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January 13, 2017

Teaching, Leading, and Social Justice

 

Obama's legacy on K-12 one of bold achievements, fierce blowback

Alyson Klein, Education Week

President Barack Obama entered the White House in 2009 amid the wreckage of the Great Recession and with education high on his list of domestic priorities. He scored some early game-changing policy victories on teacher quality, academic standards, and school turnarounds during his first term, but faced a big backlash in his second. That reaction threatened the longevity of his signature initiatives and made it virtually impossible to enact similarly sweeping change in new areas, including early-childhood education. At the same time, Obama used the bully pulpit—and his historic perch as the nation's first black president—to shine a spotlight on historically overlooked groups of students through such initiatives as My Brother's Keeper, which considered how the federal government could better help young black men succeed.

  

Governor proposes minimal funding increase for K-12 schools next year

John Fensterwald, EdSource

Citing recent revenue declines and uncertainty about the future, Gov. Jerry Brown has lowered funding for schools by $500 million in the current year and is proposing little more than a cost-of-living increase in the 2017-18 budget that he presented Tuesday. And in a press conference surprise that will likely frustrate school districts and the construction industry, Brown said that his administration would not issue any of the $7 billion bonds for K-12 school facilities that voters approved in November until the Legislature established better auditing procedures to document how the money will be spent.

 

A year in, L.A. Unified's insider superintendent has made no big waves

Anna M. Phillips, Howard Blume and Joy Resmovits, Los Angeles Times

For months after she was named superintendent of the nation’s second-largest school system, Michelle King borrowed a strategy new politicians use to get the lay of the land: She traversed the territory on a “listen and learn” tour. Although she had been working in the district for 31 years, she held town halls in Pacoima, Huntington Park and Cypress Park. At schools across the district, she assured parents that she would take their concerns back to district headquarters, where they would help shape an ambitious but practical plan to increase academic achievement and reverse years of declining enrollment.

  

Language, Culture, and Power

 

Ending the No Child Left Behind Catch-22 on English learner progress

Linda Darling-Hammond and Kenji Hakuta, EdSource

California’s State Board of Education has an opportunity at its meeting this week in Sacramento to leave behind one of the most unfair and problematic features of No Child Left Behind (NCLB): the way it calculates English learners’ progress for purposes of accountability. In doing so, however, the state will still have some other dilemmas to resolve with respect to how it will focus on, understand, and support the nearly 1.4 million public students classified as English learners. These decisions, which have given rise to considerable debate, will be critically important in this state with the greatest concentration of English learners in the country (about 23 percent of K-12 public school students) so that it can both credit schools with their successes in moving English learners to proficiency in English and maintain a focus on those long-term English learners who have been left behind. Long-term English learners are students who have been English learners for six or more years, and are not making adequate progress on both learning English and mastering core content.

 

Campuses are breaking apart into ‘safe spaces’

Frank Furedi, Los Angeles Times

The meaning of a “safe space” has shifted dramatically on college campuses. Until about two years ago, a safe space referred to a room where people — often gay and transgender students — could discuss problems they shared in a forum where they were sheltered from epithets and other attacks. Then temporary meeting spaces morphed into permanent ones. More recently, some advocates have turned their attention to student housing, which they want to turn into safe spaces by segregating student living quarters. Who would have imagined that the original safe space motive — to explore issues in an inclusive environment — would so quickly give way to the impulse to quarantine oneself and create de facto cultural segregation?

 
Educating immigrant students and emergent bilinguals (in an anti-immigrant era)

Dr. Patricia Gándara, AERA.net

“And thank you to all of you for joining me last night in conversation, engaging in conversation about something that has been weighing heavily on my heart for the last three weeks. Probably like many of you, I’m the daughter of an immigrant. A woman with an eighth grade education from Mexico. My mother believed very deeply in the promise of this country. But she also was fiercely proud of her own culture and her own language. She didn’t see anything incompatible about those two. So this anti-immigrant rhetoric of the recent presidential campaign has been especially painful on many levels.”

 

Whole Children and Strong Communities

 

‘Hidden Figures’ stars encourage girls to pursue STEM careers during LA screening

Fermin Leal, EdSource

Eighth-grader Monica Hernandez arrived at the University of Southern California excited to see in person some of her favorite stars, including Grammy winner Pharrell Williams and Oscar winner Octavia Spencer, as part of a special screening of the movie “Hidden Figures.” “Hidden Figures” chronicles the team of African-American women who provided NASA important mathematical data needed to launch the program’s first successful space missions, including the launch of astronaut John Glenn, the first American to orbit the Earth. After the event, the student from El Sereno Middle School in East Los Angeles said the stars’ message may have helped her choose a career. “I think I want to be a mathematician, or maybe a scientist,” Hernandez said. “Those seem like they would be really cool jobs.”

 

The next generation of farmers is being trained in New York City high schools

Lela Nargi, NPR

It's Monday, 8 a.m., and these teens have already mucked stalls in the barn and fed the goats, alpacas and miniature cows. They've rounded up eggs in the henhouse, harvested cabbages and a few green-tinged tomatoes, and arranged them in tidy tiers to sell in the Agriculture Store. Now they're ready to put in a full day of classes. These are the Aggies. They're the first kids to arrive at John Bowne High School in Flushing, Queens, in the morning, and the last to leave on the New York City buses and subways that shuttle them home in the evening. Some 600 of the city's public school students are enrolled in Bowne's specialized, four-year agriculture program. Like most of their schoolmates, the Aggies follow an ordinary curriculum of English, math and social studies. But they also learn the building blocks of diverse careers in the booming industry of agriculture, which sees almost 60,000 new jobs open up in the U.S. every year, according to the USDA. The Aggies grow crops, care for livestock and learn the rudiments of floriculture, viticulture, aquaculture, biotechnology and entrepreneurship.

 

Don't call it 'guidance' anymore: A talk with the nation's top school counselor

Elissa Nadworny, NPR

Counselors play a big role in helping students succeed: They help with scheduling, college applications and with issues like mental health. Since 2015, first lady Michelle Obama has honored a school counselor of the year in a ceremony at the White House. Friday, the honor goes to Terri Tchorzynski of the Calhoun Area Career Center in Battle Creek, Mich., where she works with 11th- and 12th-graders drawn from 20 public high schools in Calhoun County. Tchorzynski started her career as a high school English teacher, before getting her master's degree in counseling — a role she says she "always knew she wanted." NPR Ed caught up with Tchorzynski about her work in Michigan and the important role she sees counselors playing in schools.

 

Access, Assessment, and Advancement

 

Discrimination in gifted education must end

Harold O. Levy, Education Week

It is understandable that school administrators and teachers focus their attention on the students who face the greatest academic struggles in the classroom. I did this myself when I was the chancellor of the New York City schools more than a decade ago, with an emphasis on reducing the dropout rate and enabling more students to graduate. But in doing so, educators fail to pay enough attention to the needs of some of the brightest students. Millions of K-12 students are capable of more challenging coursework than they are currently assigned. A recent study by Johns Hopkins University and Duke University used student-assessment data from multiple states to estimate that 20 percent to 40 percent of elementary and middle school students in the United States are performing at least one level above their current grade on standardized reading tests and between 11 percent and 30 percent above on standardized math tests, but are nonetheless taught their grade-level curricula.

 

How testing practices have to change in U.S. public schools

Valerie Strauss, The Washington Post; Monty Neill, National Center for Fair and Open Testing

Last year was a good one for testing reformers. More states dropped graduation exams. Many districts cut back testing time. The grassroots assessment reform movement grew stronger and more diverse. This new year can be even better if assessment reformers take advantage of opportunities under the new federal Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA). ESSA ends most punitive federal accountability mandates. Of course, we cannot predict what President-elect Donald Trump and his education secretary nominee, Betsy DeVos, will try to do on testing and accountability. We do know that it will take concerted grassroots organizing to halt harmful state and local policies, creating space to improve education and implement new assessment systems.

 

Brown proposes more higher ed funding, but phasing out middle class scholarships

Larry Gordon, EdSource

Gov. Jerry Brown’s 2017-18 budget proposals for higher education continue his campaign for more efficiency and access at California’s public college and universities, funding ongoing programs to make it easier to transfer from community colleges, improve graduation rates and shorten time to degrees. But Brown triggered some controversy by advocating cuts in aid to middle class students and supporting tuition increases at the University of California and the California State University systems. If UC and CSU continue efforts to widen access and lower costs, Brown said he would not oppose the first tuition hikes in six years at those two university systems, describing such increases as “probably needed.” He wants to keep community college fees frozen at $46 a credit, among the lowest in the nation, in what his budget document said was “a clear signal that the colleges will remain an accessible pathway to postsecondary education.”

 

   

Inequality, Poverty, Segregation

 

Recent trends in income, racial, and ethnic school readiness gaps at kindergarten entry

Sean F. Reardon, AERA.net

“So the key finding is that the school readiness gap, the gap in school readiness is between children from high income and low income families has declined significantly over the last dozen years or so. The school readiness gap by race has also declined, so the Black-White and the Hispanic-White gap have also gotten narrower over that same time period.”    

The irony of inclusivity

Hayley Glatter, The Atlantic

If the national conversation was somehow lacking an entertaining indictment of school hallways filled with hollow calls for inclusivity, the ABC sitcom Speechless certainly fills the void. The Scott Silveri show is notable not only because—as David Perry wrote for The Atlantic

 in September—it centers around a character and an actor with a disability, but also because its satirical take on what an open and welcoming academic community looks like is particularly poignant in 2016. Students and teachers at the fictional Lafayette High School were very excited for its newest pupil, J.J. DiMeo (Micah Fowler) who has cerebral palsy, to arrive. And they wanted the DiMeo family to be completely sure of this excitement. The principal tells the DiMeos about an inclusivity-themed assembly planned for the afternoon of his first day; an entire classroom applauds J.J. when he shows up to learn; and one student (whose “cousin is deaf, so he gets it”) presents him with a giant poster that reads “J.J. for president.” These gestures, though ostensibly well-intentioned, are forced to the point of discomfort. Everyone in the California-based high school is so busy telling J.J. he’s welcome that at first, they turn him into a spectacle, and the spotlight is searing.

 

Education access problem ‘is poverty, not gender’

Jack Grove, Times Higher Education

When the United Nations began its push to improve access to higher education in the world’s poorest countries last year, it was hailed as a historic moment by many education experts. Never before had the UN set itself targets to increase participation in tertiary-level education. Instead, it had focused almost exclusively on making sure that children around the world had the chance to gain a decent education at a primary or secondary school, while efforts around post-18 education were centred on technical or vocational training. By including a goal of achieving “equal access for all women and men to affordable and quality technical, vocational and tertiary education, including university” as part of its 2030 Sustainable Development Goals, there is hope that university attendance can be boosted across the globe, particularly for women.

 

 

Public Schools and Private $

 

Louisiana court: State-approved charter schools unconstitutionally funded

Arianna Prothero, Education Week

A Louisiana state appeals court has ruled that the way several charter schools in the state are funded is unconstitutional, according to the Associated Press. At issue in the case, Iberville Parish School Board v. Louisiana State Board of Elementary and Secondary Education,

 is funding for schools that were granted charters by the Louisiana Board of Elementary and Secondary Education, rather than a local district—or parish—but are funded with money allocated to local school systems. Although charter laws have been passed in 43 states and the District of Columbia, how the schools are funded has turned out to be somewhat of an Achilles' heel in some states. Washington state's high court ruled in 2015 that the way charters were funded was unconstitutional. Lawmakers have since revised the funding system there, and charters are back up-and-running in the state. 

 

Forget charter schools and vouchers — here are five business ideas school reformers should adopt

Samuel E. Abrams, Los Angeles Times

Donald Trump never tires of reminding us that he is a businessman, and in Betsy DeVos, he has nominated a secretary of Education who endorses a business model for improving elementary and secondary schooling. The problem is, it’s the wrong model. DeVos’ prescriptions include for-profit school management, taxpayer-funded vouchers to cover private school tuition and parental choice as the primary vehicle for regulation. Yet where such free-market remedies have been tried, they have yielded disappointing results.

 

A disturbing look at how charter schools are hurting a traditional school district

Valerie Strauss, The Washington Post; Carol Burris, Network for Public Education

Bethlehem is a proud city with a tidy historic downtown that appears well-kept and well-intentioned. Income is below the national average, and unemployment is slightly higher, yet it is still in far better shape than neighboring small cities such as Allentown. The Bethlehem Steel Plant that once kept the economy robust closed down about 20 years ago. Now the small city is a small tech hub with tourism, major medical networks and local universities providing work for its nearly 75,000 residents. The public schools of the city do a fine job serving their majority minority students, of whom nearly 60 percent receive free or reduced-priced lunch. There are few dropouts, and an outstanding music program keeps kids engaged. Bethlehem’s two high schools offer AP courses, and SAT scores are consistently close to or above the national average, with most students taking the test.

 

 

Other News of Note

 

'Schools can save lives': An exit interview with the U.S. Education Secretary

Cory Turner, NPR

He didn't have long. Education Secretary John B. King Jr. was confirmed by the Senate in March 2016 after President Obama's long-serving secretary, Arne Duncan, stepped down at the end of 2015. No matter the outcome of the 2016 presidential election, King knew that Obama would be out in a year and replaced by a president who, regardless of party, would almost certainly replace him. At the helm of the Education Department, King followed the polestar that had guided him as a teacher, principal and as deputy secretary under Duncan: protect kids, especially those who have been traditionally marginalized — children of color, English language learners, students with disabilities and those living in poverty. 

 

 

Just News from Center X is produced weekly by Leah Bueso, Anthony Berryman, Beth Happel, and John Rogers. Generous support from the Stuart Foundation allows Center X to provide this service free to the general public.

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