Teaching, Leading, and Social Justice

 

Supt. boasts best grad rate yet. But how’s LAUSD really doing?

Press Play with Madeleine Brand, KCRW; Guests: Howard Blume, Los Angeles Times; John Rogers, UCLA

LAUSD Superintendent Michelle King gave her first state-of-the-district address Monday morning. She touted the highest graduation rate ever for the district, but education advocates question whether the numbers are inflated. King also talked about expanding arts education, language and technology in classrooms, but she talked less about how the district would go about accomplishing these goals. And meanwhile, one group is suing LAUSD over how it spent $450 million set aside for high-need students.

 

20 years after groundbreaking report on teaching, a new report asks: What now?

Madeline Will, Education Week

Twenty years after the nonprofit National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future released a report that pushed teaching to the forefront of the education-policy landscape, a new report seeks to revitalize the national discussion around teacher quality. “What Matters Now: A Call to Action,” released at a forum in the nation’s capital today, offers several policy and practice recommendations to support and improve teaching and learning, while also serving as a retrospective of the teaching profession following the 1996 report, “What Matters Most: Teaching for America’s Future.”

 

Diverse school leaders may boost student outcomes

Alisha Kirby, Cabinet Report

Racial tensions have been stoked on the campaign trail in recent months, highlighting the need for districts to bring in school officials with ethnic and racial backgrounds as diverse as the students they serve. Often framed as a conversation surrounding a lack of diversity among incoming teachers, surveys from the American Association of School Administrators find the issue extends to those in the district office as well, where only 4 percent to 6 percent of all superintendents are people of color.

 

 

Language, Culture, and Power

 

Dual language programs could get boost with initiative on November ballot

Michael Janofsky, EdSource

With a growing number of parents embracing the value of their children learning a second language, nine more dual immersion programs are coming to L.A. Unified when schools open next week. Among the additions are one in Armenian and another in Arabic, giving the district 65 such programs, a 25 percent increase over the last three years.

Bullied by the badge?

Kyle Spencer, The Hechinger Report

Keyla Walker, a recent graduate of Terry High School, says she still remembers police yanking her off a school bus to arrest her four years ago, following a fight she says didn’t even involve her. She still does not totally understand why, but on a warm morning during her freshman year, she and her twin sisters — both juniors — were rounded up after one of the twins slapped another student during the ride to school. All three girls were ushered into the principal’s office. They eventually were shackled and transported to a juvenile jail, where they were locked up.

 

 

What it’s like to be college-bound and worried about your immigration status

Sam Gringlas, NPR

Mayte Lara Ibarra and Larissa Martinez had just finished their senior year of high school when they each decided to go public with their immigration status. Both Texas students came to the U.S. illegally, and they didn’t want to keep that fact a secret any longer. Ibarra identified herself on Twitter as one of the 65,000 undocumented youth who graduate high school in the U.S. Martinez revealed her status in the commencement speech she delivered at graduation. Their actions sparked support and pointed criticism. That was more than a month ago. Now, with the media frenzy behind them, they both say they don’t regret the choice they made to speak up. Next month, Ibarra heads to the University of Texas-Austin and Larissa to Yale University.

 

Access, Assessment, and Advancement

 

The never-ending struggle to improve Head Start

Lillian Mongeau, The Atlantic

Fifty-one years ago in the White House Rose Garden, former President Lyndon B. Johnson announced the launch of Head Start. “Five- and 6-year-old children are inheritors of poverty’s curse and not its creators,” Johnson told his audience as he explained that the federal government would be, for the first time, funding education and health services for children living in poverty in the form of a public preschool program. That first summer, according to a press release from the time, the program was to serve 530,000 children in 11,000 centers at a cost of $112 million, or $857 million in today’s dollars.

 

Can testing save arts education?

Sarah Butrymowicz, The Hechinger Report

It sounded like an ordinary assignment for a visual arts class: Teacher Karen Ladd asked her freshmen at Sanborn Regional High School to research an artist, create a piece of art inspired by the artist’s work and then write a reflection about the experience. Dressed in tank tops and shorts that heralded the arrival of summer weather, some students studied the assignment while others listened to headphones as they browsed for artists online. One girl begged to be allowed to use Bob Ross as her inspiration; another searched determinedly for paintings of bowling to use. But this was no ordinary class project: It was a test.

 

Summer programs help prepare minority students for college STEM

Nina Agrawal, Los Angeles Times

When Oscar Leong graduated from his Los Angeles high school four years ago, he ranked second in his class, with a 4.4 GPA and a scholarship to Swarthmore College, where he planned to major in astrophysics. But Leong, the son of Mexican immigrants, struggled his freshman year, working the hardest he’d ever worked to earn just a B- in introductory physics. His confidence shaken, Leong began to wonder if he was really cut out for Swarthmore. He considered transferring, or at least dropping his major.

 

 

Inequality, Poverty, Segregation

 

State reaffirms that LA Unified violated funding formula

John Fensterwald, EdSource

The California Department of Education is sticking with its ruling in May that Los Angeles Unified has underspent, by hundreds of millions of dollars, money it should have used to increase and improve services for high-needs children under the state’s new school funding law. In reaffirming its decision, the department gives the district until the 2017-18 school year to comply.

 

Student mobility: How it affects learning

Sarah D. Sparks, Education Week

It’s always tough to be the new kid in the middle of the school year: to find new friends, adapt to new teachers and rules. But for more than 6.5 million students nationwide, being the new kid can be a frequent occurrence—and one that exacts a cost to their social and academic development and that of their classmates. As more states begin to use longitudinal data to improve schools under the Every Student Succeeds Act, a growing body of research suggests student mobility may be a key indicator to identify vulnerable students and keep them on a path to academic achievement.

 

How LAUSD successfully tackled the racial divide in 1969

Paul Wallace and Joel Strom, Los Angeles Times

We are products of the Los Angeles public schools, longtime residents of the city, and most importantly friends. We became friends even though the odds were stacked against us. It happened in 1969 when the two of us — one black, one white — ended up at school together as the Los Angeles Unified School District finally began to confront its history of segregation. Race relations in L.A. were tense then. The scars were still fresh from the six-day-long 1965 Watts riots, and at L.A. high schools the races were, for the most part, separated.

 

 

Public Schools and Private $

Cloaking Inequity: Are charter schools neither civil or right? Assessing the intersection of voting rights and educational equity

Julian Vasquez Heilig, California State University, Sacramento

In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, the Louisiana Legislature – to the objection of many in the delegation that represented New Orleans – took control of nearly all of New Orleans’ public schools. The legislature targeted New Orleans – a predominately Black jurisdiction – for public school takeover and vested power and control of the lion’s share of the city’s public schools in the Recovery School District (RSD). The RSD was to be a statewide special school district with governance vested in non-elected officials. On these facts alone, one should question the argument that school choice in New Orleans was designed to enhance civil rights.

The bias inherent in some charter schools’ admissions process

The Times Editorial Board, Los Angeles Times

And you thought applying to college could be tough. Take a look at the online application form for 2016-17 at Roseland Accelerated Middle School, a charter school in Santa Rosa. It’s called a registration form, but the intimidating set of documents with a couple dozen pages must be completed before a student is accepted, not after, according to the website.

Study says Ohio’s virtual charters can’t replace the traditional school experience

Jamie Martines, The Hechinger Report

Virtual charter schools can give students who are falling behind in traditional schools a chance to find success in an alternative learning environment. But can virtual charter schools fully replace the traditional face-to-face school experience?

 

 

Other News of Note

 

Five ways to advocate for justice in education

Rusul Alrubail, Teaching Tolerance

“We live in a time of crisis,” warned Dr. Ruha Benjamin in the beginning of her opening keynote at the 2016 International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) conference. Benjamin, an assistant professor in the Department of African American Studies at Princeton University and author of People’s Science: Bodies and Rights on the Stem Cell Frontier

, is the first black woman to keynote this conference. And the space and timing were ripe for her message: We live in an era when people who are different are treated unfairly, when people of color have to defend their mere existence. Yet, we can all do something about it.

 

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