Just to begin to understand the education issues that affect your family, it helps to have an overview of a bigger picture. Now you can do that in one place: www.edsource.org

What you’ll see first is its subtitle Clarifying Complex Education Issues

That’s for real, and if you’ll spend even ten minutes here you’ll have more perspective on what happens with your kids. (I really wish you could find this stuff in your daily newspaper, but you can’t.) The first article to come up is:

California’s Emerging Education Data System: A Status Report

If you’re interested, they’ll tell you here about:

• The long-awaited CALPADS system that collects data on individual students is set for implementation in 2009–10
• Work is starting on CALTIDES, a similar system to be built using data on individual Educators

Then they list among featured publications one called How California Compares and an article on projected workforce requirements. It points out that the future workforce is now in our schools, and that their ability in math and science will be critical in their lives and ours. One paragraph in the executive summary says this:

Student-level data show a relationship between science and math course-taking An analysis of 2005–06 student records by the California Department of Education (CDE) reveals that students who had completed Algebra I in 8th grade and were taking geometry in 9th grade were more likely to also take “college prep” science (i.e., biology) than their peers who took Algebra I in 9th grade. And science courses were less likely to be “college prep” among those students who were not yet taking Algebra I by 9th grade. Because many higher-level science courses require a certain level of math proficiency, these data demonstrate how Algebra I may serve as a gateway to a more rigorous high school science education.

When you have time, follow the links. There’s information, state by state, for the whole nation.