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Teaching, Leading, and Social Justice
What Trump didn’t say about education
Isabel Fattal, The Atlantic
Sometimes what’s not said in a State of the Union address is just as relevant as what’s said. That’s what some in the education world are thinking, at least, about Trump’s lack of mention of their topic in last night’s address. Despite being the third-longest State of the Union in the past 50 years, Trump’s speech barely mentioned schools, students, or learning. Trump’s only clear mention of the subject was a brief comment about vocational education: “Let us open great vocational schools so our future workers can learn a craft and realize their full potential.” As my colleague Alia Wong reported last night, this call for more vocational schools isn’t entirely consistent with his requested cuts to career and technical education in the 2018 budget.
State of the State 2018: What Gov. Brown said about education
Staff, EdSource
Gov. Jerry Brown delivered his eighth State of the State speech — his final one — on January 25 in Sacramento. He affirmed his belief in “local control” of K-12 schools and defended his record of expanding funding for California’s system of higher education. The following are his complete remarks on education as he delivered them.
Nearly 9,000 DACA teachers face an uncertain future
Claudio Sanchez, NPR
Of the 690,000 undocumented immigrants now facing an uncertain future as Congress and President Trump wrangle over the DACA program are about 8,800 school teachers.
The real possibility that they’ll be deported if the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program is allowed to expire has put enormous stress on them. Maria Rocha, a teacher in San Antonio, Texas, says it’s gut wrenching, but she’s trying not to show it in front of her third-graders. Rocha has been teaching at KIPP Esperanza Dual-Language Academy for three years. It’s even harder, she says, because some of her students are also at risk of being deported.
Does the big boss really matter in big-city school districts?
Jay Matthews, The Washington Post
School district superintendents are often nice people, but boring. They rarely have much effect on what happens in classrooms, where the most interesting and productive changes occur. But because the nation’s two largest districts, New York and Los Angeles, are looking for new superintendents, I forced myself to read a trenchant new guide for superintendent success by two scholars who think the man or woman at the top is important. Can Paul Hill and Ashley Jochim of the University of Washington save NYC and LA from fractious politics and stopgap solutions? Probably not. But they offer enough shrewd insights to help us decide whether new superintendents in those cities and your city have any hope of progress. Their report for the Center on Reinventing Public Education is titled “Unlocking Potential: How Political Skill Can Maximize Superintendent Effectiveness.” The authors scold superintendents who insist that they are educators rather than politicians. I agree that such people should sign up for classroom jobs and let dealmakers run their districts.
Language, Culture, and Power
Rethinking Islamophobia
Alison Kysia, Rethinking Schools
The increasing violence against Muslims, Sikhs, South Asians, and others targeted as Muslim, suggests we, as Americans, are becoming less tolerant and need educational interventions that move beyond post-9/11 teaching strategies that emphasize our peacefulness or oversimplify our histories, beliefs, and rituals in ways that often lead to further stereotyping. Although I support religious literacy — increasing our knowledge of religious texts, beliefs, and rituals — as a common good and believe increasing religious literacy in schools challenges stereotypes, my experience teaching Islam makes me question whether it is an effective antidote to Islamophobia. Hate crimes against Muslims increased 67 percent from 2014 to 2015 and were also up a frightening 91 percent in the first half of 2017 compared to the first half of 2016, according to the FBI and the Council on American-Islamic Relations. And in a recent survey conducted by the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding (ISPU), 42 percent of Muslims reported bullying of their school-aged children, and even more disturbingly, 25 percent of those cases involved a teacher.
How do we talk about students who’ve been murdered? Reflections from a former teacher
Samina Hadi-Tabassum, Education Week
During my first year of teaching at a middle school in the early 1990s, one of my students died during a gang initiation. I do not remember a grief counselor coming to the school. We were just given the date and time of the student’s funeral. A small group of teachers took the day off and attended the funeral in separate cars. I remember getting dressed for the Catholic service and sitting silently in the pews with my colleagues as the priest spoke. As a 21-year-old teacher, I cried while some of my veteran colleagues kept stoic faces throughout the service. Afterwards, we went up to the student’s family, shook their hands, and offered our condolences. We went back to our classrooms and never talked about the traumatic event again. But the student’s death continued to haunt me, as the deaths of all students do: the young woman shot point-blank while sitting in a parked car outside the school building, the young man who shot himself in a police car’s back seat after he was arrested at school, and most recently the high school student who was killed near the Chicago suburb I live in now. That last student, Elijah Sims, was just two days shy of his 17th birthday when he was killed. His high school teacher organized the vigil at a local park. Over 100 people came to celebrate his life.
Our nation’s English learners
U.S. Department of Education
English learners (ELs) are a growing part of the K–12 student population. Between the 2009–10 and 2014–15 school years, the percentage of EL students increased in more than half of the states, with increases of over 40 percent in five states.1 Under the Every Student Succeeds Act, states must annually assess the English language proficiency of ELs, provide reasonable accommodations for them on state assessments, and develop new accountability systems that include long-term goals and measures of progress for ELs. While Spanish was the most common language spoken by ELs at home in 2014–15, in some states there was more variation in the home language. The need to support less commonly spoken languages could also be different across school districts. Information about the characteristics and location of ELs in the following story map may help inform decisions about the provision of instructional supports and services for these students. These figures represent the latest look at ELs across the country, primarily using publicly available data for the 2014–15 and 2009–10 school years. See figure notes for specific data sources.
Whole Children and Strong Communities
Homeless students, destroyed campuses, ‘invisible injuries’: What California schools learned from recent disasters
Carolyn Jones, EdSource
California schools ravaged by fire, floods and mud this year have mostly re-opened and are diving in to a new semester, but district leaders say they’ve learned some crucial lessons about handling natural disasters that all schools could benefit from. “A disaster could happen anywhere at any time in California,” said Steven Herrington, superintendent of the Sonoma County Office of Education, where two public schools were destroyed, nearly a dozen schools were damaged and hundreds of students and staff lost their homes. “We all have emergency plans. For us, overall, things went pretty smoothly. But nothing can really prepare you for a major disaster like what we experienced.”
Do students really need grades? Teachers are divided
Madeline Will, Education Week
Do grades provide an accurate snapshot of a student’s performance? Or are they anxiety-producing scores that prevent educators from focusing on true learning? In an Education Week opinion essay by Mark Barnes, the creator and publisher of the popular Hack Learning book series, he writes that gradeless classrooms are a “brave new world” that more educators need to embrace. “Teachers would learn how to effectively assess academic performance, and students would become independent learners, driven by curiosity and inspiration rather than by the empty promise of a ‘good’ grade or the threat of a ‘bad’ one,” Barnes writes.
Do schools need sports?
Emily Hanford and Alex Baumhardt, The Atlantic
In 2008, three years after Hurricane Katrina, Joey LaRoche returned to his native New Orleans to teach math. Through Teach for America, he was assigned to teach in a charter school. After Katrina, the state legislature had wrested control of New Orleans’s public schools from the local school board and turned most of the schools into charters. These new schools needed to address the city’s abysmal test scores and graduation rates, so they put more resources into academics and college preparation. Many schools cut extracurricular activities, including football. Test scores and graduation rates went up, but thousands of mostly black teachers were dismissed, and thousands of students were suspended or expelled due to zero-tolerance discipline policies. Relations between the schools and the community suffered. Now, in an effort to mend fences and to provide students with a more well-rounded education, some schools are bringing football back. LaRoche, now principal at KIPP Renaissance High School, is among those leading the charge. He sees football as a piece of New Orleans culture that shouldn’t be sacrificed.
Access, Assessment, and Advancement
The outdated study that education reformers keep citing
Matt Barnum, The Atlantic
Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, made a bold statement in a recent essay: By giving students individual help, average students can be turned into exceptional ones.
“If a student is at the 50th percentile in their class and they receive effective one-on-one tutoring, they jump on average to the 98th percentile,” Zuckerberg wrote. It’s a remarkable claim, one that strains the limits of belief. And for good reason: The results from the 1984 study underlying it have essentially never been seen in modern research on public schools. Still, the results have become a popular talking point among those promoting the “personalized learning” approach that Zuckerberg’s philanthropy is advancing. One video created by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) features an illustration of a 50 on a graph zooming upward to hit 98. The New Schools Venture Fund, another influential education group that backs personalized learning, cites the same work by Benjamin Bloom.
Investigation finds D.C. schools fostered a culture of passing students
Perry Stein and Moriah Balingit, The Washington Post
Each year, students would enter Rob Barnett’s 12th-grade math class at Eastern High School struggling with fractions and basic division. The students worked hard and improved, but mastering probability and statistics in a single year when they started grade levels behind proved grueling — and not always possible. So at the end of the course, Barnett said, a crushing dilemma confronted him: Should he pass these students even if they hadn’t earned it or flunk them senior year, leaving them without a diploma? “This student has been passed along by so many teachers and now it’s up to me to decide whether this student is going to pass or whether I need to put my foot down and say that you don’t really understand math the way you are supposed to,” said Barnett, who no longer works for the school system. “It’s about a system that cares more about passing than teaching them.” A damning city report released Monday portrayed a systemic culture of passing students in D.C. Public Schools, revealing that teachers felt pressured to award diplomas even if teens failed to meet graduation requirements.
Teach students to use social media (the right way) and the possibilities are endless
Ariana Figueroa, NPR
CJ Marple wanted to teach his young students how quickly information can spread on the Internet. So earlier this year, the third-grade science teacher wrote up a tweet with the help of his students, asking for other users to retweet the message, or even reply to the message with their location. The Kansas teacher says he expected 1,000 or so retweets, but within days the tweet went viral and gained more than 227,000 retweets and 75,000 replies from users all over the world. His students, who are probably a little too young for their own social media accounts, learned a lot that week about the power of social media. If used right, Marple says, “The possibilities are endless.” Teachers have taken to creating Twitter accounts for their classrooms, which they use to post assignments and as a forum for students to tweet questions or thoughts on a specific lesson. But while introducing social media can help learning, some states have gone as far as issuing guidelines for teachers to keep social media interactions between students and teachers appropriate.
Inequality, Poverty, Segregation
Majorities say government does too little for older people, the poor and the middle class
Pew Research Center
Majorities of Americans say the federal government does not provide enough help for older people (65%), poor people (62%) and the middle class (61%). By contrast, nearly two-thirds (64%) say the government provides too much help for wealthy people. Opinions are more divided about the amount of help the government provides for younger people: About half (51%) say the government does not do enough for younger people, 29% say the government provides about the right amount of help, while 13% say it provides too much. The national survey by Pew Research Center, conducted Jan. 10-15 among 1,503 adults, finds that views on government help for the poor, the middle class and the wealthy – as well as for older people – have changed little in recent years. This is the first time this series has included a question about younger people.
Federal, state visions for improving schools collide in California
John Fensterwald, EdSource
During a presentation earlier this month on how to choose the roughly 300 lowest-performing schools that must get intensive help under federal law, a number struck some members of the State Board of Education like a brick from the sky: 3,003. That’s the total number of schools in the state — not 300 but nine or 10 times that many — that staff estimate would require at least some form of help based on the school selection criteria that the board was considering. That massive number is slightly under half of all schools in California receiving federal aid for low-income schools. It underscored the challenge, if not a larger threat, that the Every Student Succeeds Act could pose for the state board by diverting attention and resources from the different strategy of reform that the board is putting into place. That number is why the board called a time out and stripped any reference to the method it will use to select schools needing help — a key element of the state plan for complying with the law — from the revision it sent to the U.S. Department of Education last week.
A root cause of the teacher-diversity problem
Melinda D. Anderson, The Atlantic
Having just earned a teaching degree from Pennsylvania’s Millersville University, Rian Reed set out in 2011 to find a position working with special-needs students. Born and raised in a suburb outside of Philadelphia, she had built an enviable academic record, earning induction into the National Honor Society in high school and speaking at her university commencement. She sought to use her leadership skills and creativity in a classroom in her own community. So Reed, a biracial woman who identifies as black, applied to work in her hometown school district. “I thought I would serve as a role model for young female students of color, giving back to them more than what I had received,” she said. But according to Reed, the district didn’t even offer her an interview.
Public Schools and Private $
The daily 202: Koch network laying groundwork to fundamentally transform America’s education system
James Hohmann, The Washington Post
The Koch network will spend around $400 million on politics and policy this election cycle, but that’s only part of a grander effort to fundamentally transform America. Making a long-term play, the billionaire industrialist Charles Koch and his like-minded friends on the right are increasingly focused on melding the minds of the next generation by making massive, targeted investments in both K-12 and higher education. Changing the education system as we know it was a central focus of a three-day donor seminar that wrapped up late last night at a resort here in the desert outside Palm Springs. “We’ve made more progress in the last five years than I had in the last 50,” Koch told donors during a cocktail reception. “The capabilities we have now can take us to a whole new level. … We want to increase the effectiveness of the network … by an order of magnitude. If we do that, we can change the trajectory of the country.”
What Donald Trump, Mike Pence, and Betsy DeVos won’t tell you about ‘school choice’
Heather L. Weaver, ACLU
Indiana has one of the most expansive private school voucher programs in the country, courtesy of Mike Pence. During his time as governor, Pence “removed the cap on the number of students who could qualify for a voucher to a private school, increased the limits on qualifying family income, and removed [a] stipulation that the student had to try the public school first,” according to a searing analysis of the state’s school choice failures by The Washington Post yesterday. The result? Last year alone, Indiana taxpayers financed private school education — nearly all religious — to the tune of $146.1 million “with most of it going to families who would have sent their children to private school anyway.” Oh, and by the way, a 2017 study of Indiana students in grades 3-8 who actually did use the voucher to transfer from a public to a private school showed that the voucher program had a negative impact on students’ academic achievement.
Milwaukee proves that private school vouchers don’t make much of a difference: report
Charlie May, Salon
Private school voucher programs have been a controversial topic for years, and the concept is traditionally most popular amongst conservatives. President Donald Trump’s administration plans to overhaul the nation’s education system to push school-choice programs. But a recent analysis shows that “vouchers worked best when enrollment from voucher students was kept low.” Milwaukee is home to the nation’s pioneer school vouchers program, which began nearly 30 years ago. The Wall Street Journal looked at the successes and failures of the programs. The WSJ analysis showed that the differences in performance of students from public and private schools is far more marginal than one may have thought and what’s often been advertised by Republicans.
Other News of Note
Interactive map shows which San Diego County communities have highest exposure to pesticides
Lauryn Schroeder, The San Diego Union-Tribune
Two areas of east Oceanside account for nearly 60 percent of all pesticides released in San Diego County, according to state data that tracks pesticide use. Measurements from the California Environmental Protection Agency show that San Diego County used more than 53,400 pounds of pesticide chemicals per square mile from 2012 to 2014. Nearly 31,000 pounds of that were released in two inland Oceanside census tracts, which are small geographic areas inside counties and cities. According to the California EPA, which aggregated data on the census tract level, more than 1,000 pesticides are approved for use in California and are applied to fields by air, farm machinery or workers on the ground.