FindTopSchools Blog

The data system tracks student, teacher and administrator performance year to year but has barely gotten off the ground. Other states’ systems improve student performance and hold schools accountable… Read the full L.A. Times articles here.

INVITATION
October 24 Mobilizing Conference to Save Public Education

We have the power to stop the catastrophic budget cuts, fee hikes, and layoffs — but to save public education in California requires coordinating our actions on a state-wide level.

We invite all UC, CSU, JC, and K-12 students, workers, teachers, and their organizations across the state to participate in and collectively build the October 24 Mobilizing Conference to Save Public Education. The all-day conference will take place at UC Berkeley (contact us for more logistics).

The purpose of this conference is both simple and extremely urgent: to democratically decide on a state-wide action plan capable of winning this struggle, which will define the future of public education in this state, particularly for the working-class and communities of color.

Why UC Berkeley? On September 24, over 5,000 people massively protested and effectively paralyzed the UCB campus, as part of the UC-wide walkout. A mass General Assembly of over 400 individuals and dozens of organizations met that night and collectively decided to issue this call.

We ask all organizations and individuals in the state who want to save public education to endorse this open conference and help us collectively build it.

Save public education!
No budget cuts, fee hikes, or layoffs!
For state-wide student, worker, and faculty solidarity!

Please contact oct24conference@gmail.com to endorse this conference and to receive more details.

It is back to school time for many students. Mashable published a list of 15 web applications that ranges from helping students stay organized and improve study habits to helping students to reference research sources properly. Full story…

With California mired in budget crisis, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger announced the Free Digital Textbook Initiative that would replace some high school science and math texts with free, “open source” digital versions earlier this summer, hoping to save hundreds of millions of dollars a year for the state. This initiative makes sense as California is one of the biggest textbook market and the fields of math & science advance fast enough that digital versions can be revised more frequenctly than paper versions.

As part of a competition, California education authorities reviewed 20 open-source high school math and science texts to make sure they meet California’s exacting academic standards in time for use this fall. In August, the results were announced. An upstart nonprofit organization named CK-12 contributed a number of textbooks (all free and open source material), and ten meet at least 90 percent of California’s standards. This result is very encouraging.

Below are a few more links relating to digital open source textbooks:

In a Digital Future, Textbooks Are History – The New York Times

Is it time for public education to use digital textbooks? – Examiner.com

Curriki Calls on California Teachers to Open, Share and Collaborate to Enhance Education – Business Wire (Press Release)

SmartMoney.com had an article yesterday about cut backs from public schools nationwide. California school districts received plenty of mentions for obvious reasons. Read the full article here.

The San Jose Mercury News had an article today about the dire financial situation of many northern California public school districts. (We assume SoCal districts are facing the same problems.) Good districts such as Piedmont and Pleasanton are on the list of financially troubled, showing that the California budget crisis affects all school districts, good or otherwise. Read the full article here.

Newsweek just published its annual list of top public high schools in the United States. Preuss UCSD of San Diego (rank #10) and  Oxford Academy of Cypress (rank #16) took the top two spots in California. Find to full list here.

The exclusion of Whitney High of Cerritos (our #1 rank school in FTS) was explained in their Methodology/FAQ section (Question 6). Definitely check out this section as Newsweek uses very different ranking criteria as FindTopSchools (FTS).

Lastly, the FAQ section highlights a few points that we at FTS find particularly interesting:

• Academic performance data is not standardized and centralized on a national level. Even Newsweek faces many of the same data collection issues that FTS does. This is also one of the reasons why FTS have not rolled out to a national level.
• “There are many ways to skin a cat” (btw, FTS does not endorse the practice of cat skinning), there are many ways to “rank” schools as well. Which ranking criteria to use is, by and large, a subjective choice as demonstrated by Question 5 & 7. Therefore rankings (Newsweek or ours) are great for discoveries and springboards for researches, but rankings should not be used as the be-all & end-all measures in order to decide the right schools. (This is a PSA brought to you by the FTS CYA department.)
• Wouldn’t it be great if we can compare public and private schools side by side? We would love it and so would Newsweek. Question 11 tells us why we can’t.

Here is story from U.S. News & World Report about how some forward-thinking college professors and K-12 teachers are experimenting with using Twitter in classroom environment.  It is pretty cool what we can do with 140 characters or less. Read the full story here.

Here are a few articles regarding the University of California’s reactions to the recently proprosed budget cut:

On June 1, UC President Mark Yudof testified before the state’s Joint Legislative Conference Committee on Budget and detailed consequences of the proposed budget cuts.

A few days later, UC Berkeley put out a story about what we need to know regarding Governor Schwarzenegger’s proposal to eliminate Cal Grants.

For additional related news, the UC Berkeley Budget Central website (http://newscenter.berkeley.edu/budget/) consolidates news and information on the campus budget situation and the work being done to address it.

These are stories that readers may not have found otherwise in other news sources.

This story is a couple of weeks old, but with all the depressing stories about our budget crisis lately (our News page is littered with them), we feel obligated to highlight a few stories that we found positive and interesting.

Due to a statewide program instituted by the University of California, K-12 students will soon gain free access to UC-approved online college prep courses and lessons. Here is a link to the full story.

In addition, the UC College Prep website has a open access area (http://www.ucopenaccess.org) that motivated students and parents wanting to get a jump on summer learning may be interested in.