[CALIBK12] Our children need a quality education

[Catania, Amy]

Here, here!  Well said!

________________________________

From: calibk12-bounces at lists.sjsu.edu on behalf of Kelly Sunderman
Sent: Wed 2/18/2009 1:57 PM
To: Blanche Woolls; calibk12 at lists.sjsu.edu
Subject: Re: [CALIBK12] Our children need a quality education



I wholeheartedly agree that we need to advocate to maintain a quality program for kids.  However, we also need to recognize and be sensitive to the fact that "a couple of extra kids" or "losing an aide" are real issues for classroom teachers that also impact the quality of education that our students receive in very real ways.  Also, teacher jobs are NOT secure...take a look at the newer staff members at your site, and you'll see that they are just as uncertain as we are about what the future holds.  When class sizes go up, the number of teachers goes down, and the workload for those remaining teachers increases dramatically.  If we don't look big picture, and recognize the difficulties our colleagues are facing as we advocate for our programs, our pleas to keep the impact to the library program minimal may fall on deaf ears.

The unfortunate reality is that EVERY program is going to need to be prepared to take some hits, and libraries, sadly, are no exception.  Again, I wholeheartedly agree that we need to advocate to make sure that our programs remain as intact as possible, but it seems unreasonable to expect that we will not be impacted when every other program in the district will be.

I can really only speak to my district here, but I know that our Board of Education and district leadership teams are doing EVERYTHING they can to keep cuts away from kids and teachers, and that they have been taking measures to keep our district financially sound for the past several years.  In spite of their preparation, they have to cut an already skeletal budget.  They have done everything humanly possible to generate income, cut costs, and still they are REQUIRED to cut millions of dollars.  The only things left to cut in our district, unfortunately, will have a direct impact on kids.  We can't expect to remain immune...and we can't attack other programs that are also important to the success of our students.

This is a sensitive issue, because not only are we talking about the welfare of students, we're talking about our jobs.  I guess my word of caution would be to make sure that we recognize that EVERYONE is being asked to sacrifice, and the Boards of Education across the State are in a terrible position.  That position needs to be acknowledged as we advocate for our programs...we need to make sure that the people who have been given the impossible task of deciding what stays and what goes know that while we MUST advocate to preserve our library programs so that students and teachers continue to have the multilayered library support they need to thrive, we recognize the difficulty of the decisions at hand.

My intent is not to discourage anyone for advocating for their programs...I just think it's really important that we remember that this is a case where everyone is being impacted, and we need to be sensitive to the fact that the impact of this budget crisis is being felt by ALL of our colleagues, as well.

-----Original Message-----
From: calibk12-bounces at lists.sjsu.edu [mailto:calibk12-bounces at lists.sjsu.edu] On Behalf Of Blanche Woolls
Sent: Wednesday, February 18, 2009 1:06 PM
To: calibk12 at lists.sjsu.edu
Subject: [CALIBK12] Our children need a quality education

Who's walking away? They may not be walking away, but who's not walking toward the problem. Let's start with those working in school libraries who aren't members of CSLA and who don't know what CSLA is doing. Let's look at parents whose big interest in school seems to be a place where they won't need to pay for a baby sitter. Let's look at administrators who are being asked to solve this budget problem with everyone around them telling them how they can't cut this and they can't cut that and no one helping them figure out how to stop doing unnecessary things to save the necessary ones.

Who's not too worried? The many who are not in jeopardy because their salaries aren't at the level of a professional Teacher Librarian, so they will remain to check books and textbooks in and out of the room with the books and textbooks. Perhaps we shouldn't call a room without a teacher librarian a library?

Who's not worried? Classroom teachers who have been ignoring the things a school library offers to their children, whose jobs are secure although they may have a few more children in their rooms and they may lose their aide. All because they haven't had the services of a good teacher librarian and they don't know what their children have been missing.

To cancel a test, one saves the cost of buying the test, the cost of administering the test (in teacher time which equals loss of teaching and learning time), the cost of returning the test, the cost of time spent looking at the test, the loss of time in genuine learning when teachers stop teaching students to think and return to teaching rote answers. When one goes back to early education, one finds the model from India developed by a man from England to teach the children of English soldiers born to Indian women. This model had the teacher teaching one student who, equipped with his slate took on the next younger group having them write and memorize what was on his slate and taking it to be written and memorized on slates of the next younger group. It had success because what they learned was better than not learning anything at all, but what did they retain?

I'm not aware of any studies of time in the classroom related to what is learned, but that would be an interesting study. We all know that teachers can waste the lives of the students in their classrooms by giving them busy work, by teaching to the test, by boring their students into slumber.
I well remember one first grade teacher who had watched unable to do anything another first grade teacher who spent more time partying in the evenings than preparing to teach the next day. As the last children were getting on the bus on the last day, Teacher A turned to the playperson and said, "Do you realize you have just wasted 25 years of life?" That's what my ranting is all about.

The studies that have been done on an international basis show the U.S.
students ranking much lower in most areas than many other countries of the world. I should have looked up some of those results before embarking on this.

What I want is for my granddaughter to have a good education before she tries college, where she can compete with students who go to very expensive private schools. I want my nephews and nieces to come away thinking and problem solving. I want all the children of California to come away able to compete with the rest of the U.S. and the world with good thinking and problem-solving skills, and they need our help, right now.

Blanche

On Wed, 18 Feb 2009, Richard K. Moore wrote:

> Did David happen to mention any study showing a correlation between
> time in class and academic achievement?
>
> Is canceling tests really about saving trees?
>
> Or is this really about child care, and if so, why?
>
> The readers of this listserv are fully aware of the superb work being
> done by CSLA leaders to protect jobs and to promote a high level of
> school library service and quality. It's all there on the CSLA
> website:  http://csla.net/
>
> Who do you think is walking away?
>
>
> Richard K. Moore, InfoSherpa
> Huntington Beach, CA

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