December 18, 2015
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December 18, 2015
Teaching, Leading, and Social Justice
Training more black men to become teachers
Katy Reckdahl, The Atlantic
The Honoré Center is one of a small but growing number of specialized programs aimed at boosting the number of black male schoolteachers, who make up roughly 2 percent of the nation’s teaching force.
California approves tougher teacher training standards to help mainstreaming
Jane Meredith Adams, EdSource
Under federal pressure to increase the amount of time special education students spend in general education classrooms, the California Commission on Teacher Credentialing announced it will require all future teachers to learn techniques proven to foster the success of students with disabilities, including small group instruction, behavior management and using frequent informal assessments to identify and address learning gaps.
Politics in the classroom: How much is too much?
Steve Drummond, NPR
Gun control. Climate change. Donald Trump. Affirmative action. The first presidential primaries are just weeks away and with all these debates and issues in the headlines, there's no question that students are going to want to talk about them. But how should teachers handle these discussions?
Language, Culture, and Power
The struggle for Hawaiian education
Sarah Rosenblatt, Trouthout
The movement for Hawaiian education is agitating for Native Hawaiian self-determination, for the Hawaiian language to be allowed in public schools and for the creation of independent schools based on philosophies and politics of Hawaiian culture, land and resilience.
Immigrant schools aim to get students with little education through high school
Liz Bowie, The Baltimore Sun
High school teacher Alison Hanks-Sloan tried every way she could to stop 20 immigrant students from dropping out. She and a group of teachers gave them career counseling, visited their homes, and even brought in business leaders to explain how much more money they could make with a diploma.
Preschool programs face challenge of preparing staff to teach English learners
Sarah Tully, EdSource
About half of the children in the two largest public preschool programs in California – Head Start and the California State Preschool Program – speak a language other than English at home, but there is a good chance they will not be in classrooms with teachers and teacher assistants who are bilingual or trained specifically in instructing English learners.
Schools continue to grapple with ‘Huckleberry Finn’
Justine McDaniel, The Inquirer
After The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was published in 1885, the book was boycotted in some places in the United States for portraying friendship between a black man and a white boy. "In its time, it was derided and censored," said Deborah Caldwell-Stone, deputy director of the American Library Association's Office for Intellectual Freedom, which tracks challenges to books. Today, Mark Twain's classic - about a boy who flees his abusive father and travels down the Mississippi River with an escaped slave - is still sometimes challenged in American schools, but for nearly the opposite reason: its liberal use of the N-word and perceived racist portrayals of black characters.
Access, Assessment, and Advancement
The ‘sobering’ news about America’s rising graduation rates
Emily Richmond and Mikhail Zinshteyn, The Atlantic
The U.S. Department of Education is celebrating a new milestone for the nation’s high-school graduation rate, with just over 82 percent of seniors earning diplomas in 2014. But these statistics, like so many others in the education realm, should come with a warning label: The numbers don’t tell the full story.
Districts must ensure equity in rules for accelerating students in math
John Fensterwald, EdSource
Add this to California school boards’ to-do lists for 2016: Create a clear-cut, objective policy for determining which incoming 9th-grade students qualify to accelerate their sequence of math courses in high school. Districts must have the criteria in place by the start of the next school year under a state law that goes into effect on Jan. 1.
With remarks in affirmative action case, Scalia steps into “mismatch” debate
Anemona Hartocollis, The New York Times
In an awkward exchange in Wednesday’s potentially game-changing Supreme Court arguments on affirmative action, Justice Antonin Scalia hesitantly asked whether it might be better for black students to go to “a slower-track school where they do well” than to go to a highly selective college, like the University of Texas, through some form of racial preference.
To boost admissions of Californians, state should revamp education master plan, report says
Carla Rivera, Los Angeles Times
Many education reformers have long argued that California's seminal Master Plan for Higher Education is no longer suited to the task of producing millions more college graduates from an increasingly diverse pool of high school students.
Inequality, Poverty, Segregation
How poor and disadvantaged students will fare under the new education law
Eric Westervelt, NPR
Now that President Obama has signed the new Every Student Succeeds Act, or ESSA, a big question for many educators is: Will the changes help the populations most in need of better schools: students of color, students with disabilities and low-income students? I spoke with Pedro Noguera, professor of education at the University of California, Los Angeles, and director of the Center for the Study of School Transformation, about how the new legislation will affect underserved students.
Sustaining diverse communities and schools
Amy Stuart Wells, National Education Policy Center
Children’s zip codes are often closely linked to their educational opportunities due to the tight relationship between racially segregated and unequal housing and schools. Yet according to a growing number of scholars, the United States may now have the ideal chance to address this housing-school nexus, as more blacks, Latinos and Asians move to the suburbs and more whites gentrify the cities their parents and grandparents fled decades ago. In Diverse Housing, Diverse Schooling: How Policy Can Stabilize Racial Demographic Change in Cities and Suburbs, Professor Amy Stuart Wells of Columbia University Teachers College provides a review of social science evidence, highlighting the problem of reoccurring racial segregation and inequality absent strong, proactive integration policies.
Flint Michigan tried to save money on water. Now its children have lead poisoning.
Libby Nelson, Vox
The water in Flint, Michigan, poisoned the town's children with lead for months. Now the mayor of Flint has declared a state of emergency, saying that the elevated lead levels will have long-lasting effects in its children.
Public Schools and Private $
The business of charter schooling: Understanding the policies that charter operators use for financial benefit
Bruce D. Baker, Gary Miron, National Education Policy Center
This research brief details some of the prominent ways that individuals, companies, and organizations secure financial gain and generate profit by controlling and running charter schools. To illustrate how charter school policy functions to promote privatization and profiteering, the authors explore differences between charter schools and traditional public schools in relation to three areas: the legal frameworks governing their operation; the funding mechanisms that support them; and the arrangements each makes to finance facilities. They conclude with recommendations for policies that help ensure that charter schools pursue their publicly established goals and that protect the public interest.
A guide to evaluating pay for success programs and social impact bonds
In the Public Interest
There’s no free lunch. Yet across the country, advocates of Pay for Success (PFS), or Social Impact Bonds (SIBs), serve up this alternative private financing model as a cost-free, risk-free silver bullet to support critical, yet underfunded, public services. As local and state governments rush to pass enabling legislation and strike deals with investors, a closer examination of these schemes is warranted.
Rapid response unit aims to counter criticisms of Teach for America
Lyndsey Layton, The Washington Post
A nonprofit group has begun a public relations campaign to defend Teach for America against critics of the program that places newly minted college graduates in teaching jobs in some of the country’s most challenging classrooms. The new campaign, called Corps Knowledge, is an offshoot of the New York Campaign for Achievement Now (NYCAN), a network that supports public charter schools and school choice and wants to weaken teacher tenure laws.
Other News of Note
Just News from Center X will be taking off the winter holiday. Look for our next roundup on January 8, 2016.
Just News from Center X is a free weekly education news blast edited by Jenn Ayscue.
