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Teaching, Leading, and Social Justice
Students are anxious about Trump, so the L.A. public school district started a support hotline
Joy Resmovits, Los Angeles Times
The Los Angeles Unified School District has set up a hotline and opened “extended support sites” to respond to a high level of student anxiety about the election of Donald Trump as president. Parents and teachers learned about the new resources in a recorded call Monday from district Supt. Michelle King. She said the aim was to answer students’ questions and address their worries “about potential impact on them and their families” and “to provide you with emotional support, enrollment and attendance information and referrals to outside resources,” according to a transcript of the call provided by the district. The message was distributed in English and Spanish.
SD school board to Trump: Let students learn without fear
Maureen Magee, The San Diego Union-Tribune
In response to the presidential election results, the San Diego school board passed a formal resolution Tuesday that reaffirms California’s second-largest district’s commitment to the “values of peace, tolerance and respect for multiple perspectives.” Board Vice President Richard Barrera and trustee John Lee Evans put the resolution on the agenda in response to Donald Trump’s victory, and to promote the San Diego Unified School District’s upcoming “Celebration of Light.” Similar resolutions have been passed up and down the state, including one by the Los Angeles school board last month, and a proposed resolution set to go before the Chula Vista Elementary School District board next week. San Diego’s resolution addresses uncertainties and fears raised by Trump, and suggestions by the president-elect that protections for unauthorized immigrants put in place under President Barack Obama could be scrapped.
How Trump could gut public education
Dana Goldstein, Slate
School-choice philanthropist Betsy DeVos is set to become Donald Trump’s secretary of education. The school choice movement that Trump has embraced is bipartisan; centrist Democrats and Republicans both tend to support public charter schools. But DeVos, a former chairwoman of the Michigan Republican Party, represents the most conservative corner of the movement. She and her husband have funded a series of efforts to turn public school funding into vouchers for students to attend private schools. They have also fought to prevent charter schools, including for-profit charter schools, from being more tightly regulated. The DeVos appointment signals that Trump is serious about the $20 billion school voucher plan he rolled out on the campaign trail. The proposal would redirect huge swaths of the federal education budget away from school districts and toward low-income parents, allowing them to spend a voucher at a public or private school of their choice, potentially including for-profit, virtual, and religious schools.
Language, Culture, and Power
Why it’s important to talk about successful black and Latino boys
Sonali Kohli, Los Angeles Times
While Chukwuagoziem Uzoegwu was growing up, his mother often would throw what he and his brothers called “educational tantrums.” On those weekends or on random days in the long stretch of summer vacation, the Uzoegwu boys would be barred from TV “from sun up to sunset,” he said. “Leisure time was spent reading. Leisure time was spent writing,” said Uzoegwu, now 17 and a senior at King Drew Medical Magnet High School of Medicine and Science. Uzoegwu attributes his upbringing with his success as a student. He has a GPA above 4.0, is taking six Advanced Placement classes and wants to attend Stanford University. He was one of 201 L.A. County students interviewed for a new UCLA report on the experiences of successful black and Latino teenage boys in Los Angeles.
Majority of English-learner students are born in the United States, analysis finds
Corey Mitchell, Education Week
The majority of English-language learners in U.S. K-12 schools were born in the United States, according to an analysis from the Washington-based Migration Policy Institute. The institute’s analysis of U.S. Census data found that 82 percent of prekindergarten to 5th grade English-learners and 65 percent of 6th and 12th
grade English-learners are U.S.-born. The data included children ages 5 to 17 who live with at least one parent. The decision to rely on that set of numbers may have excluded sizable portions of the nation’s K-12 ELL population, namely older English-learner students with interrupted formal education and some undocumented students, including unaccompanied minors separated from parents and other family.
6 potential brain benefits of bilingual education
Anya Kamentz, NPR
Brains, brains, brains. One thing we’ve learned at NPR Ed is that people are fascinated by brain research. And yet it can be hard to point to places where our education system is really making use of the latest neuroscience findings. But there is one happy nexus where research is meeting practice: bilingual education. “In the last 20 years or so, there’s been a virtual explosion of research on bilingualism,” says Judith Kroll, a professor at the University of California, Riverside. Again and again, researchers have found, “bilingualism is an experience that shapes our brain for a lifetime,” in the words of Gigi Luk, an associate professor at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education. At the same time, one of the hottest trends in public schooling is what’s often called dual-language or two-way immersion programs.
Whole Children and Strong Communities
Art that transformed a Miami neighborhood now making its schools cool
Greg Allen, NPR
Every December, Miami’s annual Art Basel fair draws artists, dealers and buyers from around the world. This year, dozens of artists could be found not in galleries or at cocktail parties, but painting at an elementary school. Spanish painter Marina Capdevila was one of more than 30 artists working at Eneida Hartner Elementary School in Miami’s Wynwood neighborhood. Her cartoon-style painting of elderly women doing water aerobics is intended, she says, to get the kids to smile. “Always I’m trying to, when I do murals, to bring a little of my sense of humor to make people laugh,” she says. Over the last decade, Miami’s Wynwood neighborhood has been revitalized by art. Galleries, restaurants and artists’ studios have moved in. Walls throughout the area are now covered in murals and Wynwood has become a tourist destination. Now, Eneida Hartner Elementary is getting in on the action.
Why this high school works: ‘We are in a perpetual state of improvement.’
Valerie Strauss, The Washington Post
If you have paid attention to the school reform debate in recent years, you would be forgiven for thinking that public schools across the board are failing students and that schools that are struggling can only improve if they fire all of their staff, become a charter school or let the state take them over. It’s just not so. This is clear in a project called the Schools of Opportunity, launched a few years ago by educators who sought to highlight public high schools that actively seek to close opportunity gaps through 11 research-proven practices and not standardized test scores (which are more a measure of socioeconomic status than anything else). The project assesses how well schools provide health and psychological support for students, judicious and fair discipline policies, high-quality teacher mentoring programs, outreach to the community, effective student and faculty support systems, and broad and enriched curriculum. Schools submit applications explaining why they believe their school should be recognized.
A research synthesis of the associations between socioeconomic background, inequality, school climate, and academic achievement
Ruth Berkowitz, Hadass Moore, Ron Avi Astor, and Rami Benbenishty, Review of Educational Research
Educational researchers and practitioners assert that supportive school and classroom climates can positively influence the academic outcomes of students, thus potentially reducing academic achievement gaps between students and schools of different socioeconomic status (SES) backgrounds. Nonetheless, scientific evidence establishing directional links and mechanisms between SES, school climate, and academic performance is inconclusive. This comprehensive review of studies dating back to the year 2000 examined whether a positive climate can successfully disrupt the associations between low SES and poor academic achievement. Positive climate was found to mitigate the negative contribution of weak SES background on academic achievement; however, most studies do not provide a basis for deducing a directional influence and causal relations. Additional research is encouraged to establish the nature of impact positive climate has on academic achievement and a multifaceted body of knowledge regarding the multilevel climate dimensions related to academic achievement.
Access, Assessment, and Advancement
Does your state provide good data on your schools? Probably not
Elissa Nadworny, NPR
So you’re trying to find some information about the schools in your community. Did students perform well on tests? How many students in a school are from low-income families? What’s the demographic breakdown? Most folks would start to look for this by searching the web. But, depending on the state you live in, finding that information can be a real challenge. That’s according to a new report from the Data Quality Campaign. Analysts there spent 100 hours last summer looking at annual report cards put out by all 50 states and the District of Columbia. Here’s what they found: Confusion. Broken links. Complicated tables and spreadsheets, filled with numbers and figures without meaning. There was missing data, out-of-date data and lots and lots of education jargon.
U.S. treads water in PISA results for science, math, reading
Sarah D. Sparks, Education Week
U.S. teenagers seem to have internalized the national push to expand science and math fields, but that doesn’t mean they are as prepared for STEM jobs as students in other countries, according to results from the latest Program for International Student Assessment. “The United States has one of the most science-oriented 15-year-old populations,” said Andreas Schleicher, the director for education and skills at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, which runs PISA. “The downside is the knowledge and skills of those students are not adding up to their expectations.” The nation’s 15-year-olds performed above average for all countries participating in PISA in reading and science in 2015, and American students reported higher-than-average rates of enjoying science, reading about science, and interest in STEM careers, according to results released this morning. But overall, American students have not improved in either reading or science performance since 2009, and they have declined in math performance during that time, putting the United States slightly below the international average.
Young men outnumbered in college readiness efforts; more male recruits sought
Larry Gordon, EdSource
A persistent gender gap is troubling many community and school-based programs in California that seek to move low-income, first-generation and African-American and Latino high school students onto a path to college. Many more young women than young men are taking advantage of the assistance available for test preparation, college applications and financial aid, program administrators and counselors report. Young women often comprise at least 60 percent of the participants. That gender disparity has led to an intensified effort by college readiness programs across the state to recruit more boys and young men – particularly African-Americans and Latinos. But officials say change won’t be easy.
Inequality, Poverty, Segregation
With Trump’s Title IX stance unknown, video aims to educate about sexual harassment at school
Jane Meredith Adams, EdSource
National experts on sexual harassment in K-12 schools have teamed up to create a new educational video about gender equality, intended to inform students that they have a legal right to attend a school where nobody is harassed because of their gender. The timing couldn’t be better, said Esther Warkov, cofounder of the nonprofit group Stop Sexual Assault in Schools, which produced the free video for use by schools, clubs and parent groups. President-elect Donald Trump, who boasted in a 2005 video about his ability to sexually assault women, has “normalized” traumatic harassment, Warkov said, and sent a disturbing message to children and teenagers. And the Republican Party platform has stated its opposition to the Obama administration’s decision to apply legal protections from harassment to students who are gay, transgender or gender nonconforming — including the right of transgender students to use the bathroom that corresponds to their gender identity.
White flight is creating a separate and unequal system of higher education
Anthony P. Carnevale, The Washington Post
In the post-World War II era, whites fled the center city to the leafy-green suburbs and better neighborhood schools. Today, a similar trend has taken root in American higher education, only this time whites are fleeing the underfunded and overcrowded two-year and four-year open-access colleges for the nation’s top 500 universities. Since the 1990s, the number of black and Latino high school graduates who enroll in college has more than doubled. But three-quarters of that increase has been at open-access colleges. Meanwhile, white college enrollment has increased only at the nation’s top 500 universities. As a result, American higher education has evolved into a two-tiered separate and unequal system that fuels the intergenerational reproduction of white racial privilege.
Survey: Students face challenges outside the classroom
Gaby Galvin, U.S. News
Teachers and principals agree that regardless of poverty level, students face learning barriers outside of school and more needs to be done to address these problems, according to a survey released Wednesday by Scholastic Education. The Teacher & Principal School Report: Equity in Education, which factored in the responses of 4,721 pre-K through 12th grade public school teachers and principals, emphasized the difference between equality and equity in education – that is, while students should have equal access to learning resources, each student deserves equity, or the individual support needed to reach success. While barriers to reaching equity are pervasive across school poverty levels, they are significantly heightened in low-income schools. Of educators in high-poverty schools, 69 percent say their students lack access to books at home, compared with 20 percent of educators in low-poverty schools who chose that response. Similarly, 69 percent say families in high-poverty schools aren’t involved enough in student learning, compared with 18 percent of educators in schools with low poverty rates.
Public Schools and Private $
The big burden of charter school oversight
John Fensterwald, EdSource
With the California Charter Schools Association’s goal of serving a million students – a nearly 75 percent increase – within six years, charter school growth is raising the stakes for effective monitoring. But there’s a sharp contrast in charter oversight capacity between California’s largest district and other districts. With nearly a quarter of the state’s 1,200 charter schools, Los Angeles Unified’s Charter Schools Division is a regulatory behemoth, with 50 employees and the district’s muscular Office of Inspector General at its disposal. Offices in most of the other 320-plus districts that have granted charter schools, however, usually consist of one undertrained, understaffed assistant superintendent frustrated by the complexity of the job. About 90 percent of the state’s districts have issued six or fewer charters; two-thirds have issued only one or two.
Betsy DeVos helped create Michigan’s charter sector. Here’s how it’s doing
Arianna Prothero, Education Week
Before Betsy DeVos was nominated by President-elect Donald Trump to be the U.S. Secretary of Education, she played a significant role in shaping Michigan’s charter school sector as a long-time advocate and philanthropic-backer of school choice in the state. With the support of the DeVos family, Michigan was quick to jump on the charter school bandwagon in 1993—just two years after the nation’s first charter law was enacted in Minnesota. In many ways, Michigan embodies a popular philosophy of the early days of the charter movement often described by advocates as “let a thousand flowers bloom.” It’s the idea that states should encourage the growth of lots of schools—as well as different kinds of schools and management structures—and let parents, through the choices they make, regulate the market and weed out the bad options. This attitude is echoed in the DeVos philosophy toward school choice.
Exploring the consequences of charter school expansion in U.S. cities
Bruce D. Baker, Economic Policy Institute
This report highlights patterns of charter school expansion across several large and mid-size U.S. cities since 2000. In this report, the focus is the loss of enrollments and revenues to charter schools in host districts and the response of districts as seen through patterns of overhead expenditures. I begin by identifying those cities and local public school districts that have experienced the largest shifts of students from district-operated to charter schools, and select from among those cities illustrative examples of the effects of charter school expansion on host district finances and enrollments.
School choice 101: What it is, how it works and does it work?
Cory Turner, NPR
President-elect Donald J. Trump said on the campaign trail that school choice is “the new civil rights issue of our time.” But talk of school choice is, at best, confusing.
Other News of Note
Americans in all ways but paper
Carola Suarez-Orozco and Marcelo Suarez-Orozco, US News
Nearly 750,000 young people without papers were beckoned out of the shadows by the promise of a presidential act – the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, known as DACA, first offered in 2012
. After two decades of failed attempts to fix our broken immigration system, DACA would minimally address the needs of young people brought to this country as children, not of their own volition. These youngsters cautiously signed up for a contract with their new society. As children they grew up in our midst, attending our schools and churches and playing Little League. Research, our own and that of others, found that while in college they held jobs and displayed academic resilience and high levels of social and civic engagement. Despite a powerful undertow – constant financial concerns, housing insecurity, high levels of discrimination and the near permanent fear that they or a loved one could be deported at any moment – they rallied forth, American in all ways but on paper.
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.