Educators

Teacher's Town Hall

Thank you to everyone who attended. It was an excellent conversation that I hope to continue here and on my Facebook page. Delaine Eastin's insights were on target and inspiring to educators and parents alike.

Below are the comments and suggestions from the event.

Delaine Eastin started the conversation with these thoughts:

• The highest performing schools spend the most money on their students.
• Education is an investment in our future. If we truly want to be a global competitor and a wealthy nation, we must invest in the education of our children.
• A proponent of universal pre-school to ensure readiness for school.
• Not every child goes to college. For those who will not, we must offer them apprenticeships that provide real job training and skills to earn a living after graduation.
• For every bond measure, remember, unless the source of the revenue for the bond is identified, that is money that will come out of the general fund and ultimately out of education funding.

• Obtaining change is difficult because everyone went to school and believes that experience gives them the expertise to know how to fix our education system.
• It is hard to get rid of existing programs. There needs to be sunset provisions to review and renew or review and eliminate.
• Term limits should be reformed.
  • A constitutional rewrite may be the first step.
• Education needs more money and with less strings attached so that local districts can determine the best use of the money for their students. However, this should come with accountability for how the money is spent.
• No one is held accountable for education policy in Sacramento. Between legislators, the governor, the Secretary for Education, the elected State Superintendent of Public Instruction, everyone has a say, but no one is held accountable.
• The funding that education is receiving needs to be distributed more equally. And Prop. 98 funding levels should be a floor, not a ceiling – which it has become.
• Principals should have more control over administrating and standardization.
• Teachers should be peer reviewed to get the best determination of how they are performing.
• The size of classrooms needs to be reduced dramatically.
  • While it is receiving little support, it does make a difference.
• All students should receive computers. This may inadvertently cause textbook publishers to reduce costs.
  • Relying on textbooks as the sole teaching utensil makes learning too scripted.

• California's spending is currently in the bottom 10 out of 50 states in the nation.
• The state's standards are racing towards the bottom.
  • By having the lowest standards students are meeting goals, but it is not proving to be beneficial.
• The current school year has been cut down to 175 days, making California's school year the shortest in the Western World.
  • This is far less than that of the 200-226 day school year commonly found in Asia and Europe.
• In the race to the top $2 billion will be spent to evaluate standards, but is a one-time look really money well spent?
  • Instead standards should be reviewed and evaluated on an ongoing basis.
• Content and performance standards are unsatisfactory.
  • Students should be tested on content because there are no multiple choices in life.
• The framework for learning is not updated because of the lack of funding for new textbooks.
  • It is ridiculous that California's education and learning standards are not evolving in accordance to the ever-evolving world.

• Students are beginning to lose discovery, wonder, joy, and interest as early as in middle school.
  • A system needs to be created where students are not just lectured, but their interest is grasped.
  • Children need to be prized, loved, and taken care of.
• Safety on campus has dwindled because staff has decreased and adults are outnumbered.
• K-12 schools are currently overburdened.
  • Having 30 or more kids in a classroom is tough because there are a lot of non-English speakers.
  • 40% of students are in classrooms are learning English as a Second Language. This is far higher than any other state. Proving to be yet another example of the need for smaller class sizes.
• Students entering kindergarten are too young.
  • Five should be the minimum age requirement because parents are a child's first teacher, and when enrolling their child in school parents should be sure their child is prepared to participate in reading, homework, and back to school activities.

• The average student pays too much for an education.
  • In Europe and Asia systems are being built in order to keep tuition affordable.
• At community colleges the amount of paper work needed for accreditation takes instructors out of the classroom.
  • Reform needs to be found in the means of healthy assessments and accountability.
• The cost of textbooks at community colleges is prohibitive.
  • Instead teaching methods should become looser and instructors should be able to teach from multiple areas as they see fit.
  • It shouldn't matter where students are acquiring information as long as they are learning.
• Community college faculty should be full-time tenured or on tenure track.
• The success rates at community colleges are lost in the shuffle.
  • Things like students GPA or SAT scores are not kept track of resulting in the majority of students being highly challenged.
• It was suggested that the best predictor of whether or not a student will succeed in college is how well he or she wrote in elementary school.
• And this came in on Facebook from a community college instructor:
  "All community college students in the state are impacted in a major way by the loss of TTIP funds that were earmarked for library subscription databases (reliable research resources such as journals, mags, ref books, all online). Some community colleges will now not have ANY databases for students which essentially means almost no research resources for them, an untenable situation. Those that scrape up some funds for next year and beyond will still have cuts in these research resources to a high degree, still untenable for students in college. It not only means they will be minus reliable resources, but will not learn how to use these resources when they get to a 4 yr college and in the work world as well. Google and the general internet are not a substitute!!"