Just News from Center X – July 14, 2017

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Teaching, Leading, and Social Justice

Author strips key parts of bill requiring more transparency in school spending

John Fensterwald, EdSource
The author of legislation that would have required school districts to detail how much state funding they give to each school has stripped that language from the bill. Assemblywoman Shirley Weber, D-San Diego, agreed to change Assembly Bill 1321 amid increased resistance from groups representing districts and a potential veto by Gov. Jerry Brown. The Assembly had passed the bill 77-0, and two student advocacy groups that co-sponsored it, Children Now and Education Trust-West, lined up dozens of groups behind it. But groups representing county superintendents, school administrators and business officers, which had been silent in Assembly hearings, subsequently registered their opposition in a letter to the Senate Education Committee. After meeting with opponents and measuring the resistance, and likely opposition from the Brown administration, Weber and co-sponsors agreed last week to gut the bill of its strongest language. The California School Boards Association (see letter) agreed to support the revised bill, and the Association of California School Administrators agreed not to oppose it. The bill had continued a running debate over the question: What information does the public need to determine if the Local Control Funding Formula, the landmark funding bill passed by the Legislature in 2013 and championed by Brown, is working?

NEA President: ‘No reason to trust’ Betsy DeVos

Stephen Sawchuk, Education Week
The nearly 3 million member National Education Association is facing a rocky road ahead, including a projected loss of membership and a chilly relationship with the Trump administration. Teachers’ union President Lily Eskelsen García sat down with Education Week to talk about a range of issues facing the union, including its engagement with U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, the threat posed by a looming U.S. Supreme Court case, and the NEA’s new, tougher charter-school policy. Excerpts follow.

$125,000 salary to serve on a school board? In Los Angeles, yes.

Denisa R. Superville, Education Week
While most school board members across the country get no compensation for serving on their local school boards, those who serve full-time in Los Angeles will be able to make up to $125,000. The panel that oversees compensation for Los Angeles school board members unanimously approved the new salary—a 174 percent hike—this week, according to the Los Angeles Times. That amount will be more than what state legislators in California make, though Los Angeles school board members represent districts of comparable sizes, according to Kyle Stokes, a reporter at Southern California Public Radio. The increase will make Los Angeles school board members among the highest paid in California and the United States. Los Angeles Unified board members who have jobs outside of serving on the board will receive $50,000, up from $26,437.

DeVos vows changes on campus sexual assault policy

Benjamin Wermund, Politico
Education Secretary Betsy DeVos signaled Thursday that she plans to overhaul controversial Obama-era guidance on campus sexual assault, telling reporters “this is an issue we’re not getting right.” But she offered few clues about what those changes would be, when they might happen or how she would balance the rights of victims against those of the accused. The far-reaching 2011 guidance told college and university officials they must combat sexual harassment, including sexual violence, under Title IX, the federal law that prohibits sex discrimination, and threatened a loss of federal funding to institutions that failed to do so. Among other things, the guidance pushed a lower standard of proof in campus disciplinary hearings than is used in criminal trials. While many advocates for survivors of sexual assault hailed the guidance as a crucial step in cracking down on what they describe as an epidemic of campus sexual violence, critics said it has pushed college administrators to trample the rights of accused students.

Language, Culture, and Power

As California bilingual education grows, teacher training is key

Adolfo Guzman-Lopez, KPCC
Zyanya Cazares, a sixth grade teacher who is starting a new assignment this fall teaching in a bilingual education program in Los Angeles, grew up speaking Spanish. But she was recently reminded that the casual, conversational Spanish she spoke at home is not the same as the formal form of the language she’s now being asked to teach. “As a Chicana, it’s very easy to say, ‘oh I know how to say that word in Spanish, you just add an “o” at the end,’” Cazares said. “But that’s not academic Spanish, and we’re in an academic setting – so I definitely have to prepare to learn the real word of how to say it academically.” Cazares was one of a dozen current and aspiring bilingual education teachers who gathered at Cal State Dominguez Hills to learn about the latest teaching methods and also, for many teachers like Cazares, to fill in gaps in their language skills.

Just 20 percent of K-12 students are learning a foreign language

Corey Mitchell, Education Week
Arguing that the inability to communicate in any language but English constitutes a threat to the nation’s economic and military security, two recent studies have painted a grim picture of foreign-language education in the nation’s K-12 schools. The reports from the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and American Councils for International Education found that public schools and state departments of education are struggling to find qualified world language instructors and unequipped to track local and national trends on language learning. The American Councils for International Education survey—which sought state-by-state data on enrollment in foreign language courses—estimates that 10.6 million K-12 students in the United States are studying a world language or American Sign Language. That’s only one out of every five students.

Harvard faculty panel recommends banning fraternities, sororities and other social groups

Valerie Strauss, The Washington Post
A Harvard University faculty committee tasked with changing the school’s policy on student social groups has proposed that undergraduates be banned from joining fraternities, sororities and similar organizations, saying that efforts to curb “pernicious behavior” by some members of such groups have failed. The proposal, released Wednesday, follows steps taken last year by Harvard president Drew Faust to stem the influence of university single-gender social organizations, or USGSOs. These groups are not recognized as Harvard organizations but nevertheless, as Faust said in a May 2016 letter to the community, “play an unmistakable and growing role in student life, in many cases enacting forms of privilege and exclusion at odds with our deepest values.” The traditionally male final clubs are the oldest social clubs at Harvard, starting in the 18th century, and were seen as especially exclusionary even after some began to admit women, and female final clubs were formed.

Whole Children and Strong Communities

Social-emotional learning has long-lasting positive effects on students, study says

Evie Blad, Education Week
Programs that teach students how to recognize their emotions, solve problems, and form healthy relationships may continue to show positive benefits for students months, or even years, after they complete them, a new meta-analysis finds.  Students who completed social-emotional learning interventions fared better than their peers who didn’t participate on a variety of indicators—including academic performance, social skills, and avoiding negative behaviors like drug use, finds the analysis, which examined follow-up data from dozens of published studies on specific interventions. The meta-analysis builds on previous research that found social-emotional learning participants outperformed their peers academically. That research is frequently cited by policymakers and educational leaders who are seeking to promote social-emotional learning programs, through which schools teach students about emotions, relationships, and conflict resolution alongside traditional academic subjects like math.

Study: Holding kids back a grade doesn’t necessarily hold them back

Anya Kamenetz, NPR
Our education system has this funny quirk of grouping kids by birth date — rather than, say, intellectual ability or achievement or interest. But developmental pathways are as individual as kids themselves. And so there’s a perpetual back-and-forth about whether to put certain kids in school a grade behind or ahead of their actual age. Recently we covered the research on “redshirting,” or the practice of starting kindergarten a little late. That researcher concluded that it’s usually better to go ahead and enroll kids as soon as they’re old enough. For one thing, they will earn more money on average over a lifetime with that head start into the workforce. Now comes a big study to say something different: Holding kids back at third grade when they don’t meet the academic standards will give them a boost in achievement, by some measures. And, it doesn’t affect their likelihood of finishing high school.

How goofing off helps kids learn

Lea Waters, The Atlantic
Savoring and gratitude are both forms of directed attention. But in contrast to that type of on-task focus, free-form attention is what the brain defaults to when it’s off-task, allowed to move in any direction it wants. It happens when the brain is in what scientists call the resting state. In the 1990s, neuropsychologists began to delve into free-form attention and found that it has many benefits, including for children’s learning and their brain development. To shift instantly into free-form attention, all an individual has to do is goof off. Now just any kind of goofing off won’t do. There’s a constructive form of goofing off that is restorative to the brain and therefore important for strength-based parenting—parenting that focuses on kids’ strengths instead of their weaknesses. Good goofing off is active; the mind is not simply being “fed” stimuli. Rather, the activity engages the mind in a way that simultaneously gives it free rein. Good goofing off happens when the person participating is competent enough at the activity that he or she does not have to focus closely on the process or the techniques. It happens when reading, cooking a familiar recipe, shooting baskets, or simply daydreaming.

Access, Assessment, and Advancement

State board faces deadline, tough decisions on new federal law for improving schools

John Fensterwald, EdSource
With only two meetings left before a mid-September deadline, the State Board of Education is feeling the heat to make progress on the state plan for the federal Every Student Succeeds Act. Two of the unsettled issues the board will delve into this week are the criteria for choosing the lowest-performing 5 percent of schools needing assistance and a framework for a coherent system of oversight and assistance in a state with nearly 1,000 school districts and more than 10,000 schools. In lengthy letters, civil rights and advocacy groups in particular criticized the school selection methodology as seriously flawed. They also called for more details on how assistance would work, who’d provide it and for clearer expectations and benchmarks of progress. A lot of changes are needed in the next 60 days, before submission to U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, to make a credible plan, they said.

UC on track to enroll 2,500 more Californians this fall, but admission offers decline from last year’s near-historic gains

Teresa Watanabe, Los Angeles Times
Anthony Mercado and Trent Wiley graduated from Carson High School last month with premier resumes boasting 4.0 GPAs, high school sports and a slew of leadership and volunteer activities. Mercado won admission to UCLA. Wiley did not. The two students vied for seats in the most competitive year ever at UCLA, which became the first university in the nation to receive more than 100,000 applications from prospective freshmen — with room for only 5,950 of them.  To fill that class, the Westwood campus admitted 16,494 applicants — down from 17,522 last year, according to University of California data released Thursday. Offers of admission to California residents fell by 10.8% over last year to 9,292.

19 attorneys general sue DeVos over delay of borrower defense rule

Michael Martin, NPR
We’re going to spend a few minutes talking about current issues in education, something we’re going to do from time to time this summer when educators tend to have a bit more room in their schedules. We’ll start with a lawsuit against the U.S. Education Department filed by the attorneys general from 18 states and the District of Columbia over something called the Borrower Defense Rules. Those were put into place by the Obama administration to allow students who borrowed federal money to have those loans forgiven if they attended a school that misled them or broke the law. The rules were supposed to go into effect July 1, but the Trump administration delayed them, hence the lawsuit. Karl Racine of Washington, D.C., is one of the attorneys general suing the Department of Education and Secretary Betsy DeVos. And he’s here with us now in our studios in Washington, D.C., to tell us more about that. Thank you for doing that.

Inequality, Poverty, Segregation

Approved L.A. Unified settlement would send money to district’s neediest schools

Sonali Kohli, Los Angeles Times
The Los Angeles school board has authorized a lawsuit settlement that would send more money to the district’s neediest schools over the next three years for resources to improve African American and Latino student achievement. Community Coalition, a nonprofit advocacy group, filed a complaint with the California Department of Education and sued the district in 2015 with the help of the American Civil Liberties Union, alleging that the district was misspending up to $450 million meant for low-income students, English learners and foster youth. The Los Angeles Unified School District receives more than $1 billion extra for those groups each year under a recent state funding formula. The district freed up $450 million of that pot for general use, arguing that schools spend that amount on disabled students who also are in the three categories. Community Coalition and other critics called this logic improper, saying that the programs have to specifically help high-needs students.

As schools tackle poverty, attendance goes up, but academic gains are tepid

Denisa R. Superville, Education Week
P.S. 123, a K-8 school in Harlem, had been a chaotic place when Melitina Hernandez arrived as principal in 2013. Students would often run out of class to get attention. Staff members sometimes dodged confrontational parents. The school had old computers and tattered textbooks. So Hernandez and her staff set out to make big changes with a $4 million grant from the state. They started with upgrading technology and other classroom amenities. They also turned their attention to the needs of the school’s large population of homeless children. Then their efforts kicked into higher gear in 2014 when P.S. 123 became part of New York City’s broad efforts to turn around dozens of low-performing schools by injecting them with a range of health, social-emotional, and academic support services for students and their families. Nearly three years later, the results at P.S. 123, with its 530 students, offer a small window into what the city’s larger initiative is seeing: an increase in student attendance and family participation in school activities, a drop in chronic absenteeism, but uneven academic progress. Just 17 percent of P.S. 123’s students in grades 3-8 were proficient on the state’s English Language Arts exam in 2016, but in 2015, it had been even lower at 7 percent.

Girlhood interrupted: The erasure of black girls’ childhood

Rebecca Epstein, Jamila J. Blake, Thalia González, Center on Poverty and Inequality
This groundbreaking study by the Georgetown Law Center on Poverty and Inequality provides—for the first time— data showing that adults view Black girls as less innocent and more adult-like than their white peers, especially in the age range of 5–14. The report builds on similar results that have emerged from studies of adult perceptions of Black boys. In 2014, for example, research by Professor Phillip Goff and colleagues revealed that beginning at the age of 10, Black boys are more likely than their white peers to be misperceived as older, viewed as guilty of suspected crimes, and face police violence if accused of a crime.

Public Schools and Private $

A new era begins as pro-charter majority selects Rodriguez to head L.A. school board

Howard Blume, Los Angeles Times
If the new Los Angeles school board majority wanted to signal that change is coming to the nation’s second-largest school system, its members on Thursday quickly made their point. The panel’s first action was to elect Ref Rodriguez, co-founder of a charter schools group, as president. The board then gave fresh orders to district Supt. Michelle King. Rodriguez’s elevation, by a 4-3 vote, underlined that a majority more friendly to charter schools — a first for the district — had taken control following the most expensive school board elections in the nation’s history. Charter school supporters were the major campaign spenders, followed by the local teachers union, whose candidates lost. And the directives to King — in the form of a resolution to put “students first” — established that the board considers the district’s performance unacceptable. Last month, the outgoing panel extended King’s contract through June 2020. But Thursday’s tone could signal a desire by this board to choose its own schools chief.

Churches running charter schools? The latest Supreme Court decision could open the door in some states

Matt Barnum, Chalkbeet
Reverend Michael Faulkner wanted to start a charter school through his church in Harlem. But there was a problem: New York law bars religious denominations from running charters, even if, as Faulkner promised, the school would teach a secular curriculum.  So Faulkner — a one-time NFL player who ran for Congress in 2010 — and his church sued.  “The New York Charter Schools Act is nothing more than an attempt by the State to erect a barrier for those who express their religious beliefs from access to public resources that are generally available to all others,” read the 2007 complaint.  The suit was voluntarily dismissed in 2009, and Faulkner, now running for city comptroller, described it as “dormant.” But a recent Supreme Court decision might mean that suits like that one have a better chance of prevailing.

After years of battle, de Blasio and charters weigh a truce

Eliza Shapiro, Politico
After four years of intermittent battle, Mayor Bill de Blasio appears to have reached a truce with New York City’s powerful charter school sector. The mayor, who spent the first months of his tenure embroiled in a feud with the city’s most influential charter operator, Eva Moskowitz, allowed a series of concessions to the sector last month as part of a deal to secure a two-year renewal of mayoral control. That trade seems to have paid off for a mayor eager to avoid a distracting fight over education as he seeks re-election this fall. On Wednesday, a dozen of the city’s charter operators wrote de Blasio a letter thanking him for what they hope will be a newfound willingness to work with charters.

Other News of Note

Everyday sexism in a ‘post-feminist’ world

Hayley Krischer, The Atlantic
For the past two decades, “girl power” has become a popular way of describing the success of girls in American culture. Widespread reports of “alpha girls” – girls who can do it all, find popularity, escape gender stereotypes, excel in school and walk away with the Homecoming Queen prize – have, according to all kinds of media reports, pioneered a gender takeover. In 2007, The Nation reported that girls can do everything boys can – and better. A New York Times story that same year documented what the author described as “amazing girls” – girls who are high-achieving and confident and engaged and “have grown up learning they can do anything a boy can do, which is anything that want to.” Business Week in 2003 described girls as “building a kind of scholastic Roman Empire alongside boys’ languishing Greece.” Yet in a number of Canadian secondary schools at least, girls have encountered a sort of cultural time-machine when interacting with their male counterparts. In interviews with researchers between 2010 an 2013, the girls often spoke of boys’ tendency to “joke” with them when they didn’t like something they heard, allegedly telling the girls something along the lines of: “Go make me a sandwich.”

We don’t need no education

Paul Krugman, The New York Times
A few days ago Pew reported that Republicans, who were already much less positive than Democrats about higher education, have turned very negative on the role of colleges in America. True to form, this worries some liberal commentators, who are calling for outreach – universities should examine their implicit biases, make an effort to hire more conservative faculty, etc. And you can see the point. After all, among college professors 59 percent identify as Democrats versus only 13 percent as Republicans; senior faculty were even more liberal, with very few identifying themselves as conservatives. Oh, wait – that wasn’t a survey of college professors; it was a 2004 survey of the military, and the 59-13 comparison was of Republicans versus Democrats. Support for Republicans in the military has eroded since then, but the officer corps is still far more conservative than the country at large. Strange to say, however, I haven’t seen a lot of op-eds demanding that the military change its recruiting practices and practice what amounts to affirmative action on behalf of liberals.