Regular reader Deirdre Nurre writes: Tonight, for one night only: a rare joint work session of the School Board and the City Council convenes to present the 2020 Vision. Session begins at 7 pm in the auditorium of Longfellow Middle School. 2020 Vision is a citywide movement to ensure academic success and wellbeing for all of Berkeley’s children and youth, by closing the achievement and health gaps in Berkeley’s public schools. The City Council and School Board made a formal agreement committing to work together to close this gap by the year 2020. A team of dedicated people from the city, school district and many parts of the community have collaborated to form draft recommendations for achieving the goals in the agreement. I will attend tonight’s session with a certain excitement and a certain foreboding. First, I’m surely not alone in working with various organizations that have benchmarked 2020 as the year by which we will vanquish poverty, sloth, disease, and environmental hazards. Googling Nostradamus does not increase my confidence in these predictions, but hope springs eternal. I am hoping to hear more about the achievement gap in public education, a term oft-used but never clearly defined. Perhaps we’ll have […]
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