Focus
“Life after San Gabriel” pg. 6-7
THE
Life & Art
Sports
sweaters and leggings” pg. 9
“Girls tennis team changes a decade of history” pg. 11
“All the fall things:
Matador
Volume 60, NUMBER 3
WEDNESDAY, november 5, 2014
S a n G a b r i e l H i gh S c h o o l
801 Ramona St., San Gabriel, CA 91776
www.thematadorsghs.com
Students vote in mock elections S i mon Fung
Sophomore Mandy Zhao participates in the mock election by voting behind a ballot box in the Multipurpose room.
In preparation for the California general election, Students Advocating for Voter Empowerment (SAVE) held a mock election on Oct. 30 with the assistance of Arsalyn Youth Forums. Seniors, juniors, sophomores, and select freshman classes participated in the mock election by casting votes for various offices in government, such as California Governor, State Attorney General, members of the California State Assembly and Senate, and congressperson for the House of Representatives. For some students, the mock election was the first time that they went through the electoral process. “I was not informed at all before this, so I think it’s a good experience for students, especially for seniors because they will be eighteen next year and they’re going to be voting, so it’s a good practice,” senior Zoey Su said. Students were also able to vote on Proposition 46, which if passed would require drug testing for doctors, and Proposition 47, which would bring nonviolent felonies such as drug possession down to mere misdemeanors. “I think that Proposition 47 would be really useful since some felonies would become misdemeanors, which makes their terms much less harm for minor crimes committed that do not involve violence, such as possession of drugs,” senior Andy Tran said.
By familiarizing students with the voting process, SAVE Adviser Eric Hendrickson hopes to see more students involved in the voting and government in the near future. “We want to get students more connected with civic engagement. When I think of all my juniors, they could all be voting in sixteen months. Most of them will be sitting out this actual election,” Hendrickson said. Hendrickson hope that future voters at San Gabriel will become educated voters by introducing students to the voting process. Hendrickson also hopes to draw attention to political inactivity with this mock election, as voter turnouts in the state of California have been reaching record lows. According to the office of the California Secretary of State, only a quarter of eligible voters participated in California’s primary elections in June. The office of the California Secretary of State found that only 25.2 percent of eligible voters throughout the state participated in the primary elections this June. “I’m hoping that students feel that helplessness [when] they don’t know the issues,” Hendrickson said. “I’m hoping that negative feeling will encourage them to get informed when the time comes to vote. We want to take uneducated voters and encourage them to be informed when voting.” Preliminary results for the state general elections will be available today, Nov. 5th. Photo by Sydney Trieu
TIME magazine cover stirs controversy over issue of teacher tenure Kri s t y Duong Upon the release of the cover of Time magazine’s Nov. 3 issue, teachers were spurred to action, taking offense to the cover line “Rotten Apples” which stated that bad teachers are the problem in education and that job protections are keeping them employed. The issue is based on the ruling of Vergara v. California, which struck down Calif. laws regarding teacher tenure and other job protections. Many teachers’ unions denounced the ruling and appealed. Now they are awaiting a trial date. Despite the attack on teacher tenure, the article featured in this issue of Time magazine, “Taking on Teacher Tenure,” notes that this reform movement is not being led by teachers’ unions but by wealthy businessmen and billionaires. The lead advocate for this “war on teacher tenure” is Silicon Valley entrepreneur David Welsh who believes that teacher tenure is protecting bad teachers, depriving students their constitutional right to a good education. However, many teachers disagree. “I feel like a lot of people are scapegoating teachers as the problem with education, and most of the blame for lack of student progress is being placed upon teachers,” Robert Johnson, San Gabriel High School’s union segment director, said. “The solution that’s being offered outside of education, coming from the business community, is to make education more like a business model, and one of the solutions that the business community offers is to do away with teacher tenure.” Educators from the Badass Teachers Association, an organization of teachers and civilians that participate in education activism, assert that “the cover uncritically situates the tech millionaires as saviors without revealing their own self-interest in the tenure fight, the creation of a nation of corporate-run franchise schools.” Teacher tenure was created to protect “teachers’ creativity,” their freedom to teach the way they see best rather than just following a strict textbook, cookie cutter format, according to AP government teacher Raymond Gin. According to teacher union representative, Lorraine Tom, tenure “protects teachers with different or unorthodox views [and] their freedom to expose students to [those views].”
President of the American Federation of Teachers Randi Weingarten created an electronically organized campaign and got union presidents all over the country to sign the petition, gathering over 900,000 signatures opposing the article. “The reason why the unions oppose the article is because of their misunderstanding of tenure,” President of Alhambra Teachers Association Roz Collier said. “Tenure is a due process right that says there has to be a cause for someone to be fired. It stops [things like] favoritism.” One flaw that many critics find with this attack on teacher tenure is that it separates “good” teachers from “bad” teachers based on test scores. They use measures such as Race to the Top and No Child Left Behind to encourage the use of quantitative values to evaluate teacher performance. They ask how one can determine a teacher’s effectiveness through student test scores when students are not all the same. “How can you measure, for example, ESL [students] with the same yardstick as AP students?” Gin said. Other factors need to be taken into account when determining what is wrong with education are funding, resources, and testing. Students that lack funding for good resources may be just as disadvantaged as those who are taught by “bad” teachers. In addition, the question also arises to how effective our testing system is, especially with the introduction of Common Core. According to Time magazine, “teachers in Florida, Colorado, New York, Texas, and Tennessee have filed lawsuits against their states, alleging unfair testing expectations.” However, at the same time, it cannot be denied that there are “rotten apples” in the education system that use teacher tenure as a shield to as Gin says, “see what they can get away with.” “The tenure system can be seen from both sides,” senior Brian Choy said. “[On one hand], it protects teachers from unemployment [but, on the other hand], it keeps, as I describe, old outdated teachers who either need to adapt to changing times or find a new position. We know there are teachers who deserve to stay, and we have had experience with ones we aren’t fond of, but you can’t generalize the tenure system as the reason why ‘bad’ teachers are allowed to stay.” Ultimately, the battle here is between business and teachers unions, a battle that has been going on for at least a hundred years. Illustration by Cassandra Chen