Recently found … 11/12/2011

  • tags: teachers educational reform

    • By now, the pattern is impossible to ignore: More than 30,000 teachers in California received layoff warnings last spring; another 300 prepared for unemployment in Milwaukee; in Chicago, 1,000 more were looking for work, and by the time school started in September some 60,000 teachers across the country had lost their jobs.

       

    • Certain ramifications are obvious: Fewer teachers equals larger classes and less attention devoted to each student, even as the demand for improved outcomes mounts.
    • Some of the less apparent results of school layoffs could be at least as damaging. Thousands of jobless teachers – and their kids — no longer have health insurance. Many are in their 30s and 40s, traditionally the prime years for earning money toward retirement. But not now.

       

    • “In my 20 years in education, I have never seen the devaluation of education as I have recently,” said Lloyd Verstuyft, superintendent of Texas’s Southwest Independent School District.

       

    • “You can’t cut $4 billion from public education and not feel it. Schools are not only places of teaching and learning, they are a place of support. That is being chipped away now, and it will have consequences.”

       

    • “The public has to make clear that they expect schools to be funded,” she said. “If we ever expect to get into a better economic climate, education is not what we can cut and get there. Education needs to be looked at for what it is – the driver of everything that we’re trying to do as a nation.”

       

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.