Just News from Center X – February 4, 2022

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Teaching, Leading, and Social Justice

More than half of teachers are looking for the exits, a poll says

Anya Kamanetz, NPR

Teachers are picking up slack for absent colleagues. They’re covering for unfilled positions. And 55% of them say they will leave teaching sooner than they had originally planned, according to a poll of its members by the nation’s largest teachers union. The National Education Association poll, conducted in January, helps quantify the stress being placed on educators right now. It found that the number who say they’ll leave the profession sooner has risen significantly since August.

Where are all the substitute teachers?

Suzanne McLeod and Larry Dake, The Conversation

As a result of the omicron variant of the coronavirus, many school districts across the country are finding themselves short of teachers, who are quitting, getting sick or even dying. Some schools have even called on parents to step in to provide adult supervision in classrooms. In New Mexico, the governor has asked National Guard members to serve as substitute teachers. Normally schools hire substitutes to cover teacher absences. But there are so many teachers out with COVID-19 that the demand is much higher than usual. Pay for substitute teachers averaged $17 an hour in May 2020, according to federal figures. Assuming a substitute worked as much as possible – seven hours a day for 180 school days – that’s $21,420 a year, which is about one-third of the national average pay for full-time teachers.

Frustrating, exhausting but worth it: School principals tell what their jobs are like now

Carolyn Jones, Ed Source

Between ever-changing Covid guidance, teacher shortages and students’ escalating mental health needs, these are extraordinarily stressful times for California’s school principals. But there’s hope that these challenges will lead to permanent, positive changes in K-12 education, especially for students who faced inequities long before the pandemic, according to a panel of school principals who participated in an EdSource webinar Monday. “Right now we have a tremendous opportunity to transform what we expect from schools and what schools expect from students,” said Vito Chiala, principal at Overfelt High School in San Jose. “If we take advantage of it.”

The roundtable, “California school principals: Leading staff and students through uncertain times,” covered a wide range of challenges that principals are facing and how districts and the state can support them. The stakes are high: Recent research shows that 1 in 5 principals quit every year, and 4 of 5 say they experience frequent job stress.

Language, Culture, and Power

Black History Can Do More Than Counter White Racism

Anthony L. Brown, Education Week

What does it mean to study Black history? Black history is a movement of ideas targeted to redress the long history of anti-Blackness. Anti-Blackness is a totalizing system of thought that positions Black people, including their bodies, culture, and value systems, as bad or dysfunctional. But Black history does more than counter anti-Black ideologies; it also documents the social contexts, experiences, aesthetics, and intellectual pursuits of African Americans. This idea of both countering white racism and writing and creating from one’s standpoint—removed from the white gaze—is central to Black history. Ideas and knowledge have an inextricable link to the physical and material realities of Black folk. It is not just history that has a role in spreading or debunking anti-Black ideas but also the arts, sciences, social sciences, advertising, and photography. Black history is thus part of a broader transformational movement across different disciplines.

Removing Indigenous concepts from ethnic studies sends a terrible message to California’s students

Sean Arce, Theresa Montaño, & Guadalupe Cardona, Los Angeles Times

Removing the Indigenous concepts In Lak’ech and Ashe from California’s Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum, on the false premise that they are religious, sends a message to all of the state’s students, especially those who are Chicanx, Black and Native, that their cultures are not worth fighting for. Last September, the Californians for Equal Rights Foundation and three San Diego parents sued the California Department of Education and the California State Board of Education, claiming that In Lak’ech was an Aztec prayer and Ashe was a religious chant.

Undocumented Students Still Need Support

Teresa Mettela, The Nation

It took Farah Said almost seven years to complete her undergraduate studies as an undocumented student in New York City. After enrolling in CUNY City College’s Childhood Education Program and completing 113 credits, Said was told she could not graduate. Even though she had applied and was accepted to the program as an undocumented student, administration later informed her that she would not be able to complete the last, required part of the curriculum—student teaching. “Student teaching requires finger printing and finger printing requires a social security number, which I did not have,” says Said. Said is among 51,000 undocumented students who currently reside in New York and of 569,000 in the United States. New research indicates that undocumented students account for approximately two percent of all students in higher education in the United States; these students are often encouraged to apply to the City University of New York.

Whole Children and Strong Communities

Some families are being forced to choose between remote learning and school meals

Cory Turner, NPR

Joel Barron, a mother of two in Minnetonka, Minn., has a question for policymakers: “Will you look in my child’s eyes when they do not have any food?” Until recently, Barron’s children, ages 10 and 12, qualified for free school meals. During the last school year, when they and millions of other kids were learning remotely, Barron received the value of the meals they missed on a debit card that she could use to buy groceries herself. The program, called P-EBT, began with the pandemic in March 2020. “It was a godsend,” Barron says of the Pandemic Electronic Benefit Transfer program, which is administered by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). “We were able to actually get through the whole month without trying to think about, ‘Oh, we have to go to the food [pantry].’ ”

In U.S., women more likely than men to report feeling empathy for those suffering

Joshua Alvarado, Pew Research

Research has suggested that the COVID-19 pandemic has had greater impacts on women in the economy and the home. In this period of turmoil, women also may be carrying a heavier emotional burden than men, according to a Pew Research Center survey. The Center recently asked Americans about their thoughts and feelings regarding human suffering in light of the pandemic and other recent tragedies, finding that women and men answered a few questions somewhat differently. Two-thirds of women (66%) say that in the past year, they have personally thought “a lot” or “some” about big questions such as the meaning of life, whether there is any purpose to suffering and why terrible things happen to people, compared with 55% of men who report the same.

Child Obesity Grew During the Pandemic. How Schools Can Help Reverse the Trend

Arianna Prothero, Education Week

Anxiety, depression, and stalled social development are a few of the troubling developments that research has linked to the pandemic. Add obesity to that list. Recent research has found a significant rise in obesity rates among children and teens over the course of the pandemic, accelerating an already troubling upward trend. Schools, a key source of proper nutrition and physical education, are positioned to help head off this trend. But efforts to tackle the problem face stiff competition for educators’ attention alongside the ongoing pandemic, staff shortages, and the need to make up for lost academic ground.

Access, Assessment, Advancement

New York Desperately Needs Universal Childcare

Jabari Brisport, Jacobin

For three and a half years, the director of a Long Island childcare center has not taken home a paycheck. She has woken up early and stayed up late running the center, but to keep it open and keep paying her staff, she had to take herself entirely off the payroll. Even so, the program has only lasted because members of the local community have contributed their own time, money, and energy painting the walls, fixing the boiler, paying for medicine, and more. As the director explains all this to me at her center, she pauses regularly to help care for the children that surround us. I met her and visited her center during a ten-week childcare listening tour across New York State. On this tour, it quickly became clear that her story and the story of this center are not the exception, but the norm. The entire childcare industry is hanging on by a thread.

Baker College Threatens Legal Action Against Former Teacher Who Talked to Reporters

Anna Clark and David Jesse, ProPublica

Baker College, one of the largest private schools in Michigan, is threatening legal action against a former faculty member who spoke to ProPublica and the Detroit Free Press for an investigation published this month. Jacqueline Tessmer, who taught digital media for 14 years at Baker’s campus in Auburn Hills, told the news organizations that students often came to the nonprofit college unprepared to succeed and exited without degrees or good jobs but with heavy debt from loans. “Baker College has ruined a lot of people’s lives,” she said in the story. A Jan. 19 letter to Tessmer — sent by the law firm Plunkett Cooney on behalf of Baker — demanded she retract her statements, which it described as “false and defamatory.”

U.S. Supreme Court Decision Sounds Death Knell for Race-Conscious College Admissions Policies [Q&A]

Gary Orfield, NEPC

It’s been under attack since its inception. But affirmative action in college admissions may be gone for good within the next two years as a result of the U.S. Supreme Court’s announce-ment last week that it will decide cases related to race-conscious admissions policies at the University of North Carolina and Harvard. The cases, Students for Fair Admissions Inc. v. President & Fellows of Harvard College and Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. University of North Carolina, both involve challenges against the admissions policies of highly competitive universities that consider race as one of multiple factors in their efforts to assemble a diverse student body. Both were filed by a conservative group, Students for Fair Admissions, founded by former stockbroker Edward Blum. The Harvard case alleges that the university’s approach to admissions places Asian students at a disadvantage. The North Carolina case argues that the public university’s con-sideration of race in undergraduate admissions violates Title VI and the Constitution. In the Q&A below, National Education Policy Center Fellow Gary Orfield discusses the implications of a decision that will almost certainly have major implications for affirmative action, given the current conservative makeup of the court. Orfield is Distinguished Research Professor of Education, Law, Political Science, and Urban Planning at the Univer-sity of California, Los Angeles, and co-director of the Civil Rights Project/Proyecto Dere-chos Civiles at UCLA, and the author of The Walls around Opportunity: The Failure of Colorblind Policy for Higher Education.

Inequality, Poverty, Segregation

Economic segregation in schools has worsened, widening achievement gaps, study says

Howard Blume, Los Angeles Times

The segregation of young students from low-income families — brought on by climbing Latino enrollments and the departure of white and middle-class families — has worsened across the country over a 15-year period, contributing to widening achievement gaps along economic and racial lines, a new study has concluded. In 2000, the typical child from a family living below the poverty line attended an elementary school where 45% of those enrolled were children from middle-class families. By 2015, that figure fell to 36% nationwide, according to a UC Berkeley and University of Maryland study. Researchers compared data for elementary-school students at more than 14,000 school districts nationwide over a 15-year period, ending in 2015.

Report points to why Arizona Latino students have been falling behind academically [AUDIO]

Griselda Zeteno, KTAR News

A new report shines a light on factors that for decades have been causing Latino students in Arizona to lag behind many of their peers. Poverty, healthcare, housing and food insecurity are just some of those factors that determine whether Latino students are able to go to school prepared to learn, according to the latest MAPA report. “We are calling these factors the social determinants of education,” said Stephanie Parra, executive director of the advocacy group ALL in Education.

Racism in O.C. schools is nothing new — but it’s surprisingly diverse

Gustavo Arellano, Los Angeles Times

It’s an Orange County ritual as reliable as the Los Angeles (yeah, right) Angels underachieving. High school students hurl racial and ethnic epithets at their peers, openly and without shame. At sporting events, after school, during lunchtime. Against rival schools or fellow classmates. There’s outrage and condemnation, and administrators and parents vow: “Never again.” And then it happens again. Prep racism happened when I was a student at Anaheim High School in the mid-1990s and our teams played wealthier, whiter schools. Such taunts continued when my brother was a basketball player a decade later.

Democracy and the Public Interest

Book Ban Efforts Spread Across the U.S.

Elizabeth A. Harris and Alexandra Alter, New York Times

In Wyoming, a county prosecutor’s office considered charges against library employees for stocking books like “Sex Is a Funny Word” and “This Book Is Gay.” In Oklahoma, a bill was introduced in the State Senate that would prohibit public school libraries from keeping books on hand that focus on sexual activity, sexual identity or gender identity. In Tennessee, the McMinn County Board of Education voted to remove the Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel “Maus” from an eighth-grade module on the Holocaust because of nudity and curse words. Parents, activists, school board officials and lawmakers around the country are challenging books at a pace not seen in decades. The American Library Association said in a preliminary report that it received an “unprecedented” 330 reports of book challenges, each of which can include multiple books, last fall.

The Inside Story of the Banning of “Maus.” It’s Dumber Than You Think

David Corn, Mother Jones

One of my favorite books is Maus: A Survivor’s Tale, Art Spiegelman’s brilliant 1986 graphic novel that recounts his parents’ harrowing experiences during the Holocaust when they were imprisoned in Auschwitz. In the book, Jews are depicted as mice, Germans as cats, Poles as pigs. It is a richly and simply drawn blend of history, fiction, and memoir that captures the story of these survivors, their trauma, and the consequences for their son. The book is a complete artistic success, hailed widely as a masterpiece and awarded a Pulitzer, the first ever handed to a graphic novel. Not to overstate Maus’ significance, its publication legitimized this form of storytelling and marked a historic moment in American literature. In 1992, the Museum of Modern Art mounted an exhibition displaying Spiegelman’s original panels for the work. Two weeks ago, a Tennessee school board voted to ban the book.

Preparing citizens to stick their heads in the sand

Valerie Strauss, Washington Post

Discomfort. That’s what many of the laws and bills put forth in Republican-led states to limit how teachers can address the legacy of slavery, gender and other subjects in classrooms say they are trying to avoid. Kids shouldn’t feel “discomfort.” It’s right there in the bill, titled “Individual Freedom” and backed by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) making its way through the legislative process in the Sunshine State; it would prohibit anybody from making anybody else “feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress on account of his or her race, color, sex, or national origin.” And it’s already law in other states. The laws, of course, are aimed at stopping teachers from discussing the racist history of the country and other controversial subjects, but they are, according to the authors of this post, based on three fundamental misconceptions.

Other News of Note

Black Lives Matter at DeKalb Schools: Students want to talk about race

Cassidy Alexander, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

The students have spoken in DeKalb County: They want to talk about race. Just miles away, state Republican lawmakers have spoken, too: They want to limit those discussions. But for the next few days, in the DeKalb district, students and staff will have those talks about racial disparities and celebrate the accomplishments of Black community members. It’s part of the annual Black Lives Matter “week of action.” Superintendent Cheryl Watson-Harris said the week is about letting students in the state’s third-largest district have difficult conversations. “It’s our responsibility as educators to create safe spaces for children to speak about issues that are important to them,” Watson-Harris told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “That I do not believe is in conflict with any of the other larger political conversations.”

Manchester high schools had a dress code from the ’80s. Students decided it was time to update it. [Audio]

Sarah Gibson, New Hampshire Public Radio

Central High School senior Kellan Barbee has a straightforward style: navy fleece sweater, loose gray pants. He’s never got in trouble with the dress code, but many people he knows have. And last year, he decided it was time for an update. “It was created before a majority of our high school students were born,” says Barbee, who serves as one of four student representatives to the Manchester school board. “The original language of it is from the eighties.” After months of talking to students and district administrators, Barbee rewrote the dress code, which got final approval from the Manchester school board last week. It is the first policy in the district authored by a student.