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Teaching, Leading, and Social Justice
Why won’t Betsy DeVos defend civil rights?
Aba Blankson, Inside Higher Ed
Betsy DeVos and the U.S. Education Department have diluted the Office for Civil Rights’ mission to defend students and employees from discriminatory practices in colleges, universities and a host of other places that receive federal funding, in accordance with Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. DeVos unilaterally — and without a public comment period — decided to change policies to allow the OCR to ignore a large swath of civil rights complaints. Secretary DeVos, before you make any additional changes to the OCR, the NAACP respectfully requests that you first at least familiarize yourself with the purpose and function of the office.
While appearing before the U.S. House of Representatives’ Education and Workforce Committee, DeVos was rightfully questioned on her commitment to civil rights by Democratic Congresswoman Marcia Fudge of Ohio, who asked her to state the Office for Civil Rights’ mission. DeVos’s reply: “The Office for Civil Rights is committed to protecting the civil rights as determined under the law of this land, and we do so proudly and with great focus each day.” DeVos’s use of a circular definition when stating OCR’s mission betrays her lack of understanding and appreciation for the essential work the office does.
New school year, new leaders; familiar and serious challenges for L.A. Unified
Howard Blume, Los Angeles Times
The nation’s second-largest school system kicks off a fresh year Tuesday with dozens of first-time programs to spur student achievement and recapture enrollment. But not everything new at L.A. Unified was planned, including recent leadership turnover at the top. As for details of plans to deal with intractable problems, including deficit spending and lagging achievement, they haven’t yet been publicly laid out. This year’s additions include dozens of magnet schools and language programs developed over the last two years under former Supt. Michelle King. King left in September on medical leave and never came back — which was not anticipated at this time last year. Nor was the downfall of former school board member Ref Rodriguez, who stepped down as board president last year after being charged with political money laundering and resigned from the school board last month, when he pleaded guilty. The new schools chief is businessman turned philanthropist Austin Beutner. The new school board president is longtime board member Monica Garcia. As for the board, for now it now has six members, not seven, until it decides how to replace Rodriguez.
The state of America’s student-teacher racial gap: Our public school system has been majority-minority for years, but 80 percent of teachers are still White
Laura Fay, The 74
In 2014, according to U.S. Department of Education projections, the demographics of the nation’s classrooms were set to break a historic barrier: For the first time, the majority of students in America’s public schools would no longer be white. Based on population trends, National Center for Education Statistics predicted that 50.3 percent of the student body for the 2014-15 school year would be people of color — a precursor to the country as a whole becoming majority-minority in the next three decades. (The Office for Civil Rights is expected to release more complete student demographic information for that time span in the next year.) But are the classrooms of 2018 and beyond rising to meet this seismic shift? Many critics are less than optimistic. “In general, U.S. schools tend to change more slowly than the country around them, for better or worse,” Jon Valant, a fellow at the Brookings Institution, told The 74 in an email. “I’m not sure that I’m seeing or expecting a major direct response to the projected demographic shifts.” Although America is becoming more diverse each year, and is expected to have a majority-minority population by 2044, the teaching force is not keeping up with the changing racial makeup of America’s children. Elementary and secondary school teachers form a group far whiter and more female than the students in their classrooms, despite a strong body of research that indicates that a diverse teaching staff benefits students of all races.
Language, Culture, and Power
Youth voter turnout is low, but these Central Valley College students want that to change [AUDIO]
Laura Tsutsui, Valley Public Radio
Summers for college students usually mean part time jobs or summer school. But this year, one group of students have dedicated their time to civic engagement. While some of them are new voters themselves, they’re hoping to get other young adults to make voting a priority. This summer, 25 students from University of California, Santa Cruz and University of California, Merced have returned to where they grew up in the Central Valley to try to increase voter turnout among young adults. It’s all part of the Central Valley Freedom Summer project. Veronica Terriquez launched the project this year. As a sociology professor at UC Santa Cruz, Terriquez started this because of a trend she noted among students from the Central Valley. “As a professor, I see that a lot of students from the Central Valley don’t go back,” Terriquez says. “So there’s brain drain.” She says that not only were students choosing to settle down away from the Valley, but the young adults who stayed weren’t very engaged in local issues. Terriquez has studied youth organizing and civic engagement, and she says that while most metropolitan areas do a good job of educating young voters, she sees that breakdown in the Central Valley. “Particularly in Los Angeles and in the Bay Area, where there has been kind of a civic infrastructure to support young people’s engagement around a range of issues, these efforts tend to be a bit smaller in the Central Valley where there isn’t that civic infrastructure,” says Terriquez.
Moving stories educators guide
Adam Strom, Carola Suárez-Orozco, Marcelo Suárez-Orozco, and Veronica Boix-Mansilla, Re-imagining Migration
The Moving Stories App provides an engaging classroom experience that allows students to explore our national foundational narrative of migration. Together, students can learn about shared experiences of migrants, through historical and current event lenses. The App and these accompanying lessons provide an opportunity to build empathy and understanding across diverse student experiences. It also offers and empowering experiences for (often) invisible students in the classroom.
Ethnic studies should be a high school requirement
Luis A. Alejo and Jose Lara, EdSource
Fifty years ago, the Third World Liberation Front strikes at San Francisco State and UC Berkeley in 1968 led to the creation of the first college-level ethnic studies courses in the country. Now, California is on the verge of becoming the first state to adopt legislation that would make ethnic studies a high school graduation requirement. But other states have been leading the way in implementing ethnic studies at the high school level. In April last year, for example, Indiana Governor Eric Holcomb, a Republican, signed legislation requiring all Indiana high schools to offer an ethnic studies course each year beginning in July 2017. Oregon Governor Kate Brown, a Democrat, followed last June, with a law to require ethnic studies in the curriculum of all its K-12 schools, beginning in 2021. Unfortunately, fewer than 5,000 of California’s 1.7 million high school students, or less than 1 percent, had access to an ethnic studies course in 2013. While our state now offers bachelor’s, master’s and doctorate courses and degrees in ethnic studies at our most prestigious colleges and universities, California has just not come far along when it comes to our high schools. California can and must do better.
Whole Children and Strong Communities
How to make a civics education stick
Emily Cardinali, NPR
How do you teach kids to be active participants in government? Or to tell the difference between real news and fake news? In their last legislative sessions, 27 states considered bills or other proposals that aim to answer these questions. Many of those proposals are rooted in popular ideas about the best ways to teach civics, including when kids should start, what they should learn and how to apply those lessons. Here’s a look at some of those concepts.
After school programs — big in California — fight to survive as Trump eyes cuts
Jessica Calefati, The Mercury News
Like many of his peers, Kaleb Long is mature enough to stay home alone, but not quite old enough for a part time job. Had he not enrolled in Rosemont High School’s summer learning program, the 13-year-old predicts he would have spent his Sacramento summer alone, sleeping in and playing video games. Instead, he took six weeks of publicly-funded classes in entrepreneurship and slam poetry. He learned how to box and picked up tips that should ease his transition to the upper grades. And he started a community project to raise awareness about racism. “These kids need a safe haven, and we provide one,” said Brianna James, 24, the program’s senior team leader. Participants’ families typically can’t pay for summer enrichment out of pocket, she added. “Without us, the students would have nowhere to go.” But such federally funded summer and after-school programs — serving more than 100,000 California students, predominantly middle and high schoolers — will be fighting for survival next month as Congress and President Donald Trump start negotiations over the federal budget. Currently, over 400 programs operating across the state receive about $130 million annually from Washington. But as Trump seeks to shrink the federal government’s role in education, he’s trying to claw back that funding, arguing that the programs don’t actually boost student achievement like they’re supposed to.
Focusing can be hard for kids when going back to school in the summer means hot classrooms
Sonali Kohli, Los Angeles Times
Hundreds of thousands of L.A. Unified students returned to class Tuesday — but not all of them were able to escape the heat. The school district had a backlog of 1,709 complaints about heating, ventilation and air conditioning systems, according to a spokeswoman. Of those, 309 were reported between Monday and Tuesday morning as staff returned to their classrooms in preparation for the first day of school, said L.A. Unified maintenance and operations director Robert Laughton. This summer has brought record-breaking heat to California, though the first week of school isn’t expected to be much hotter than usual. Tuesday’s forecasted high in downtown L.A. was 84 degrees, compared with the average 82 degrees, said National Weather Service meteorologist Keily Delerme. But closed classrooms filled with dozens of students get hot — even hotter than outside. “The more bodies you put into a classroom, the more heat you’re introducing into that space, which means the air conditioning has to work a little longer … to keep that space at the temperature you want it,” Laughton said.
Access, Assessment, and Advancement
Parents can stop guessing if their kids are ready for the academic year with a new interactive tool that gauges school readiness
Esmeralda Fabian Romero, LA School Report
Most parents think their kids are ready for the next grade. In fact, 90 percent believe their child is academically on par with or above their peers in their grade. However, only 39 percent of teachers believe their students are at grade level when they start the new school year. The reality is that only about 1 in 3 eighth-graders read and do math at grade level, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress. For Latinos, it’s less than 1 in 5. To help teachers and parents assess a child’s academic achievement level, the nonprofit education research group Learning Heroes this week launched a new “readiness check” interactive digital tool to close that perception gap. “We have been really focused on trying to bridge what we call this perception gap because our research also found that parents hold themselves responsible, they want to be involved,” said Windy Lopez-Aflitto, Learning Heroes’ vice president of content. “We believe that by having a more accurate picture, parents can more effectively support specific skills and best partner with their child’s teacher from the beginning of the school year.”
It’s time to get smart about gifted learning, and who gets exposed to it
Jay Matthews, The Washington Post
I may dislike the way gifted education is done because I was once overlooked for a gifted program. Blame it on a clerical error. Three of my middle-school friends with the same grades I had were accelerated to algebra while I wasn’t. The high school had lost my file. Our gifted programs need help. Money is limited. Schools will designate one child who is a point above the test cutoff as gifted and reject a similar child for being a point below. Many educators consider the system arbitrary and devoid of useful research. They want to offer enriched lessons to anyone who might benefit. I thought schools were doing their best to make sensible decisions, until I had a distressing surprise. While rummaging through the gifted-program website of the school district educating some of my relatives, I found a list written by Janet Szabos in 1989 for Challenge magazine. At first, I thought it was a mistake, or a joke.
Support builds to create longitudinal data system to track student progress in California
Mikhail Zinshteyn, EdSource
California needs a statewide system that tracks student performance from pre-school to college and beyond, several experts and lawmakers said at a state Senate hearing on Tuesday. The state, which trails most states in providing such a system, needs to be able to answer questions about education quality and how students progress from K-12 to college and the workforce, speakers said. The current information available is “all very disconnected, and there are gaps,” said Sen. Steven Glazer (D-Orinda), who conducted the hearing as the chair of the Select Committee on Student Success. Educators and the public do not have data that “in my view greatly improve students’ performance and their ultimate employment.” The committee was created in early 2017 to explore best practices and innovation to improve student success. The hearing reflected the urgency that many researchers, educators and advocates feel about the importance of establishing a way to track the progress of California students throughout the state’s public education system and beyond. Gov. Jerry Brown has resisted efforts to set up such a data tool. By contrast, Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, has expressed strong support for one, and backers of the data system will be looking to him for action on this issue should he be elected governor in November, with recent polls showing that is likely.
Inequality, Poverty, Segregation
Get out! Black male suspensions in California public schools
J. Luke Wood, Frank Harris III, Tyrone C. Howard, Community College Equity Assessment Lab and the UCLA Black Male Institute
This report presents an analysis of exclusionary discipline data from public schools in California. Exclusionary discipline involves the removing of students from classroom learning environments as a form of punishment. Most commonly, this involves the practices of suspending or expelling students. There are more than 6.4 million students attending public schools in California. Among these students, a total of 381,845 suspensions were levied during the 2016-2017 academic year. While African Americans account for only 5.8% of the state’s public-school enrollment, they represent 17.8% of students who are suspended in the state and 14.1% of those who are expelled. This disproportionality is only made more astonishing by examining the suspension numbers that this data account for across the state. Last year, there were 67,945 suspensions and 798 expulsions of Black students. Stated differently, in the 2016-2017 school year, there was a total of 186 suspensions and 2 expulsions of Black students per day. These data help to demonstrate why the scholarly literature is replete with critiques on suspension and expulsion practices employed in schools (Fitzgerald, 2015; Losen & Skiba, 2010; Morris & Perry, 2016). Moreover, these data indicate why much of this literature centers on the over-exposure of Black students to exclusionary discipline. No other student group experiences this type of disproportionality in discipline.
Do children have a right to literacy? Attorneys are testing that question.
Moriah Balingit, The Washington Post
When Jamarria Hall strode into Osborn High in Detroit his freshman year, the signs of decay were everywhere: buckets in the hallways to catch leaking water, rotting ceiling tiles, vermin that crisscrossed classrooms. In the neglected school, students never got textbooks to take home, and Hall and his classmates went long stretches — sometimes months — with substitute teachers who did little more than supervise students. “It doesn’t seem like a high school,” said Hall, who graduated in 2017. “It seems like a state prison.” Hall was part of a class of Detroit Public Schools students who sued state officials in federal court, arguing that the state had violated their constitutional right to learn to read by providing inadequate resources. A federal judge agreed this summer that the circumstances at Hall’s school shocked the conscience. But what is shocking, he concluded, is not necessarily illegal — even if some graduates of Detroit’s schools struggle to complete a job application. “The conditions and outcomes of Plaintiffs’ schools, as alleged, are nothing short of devastating. When a child who could be taught to read goes untaught, the child suffers a lasting injury — and so does society,” Judge Stephen J. Murphy III wrote.
Policies needed to build inclusive cities and schools
Kfir Mordechay, Pepperdine University and Jennifer B. Ayscue, AERA Congressional Fellow
Race and class segregation have long governed patterns of residential sorting in the American metropolis. However, as urban neighborhoods across the country experience an influx of white and middle-class residents, they could alleviate the stark economic and racial segregation that is ubiquitous to urban neighborhoods and school systems. This paper argues that gentrification is a growing phenomenon with great potential to influence neighborhoods as well as cities and the schools within them. Key steps are discussed that policymakers can take to foster neighborhood and school change that is both inclusive and equitable.
Public Schools and Private $
School choice is the enemy of justice
Erin Aubry Kaplan, The New York Times
In 1947, my father was one of a small group of black students at the largely white Fremont High School in South Central Los Angeles. The group was met with naked hostility, including a white mob hanging blacks in effigy. But such painful confrontations were the nature of progress, of fulfilling the promise of equality that had driven my father’s family from Louisiana to Los Angeles in the first place. In 1972, I was one of a slightly bigger group of black students bused to a predominantly white elementary school in Westchester, a community close to the beach in Los Angeles. While I didn’t encounter the overt hostility my father had, I did experience resistance, including being barred once from entering a white classmate’s home because, she said matter-of-factly as she stood in the doorway, she didn’t let black people (she used a different word) in her house.
Gary Hart, author of California’s charter school law, reflects on its impact
John Fensterwald, EdSource
What does the “father” of California’s quarter-century old charter school law think of it now? EdSource recently caught up with former State Sen. Gary Hart, a Democrat who represented Santa Barbara in the Assembly and Senate for 20 years before retiring in 1994. In 1992, as chairman of the Senate Education Committee, he authored the nation’s second charter school law. Sue Burr, a consultant to the committee at the time and currently a member of the State Board of Education, played a major role in drafting it. EdSource writer John Fensterwald asked Hart in an interview and in writing what he was trying to do then and how, in hindsight, he might write a different law today. The answers have been edited for length and clarity. The original law capped the number of charter schools statewide at 100, with no more than 10 in any one district and 20 in Los Angeles Unified. In 1998, the Legislature raised the limit to 250 charter schools plus an additional 100 more each year after that.
Kavanaugh could unlock funding for religious education, school voucher advocates say
Erica L. Green, The New York Times
Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh, in a speech last year, gave a strong hint at his views on taxpayer support for religious schools when he praised his “first judicial hero,” Justice William Rehnquist, for determining that the strict wall between church and state “was wrong as a matter of law and history.” Mr. Rehnquist’s legacy on religious issues was most profound in “ensuring that religious schools and religious institutions could participate as equals in society and in state benefits programs,” Judge Kavanaugh, President Trump’s nominee to succeed Justice Anthony M. Kennedy on the Supreme Court, declared at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative research organization. Words like that from a Supreme Court nominee are breathing new life into the debate over public funding for sectarian education. Educators see him as crucial to answering a question left by Justice Kennedy after the Supreme Court ruled it unconstitutional for the state of Missouri to exclude a church-based preschool from competing for public funding to upgrade its playground: Can a church-school playground pave the way for taxpayer funding to flow to private and parochial schools for almost any purpose? Over his decades-long legal career, Judge Kavanaugh has argued in favor of breaking down barriers between church and state. He has filed friend-of-the-court briefs in support of school prayer and the right of religious groups to gain access to public school facilities. He was part of the legal team that represented former Gov. Jeb Bush of Florida in 2000 when he defended a school voucher program that was later ruled unconstitutional. The program had used public funds to help pay the tuition of students leaving some of the state’s lowest-performing schools for private or religious schools.
Other News of Note
Do metal detectors and X-ray machines belong in schools?
Perry Stein, The Washington Post
The staff at IDEA Public Charter High School greets each child by name every morning. They shake some students’ hands, give others a quick high-five and engage in brief conversations when they can. The morning ritual is intended to create a warm learning environment. But it’s not all about cordiality: It’s also part of the high school’s safety plan. Justin Rydstrom, the head of IDEA, said the school banished metal detectors five years ago, believing that staff members who have built a rapport with students are better equipped than any machine to detect if a teenager seems off one day. “Staff relationships and staff presence really give us our best indicators in terms of what students are coming into the doors with and how they are feeling,” Rydstrom said. The February shooting that left 14 students and three staff members dead at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., intensified the debate over whether metal detectors and X-ray machines that are common in airports and courthouses belong in schools.