The Guy with 'The Best Job in Public Education'

Fri, 30 Jan 2009 00:00:00 -0800

voiceofsandiego.org - By Emily Alpert - Jan. 30 (Interview) - Despite being the son of a principal and a schoolteacher, Jed Wallace says he stumbled into teaching to pay the bills. But what started as just a job at a massive Los Angeles elementary school became a passion and eventually convinced him that solutions lay outside school districts in charters: publicly funded schools that are independently run and free from the rules that gird school districts. The idea germinated after Wallace helped Hooper Avenue Elementary School boost its test scores "overnight" simply by clamping down on teacher and student turnover. Teachers agreed to stick it out at the school instead of climbing the career ladder to more comfortable schools; an area superintendent allowed Hooper to keep enrolling students who had moved a few schools away when a parent got sick or lost a job. But then a new leader came into the school district and parents were told they had to go back to their home schools. Wallace found himself standing outside the school facing furious families. He calls it one of the worst days in his professional career. "I said, 'I will not put myself in a situation where I do not have greater control over my professional destiny,'" Wallace recalled. "And it was clear to me that the charter school movement was in fact that place." Fifteen years later he has seen charters from nearly every angle: as a classroom teacher and charter founder, as a San Diego Unified manager overseeing charters, and as the executive director and later the chief operating officer of High Tech High, a lauded system of charter schools that use projects to engage students in their classes and now trains its own teachers. He was tapped in December to lead the California Charter Schools Association, a group that advocates for quality charters statewide.

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Crazy U.S. Thinking: Rampant Sexually Spread Diseases and No Talk About Sex!

Fri, 28 Mar 2008 00:00:00 -0700

AlterNet - By Lara Riscol - Mar. 28 (Opinion) - Fueling the myth that sexual health education causes promiscuity is blood sport in traditionalists' sex-driven culture war. "In our abstinence-only world today, people sometimes confuse providing sexual education with promoting sexual activity for young people," says Deb Levine. Debra Hauser, executive vice president for Advocates for Youth, agrees. "Even enlightened educators fear that parents and administrators will react negatively to a curriculum that promotes healthy sexuality -- that the perception will be that they are condoning or promoting sex," says Hauser, whose group lobbies for the stalled REAL Act to provide unprecedented funding for sex ed that goes beyond today's disease-prevention model. "The perception of many is that [sex ed] needs a heavy-handed message that teaches sex is likely to lead to negative outcomes. Thirty years of public health research shows that teaching young people about healthy sexuality does not promote sex."

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The Guy with 'The Best Job in Public Education'

Crazy U.S. Thinking: Rampant Sexually Spread Diseases and No Talk About Sex!