LAUSD `bloat’ draws outcries, reports the Los Angeles Daily News, which printed salaries of administrators and teachers in Los Angeles Unified.

. . . the LAUSD’s bureaucracy ballooned nearly 20 percent from 2001 to 2007. During that same period, 500 teaching positions were cut and enrollment dropped by 6 percent.

Administrators average $95,000 a year; teachers average $63,000.

Kids have a new playground with grass instead of asphalt at a Rhode Island charter elementary school. For two years, a committee of students planned the playground.

Assigned to write a persuasive letter, fourth-grader Bernardo Garcia wrote to an executive at Lowe’s home improvement stores:

Can you donate some turf to our school which is the Learning Community Charter School? One reason why I think we need turf is that in a middle of a soccer game some boys get hurt and they have to go to the nurse who cares about us Nurse Liz. Nurse Liz can’t take this much chaos in her office. My second reason why I think we need turf is that we fall and get hurt cause our yard is made out of cement. If we had turf we can Dive for the Ball without getting hurt. My last reason why I think we need turf is that we can get scratches Big ones. If we had turf we would get no scratches.”

Lowe’s donated $110,000.

Students are now writing letters in hopes of getting a science fair.

Charter high school students in Chicago and Florida were significantly more likely to earn a diploma and go to college than comparable students, a Rand study concludes.

Controlling for observed student characteristics and test scores, . . . estimates indicate that among students who attended a charter middle school, those who went on to attend a charter high school were 7 to 15 percentage points more likely to earn a standard diploma than students who transitioned to a traditional public high school. Similarly, those attending a charter high school were 8 to 10 percentage points more likely to attend college.

The effect is similar to the impact of Catholic high schools on educational attainment.

Lance Izumi argues for English immersion while Bruce Fuller stumps for transitional bilingual classes on the New York Times’ Education Watch.

Fuller argues:

But millions of young children enter school without grasping much English, and No Child Left Behind now humiliates them by setting on their desk a standardized exam that can’t be deciphered.

I think this is a red herring. NCLB requires testing at the end of third grade, when most students have had nearly four years to learn English. Those in English immersion have much more exposure to English than those in transitional bilingual classes, which typically use Spanish 90 percent of the time in kindergarten and first grade and often don’t teach reading in English till the middle of third grade.

Fuller writes:

Even a Bush administration review of controlled classroom experiments — seeking to identify what works in language teaching — found stronger achievement gains for students enrolled in quality bilingual programs, compared with English-immersion classrooms. Yet a skilled bilingual teacher is crucial, one who understands the knowledge and social norms that children acquire at home, and how to build from the first language to advance rich oral language and then written literacy.

Unfortunately, there’s a shortage of skilled bilingual teachers; as a result, quality bilingual programs are the exception, not the norm. It’s easier to find teachers capable of teaching well in English.

In a post about the uses and misuses of technology — wacky fonts can’t disguise weak content — HuffEnglish includes a hilarious YouTube video, Life After Death by PowerPoint by corporate comedian Don McMillan.

While warning readers to “beware of the easy school fix,” Washington Post writer Jay Mathews describes management professor Bill Ouchi’s research on the power of reducing Total Student Loads per teacher. When middle and high school teachers are responsible for fewer students, test scores go up, writes Ouchi, author of Making Schools Work, which called for giving more power to principals.

He says when middle or high school principals are given control of their schools’ budgets — a rare occurrence in big districts — they tend to make changes in staffing, curriculum and scheduling that sharply reduce TSL, the number of students each of their teachers is responsible for. Some urban districts have TSLs approaching 200 kids per teacher. But after principals get budgeting power, the load drops sharply, sometimes to as low as 80 kids per instructor. When that happens, the portion of students scoring “proficient” on state tests climbs.

A 1997 study found only 43 percent of school district employees were regularly engaged in classroom teaching, Ouchi writes in his new book, which will be out next year. (Mathews has an advance chapter.)

“When a district has too few classroom teachers,” Ouchi writes in his chapter, “student loads per teacher rise to the point where teachers can no longer know their students well enough to establish a bond of trust with them. Without this trust, a teacher can neither establish an orderly classroom nor push a student to do his or her best, and the teacher’s job often becomes frustrating and constantly stressful.”

After analyzing the effect of class size, teacher experience, teacher credentials, professional development, time devoted to math and reading instruction and other factors, Ouchi’s research team concluded that only TSL had a significant effect on student performance in all the districts studied.

Some middle schools and a few high schools combine English and history into “humanities,” so teachers have twice as much time with half as many students. It’s less common to combine math and science, though that’s sometimes done. It’s also possible to have teachers teach fewer classes and spend the extra time as counselors or administrators. Cutting class size is the simplest way to reduce teaching loads, but the most expensive.

Why do teachers go nuts and quit? Mimi explains at It’s Not All Flowers and Sausages:

If one more person tells me to do it “for the kids”, I might throw a kid at them. Seriously. Stop playing on our good intentions and altruistic dedication to the future and treat us like the professionals you so desperately claim you want us to be. It just seems at times as if this job teeters on the brink of being inhumane.

I thought it was bad enough that I occasionally have to stomp my feet while peeing (to scare the mice away…really). ( I rationalize that it’s good for my thighs.)

Then I thought we had hit rock bottom when the administration took no sort of stance after teachers routinely had their personal property stolen out of their locked classrooms.

When I found a dead mouse in the middle of my rug (with several other LIVE mice feasting on the corpse) at 7:30 a.m., I thought, “This is it…this is as low as we can go. What else can be expected of me?”

Then the administration took away teachers’ parking spots.