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July 15, 2016

Teaching, Leading, and Social Justice

 

What kids need to hear about race and violence — but many schools won’t touch

Trakela Small, Valerie Strauss, Answer Sheet

There are plenty of resources available for educators and parents to help them engage young people in conversations about race, racism and police violence. I published such a list this week, which you can find here. But this post is about a mindset in too many schools where the adults don’t want to engage students in discussions about such sensitive issues — even though many educators believe it is as important as anything else kids learn in school. This is a personal story by Trakela Small, an English teacher who has worked at private, public and charter schools for the past six years. She recently became an administrator at a charter school. She says her passion for social justice led into the field of education — and keeps her there. This article, which was originally published on the Educator’s Room blog here

and which I have permission to republish, speaks specifically to the deaths of a number of black men at the hands of white police officers.

 

Teaching about race, racism and police violence: Resources for educators and parents

Valerie Strauss, Answer Sheet

Teaching Tolerance was founded in 1991 as a project of the Southern Poverty Law Center and is dedicated to reducing prejudice and supporting equitable school experiences for all children in America. It provides free educational materials, and its magazine is sent to nearly every school in the country. Teaching Tolerance materials have won two Oscars, an Emmy and dozens of REVERE Awards from the Association of American Publishers. Below is a list of resources that teachers and parents can use to help educate children about race, racism and police violence at a time when the country is reeling from a string of killings of black men at the hands of police in cities across the country, as well as the killing of five white police officers by a black gunman in Dallas. Anyone can access the program’s website here. It is reprinted with permission of Teaching Tolerance.

 

 

Meet the new L.A. Unified student board member

Sonali Kohli, Los Angeles Times

It’s hard to be an effective politician when your vote doesn’t even count. Karen Calderon has a plan for that. The newest Los Angeles Unified School District student board member — elected by other high school student leaders in the district — will have a voice at school board meetings. At 16, she will be able to put items on the agenda up for discussion at meetings, comment and vote. But her vote is just advisory, so it doesn’t factor into decision-making. “That was something that really really concerned me,” Karen said. “We don’t have the resources to truly analyze every single piece that goes before the board.” So she plans to dig into the issues she cares about — financial literacy, access to better drinking water, rigorous graduation standards — before board meetings. To make her voice count, she wants to talk to board members when they're making the decisions. It’s a strategy that Steve Zimmer, the (adult) board president himself, applauds.

 

Language, Culture, and Power

 

How marginalized families are pushed out of PTAs

Casey Quinlan, The Atlantic

When Rolling Terrace Elementary School in Takoma Park, Maryland, told parents in the fall of 2014 that it would allow students to use Chromebooks as a way to bridge the digital divide between low-income families and affluent families, there were mixed reactions. The plan was aimed at helping students become more adept at using technology, but the affluent parents, most of whom were white, were apprehensive about their children getting more screen time.

 

For LGBTQ students, author says, safety is ‘not enough’

Kendra Yoshinaga, NPR

Across the country there are stories like this: In a high-poverty area of Honolulu, a high school social worker helps her Asian-Pacific Islander students talk with their families about being LBGTQ. At a time when LGBTQ concerns in schools are increasingly visible — and often debated — teachers and administrators are looking for new ways to support students.

 

Nation’s largest teacher union adopts policy statement on school discipline and the school-to-prison pipeline, rebalancing the politics of reform

Derek Black, Education Law Prof Blog

Yesterday, the Nation's largest professional employee organization and largest teacher union, the National Education Association (NEA), adopted an official policy position on school discipline and the school-to-prison pipeline.  The prefatory language of the policy appropriately recognizes the major issues. 

Access, Assessment, and Advancement

 
Why does America invest so little in its children?

Lillian Mongeau, The Atlantic

“He was very angry. He was scratching his face, kicking, and screaming,” Carrie Giddings, a preschool teacher, said of one of her students during his first days in her class at Kruse Elementary School in northern Colorado. The boy’s father had been in and out of jail, Giddings said. She thinks the 3-year-old had witnessed abuse at home before he enrolled in preschool at Kruse. His family was poor. For a while, they had lived with relatives, unable to afford their own place.  “Everything that could happen to a kid, he’d had it all,” Giddings said, asking that the child’s name not be used. “He was a year and a half behind.”

 

Summer algebra institute helps prepare students for high school math

Pat Maio, EdSource

Next month, 14-year-old Malachi Compton is heading into 9th grade at Grand Terrace High School in the Colton Joint Unified School District east of Los Angeles. But first, he needs help with math. So he rises at 6:30 a.m. four days a week to attend Summer Algebra Institute classes at the Boys & Girls Club of San Bernardino, where he learns to add and subtract fractions with different denominators and calculate algebraic expressions with exponents.

 

The challenge of equipping California’s Latinos with bachelor’s degrees

Emily DeRuy, The Atlantic

Despite making up a growing proportion of California’s population, Latinos are less likely than whites, Asians, and blacks in the state to have graduated from a four-year college. The rollout of a new program that allows some community colleges to grant bachelor’s degrees has the potential to change that. But a new report from UCLA’s Civil Rights Project cautions that the degree gaps aren’t going to close unless the schools and state lawmakers are willing to acknowledge and deliberately focus on them.

 

Inequality, Poverty, Segregation

 

After a week of violence, an important step toward racial harmony in our schools

Richard Kahlenberg, The Century Foundation

On the heels of a terrible week of racial strife—in which black men were shot and killed by police in Louisiana and Minnesota, and white police officers were gunned down by a sniper in Texas—an important plan

was unveiled this morning to help promote greater racial harmony and social justice for the next generation of Americans. Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT), Representative Marcia Fudge (D-OH), U.S. Secretary of Education John B. King Jr., and American Federation of Teachers (AFT) president Randi Weingarten made a powerful case that in order to provide social cohesion in our democracy, and social mobility in our economy, our nation needs to address rising economic and racial segregation in our schools.

 

Beyond integration: How teachers can encourage cross-racial friendships

Kendra Yoshinaga, NPR

There's a reason Jose Luis Vilson's students learn in groups: He wants them to feel comfortable working with anyone in the classroom, something he's realized in his 11 years of teaching doesn't always come naturally. "I don't really give students a chance to self-select until later on, when I feel like they can pretty much group with anybody," he says. Vilson teaches math at a public middle school just north of Harlem in New York City. Most of his students are Latino and African-American, and Vilson pays close attention to the fact that their racial identities affect their experiences in the classroom.

 

The people taking care of American children live in poverty

Danielle Paquette, Los Angeles Times

The people paid to watch America's children tend to live in poverty. Nearly half receive some kind of government assistance: food stamps, welfare checks, Medicaid. Their median hourly wage is $9.77 — about $3 below the average janitor's. In a new report, researchers at UC Berkeley say that child care is too vital to the country's future to offer such meager wages. Those tasked with supporting kids, they say, are shaping much of tomorrow's workforce.