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Teaching, Leading, and Social Justice
California Gov. Brown proposes $4 billion boost for schools and more local control
Daarel Burnette II, Education Week
California’s Gov. Jerry Brown, a Democrat, said last week he wants to add $4 billion to the state’s school funding formula, empower local officials to make better decisions to improve schools, and curtail a teacher shortage that’s hampered schools throughout the state. The ambitious education agenda, detailed in his state-of-the-state speech and in a subsequent press conference, could help set the education agenda for statewide elections: Brown and state chief Tom Torlakson are not running for reelection because they have reached their term limits.
California higher education leaders urge Dreamers to reapply quickly for DACA protection
Larry Gordon, EdSource
The leaders of California’s three sectors of public higher education joined forces Wednesday to urge all undocumented students to take advantage of a recent court decision and reapply for protection against deportation under the DACA program. “Re-enroll now, re-apply now for DACA,” said University of California president Janet Napolitano, who formerly was U.S. Sec. of Homeland Security in the Obama Administration and helped create the executive order for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program in 2012. “We stand with our DACA students. They are important members of our university community,” Napolitano said. Napolitano spoke at a press conference in Sacramento along with state attorney general Xavier Becerra, California community colleges chancellor Eloy Ortiz Oakley and Loren Blanchard, the Cal State system’s executive vice chancellor for academic and student affairs. All said that a ruling last week by a U.S. federal judge in San Francisco has in effect revived DACA at least temporarily by blocking the Trump administration’s plan to end it as planned on March 5.
Is the ‘war on teachers’ as dire as it’s made out to be?
Matt Barnum, The Atlantic
Is a “war on teachers” driving them out of the classroom? In many states, teachers and their unions have made that case, noting that it’s become tougher to earn tenure, bargaining rights have been diminished, and more of their evaluations are based on test scores. A new study tries to find out whether the two—recent policy changes and teacher turnover—are really linked. Its findings make it the latest in a handful of recent studies to suggest that the weakening of teachers unions and job protections hits already-struggling schools the hardest. Focusing on Michigan, the researchers find that a spate of teacher-focused policy changes passed in 2011 and 2012 did not cause an overall increase in teacher turnover. But at schools with lower test scores or more students in poverty, teacher churn jumped. This, the researchers say, raises an important concern: “That teacher labor-market reforms like those implemented in Michigan may disproportionately impact the poorest schools and school districts—those already facing staffing constraints.”
Subsidized housing may help school districts retain teachers
Jeanie Lindsay, NPR
For many teachers, finding an affordable place to live near their schools, where they work, is really tough, and buying a house can be an even bigger challenge. But there’s an effort in Indianapolis to change that. Jeanie Lindsay of Indiana Public Broadcasting reports on a new housing project for teachers.
Language, Culture, and Power
After Trump insult, educators rally around Haitian, African students
Corey Mitchell, Education Week
Educators across the country are rallying around their students of Haitian and African descents after President Donald Trump demanded to know why the United States should accept immigrants from Haiti and the “shithole countries” in Africa. Trump’s comments come at a time when more foreign-born black people live in the United States than at any time in history—and many of the residents are children enrolled in the nation’s K-12 public schools. The president made the remarks while rejecting a bipartisan immigration deal on Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals that would have offered more visas to underrepresented countries in Africa and countries with expiring Temporary Protective Status, including Haiti. Upon hearing the proposal, Trump asked several members of Congress why the U.S. would want people from Haiti and more Africans instead of places such as Norway, a European country. U.S. schools are educating tens of thousands black, foreign-born English-language learners. More than 13,000 of the students are from Haiti, according to a 2015 U.S. Department of Education fact sheet. The same report found that nearly 4,000 of the students were from Kenya, more than 2,000 each from Ethiopia and Somalia and another combined 3,800 students were from unspecified African countries. “This morning in classrooms across our country, America’s teachers are dealing with the fallout. What happens in classrooms if children simply mimic or repeat the president’s vulgar and vile comments or share their racist overtones?” American Federation of Teacher President Randi Weingarten wrote in a statement. “The countries and the people the president targeted need to know that the American people do not stand for Trump’s hateful and racist words.”
Schools become a ‘safe haven’ for Salvadoran students in wake of crackdown
Carolyn Jones, EdSource
California schools are bracing for the impact of the Trump administration’s decision to oust thousands of Salvadoran immigrants, many of whom have been in the U.S. since the early 2000s and whose children are U.S. citizens. “It’s a calamity for families who’ve built their lives here, own homes, own their own businesses, pay taxes, are part of the community,” said Juan Rivera of Carecen SF, a nonprofit that assists Central American immigrants in the San Francisco Bay Area. “Sending these families back to a situation of extreme violence and poverty — it’s horrible to put children in that position. While this moves forward, schools can provide a safe haven.” On Monday, the Department of Homeland Security announced it was ending the Temporary Protected Status program for Salvadorans who fled the country after a pair of major earthquakes in 2001. The deadline for returning to El Salvador is Sept. 9, 2019, giving families 18 months to apply for other legal immigration status or make moving arrangements.
How colleges foretold the #metoo movement
Lena Felton, The Atlantic
Since the fall, the staggering cascade of sexual-misconduct allegations waged against powerful men—from Hollywood moguls to prominent politicians—has mostly centered on the workplace. But as the nation fixated on the downfalls of Harvey Weinstein, John Conyers, and countless others, what has come to be known as the #MeToo movement has been reverberating on college campuses across the country, too. Students flooded social-media feeds with their own stories; university leaders condemned sexual harassment in emails and announcements. Amelia Goldberg, a junior at Harvard College and member of the student-run anti-sexual-violence group Our Harvard Can Do Better, described the experience on campus to me as a “collective airing of trauma.”
Whole Children and Strong Communities
The school-first solution
Pete Ryan, Politico
Americans spend $5,000 more per year on medical care than people in other rich countries, yet live shorter and less healthy lives. Most efforts devoted to addressing health involve the medical system: covering more people, changing the flow of dollars to providers, reducing administrative expenses and the like. But medical care is largely focused on helping people who are sick. What’s the best way to prevent them from getting sick in the first place? I have come to believe that the most cost-effective dollar in health is the one spent on education. There are good economic arguments to be made for a number of different types of nonhealth spending that will improve people’s health, such as cleaning up the environment or lowering the price of healthy food. But the effects of these policies go only so far. Subsidizing healthy food might help people’s weight, but can’t keep them from smoking, drinking, or overdosing on opioids. Education, by contrast, addresses the entire panoply of adverse health behaviors.
Couple invested $50 million in L.A.’s neediest kids and it made them richer
Steve Lopez, Los Angeles Times
Melanie Lundquist, a philanthropist from Palos Verdes Estates, stood in the hall near the principal’s office at Santee Education Complex near downtown Los Angeles. Jaden Pitts, a 17-year-old senior from South L.A., happened to be walking by. He is a Lundquist fellow, which means he’s no slouch. The young man has served as student body treasurer, was a member of the committee that chose the current Santee principal, plays guard on the basketball team, runs sprints on his track team, and started a campus club — Brothers and Hermanos — to explore why male students lag behind females in school performance. Lundquist was curious about his college plans. “Stanford is my first choice,” said Jaden, who’s also interested in Chapman and Loyola, among other universities. “And what do you want to study?” Lundquist asked. “Business,” Jaden said. Lundquist, whose husband, Richard, runs a commercial development company, beamed. The business school at the University of Oregon is named after her father-in-law, she told Jaden. If he ever wanted to explore the possibility of going to school in Eugene, she told the student, she could make a connection for him. Jaden thanked her and walked away with a smile. Melanie and Richard Lundquist are not walking away. Ten years ago, they pledged $50 million to schools in some of L.A.’s most impoverished neighborhoods. Some of their friends questioned their sanity, given school district bureaucracy and politics and the socio-economic challenges of students.
Is school-discipline reform moving too fast?
Wayne D’Orio, The Atlantic
One of the more radical transformations in public education today begins with a simple greeting each morning among second-graders. “Good morning, Mahlet,” says one student to another at McMicken Heights Elementary School in SeaTac, Washington. “Good morning, Liliana,” the second student responds. The exercise continues briskly until all 23 students seated in a circle have been recognized; then the children stand and greet three classmates each with handshakes and solid eye contact. Next, a handful of students are chosen to ask questions of their peers. While the query can be basic, such as “What kinds of movies do you like?,” some of the seven-year-olds struggle to formulate a question and ask it with a strong voice. “I’m not comfortable with that question,” one girl says after she receives a vague inquiry about her feelings. When another student is asked about her favorite color, she politely says, “Can you ask me a harder question?” This activity, part of a Yale-designed program to build students’ social skills, usually runs for at least 20 minutes each day in all 18 elementary schools in Highline Public Schools, a racially diverse district just south of Seattle. “Teachers say, ‘I know more about my students than ever before,’” says Alexandria Haas, the principal of this pre-K-6 school. And that knowledge, she believes—combined with new strategies to help students regulate their emotions—has contributed to a 43 percent drop in the number of children referred for discipline from 2014 to 2016, according to school data.
Access, Assessment, and Advancement
Nation’s schools stuck in ‘average’ range on annual report card
Sterling C. Lloyd, Education Week
As a new presidential administration nears the close of its first year in office and educators across the country grapple with the challenges and opportunities in implementing the Every Student Succeeds Act, the nation’s educational performance earns a grade of C from Quality Counts 2018, the 22nd annual report card issued by the Education Week Research Center.
The nation’s score of 74.5 is about the same as last year, when it posted a 74.2, also a C grade—continuing years of flat performance noted in the annual report, which weighs a host of academic, fiscal, and socioeconomic factors. Looking deeper, this year’s score reflects a mix of strengths and weaknesses, along with substantial disparities between high- and low-performing states. Nationally, high school graduation and postsecondary participation rates are up. But schools continue to struggle with wide achievement and funding gaps. Massachusetts finishes first in the nation for the fourth straight year, with a B-plus and a score of 86.8. Four states with grades of B are its closest competitors: New Jersey (85.9), Vermont (84.1), New Hampshire (83.7), and Connecticut (83.0). At the other end of the spectrum, Nevada receives the nation’s lowest score (65.0), a D. New Mexico also gets a D, with a score of 66.2.
Can 600-plus California districts narrow the achievement gap?
John Fensterwald and Daniel J. Willis, EdSource
As part of the California School Dashboard, the state’s new school accountability system, 1 in 4 school districts will receive assistance from county offices of education and the state to help improve the performance of groups of students who have done particularly poorly on criteria set by the state. But an EdSource analysis found that 561 additional districts are not targeted for formal state support, despite large and persistent achievement gaps between African-American, Latino and low-income students and white and Asian students in those districts. Under the state’s rules for determining county help, those districts, serving several million students, will now face the challenge on their own of narrowing large academic disparities, as indicated by scores on standardized tests in math and English language arts. In many places, those achievement gaps have persisted for decades and failed to narrow during 15 years of state- and federally dictated school reforms during the era of the No Child Left Behind Act. Now, many districts will proceed without an alternative system of strategies and effective supports in place to guide them.
L.A. Unified approves a plan to reveal more information about its schools
Howard Blume, Los Angeles Times
If you are a parent considering one of two special academic programs at Hamilton High School in Palms, you face something of a challenge: The Los Angeles school district provides no data to the public that allows for a direct comparison — even though it has this data. On Tuesday, the Board of Education took a step toward making available its data, preferably in a form that the public can make sense of. The goal is to start with a single webpage that would lead to information that could be downloaded, sorted and searched.
Inequality, Poverty, Segregation
America’s schools are ‘profoundly unequal,’ says U.S. Civil Rights Commission
Cory Turner, NPR
“The federal government must take bold action to address inequitable funding in our nation’s public schools.” So begins a list of recommendations released Thursday by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, an independent, bipartisan agency created by Congress in 1957 to investigate civil rights complaints. Thursday’s report comes after a lengthy investigation into how America’s schools are funded and why so many that serve poor and minority students aren’t getting the resources they say they need. The 150-page report, titled “Public Education Funding Inequity: In An Era Of Increasing Concentration Of Poverty and Resegregation,” reads like a footnoted walking tour through the many ways America’s education system fails vulnerable students — beginning with neighborhood schools that remain deeply segregated and continuing into classrooms where too many students lack access to skilled teachers, rigorous courses and equitable school funding.
Healthier kids? Just hands their families cash.
Adriana Lleras-Muney, Politico
It might sound like a commonplace, but if we want American adults to be healthier in the future, we should invest in children today. The food we eat when we’re young, the air we breathe, even our social and emotional environment, all shape the development of our bodies and minds. Poor children start out with a health disadvantage from the beginning, breathing dirtier air, drinking tainted water, eating inferior food, studying in bad schools which they leave sooner, and in general growing up with more stress and fewer opportunities. All of these factors have been shown to harm their physical health in the short and the long run. Poor children turn into unhealthy adults. But what’s the most effective way to fight the health effects of poverty? That answer isn’t as obvious. The U.S. welfare system, which should combat poverty and its adverse effects, focuses primarily on ensuring that only the deserving poor receive aid. It employs stringent systems to assess eligibility for every program designed to help the poor. Conditions are attached on parental behavior, such as work requirements. And most support is in-kind: Instead of cash, the U.S. prefers to offer food to the hungry, and health insurance to the uninsured, etc. These policies seek to keep program costs down. But in the end, the U.S. has among the highest child poverty rates in the developed world, with almost 1 in 5 children growing up in poverty.
There’s more arts education in LA than you might expect, but not for everyone
Carla Javier, KPCC
More arts education is being offered to more students than previously assumed – 89.6 percent of elementary schools–and 92.7 percent of secondary schools–offer at least some arts instruction during the school day to students. That’s according to the Los Angeles County Arts Commission’s arts education arm’s recently-released county-wide survey of schools and districts’ arts education offerings. The findings were surprising to many advocates, given a common perception that the arts are often the first to go when schools have limited funds.
Public Schools and Private $
Betsy DeVos: Nothing Presidents Barack Obama or George W. Bush did in education reform really worked
Valerie Strauss, The Washington Post
Education Secretary Betsy DeVos delivered her first speech of 2018 and flatly declared that school reform efforts under Presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush had not worked — nor had any other reform effort by any education secretary. She also said the establishment of the Education Department by President Jimmy Carter in 1979 was essentially a “giant nod to union bosses.” DeVos gave a keynote address at the American Enterprise Institute’s conference titled “Bush-Obama School Reform: Lessons Learned,” and then answered questions from Rick Hess, resident scholar and director of Education Policy Studies at the conservative think tank. Here are some things she said — and didn’t say — in her speech and in her conversation with Hess, followed by the text of the speech.
What we can learn from closure of charter school that DeVos praised as “shining example”
Claire Smrekar, The Conversation
When Education Secretary Betsy DeVos and first lady Melania Trump visited Excel Academy Public Charter School last spring, DeVos praised the school as a “shining example of a school meeting the needs of its students, parents and community.” Melania Trump called the charter school “an exceptional example of a school preparing young women both academically and personally so that they may succeed in a global community.” The visit made international headlines due to the fact that it also featured Queen Rania Al-Abdullah of Jordan. In terms of publicity, a school could not ask for a better platform. Unfortunately, we now know the praise the school got during its brief time on the world stage did not match its poor performance. On Jan. 11, the DC Public Charter School Board voted unanimously, 6-0, to shut down the Pre-K-8, all-girls school at the end of the current school year. The board action wasn’t because of some sudden turn of events after Secretary DeVos, Melania Trump and Queen Raina paid their visit. Instead, records show, it was because the “trend for student performance over the past several years has been negative, despite any benefits that may have occurred from learning in an all-girl setting.”
The mess in Arizona’s charter school sector
Valerie Strauss, The Washington Post; Jim Hall, Arizonans for Charter School Accountability
The pro-school-choice Center for Educational Reform ranks Arizona as the state with the fewest regulations and restrictions for charter schools in the country. Arizona has no cap on charter schools and allows charter owners to opt out of procurement requirements and accounting guidelines required of other state agencies. Statutes even mandate that the state auditor general cannot monitor charter schools — but the lack of transparency goes much further than that. Charter schools have been allowed for years to systematically submit false and incomplete spending data to the state, making it impossible to detect waste and fraud.
Other News of Note
How civics teachers can talk to students about Trump’s racist comments
Valerie Strauss, The Washington Post; Andre Perry, Brookings Institution
Education Secretary Betsy DeVos may not have said anything publicly about President Trump’s racist remarks on Jan. 11 when he referred to Haiti, El Salvador and African nations as “shithole countries” — but civics teachers can’t afford to ignore them. Inertia in the face of this kind of vitriol reinforces the kind of schooling that fostered many presidents’ bigoted views, including Trump’s. At a meeting last week in the White House with legislators about immigration reform, Trump made the comments and suggested that the United States should welcome people from Norway, a majority-white country. After the remarks were reported, Michigan teacher Dan Morse tweeted this directly to me and a few other education experts: “Thinking about my immigrant students this morning and about the disgusting comments made by our president yesterday. I teach civics. How should we address?”