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
Trump taps ex-Florida chief, Lt. Governor for top K-12 post under DeVos
Alyson Klein, Education Week
President Donald Trump has tapped Frank Brogan, who served as former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush’s lieutenant governor, as assistant secretary of elementary and secondary education, the top post at the Education Department overseeing K-12 policy. Brogan was elected Florida’s commissioner of education in 1994, a gig he held until 1999, when he became lieutenant governor. He then served as Bush’s second banana from 1999 to 2003. He has also held just about every possible job in K-12 education policy and instruction. He’s been a teacher, principal, and superintendent of schools in Florida’s Martin County.
Investigation of embattled L.A. school board member now includes conflict-of-interest allegations
Howard Blume, Los Angeles Times
The criminal investigation of Los Angeles school board member Ref Rodriguez has expanded to include separate conflict-of-interest allegations, sources close to the case confirmed Wednesday. The expanded probe is one reason that attorneys on both sides agreed in court Wednesday to a further delay in the timeline of steps that could lead to a trial. “It’s an ongoing situation,” said L.A. County Deputy Dist. Atty. Susan Ser. “There have been subsequent revelations.” Ser said she could not discuss the case but confirmed that the conflict-of-interest allegations had entered the picture. Another source close to the case who asked for anonymity also confirmed the development.
Survey: Educators’ political leanings, who they voted for, where they stand on key issues
Alyson Klein, Education Week
Andrew Zimmerman, a social studies teacher and self-described libertarian, and Jeanné Collins, a superintendent and big fan of Sen. Bernie Sanders, the Vermont independent, aren’t anyone’s idea of political soul mates. But both educators agree on one thing: It isn’t their role to talk about their own political beliefs at school, particularly in an increasingly polarized climate. “I usually don’t tell my students my viewpoints,” said Zimmerman, a high school teacher in Uhrichsville, Ohio, in a county that voted overwhelmingly for Republican Donald Trump in last year’s presidential election.
Language, Culture, and Power
Why do American schools have such long hours?
Alice Roth, The Atlantic
U.S. students spend more time in K-12 schools than their peers in many other countries. In fact, in Japan and South Korea, kids spend an average of about 150 fewer instructional hours per year in school, yet these students consistently score higher on international tests. How is that possible? In this episode of School Myths by The Atlantic, we delve into the reasoning behind the structure of America’s school calendar.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s great idea for teaching civics to English-language learners
Alexandra Campbell Howe
The U.S. has an estimated 4.6 million English Language Learning (ELL) students, of which 3.4 million are Spanish speaking. According to iCivics, an education non-profit, students tend to struggle more with social studies and civics because the academic language used is difficult, and teachers have limited training and resources to help them. Enter Justice Sonia Sotomayor. The nation’s first Latina Supreme Court Justice, who sits on iCivics’ board, envisioned making a game available in Spanish that teaches U.S. civics in a more approachable and engaging way. The result is ¿Tengo Algún Derecho?, a Spanish-language translation of “Do I Have a Right?”, which was first released in 2011. The game teaches the fundamentals of American civics and how U.S. democracy works by familiarizing students with American civil liberties. It challenges players to run their own law firms that take pro-bono cases in which clients’ constitutional rights maybe have been violated.
Campus conversation: University of Redlands’ Reggie Robles talks about Trump, ‘myths of masculinity’
Rosanna Xia, Los Angeles Times
When Donald Trump won the presidential election last year, Reggie Robles felt like all his work had hit reset. Then came the drumbeat of sexual assault reports in Hollywood, politics, academia. Robles is the associate director of campus diversity and inclusion at the University of Redlands. He also is the co-founder of a campus program called DUDES, or Dudes Understanding Diversity and Ending Stereotypes. DUDES encourages young males to talk to each other about compassion, violence and the social pressures they feel to be masculine. It brings them together to consider with full frankness what it really means to be a man. No question is too candid for Robles, who plays pickup basketball, likes the same music as his students and even lived for a time in the dorms. Through workshops, speaker series and social activities, his students point out — and question — what men do and don’t do. Why is showing emotion stigmatized? What’s wrong with asking for help?
Whole Children and Strong Communities
Schools are closed amid firestorms, but campus kitchens stay open
Howard Blume, Los Angeles Times
When L.A. Unified closed 265 schools because of area fires, meals were sacrificed as well as academics. About 80% of district students are from low-income families, and many depend on schools for breakfast, lunch and — in some cases — dinner. The nation’s second-largest school system responded by designating three San Fernando Valley schools as areas where students and area families could pick up food Friday and Saturday. Many campuses that were unaffected by the firestorms stood by through Friday to provide dinners to students who stopped by within 10 minutes of the close of school.
Teaching in the shadow of trauma
Elizabeth Kleinrock, Teaching Tolerance
“Watch out for that kid.” These are words nearly every teacher has heard at the beginning of each year, as students move from one class to the next. Emails are exchanged between parents and administrators regarding one disruptive child in the class, containing questions such as, “Why hasn’t this child been expelled?” or “Does a kid like this really belong here?” While these questions and conversations are common, it is crucial to push ourselves to ask the next questions: “What is causing this behavior to manifest? What is occurring in this child’s life that we can’t see?”
The contradictions of good teaching
Matt Barnum, The Atlantic
Is a good teacher one who makes students enjoy class the most or one who is strict and has high standards? And are those two types even at odds? A new study that tries to quantify this phenomenon finds that on average, teachers who are good at raising test scores are worse at making kids happy in class. “Teachers who are skilled at improving students’ math achievement may do so in ways that make students less happy or less engaged in class,” writes University of Maryland’s David Blazar in the study, published in the peer-reviewed journal Education Finance and Policy. The analysis doesn’t suggest that test scores are a poor measure of teacher quality, but does highlight the different ways teachers may be effective.
Energy efficiency is built into the mission at ‘green schools’
Robin L. Flanigan, Education Week
While it was still in the design stage, plans for Discovery Elementary School in Arlington, Va., included making it the largest zero-energy elementary school in the country—meaning it produced as much energy as it used—and the first in the mid-Atlantic region. The school not only accomplished those goals under budget, it generated more clean energy than it used in 2016, making it what’s known as a “net-positive” building that feeds electricity back into the local grid.
Access, Assessment, and Advancement
Big changes in requirements to become a special education teacher in California
John Fensterwald, EdSource
The California Commission on Teacher Credentialing is making big changes in how special education teachers will be trained, adding core courses and an assessment already mandated for general classroom teachers. Commissioners view the overhaul of preparation requirements as critical to improve the education of the state’s roughly 740,000 students with disabilities and predict the changes could be transformative: More students with disabilities will be identified and served earlier, taught more effectively and “mainstreamed” more often in classrooms serving all students.
It’s not how long you spend in PD, it’s how much you grow
Liana Loewus, Education Week
The research is clear: The “sit ‘n’ get” model of professional development doesn’t work.
Yet the majority of states continue to base the requirements for maintaining a teaching license on clock hours or seat time. And very often that looks like teachers heading en masse to one-off conferences and seminars, disconnected from their everyday classroom work. But 14 states, including Georgia most recently, are now trying something different. They’re asking teachers to craft personalized plans for improving their instruction, and they’re measuring success with proof of teacher advancement.
Online-only California community college to target ‘stranded workers’
Louis Freedberg, EdSource
With time running out on his governorship, Gov. Jerry Brown is pushing California’s 114-campus community college system to create one more college: a new fully online college that would have been unimaginable during his first term as governor. To that end, he met Wednesday with California Community Colleges Chancellor Eloy Ortiz Oakley and Vice Chancellor of Workforce and Digital Futures Van Ton-Quinlivan to consider several options for establishing the college. Last May, Brown sent Oakley a letter asking him “to take whatever steps are necessary to establish a new community college that — exclusively — offers a fully online degree program,” and to come up with plan for how to do so by last month.
Inequality, Poverty, Segregation
How one California district narrowed its Latino achievement gap
Carolyn Jones, EdSource
Last year, a girl in Melody Gonzalez’s class at Las Palmas Middle School, in the San Gabriel Valley, started sobbing in class one day. Gonzales asked her what was wrong. The girl said her father had just been deported. “I felt terrible. There was nothing I could say or do. So I just listened,” said Gonzalez, who’s been teaching seven years. “I just tried to be there for her. I think the listening helped — now she knows she can come to me. … Just building that relationship with kids makes a difference. They’re not just any kids, I see them as my kids, and they know they can trust me.” Such supportive, personal relationships between teachers and students are one reason why Covina-Valley Unified, where Las Palmas is located, has such a high student success rate, especially for Latino students, teachers and administrators said. Latino students, who make up 75 percent of the district’s 12,000-student enrollment, have a 97 percent graduation rate, among the highest percentages of any ethnic group in any district in the state.
One in 4 California school districts required to get county help based on new state performance data
John Fensterwald, EdSource
One in 4 California school districts received notice that they must work with county offices of education or with a new state agency to improve the education of at least one of their student groups that were ranked among the worst performers on the California School Dashboard, a new school and district grading system released on Thursday. In two-thirds of the 228 districts designated for assistance, students receiving special education services were among student groups identified as performing very poorly. In half of the designated districts, students with disabilities were the only student group flagged. The districts must now take a hard look, with help from the county or the new California Collaborative for Educational Excellence, at the factors behind the low achievement of students whose disabilities range from mild learning deficits to severe physical and emotional handicaps.
Just how racist is children’s literature? The author of ‘Was the Cat in the Hat Black?’ explains.
Valerie Strauss, The Washington Post
Fifty years after the civil rights movement, we have a new civil rights crusade — the Black Lives Matter movement, inspired by the 2013 acquittal of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin’s murderer, and galvanized by the 2014 Ferguson protests against police brutality. Fifty years after Nancy Larrick’s famous “All-White World of Children’s Books” (1965) asked where were the people of color in literature for young readers, the We Need Diverse Books™ campaign is asking the same questions. These two phenomena are related. America is again entering a period of civil rights activism because racism is resilient, sneaky and endlessly adaptable. In other words, racism endures because racism is structural: it’s embedded in culture, and in institutions. One of the places that racism hides — and one of the best places to oppose it — is books for young people. That’s the start of a provocative, recently published book which discusses exactly what this title says: “Was the Cat in the Hat Black?: The Hidden Racism of Children’s Literature, and the Need for Diverse Books.” It was written by Philip Nel, a scholar of children’s literature and English professor at Kansas State University who also is director of the children’s literature program at the school.
Public Schools and Private $
LAUSD ramps up conflict-of-interest inquiry at Ref Rodriguez’s former charter school
Kyle Stokes, KPCC
The conflict-of-interest allegations against Los Angeles Unified School Board member Ref Rodriguez continue to cause problems for the network of charter schools he helped start. Last week, L.A. Unified School District officials sent a second letter accusing leaders of the charter network — Partnerships to Uplift Communities, or “PUC Schools” — of providing inaccurate or incomplete answers to district questions connected to Rodriguez, according to a copy of the letter obtained by KPCC. PUC Schools insists it has not intentionally misled the school district — and that it has handed over some of the information that L.A. Unified says it has withheld.
Audit finds possible financial fraud at Blue Oak Charter School
Dani Anguiano, ChicoER
A former Blue Oak Charter School administrator is alleged to have used school credit cards to purchase weapons, movies and clothing, according to an audit conducted by the Fiscal Crisis Management Assistance Team. The Fiscal Crisis Management Assistance Team, a state agency tasked with providing financial guidance and reviews to California school districts, audited Blue Oak this year in response to concerns brought forth by the school and the Butte County Office of Education. The team analyzed financial documents from 2014-2015, 2015-2016 and 2016-2017, and found that fraudulent activity may have occurred in that period, according to the Extraordinary Audit report released on Nov. 16. The school’s executive director during that time was Nathan Rose.
How a handful of pro-charter billionaires flooded Oakland’s school board elections with cash
Darwin BondGraham, East Bay Express
Two independent-expenditure committees with ties to charter-school groups have spent nearly half-a-million dollars on three Oakland school-board candidates: James Harris, Huber Trenado, and Jumoke Hinton Hodge. If it were just a matter of raising money from parents, teachers, and community members, then school-board candidates James Harris, Huber Trenado, and Jumoke Hinton Hodge’s financial advantage over their opponents would be minimal. For example, the incumbent board chairman Harris has raised $11,836 from individual contributors for his re-election this year. That’s not much more than Chris Jackson, his challenger, who has scraped together $9,622. But Harris, Trenado, and Hinton Hodge benefit from two independent-expenditure committees funded by super-wealthy charter-school advocates, which have raised millions since 2014. These committees are on track to spend about half-a-million dollars to help Harris and Hinton Hodge keep their seats on the board, and to help Trenado unseat Roseann Torres.
Other News of Note
How a deregulated internet could hurt America’s classrooms
Ariana Figueroa, NPR
Schools across the country are nervously watching to see if the Federal Communications Commission chooses to repeal Obama-era regulations that protect an open internet, often referred to as “net neutrality.” The 2015 rules are meant to prevent internet providers, such as Comcast, AT&T and Verizon, from controlling what people can watch and see on the internet. Companies can’t block access to any websites or apps, and can’t meddle with loading speeds. Educators rely heavily on technology in the classroom, so the repeal vote — expected Thursday — could dramatically impact the way students learn. “One of the key elements of the internet is that it provides immediate access to a huge range of high-quality resources that are really useful to teachers,” says Richard Culatta, CEO of the International Society for Technology in Education. He previously led the Department of Education’s Office of Educational Technology during the Obama administration. “But when carriers can choose to prioritize paid content over freely available content, schools really are at risk,” he says.