Just News from Center X – August 11, 2017

Teaching, Leading, and Social Justice

Summer and after-school programs may face government funding cuts

A. Martinez, KPCC
Many students across California are officially back at school, although some never left because they attended summer school. But now, the Trump administration is proposing cuts that put summer school in danger. “They’re interested in de-funding the 21st-century community learning centers,” says Deborah La Torre, associate with UCLA’s National Center for Research on Evaluation, Standards and Student Testing. “This program helps to fund both summer schools and after-school programs within the state of California and other states.” All of the federally- and state-funded programs in California are required to have certain components. “They’re required to have homework help. They’re required to have academic enrichment,” says La Torre. “[Kids are] less likely to drop out of school or have issues in school if they attend after-school programs on a regular basis.” And hundreds of these kinds summer programs in California stand to lose millions of dollars in federal funding.

L.A. schools Supt. Michelle King pushes for 100% graduation in her State of the District speech

Anna M. Phillips, Los Angeles Times
More magnet programs, more bilingual education programs, more attention paid to preparing the youngest students in L.A. Unified’s system. Above all, more graduates. L.A. Unified Supt. Michelle King — her contract newly extended until 2020 — laid out her priorities Tuesday morning in a speech that promised to push ever harder for her goal of 100% graduation but offered few new proposals. The superintendent’s State of the District address, delivered this year at Garfield High School in East L.A., is an annual tradition. The event is part pep rally for the 1,500 administrators in the audience, who will begin a new school year on Aug. 15, and part political performance.

Fade to black: How teachers are using the solar eclipse to shed light on science

Carolyn Jones, EdSource
It’s official: the world is not flat, and on Aug. 21 California science teachers will prove it. With the total solar eclipse coinciding with the start of school for thousands of California students, teachers around the state will be using the rare solar spectacle to ignite students’ interest in science, showing them first-hand evidence that the earth rotates around the sun, the moon spins around the earth and all three of them are undeniably round. “The eclipse will help students appreciate the beauty of space — feel that joy and sense of wonder, ask questions and create their own journey of understanding the universe and their place in it,” said John Panagos, a teacher at Burckhalter Elementary in Oakland. “If we can get them excited about the eclipse, then that can translate to so many other subjects,” he said.

Language, Culture, and Power

Is a new English-proficiency test too hard? Educators and experts debate.

Corey Mitchell, Education Week
Roughly 2 million students took ACCESS 2.0 exams this past school year, encountering new standards that aim to raise the bar for English-language proficiency. In many of the 35 states that belong to the WIDA consortium—and use ACCESS 2.0, the common test it designed to assess students’ language proficiency—scores plummeted under the more demanding requirements. For school systems large and small, educating more English-learners than they planned for has meant potential budgeting, scheduling, and staffing crises. But some districts won’t feel the full brunt of the change right away. Facing potential bottlenecks in the pipelines that move hundreds of thousands of students from the status of English-language learner to English-proficient each school year, states across the country are re-examining when students make the transition. Colorado, Maine, Massachusetts, and Tennessee are among the states that have already lowered their exit criteria in response to the new scoring scale.

The campus-speech debate spends summer break in statehouses

Conor Friedersdorf, The Atlantic
Until this summer, the debate about free speech on college campuses was shaped by small groups of student activists, forcefully protesting an ever-expanding list of controversial speakers, and their critics and defenders, who were mostly reactive. The clearest conflict, amid many shades of gray, concerned the subset of those activists who went beyond mere protest and tried to shut down events.  They usually purported to do so on behalf of a historically marginalized group, contested the notion that liberal tolerance is a sacrosanct campus value, and rejected the philosophy set forth in Yale University’s 1974 report on free expression: that “the history of intellectual growth and discovery clearly demonstrates the need for unfettered freedom, the right to think the unthinkable, discuss the unmentionable, and challenge the unchallengeable;” and that “to curtail free expression strikes twice at intellectual freedom, for whoever deprives another of the right to state unpopular views necessarily also deprives others of the right to listen to those views.” Those most extreme activists succeeded in denying campus platforms to some speakers, generated a lot of media attention, and seemed for a while to suffer no consequences, even as observers like the socialist activist and academic Freddie deBoer cautioned that, for few if any gains, they were courting an inevitable backlash. That backlash is now upon them.

Teaching in a world filled with fear

Precious Crabtree, Education Week
As an educator, I know that many of my students experience fear and bigotry because of the color of their skin, the way they dress, or the beliefs they hold. Too often, this reality interferes with my students’ abilities to learn, feel accepted by their peers, and experience school as a happy and safe environment. This past spring, a 3rd-grade student asked me, “Why does our president hate me?” This question caught me off guard, especially because this student was so serious and sincere in her delivery of it. When I asked the student to share why she felt that way, she responded, “He wants to build a wall and send people like me to Mexico.” I explained that hate is the byproduct of fear, and that people sometimes fear what they don’t understand, including people who are different from them. I tried to calm her own fears by saying that the president doesn’t hate her specifically—he doesn’t understand people who are different from him. It was at that point that I realized our kids are paying significantly more attention to social media, quotes from national leaders, and news than my peers and I did as children. Shielding our kids from these potentially harmful influences might seem like the simplest solution, but as media becomes increasingly prevalent, that becomes more difficult—and I’ve seen many young people consume today’s news with just as much savvy as adults.

Whole Children and Strong Communities

Circle up: Teaching social-emotional skills year round

Jane Meredith Adams, EdSource
What Omar Quinitanilla, 12, liked best about summer school was the worrying. Not his own worrying, which he addressed during a second period “Issues and Choices” class by charting a path from high school to an engineering Ph.D. He relished the concern that teachers at Aim High in Oakland directed at middle schoolers during a five-week session of math, writing and conversation circles about the important stuff — how to take a deep breath and figure out who you want to be. “Every single time we go on a field trip, they worry about you,” Omar said, sounding a bit incredulous. “Safe” is how it made him feel, he said. Creating places that feel safe for students has been the raison d’être of summer programs like Aim High, as it has been for hundreds of after-school programs in school districts across the state. Yet for many school principals who are casting about for ways to improve students’ sense of physical and emotional safety — and in doing so, students’ interest in being at school and learning — the  idea of calling on summer school and after-school experts hasn’t occurred to them. But that is starting to change.

Between swimming and archery, this camp helps kids overcome the stigma of HIV/AIDS

Peter Balonon Rosen, NPR
Brad Higgins has been groundskeeper at Jameson Camp for 20 years. Back when he started, the subject of HIV and AIDS was so loaded with stigma that lots of people wouldn’t talk about the disease, sometimes even within families. Every summer the camp hosts one special sleep-away week for kids affected by HIV or AIDS. Each of those years, he would watch campers and their parents have tough conversations in the car before getting dropped off at the camp in Indianapolis. That’s because the camp has always had this rule: Campers need to know why they’re here. And once children learned, they needed a stigma-free place to process it. Some campers here are living with HIV/AIDS themselves. Others have parents living with it, or perhaps family members who have died from the illness and maybe “the rest of the family didn’t know that,” says Higgins. Today, the stigma around HIV/AIDS may not be as profound, but it’s still there.

A superintendent mobilizes to mitigate the effects of lead exposure on students

Kavitha Cardoza, Education Week
“Next, an update on how schools in Flint, Michigan are coping with lead problems and what the city’s school superintendent did to protect children from exposure while making sure their education was not interrupted. The district was already facing declining enrollment, financial problems, and falling test scores. Lead is especially dangerous to young children, having the potential to impair brain development and cause behavioral changes. The Flint school district began making changes even before other city officials.”

Access, Assessment, and Advancement

Higher than expected turnout for LA College Promise

Adolfo Guzman-Lopez, KPCC
Community college officials overseeing the Los Angeles College Promise initiative are reporting that enrollment for the new program – which waives a year of community college tuition for L.A. Unified graduates – is much higher than expected at several of L.A.’s nine community college campuses. “We were hoping for between about 600 to 750 [students enroll] and as of now, we have about 800, and we anticipate having somewhere between 800 and a thousand when all is said and done,” said Joanna Zimring-Towne, the head of new student programs at Pierce College in the San Fernando Valley. Officials at the L.A. Community College District said enrollment for the inaugural group of students starting classes later this month is also higher than expected at East L.A. College and L.A. Valley College, while the nine campuses altogether are expected to reach the district-wide enrollment target of 5,000 students. The success of the program across campuses signals progress toward opening the doors of a college education to more L.A. high school students, improving their ability to earn a degree, and help quench the region’s thirst for a more highly trained workforce, officials said.

Growing number of California school districts offer students free college entrance exam

John Fensterwald, EdSource
An increasing number of school districts and charter school organizations in California are offering either the SAT or ACT, the other college readiness test, for free to all high school juniors. Newly published research concluded that one benefit — a statistically significant increase in 4-year college enrollment — shows the effort is a smart investment. In 2016-17, 22 districts offered the SAT for free, compared with only four districts two years earlier, according to the College Board, which administers the SAT. An additional six districts, plus 10 charter school organizations and Catholic schools and a county office of education, offered the ACT for free last year. Together, they include some of the state’s largest districts and charters: Santa Ana and Aspire Public Schools (ACT), and Long Beach, Fresno, San Jose and Oakland (SAT). (Go here for the full list.)

Cal State will no longer require placement exams and remedial classes for freshmen

Rosanna Xia, Los Angeles Times
Cal State plans to drop placement exams in math and English as well as the noncredit remedial courses that more than 25,000 freshmen have been required to take each fall — a radical move away from the way public universities traditionally support students who come to college less prepared than their peers. In an executive order issued late Wednesday, Chancellor Timothy P. White directed the nation’s largest public university system to revamp its approach to remedial education and assess new freshmen for college readiness and course placement by using high school grades, ACT and SAT scores, previous classroom performance and other measures that administrators say provide a more accurate and comprehensive understanding of students’ knowledge. Cal State will no longer make those students who may need extra help take the standardized entry-level mathematics (ELM) exam and the English placement test (EPT).

Inequality, Poverty, Segregation

This school district asked real estate agents to help rekindle its reputation

Adofo Guzman-Lopez, NPR
Brian MacDonald was looking for a new home several years ago in the wealthy city of Pasadena, Calif. He says when he told the real estate agent that he had five school-aged children, she told him not to enroll in Pasadena’s public schools. That was pretty surprising to MacDonald. He’s the school district’s superintendent. “Her recommendation was Arcadia, or even Glendora,” two nearby cities, he says. “She thought that it was OK to tell me that I should put my kids in another district. I mean, I couldn’t believe it. My jaw dropped.” A contentious desegregation order decades ago has helped turn Pasadena into a city with big divisions in education. Nearly half of the area’s kids attend private school or a school outside the district – more than any district its size in the country. The National Association of Realtors advises agents not to tell clients whether schools are good or bad. That may steer them away or toward a particular community — which could be a violation of federal Fair Housing laws. But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen.

Black plaintiffs in Alabama appeal decision to allow white city to secede from its school district

Emma Brown, The Washington Post
Lawyers for black Alabama schoolchildren are appealing a federal judge’s decision to allow a predominantly white city near Birmingham to secede from its predominantly black school district, arguing that to allow such a separation would run counter to long-standing case law and undermine black students’ civil rights. Gardendale — a mostly white municipality north of Birmingham — has sought for years to form its own school district independent from surrounding Jefferson County, arguing that their students would benefit from a smaller school system and a greater degree of local control. In April, U.S. District Court Judge Madeline Haikala found that the separation arose out of intentional racial discrimination, sent messages of racial inferiority to black students and would likely hamper court-ordered desegregation efforts countywide — but she said the effort could move forward anyway.

The myth of reverse racism

Vann R. Newkirk III, The Atlantic
Contrary to initial indications, the civil-rights division of the Department of Justice won’t be dismantling affirmative action after all. At least, that’s the current word from Trump administration officials, after a New York Times article claimed the department would be using the broad powers of justice to take on universities that it decided had discriminated against white people. The DOJ since clarified that it was gearing up to investigate complaints from dozens of organizations alleging that certain universities used quotas—which are illegal—to limit the number of Asian American enrollees. Still, the beacons have been lit, and America’s annual heated argument about affirmative action has begun anew, this time against the background of racial tensions that have helped define the early goings of the Trump presidency. As always, those tensions and long-held beliefs about racial advantages rule the debate.

Public Schools and Private $

Late donations from Eli Broad and others helped charter advocates shift power on L.A. school board

Howard Blume, Los Angeles Times
A charter-school advocacy group relied on major last-minute donations to help turn around a key Westside school board race and propel its favored candidates to a majority on the Los Angeles Board of Education, newly disclosed financial reports reveal. The contributors in the final stretch of the L.A. Board of Education campaigns included philanthropist Eli Broad, who gave nearly $1.9 million in April and May to California Charter Schools Assn. Advocates, and Manhattan Beach businessman William Bloomfield, who overall contributed $2.275 million, the vast majority in April and May. In the last weeks before the May 16 election, pro-charter spending swamped the Westside race just as the major spender on the opposing side, the L.A. teachers union, was shifting resources to the other school board contest in a different part of the city.

The public schools near Betsy DeVos’ hometown are doing great

Anya Kamenetz, NPR
Betsy DeVos was back in western Michigan last week. It was her first public visit to the area where she grew up since being named education secretary. She visited a science-focused summer learning program and Grand Rapids Community College, and she met privately with superintendents from across the state. DeVos’ efforts to expand school choice, as a philanthropist and advocate, concentrated for decades on her home state. She and her husband helped found a lauded aviation-focused charter school just outside Grand Rapids. They campaigned for a largely free-market approach to school choice that sees 80 percent of charter schools in Michigan run by for-profit operators, an unusually high figure. DeVos didn’t choose to publicly highlight the city’s public schools during her visit, but John Helmholdt, chief spokesman for the Grand Rapids Public Schools, says the 17,000-student district is flying high right now.

Letter: Charter schools don’t tackle racism

David Hecker, Detroit News
Both the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and NAACP have called for public, accountable charter and traditional public schools, investment in public schools and a focus on children’s wellbeing, powerful learning, educators’ capacity and collaboration. That’s what we want for every family and community. Ingrid Jacques (“School choice is not racist,” Aug. 4) attacked AFT President Randi Weingarten and the NAACP because she can’t defend the overwhelming evidence showing that, while many of our public schools need to do better, private school vouchers and charter school policies that lack accountability and transparency have been proven not to be the answer. In fact these “choices” being pushed by Education Secretary Betsy DeVos drain money from traditional public schools, money these schools need to improve. Numerous national studies indicate charter and voucher schools do nothing to address, and often exacerbate, the segregation and institutionalized racism that exists too often in our educational systems.

Other News of Note

The ‘Trump effect’ on Canada’s classrooms

Emily Richmond, The Atlantic
Standing at the front of her classroom this past February, the public high-school English teacher Jana Rohrer wrote the words “American Flag” on the board and asked her ninth-grade students to tell her what came to their minds. Over the past six years Rohrer has used the exercise as part of a lesson to help explain symbolism in Harper Lee’s classic To Kill a Mockingbird. And over the past six years, the students’ answers had become routine: Freedom. Independence. Patriotism. This time, there were new words mixed among the more familiar responses: Hate. Racism. Danger. “It was like when you hear a record scratch and the music stops,” said Rohrer, recalling the moment from the classroom exercise. “I was just floored.”