Board Consideration Of Superintendent'S: Fill & Download for Free

Schools in Canada are far safer than those in the United States. Since 2009 the U.S. has had 57 times as many school shootings as all other major industrialized nations combined. (Canada had two over the same time period.) The number of armed security guards in American schools has climbed steadily for the past decade. Canadian schools, on the other hand, tend to use less heavy-handed measures to keep kids safe.In Canada, education is exclusively a provincial responsibility. and the federal government takes a mostly hands-off approach to publicly-funded schools. There is no national governing body for education in Canada. In contrast, Americans have the Federal Department of Education.One of the unique aspects of the Canadian public school system is the amount of decentralization and the degree to which schools are run by local school authorities. Each province is divided at the local level into school districts governed by a superintendent and a locally elected school board (or board of education)The quality of public schools in Canada varies considerably from province to province and community to community, but although some are poor, most are excellent. Where schools are well-run, the quality of public education rivals any in the world and can offer opportunities seldom available in many other countries.The school year in Canada usually runs for ten months. In the United States, the school year is typically nine months, or one month shorter. This means that over 12 years of schooling, Canadian children get 12 more months of education.Another distinguishing feature is that Canada's teachers are well paid by international standards and entry into teaching is highly selective. Even at Canadian schools where average standards are low, students who take full advantage of the opportunities afforded receive an excellent education. At their worst, Canadian public schools are about equal to the average American public school. At their best, they are far better than any US state.On the most recent Programme for International Assessment (PISA) tests administered by the OECD, Canada ranked 4th overall globally among OECD countries - well above the U.S., who were way back at 31st.Canada is very good at integrating the children of immigrants into the population compared to the United States. Canada is one of the few countries where migrant children achieve at a level similar to their non-migrant counterparts.56% of Canadians go on to get a College or University degree or diploma, which is the highest rate in the world.See How Canada became an education superpower: https://www.bbc.com/news/business-40708421

Excerpts from the best overview story I could find about David WelchDavid Welch, the 52-year-old Silicon Valley entrepreneur and founder of Students Matter. His Menlo Park-based nonprofit initiated Vergara and is picking up all of the plaintiffs’ attorneys and PR fees — a bill that was running nearly $3 million even before Welch’s high-powered legal team first set foot in Los Angeles Superior Court for the trial.What may be unique about Vergara is David Welch himself, a man who prior to creating Students Matter in 2010 — the same year as the Reed case — had virtually no background in education policy or any direct financial stake in the multibillion-dollar, for-profit education and standardized testing industries.Most websites belonging to educational privateers such as StudentsFirst, NewSchools Venture Fund or Parent Revolution present images of children at play or of hand-raising students in class. Students Matter | Quality Education is something altogether different. Here a reader will find no editorials about learning tools, pedagogical developments or issues facing today’s teachers. Instead, nearly every screen down to its donations page is devoted to a single subject: Vergara v. California. Far from appearing as a celebration of “school reform,” Welch’s site seems to represent a lawsuit in search of a school district.Yet Welch and his nonprofit play a special role among a group of other nonprofits and personalities whose legal actions, school board campaigns, op-eds and overlapping advisory boards suggest a highly synchronized movement devoted to taking control of public education. The David and Heidi Welch Foundation, for example, has given to NewSchools Venture Fund, where Welch has been an “investment partner” and which invests in both charter schools and the cyber-charter industry, and has been linked to the $9 billion-per-year textbook and testing behemoth Pearson. Welch has also supported Michelle Rhee’s education-privatizing lobby StudentsFirst, most recently with a $550,000 bequest in 2012.StudentsFirst also turned up on an early list of Students Matter’s “advisory committee” that included ardent education privatizers Democrats for Education Reform, Parent Revolution and NewSchools Venture Fund. Both StudentsFirst and NewSchools Venture Fund also appear on a list of Vergara supporters that includes the California Charter Schools Association, along with Los Angeles Unified School District superintendent (and onetime Vergara co-defendant) John Deasy and former Oakland Unified School District superintendent Tony Smith.The connections don’t stop there: Students Matter now includes both NewSchools CEO Ted Mitchell — currently under consideration for the number two post at the federal Department of Education — as well as Parent Revolution executive director Ben Austin on its current advisory board.In his official Students Matter biography, Welch, who holds a PhD in electrical engineering, states that “his passion for public education arises from his roles both as a parent of three school-aged children and as an employer in two highly successful start-ups in Silicon Valley.” (Neither Welch nor a Students Matter spokesperson responded to Capital & Main’s requests for comment for this article.) Welch made his first fortune engineering the $41 billion merger of fiber-optics giants JDS Uniphase and SDL in 2000. He co-founded Sunnyvale’s Infinera Corporation in 2000. Welch, whose reported 2012 income was $2.23 million, lives in a $12.5 million estate nestled in the bucolic Silicon Valley enclave of Atherton, which ranks first on Forbes’ annual list of America’s most expensive ZIP codes.Source: David Welch: The Man Behind Vergara v. California

Returning $20 to a woman saved my teaching career and kept me from being labelled a sex offender.I was doing the first phase of my student teaching, observing a middle school classroom two days a week for three hours each day. I showed up in the morning before the kids got there and left right before their lunch. One day, as I was signing myself out of the office in the afternoon, I saw one of the students in my class sitting in a chair beside the desk of the secretary. I heard him tell one of the ladies there that he was waiting for his mom to bring the money he forgot at home so he could go on his field trip.As I walked out of the building and into the foyer, I held the door open for a flustered-looking woman rifling through her purse with her hands full of trash and receipts. I walked out the main doors and onto the large concrete walkway that led to the bus stop and teacher parking lots. Twenty feet ahead of me on the ground, flapping back-and-forth in the breeze, was a neatly folded pile of money.I knew what it was and who it belonged to before I even reached it. I stood on the walkway for a moment, staring at the cash and then back up to the main doors. Finally I reached down and grabbed the money and started walking towards the building. A second later, the flustered woman came out of the doors, and I waved the pile of bills at her.“Did you drop this?” I asked her.“Yes!” She said, breathless with relief.I asked her if she was my student’s mom, and she said yes, and I told her I figured this was for the field trip, and she confirmed it was. She thanked me profusely, and then walked back inside the building. I got in my car and left.Eighteen months later, I was just finishing the full-time student teaching aspect of my degree and I was two weeks from graduation. My placement this time was a suburban high school five minutes from my apartment. On the eve of my final week at this assignment, I was awoken from my sleep by a phone call from the head of the student teaching department at the university.One of my students at the high school had gotten on my Facebook profile, apparently looking for some pictures that were rumored to be inappropriate. They didn’t find any pictures, but what they did find were some status updates and other posts from circa 2009 that ran the gamut from slightly NSFW to full-blown offensive. The parents of the student involved became aware of this somehow, and on top of that there was some question of whether I had initiated contact with this student or otherwise encouraged them to look at my page or make contact outside of school.I asked the department head what was going to happen. He told me that the university had just gone on spring break, and so no action by them would happen for at least a week. Once they returned, they would schedule a hearing. The superintendent of the high school (also a board member of the university, alumnus, and local sports celebrity) was reported to have not only wanted me removed from the school, but also be denied my teacher certification as well as my diploma.I was despondent. The next morning, at the local restaurant where I worked, students and parents showed up solely to berate and yell at me and call me a pervert. For the last semester I had seen my students at the local Walmart, in my neighborhood, and they even worked with my girlfriend at her restaurant. Now I was terrified to go anywhere in case they saw me. A long week went by before the department head called me into his office.When I arrived, he questioned me extensively. I told him the truth, that I had gotten rid of all the usual silly pictures on my Facebook a long time ago as per the teaching program guidelines, but I guess even though my settings were on private all material before 2009 needed to be individually hidden from your timeline. There were certainly posts that were tasteless or offensive, although they also lacked some of the context that—at that time and at that age—made them popular or humorous. There were also a couple posts that were explicitly about the high school superintendent. I made clear in no uncertain terms that I had never propositioned or “groomed” or attempted to make ANY contact with any of my students. In fact, two weeks prior to this whole incident, I had reported to all responsible parties that a few female students seemed to be expressing more than just mild curiosity about me, and I was taking all necessary steps in order to not put myself in a delicate or potentially compromising situation.The department head told me that there would be a hearing where a committee of administrators and professors at the university would review the evidence and take my statement into consideration. He would report back to me their decision by the end of the week.So I sat for another week and did nothing. Other student teachers in the program started to find out about what was going on. I wasn’t supposed to show up to any of the pre-graduation meetings or senior seminar stuff. As if that wasn’t enough, a regular customer at the restaurant I worked at was arrested for making child pornography after a violent gun-battle with the police, and somehow his connection to the restaurant and my situation were conflated (his daughter was actually one of my students), and so I had people who thought somehow that I was also involved in a child pornography ring. The high school baseball team came into my girlfriend’s Applebee’s restaurant and harassed her.I got an email Wednesday evening from the department head telling me to come to his office in the morning. When I arrived, I was more nervous than I had ever been in my life. I had already dropped out of college a handful of times in the past because of money and laziness and people dying and just life in general. I had literally rebuilt my life from scratch to go back to college and get my teaching license. The department head handed me a file with the transcript of the committee’s meeting and their decision.Then he told me that his daughter was a teacher at one of the local middle schools. He was going around one day doing observations on student teachers and he decided to drop by and say hi as lunch was about to begin. He was sitting in his car in the parking lot about to go in when he saw a flustered woman get out of her vehicle and walk towards the main entrance. While she was digging through her purse pulling out bits of trash and old receipts, she must not have noticed that a neatly folded pile of bills had fallen onto the ground.I had shown him, he said, who I really was when I was standing all alone in front of a small pile of cash that belonged to somebody else. The committee had decided pretty quickly that I wasn’t a pervert, and apparently the student in question had requalified their remarks about whether I had actually encouraged them to make contact. As for my offensive status updates, the administration had devolved to a near shouting match about what exactly constituted a transgressive violation, and so no clear consensus was ever reached, except that I had better just make my Facebook page completely private in the future.Everyone agreed that I needed to finish up my last week at a new school, so I was put into a new placement where I graded argumentative essays for a couple days until my time was up. I graduated right on time, but decided to skip the ceremony and use the school gym one last time before my student ID card got deactivated. A couple weeks later I got a friend request from one of my old students. Attached was a brief but friendly message, with an almost confessional tone. They told me that my class had been their favorite, and were excited about college in the fall. Hopefully, they said, things had worked out all right for me in the end.