Just News from Center X – January 20, 2017

Just News from Center X is a free weekly education news blast.
Please subscribe and tweet or share.

January 20, 2017

Teaching, Leading, and Social Justice

Alyson Klein and Andrew Ujifusa, Education Week

Betsy DeVos, Donald Trump’s pick to lead the U.S. Department of Education, sought to use her confirmation hearing to beat back the notion that she would undermine public education as head of the department, as Democrats pressed her on everything from her views on the civil rights of gay and lesbian students, to states’ responsibilities for students in special education, and guns in schools. “If confirmed, I will be a strong advocate for great public schools,” DeVos said. “But, if a school is troubled, or unsafe, or not a good fit for a child—perhaps they have a special need that is going unmet—we should support a parent’s right to enroll their child in a high-quality alternative.” She also noted that her mother, Elsa Prince, was a public school teacher. But those assurances didn’t seem to quell the anxieties of Democrats on the committee, including Sen. Patty Murray of Washington, the ranking member. “I have major concerns with how you have spent your career and fortune fighting to privatize public education and gut investments in public schools,” she said.

Emily Deruy, The Atlantic

Donald Trump advocated on the campaign trail for a $20 billion federal school-voucher program. But during her confirmation hearing on Tuesday evening, Betsy DeVos, the president-elect’s choice to lead the U.S. Education Department, said school choice should be a state decision. She framed school choice as a right for students and families. And she said during the hearing that she was committed to strengthening public education for all students. While the Michigan billionaire has backed charter schools and vouchers, which let families use public money to pay for private schools, DeVos would not, she said, try to force states to embrace school choice. But a number of organizations, largely Democratic, that had raised questions about DeVos’s commitment to expanding charters and vouchers and about her family’s financial holdings and religious causes were unlikely to find much more of the hearing reassuring.

Madeline Will, Education Week

This week, hundreds of thousands of people will descend upon Washington for the presidential inauguration of Donald Trump. Among the crowd: Teachers. Whether they’re there to support or protest Trump, to take their students to witness history or to see it for themselves, educators across the country are preparing to see the 45th president of the United States sworn in. “I like taking kids to the inauguration because it’s such a patriotic, nationalistic sort of thing that you don’t even see on the Fourth of July. This is tradition,” said Anne McCanless, a social studies teacher from a public school in Charlotte, N.C., who is taking a group of 40 high school students to see Trump sworn into office. “This is real history happening, and they’re a part of it.” McCanless took groups of students to both of Barack Obama’s inaugurations, in 2009 and 2013. This one, she and other teachers have said, feels a little different.

Fermin Leal, EdSource

Students in teacher preparation programs who commit to teach math, science, bilingual education or special education could receive grants of $20,000 under a new bill introduced in the state Legislature. Assembly Bill 169, authored by Assemblyman Patrick O’Donnell, D-Long Beach, is aimed at recruiting more students into teaching careers in high-demand subjects, those that school districts across the state have struggled to fill amid the ongoing teacher shortage. AB 169 would award the one-time grants to teaching candidates who commit to working in math, science, bilingual education or special education for at least four years after they receive their teaching credential.

 

 

Language, Culture, and Power

Paige St. John, Joel Rubin, and Teresa Watanabe, Los Angeles Times

It was the biggest political showdown at UC Davis in years: Hundreds of students and activists turned out last week with protest signs and noisy chants, ultimately shutting down a planned talk by provocative conservative Milo Yiannopoulos. Get ready for more like it. As Donald Trump prepares to be inaugurated Friday as the nation’s 45th president, university students and officials are bracing for an escalation in campus political clashes and the sticky free-speech issues they present. Yiannopoulos — who is scheduled to speak at UCLA, UC Berkeley and Cal Poly San Luis Obispo over the next three weeks as part of his national “Dangerous Faggot” tour — may be the firebrand of the moment, but university officials believe that Trump’s election has emboldened more voices like his.

Carolyn Jones, EdSource

English learners can dramatically improve their science skills when teachers blend science lessons with language instruction, according to a new report released by an Oakland education nonprofit. The report identified six districts with innovative science programs – ranging from Calipatria Unified in Imperial County to Oak Grove in San Jose. It found that in those schools, English learners scored close to, or in some cases even exceeded, their English-proficient peers on standardized science tests. In some cases, they scored three times as high as English learners at schools where science is taught very little, not at all, or in a way that’s difficult for non-English speakers to follow. “You don’t have to wait until a kid is fluent in English to teach them science,” said Sarah Feldman, coauthor of the report along with Verónica Flores Malagon. “If you weave together science and language, kids can learn it now and in fact do very well. That’s pretty amazing.”

Gary Warth, The San Diego Union-Tribune

UC San Diego students who want to keep a kosher or halal diet now have a place on campus to go. Even better for night-owls, it’s also the first of any University of California diner open 24-hours a day. The school’s OceanView Terrace in Thurgood Marshall College reopened after an extensive renovation Wednesday and was filled with students who came for free pizza, Mediterranean cuisine, salads and pastries. They also found tributes to the man their school is named after and got a subtle lesson in cultural cooperation.

 

Whole Children and Strong Communities

Kate Stoltzfus, Education Week

Teachers in California may soon have a new curriculum to teach–one to help students recognize “fake news.” Two bills introduced last week by Democratic lawmakers call for the state to develop curriculum standards that teach students how to evaluate online news, reports the Los Angeles Times. One bill, brought to the table by Assemblyman Jimmy Gomez, would require curriculum standards that include “civic online reasoning” so students can learn to tell the difference between news that informs and news that misleads. A separate bill by state Sen. Bill Dodd asks the state education board to come up with a “media literacy” curriculum framework. “The rise of fake and misleading news is deeply concerning. Even more concerning is the lack of education provided to ensure people can distinguish what is fact and what’s not,” Dodd said in a statement.

Deborah Sullivan Brennan, The San Diego Union-Tribune

Instead of tests and worksheets, future students in a transformed Vista High School can expect to play games — and even create them in class — to illustrate and reinforce the academic concepts they’re mastering. Those kinds of innovative learning strategies were the focus of a workshop last week that sought to introduce parents, teachers, community members and incoming students to a new educational model the school will unveil next fall. In an exercise that mirrored actual classroom assignments, visitors teamed up to design a “Game of Life” to represent the myriad options for life after high school. It illustrated the various pathways students could take after graduation, and the unconventional lessons that will be the norm at Vista High, which is re-imagining secondary education through a $10 million grant from XQ: The Super School Project.

 

Access, Assessment, and Advancement

John Fensterwald, EdSource

After hours of discussion, the State Board of Education on Wednesday settled two much debated issues that will enable state officials to move ahead this year with the state’s new school accountability system. One decision creates a different way to measure schools’ and student groups’ progress on standardized tests in math and English. The other, more contentious issue will determine which schools and districts will require intervention or technical help because their English learners did poorly on the math and English language arts tests. In September, the board approved a framework for the new improvement and accountability system that will give a broader view of schools’ and districts’ performance through measures that will include students’ readiness for college and careers, school climate, parent engagement and academic performance. The board set a timeline for refining the metrics over the next year.

Madeline Will, Education Week

When the Every Student Succeeds Act removed the federal requirements from teacher-evaluation systems imposed by the Obama administration, states were given the opportunity to decide the best way to grade their teachers. And a year after ESSA’s passage, most states are still tinkering with their evaluation systems—particularly regarding student growth measures, a controversial addition that assesses teachers based on students’ academic progress and performance. ESSA does not require states to set up teacher-evaluation systems based in significant part on students’ test scores, which was a key part of the U.S. Department of Education’s state-waiver system under the No Child Left Behind Act, the predecessor to ESSA. States now have a newfound flexibility to adjust their evaluation systems—and in doing so, they’re all over the map.

Kelly Mcevers, NPR

Student loan debt is not just an issue for young people. A new report from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau says that in the last decade, the number of older Americans – 60 and up – with student loan debt has quadrupled. And many of those older people who are often on fixed income struggle to make loan payments. They default at a higher rate than any other age group. With us to talk about this report is Seth Frotman, the CFPB student loan ombudsman and head of the CFPB’s office for students. Welcome to the program.

 

Inequality, Poverty, Segregation

Terry Gross, NPR

Sixty-three years after the Supreme Court’s ruling in Brown v. Board of Education, many schools across the country either remain segregated or have re-segregated. Journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones tells Fresh Air‘s Terry Gross that when it comes to school segregation, separate is never truly equal. “There’s never been a moment in the history of this country where black people who have been isolated from white people have gotten the same resources,” Hannah-Jones says. “They often don’t have the same level of instruction. They often don’t have strong principals. They often don’t have the same technology.” Still, when it was time for Hannah-Jones’ daughter, Najya, to attend kindergarten, the journalist chose the public school near their home in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, even though its students were almost all poor and black or Latino. Hannah-Jones later wrote about that decision in The New York Times Magazine.

Corey Mitchell and Alex Harwin, Education Week

As the presidency of Barack Obama comes to a close, the schools across the country named to honor him and first lady Michelle Obama paint a panorama of a divided nation, one separated by race, class, and place. Many are located in places like Normandy, a struggling St. Louis-area enclave where unemployment rates are high and high school graduation rates are low. The schools here are among the poorest and most segregated in Missouri. All but a handful of the 400 students at Normandy’s Barack Obama Elementary are black; almost all of them qualify for free or low-cost meals. The racial and economic segregation that persists here can be found in Obama-named schools across the nation, from Los Angeles to Long Island. More than 90 percent of students who attend the namesake schools are black and Latino. Fewer than 4 percent are white.

Melinda D. Anderson, The Atlantic

In the summer of 1963, Martin Luther King Jr. delivered the closing remarks at the March on Washington. More than 200,000 people gathered to cast a national spotlight on and mobilize resistance to Jim Crow, racist laws and policies that disenfranchised black Americans and mandated segregated housing, schools, and employment. Today, more than 50 years later, remnants of Jim Crow segregation persist in the form of mass incarceration—the imprisonment of millions of Americans, overwhelmingly and disproportionately black adults, in local, state, and federal prisons. The U.S. incarceration rate is more than five times higher than that in most of the world’s nations, despite a crime rate that’s comparable to other politically stable, industrialized countries. And among the swelling number of incarcerated men and women is a vast number of parents. In 2015, The Atlantic’s Alia Wong highlighted a study from Child Trends that found that one in nine black children has had a parent in jail or prison, about twice as high as that for white children. For black adolescents ages 12 through 17, it’s nearly one in seven. Predictably, this has implications for America’s classrooms.

 

Public Schools and Private $

Cory Turner, NPR

The education philosophy of Betsy DeVos boils down to one word: choice. The billionaire has used her money to support the expansion of public charter schools and private school vouchers. For more than three hours on Tuesday, President-elect Donald Trump’s pick to run the Education Department handled tough questions on school choice, charters and the future of the nation’s schools from the Senate committee that handles education. In her opening remarks, DeVos made clear she doesn’t think traditional public schools are a good fit for every child.

Amy Goodman, Democracy Now

On Tuesday, education secretary nominee Betsy DeVos faced intense questioning by Democratic senators during her confirmation hearing. DeVos is a longtime backer of charter schools and vouchers for private and religious schools. She and her husband have also invested in a student debt collection agency that does business with the Education Department. On Tuesday, DeVos was repeatedly questioned over her role in her family’s foundations, which have poured millions of dollars into funding private Christian schools and anti-LGBT organizations, including the groups Focus on the Family and the Family Research Council, which the Southern Poverty Law Center has listed as a hate group. During her testimony, DeVos claimed she had nothing to do with the family’s Prince Foundation, even claiming that multiple federal tax filings listing her as the foundation’s vice president were incorrect.

Louis Freedberg, EdSource

Aspects of President-elect Donald Trump’s proposal for a massive $20 billion “school choice” program are running into resistance from an unexpected source: charter school advocates in at least two states. According to the plan he announced last September, the goal would to allow parents to use federal and state dollars to enroll their children “in the local public, private, charter or magnet school that is best for them.” The plan would include provide parents with tax-payer supported vouchers that could be used to pay for private school tuition. That has been a central passion of Betsy DeVos, Trump’s multibillionaire nominee to be secretary of education, who will testify before the Senate Health, Labor, Pensions and Education Committee at her confirmation hearing beginning at 2 p.m. PST on Tuesday. She has also been a vigorous supporter of charter schools, and has been a driving force in promoting charter schools in her home state of Michigan. Her husband, Dick DeVos, the son of Amway co-founder Richard DeVos, even started one, the West Michigan Aviation Academy in Grand Rapids. But so far, charter school associations in two states — California and Massachusetts — are expressing concerns about different parts of Trump’s school choice plan.

Arianna Prothero, Education Week

Florida’s high court has thrown out a lawsuit challenging one of the country’s largest private school choice programs, according to the Associated Press. The Florida Supreme Court did not say why it declined to hear the lawsuit backed by the Florida Education Association, a statewide teachers’ union, but the justices rejected the suit, McCall v. Scott,4-1. “Who is allowed to challenge the constitutionality of the tax credit vouchers?” FEA’s president and one of the plaintiffs, Joanne McCall, said in a statement. “This ruling, and the decisions by the lower court, don’t answer that question. We still believe that the tax credit vouchers are unconstitutional, but we haven’t had the opportunity to argue our case in court.” The Florida Tax Credit Scholarship program is a voucher-like program that helps nearly 98,000 low-income students in Florida pay for tuition at private schools. Unlike a traditional voucher program, the money doesn’t come directly from the state; rather, the state uses tax credits to incentivize donations to a scholarship program from private businesses.

 

Other News of Note

Austin Cross and Libby Denkmann, KPCC

Across the country yesterday, people gathered to honor Martin Luther King Jr.  But to some, observances this year were marred by a rift between President-elect Donald Trump and civil rights icon, Georgia Congressman John Lewis. Lewis has said Trump is not a “legitimate” president. On Saturday, the President-elect fired back, Tweeting that Lewis is “all talk and no action.” Civil rights leaders and lawmakers on both sides of the political aisle were quick to condemn the remarks.  So what might this weekend’s exchange signal about the future relationship between the White House and the African American community?  For answers, Take Two spoke to Tyrone Howard, director of UCLA’s Black Male Institute.

Miguel Covarrubias, The Hill

As a teacher in Los Angeles, I spend my days working with students who have benefited from Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals — the landmark policy, also known as DACA, that grants immigrants who entered our nation as minors deferred action from deportation and eligibility for a work permit.

Over the past year and a half, I have watched as President-elect Donald Trump has repeatedly pledged to immediately rescind this policy upon taking office. I have listened as he has rationalized his decision, characterizing young immigrants as “criminals” who make our country less “safe” and should be “deported.” I have taught many DACA students over the years and know this characterization is false.

 

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.