This is the 9th entry in a continuing series on the status of public education in California today. Speak Out California’s own Jackie Goldberg has been involved in the public school system for close to 40 years-as teacher, LA Unified Schoool Board Member, LA City Council Member, State Assemblymember and Chair of the Assembly Committee on Education.
To see the other stories and analysis she has done, just go to our Weblog, scroll down the left-hand side of the page and click on the “Public Education” category.
We welcome your comments and responses as Speak Out California tries to provide Californians with honest discussion and appraisal of what is good and bad in the largest public school system in the Country. With so many challenges ahead, we hope you will let us know your thoughts on the subject as well.
Category Archives: Public Education
Has the U.S.Supreme Court officially reinstated racism in our schools?
This past week has been a woefully sorry one for the rights of the American people. The neocons have gained total control of the Supreme Court and are gleefully and unquestionably overturning the hard-fought gains of the past seventy-plus years. Many of us saw this coming but can only wish, sadly, that we had been wrong.
This court has thrown judicial precedent out the window. Both John Roberts and Samuel Alito obviously lied about their commitment to it when they testified before the Senate of the United States, but it seems lying and cheating and commuting sentences of convicted criminals is all within the Bush playbook. Such arrogance now extends to Bush’s court and seems to continue unabated. This past week it was civil rights, consumer rights and first-amendment rights of individuals all paying the price of this lawless and reckless administration’s blind allegiance to a corporate ideology. But the most stunning of all is the rejection of one of the pillars of our society over the past 50 years—that segregation in education is, as a matter of fact and law, unequal. Not anymore.
We asked Speak Out California’s own Jackie Goldberg to take a look at the right-wing spin on this decision—that we don’t need such legal protections any longer; that Brown v. Board of Education is passe and irrelevent to today’s world and that destroying its mandate is not a big deal. Of course it’s a big deal and Jackie pulls no punches in dissecting the neocon attempt to downplay the significance of this offensive and dishonest opinion by the Court.Here is her response to an opinion piece that ran last week in the New York Times by one Juan Williams:
Public Education—Is anyone in charge here?
We continue with Speak Out California Board Member and Former Assemblymember Jackie Goldberg’s series on the state of public education in California today. In this entry, she examines and explains the veritable stew of players in the education arena—from the state down to the school district and provides her insights into how we’ve gotten into the mess we’re in today….and what we must do to get out of it. As a teacher, Los Angeles Unified School District Board Member, LA City Council Member and Chair of the Assembly Committee on Education during her six years in the California State Assembly, she has a wealth and breadth of experience virtually unparalleled in the current debate on where we must go and how we must go about fixing the education crises in our state.
She continues her comments and insights here:
Raising Educational Achievement
Continuing our series, former State Assemblymember and Los Angeles Unified School Board Member Jackie Goldberg gives us her take on how we can raise achievement in our schools. Focusing on our under-performing schools, here’s her take on what we should be doing in California to improve learning in a way that measures more than rote performance on standardized tests and gets to the heart of learning and education.
How to fix the education divide- more beginnings
Speak Out California’s resident expert and former Assemblymember, School Board member and long-time teacher, Jackie Goldberg continues her commentary on the state of education in California today-and what we need to do to improve the quality of education we are providing to all our students.
With recent reports indicating that California will not have enough well-educated and trained people to meet its workforce needs over the next several decades, it is critical that we start NOW and work to close that gap.
Here is what Jackie Goldberg has to say on one of the most critical yet controversial areas of educational reform in California—how to continue Class size reduction, including a passionate pitch for ways we can pull together the funding necessary to close the education gap in our state:
It IS Class size, of course!
Recently a long-awaited and highly anticipated report on the state of education in California was released. The findings presented lots of fodder for both sides. Our Governor, of course, chose to ignore the clear mandate that the state of California needs to invest more in our schools, instead insisting that money would only be considered after the “reforms” he cherry-picked were implemented. Predictably, he went after the teachers, and ignored the discussion that concludes with the lack of financial commitment that is required to increase academic performance, particularly in our underserved communities.
Our own former Assemblymember and education expert, Jackie Goldberg, responds to the report and the discussion about what is needed to make our schools better in the years ahead, especially for our poor kids.
Here is what she has to say:
Attacking California’s high school drop-out epidemic
As students begin the graduation process at high schools throughout California, we thought it would be helpfu to take a look at how many young people who start high school actually graduate. We know that the drop-out rate in California is unacceptably high and that it overwhelmingly affects young people of color and low socio-economic standing. We need to ask ourselves whether the current system, with the required exit exam and the unfunded No Child Left Behind program is fixing the problem, or making it worse.
Senators Darrell Steinberg and Gloria Romero have introduced legislation that is currently moving through the legislature that tries to deal with the issue. We’ve asked Speak Out California Board Member, R. Stanley Oden, Assistant Professor of Sociology at California State University at Sacramento, and long-time political activist, to give us his observations on this epidemic. Are we doing what we can to help our students navigate through the world of employment and the hope of opportunity often so elusive to those who come through high school empty-handed?.
How to fix our schools–Do we have the will?
Former Assemblymember and long-time teacher and school board member Jackie Goldberg has provided Speak Out California with her response to the recently released 1000 page report on the state of K-12 education in California.
She makes a strong case for why “money counts”, in spite of the Governor’s simplistic and right-wing tainted mantra that bad teachers are the problem, not money.
In her first two blogs, published this week on Speak Out California’s blog, she talks about the need to invest more in our children and teachers as they do in private schools similar to the ones to which our Governor sends his own children.
In today’s blog, Jackie identifies the structural problem with more and more decisions being made by Sacramento in cookie-cutter fashion and not serving our diverse student body. Here is her analysis of why we need to return our schools to local control.
We appreciate the number of people who have responded by email to Speak Out California, but would urge that your comments be posted directly on the blog so that others can see what you are thinking as well. We hope to continue the discussion and then work to achieve the goal of returning quality education into the schools of our state to ensure a better future for our children and our critically important work-force.
Fixing our broken educational system
Former Assemblymember Jackie Goldberg, long-time teacher, school board member and immediate past Chair of the Assembly Committee on Education provides us with some pretty plain facts-and numbers- about how much money it takes to properly educate children in the world today.
Here is her second in a three-part series of observations and comments about the recent report that came out on the state of California’s K-12 education system and the Governor’s partisan knee-jerk and overly simplistic view of its contents and our schools needs.
We invite your comments and suggestions in hopes of creating a wide-reaching dialog about what you think the real problems and solutions might be that will bring our schools back to the levels of excellence that once marked our public education system and established it as a standard for all the other states to emulate.
What will really fix California’s schools?
Within the past two weeks, a specially appointed commission came out with a report on the state of public education in California. As is his tendency to the dramatic and simplistic, Governor Schwarzenegger called for reform that focuses primarily on getting rid of the bad teacher. While many of us still remember the bad teacher we came across during our K-12 experience, I suspect we far better remember the teacher who inspired and enthralled us to learn more and do better.
Our own Speak Out California board member and former Assemblymember Jackie Goldberg spent many years as a classroom teacher and School Board member for the LA Unified School District. She also chaired the Assembly Committee on Education for the past four years in Sacramento. Very few people have such a wide-range of experience and insights on this issue so we asked her to share her thoughts on this report and the state of K-12 education in California
today. Her three-part analysis starts today and will continue throughout the week on our blog.
We invite your comments and opinions in hopes that we can generate an open and wide-ranging discussion on this extremely complex and wide-reaching challenge facing California today-and how it bodes for the future of our state.