October 7, 2016
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October 7, 2016
Teaching, Leading, and Social Justice
Teacher stress and health: Effects on teachers, students, and schools
Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and Penn State University
Teachers play a critical role in shaping the lives of our nation’s children. Teachers not only facilitate learning, but also influence a child’s social and emotional development. Today, teaching is one of the most stressful occupations in the U.S. High levels of stress are affecting teacher health and well-being, causing teacher burnout, lack of engagement, job dissatisfaction, poor performance, and some of the highest turnover rates ever. Stress not only has negative consequences for teachers, it also results in lower achievement for students and higher costs for schools. A New York City study showed higher teacher turnover led to lower fourth and fifth grade student achievement in both math and language arts. The cost of teacher turnover is estimated to be over $7 billion per year.
California's largest school districts use aggressive tactics to find teachers
Fermin Leal and Pat Maio, EdSource
Against the backdrop of a widely reported teacher shortage, most of California’s 25 largest school districts were able to fill nearly all their job openings for fully credentialed teachers by the time school started this year, according to an EdSource survey. Eight of the state’s largest districts reported having no unfilled openings. That included the state’s three largest — Los Angeles Unified, San Diego Unified and Long Beach Unified. Only five said they had 30 or more openings for fully credentialed teachers by the time the school year started.
Reclaiming agency: Justice-oriented social studies teachers respond to changing curricular standards
Alison G. Dover, Nick Henning, and Ruchi Agarwal-Rangnath, Teaching and Teacher Education
Emphases on high-stakes testing and accountability can undermine teachers' ability to use their professional expertise to respond to the localized needs of their students. For justice-oriented teachers, they also create ideological conflicts, as teachers are forced to navigate increasingly prescriptive curricular mandates. In this article, we examine how justice-oriented veteran social studies teachers in the United States use their disciplinary expertise and professional agency to respond strategically to the influence of the Common Core State Standards on their discipline. We conclude by discussing the implications for preparing candidates to teach for social justice in accountability-driven contexts.
Language, Culture, and Power
Ivy League professor: ‘I would much rather my own children interact with drugs than with the police’
Carl L. Hart, The Washington Post
For the past few years, like academic semesters, the killing of black people by the police has been on a regular schedule. The explanation script, always controlled by the police, is familiar and tired. The deceased person’s reputation is dragged through the mud. He had a gun or she was under the influence of some drug; therefore, deadly force was necessary. Video footage almost always contradicts this official account. But it doesn’t seem to matter because the police are rarely held accountable in such cases. As a result, there is community outrage that sometimes reaches the level of unrest. Authorities call for calm and peace — rather than justice — and then we are forced to have the same national conversation about race and diversity that we have had for more than 50 years. The only thing that changes is the names of the pundits paraded before the public. As a professor, a black professor, I often think about the impact that this has on my students, especially the black students. What messages does it send to them?
The unintended consequences of taking a hard line on school discipline
Clyde Haberman, The New York Times
It did not take long for school safety agents in New York to find their first gun of the new school year. Day 1 had barely begun at a Brooklyn high school last month when the officers stopped a 15-year-old student who had stowed a loaded .22-caliber pistol in his backpack and thought he could pass it through a metal scanner. In short order, the boy was led away by the police. Also in short order, the city’s Department of Education issued a statement invoking a two-word phrase that has virtually been holy writ in classrooms around the country for the past quarter of a century: “There is zero tolerance for weapons of any kind in schools.” It is hard to imagine many law-abiding citizens disagreeing that the acceptance level for students carrying guns, knives, drugs or other harmful items should be nonexistent. But the concept of zero tolerance has come to encompass such a broad range of disruptive actions that roughly three million schoolchildren are suspended each year, and several hundred thousand are arrested or given criminal citations.
STEM women band together to overcome underrepresentation
Casey Leins, U.S. News
When 32-year-old Amy Orsborn was studying engineering physics as an undergraduate at Case Western Reserve University, she didn't even realize she was the only female in her class – until a male peer pointed it out, that is. Once she realized her classmate was right, she began to doubt her academic abilities, even as she went on to earn a Ph.D. in bioengineering at the University of California—Berkeley. "I think that basically once I realized that I was one of the only women, it really dovetailed with when classes started getting really hard," Orsborn says."So rather than just thinking 'this is a hard class,' I really started feeling like 'maybe I'm not cut out for this,' 'maybe there's a reason there are no women,' and it was really tough."
Whole Children and Strong Communities
Gender-neutral bathrooms, high-quality ethnic studies class and other changes coming to California schools
Howard Blume, Los Angeles Times
Anyone looking for confirmation of the nation’s cultural divide can add education and gender-neutral bathrooms to the list of proof points. North Carolina sparked a national furor by requiring transgender people to use bathrooms corresponding to the gender on their birth certificates, citing risks to children in schools as a primary justification. California has been shifting the other way with little fanfare.
Free Wi-Fi: San Jose, East Side schools to bring internet to neighborhoods
Sharon Noguchi, The Mercury News
At least two Saturdays each month, a few hundred students crowd into Overfelt High School’s library and classrooms to research papers, catch up on homework and collaborate on projects.
It’s not that the students love spending weekends at school. Some are getting extra credit or making up work, but many are drawn by the school’s internet access — something that an estimated 400 students, nearly a third of Overfelt’s student body, don’t have at home. Soon, that problem could disappear. In one of the nation’s first efforts at creating a school-district-wide network that reaches into students’ homes, the East Side Union High School District and city of San Jose are teaming up to provide free wireless internet access in some of the city’s poorest neighborhoods.
Access, Assessment, and Advancement
Beyond test scores: The right way to assess students and schools
Valerie Strauss, The Washington Post; Monty Neill, FairTest
The way we measure students’ academic progress sends powerful messages about what kinds of learning we value. When measurement systems are used to evaluate schools, the factors they emphasize can control classroom practices, for good or ill. The test-and-punish approach embodied in the federal No Child Left Behind (NCLB) law undermined educational quality for many. It inhibited school improvement. It delivered a message that deep learning and supportive, healthy school environments do not matter. The damage has been most severe in the most under-resourced communities. There, the fixation on boosting test scores not only harmed teaching and learning, it also led to mass firings and school closings. The deteriorating educational climates fed the school-to-prison pipeline.State officials push alternative ways to report test scores
John Fensterwald, EdSource
Top education leaders in California are dissatisfied with how the federal government requires calculating school performance using standardized test scores. But they say the California Department of Education lacks the time and money to do analyses that may better measure achievement of low-performing subgroups. Students in California and 15 other states who take the Smarter Balanced assessments in math and in English receive a score on a scale between 2,000 and 3,000. The issue is how to interpret that score, and whether the states should focus on how students improve from year to year, not just whether they meet a set proficiency standard.
A social-justice agenda for community college
Emily Deruy, The Atlantic
Eloy Oakley isn’t shy about his plans to be much more “proactive” than previous chancellors when he takes over California’s mammoth community-college system in December. “We’re going to take on a much more aggressive agenda with a clear lens on social justice and equity,” Oakley, who is in his final weeks as head of the Long Beach Community College District, told me during an interview at his office on the Long Beach City College campus. Oakley, who is himself a product of the system and a first-generation college student who grew up in a family where higher education was not the expectation, is under no illusion that California’s community colleges alone can close the racial and socioeconomic educational attainment gaps that plague the state. But Oakley, who will be the first Latino to hold the position, wants California’s 113 community colleges to see eliminating the inequity and opportunity disparities that create those divides as part of their shared responsibility.
Inequality, Poverty, Segregation
Tupac on inequality
Josh Hoxie, Inequality.org
“There’s no way these people should own planes and there’s people who don’t have houses or apartments.” Who said it? Reading this today, you might think the words came from presidential candidate Bernie Sanders who has made rising inequality the major focus of his campaign. However, the words come from a recently unearthed video of deceased hip-hop artist Tupac Shakur being interviewed on MTV News in 1992.The case for a right to education
Thor Benson, AlterNet
This month, a unique lawsuit was filed in Michigan against Gov. Rick Snyder and numerous state education officials, claiming that students in Detroit are being denied their constitutional right to literacy. The 133-page complaint, filed by the pro-bono Los Angeles-based firm Public Counsel, is attempting to gain class action status. The lawsuit highlights poor conditions in Michigan schools, like classrooms so hot teachers and students literally vomit, vermin in schools, outdated and limited books, an overall lack of teachers, and much more. Detroit's school districts have some of the lowest performing schools in the country.
Why parents are being forced to find childcare underground
Alieza Durana, The Atlantic
The front door of Nora Nivia Nevarez’s adobe-like house in suburban Albuquerque, New Mexico, opens to blocks and children’s books scattered around the brightly colored carpet, shaped like a puzzle piece. Throughout the afternoon, she keeps a careful eye on her four small charges, ages 4 months to 10 years, by turns reading books and helping them with puzzles. One little boy named Javier cries as his guardian, Guadalupe, picks him up. He’s tired and ready to go home. “I love caring for children, I just wish it were a little bit easier,” she sighs, speaking in Spanish. Nevarez, 50, has been taking care of children for decades. She began with her own three children, cared for her two grandchildren, and now helps friends and neighbors as a registered family-childcare provider in Southwest Albuquerque, one of the many in the state. And truly, her work is a labor of love. She doesn’t turn anyone away. Javier is autistic and his guardian hasn’t been able to find anyone else who will care for the child. Nevarez will.
Public Schools and Private $
Brown vetoes bill requiring charters to comply with conflict of interest, open records laws
John Fensterwald, EdSource
Gov. Jerry Brown vetoed a bill Friday, pushed hard by the California Teachers Association, that would have required charter schools to comply with the state’s open meetings, public records and conflict of interest laws. Brown’s rejection of Assembly Bill 709, authored by Mike Gipson, D-Carson, was expected. Brown vetoed an almost identical bill two years ago, and, as a Senate Education Committee analysis noted, the bill “does not include any substantive changes that seek to address” the issues Brown raised then.
Audit: How charter school management groups pose risks to federal funds
Arianna Prothero, Education Week
A federal audit warns that cozy relationships between charter schools and the organizations that run some of them could put federal funding at risk. Charter management organizations, or CMOs, are groups that run critical functions like finances, fundraising, communications, and curriculum for multiple charter schools. Not all charter schools are run by a CMO—the majority of charter schools in the country are actually single-campus operations. The level of independence between the school and the CMO varies on a case-by-case basis, and the U.S. Department of Education's Office of Inspector General, which conducted the audit, is basically saying that in some instances there is so little independence between the school and the management group that it could lead—and has led—to trouble.
Controversial group that supports charter schools announces grants to replicate strong L.A. Unified campuses
Howard Blume, Los Angeles Times
A group that was spawned from a controversial plan for rapid charter-school growth announced Wednesday that it would fund grants to incubate new campuses run by the Los Angeles Unified School District. Great Public Schools Now describes its mission as replicating successful schools in areas where Los Angeles students currently attend failing ones. The schools defined as failing invariably are operated by L.A. Unified. Nonetheless, L.A. Unified will be an early recipient of “great schools” grants — if the district can meet the specified conditions, said Myrna Castrejón, executive director of the locally based group. The grants, totaling as much as $3.75 million, would help jump-start up to five L.A. Unified projects.
Other News of Note
South African police fight students demanding free education
Christopher Torchia, San Francisco Chronicle
South African students protesting for free education disrupted lectures at one of the country's leading universities on Tuesday, clashing with police who tried to disperse crowds with tear gas, rubber bullets and stun grenades. The violence at the University of the Witwatersrand, or Wits, in Johannesburg erupted despite an appeal from the vice-chancellor, Adam Habib. He had asked students and staff to "take back our campus" from what he called a minority of students who would rather protest than study.
Oxford University is addressing sexual assault by making consent classes mandatory
Claire Lampen, Business Insider
Most people know that rape and sexual assault are wrong, but that knowledge hasn't prevent either crime from occurring at alarming rates. And yet some students U.K. universities are balking at newly instituted freshman classes on consent, calling them "patronizing," the Sunreported. For roughly five years, the University of Oxford has offered such workshops — but for 2016's incoming freshman class, consent classes will be "compulsory," according to the BBC.
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.
