Just News from Center X – February 24, 2017

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Teaching, Leading, and Social Justice

Trump administration rescinds transgender-student guidance

Evie Blad, Education Week
The U.S. departments of Justice and Education rescinded Obama-era guidance on the rights of transgender students today, lifting requirements that schools allow students to use the restrooms and locker rooms that match their gender identity. The Trump administration had long signaled the shift. White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer said Tuesday that the president believes the treatment of transgender students is a “states’ rights issue.”

So far, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos is just what her critics feared

Valerie Strauss, The Washington Post
Michigan billionaire Betsy DeVos has been U.S. education secretary for only a few weeks, but already she has shown herself to be exactly what her critics feared. In her brief time running the Education Department she has (among other things): insulted teachers at a middle school, bashed protesters, saying they are “hostile” to change and new ideas, said she would be fine if the department she runs is shut down, complained that critics want “to make my life a living hell,” failed to participate in the first Twitter chat her department had for teachers on Feb. 21, suggested schools should be able to compensate for troubles children have at home, such as absent fathers, had U.S. marshals protect her after protesters blocked her entrance to a D.C. school door, made a confusing statement about the Common Core State Standards, made crystal clear that a top priority will be pushing for alternatives to traditional public schools, otherwise known as “school choice.

Undocumented teachers shielded by DACA in legal and emotional limbo

Corey Mitchell, Education Week
Jose Gonzalez’s parents brought him to the United States from Mexico just before his second birthday. In the 23 years since, he graduated high school with honors, earned an Ivy League degree, and received recognition from the Obama White House for his work teaching students in immigrant-filled Los Angeles charter schools. Now, Gonzalez faces a potentially cruel twist of fate: he could go from being lauded by the White House to being a target for deportation as part of President Donald Trump’s widespread immigration crackdown.

Language, Culture, and Power

5 ways teachers are fighting fake news

Sophia Alvarez Boyd, NPR
As the national attention to fake news and the debate over what to do about it continue, one place many are looking for solutions is in the classroom. Since a recent Stanford study showed that students at practically all grade levels can’t determine fake news from the real stuff, the push to teach media literacy has gained new momentum. The study showed that while students absorb media constantly, they often lack the critical thinking skills needed to tell fake news from the real stuff. Teachers are taking up the challenge to change that. NPR Ed put out a social media call asking how educators are teaching fake news and media literacy, and we got a lot of responses. Here’s a sampling from around the country.

Why this high school band is only buying music from composers of color this year

Solvejg Wastvedt, NPR
There’s a bulletin board at the front of the band room at Spring Lake Park High covered in portraits of the composers who wrote this year’s music selection. The bulletin board isn’t new — it’s there every year. What’s new are the faces: Instead of primarily white men, there are faces of women and composers of color. This is intentional. The band directors at Spring Lake Park, outside of St. Paul, Minn., have pledged to include at least one piece by a female composer and one by a composer of color in each concert, for each of the school’s bands. “We made a commitment this year to only buy music from composers of color,” says Brian Lukkasson, one of the directors. He says it’s been hard, but not because those composers aren’t writing for bands. “It’s really hard to find music because there’s just not a lot of composers of color that are being published,” Lukkasson explains.

These California teachers mocked students for skipping school on immigrant boycott day

Kristine Guerra, The Washington Post
Six high school employees in a predominantly Latino district in Southern California were placed on administrative leave after they posted social-media comments insulting students who skipped classes to participate in the “Day Without Immigrants” protest. The employees — five teachers and one guidance coordinator — said classes were quieter and grades higher with the students gone. Words such as “lazy,” “drunk” and “failing” were used to describe those who were absent. Many immigrants across the country went on strike Thursday to protest President Trump’s immigration policies and to bring attention to their importance to the economy. The protest, which began through a social-media campaign, urged immigrants to not spend money and to not attend work or school for the day. The impact was felt mostly in the restaurant industry, where immigrants make up nearly 23 percent of the national workforce, The Washington Post’s Perry Stein reported.

 

Whole Children and Strong Communities

Build relationships not walls in our schools

Californians for Justice
“‘What does it feel like to not have a single caring adult at school?’ ‘It feels pretty sad.’ ‘Terrible.’ ‘Discouraging.’ ‘Harsh and messed up.’ ‘You don’t have anybody to talk to. Nobody you can trust to go to for help.’”

Teacher training programs urged to increase focus on social-emotional skills

Jane Meredith Adams, EdSource
Teachers-in-training need more instruction on how to develop their own and their students’ social and emotional skills, including the ability to reflect on interactions, empathize with others and calm themselves, according to a report released Thursday by the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning, an advocacy and research group based in Chicago. While teacher preparation programs include child development classes, the coursework typically provides no guidance on how teachers can enhance the maturity of their students, according to the report, which surveyed a sample of teacher training programs across the country. “There was very little on ‘How do you promote self awareness in children? How do you promote empathy?’” said Kimberly Schonert-Reichl, an education professor at the University of British Columbia and the lead author of the report.

Fighting for critical civic education in dangerous times

Nicole Mirra, DML Central
The actions that Donald Trump has taken during the first weeks of his presidency have struck many Americans as shockingly antithetical to the values upon which our country was purportedly founded. Posts on Twitter note the terrible irony of refugees and immigrants being detained at our nation’s airports while our Statue of Liberty beckons the world to “give us your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” Those outraged at the prospect of religious tests to enter the country ask, “didn’t we already find it self-evident that all men are created equal?” This question reminded me of something that Barack Obama said during his presidential farewell address, that stirring exhortation to democratic action that now feels like it was delivered so impossibly long ago. He reminded us, his fellow citizens, that while rights may be self-evident, they are not “self-executing” — that only “we, the people, through the instrument of our democracy, can form a more perfect union.”

Adulting school teaches young adults grown-up skills

Patty Wight, NPR
Transitioning to adulthood isn’t new, but there is a more modern way to describe it: adulting.
Get your car’s oil changed? That’s adulting. Cook dinner instead of order takeout? That’s adulting. And now a new school in Maine, called the Adulting School, is dedicated to teaching skills like these to fledgling adults so they can become successful grown-ups. The school offers private social media groups and live events at local bars and restaurants. At these events, attendees can learn skills like how to network as a pro or how to fold a fitted sheet.

Access, Assessment, and Advancement

Investigation: High schools hide dropouts by steering them to alternative programs

Catherine Gewertz, Education Week
In a bid to game the accountability system and hide their dropouts, many traditional high schools steer their low-performing students to alternative programs that become dumping grounds and dropout factories, according to a special investigation published by ProPublica. In a report published Tuesday, ProPublica focuses on an Orlando, Fla., high school that funnels many struggling students to a nearby charter alternative school, where many say they learned little or left before earning diplomas. But the problem extends far beyond Florida, ProPublica reports; many high schools across the country encourage students who aren’t excelling to enroll in alternative charters instead. Those moves allow the sending high school to get low-performing students—dropout risks—off their books, and look rosier in state accountability ratings.

California Speaker pro tempore calls for statewide testing in history-social science

Nancy McTygue, California History-Social Science Project
Last fall, I wrote a blog post in response to a repeated question that we were getting from teachers and administrators:  “What about testing in history-social science?”  As I wrote then (and have excerpted below), I still think statewide testing in history-social science is a way off, and is in no way a sure bet.  However, late last week, I heard something surprising – the #2 member in the Assembly is taking up the cause of statewide testing in history-social science, working with the State Superintendent.  There are many strong reasons against testing, but let’s also consider the case in favor of it, and what this would mean for our collective disciplines.

Placement tests land many students in a math maze instead of on pathways to success

Pamela Burdman, EdSource
Imagine you’re 16. You’ve just passed your California driver’s test, and you’re lining up to get what you think will be your license. Instead, you’re presented with a form telling you that, though you passed your driving test, your county requires an additional test to be sure you’ll be safe on the local roads. And there’s a waiting period of three months to sign up for the second road test, which is only given twice a year. If you pass it, you may drive on any roads in the county. If you fail, however, you’ll be diverted to a special four-month class to help you become a safe driver. That’s not altogether different from the math maze that confronts students at some California State University campuses each year.

Inequality, Poverty, Segregation

Spatializing student learning to reimagine the “place” of inclusion

Srikala Naraian, The Voice
“My name is Srikala Naraian and I am an associate professor in the department of curriculum and teaching at Teacher’s College. I am going to be speaking about my paper titled “Spatializing student learning to reimagine the ‘place’ of inclusion.” The goal of inclusive education is generally understood to be the fundamental restructuring of schools to make them hospitable to all forms of learning and differences, including differences in ability. However, inclusion in practice has acquired a much narrower meaning. It has come to refer to the physical placement of students with disabilities in the general education classroom. To bring inclusion closer to the ideal of inclusive education, we need, then, a new conception of place that can permit educators to describe student learning differences in ways that are not attached to fixed environments.”

When school doesn’t seem fair, students may suffer lasting effects

Evie Blad, Education Week
When students believe schools are unfair places, their loss of trust can lead to a lack of engagement that affects them for years, researchers say. Students who perceive a lack of justice or disparate treatment for certain racial groups may respond with defiant behavior.
And discipline for that behavior may cause them to become further disengaged from school, fostering a spiral of defiance that may lead to poor outcomes, such as less likelihood of college enrollment, researchers from the University of Texas at Austin and Yale and Stanford universities write in a paper published last week. Black and Hispanic students, who often bear the brunt of inconsistent school discipline, are less likely than white peers to trust their schools, the researchers found.

What tames inequality? Violence and mayhem

Walter Scheidel, The Chronicle of Higher Education
How many billionaires does it take to match the net worth of half of the world’s population? In 2016, the richest eight people on the planet owned as much private net wealth as the poorer half of humanity, more than 3.5 billion people. If they decided to go on a field trip together, these fortunates would fit into a minivan. Three years earlier, 85 billionaires were needed to clear that threshold, calling for a more commodious double-decker bus, as Oxfam noted at the time. And not so long ago, in 2010, no fewer than 388 of them had to pool their resources to offset the assets of the global other half, a turnout that would have required a small convoy of vehicles or filled up a typical Boeing 777 or Airbus A340.

Public Schools and Private $

A cautionary tale about the fight over a charter school and the effect on a community

Valerie Strauss, The Washington Post; Carol Burris, Network for Public Education
The popular rationale for charter schools is that they provide families with “choice.” Competition is good, proponents claim, and neighborhood schools will get better as they compete for students and resources. Increasing numbers of parents, however, argue that the opposite is happening. They complain that charters take away the choice they want — a public school in their neighborhood in easy walking distance from their home. The playing field is not even, they argue. Charters have more money to spend, and are favored by political forces. And when a charter chain aggressively lobbies to take over a public school, parents are pitted against each other. Surely that is no one’s choice. What follows is just such a story — that of Philadelphia’s John Wister Elementary, a neighborhood school replaced by a charter, and how that replacement tore a community apart.

The mile high promise, and risk, of school choice

Eric Westervelt, NPR
During Betsy DeVos’ bitter confirmation hearing last month for education secretary, U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet pointed to Denver as a potential national model of a big city school district that’s found an innovative, balanced approach to school choice. “Without exception,” the Colorado Democrat told DeVos, “we demanded quality and implemented strong accountability” for the mix of traditional, charter, innovation and magnet schools in the 92,000-student district. Bennet invited DeVos to come see the Mile High city’s choice program first-hand. DeVos said she’d “love to.” We don’t yet know if she plans to take up Sen. Bennet’s invitation. But NPR Ed did.

A new study suggests that school vouchers could actually hurt organized religion

Matthew Rozsa, Salon
Although school vouchers may be a boondoggle to churches, a new study from The National Bureau of Economic Research finds that “they offer financial stability for congregations while at the same time diminishing their religious activities.” The National Bureau of Economic Research found that more than 80 percent of private school students in the 2011/2012 school year attended a religiously-affiliated school, with Catholicism being the most common religious affiliation. The authors studied 71 Catholic parishes in Milwaukee from 1999 to 2013.

Other News of Note

James Pennington’s fight for African slave trade refugees

Sharla Fett, Black Perspectives
In the hot summer of 1860, Americans confronted an urgent refugee crisis. Over 1,400 young and destitute Africans, seized by the navy from illegal slave ships, filled a camp on the sandy beach of Key West, Florida. Their presence forced into public view two issues critically important in our own times: the value of black lives and U.S. policies on vulnerable and displaced people. In response, Rev. James W. C. Pennington, a New York abolitionist and former fugitive slave, argued for compassion, accountability, and inclusion as principles that would serve justice and strengthen the nation. African slave trade refugees differed from today’s asylum seekers in one critical respect: they had never sought to enter the United States but instead had been brutally dislocated through the transatlantic slave trade. Despite a U.S. ban passed in 1807, many American citizens continued for decades to participate in international slaving. Networks of human traffickers forcibly shipped millions of enslaved Africans to Cuba, Brazil, and elsewhere in the Americas. Increasingly large numbers of children and young teenagers (between 40 to 50 percent of all captives in many voyages) were crowded into the holds of illegal slave ships. Naval cruisers who managed to intercept a contraband slaver found hundreds of captives whose youth compounded their vulnerability.

 

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.