Teaching, Leading, and Social Justice

Civil rights groups blast Betsy DeVos’ ‘lack of respect’ for student diversity

Andrew Ujifusa, Education Week
A coalition of civil rights groups are registering their concern that education secretary nominee Betsy DeVos’ track record does not square with the U.S. Department of Education’s mission of “fostering educational excellence and ensuring equal access” for all students. At the same time, DeVos is pushing back on the specific idea that she favors school choice at the expense of public education. In a Dec. 12 statement, the 33 groups argue that DeVos’ record of support for groups opposed to LGBTQ rights, and her criticism of affirmative action policies, “demonstrate a lack of respect and appreciation for the diversity of our nation’s classrooms and fail to recognize a long and pernicious history of discrimination against groups of students.” And more broadly, they say her support for vouchers and opposition to “appropriate oversight” for charter schools, among other things, indicate a disregard for concerns about school segregation and raise questions about her commitment to fairness in education.

Feds resolved nearly 100 civil rights complaints in California schools in 2016

Jane Meredith Adams, EdSource
The U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights said it resolved nearly 100 allegations of civil rights violations – most of them alleging gender-based or disability-based discrimination – in California schools and colleges in fiscal 2016, as some conservatives signaled that aggressive civil rights enforcement under the Obama administration would be curtailed under President-elect Donald Trump. In California in fiscal year 2016, the office reached 99 resolution agreements with school districts across the state. Typically, districts resolve a case with no admission of wrongdoing and set up a plan for remedying an allegedly unfair situation. Federal investigators found that African-American and Latino students in the Lodi Unified School District were disciplined more severely than white students for similar offenses, a special-needs student from Oakland Unified School District was denied his education because of harassment and excessive punishment, and female and male athletes in the Los Angeles Unified School District must have access to comparable facilities.

Trump’s presidency could radically change colleges’ response to sexual assault

Shanlon Wu, The Washington Post
A radically different legal landscape for campus sexual assaults likely awaits colleges and their students after the winter holidays. The outgoing Obama administration devoted considerable resources to raising awareness about campus sexual assaults and forcing compliance with Department of Education guidelines by opening up more than 200 investigations of schools for possible violations of Title IX – the federal law that prohibits discrimination in education on the basis of gender – over the schools’ handling of campus sexual assaults. But the incoming Trump administration is likely to rein in what many see as overly aggressive enforcement actions that have produced unfair results for accused students. Making it harder to prove campus sexual assaults by raising the burden of proof is likely to be first among the major changes coming.

Language, Culture, and Power

 

Home-grown school superintendents bring stability, deep knowledge to their districts

Michael Collier, EdSource
A small group of home-grown school superintendents in California defy the stereotype of a school leader who parachutes into a district, spends three or four years there, and moves on to a new job in another district. One in 4 of the superintendents in the state’s 20 largest districts were at one time students in the same district that they now lead. Some of them – including Los Angeles Unified’s Michelle King, Long Beach Unified’s Chris Steinhauser and San Juan Unified’s Kent Kern – have spent their entire professional careers there. These superintendents bring a deep understanding of their districts that comes only from growing up there and experiencing district schools from the inside. Some of those superintendents say they are likely to stay longer in their positions than the typical school chief, and some education experts say they have a greater chance of effecting change and maintaining district stability.

Students remove Shakespeare portrait from English Department at Ivy League school

Valerie Strauss, The Washington Post
Shakespeare takes another hit. At the University of Pennsylvania, the student newspaper reports that a group of students took down a large portrait of William Shakespeare, which had for years been displayed above a staircase in a building housing the English Department. Why? According to the Daily Pennsylvanian, the students wanted the wall art in the department to represent the world’s diversity of authors, so they replaced Shakespeare on the Heyer Staircase with a photo of Audre Lorde, an African American writer, feminist and civil rights activist.

Facing pressure to cut special education, Texas schools shut out English Language Learners

Brian M. Rosenthal, Houston Chronicle
Refugees, immigrants and other kids who do not speak English are entitled to the same special education services as native speakers. But in this Southeast Texas city, they seldom get them.
Just 39 of the nearly 1,000 English Language Learners here receive services like tutoring, counseling and speech therapy, 70 percent fewer per capita than a decade ago. Many more need help, but usually, teachers say, their pleas are ignored. “It’s almost impossible to get my kids into special ed,” said Arlene De Los Santos of Patti Welder Middle School. “They have to have very, very severe needs for the school to even consider it.”

Whole Children and Strong Communities

 

The playground where babies learn to talk

Emily Deruy, The Atlantic
At first, the playground at Officer Willie Wilkins Park looks pretty standard. There’s a slide to skid down, ramps to climb up, bridges to cross, and nooks to investigate. But there’s also something relatively unusual: words, and lots of them. Mixed in among the bright primary colors of the structure are white panels plastered with whimsical illustrations and phrases like “let’s talk about the sunshine” and “let’s talk about food.” They’re not a random addition; the panels are a deliberate attempt to foster early language and brain development in babies and toddlers. The park sits in the eastern part of the city, in a neighborhood with high poverty rates and low educational attainment. Studies suggest that a 30-million “word gap” exists between low- and upper-income children: Poor children hear, understand, and use fewer words, which can have long-term negative consequences. Babies who hear fewer words are less likely to do well in school and kids who drop out of school are less likely to be healthy adults.

The brain science behind student trauma

Bruce D. Perry, Education Week
The most remarkable feature of humankind is the flexibility of our brains. This neuroplasticity—or the brain’s ability to adjust its activities in response to new situations—is what has allowed our species to make dramatic changes from generation to generation. Humans have evolved from small hunter-gatherer clans to urban, digitally connected, international communities. The most malleable part of our brain is the neocortex, which can absorb and store more bits of information than the brains of any other species. This capacity for cognitive thinking allowed us to create language, democracy, and thousands of other inventions. In fact, our most remarkable invention is public education: a structured system to provide the social and cognitive stimulation children need to take advantage of their brain’s malleability and develop knowledge and skills in mathematics, science, and history. By providing structured cognitive and social experiences, the U.S. public education system has expressed the potential of millions of children, which has, in turn, led to invention, creativity, and productivity that has transformed the world.The key to the success of any educational experience is the capacity to “get to the cortex.” Yet, each year, nearly one-third of all children attending U.S. public schools will have significantly impaired cortical functioning due to abuse, neglect, domestic violence, poverty, and other adversities. Understanding the effects of trauma on a child’s brain and how these effects alter the ability to learn is essential to improving our public education system.

The case for abolishing class rank

Valerie Strauss, The Washington Post; Alfie Kohn, author of Schooling Beyond Measure
When students are rated with letter or number grades, research shows they’re apt to think in a shallower fashion — and to lose interest in what they’re learning — as compared with students who aren’t graded at all. Alternative methods for reporting student progress are not only less destructive but also potentially more informative. Given the absence of pros to balance the cons, then, you have to wonder why grades persist. The only explanation that seems even halfway persuasive is the fear that kids won’t get into college if they aren’t tagged with a GPA. But of course that doesn’t explain why grades would be used in middle school (or, heaven help us, elementary school), where students’ performance is of no interest to colleges.[1] Moreover, some (public and private) high schools do not give any grades at all, and their graduates are regularly accepted by both large state universities and small, selective colleges.

Access, Assessment, and Advancement

 

Early childhood education pays big dividends, study says

Theresa Harrington, EdSource
Providing poor children with high-quality early childhood education – from birth through age 5 – results in adults who are healthier, earning higher incomes and less involved in crime, according to a new study that followed participants for 35 years. The study showed a positive impact especially on boys and their families. Described by the authors as “groundbreaking,” the study goes further than earlier research that showed benefits to 3– and 4-year–olds attending preschool.
Nobel laureate James Heckman and researchers from the University of Chicago and University of Southern California reached these conclusions after analyzing data related to low-income African-American children who attended two preschools in North Carolina in the early 1970s. They also studied children in control groups who either did not attend preschool or participated in lower-quality programs.

California wants to update its standardized science tests, but the government says no — again

Joy Resmovits, Los Angeles Times
California wants to update its standardized tests in science. But for the second time, federal officials have nixed the state’s rollout plans. State officials say that disapproval won’t stop them.
Students have been taking the same science tests in California since 1998. The new tests are supposed to be more hands-on. They’re in keeping with the Next Generation Science Standards, a set of goals the state recently adopted to focus science learning more on experiments than on listening to teachers give lectures.

Three steps Congress can take to fix the student debt system

Beth Akers and Matthew M. Chingos, The Fiscal Times
Higher education reform will be front and center in 2017, as historic levels of public concern about rising college tuition and student debt levels pressure Congress to turn to the overdue reauthorization of the Higher Education Act. This wide-ranging federal law covers everything from student loans to Pell grants for low-income students to the transparency of consumer information on college prices. Congress has already proven it has the ability to pass major education legislation. Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-TN), the chairman of the committee responsible for education, took the lead last year in the bipartisan reauthorization of the main K-12 education law. We offer three policy proposals that would benefit students and taxpayers, based on the analysis in our new book, “Game of Loans.” These are ideas that lawmakers from both parties can get behind, with the goal of simplifying the process for student loans.

Inequality, Poverty, Segregation

 

The reason America’s schools are so segregated — and the only way to fix it

Valerie Strauss, The Washington Post; Richard Rothstein, Economic Policy Institute
A bill introduced in the New York City Council proposes to establish “an office of school diversity within the human rights commission dedicated to studying the prevalence and causes of racial segregation in public schools and developing recommendations for remedying such segregation.” But it is not reasonable, indeed it is misleading, to study school segregation in New York City without simultaneously studying residential segregation. The two cannot be separated. School segregation is primarily a problem of neighborhoods, not schools. Schools are segregated because the neighborhoods in which they are located are segregated. Some school segregation can be ameliorated by adjusting school attendance boundaries or controlling school choice, but these devices are limited and mostly inapplicable to elementary school children, for whom long travel to school is neither feasible nor desirable.

Choosing between shelter and school

Sascha Brodsky, The Atlantic
The Flatlands Family Residence is a shelter for homeless families that sits near the end of a subway line in Brooklyn next to a truck depot and across the street from an industrial air-conditioning business. Drawings made by the children who live there are taped on the walls of a hallway that extends past a metal detector manned by security guards. Those children include Diana Duncan’s four kids, who sleep on bunk beds and often do their homework at a small table in the kitchen. The Duncan family has been living in Flatlands since April. Their journey into the shelter system began when Duncan was forced to give up her job as a registered nurse to care for her 4-year-old son Dayle, who has Down syndrome and health problems that include breathing difficulties. After she separated from her husband, a bank foreclosed on her house and she ended up in Flatlands. Duncan says it’s a daily struggle getting her kids to school. She asked to be placed in a shelter closer to her childrens’ schools but said she was told there were none available. So, her children have to line up in front of the Flatlands residence at 6:45 a.m. to get on school buses—it can take them up to two hours to get there. They often arrive late and exhausted; a doctor told Duncan that the long trip is bad for Dayle’s health.

Report: A third of community college students face housing challenge

Gary Warth, The San Diego Union-Tribune
One third of community college students in California face uncertain housing and even homelessness while 12 percent sometimes aren’t sure where they will get their next meal, according to a study by San Diego State University researchers. Released this week by the Community College Equity Assessment Lab at SDSU, the study is the first of its kind to  examine housing challenges and food insecurity faced by community college students, said Luke Wood, director of the lab and co-author of the report. “We knew that there would be challenges with food insecurities, but what I think we were surprised with was such high percentage of students across the board,” Wood said. Delving deeper in the data, Wood said he and co-author Frank Harris III found an especially high rate of black and southeast Asian students facing food and housing challenges. Among men, housing insecurity was faced by 48.4 percent of black students and 42.3 percent of southeast Asian students. The numbers were slightly lower for women of those races.

Public Schools and Private $

NAACP president says charter school growth weakens public school system

Leslie A. Maxwell, Education Week
The NAACP—the nation’s oldest civil rights organization—is raising alarms about the growth of charter schools. The group wants a moratorium on new charters until a host of issues can be addressed… But African-American charter advocates are pushing back, calling the NAACP misguided and out of touch. They argue charters offer an important option to parents faced with failing traditional public schools. The debate over charters is only likely to intensify during the Trump administration. The president-elect’s nominee to lead the U.S. Department of Education, Betsy DeVos, is a strong supporter of school choice, including charters. Education Week sat down recently with NAACP President Cornell William Brooks to discuss charters, education inequality and the challenges ahead. Here’s some of what he had to say.

The notable silence of New York’s charter-school leaders

Monica Disare, The Atlantic
When news broke that President-elect Donald Trump tapped the school-choice advocate Betsy DeVos as U.S. education secretary, New York City’s charter-school sector was relatively quiet. With the exception of the Success Academy CEO Eva Moskowitz, who tweeted she was “thrilled,” local charter-school leaders and advocates have mostly kept to themselves. That might seem surprising in a city where more than 100,000 students are educated in charter schools. But DeVos’s brand of school choice, which so far has focused on fighting for private-school vouchers and less charter oversight, is very different from the type than exists in New York City—and some local charter leaders appear wary of it. “I think a great many charter supporters, and indeed charter founders, are deeply troubled by the idea of vouchers,” said Steve Wilson, the CEO of the New York-based Ascend charter school network. “I would venture most charter-school founders are liberal Democrats who are committed to social justice and would be very troubled by free-market mechanisms.”

ACLU sues charter claiming transgender student denied admission

Maureen Magee, The San Diego Union-Tribune
The ACLU has filed a lawsuit in Superior Court against e3 Civic High School amid allegations the charter school denied admission to a transgender student because of gender identity.
This is the second time in about a year that the American Civil Liberties Union of San Diego and Imperial Counties has raised concerns about the charter’s culture when it comes to LGBT students. “It looks like they have a problem,” said David Loy, ACLU legal director. “We think they have an obligation to dispel the concern that they do have a pattern and practice of discrimination.”

Other News of Note

 

LA Unified schools: Hubs for education — and social services?

Alex Caputo-Pearl, KPCC
Los Angeles schools shouldn’t only be places where students go to learn; they should also be community centers, after-school gathering spots and hubs for social services. That principle is better known nationally as the “community schools” model — and it’s about to get the endorsement of a newly-formed, powerhouse coalition of labor unions, faith-based groups and social justice organizations who see it as a new organizing principle for the Los Angeles Unified School District. The coalition, known as “Reclaim Our Schools L.A.,” envisions replicating the “wraparound services” already in place at some L.A. Unified schools — like at Garfield High’s “Wellness Center,” where a non-profit provider offers physical exams, family planning and mental health services — on campuses across the sprawling district.

 

Just News from Center X is produced weekly by Leah Bueso, Anthony Berryman, Beth Happel, and John Rogers. Generous support from the Stuart Foundation allows Center X to provide this service free to the general public.