-readiness standards. Feedback on the draft is being accepted until October 21, 2009.
Sacramento News
Since the implementation of Prop 13, state government avoided raising taxes and spends like Santa whenever it receives extra revenue. As a result, California is going broke.
Reforming State and Local Governance
Repair California, a proponent of a constitutional convention to change how the state is governed plan has delayed submission for two related ballot measures to the state attorney general’s office to late October.
The Governor’s Commission on Taxation recommendations are met with shrugs.
School District Impacts
Look for more news like this. The Sacramento County Office of Education made a decision to move Natomas School District into “negative status” so a financial adviser could be appointed to assist the district with its budget revisions.
On the personnel front, some teacher unions are resisting the movement to increase class size in San Diego county.
Salinas Union High School Board approved a pay cut for CSEA employees.
In Los Angeles Unified School District, the budget cuts are having a ripple effect throughout the system. Veteran substitute teachers have lost work when the union agreed to side letter to use recently laid off permanent teachers, the Board of Education voted to eliminate all special committees and limit public comment at Board meetings, and in what Los Angeles school district officials hope is the first of several concessions by labor unions, bus drivers have agreed to take six unpaid days off this fiscal year.
Facebook – Getting Started
Filed under: Community Engagement, Social Media
With serious demands on your time, why should you consider joining Facebook as an elected school board member? For same reason why virtually every school district eventually built and maintains a website, Facebook provides another channel of communication with your community. As Facebook continues to become part of everyday life, more and more parents and community members use Facebook. Therefore, each school district and its elected officials need to evaluate when to take advantage of the benefits Facebook has to offer.
From the Facebook statistics page, here some numbers:
- More than 300 million active users
- 50% of our active users log on to Facebook in any given day
- The fastest growing demographic is those 35 years old and older
- Average user has 130 friends on the site
- More than 6 billion minutes are spent on Facebook each day (worldwide)
- More than 40 million status updates each day
- More than 10 million users become fans of Pages each day
Beyond the opportunities for using Facebook for community engagement, there is a need to understand the implications of the educational benefits of Facebook. In 2008 study done by researchers at the University of Minnesota found that students using social networking sites are actually practicing the kinds of 21st century skills we want them to develop to be successful today. Students are developing a positive attitude towards using technology systems, editing and customizing content and thinking about online design and layout. They’re also sharing creative original work like poetry and film and practicing safe and responsible use of information and technology.
Take Action -Your Profile
The first step in joining Facebook is creating a profile. The best profile on Facebook is a complete one. Don’t be shy – the purpose of Facebook is to connect and interact with others, so don’t be shy!
•Always provide the Basic Information about yourself: Full Name, Sex, Birthday, etc.
•Provide a good updated profile picture of yours so that people get to know how you look like.
•In the Personal Information block fill up your activities, interests, write a few line about yourself. Try to be specific about yourself. Focus on your activities, likings, achievements. Don’t attempt to write an essay though.
Join CSBA Fan Page
One of the benefits of Facebook is the ability to join groups of like minded individuals to share thoughts and ideas. The California School Boards Association has created a group for school board members. At minimum, join CSBA fan page.
Friends and Requests
Once you have completed your profile and joined your first group you then have to decide how to connect with others. Facebook has the ability to group connects into “lists”. A typical setup for lists would be “Friends”, “Family”, and “Professional”. These three groups can then be used to apply different privacy policies. For example, you may want your family to see photos from the birthday party you were at last night, but you don’t want your friends or professional contacts to see those photos. In a future post I will cover in detail how privacy settings can be used to maintain boundaries on the information that is shared.
News Impact CA School Districts Through September 18
Federal News
As the Legislative session concluded, there was no significant progress on improving California’s chances for receiving Race to the Top competitive grant funding. So Governor Schwarzenegger called a Special Session to address the issue of tying teacher performance to student achievement.
Sacramento News
With the release of school accountability data, it strengthens the need to play close attention to the authorization of No Child Left Behind. Fewer schools and LEAs made AYP than in 2008. Fifty-one percent of schools made AYP in 2009, a slight decline of one percentage point from 2008.
Reforming State and Local Governance
While reform efforts are barely underway, the Legislature is wasting no time in creating their anti-reform efforts.
School District Impacts
One of the programs experiencing significant changes as a result of State budget reductions is Adult Education. Beyond the 20% decline in funding, school boards are using category flexibility to sweep up excessive funds from Adult Education programs across the state.
Modesto school district attempts to save money through reorganization draws criticism from unions.
Implementation of staff reductions is creating problems for school districts who have not been maintaining good records of seniority.
RSS Benefits
RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is an application that allows people to subscribe to online distributions of news, blogs, podcasts, or other online information. Rather describe how it works in text format, watch this 4 minute short video .
Individual Benefits
The big benefit to RSS is you can opt-in to content of interest, totally controlling the flow of information that you receive. If the quality of the content in the feed declines, you simply remove the feed from your RSS reader and you will not receive any additional updates from that source. The RSS reader acts as an aggregator, allowing you to view and scan multiple content streams in a timely fashion.
School District Benefits
RSS is a great supplemental communication method that does not burden the school district with maintaining lists. RSS feeds are compiled according to the citizen’s choices. Do you have an RSS feed on your district website? For those that do not have the staff, skills, or time to create the XML feeds, there are third party services that will create RSS feeds for a fee. With these new services, all the necessary components are in place and RSS is growing in use and popularity. Many constituents may now subscribe to and read RSS news feeds on a regular basis, meaning a school district’s RSS feed could be seamlessly slipped into their established collection of feeds. The message – RSS is now able to add value to community communications.
Better than email, RSS feeds will not fall victim to spam filters and subscribers can remain anonymous and in control, ensuring no delivery is unsolicited. RSS feeds could be considered the evolution of a school district’s print or e-newsletters. However, RSS does not replace e-mail, which offers one-to-one communication, sophisticated tracking options, and more intimate communication channels. The key difference is that RSS feeds are generalized to a public or targeted audience, but email has the potential to be customized per recipient.
The best evidence of the value I get from RSS is that I cannot imagine being without it anymore. How else could I possibly monitor 100+ sources with the same time and energy I would need to monitor 5 sources?
Take Action
If you are not a RSS user currently try the following:
1. Select a RSS Reader
I use Google Reader but there numerous other choices available.
2. Oversubscribe
I’m a big believer in subscribing to anything that looks of interest. Read what you can and don’t worry about the rest. The chances that you’ll see something worthwhile in a feed are far, far higher if you’ve subscribed to it than they would have been if you hadn’t.
The world of the web is a raging river; any fear you have of sticking your toe in a big, fast current is no reason to spend all your time in a tiny stream instead, in hopes perhaps that you can drink all the water.
I don’t know why people feel obligated to read every item in every feed they’ve subscribed to. Get over that and you’ll already be a far happier person. Many people say they find relief knowing that with enough subscriptions, anything important that they missed will come up again later. Other people oversubscribe and then just read “watch lists” – searches for keywords inside their subscribed feeds. Some feed readers make this easy.
3. Try a River of News View
Some feed readers require that you click through all of one feed’s items at a time. Others allow you to see whatever individual items are most recent, regardless of what source feed they came from. This is the preferred method of most news bloggers – but it could serve you well too. There’s no way to read every item in every feed you’ve subscribed to, so after reading what’s most important – try switching to what’s most recent!
Try reading those items in order of appearance, until you don’t want to read them any more. Then stop. Maybe mark all as read, maybe don’t worry about it. Life’s too short to worry about it, aren’t you glad you read what you were able to find the time to read?
Suggested Sites for RSS feeds (look for the RSS icon to subscribe after you have set up your RSS reader)
- Education Experts
- Education Week District Dossier
- Education Week Leader Talk
- NPR Education Topics
- National School Board Associations BoardBuzz
- US Department of Education
- The McMahon Group
News Impacting CA School Districts Through September 11
Federal News
La Mesa-Spring Valley School District trustees took extraordinary steps to block the broadcast of President Obama’s speech.
Sacramento News
State Controller John Chiang released his monthly report detailing California’s cash balance, receipts and disbursements in August 2009. Total General Fund revenue was down $237 million (-3.6%) from estimates in the recently amended 2009-10 Budget Act.
Lawmakers recently approved a four-year suspension of California’s textbook-adoption process, as well as its curriculum commission, which was in the middle of updating state frameworks, or content guidelines in science, social studies, and other subject areas. A new state law also allows district officials to forgo purchasing instructional materials altogether and use the money instead on staffing and other critical areas to offset funding cuts resulting from California’s $26 billion budget gap.
Education Finance Districts legislation appears headed to the Governor’s desk. While it does not lower the two-thirds voter approval necessary to raise taxes both at the state and local level, the bill creates “education finance districts” in which three or more contiguous school districts can band together to try to increase local taxes.
Reforming State and Local Governance
A preliminary draft of recommendations from the Commission on 21st Century Economy have been released ahead of the September 20 deadline. The overall objective is to help stabilize state revenues, reduce volatility, promote long-term economic growth and job creation for the state and its citizens, and to establish a tax structure that fits the state’s 21st century economy.
STRS is developing plans to deal with a 25% loss in value.
School District Impacts
Each year school districts need to review their budgets within 45 days after the State passes their budget. As a result, many school districts are discovering the reductions they made last Spring were not enough and they are facing significant reductions again. For example, Los Angeles Unified School District is facing an additional $140 million in reductions. Riverside Unified is looking at an additional $44 million in reductions on top of $30 million made last year. Santa Rosa need an additional $10 million in reductions above the $8 million in reductions from last year.
The Los Angeles Times reports school districts are looking for commercial sponsors and Santa Rosa school district approved a policy to allow commercial naming rights.
School districts who provide bus service are cutting back services.
Central Valley school districts” class size ar growing due to budget issues.
Search Alerts
This will be the first in a series of posts dedicated to evaluating the impact of social media on school districts. Watch this short video if you want to get an overview of the importance of social media.
As school board members, part of our job requires us to research topics related to public education. Being able to find relevant results from searches is crucial. Sometimes after your initial research you want to monitor the topic but not spend time recreating the search query. That is where Search Alert are used.
Why use Search Alerts
•To follow a particular topic or person on an ongoing basis — to then selectively engage with via reading, commenting on, blogging about, etc.
•To discover new conversations, content, and people within a topic area . For me, search alerts have been the most effective means for discovery of new sources of information.
Google Alerts
There are many search engines but I use Google.
Google Alerts are email updates of the latest relevant Google search results (web, news, etc.) based on your choice of query or topic. Some handy uses of Google Alerts include: monitoring for the appearance of your name in new stories and blogs, keeping abreast of stories posted about your school district and tracking a topic of interest.
To create a Google Alert you need to sign up for a Google account (this is not same as signing up for a GMail account). For additional information about Google Alerts you can read Google’s FAQ . You can complete your first Google Alert by entering your search criteria like this:
In this request, I will receive an email once a day if Alameda Unified appears in a news stories on the internet. I will not receive an email if there are no stories.
Helpful Tips
Exact Keyword Search: You can specify exact keywords by putting a plus sign (+) in front of the word. For example, if you search for the word “publish,” Google search results would include “publishing” and “publisher.” Adding a plus sign to the beginning of the word (+publish) will ensure that you only receive exact matches.
Exact Key Phrase Search: When you search for a phrase, Google results will returns anything that includes all of the words in the phrase, not that exact phrase. But if you enclose your search in quotes (“how to publish a book”), the results will only include that exact phrase.
Alternate Keyword: To return a search with alternate results, use “OR” between the words (the letters OR must be capitalized). For example, “author OR writer” will return results with either keyword. For a more complex search, you can put part of the phrase in parenthesis: (author OR writer) “business books”.
Search a Single Website: If you want to track new entries on a specific site, you can use the “site:” operator. For example, if you want to track mentions of business books on the New York Times website, your search would look like this: “business book” site:nytimes.com.
Links to your website: Want to know when someone links to your website or blog? Your search would look like this: link:www.alameda.k12.ca.us
Take Action
Take a minute and Google your school district. What results show up? Are there any surprising links from unexpected sources? Google your name and city together. Are your surprised by where your name is found? Create one alert and monitor the results.
News Impacting CA School Districts Through September 4
Federal News
A popular president’s strong stances on education issues can shift the public perception of that issue, according to a new poll released today by Education Next magazine and the Program on Education Policy and Governance at Harvard University.
While the president is popular, that does not mean that a planned address to the nation’s students is being accepted with open arms in all school districts.
Education Secretary Duncan stood behind the requirement that teacher evaluations be tied to student achievement for a state to be eligible for some of the $4.35 billion in competitive federal funds being offered as part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.
Sacramento News
200 school districts have school bond refinancing deals — all of which have been condemned by Attorney General and former Governor Jerry Brown as unconstitutional.
Reforming State and Local Governance
Whenever the gridlock in Sacramento spurs action for reform efforts, the Legislature creates its own version of reform to counteract the pending proposals.
School District Impacts
With shrinking budgets, look for more employees groups to reject contract offers that offer no raises and other takebacks.
Georgia is the only state so far to have imposed statewide furloughs for educators this fiscal year, although some states are considering it. But furloughs are happening in individual districts in other states, such as New Mexico, Florida and California, said Ed Muir, deputy director of research and information services for the American Federation of Teachers.
As school starts up, budget decisions made last Spring show up in the classroom.