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Teaching, Leading, and Social Justice
When it comes to sexual harassment, schools are not immune
Evie Blad, Education Week
Early in Kelly Wickham Hurst’s teaching career, some of her colleagues warned her about an older male coworker. He came in early and sometimes cornered women, telling inappropriate jokes that at times led to uncomfortable physical contact he brushed off as accidental, they said. The Springfield, Ill., middle school had a wave of young, newly hired female teachers that year, and they believed its administration didn’t take their concerns about the man seriously, Hurst said.
Teachers could get a bigger deduction – or lose it entirely – under tax reform
Carla Javier, KPCC
Right now, teachers can deduct up to $250 of classroom related expenses paid out of pocket, but the future of that deduction – called the Educator Expense Deduction – is in flux. There are two versions of the proposed tax plan in Congress right now: one in the House of Representatives, and one in the U.S. Senate. The House plan, which passed last week, would eliminate the $250 deduction. Krista Carson Elhai is a theater teacher at Claremont High School. She’s also president of the California Educational Theater Association. She says she’s lucky to work for a school that reimburses her as much as it can when she pays for necessary supplies, like the materials she and her students need to put on a show. However, when she uses some of her own funds to help students attend field trips, she doesn’t always ask for reimbursement. She said she has paid up to $300 of her own money to help send a student to an event they could not afford on their own.
Educating for democracy
Teaching Channel
Disengagement from, and frustration with, the divisive nature of politics appears to be intensifying. In fact, a poll of teens in 2016 showed that most believe they’re living in a divided America, with four out of five teenagers saying that Americans are greatly divided on their most important values. We believe that educators have a significant role to play in preparing our youth to learn about, engage with, and respond to complex civic and political issues in informed and effective ways. To support such efforts, the Teaching Channel and the Civic Engagement Research Group have launched the Educating for Democracy Deep Dive, which is a curated collection of videos accompanied by educational resources, blogs, and articles related to preparing youth for civic and political life in the digital age.
Language, Culture, and Power
Trumpism infects California’s schools
Michelle Chen, The Nation
When a truck careened down a sunny Manhattan bike path and mowed down eight people on Halloween, the horror left the whole city reeling. But some communities had to brace for a second wave of fear to follow the initial trauma: the collective suspicion that Muslim Americans have come to expect in the wake of Islamist-inspired terror attacks, as racial hatreds and public panic reignite over “homegrown terrorism.” The impact of this distrust starts early, as Muslim American children have come to expect a range of hostility from their own neighbors. An advocacy group, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, has catalogued the types of anti-Muslim hate facing California’s Muslim students, revealing a pervasive culture of bigotry and anxiety from the schoolyard to the principal’s office.
Overcoming hate in our backyards
Mica Pollock, Rethinking Schools
Hate speech and harassment have spiked nationwide since the 2016 election. They’ve spiked in our own backyards, too — requiring each community to counteract hate proactively. We can counter hate at our dinner tables; we can do it via our religious organizations. I suggest we counter hate particularly where we most come together daily: in our schools. I started writing about a spike in hateful talk and harassment on campuses both before and right after the election. The question then was whether that spike would fade. No such luck: a recent, nationally representative UCLA survey found that 27 percent of 1535 teachers surveyed in May 2017 “reported an increase in students making derogatory remarks about other groups during class discussions. This included sexist as well as racist and anti-Muslim comments.” Recent hate and harassment examples from schools nationwide included school swastikas and n-words scrawled on bathroom walls, taunts to peers about deportation, and other visible messages like “Kill the [N-word]” and “F–k Jews.” Teachers in eight states used the word “emboldened” to describe students’ increasingly hateful remarks in class — including never-before-encountered explicit statements of white supremacy. Teachers nationwide told researchers they wanted help handling the hate surge – and 91.6 percent of teachers surveyed agreed that “national, state, and local leaders should encourage and model civil exchange and greater understanding across lines of difference.”
Native American students fight discrimination by celebrating their heritage
David Sommerstein, NPR
Ask students in the Mohawk Club at Massena Central High School whether they’ve been on the receiving end of negative stereotypes, and the answer is quick and sharp. “We see that we’re always the troublemakers or that we’re bad kids,” says Amanda Rourke, the club’s president. Member Mallory Sunday adds, “It’s funny because they don’t understand who we are as a people.” They and other club members live on the Akwesasne Mohawk reservation next to Massena, N.Y., on the U.S.-Canada border. One-tenth of the student body at their high school is Native American. A new survey found that nationwide, three-quarters of Native Americans believe there is discrimination against their group today. The poll is a collaboration between NPR, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. The members of the Massena Central High School Mohawk Club are trying to fight that discrimination by sharing their history, culture and food with their classmates.
Whole Children and Strong Communities
Students get Thanksgiving dinners as part of anti-gang challenge
Hannah Fry, Los Angeles Times
Fifteen students at Wilson Elementary School in Costa Mesa were among more than 800 who this week received a special delivery just in time for Thanksgiving. Representatives of the Costa Mesa Police Department, Orange County Probation and the Orange County district attorney’s office, who collaborate as part of the Orange County Gang Reduction Intervention Partnership, showed up at the campus with turkeys and all the fixings for holiday meals for the students and their families. GRIP is a coalition of law enforcement agencies that helps identify at-risk children and provide them with incentives not to join street gangs and to continue to attend school. The holiday dinners, which are meant to feed a family of 10, were prizes for Orange County students in fourth through eighth grades who succeeded in the partnership’s eighth annual Thanksgiving challenge to improve their school attendance, behavior and grades in time for the holidays.
Yes, kids need more civics education — but they need to be taught civility at least as much
Valerie Strauss, The Washington Post; Eve Rifkin, City High School
It is not a lucky coincidence that the students at my school demonstrate respect toward — and curiosity about — each other, especially during discussions about controversial topics. It is the product of intentional choices that are made at the classroom and school levels every single day. For the past 13 years, my school co-founders and I, along with our entire teaching staff, have made the choice to cultivate an environment of tolerance, respect and civility. Our school’s student-generated norms include these: “allow others to openly share their ideas without fear of ridicule” and “be open-minded and patient with others.” In classrooms, student working groups are intentionally designed so that students with diverse backgrounds and opinions have opportunities to collaborate. But those structures are still not enough to ensure civility in our school environment. We need to periodically push pause and ask students to collectively reflect on whether they are feeling supported by their peers and what they are doing to contribute to a meaningful learning environment.
State board’s next challenge: How to measure school climate, the heartbeat of a school
John Fensterwald, EdSource
Busloads of high school students and parents from organizations statewide have trekked to State Board of Education meetings for two years, clamoring for changes they believe will improve school climate. In moving testimony, students described schools where they feel disconnected, misunderstood and often under-challenged. “If you are serious about closing the achievement gap, and bringing equity to our most vulnerable students, don’t continue to neglect school climate,” Armon Matthews, a junior at Oakland High School, testified this month to the board. Matthews is a student leader with Californians for Justice, a statewide nonprofit that has led a school climate campaign under the Twitter hashtag #SchoolClimateIsTheHeart.
Access, Assessment, and Advancement
New California law expands low-income parents’ access to subsidized child care
Ashley Hopkinson, EdSource
In an effort to remove obstacles for Californians trying to succeed in the labor market, a new law could make access to child care easier for low-income parents taking classes to learn English or complete high school. The law will expand the eligibility requirements for subsidized child care. It will make low-income parents who are enrolled in English as a second language classes (ESL) or a program to earn a high school diploma or general education development certificate (GED) eligible to place their children in subsidized care. Although in the past some parents taking ESL classes were considered eligible for subsidized care, it was not specifically listed as a factor for eligibility. Under existing law, low-income families who met the income criteria and who were participating in vocational training could qualify for state child care services. Vocational training, also referred to as career technical education, provides workforce training that leads directly into professional fields such as health care or office management. However the law did not clearly spell out what courses qualified as vocational training, advocates said.
K-12 spending in most states still far below pre-recession levels, report says
Daarel Burnette II, Education Week
K-12 spending in a number of states is still far below pre-Recession levels, according to an analysis released Wednesday by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a progressive think-tank. And those spending cuts have started to have a lasting impact on the quality of education students receive, said Michael Leachman, the organization’s director of state fiscal research who conducted the research. Classrooms are filled to the brink, he said, teachers have taken pay cuts, and academic results have lagged. State political leaders should leverage new taxes on its citizens or find new revenue sources, said Leachman.
UC regents seek ways to expand financial support and speed graduation
Teresa Watanabe, Los Angeles Times
University of California regents are looking at ways to make UC educations more affordable, including handing out grants for summer school and giving students multiyear financial aid commitments. A recent survey found that the 10-campus UC system awards the most generous freshman financial aid of top public universities nationwide, averaging $19,000 to $22,000 annually. UC campuses also enroll a higher share of low-income students than their peers. About 4 in 10 UC students receive federal Pell grants. But regents will consider another tuition increase at their next meeting in January, and some of them at their meeting Wednesday said they need to do more to help. “It seems we’re not doing our job,” said Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom, an ex-officio regent.
Inequality, Poverty, Segregation
The long-run impacts of same-race teachers
Seth Gershenson, Cassandra M. D. Hart, Constance A. Lindsay, and Nicholas W. Papageorge, IZA Institute of Labor and Economics
Black primary-school students matched to a same-race teacher perform better on standardized tests and face more favorable teacher perceptions, yet little is known about the long-run, sustained impacts of student-teacher demographic match. We show that assigning a black male to a black teacher in the third, fourth, or fifth grades significantly reduces the probability that he drops out of high school, particularly among the most economically disadvantaged black males. Exposure to at least one black teacher in grades 3-5 also increases the likelihood that persistently low-income students of both sexes aspire to attend a four-year college. These findings are robust across administrative data from two states and multiple identification strategies, including an instrumental variables strategy that exploits within-school, intertemporal variation in the proportion of black teachers, family fixed-effects models that compare siblings who attended the same school, and the random assignment of students and teachers to classrooms created by the Project STAR class-size reduction experiment.
Teachers set aside politics to help students tackle economic inequality
Stacy Teicher Khadaroo, The Christian Science Monitor
When Allegra Smisek’s 8th -graders in suburban Hopkins, Minn., play a simulation game, representing countries with more or less resources, “they quickly find out that the students that start with less need to form alliances … or work for the wealthy countries in order to survive,” she says. Over the course of several class periods, the Global Studies students exchange work for fictitious currency, and help their teams adjust after natural disasters. Suddenly, they’ve got a better idea of some of the forces driving economic inequality. It’s a topic that might be coming up more often now, as the United States Congress wrangles over a tax overhaul and the “Paradise Papers” uncover profits tucked away in tax havens. Polls have long shown that a majority of Americans – both Democrats and Republicans – would like to see wealth gaps narrowing. But how is the subject broached in classrooms, and how often? Does it depend on teachers’ political views?
Young and homeless in America
Carolyn Jones, EdSource
More than 4 percent of adolescents and 10 percent of young adults nationwide were living on the street, in cars or shelters, or couch-surfing at some point in the last year, according to a sweeping study by the University of Chicago released Wednesday. The study, “Missed Opportunities: Youth Homelessness in America,” was based on random phone surveys of 26,000 young people ages 13 to 25, and represents one of the most accurate, wide-ranging overviews ever conducted of homeless youth, a group whose numbers have long eluded researchers, educators and social workers, homeless advocates said. “We just haven’t had definitive numbers like this before,” said Shahera Hyatt, director of the California Homeless Youth Project, a state agency. “It’s fantastic to have this data, but the numbers are staggering. We as a country really have to face the truth about youth homelessness. I hope this report finally spurs us into action.”
Public Schools and Private $
Charters and consequences: An investigative series
Network for Public Education
This report, Charters and Consequences, is the result of a year-long exploration of the effects of charter schools and the issues that surround them. Each of its eleven issues-based stories tells what we learned not only from research, but also from talking with parents, community members, teachers, and school leaders around the nation who have observed the effects of charters on their communities and neighborhood schools. While stories of individual charter successes are well covered by the media, substantive issues surrounding the explosion of charter school growth are too often brushed aside. The purpose of this report is to bring those issues to light.
School choice creates challenges for parents. What are cities doing to help?
Ariana Prothero, Education Week
School choice has created unique challenges for cities—especially when it comes to making sure parents can navigate all the school options before them. Civic and community leaders across the country have been experimenting with solutions to help ease the process parents must face when applying and enrolling their children in cities with lots of public schooling choices. Indianapolis is the latest city to launch a single application and enrollment system for all of its district, magnet, and charter schools.
House GOP tax bill ends programs charter schools have relied on for building projects
Kyle Stokes, KPCC
Finding a place to house a charter school in Los Angeles is tough enough. Constructing a completely new charter school building is tougher still. Now, charter school advocates are sounding the alarm about provisions of the U.S. House’s recently-passed tax bill which, if enacted into law, would end several programs that have been crucial to financing billions of dollars-worth of charter school projects nationwide. “This bill jeopardizes the ability of charter schools to access the needed resources to secure a facility,” said Nina Rees, leader of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, in a statement. Charter schools get public funding, but often don’t get the same funding for facilities as district-run schools. That means they have to pay for facilities largely on their own.
Other News of Note
Mexico struggles to integrate foreign students, including U.S.-born children
Emily Green, NPR
More American youth are moving to Mexico than there are Mexican youth coming to the U.S. More than half a million American children have moved to Mexico since 2008, and are studying in schools there.