Class conflict: Santa Ana schools are spending more and more on fewer students. (U.S. Air Force file photo) School officials in California’s sixth-largest school district are working overtime to promote a massive $1.2 billion bond tentatively scheduled for a districtwide vote in November. Yet behind their chatter about improving Santa Ana Unified facilities is a...
Call it a tale of two school districts: The Santa Ana Unified School District (SAUSD) is sending out conflicting messages regarding the status of its schools: their facilities are amazingly good — unless they’re amazingly bad. According to the School Accountability Report Cards (SARCs) posted on the SAUSD website, all of the district’s high schools...
MOVE OUT: U.S. Marines at Camp Pendleton, California, preparing for deployment, Oct. 24, 2017. (U.S. Marine Corps photo by LCpl Anabel Abreu Rodriguez) Among the many burdens we place on military families, there’s frequent re-location from one military duty station to another – one year you’re in North Carolina, the next in Southern California or...
It is impossible to achieve diversity without discriminating. The only way that would be possible would be if every imaginable human subgroup were equally qualified to perform every imaginable task. In reality, while individual talents vary dramatically in a manner completely irrespective of group identity, on average, groups exhibit huge and verifiable differences in aptitude....
November saw a rash of stories about the troubled public school monolith. As I wrote last week, the public education brand is in trouble and as 2017 fades away, a wave of stories is sending the year out with not a bang or a whimper, but rather with an unceremonious thud. A Public Policy of...
Do public schools really serve the public? On November 16th, the United Teachers of Los Angeles held a “Save Our Schools” rally, which was part of the larger American Education Week, a National Education Association creation. Touting NEA’s 2017 theme, “Public Schools for all,” union President Lily Eskelsen García emphatically stated “Public schools are the...
Too many kids in California are failing, and the powers-that-be are doing nothing effective about it. As I wrote recently, the Big Education mandarins are forever pointing fingers at charter and private schools, claiming they’re “unaccountable.” But in reality, there is no entity in America that is less accountable than a unionized, government-run school system....
Sacramento – The Los Angeles Unified School District and some of the nation’s highest-performing charter schools are engaged in what one report has called a “game of chicken” – with the fate of 14 of these schools and their nearly 4,600 students hanging the balance. But that suggests this is about two parties engaged in...
This year has not been kind to the land of the free. Due to advancing ignorance and arrogance – a deadly combination – the basic tenets of our republic are in trouble, and public education is at the center of much of what is wrong. While we went through a similar socio-political upheaval in the...
“A public employer shall provide all public employees an orientation and shall permit the exclusive representative, if applicable, to participate.” – Excerpt from California State Assembly Bill AB 52, December 2016 In plain English, AB 52 requires every local government agency in California to bring union representatives into contact with every new hire, to “allow...
The way we pay our teachers is outmoded and needs to go the way of the horse-and-buggy. When I first began to substitute teach in Los Angeles in 1985, I learned about “incentive pay.” If a sub was willing to go to “schools in need,” he could earn about 40 percent more than a regular...
In announcing the end of the DACA program two weeks ago, President Trump seemed to fulfill a campaign promise to kill a program he once declared unconstitutional. But later, the president seemed to call for a permanent legislative solution that would grant resident status to people brought illegally to the country as minors. Tweeting that...
Thanks to collective bargaining, traditional public school teachers “get sick” way too often. It’s no secret that many teachers take advantage of the “sick days” that are part of a typical union collective bargaining agreement (CBA). Of course, while sick days are used legitimately by all teachers at some point, many (including yours truly, on...
Anti-school choicers are getting desperate. The traditional public education monopolists are using some truly bizarre arguments to ensure that children remain in government-run schools. In July, American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten intimated that parents who opt out of government schools are equivalent to southern segregationists. Then later in July, Katherine Stewart penned possibly...