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July 22, 2016

Teaching, Leading, and Social Justice

 

What did Mike Pence do for Indiana schools as governor? Here’s a look

Eric Weddle and Claire McInerny, NPR
Tonight is the night Indiana Gov. Mike Pence will take the stage in Cleveland at the 2016 Republican National Convention. He is now, officially, the vice-presidential running mate of Republican nominee Donald Trump. But before that happens, we want to take a dive into Pence's education policies in the nearly four years he's been the governor of Indiana. Just how much does he have in common with Donald Trump when it comes to schools and education? Definitely not nothing. Let's take a look.
 

Why are third-graders afraid of Donald Trump?

Emily Richmond, The Atlantic
Although he’s almost a decade shy of the voting age, Micah St. George has a message he’s anxious to deliver to the Republican National Committee: Please don’t nominate Donald Trump for president. A soon-to-be fourth grader in Newton, Massachusetts, Micah is the co-founder of Kids Against Trump, a group that started with a paper petition passed around the playground at Angier Elementary, a K-6 school in a bucolic suburb just west of Boston. The idea for the petition started in February after some of Trump’s speeches. The candidate’s words troubled Micah on two levels. First of all, there were Trump’s disparaging comments about women, Muslims, and immigrants. Micah was adopted from Guatemala as an infant, and he has two moms. So it felt to Micah like Trump was attacking his family and friends.
 

Nearly 1 in 4 students at this L.A. high school migrated from Central America — many without their parents

Cindy Carcamo, Los Angeles Times
Gaspar Marcos stepped off the 720 bus into early-morning darkness in MacArthur Park after the end of an eight-hour shift of scrubbing dishes in a Westwood restaurant. He walked toward his apartment, past laundromats fortified with iron bars and scrawled with graffiti, shuttered stores that sold knockoffs and a cook staffing a taco cart in eerie desolation. Around 3 a.m., he collapsed into a twin bed in a room he rents from a family. Five hours later, he slid into his desk at Belmont High School, just before the bell rang. The 18-year-old sophomore rubbed his eyes and fixed his gaze on an algebra equation. Minutes ticked by, and others straggled into the class, nine in all. Like Marcos, most had worked a full shift the night before — sewing clothes, cooking in restaurants, painting homes. Most were immigrants from Central America, part of several waves of more than 100,000 who arrived as children in the U.S. in the past five years without parents, often after perilous journeys.
 

Should students learn about Black Lives Matter in school?

Hayley Glatter, The Atlantic
If the Chicago social-studies teacher Gregory Michie waits for a textbook to teach his students about the Black Lives Matter movement, the first seventh-graders to hear the lesson won’t be born for another seven years.
 
 

Language, Culture, and Power

 

California school officials adopt landmark LGBT coursework

Jill Tucker, SF Gate
State officials on Thursday added the evolution of gay rights and the contributions of lesbian and gay figures in history to the list of topics that public-school students will be taught in California, a landmark move that puts the ongoing LGBT civil rights fight into the mainstream of public education.
 

After hours of testimony, state board adopts history guidelines

John Fensterwald, EdSource
After listening to five hours of charged disagreements by Hindus, Muslims and others on how their religions and culture should be depicted in California classrooms, the State Board of Education adopted new social science guidelines Thursday that will stress teaching critical thinking and objective inquiry so that students can determine historical truths for themselves.
 

The long-term effects of social-justice education on black students

Melinda D. Anderson, The Atlantic
Last summer, the high-school English teacher T.J. Whitaker revised the reading list for his contemporary literature course with the addition of a new title—The Savage City, a gritty nonfiction account of race and murder in New York City in the 1960s. The 24-year teaching veteran said he chose the book to give his students at Columbia High School in Maplewood, New Jersey, a chance to read “an honest depiction of the Black Panther Party and the corruption that existed in the NYPD during the ‘60s.” In a school where black students are half of the student body—and a photo of two white peers in blackface caused an uproar in May—Whitaker’s classroom is a space for students to examine issues such as oppression, classism, and abuse of power. And it’s yielding results.  
 
 

Access, Assessment, and Advancement

 

Head Start and Mississippi’s black freedom struggle: An interview with Crystal R. Sanders

Keisha N. Blain, African American Intellectual History Society; Crystal R. Sanders, Pennsylvania State University
While searching for speeches in the Congressional Record related to the Howard protest, I stumbled upon a 1966 speech given by United States Senator John C. Stennis (D-MS). Senator Stennis took to the Senate floor to oppose the Child Development Group of Mississippi (CDGM), a statewide Head Start program that he maintained was a front for communism and black militancy.  His sensational language piqued my curiosity so I began looking for more information about CDGM.  I asked myself “What could be so radical and subversive about a program for preschoolers?” The more digging I did on CDGM’s program, the more obvious it became to me that black education at all levels—including early childhood education—is political and contested. I was struck by how black women throughout the Magnolia State mobilized to bring preschool programs to their children in the same ways that black men and women had nickeled and dimed elementary and secondary schools into existence decades earlier.  Also of interest was the fact that many of the individuals connected to CDGM had played integral roles in the state’s freedom struggle.  Head Start simply became their next battleground in a much longer war waged for full freedom.

 
Here’s an idea: Change the federal definition of student achievement

Anya Kamenetz, NPR
Morgan Polikoff has a modest proposal. The associate professor at the University of Southern California's Rossier School of Education has been looking over the new federal education law. He thinks the Department of Education should abandon what has been the central principle of school accountability for the last decade and a half. He has submitted a public letter during the feds' open comment period for rulemaking and asked other researchers and education figures to sign on. So far, dozens have joined him. What Polikoff wants the government to ditch is a reliance on the "proficiency rate."
 

Bus tours take high school students to colleges – and maybe their futures

Larry Gordon, EdSource
At 9 a.m., the first group of teenagers boarded a yellow school bus at the Boys & Girls Clubs of the Los Angeles Harbor in San Pedro, close to the West Coast’s largest port. After two more stops to pick up others, it headed north on the crowded freeway to Santa Barbara, 125 miles up the coast – and to a glimpse of their possible futures. Thirty-six students, most from lower-income and immigrant families, then spent the day touring two campuses – UC Santa Barbara and Santa Barbara City College. Almost 12 hours later, the bus was back where it started, but many of the students were not – their eyes had been opened to expanded opportunities.
 

Incoming community college chief wants to increase full-time enrollments and graduation rates

Larry Gordon, EdSource
Overhauling financial aid policies to encourage more community college students to enroll full-time. Working more closely with K-12 schools and the state’s four-year public universities. Getting more high school students to take community college courses. Helping more students from low-income and minority communities to get workforce training or associate degrees. Those are some of the goals that Eloy Ortiz Oakley said he wants to pursue when he becomes the next chancellor of California’s community college system in December. Oakley, who has headed the Long Beach community college district since 2007, was hired on Monday to become statewide chancellor and will oversee the 113 colleges that enroll 2.1 million part-time and full-time students. 
 
 

Inequality, Poverty, Segregation

 

‘Islands’ that separate education haves from have-nots

Anya Kamenetz, NPR
The school district of Freehold Borough, N.J., has a 32 percent poverty rate. It is fully surrounded by another school district, Freehold Township, which has a 5 percent poverty rate. Freehold Borough is what a new report calls an "island district" — and it's not alone. The report, from a nonprofit called EdBuild, maps 180 of these islands around the country: Districts that, by historical accident or for political reasons, lie completely inside other systems with a disparate poverty rate and often different funding levels.
 

Where books are all but nonexistent

Alia Wong, The Atlantic
Forty-five million. That’s how many words a typical child in a white-collar family will hear before age 4. The number is striking, not because it’s a lot of words for such a small human—the vast majority of a person’s neural connections, after all, are formed by age 3—but because of how it stacks up against a poor kid’s exposure to vocabulary. By the time she’s 4, a child on welfare might only have heard 13 million words.
 

As America’s students grow more diverse, a leading researcher explains how schools can adapt

Patrick Wall, Chalkbeat
Ready or not, America is watching its student population grow more diverse. For the first time in the nation’s history, the overall student population is now less than half white. And while many schools remain deeply segregated, others are growing more mixed as Asian, black, and Hispanic families move to the suburbs and whites settle in gentrifying urban neighborhoods. But there is a difference between diverse schools and ones that are integrated, says Amy Stuart Wells, a Teachers College professor who has long studied race and education. History has shown that seating students of different colors side by side isn’t enough — real integration requires schools to adopt inclusive curriculums, teachers to reflect on their own biases, and students to learn how to interact across race and class lines, she says.
 
 

Public Schools and Private $

 

How charter schools in Michigan have hurt traditional public schools, new research finds

Valerie Strauss, Answer Sheet
How do some charter schools affect the traditional school districts in which they are located? Disastrously in some cases, as a new study about Michigan schools shows. The study, “Which Districts Get Into Financial Trouble and Why: Michigan’s Story,” finds that among Michigan districts, “80 percent of the explained variation in district fiscal stress is due to changes in districts’ state funding, to enrollment changes including those associated with school choice policies, and to the enrollment of high-cost special education students.” A working paper was released last November and the study will be published in the fall edition of the Journal of Education Finance. In the following post, Jennifer Berkshire, author of the EduShyster website, interviews the lead author of the study, David Arsen, a professor in the Department of Educational Administration College of Education at Michigan State University about the research and its implications for charter school expansion in other places. He notes in the interview that “overwhelmingly, the biggest financial impact on school districts was the result of declining enrollment and revenue loss, especially where school choice and charters are most prevalent.”
 

Charter school and union unite on wanting L.A. Unified to pay retiree benefits for charter teachers

Howard Blume, Los Angeles Times
The local teachers union has made rare common cause with a charter school: They are pressing to have the Los Angeles school district — not the charter — pay for costly retiree benefits that are due to teachers who worked at the charter.
 

Why the movement to privatize public education is a very bad idea

Valerie Strauss, Answer Sheet
Samuel E. Abrams is the director of the National Center for the Study of Privatization in Education at Teachers College, Columbia University. He has written a new book, “Education and the Commercial Mindset,” that details how and why market forces have come to rise in public education and become important in corporate school reform.

Other News of Note

 
How four teenage girls organized this week’s huge silent protest

Bettina Chang, Chicago Magazine
Eva Lewis is someone you should know. She and three other black teenage girls were the driving force behind Monday’s massive sit-in protest in Millennium Park and subsequent march to protest gun violence and police brutality in Chicago. The event to “break the divide between communities, and bring youth from all areas of Chicago in solidarity with Black Lives Matter,” drew more than 1,000 people and the attention of local and national media—not bad for a group of 16- and 17-year-olds who organized the whole thing on social media. The silent sit-in was followed by poetry and other performances, and the group gained steam as it left the park and closed down the streets, marching toward Federal Plaza to meet up with another, unaffiliated group of protesters.
   

 

Just News from Center X is a free weekly education news blast edited by Jenn Ayscue.

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