Posted on 06/01/2005 6:00:46 PM PDT by ProtectOurFreedom
BILL NUMBER: AB 756 AMENDED
BILL TEXT
AMENDED IN ASSEMBLY APRIL 7, 2005
INTRODUCED BY Assembly Member Goldberg
FEBRUARY 18, 2005
An act to add Section 60050 to the Education Code, relating to instructional materials.
LEGISLATIVE COUNSEL'S DIGEST
AB 756, as amended, Goldberg. Instructional materials: page limitation. Existing law requires the State Board of Education to adopt at least 5 separate basic instructional materials, as defined, for use in kindergarten and each of grades 1 to 8, inclusive, in language arts, mathematics, science, social science, bilingual or bicultural subjects, and any other subject, discipline or interdisciplinary areas for which the state board determines the adoption of instructional materials to be necessary or desirable.
Existing law requires the governing board of a school district maintaining one or more high schools to adopt textbooks for use in the high schools and authorizes only textbooks of publishers who comply with certain requirements to be adopted.
Existing law required the State Board of Education by July 1, 2004, to adopt maximum weight standards for textbooks, as specified. This bill would prohibit the State Board of Education and school districts from adopting instructional materials that exceed 200 pages in length.
Vote: majority.
Appropriation: no.
Fiscal committee: no.
State-mandated local program: no.
THE PEOPLE OF THE STATE OF CALIFORNIA DO ENACT AS FOLLOWS:
SECTION 1. Section 60050 is added to the Education Code, to read:60050. (a) Neither the state board nor a governing board may adopt instructional materials that exceed 200 pages in length. (b) The Legislature encourages the use of technology and multimedia materials in order to comply with subdivision (a) and reduce the cost and weight of textbooks.
If reducing text books to 200 pages is going to save us money, then why stop there? Why not 100 pages? Or maybe 50?
Of course, why stop with the books? Let's shorten the homework assignments as well. My 8th-grade son already gets homework assignments to "write a paragraph". I'm sure in a year or two, this will be shortened to "write a sentence" or "draw a picture."
I wouldn't be surprised if the enviro-wackos are behind this to "save the trees." We all know public education is doomed. This could be the last nail in the coffin.
Lunacy is correct.
Related thread from a couple of days ago:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1411749/posts
CA: Assembly says shorter books would help kids
Sac Bee ^ | 5/27/05 | Jim Sanders
What about being able to order replacement/new copies of existing adoptions?
Of course this will cost the schools money. The publishers will just create several smaller books out of the original one.
"Legislature encourages the use of technology and multimedia materials in order to comply with subdivision."
So is the legislature going to raise money to buy laptops for each student?
I'm not a fan of most K-12 textbooks, but the legislature has no business micromanaging the schools this way. Somebody's brother-in-law must work for a textbook publisher...
Many children are getting back injuries from carrying books that weigh too much.
I'm hoping that a subject can have multiple books, but each one cannot have over 200 pages.
It's a shame that this has to be made a law. It should be common sense.
1. Not long back it was "friends" of the Dems who were complaining that students were incurring back troubles resulting from backpacks containing heavy books. Perhaps that is applicable for some states; but in CA, seldom are the books even allowed out of the classroom. For reasons too numerous to list here; use your imagination.
2. The books MUST at least have 200 pages else "friends of the Education" committee will not get good CONTRACTS in authoring these so-called Textbooks. This will upset that fragile balance which exists in the Fragile California Eco-Educational Union System.
Therefore, while yes, your child's non-homework will now be reduced to "thinking about anything" afterschool, modern day teachers in CA are required to "know the minds of their students" and perhaps may progress to assigning grades accordingly.
Goldberg is known among California Residents as a "not for the citizens" type of legislator. Those who are friends of Goldberg applaud her efforts to keep them, nominally, at best employed.
Your problem sir, is you think the CA educational system is supposed to be for the children. It's not. It's for the "grown-ups". They simply must be kept entertained, you know.
They throw out textbooks all the time. My kids' school is closing at the end of the year, and my daughters keep on bringing home old textbooks that the teachers don't use anymore.
I'm glad. We've got lots of reading material for the summer, but it seems like a waste to keep on buying new books.
The books are reading books and contain most of the same stories that are in their current book. I can see history and science books needing to be updated occasinally, but reading books should be goood for many years.
A Modest Proposal for Saving Our Schools
The multi-million dollar campaign paid by starving teachers' unions has finally placed our sadly neglected schools at the center of the budget debate.
Across California, children are bringing home notes warning of dire consequences if Gov. Schwarzenegger's scorched earth budget is approved — a budget that slashes Proposition 98 public school spending from $42.2 billion this year all the way down to $44.7 billion next year. That should be proof enough that our math programs are suffering.
As a public school parent, I have given this crisis a great deal of thought and have a modest suggestion to help weather these dark days.
Maybe — as a temporary measure only — we should spend our school dollars on our schools. I realize that this is a radical departure from current practice, but desperate times require desperate measures.
The governor proposed spending $10,084 per student from all sources. Devoting all of this money to the classroom would require turning tens of thousands of school bureaucrats, consultants, advisers and specialists onto the streets with no means of support or marketable job skills, something that no enlightened social democracy should allow.
So I will begin by excluding from this discussion the entire budget of the state Department of Education, as well as the pension system, debt service, special education, child care, nutrition programs and adult education. I also propose setting aside $3 billion to pay an additional 30,000 school bureaucrats $100,000-per-year (roughly the population of Monterey) with the proviso that they stay away from the classroom and pay their own hotel bills at conferences.
This leaves a mere $6,937 per student, which, for the duration of the funding crisis, I propose devoting to the classroom.
To illustrate how we might scrape by at this subsistence level, let's use a hypothetical school of 180 students with only $1.2 million to get through the year.
We have all seen the pictures of filthy bathrooms, leaky roofs, peeling paint and crumbling plaster to which our children have been condemned. I propose that we rescue them from this squalor by leasing out luxury commercial office space. Our school will need 4,800 square feet for five classrooms (the sixth class is gym). At $33 per foot, an annual lease will cost $158,400. This will provide executive washrooms, around-the-clock janitorial service, wall-to-wall carpeting, utilities and music in the elevators. We'll also need new desks to preserve the professional ambiance.
Next, we'll need to hire five teachers — but not just any teachers. I propose hiring only associate professors from the California State University at their level of pay. Since university professors generally assign more reading, we'll need 12 of the latest edition, hardcover books for each student at an average $75 per book, plus an extra $5 to have the student's name engraved in gold leaf on the cover.
Since our conventional gym classes haven't stemmed the childhood obesity epidemic, I propose replacing them with an annual membership at a private health club for $39.95 per month. This would provide our children with a trained and courteous staff of nutrition and fitness counselors, aerobics classes and the latest in cardiovascular training technology.
Finally, we'll hire an $80,000 administrator with a $40,000 secretary because — well, I don't know exactly why, but we always have.
Our bare-bones budget comes to this:
| 5 classrooms | $158,400 | |
| 150 desks @ $130 | $19,500 | |
| 180 annual health club memberships @ $480 | $86,400 | |
| 2,160 textbooks @ $80 | $172,800 | |
| 5 C.S.U. associate professors @ $67,093 | $335,465 | |
| 1 administrator | $80,000 | |
| 1 secretary | $40,000 | |
| 24 percent faculty and staff benefits | $109,312 | |
| Offices, expenses and insurance | $30,000 | |
|
|
||
| TOTAL | $1,031,877 | |
This budget leaves a razor-thin reserve of just $216,703, or $1,204 per pupil, which can pay for necessities like paper, pencils, personal computers and extra-curricular travel. After all, what's the point of taking four years of French if you can't see Paris in the spring?
The school I have just described is the school we're paying for. Maybe it's time to ask why it's not the school we're getting.
Other, wiser, governors have made the prudent decision not to ask such embarrassing questions of the education-industrial complex because it makes them very angry. Apparently the unions believe that with enough of a beating, Gov. Schwarzenegger will see things the same way. Perhaps. But there's an old saying that you can't fill a broken bucket by pouring more water into it.
Maybe it's time to fix the bucket.
My son was often required to do the homework BEFORE the teacher went over the material. He would spend hours every night doing boring, monotonous homework that taught him very little and he hated it. This is because the idiots that "taught" him equated more homework with teaching.
I remember one time when ALL THREE of my sons had EXACTLY the same home work (9th, 6th, and 5th grades), trace an eyeball and label the parts of the eye. Does it REALLY matter if they can't tell you the difference between a rod and a cone or name all the muscles of the eye?
We took the youngest two out of public high school and homeschooled them for the last 2 and 3 years.
Public elementary school has been great for us. However, now our district is closing our very good school. My daughters have to go to another elementary school, and my son will be starting middle school.
We tried private with my son, and he was bored. He's gifted and needs accelerated math. They just couldn't accomodate that in the private school.
If we don't like the new schools, then it will be homeschool for us.
I'm very skeptical of the new schools.
I also cannot stand our district. They've been awful with the school closure. They've treated the teachers poorly, and they should not have closed our school. Financially, they made a mistake. The parents pointed out that the district would have to do an environmental impact study on the school they were going to put our school's students in because they were going to add so many portables.
Instead they are moving our school and the other school into a middle school that they are closing. The middle school had just been remodeled one year ago, and now it is going to be remodeled again to accomodate little elementary school kids. What a waste of money.
Our school was a National Blue Ribbon School with high test scores, a happy, active parents group, and great programs. Now it will all be dismantled. The school also had lots of Christians on its staff, so I felt very comfortable with my kids going there.
Hopefully, God will be watching over my kids in the new schools.
Why limit the number of pages instead of the weight? Without glossy heavyweight paper, textbooks could be printed on lighter paper without shortening the text. Pictures could be limited to either black and white or cheaper colors (since the paper is thinner), or they could use the old style of inserting a few color plates while the majority of the pages were printed with only black ink. The information could be preserved but the books could be lighter.
I see. The problem was that the school was TOO successful and made all the other schools look bad. The liberals are so enamored of having everyone "equal" that they don't care if they drag the best down to achieve "equality".
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