[CALIBK12] Taking Center Stage Act II

[Peter Doering]

Hello Everyone,
I attended our PLC meeting (SCCOE administrators from all the subject areas) this week and our focus right now is analyzing Taking Center Stage - Act II http://pubs.cde.ca.gov/tcsii/index.aspx.  During our meeting we had great discussion on the first part of the webcast dealing with Russlynn Ali's presentation.  mms://streamer.scoe.net/TSCII/080408TCSII.wmv.  
I highly recommend that everyone watches the video (Just to warn you - It is very long).  Russlynn really focuses on the California data.  And I understand that the presentation is mostly dealing with CST data and middle schools but I see an opportunity for libraries to tie in - I just don't know how yet.
When we ask people in California why we score so low on standard tests the answer that we almost always hear is because we have a huge population of ELL students, too many poor schools, not enough money spent per pupil, etc.  Russlynn addresses all these issues and does comparisons to show that this is not the reason.  A good part of her presentation is talking about having qualified teachers teaching in the right subject areas.  In low performing schools almost ½ of the teachers do not have the proper credentials.
I am not bringing this up to start the conversation/debate again about Teacher Librarians vs. paraprofessionals.  The reason that I am bringing this up is because as a COE we are not looking at individual items such as libraries, math, science, etc.  When we work together we are looking at the big picture and seeing how all our areas are affected by it.  I think as a whole I think our organization and libraries need to become part of the bigger picture and stop focusing so much on libraries as an individual concept.  I think we would benefit more being a small part of a larger project that the main focus isn't just libraries.  My COE as a whole will focus on Taking Center Stage for months to come - I would have loved to have one slide about school libraries in this presentation.
With that said I have no idea how we accomplish this as whole and I am very open to ideas and thoughts.
Peter

Peter Doering
Coordinator, Learning Multimedia Center
Santa Clara County Office of Education
1290 Ridder Park Drive
San Jose, CA 95131-2304
(408) 453-6670
(408) 453-6815 Fax
peter_doering at sccoe.org
www.sccoe.org/depts/library