Just News from Center X is a free weekly education news blast.
Please share and encourage colleagues and friends to subscribe.
Teaching, Leading, and Social Justice
Teaching Activities for: ‘A Lynching Memorial Is Opening. The Country Has Never Seen Anything Like It.’
Caroline Crosson Gilpin, The New York Times
Valley parents want ‘voices counted’ in search for LAUSD chief
Sarah Favot, Los Angeles Daily News
A group of San Fernando Valley parents decried the Los Angeles Unified School District’s search process for the next superintendent and claimed the school board is not being transparent and not seeking input from parents and students. The school board has not held public input sessions as it did during the last superintendent search and has met in closed session to discuss who will lead the nation’s second-largest school district. “The student voice and the parent voice must be part of that decision-making process,” said Joe Macias, of Reseda, a parent of two LA Unified students. Macias and a handful of other parents spoke before the school board went into closed session last week to interview candidates.
Despite progress, California’s teaching force far from reflecting diversity of students
Louis Freedberg, EdSource
California has a far more racially and ethnically diverse teaching force than it had 20 years ago — and a more diverse one than is the case nationally. About about 1 in 3 of the state’s 305,000 teachers are teachers of color, compared to 1 in 5 teachers across the nation. But during the same period, California’s public school student population has also become more diverse. As a result, the diversity gap between teachers and students has barely narrowed, and in some cases widened. The results underscore the ongoing challenge that California has in creating a teaching force that mirrors the diversity of its student body. Students of color now comprise three quarters of public school enrollments. The task is exacerbated by teacher shortages being experienced by many districts, especially in hard-to-staff subjects like math, science and special education, and in urban and rural school districts, precisely those that often have the most diverse student populations. It is not just a question of demographics. A growing body of research suggests that having teachers that mirror the racial and ethnic diversity of their students can have an impact on how well their students do academically.
Why principals are embracing personalized learning
Michelle R. Davis, Education Week
High school Principal Dwight Carter used to be gung-ho about the deluge of ed-tech devices coming to education. He worked hard to expand the reach of digital tools in his Ohio school to personalize learning for students. But in the last few years, Carter has taken a step back. Educational technology can help make differentiation more efficient for teachers, he said, but it isn’t the technology itself that individualizes the learning process for the 1,500 students at New Albany High School. “Technology can free teachers up to do more one-on-one instruction,” he said. “That’s where the personalization happens.” Across the country, principals like Carter are embracing the idea of personalized learning, but not always putting it front and center in their schools. They think the idea—and the technology that supports it—holds promise when it comes to engaging students and allowing teachers to focus on what’s important. But they remain concerned about the negative impact that ed tech, in the guise of personalized learning, can have on a student’s ability to think deeply and connect with their peers. “The notion of personalized learning as a single cohesive movement isn’t quite accurate,” said Jason Dougal, the CEO of the National Institute for School Leadership. “Is it a tool to truly enhance the learning experience? There are disparate views.” Principals are definitely thinking about personalized learning, whether that means adaptive-learning software in some schools or student-led education in others. In an Education Week survey of 500 principals, assistant principals, and school deans, only 9 percent said it wasn’t on their radar screens. The majority of those surveyed—54 percent—hewed more to Carter’s line of thinking: personalized learning was a “promising idea” or “one of many school improvement strategies” available.
Language, Culture, and Power
U.S. must keep DACA and accept new applications, federal judge rules
Miriam Jordan, The New York Times
In the biggest setback yet for the Trump administration in its attempt to end a program that shields some undocumented young adults from deportation, a federal judge ruled Tuesday that the protections must stay in place and that the government must resume accepting new applications. Judge John D. Bates of Federal District Court for the District of Columbia said that the administration’s decision to terminate the program, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, was based on the “virtually unexplained” grounds that the program was “unlawful.” The judge stayed his decision for 90 days and gave the Department of Homeland Security, which administers the program, the opportunity to better explain its reasoning for canceling it. If the department fails to do so, it “must accept and process new as well as renewal DACA applications,” Judge Bates said in the decision. The ruling was the third in recent months against the Trump administration’s rollback of DACA. Federal judges in Brooklyn and in San Francisco each issued injunctions ordering that the program remain in place. But neither of those decisions required the government to accept new applications.
Immigrant students: Our kids, our future
Patricia Gándara, Learning Policy Institute
The 50th anniversary of the Kerner Commission report finds us in a very different country. Fifty years ago, we were living in a black-and-white world. At the time of the Kerner Commission, immigration was at a historic low. Less than 5% of the population were immigrants, and those immigrants were largely White Europeans. Because of this trend, in 1965 the federal government removed immigration quotas that had been established in a more xenophobic time and emphasized family reunification as a goal of our immigration policy. These changes led to a dramatic shift in the demographics of the nation. Today, about 44 million people—13.5% of the population—are immigrants of many different ethnicities. They represent a lower percentage of the general population than immigrants did in 1890, making this the country’s second great wave of immigration. To hear the rhetoric around building a wall on the southern border, one would think that 100% of our immigrants come from Mexico, but the reality is that Mexicans comprise only 26% of all immigrants in the U.S. In fact, in 2016, more immigrants came from both India and China than came from Mexico. The Asian population in the U.S. is growing faster than the Latinx population. We are now a four-race country: White, Latinx, Black, and Asian. One in four children in the U.S. today is the child of immigrants, with at least one immigrant parent. This is a significant portion of our population, but it’s important also to note that 90% of those “immigrant” children were actually born in the U.S. They’re our kids. They’re our citizens. They’re our responsibility. They’re our future.
After blackface incident, minority students at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo say they don’t feel welcome
Hailey Branson-Potts, Los Angeles Times
Aaliyah Ramos was walking through the Cal Poly San Luis Obispo campus last year when a prospective student approached her. Ramos was the only black person, the young woman said, that she and her mother had seen that day. They asked about the quality of education and the diversity of the student body. Ramos, a mechanical engineering student, didn’t want to sugarcoat the truth: Cal Poly long has been predominantly white. But she told the young woman — who also was black — that she didn’t want to discourage her from applying, because that wouldn’t help with diversity at a school where only 0.7% of students are African American — the lowest percentage of any university in the California State system. Now, after a recent spate of racial incidents — including a white fraternity member appearing in blackface — Ramos is reconsidering her answer. “Yes, we have good resources here,” Ramos said. “But if you truly value your well-being and your ability to feel like you can be yourself and be respected and welcomed on campus, do your research and find a school that strives to make everyone feel this way.”
Whole Children and Strong Communities
The brain science is in: Students’ emotional needs matter
Jim Shelton, Education Week
Among policy elites and pundits in education, the urgency to improve academic achievement has stoked a raging debate. On one side are those who prioritize rigorous cognitive and academic development; on the other, those who care most about students’ noncognitive skills and the physical, social, and emotional needs of the whole child. To many teachers, the debate seems ridiculous—because they have long known the answer is “both.” Now, science is on their side. Teachers, like parents, have always understood that children’s learning and growth do not occur in a vacuum, but instead at the messy intersection of academic, social, and emotional development. And they know that students’ learning is helped (or hindered) by the quality of students’ relationships and the contexts in which they live and learn. Working to weave those threads, skilled teachers often have yearned for schools—and policy approaches—that understand this complex reality. Such approaches will get a major boost from a sweeping review of scholarship contained in a pair of new studies on the science of learning and development released earlier this year. The researchers—Turnaround for Children’s Pamela Cantor and Lily Steyer; American Institutes for Research’s David Osher and Juliette Berg; and Harvard Graduate School of Education’s Todd Rose—offer reason for enormous optimism about what’s possible for all children, and especially those who have faced adversity and trauma. These two metanalyses (which were informed by the Science of Learning and Development interdisciplinary working group supported in part by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, whose education work I lead) drew on neuro-, cognitive, and behavioral science. In doing so, they brought together research on learning and development, which we oddly and unfortunately often separate in education, contrary to the urging of psychologists and child development specialists.
Whole child, whole family, whole community
Jonathan P. Raymond, Vunela
Four California foundation presidents walk into a bar…. I know. It doesn’t sound like a promising joke. And it’s not. Instead, it’s a story about how real life experience can inform policy and practice, and how working together, we can build a better future for our children. Meet the four presidents: Fred Ali of the Weingart Foundation; Antonia Hernandez of the California Community Foundation; Robert K. Ross of the California Endowment, and me, Jonathan Raymond of the Stuart Foundation. All of us are charged with improving the lives of California’s low-income children and families and empowering them to overcome the built-in burdens of poverty and discrimination. Last month, my three colleagues published an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times titled “What LA should look for in its next police chief and school superintendent.” In it, they emphasize that these two highly visible appointments will “set the tone” for Los Angeles for years to come. The school system, they say, must move beyond arguments over charter schools, and instead “prioritize the real needs of children and their families” by applying a Whole Child approach. The police, meanwhile, must build out community policing, and improve public safety by placing prevention over punishment. Both leaders must see children and adults not as statistics but as people — not as test scores, or data points on a law enforcement chart.
These teens saw how poor mental health hurt their peers. So they got a law passed.
Debbie Truong, The Washington Post
Lucas Johnson’s résumé is characteristic of any high-achieving high school senior. There’s the raft of Advanced Placement classes, a dozen during his four years at Monticello High School in Virginia’s Albemarle County. There are the extracurriculars — tutoring and Model United Nations and student council and cross-country. During his junior year, there was the stress that accompanied all of it — stress that, at times, made him ask: “What is the point of all of this?” The 18-year-old witnessed distress among his peers, too — troubling Facebook and Instagram posts, bullying that went unaddressed, students without a place to turn. So Johnson and two other Albemarle County students, Alexander Moreno and Choetsow Tenzin, sought to fix that. They lobbied for more mental health resources in their schools before setting their aim higher: a law requiring mental health instruction for Virginia’s ninth- and 10th-graders. The legislation sailed through the House and Senate and was signed into law by Gov. Ralph Northam (D) last month.
Access, Assessment, and Advancement
English learners are becoming English-proficient at higher rates. How did LAUSD pull it off?
Kyle Stokes, KPCC
Students in the Los Angeles Unified School District who are still learning English are becoming proficient in their new language at record levels. In L.A. Unified, 20.7 percent of the students who began the school year as English learners will end the year having been designated as “fluent-English-proficient” — a record high “reclassification” rate, as the state’s largest school district recently announced. If you count the independent charter schools L.A. Unified oversees, the reclassification rate is slightly lower: 20.2 percent — but that mark is still more than 5 percentage points higher than the statewide average, which also rose, according to a KPCC analysis of the data. Instructionally, the process of reclassifying an English learner can be long and arduous, varying greatly depending on the student. Some students come in needing only to learn the English terms for concepts they’ve already learned in their home language; others require intensive instruction in the underlying concepts as well as a new language. But the academic challenges have historically been compounded by a paperwork nightmare.
Children from working-class families invited to UCLA to see opportunities
Anna Rose Carter, Daily Bruin
Maria Mena, a janitor at Santa Monica College, brought her son to UCLA on Saturday to motivate him to pursue higher education. “A lot of kids in our community aren’t motivated to go to college because they don’t think it’s for them, so they don’t go,” she said. “This can give some firsthand insight for my child to know that it’s possible.” Education and labor studies students invited the families of garment, janitorial and domestic workers involved in UCLA Labor Center’s Parent Worker Project to campus to teach them about opportunities for higher education. The event offered bilingual tours, a trip to the Fowler Museum for younger children and workshops to help families understand the college application process and how to afford it. The Parent Worker Project works to improve access to higher education for children from working-class families.
Community colleges ramping up services for formerly incarcerated students
Adolfo Guzman-Lopez, KPCC
For the last couple of years, staff at Glendale Community College has taken an ad hoc approach to helping students who enrolled after serving prison sentences. “Right now we are informally supporting them through my colleagues and I, who provide mentorship, helping them pick classes, helping them apply to college,” said Ziza Delgado, an adjunct faculty member at the campus and the co-founder of the Restorative Justice Center. But Delgado and her colleagues have major expansion plans for the fall. They’ve applied for a multimillion-dollar grant from the California Community College Chancellor’s Office to hire more than half a dozen people, including counselors and outreach workers to identify formerly incarcerated students and to acquire office space to house these services. Formerly incarcerated students share some of the same struggles as many other students: high college costs and balancing work with school, but some of their challenges are unique. They often need to adapt from a regimented life behind bars to classroom environments where communication and collaboration is important. And they often fear revealing their challenges because of stigmatization. “This community is completely disposable to many people,” Delgado said. Delgado’s campus is one of a growing number of Southern California community colleges trying to reap the multiple benefits of creating support programs for this student population.
Inequality, Poverty, Segregation
Schools ‘less safe for Black and Brown children,’ civil rights advocates say
Corey Mitchell, Education Week
National experts and civil rights advocates say new federal data that show black students and students with disabilities remain vastly over-represented among students involved in police interactions should come as no surprise. The U.S. Department of Education on Tuesday released a report highlighting statistics from the 2015-16 school year’s civil rights data collection on school safety and discipline. You can read Education Week’s overview of the new civil rights data here. Despite campaigns to address the discipline disparities, black students and students with disabilities face gaps similar to what they faced five years ago. “Schools are places where there’s tremendous amounts of discretion with regard to when to call law enforcement. As a result, we end up with folks who fear black kids, who fear for their physical safety, fear that they can’t control their class, or quite frankly, contempt [for black children],” said Phillip Atiba Goff, the president of the Center for Policing Equity at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York. “Anytime you have high levels of fear and high levels of discretion, you’re going to end up with high levels of disparity.”
Abuse, violence common among LGBT homeless youth, study finds
Carolyn Jones, EdSource
LGBT homeless youth are significantly more likely to face violence, sexual exploitation and early death than their straight peers, according to new research released Wednesday. The study, by Chapin Hall at the University of Chicago, was based on a phone survey of 26,161 young people nationwide about their housing status and in-depth interviews with 215 homeless young people ages 13 to 25 who identified as gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender. It’s part of the Voices of Youth Count, an ongoing study of homeless young people in the United States. “The findings are a bit grim, but hopefully it will galvanize communities to help these young people,” said Matthew Morton, principal investigator for the Voices of Youth Count. “This is a very resilient population, and many expressed hope that they can rise above their circumstances. The message here is really from the youth themselves — if we listen to them and offer help where it’s needed, they can make great progress.” The study found that LGBT young people are more than twice as likely to become homeless as their straight counterparts, but not necessarily because they’re LGBT, Morton said. Sexual orientation is usually one factor among many that lead young people to leave home, he said.
They were young. And homeless. And moms. Now, they have college degrees.
Meredith Kolodner, The Washington Post
The single, formerly homeless mothers living in Family Scholar House apartments are used to seeing faces drawn down with pity or judgment when they tell their stories. Pregnant at 15. Bruised and beaten by a boyfriend. Kicked out of school. Living in a car or a windowless basement with an infant. But when these women speak about their lives, their eyes rarely fall to the floor, and their faces do not mirror that unspoken expectation of shame. It may be the 3.0 GPA they’re earning at a Kentucky university, or the nursing degree just one semester away, or the fact that their first-graders sleep well and are learning to read. Single moms have one of the lowest college graduation rates in the country, which has been linked to poverty that impedes their children’s ability to escape as well. But these formerly homeless women — along with a handful of men — in Louisville have a college graduation rate that exceeds that of their single, childless, more affluent peers. With a creative use of the Section 8 housing program, wall-to-wall counseling and perseverance, this community of women has defied the odds. Now, cities around the country are beginning to explore whether they can do the same thing.
Public Schools and Private $
Charter schools are booming in California. Here’s where they are growing fastest
Phillip Reese, The Sacramento Bee
California’s charter school enrollment continues to skyrocket, growing by more than 25,000 students during each of the past 10 years. Almost 630,000 students attended California public charter schools at the start of this school year — about one in every 10 students, according to new data from the California Department of Education. California charter school enrollment has increased 150 percent in the last 10 years. Charter schools operate independently from public school districts. Proponents of charter schools say this freedom benefits teachers and students by encouraging innovation. Opponents say they take away funds from traditional public schools, increasing educational disparities. The fight between charter schools and traditional schools is a major issue in California politics. Charter school proponents, for instance, are pouring millions into the gubernatorial campaign of former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa. During the past five years, charter school enrollment grew by at least 30 percent in 26 California counties. Among urban counties, growth was fastest in Contra Costa, San Francisco and Los Angeles counties.
Massachusetts high court upholds limits on charter schools
Christopher Anderson, Jurist
The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court on Tuesday dismissed a complaint challenging that state’s limits on charter schools. Massachusetts’ charter school law sets a limit on the total number of charter schools operating in the state and a limit on local school district funds that may be diverted to charter schools in a given area. Several students from areas of Boston with underperforming public schools and the maximum number of charter options were denied admission to the charter schools. They subsequently sued state education officials claiming that the funding cap unconstitutionally prevented them from receiving an adequate education. One argument advanced by the students was that their inadequately performing public schools amounted to a violation of the education clause of the Massachusetts Constitution. The court rejected this argument, finding that the constitutional provision is not violated the moment any school stops performing adequately. If there are measures in place to improve the school system as a whole over a reasonable period of time, the state’s constitutional burden will be met. Furthermore, the students in the case demanded that the remedy to their poorly performing schools be admission to the charter schools. The court again rejected their argument on the grounds that the constitutional right is for an opportunity to receive an adequate education, not the right to attend a charter school.
Teachers from only D.C. charter school with a union take to the streets to protest
Perry Stein, The Washington Post
A rare battle between teachers and administrators at a charter school has broken into public view, with educators taking to the streets of a D.C. neighborhood to press their case that the school is spending millions of dollars on consultants while cutting core classroom positions. The teachers at Chavez Prep Middle — the first D.C. charter school to unionize — say the administration’s spending is hurting students, who predominantly come from low-income, Hispanic families. The teachers voted in June to unionize and are represented by the American Federation of Teachers. The three other campuses in the D.C. Cesar Chavez charter network are not unionized. The protest unfolded as teachers at Chavez Prep Middle are negotiating their first contract with school leaders. “We want to make sure our students are as best served as possible,” said Do Lee, an eighth-grade math teacher. “But a lot of our money is going to the [consulting firm], and we don’t see the trickle-down effect.”
Other News of Note
NPR/Ipsos poll: Most Americans support teachers’ right to strike
Anya Kamenetz, NPR
As the wave of teacher walkouts moves to Arizona and Colorado this week, an NPR/Ipsos poll shows strong support among Americans for improving teachers’ pay and for their right to strike. Just 1 in 4 Americans believe teachers in this country are paid fairly. Nearly two-thirds approve of national teachers’ unions, and three-quarters agree teachers have the right to strike. That last figure includes two-thirds of Republicans, three-quarters of independents and nearly 9 in 10 Democrats. “Our teachers have not been able to have raises for the last several years and I’m certain it’s the same issue that’s going on around the country,” said Marla Hackett of Queen Creek, Ariz., who responded to the survey and said she has a daughter who is a teacher. “They are underappreciated, underpaid and they work ridiculously long hours.” Just over 1,000 Americans were surveyed in the second week of April, when teachers were marching in several mostly red states.