August 26, 2016
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August 26, 2016
Teaching, Leading, and Social Justice
California high court lets rulings stand on teacher tenure, school funding lawsuits
John Fensterwald, EdSource
In a pair of split decisions with lengthy dissents, the California Supreme Court Monday voted 4-3 to decline hearing appeals of lawsuits that challenged teacher protection laws and the state’s level of funding for K-12 education. The decision in Vergara v. California gives a big victory to the state’s teachers unions — the California Teachers Association and the California Federation of Teachers — which sought to preserve the existing tenure, layoff and dismissal laws. It spelled defeat for Students Matter, a small nonprofit organization that sponsored the lawsuit and argued that the laws harmed poor and minority students who were disproportionately saddled with 1 to 3 percent of the state’s worst-performing teachers. The decision in the other case, Campaign for Quality Education v. California and Robles-Wong v. California, two lawsuits that were combined, upholds lower court rulings that found no constitutional basis for challenging the Legislature’s authority to determine what it considers sufficient school funding.
Bloomberg law brief: CA high court upholds tenure law
June Grasso, Bloomberg Law; Guests: Mark Paige, University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth, Kevin Welner, University of Colorado at Boulder
Mark Paige, a professor at the University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth, and Kevin Welner, a professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder, discuss a California Supreme Court decision, which has upheld the state’s controversial teacher tenure law. On Monday, the high court said that it would not take up a lawsuit by a group of students, who claimed that the tenure laws made it impossible to fire incompetent teachers and hurt students in poorer neighborhoods.
Teacher diversity gap not easily closed, report warns
Madeline Will, Education Week
The path toward reaching a diverse teacher workforce is much steeper than has been previously acknowledged, a new report published by the Brookings Institution concludes. Students of color make up about half of all public school students, yet just 18 percent of teachers are of color. Efforts to increase the diversity of the teaching profession have been heralded by the U.S. Department of Education and taken up by school districts across the country. But researchers and analysts from the Brown Center on Education Policy and the National Council on Teacher Quality found that the chances of significant progress in this realm are realistically very slim, even looking forward nearly 50 years.
Why white students need black teachers—by a white teacher
Valerie Strauss, Ashley Lamb-Sinclair, Answer Sheet
One of the key arguments often given for why it is important to increase the diverse of America’s teaching force is that students of color do better academically when they have teachers of color. A 2010 student titled “Diversifying the Teaching Force: An Examination of Major Arguments” found that “teachers of color use their insider knowledge about the language, culture, and life experiences of students of color to improve their academic outcomes and school experiences.” In this post, a white teacher explains why it is also important for white students to be taught by people of color. She is Ashley Lamb-Sinclair, the 2016 Kentucky Teacher of the Year.
Language, Culture, and Power
We must talk openly about real reasons for racial disparities
Judge Steven Teske, Juvenile Justice Information Exchange
Let’s talk about race. The mention of race stirs emotions that are usually not expressed for fear of the response. For many years, this chilling effect created the mirage that race relations were not so bad. We mask the problems that have been festering for years in order to keep interactions between people of different races peaceful. Many white people suppress comments about race for fear of the response, especially in racially mixed settings. That began after the passage of the civil rights laws of the ’50s and ’60s, leading to a congenial demeanor toward our fellow citizens of color. This creates the impression — for white people, at least — that race relations are improving. Black people, however, have not been fooled.
Corporal punishment use found in schools in 21 states
Sarah D. Sparks & Alex Harwin, Education Week
Corporal punishment has declined so rapidly in the United States in the last 15 years that many people think it's practically nonexistent in modern American public schools. To the contrary, more than 109,000 students were paddled, swatted, or otherwise physically punished in U.S. classrooms in 2013-14, according to Education Week Research Center analyses of the most recent wave of federal civil rights data.
Without local school boards, parents in poor communities lose their vote
Lily Altavena, Rose Velazquez, and Natalie Griffin, The Hechinger Report
In at least 20 states, lawmakers have stripped locally elected school board members of their power in impoverished, mostly minority communities, leaving parents without a voice – or a vote – in their children’s education, according to a News21 state-by-state analysis of school takeovers.
Access, Assessment, and Advancement
Thousands of new preschool seats open at LAUSD schools
Deepa Fernandes, KPCC
When the Los Angeles Unified School District opened its doors for the new school year last week, the number of 4-year-olds who began class in the district's newest grade was more than double the number who enrolled last year.
Higher test scores, yes, but no narrowing of achievement gaps in California
John Fensterwald, EdSource
Smarter Balanced test scores for all California student subgroups nudged upward this year, in tandem with average statewide gains in math and English language arts. But parallel progress won’t narrow the wide disparities in achievement between low-income and Hispanic students and their white, Asian and wealthier classmates. And for African-American students and for English learners, the achievement gap slightly widened, according to results that the Department of Education released on Wednesday.
Poll: Rising share of Americans like their local schools ... but there's a catch
Andrew Ujifusa, Education Week
Are you a fan of your local public school? Then you've got some company—in fact, you might have more company than at any other time in recent history. That's one main conclusion from results of a public-opinion poll released by Education Next, a K-12 policy journal, on Tuesday. The poll, which has been conducted since 2007, found that a higher share of respondents would give their local schools an A or B grade (55 percent) than in any other previous survey conducted by the group. Views of public schools have improved across several demographic groups broken out by Education Next since 2007, but whites' views of their local schools remain markedly better than those of blacks and Hispanics.
Inequality, Poverty, Segregation
Youth voice in school finance
Veronica Terriquez, John Rogers, and May Lin, UCLA IDEA and USC PERE
Youth Voice in School Finance: The Building Healthy Communities Initiative and Young People’s Involvement in Shaping Local Control Accountability Plansdraws on a survey of staff from youth development and youth organizing groups across California to highlight new ways that high school age youth are shaping school district decision-making.
Why school funding will always be imperfect
Nadra Kareem Nittle, The Atlantic
In 2013, California passed an unusual law that aimed to revolutionize how school districts receive state funding. The Local Control Funding Formula, or LCFF, gives school districts the autonomy to decide which programs and services to spend state funding on. And it’s far more than another boring funding provision: Its primary goal was to ensure equity by devising a complex recipe of budgeting mechanisms, in part by giving additional money to districts based on their numbers of high-needs students—English learners, low-income children, and foster youth. The law’s passage marked the first time in four decades that California underwent such a dramatic shift in school finance.
Where are America's most economically segregated schools?
Rowena Lindsay, The Christian Science Monitor
School systems in Detroit and its neighbor, Grosse Pointe, Mich., are the most economically disparate adjacent school districts in the country, according to a new report from EdBuild, an educational funding reform nonprofit. Looking at every school district in the country, compared with the other districts it borders, "Fault Lines: America's Most Segregating School District Borders," shows that while 49.2 percent of Detroit's school-age residents live in poverty, only 6.5 percent of their peers in neighboring Grosse Pointe live below the poverty line. The problem goes beyond segregation itself: given American schools' reliance on local property taxes for funding, such disparate incomes are reflected in disparate opportunities for children in nearby districts.
Public Schools and Private $
Regulating charter schools
William J. Mathis, National Education Policy Center
A fundamental premise of charter schools is that deregulation will free teachers, principals and schools to excel. Regulation or accountability in the conventional sense can cause gridlock and inefficiencies, so charter schools were designed to free up schools for innovation. Instead of conventional regulatory accountability, charters would be accountable through competition and the market model. While there is certainly merit to these arguments—that bureaucratic regulation can be nonsensical and burdensome, and that deregulation can allow beneficial innovation—the picture is not so black-and-white. Regulations arise because taxpayers are understandably wary of abusive and incompetent uses of public funds, particularly in areas such as public schooling that play such a central role in our democracy. In a brief released today, Regulating Charter Schools,William Mathis examines these tensions and the need for balance. “There is no perfect amount of regulation or deregulation, but we need to be regularly reassessing the situation and responding to clear problems,” explains Dr. Mathis.
L.A. Unified targets well-known charter school for possible revocation
Howard Blume, Los Angeles Times
The well-regarded El Camino Real Charter High School faces a possible shutdown following an investigation by the Los Angeles Unified School District. Issues cited by the school system in a letter to the school this week include possible inappropriate spending, poor accounting and oversight, and violations of public-meeting rules.
As enrollment declines, L.A. public schools borrow a tactic from the charters: marketing
Anna M. Phillips, Los Angeles Times
First a delivery truck plastered with pictures of smiling children started making the rounds of the northeast San Fernando Valley last spring. Then came a billboard on Van Nuys Boulevard for the same 90-year-old product: a Los Angeles public school. “I saw the ad. Are you enrolling new students?” parents asked Richard Ramos, a principal in his third year at Haddon Avenue STEAM Academy in Pacoima. His answer was an enthusiastic yes. As enrollment in traditional public schools around the city has declined and charter schools have mushroomed, Ramos and other principals are having to compete for students or risk school closure. To do this, they are turning to marketing tactics long employed by charter schools: handing out glossy fliers and creating Facebook pages to promote their after-school activities. The time and attention they are pouring into recruitment is fundamentally changing the nature of their jobs.
Other News of Note
Teen artist and activist Berneisha Hooker stands for Black rights
Black Matters
The fight for justice is not a fight for only ‘grown-ups’, and this is proven greatly by Miss Berneisha Hooker. As a high school student in a mostly Black school, Berneisha began advocating for Black rights. Her first major work was in organizing the painting of various big Black and Hispanic historical names on the walls inside the school. She did this in order to make students remember that as Black people, we can all be responsible for the change we want to see. Her play, the Evolution of Race, also talks about social issues related to Black people wanting to acquire an education.
Just News from Center X is a free weekly education news blast edited by Jenn Ayscue.
