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November 11, 2016

 

 

Teaching, Leading, and Social Justice

 

Donald Trump elected 45th president of the U.S.

Andrew Ujifusa, Education Week

Republican Donald Trump, whose brash campaign for the White House included strong support for school choice and sharp denunciations of current education policy, has been elected president of the United States, the Associated Press reported early Wednesday. Trump’s victory in the presidential race leaves widespread uncertainty about what’s in store for public schools under the first Republican administration in eight years. Aside from school choice, Trump, a New York-based real estate developer, spent very little time talking about K-12 education during his campaign. And he has no track record to speak of or draw on for insights into what he may propose.

 

Donald Trump and the future of education

Emily Deruy, The Atlantic

I’ll be honest; I’d pre-written a piece on what a Clinton presidency might mean for education. The polls pointed in her direction and she’s been talking about children and schools for years, meaning there was plenty to mull. I’d interviewed a number of both conservative and liberal education wonks who had a general idea of what to expect and a relatively uniform belief that she would work across the aisle. Now, what happens education-wise under Donald Trump’s administration is unclear. What he’s said on the campaign trail about schools and students obviously won’t transfer directly into policy, but his words offer clues. Will Trump shutter the U.S. Education Department entirely, as he’s suggested? That seems highly unlikely, but there’s a very real chance he’ll scale back its scope drastically. Looking at the big picture, with Republicans controlling the White House, Senate, and House of Representatives, more decision-making power is likely to be transferred back to states and local governments. And Trump is likely to push what he’s called a “market-driven” approach to education. That makes civil-rights groups and many Democrats who see the federal government as something of a safety net for vulnerable low-income students and children of color nervous.

 

The only detailed education proposal Donald Trump provided during his campaign would cost states $110 billion

Abby Jackson, Business Insider

Donald Trump was elected 45th President of the United States of America early Wednesday morning, in what is being called one of the most stunning upsets in political history. While education policy was largely a second-tier issue during his campaign, he did unveil one detailed proposal for his education agenda in September, pledging to immediately invest $20 billion in school choice. “There's no failed policy more in need of urgent change than our government run education monopoly,” Trump said at a speech in Cleveland, Ohio. “I want every single inner-city child in America who is today trapped in a failing school to have the freedom, the civil right, to attend the school of their choice.” Trump's plan would reprioritize existing federal dollars to establish a grant to allow children living in poverty to attend whatever school they wanted. Trump argued that the voucher system would not only help impoverished children enroll at quality schools, but a free market would also improve the entire system.

 

Trump’s win leaves Obama’s higher education reforms in doubt

Danielle Douglas-Gabriel, The Washington Post

Donald Trump’s defeat of Hillary Clinton in the election places eight years of higher-education reform under President Obama in doubt, raising questions about the direction of policies governing financial aid and for-profit colleges.

The Obama administration has enacted sweeping changes to the way the federal government provides and collects student loans, kicking banks out of the lending process and expanding a suite of repayment plans tied to income. Those moves rankled Republicans, as did a set of policies pushing tough employment and student-debt-forgiveness rules aimed at for-profit colleges. Now, advocates fear that there is nothing preventing the GOP from overturning those regulations.

 

 

Language, Culture, and Power

 

This is what California's teenagers want[ed] from the next president (10/19/16)

Sonali Kohli, Los Angeles Times

Most teenagers can't vote in this election. But they know what they’d like to say to the next president. L.A. Times High School Insider asked current and recent high school students what issues are important to them, and what they want the next president to know. More than 140 students chimed in, most from Southern California. Many asked for immigration reform so they won’t have to be afraid that they’ll return home from school to find their parents deported. They want college to be affordable so they’re not weighed down by student debt before they get a chance to contribute to their country. They want to know that the president will put aside partisan politics and lead. They also want to protect the marginalized: those who fear being shot by police, those who need safe bathrooms.

 

Voters embrace bilingual education, extend taxes in prop. 58 and 55 victories

Ana Tintocalis, KQED News

California has made a huge about-face when it comes to bilingual education in public schools, approving Proposition 58. The significance of this initiative underscores the changing demographics and cultural shifts in the Golden State. “I’m really elated right now, as a teacher and as a Californian,” said Anne Zerrien-Lee, who teaches first grade at Aldama Elementary, a Spanish-English dual-language school in Highland Park in Los Angeles. “I think this shows that people are realizing the great benefit to our students of learning in two languages.” Eighteen years ago, voters approved Proposition 227, the English in Public Schools initiative, which required schools to teach all students in “English only” unless parents obtained a waiver for their child. Proposition 58 will repeal key provisions of Proposition 227, thereby eliminating the English-only mandate.

 

 

 

Whole Children and Strong Communities

New campaign promotes power of teachers to reduce stress of traumatized students

Jane Meredith Adams, EdSource

Most of the 3rd-graders in Anita Parameswaran’s class at Daniel Webster Elementary in San Francisco have had experiences so awful that their brains won’t let them easily forget. “Whether it be that they’ve been sexually molested, or they’ve seen domestic violence, or shootings, or they know somebody who’s passed away,” Parameswaran said, “I would say every single year about 75 percent, give or take, come in with a lot of trauma.” Now a national campaign is recognizing, backed by research on brain development, the power of teachers like Parameswaran to lower the levels of stress hormones in a child’s body and strengthen the neural connections needed for learning and self-control. The campaign, called Changing Minds and launched last month, is a partnership of the U.S. Department of Justice, the nonprofit group Futures Without Violence and the Ad Council, a nonprofit agency that creates public service advertisements.

 

Black frames rule at annual eye clinic for kids

Christine Huard, The San Diego Union-Tribune

More than 1,500 students from every school district in South County received comprehensive eye exams and picked out a new pair of glasses last week. Whether because of a lack of access or the cost, some of the children had never had their vision tested. And for others, it had been years since they last had their eyes looked at by an optometrist. As they excitedly waited in line, many had only one thing on their minds. “Do they have black frames?” 10-year-old Nicolas Mendez asked. “I want black frames that say ‘Raiders’ on the side.” Two of his classmates from Ira Harbison Elementary School in National City wanted the same. And from the look of the dwindling number of color choices available last Thursday morning at the annual OneSight San Diego clinic, so did a lot of other kids. “They all want black,” volunteer Brigette Messbarger said. “And all the kids want big glasses this year.” OneSight is a nonprofit organization with a mission that reaches around the world. It’s aim is to unlock each person’s full potential through clear sight. The National City Host Lions Club has partnered with the organization for 11 years now to provide eye clinics each November at Camacho Gym in Las Palmas Park.

 

Out of options, this school got UBER to pick up its students

Lydia Emmanouilidou, NPR

When Patricia Gentile was settling in as the new president of North Shore Community College in Massachusetts — about twenty miles north of Boston — she remembers looking out her window and seeing something strange. “All of these cars rolling up, and tons of folks getting in and out,” Gentile says, thinking about that January day a couple years ago. “So I asked my assistant, ‘What's going on down there?’” Turns out that's where students were picked up and dropped off, but Gentile wondered why there were just so many cars. “And that's how I found out that this campus was not accommodated by public transportation.” The closest option? A bus stop at a mall about four miles away. Once you arrive there, though, getting the rest of the way is up to you.

 

 

Access, Assessment, and Advancement

 

California leaders join GOP critics of draft federal school funding rules

John Fensterwald, EdSource

The state’s top education officials have issued new objections to how federal officials plan to enforce the Every Student Succeeds Act, or ESSA, the new law replacing the No Child Left Behind Act. In a letter released Monday, State Board of Education President Michael Kirst and Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Torlakson accused the U.S. Department of Education of overstepping its authority to ensure that federal dollars for low-income students will create more overall funding at schools those students attend. They note that California’s education funding system, the Local Control Funding Formula, redistributes a significant amount of money to low-income students and English learners. But, they said, the U.S. Department of Education is proposing to micromanage how districts would use state and federal money and interfere with local decision making in ways that would exceed Congress’ intent.

 

New report cards in SF: A-F grades get an O for obsolete

Jill Tucker, San Francisco Chronicle

Report cards used to be simple — small cards with gold stars or check marks or letter grades to tell parents how their children were doing in math, reading, writing, social studies and maybe penmanship. Not anymore. Across the country, school districts are adopting comprehensive, multipage report cards that detail dozens of skills students should learn — and how close they are to learning them — rather than focusing solely on past performance on projects, tests or homework. The movement to make report cards more dynamic underlines the enduring power of these essential, emotionally laden documents of childhood. San Francisco elementary schools will roll out the newest incarnation of these standards-based report cards this month, with each elementary-school student across the district receiving about 50 grades on specific skills they should have by the end of the school year.

 

A few hundred dollars in aid can make all the difference to some college students

Danielle Douglas-Gabriel, The Washington Post

Some of the brightest students on the path to graduation are more likely to drop out of college if they lose even small amounts of financial aid, according to a study released Tuesday by EAB, an education consulting firm. Researchers analyzed more than 40,000 students and found that those with grade-point averages above 3.0 who lost $1,000 to $1,500 in grant money are 2.5 percentage points more likely to quit school than those with little or no change in aid. All students who have a GPA between 2.0 and 4.0 are more at risk of leaving school when they lose financial aid. And the more money students lose, the greater their chance of quitting school.

 

 

Inequality, Poverty, Segregation

 

Crossing the border for school

Emily Deruy, The Atlantic

Born in the United States, Mayra Kahori Vidaña Sanchez spent most of her childhood in Juárez, Mexico. When she was around 12, Vidaña Sanchez moved a few miles north of the border to El Paso, Texas, for school. Although technically a U.S. citizen, she spoke little English and carried a pocket dictionary to class. She spent hours listening to pop music and watching American television, trying to absorb not only a language but a culture that felt undeniably unfamiliar.

Despite her efforts, a few kids at school made fun of Vidaña Sanchez and her brother for their accents and supposed foreignness. Yet once, during elementary school back in Mexico, she’d had to give back a scholarship after the mother of a classmate complained that it shouldn’t have gone to a kid born in the United States. Not quite Mexican, not quite American.

 

Reading, writing, and concentrated poverty

Marc Tucker, Education Week

Let's try a thought experiment. Imagine that you are the new superintendent of schools in a city school district in which the majority of students live in concentrated poverty. You conceive of your job as getting your students ready for some sort of college or a career that begins right after they graduate from high school. You know they don't stand a chance if they cannot read and write well enough to survive the first year of a typical community college program. You've learned that the typical first-year community college text is set at a 12^th-grade level of literacy. So you set a simple goal for your district: making sure that your graduates can read a text written at a 12^th-grade level and can write simple paragraphs that have a beginning, a middle and an end and present a set of thoughts in a reasonably logical order. That should not be so hard. After all, 12^th

-grade literacy is high school literacy. Writing simple declarative sentences that describe something or make a straightforward argument in a logical order is not that hard. Then you face reality. It feels like a brick wall. 

 

 

 

Public Schools and Private $

 

Mass. charters, Ga. school takeovers: Voters decide four education ballot questions

Emma Brown, The Washington Post

Though the presidential race cliffhanger was taking up most of the political oxygen Tuesday night, there were also important education policy developments in the states. Here’s how four high-profile ballot initiatives fared.

 

Teachers at four L.A. campuses want no part of funding from pro-charter school group

Howard Blume, Los Angeles Times

Teachers at four Los Angeles campuses overwhelmingly voted this week to oppose a program that could provide extra resources because the money would come from a pro-charter school organization. The school district said Friday that it has withdrawn grant applications for two of the schools. Faculties voted at Drew Middle School and Gompers Middle School in South Los Angeles and Pacoima Middle School and San Fernando High School in the northeast San Fernando Valley. The potential funding being rejected would come from from Great Public Schools Now, a nonprofit formed to replicate successful schools across low-income Los Angeles neighborhoods in which the neighborhood campuses have low test scores.

 

Outsized influence: Online charters bring lobbying 'A' game to states

Arianna Prothero, Education Week

For five years in a row, the Hoosier Academies Virtual School had been failing. The school, where students take all of their classes online while at home, had been assigned an "F" grade from the state of Indiana every year it had been open except its first, when it had garnered a "C." That troubled track record had finally made the virtual school of nearly 4,000 students a candidate for state regulators' chopping block. In September, Hoosier Academies representatives appeared before the Indiana board of education to make their case for giving the school another chance. There, they revealed their strategy: the creation of a second virtual school—one to which they had siphoned students who were most behind. Those students, they argued, would get more support and specialized services.

 

 

Other News of Note

 

#Education #Equity #Empowerment 

Eliza Byard, Twitter, 2016
This is how the future voted. This is what people 18-25 said in casting their votes. We must keep this flame alight and nurture this vision. https://twitter.com/EByard/status/796317753749729280

 

 

 

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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