Just News from Center X – January 12, 2018

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Teaching, Leading, and Social Justice

L.A. school board keeps interim leader, prepares for superintendent search

Howard Blume, Los Angeles Times
Meeting for the first time since Supt. Michelle King announced her retirement, the Los Angeles Board of Education voted Tuesday to name Vivian Ekchian — who has been filling in for King since October — as interim superintendent. Board members announced the decision after a 2 ½-hour closed session. “The board had a very thoughtful and rich conversation about the work of the superintendent and the selection process ahead,” board President Monica Garcia said after the meeting. The board now will begin work on selecting the district’s sixth leader in the last decade. At a minimum, Garcia said, members will spend time hashing out the selection process each Tuesday when they meet.

A focus on writing in every class is key to success in this rural California district

Theresa Harrington, EdSource
Jesse Sanchez, principal at Brawley Union High School in Imperial County, was alarmed when four years ago he read proposals seniors submitted for voluntary end-of-year projects on topics such as nutrition and community service. “What I was reading wasn’t making any sense,” said Sanchez, principal of the main high school in Brawley, a town in a remote desert region of California a half–hour drive from the Mexican border. What worried him most was the poor quality of students’ writing, which showed some lacked the ability to make coherent arguments for projects they wanted to do to earn a special graduation sash and a note on their transcripts recording project completion. Sanchez responded by creating a school-wide program that requires all students to write regularly in every class, including P.E., where earlier this year, students wrote about what they had learned regarding muscle anatomy and weight training. The writing program helped spur a culture shift throughout the Brawley Union High School District, which includes a continuation high school for students who are behind in credits and a community day school for students who have behavior or attendance problems. The culture shift included comprehensive teacher training and staff teambuilding, new classes, and stressing the importance of standardized Smarter Balanced tests in English language arts and math to students. Over the past three years, the school, which serves about 1,670 students, has seen its scores soar on these tests aligned to the Common Core standards, which high school juniors take each spring.

In schools, classroom proximity breeds teacher collaboration

Sarah D. Sparks, Education Week
When a teacher has a problem, she might go to a mentor or an instructional coach—but often, she goes to whomever is closest at hand. That’s why a new series of studies suggests that school administrators can boost teacher collaboration and build on formal teacher training by paying more attention to how teachers are assigned to classrooms within the building. “Clearly, it can make a big difference,” said co-author James Spillane of Northwestern University, whose most recent work is published Tuesday in the magazine Education Next.

Language, Culture, and Power

Diverse Virginia school district makes push for more teachers of color

Debbie Truong, The Washington Post
A student who steps into a classroom in Virginia’s largest school district is likely to be Hispanic, Asian, black or multiracial. Chances are, that student’s teacher will be white. Students of color made up more than 60 percent of the Fairfax County school district’s enrollment last fall, according to state data. Meanwhile, teachers of color were about 18 percent of the school system’s teaching staff, data from the school district shows. Officials say they are trying to bridge those differences with recruiting and hiring practices aimed at courting a more racially diverse teaching force. Recruiters have twice taken trips to Puerto Rico in the past two years and participated in employment fairs hosted by institutions that serve people of color. The redoubled focus has helped, but Superintendent Scott Brabrand said the 188,000-student school system is committed to further diversifying its cadre of teachers. “We need to have a workforce that reflects the diversity of our students,” he said. “The reality is that our work around hiring teachers of color is improving but it’s still not where we want it to be.”

Why do cartoon villains speak in foreign accents?

Isabel Fattal, The Atlantic
When the sociolinguist Calvin Gidney saw The Lion King in theaters two decades ago, he was struck by the differences between Mufasa and Scar. The characters don’t have much in common: Mufasa is heroic and steadfast, while Scar is cynical and power-hungry. But what Gidney noticed most was how they each spoke: Mufasa has an American accent, while Scar, the lion of the dark side, roars in British English. In a climactic scene in which Scar accuses Simba of being the “murderer!” responsible for Mufasa’s death, the final “r” in his declaration floats up into a sky bursting with lightning, and it’s hard to imagine it sounding quite as monstrous in another tone. Gidney, an associate professor in child study and human development at Tufts University who specializes in sociolinguistics, saw Scar’s accent as part of a disturbing pattern in the film: Foreign accents and non-standard dialects were being used to voice all of the “bad” characters. Gidney also noticed that Scar’s minions, the hyenas, spoke in either African American English or English with a Spanish accent. Gidney found this trend concerning, especially since the theme of the movie could be described as “the ‘natural order of things,’” he said. “I thought it was really disturbing that it was necessary to ‘take back the jungle’ from the British-sounding evil lion, plus the African American-sounding and Latino-sounding hyenas.”

Sexual harassment reports double at Los Angeles community colleges

Adolfo Guzman-Lopez, KPCC
According to a report released on Monday by the nine-campus Los Angeles Community College District, formal complaints of sexual harassment at the campuses and the central office nearly doubled in the most recent years. The report tallied 14 sexual harassment complaints in 2016 and 27 in 2017. The district educates 140,000 students. “While I think those numbers are unacceptable, I think those numbers, to me, appear to be a little low,” said Andra Hoffman, an elected board member for the LA Community College District and chair of the Ad-Hoc Committee on Title IX/Sexual Harassment. Many people who suffer harassment, Hoffman said, don’t file formal complaints, although the current climate is leading many more to come forward. The report comes during a climate in which many U.S. institutions, both public and private, are being called to account for the ways in which they handle harassment. That’s leading administrators to overhaul their harassment policies.

Whole Children and Strong Communities

At this nature-based preschool, a rainy day is a chance for muddy play

Priska Neely, KPCC
The first big rainstorm of 2018 didn’t keep the kids at the Child Educational Center indoors. The programming at the La Cañada early learning center is based in nature and play, so children usually spend more than half their days outside. And a rainy day is no different. “Because it doesn’t rain much here, these are opportunities for children to really get out and explore,” said preschool director Ellen Veselack. “They’re such incredible little scientists because they want to know about everything and this is just one more opportunity to really figure out what’s going on.”

The secret to student engagement

Chip Heath and Dan Heath, Education Week
What makes certain brief experiences in our lives so memorable and meaningful? Let’s call them “peak moments”: A wedding day. A successful public presentation. An award received for work well done. We spent several years studying peak moments, and in our book The Power of Moments, we reveal what we learned: Peak moments share similar elements—such as elevation and connection—and armed with this knowledge, all of us can create richer experiences for the people we care about. But there’s one critical period in life that is missing these powerful moments: the time students spend in the classroom. Think about it: What do you remember from your experience as a student? Senior musical. Swim meets. Science fairs. Football games. Debate tournaments. Choir concerts. Notice the pattern? They’re all peak moments, representing the culmination of students’ work. They’re social, often performed in front of an audience, and involve an element of competition or pressure. There’s a sense of pomp and circumstance about them—notice how often we actually wear distinctive clothes to them. Unfortunately, all those memorable moments happen outside the classroom, even though students spend the vast majority of their time inside the classroom.

A school sought 50 men to stand in for absent fathers at ‘Breakfast with Dads’ — nearly 600 showed up

Valerie Strauss, The Washington Post
Something somewhat extraordinary happened last month at Billy Earl Dade Middle School in Dallas. The school — with a student population of nearly 900, about 90 percent from low-income families — planned to host its first “Breakfast with Dads,” according to the Dallas Morning News. About 150 male students, ages 11 to 13, signed up. But event organizers were concerned that some would attend without a male figure at their side, so they put out a call for volunteers who could serve as mentors. “When a young person sees someone other than their teacher take interest in them, it inspires them. That’s what we want to see happen,” the Rev. Donald Parish Jr., pastor of True Lee Missionary Baptist Church and the event organizer, told the Morning News. A call for volunteers by children’s advocate Kristina Chäadé Dove‏ — who has served on what is called a site-based decision-making team for the middle school — was published on social media in early December. When the day came for the event, nearly 600 men showed up to help and mentor the boys, some of them volunteering for the first time.

Access, Assessment, and Advancement

A Stanford study of 45 million students found something startling about which kids succeed

Chris Weller, Business Insider
For many parents, judging a local public school comes down to average test scores and the amount of money going into that school. A new Stanford University study of test scores from 45 million students, who populate the about 11,000 US public-school districts, upends that set of assumptions. The study found no correlation between a given district’s socioeconomic status and the average test scores of its students. According to Stanford sociologist Sean Reardon, the smartest way to measure a school’s effectiveness was to instead look at the students’ rate of improvement over time, as measured by their standardized tests.

Expansion of AP computer science courses draws more girls and minorities

Nick Anderson, The Washington Post
Ten years ago, girls were so scarce in high school computer science classes that the number of female students taking Advanced Placement tests in that subject could be counted on one hand in nine states. In five others, there were none. Latino and African American students were also in short supply, a problem that has bedeviled educators for years and hindered efforts to diversify the high-tech workforce. Now, an expansion of AP computer science classes is helping to draw more girls and underrepresented minorities into a field of growing importance for schools, universities and the economy. Testing totals for female, black and Latino students all doubled in 2017, following the national debut of an AP course in computer science principles. It joined a longer-established AP course focused on the programming language Java. Racial and gender imbalances persist. But education leaders said the data show a significant advance in a quest to banish the stereotype that computer science is mainly for coding geeks who tend to be white or Asian American boys.

Many large public universities don’t collect data on suicides, report finds

Samantha Raphelson, NPR
Forty-three of the largest public universities in the U.S. do not track student suicides, according to recent findings from The Associated Press, despite efforts to improve mental health on campus. Advocates say that without this data, schools can’t determine whether those initiatives are working. Since the 1990s, a rising number of college students have been seeking treatment for serious mental health problems, according to the American Psychological Association. Forty-six public universities currently track suicides, 27 of which have consistently done so since 2007, says Collin Binkley, the AP reporter who conducted the survey of the 100 largest U.S. public universities. Nine schools could only provide limited data, and two didn’t provide any information.

Inequality, Poverty, Segregation

NFL player turned art teacher Aaron Maybin paints a picture of Baltimore’s cold schools: ‘kids are freezing’

Jeff Barker, The Baltimore Sun
Former NFL linebacker Aaron Maybin was growing frustrated as he repeatedly vented on social media about shivering Baltimore City schoolchildren enduring unheated classrooms. “I was tweeting about it and people just weren’t getting it,” said Maybin, who teaches art at Matthew A. Henson Elementary School, on Monday. And then it struck him: People need to see it. So Maybin, 29, set his phone down and hit “record.” The Twitter video last week of kids seated in the school library with winter coats — and Maybin clasping his hands together for warmth — went viral and propelled him into the forefront of what’s become a prominent educational issue and the political debate over who is to blame.

Professors suggest ‘baby bonds’ could fix widening inequality in The U.S.

John Ydstie, NPR
“Baby Bonds” are back in the news. Two professors presented their idea to do something about widening inequality to an economics conference. They suggest creating an education trust fund for each newborn. The grants — ranging from $500 to $50,000 — would be on a sliding scale tied to household income.

How money matters for schools

Bruce Baker, Learning Policy Institute
For decades, some politicians and pundits have argued that “money does not make a difference” for school outcomes. While it is certainly possible to spend money poorly, this viewpoint is strongly contradicted by a large body of evidence from rigorous empirical research. A thorough review of research on the role of money in determining school quality leads to the following conclusions: Does money matter? Yes. On average, aggregate per-pupil spending is positively associated with improved student outcomes. The size of this effect is larger in some studies than in others, and, in some cases, additional funding appears to matter more for some students than for others—in particular students from low-income families who have access to fewer resources outside of school. Clearly, money must be spent wisely to yield benefits. But, on balance, in direct tests of the relationship between financial resources and student outcomes, money matters.

Public Schools and Private $

Los Angeles deserves to know more about Ref Rodriguez’s role as charter school landlord

Donald Cohen, Huffington Post
The recent revelation that the campaign money-laundering case against Los Angeles school board member Ref Rodriguez has expanded to include separate allegations of conflict of interest reveals a hard truth: the public knows far too little about how our money is being spent on charter schools. If the charter school group that Rodriguez cofounded, Partnerships to Uplift Communities (PUC), hadn’t held itself accountable, would we have ever found out about his potential conflict of interest? The office of the L.A. Unified inspector general must now be fully empowered to determine whether the $285,000 in public money Rodriguez transferred to nonprofits that he controlled actually contributed to the education of PUC students. But there’s another pot of money we should be looking at while we’re at it. Last spring, In the Public Interest found that of the hundreds of millions of public dollars going to California charter school groups annually to lease, build, and buy school buildings, much is spent with little oversight or accountability due to inadequate state policy. Not only has the public supported charter schools that have been found to have discriminatory enrollment policies, we’ve even given facilities funding to those that have engaged in unethical or corrupt practices. In a number of instances, groups have used this funding to pay above market rate rent to property owners they have close business ties with, effectively siphoning public money into private pockets.

A charter school owns condos. Can students use the hot tub?

Editorial, Houston Chronicle
Who knows who you’ll run into at the succession of holiday wassails and New Year’s parties being held across Houston? Maybe J.J. Watt will show up at a neighborhood fundraiser. Perhaps George H.W. Bush will drop by. But there’s one guy everyone should keep an eye out for: Kevin Hicks. He’s the superintendent of Accelerated Intermediate Academy, a public school charter system in Texas that has received more than $55 million in federal and state monies since opening in 2001, as reported by Jacob Carpenter in the Chronicle. Apparently he’s a rare sight around his school, according to some parents and former teachers, even though he’s paid more than a quarter-million dollars each year. So if you happen to run into Hicks, would you mind asking him a few questions? Since 2011, Accelerated has purchased two pricey condos in high-end neighborhoods – one in Houston, and one in Dallas – while paying its teachers below-average salaries and housing its fewer than 300 students in structures resembling portable trailers, some without windows. In contrast, the Houston condo has floor-to-ceiling windows. It also has access to a pool with skyline views. The Dallas unit, which is advertised to feature a wine cooler and granite counters, has access to a rooftop deck and hot tub. We’d like to know what purpose these condos truly serve, and who, if anyone, lives in them.

UCLA initiative promotes school collaboration to improve math performance

George White, EdSource
In bringing together principals of charter schools and regular public schools, a new university-based initiative is attempting to salve wounds inflicted by the rawest conflict in the nation’s second-largest district. There are more charter schools in Los Angeles Unified than anywhere else in the nation, and the battles over them continue to roil the district. A number of educators have said the key is for charter schools and regular schools to collaborate with each other, learn from each other, rather than wage energy-and resource-draining battles. In other words, to return to the original purpose of charter schools, which was to be laboratories of innovation that the public schools that spawned them could apply in their own classrooms. That is where the UCLA Center for the Transformation of Schools comes in. The center was founded last November by UCLA professor Pedro Noguera, who has been a vigorous voice in calling for a truce in the charter school wars and to focus on what each sector can learn from the other.

Other News of Note

Recommit to your role as citizen in 2018

John B. King, Jr., The Baltimore Sun
The end of one year and the start of another is an opportunity for renewal. Among the aspects of American life most in need of renewal is our commitment to civic education and engagement. It is essential for building the political will to grapple effectively with the complex challenges we face — from getting the relationships between police and communities right to combating the opioid epidemic to navigating the consequences of climate change. Yet worrisome signs of inadequate civic education for our students abound. The National Assessment of Educational Progress, or the “Nation’s Report Card,” recently showed that in 12th grade, only one in five students demonstrated a working knowledge of the Constitution, the presidency, Congress, the courts and how laws are made. A 2016 survey of American adults also found that about one out of every three respondents could not name a single branch of the United States government. Getting civic education right requires attending to three critical things: students’ foundational knowledge, their skills and their inclination for civic action.