Title:
Thousands of US Teachers Lose Jobs as States Cut
Budgets
Description: This is
a VOA Special English Education Report.
See text below
Text:
America's recession ended in June of two thousand
nine but recovery has been slow. Many states face
budget problems and have cut spending in areas
including education. In California, thousands of
teachers have lost their jobs. Sixty percent of the
teachers at the Mariposa-Nabi primary school in Los
Angeles have received dismissal notices.Salvador
Rodriguez, the school principal, has been able to
provide computers for his students. "We have to keep
going and make it the best year possible with all
these changes," he says. But fewer teachers mean
bigger classes at his school. Mr. Rodriguez says
there used to be twenty students to a teacher. By
next year, he expects nearly thirty students in a
class. Fewer teachers also mean less individual
attention. Teachers say this is true especially in
schools with large immigrant populations where
English is not the first language of many
students.Los Angeles has the nation's second-largest
public school system after New York City. The
district has dismissed ten to twelve percent of its
staff during the past two years. John Deasy, the
head of the Los Angeles Unified School District,
says about half of those laid off were teachers.An
education professor at the University of California,
Los Angeles, John Rogers, says other states have
also laid off teachers. But he says the situation in
California is worse because the state was already
facing a budget deficit before the recession. Also,
California was spending less per student than the
national average. Primary and secondary schools in
California receive most of their funding from the
state government. AJ Duffy is president of the
United Teachers Los Angeles union. Mr. Duffy says
the amount of funding each year depends on the
economy. He says: "In the past two and a half to
three years, we've lost twenty billion dollars in
funding for public education."Superintendent John
Deasy says the jobs of school librarians and nurses
are also being cut. And he expects more changes if
the state budget does not improve -- like closing or
combining schools.Most California school districts
have already reduced the number of days per year
that students must attend classes. Other states are
also talking about shortening the school year to
save money. For VOA Special English, I'm Carol
Presutti. For more education news and for English
teaching activities, go to voaspecialenglish.com.
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Hi. I
personally reviewed this video and found it appropriate for
the news section of English Global Group. This
is a Voice of America video which covers an interesting
topic in Special English. I would appreciate some feedback from both
students and teachers about this video. You can comment in
the window below using any of a number of different services
including Facebook, Yahoo, AOL, and Hotmail.
