Letter to the Editor - May 22, 2009
Ok, you have showed how mad you are at our politicians and have defeated to budget propositions. But what did it get us?
As an educator, let me explain this to you. 30,000 teachers have already received layoff notices. Now the state is changing the rules so that the school districts can layoff additional teachers to pay for the additional cuts ($5 billion more) in education. I am not sure how many more teachers will be laid off, but who really gets hurt by this is the kids.
One of the Governor's ideas is to cut the school year by 7.5 days. I personally don't know what a half day is, so in reality, think of it as 8 days. The current school year is 180 days. Let's suppose you are a math teacher who needs 160 days to cover the subject. Each day you need to review homework, present new material, and give students time to work in class independently on the new material. Ok, you say you have an extra twenty days. Not so. Six of those days are semester final exams. Twelve more are unit tests. Ok, now you have two days extra, right. No again. You will lose another two days for the state exit exam and four to six days for the California Standards Test.
You are already in the whole four to six days. Oh, don't forget all of the other school related activities such as assemblies, fire drills, etc. Just for argument sake we will use the number 154 for the actual number of days you get to cover 160 days of material. Now the state takes away another 8 days and you still have the same requirements. 146 days to do 160 days of work. That equals one whole chapter, the most important chapter, the last chapter. But who care if the teacher has more work to do than time to do it. YOU DO, because the kids are short changed!
This state historically has prospered because of the educated work force. If I don't have the time to teach your kids what they need to learn than we as a state will suffer. It's already happening. Kids in large classes perform more poorly than kids in small classes. And yet, we want to increase the class size by 20% and decrease the number of days to teach this larger class. Is that what you really wanted?
