Good Schools For All By Voice Of San Diego

The Sweetwater Union High School District is the largest secondary school district in the state. A few years ago, the district decided to move its schools onto the same calendar system. On this week’s podcast, Karen Janney, superintendent of the Sweetwater Union High School District, joins co-hosts Scott Lewis and Laura Kohn to talk about how she helped develop the district’s common calendar and the impact the change has had on families. “Before 2007, we had families on up to three different schedules. So they could be at an elementary school district on one calendar, at a middle school on another calendar and at a high school on another calendar,” Janney said. “It just wasn’t good for families.” Families faced challenges with calendar misalignments such as planning for varied bus schedules, attempting to transfer students to schools to make up credits and trying to plan summer vacations. “A lot of time the older siblings take care of the younger siblings and if they’re on two different calendars, it make

The Barrio Logan College Institute is an after-school program that serves low-income disadvantaged students from across the county and prepares them to go to college. One way the organization says it transforms students’ lives is by educating and empowering parents to exercise school choice. On this week’s podcast, Barrio Logan College Institute Executive Director Jose Cruz joined co-hosts Scott Lewis and Laura Kohn to talk about school choice and how to create a so-called college-going culture. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Every kid learns at his or her own pace. They each need something different when it comes to education. Personalized learning has emerged as a response to kids' individualized needs and their varied pace of learning. It's a radically different educational approach that's been gaining steam lately thanks to technology that allows teachers to better track students and provide them with personalized educational experiences. On this week's podcast, co-hosts Scott Lewis and Laura Kohn talk to someone who’s putting the personalized learning approach into practice. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Normally, the County Board of Education race isn’t one that makes it into headlines. But this year, four of the five spots on the board are up for grabs. And things are heating up. The folks elected to the County Board of Education wield some power. They do things like approve the San Diego Office of Education‘s annual budget, select and choose the very powerful county superintendent. The board also serves as the appeals board for charter schools that have been denied the right to open by a district in San Diego County. In this week’s podcast, co-hosts Scott Lewis and Laura Kohn tried to put on a debate between District 1 incumbent Gregg Robinson and his challenger, Mark Powell.  District 1 represents most of the city of San Diego on the board. Only Robinson accepted the opportunity to debate. But Lewis and Kohn got Powell on the phone after to ask why he wouldn’t face off with Robinson. One hot topic in the race is charter schools and whether the candidates would support more of them in San Diego. “I’m s

Damian checked a little box when he registered his son Ethan for kindergarten. It indicated that the family predominantly spoke Spanish at home. At the time, Damian had no idea his son would be classified as an English-learner, and that the designation would follow his son around, having a profound impact on his education. It's been difficult, Damian said, to get the school district to recognize that, although his son still speaks Spanish at home, he's a smart kid who's excelling in many ways. "That's my major concern is that I can't describe my kid to this bureaucracy in the right way," he said. This week, hosts Scott Lewis and Laura Kohn take a new approach to the podcast by weaving Damian and Ethan's story into the larger question of how our city, state and country is educating English-learners. In November, voters will weigh the California Multilingual Education Act. The measure would essentially gut Proposition 227, the controversial statue that banned bilingual education in most classrooms unless p

The move from play-based preschools to increasingly rigorous kindergarten classrooms is rough, for both kids and parents. A Good Schools for All listener, Sally Cox, called in to share her story about a particularly jarring transition from preschool to kindergarten. She said she thought her son was well-prepared, but kids in his kindergarten class were expected to be reading by October, and her son quickly fell behind. “I think the alignment issues between expectations in kindergarten and how children are prepared in preschool really need to be dealt with,” Cox said. Hosts Scott Lewis and Laura Kohn dig into the big transition problem, which is worsening thanks to a ratcheting up of academic expectations for kindergarteners. Transitional kindergarten, or TK, a public-school program offered to kids born between Sept. 2 and Dec. 2 as the first step of a two-year kindergarten class, has been one attempt at closing the early education achievement gap.  TK is great for the small number of kids who happen to be

Education technology is exploding. This week in San Diego some of the major players in technology companies, their investors and education leaders gathered in San Diego for the ASU GSV Summit to talk about disrupting classrooms. We grabbed one of the attendees on his way to the talks. Tom Vander Ark, CEO of Getting Smart, an organization that advocates for innovations in learning, joins the podcast to talk about how technology is increasingly entering and improving the educational system. He said the dubbed EdTech movement is finally ready for real, widespread implementation in schools across the world. "That revolution started 20 years ago but we're finally beginning to understand how to incorporate all these new tools into schools," he said. "Both in K-12 and higher ed." An example is the adaptive learning approach, he said, which uses computers or tablets and game-like software that, with just a few initial questions, understands a student's reading or math level then adjusts and makes follow-up questi

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You might not have any idea what the California State Board of Education does. I didn't. That is, until we talked to Trish Boyd Williams, a member of the board. Williams lives in San Diego and has a major role on the board and she explained it to me for the latest episode of Good Schools for All. It was that board, of course, that is the reason Common Core was adopted in California so we took the opportunity to break down how it's going and how the board determines its standards. My co-host Laura Kohn was screaming at the TV during a recent Republican presidential debate as they went on about Common Core. Take a listen to hear what she says they got wrong. Williams said it's having a major impact in the state. "What’s different about the Common Core state standards in English, Language Arts and Math over the previous standards in English and Math is that it shifts the focus. There’s less memorization of isolated facts, and there is more focus on bigger ideas, and on discussion, analysis, arguing from evi

I've always sensed a disconnect between school and life. For my own life, I came to understand it as a kind of convergence of lines — school is one of the lines, and if you follow it long enough and well enough, it will eventually converge with life and propel you forward. In his film "Most Likely to Succeed," Greg Whiteley approaches the disconnect differently. As he tries to demonstrate in the film, the school line not only doesn't converge with the life line but is harmfully off track. Standardized tests and the so-called Prussian Method of education, where each subject — reading, math, social studies and science — is taught separately and aimed at building a base level of knowledge for everyone. The movie centers on San Diego's High Tech High and its project-based teaching approach. Whiteley is the filmmaker behind the critically acclaimed documentary "Mitt," an inside look with exclusive access to Mitt Romney's presidential campaign. It turns out Whiteley and his wife and children live in Point Loma,

Studies have shown that the first five years are the time that will define a child’s ability to constantly learn throughout the rest of their life. When children learn a lot and frequently at an early age, it lays down patterns in their brain that will continue to be repeated throughout their life, allowing them to learn more and more. This is why that time of life is so important. Professor Heckman recently published results that at-risk children who don’t get high quality early childhood experiences are 25% more likely to drop out of school, 40% more likely to become teen parents, and 60% less likely to attend college. Not only is this time pivotal in a child’s life, but the average cost of education between ages 0-5 is actually nearly the same as the amount spent on a child’s college education. But at that age, parents have had a lot more time to save for the expense, whereas parents of preschool-aged children are often caught off guard by the expense. San Diego, and California in general, has done a lo