Just News from Center X – July 28, 2017

Teaching, Leading, and Social Justice

In D.C. rally, hundreds protest Trump’s planned cuts to education

Ellie Silverman, Chicago Tribune
Nolan, his 10-year-old son, had bragged to his friends when his mom attended the Women’s March after President Donald Trump’s inauguration, and then he had asked his dad when he could go to a march, too.  So the family of four drove down Friday night to join those seeking to be heard at the “March for Public Education,” a rally and protest against the Trump administration’s efforts to cut federal education funding and expand private-school vouchers.  “I love a good road tip, but this one’s special,” said Maxwell, who was sporting a “Schoolhouse Rock!” T-shirt while standing next to his wife, Melissa Maxwell, 41, who was wearing a “Nasty scientist” T-shirt, and their two sons Nolan and Garrett, 7.  Teachers, current and retired, parents, students and their families began converging about 10 a.m. near the Washington Monument to march in support of public education. Similar marches took place in 11 cities nationwide, including Detroit, Austin, Miami and Lincoln, Nebraska, according to the march’s website.

After proposing $9 billion cut, Trump making salary donation to Ed. Dept.

Alyson Klein, Education Week
President Donald Trump, who is seeking to cut the U.S. Department of Education’s budget by $9 billion, plans to donate his $100,000 salary for this quarter to the agency, to help pay for a camp focused on science, technology, engineering, and math, or STEM. His press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, announced the donation Wednesday. Trump has already moved to get rid of existing federal programs that school districts can and do use for STEM in his first-ever budget request, released earlier this year. For instance, he wants to totally scrap the $1.1 billion 21st Century Community Learning Center program, which finances after-school and summer programs, including many with a STEM focus. The White House has also sought to zero out the brand-new Student Support and Academic Enrichment Grants, one of the few federal programs that school districts can use for science and technology. Lawmakers in the House who oversee education spending ignored Trump’s asks and approved funding for both programs anyway.

Teachers with student debt: These are their stories

Elissa Nadworny and Julie Depenbrock, NPR
Teachers have one of the lowest-paid professional jobs in the U.S. You need a bachelor’s degree, which can be costly — an equation that often means a lot of student loans. We’ve reported on the factors that make this particular job even more vulnerable to a ton of debt, including chronically low teacher pay, the increasing pressure to get a master’s degree and the many ways to repay loans or apply for loan forgiveness. More than 2,000 teachers responded to our first survey about the issue, and we’re following up to hear a few of their stories.

Language, Culture, and Power

D.C. looks to students for ways to address chronic absenteeism

Joe Heim, The Washington Post
On a warm summer day when they would have been forgiven for wanting to be just about anywhere else, a dozen or so D.C. public high school students gathered at the Anacostia Neighborhood Library to help teach grown-ups a thing or two about why kids skip school and what can be done about it. After all, the thinking went, grown-ups have had lots of ideas, and not many have worked. Let’s hear what the kids suggest. And so on Tuesday, after being greeted by Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) and D.C. Public Schools Chancellor Antwan Wilson, the students from six public and public charter schools met with school administrators, counselors and truant officers for the second annual “Every Day Counts! Attendance Design Challenge,” a day-long workshop arranged by school leaders to solicit and develop ideas from students to tackle chronic absenteeism in the city’s schools.

Why Whites and Asians have different views on personal success

Alia Wong, The Atlantic
There’s a saying in China that it’s better to be the head of a chicken than the tail of a phoenix. The premise of the aphorism—it’s better to be over-qualified than under-qualified relative to one’s surroundings—is so widely accepted that similar versions of it exist across cultures. In Japan, they tend to say that it’s better to be the head of a sardine than the tail of a whale. Americans and Brits often declare that it’s better to be a big frog (or fish) in a small pond than a little frog in a big pond. Extensive research supports these axioms, particularly in the realm of education. Longitudinal studies have consistently shown that high-performing students at less-selective schools feel more competent, have higher GPAs, and have more ambitious career aspirations than low-performing students at more-selective schools. Despite the compelling evidence and age-old maxims, however, people abide by that advice to different degrees in different situations. While one study found that on average, roughly two-thirds of people would prefer to have a high IQ and live in a less-intelligent place than the reverse, for example, that percentage varied from 18 percent to 80 percent across different situations.

After assault, some campuses focus on healing over punishment

Tovia Smith, NPR
On-campus disciplinary processes for assaults that are reported have drawn criticism from both survivors and those accused of assault. According to federal statistics, only about one in six survivors of sexual assault on college campuses report the incident to school authorities. So some campuses are considering a new approach. The process, called “restorative justice,” looks more like a therapeutic intervention aimed at healing than a trial focused on guilt and punishment. Campus administrators are increasingly open to it, despite concern from some activists that it’s too soft on perpetrators of sexual assault. A typical campus adjudication process, aimed at punishing the perpetrator, “wouldn’t have really fixed anything,” says one rape survivor. “It wouldn’t have healed any hurt.” She was assaulted her freshman year at a small school in the Northwest, and asked that her name not be used in this story. The young woman says a disciplinary hearing would have retraumatized her, and created too much pain for too little gain.

Whole Children and Strong Communities

Home nursing visits provide wide-ranging benefits for mothers, young children

Ashley Hopkinson, EdSource
Children born to low-income, first-time mothers who received home nursing visits showed increased mental health, stronger social and emotional development and academic gains, according to researchers who analyzed the impact of the Nurse-Family Partnership program, one of the largest home visiting programs in the country. Researchers also found the program reduces anxiety and improves the parenting skills of mothers. It also has a positive impact on home environments and behavior skills in children, researchers found. Researchers said the benefits of the program “warrant continued and increased investment.” The Nurse-Family Partnership program utilizes trained registered nurses who work closely with families during pregnancy and up to age 2. The nurses teach them to maintain proper health, develop parenting skills and establish work and family goals.

Is social-emotional learning a hoax? Readers respond

Education Week
In a recent spirited Commentary, Chester E. Finn Jr. took aim at the “faux psychology” undergirding the social-emotional-learning movement. Education Week received a host of letters in response to Finn’s June 21 essay, “The Dirt-Encrusted Roots of Social-Emotional Learning.” While most readers jumped to the defense of teaching students about emotions, relationships, and problem-solving, others encouraged a more cautious approach to the trend.

Schools are missing what matters about learning

Scott Barry Kaufman, The Atlantic
When Orville Wright, of the Wright brothers fame, was told by a friend that he and his brother would always be an example of how far someone can go in life with no special advantages, he emphatically responded, “to say we had no special advantages … the greatest thing in our favor was growing up in a family where there was always much encouragement to intellectual curiosity.” The power of curiosity to contribute not only to high achievement, but also to a fulfilling existence, cannot be emphasized enough. Curiosity can be defined as “the recognition, pursuit, and intense desire to explore, novel, challenging, and uncertain events.” In recent years, curiosity has been linked to happiness, creativity, satisfying intimate relationships, increased personal growth after traumatic experiences, and increased meaning in life. In the school context, conceptualized as a “character strength,” curiosity has also received heightened research attention. Having a “hungry mind” has been shown to be a core determinant of academic achievement, rivaling the prediction power of IQ.

U.S. children gain ground in home supports, federal data show

Sarah D. Sparks, Education Week
While child lead-poisoning problems have spurred concerns nationwide, new data from 23 federal agencies that work with children suggests children’s physical environments have become healthier and their homes more supportive, but both still show room for improvement. The report “America’s Children: Key National Indicators of Well-Being,” tracks longitudinal data on more than 40 benchmarks in children’s education, family supports, health, physical safety, and behavior for the nation’s more than 73.6 million children from birth through age 17. It found U.S. children gaining ground in family supports such as income and parent involvement in education, but also in physical safety and health at home. Overall, only 1 percent of children nationwide showed an elevated level of lead in their blood (defined as 5 micrograms of lead or more for every deciliter of blood.) That’s a historic low, and down from 26 percent of all children in 1994.

Access, Assessment, and Advancement

The collateral damage of testing pressure

Matt Barnum, The Atlantic
Kindergarten, first grade, and second grade are often free of the high-stakes testing common in later grades—but those years are still high-stakes for students’ learning and development. That means it’s a big problem when schools encourage their least effective teachers to work with their youngest students. And a new study says that the pressure of school accountability systems may be encouraging exactly that. “Evidence on the importance of early-grades learning for later-life outcomes suggests that a system that pushes schools to concentrate ineffective teachers in the earliest grades could have serious unintended consequences,” write Jason Grissom of Vanderbilt and Demetra Kalogrides and Susanna Loeb of Stanford, the authors of the study.

Tech nonprofit helping African-American teens get ahead in coding

Carolyn Jones, EdSource
Charles McClain’s road to computer programming started with a vice familiar to many 15-year-olds: Playing too many video games. “My dad finally said, if you make your own video game I’ll let you play as much as you want,” said McClain, a high school sophomore from Oakland. “That got me thinking. I play a lot of video games, but do I even know how they work? So I decided to learn to code, and it’s going really well.” McClain is enrolled in a free, two-year coding and entrepreneur program for African-American boys in the East Bay called Hidden Genius Project, one of a growing number of nonprofits aimed at boosting the representation of African-Americans in the technology sector.

New class leads to big gains in number of girls, minorities taking AP computer science exams

Carolyn Jones, EdSource
Educators were cheering over newly released results from the College Board showing significant increases in the number of females, Latino and African-American students who took either the Advanced Placement computer science exam or the new computer science principles exam this spring. “I am over the moon. These numbers are amazing,” said Hadi Partovi, chief executive of Code.org, a nonprofit that provides free coding instruction to students around the world and has advocated for greater diversity in the computer science field. “This is a great reflection on the U.S. public school system. Every American should be proud — the U.S. is really leading the way.” Of the 111,262 high school students who took the College Board’s Advanced Placement computer science exams in May, 27 percent were girls, a jump from 23 percent last year. Twenty percent of the test-takers were Latino or African-American, up from 15 percent in 2016.

Inequality, Poverty, Segregation

30 years after landmark legislation, schools still struggle to serve homeless students

Rina Palta, KPCC
It’s been three decades since, recognizing the unique needs of homeless students, Congress passed a law requiring school districts to identify and meet the needs of homeless students.  Since the McKinney-Vento Act passed in July of 1987, school districts have been tasked with ensuring homeless students have access to education, and the results, experts and advocates say, have been somewhat mixed. “What it’s done is actually allow homeless children to go to school,” said Barbara Duffield, executive director of SchoolHouse Connection, a national group that advocates for resources for homeless children. “When the act was passed, state residency laws, guardianship [and] other rules for enrollment essentially barred homeless children from going to school.” Now, schools are expected to enroll homeless students without imposing barriers, and must continue to admit a student who became homeless while attending the school. Districts must have a liaison for homeless students to help them with things like transportation to school, tutoring services, or any obstacles homelessness presents to their education. “On paper, the law really does address the barriers,” she said. “The challenge is implementation and the lack of resources behind it.”

What it takes to mentor poor kids

Caroline Kitchener, The Atlantic
In January 2015, Brandon Stanton, creator of the popular photo blog Humans of New York, interviewed a middle school student named Vidal Chastanet. He asked Chastanet, who goes to school in Brownsville, a neighborhood with one of the highest crime rates in New York City, who had influenced his life the most. Chastanet told Brandon about his school principal, Nadia Lopez. “When we get in trouble, she doesn’t suspend us. She calls us to her office and explains to us how society was built down around us. And she tells us that each time somebody fails out of school, a new jail cell gets built. And one time she made every student stand up, one at a time, and she told each one of us that we matter.”

Texas Senate approves ‘bathroom bill’ to restrict transgender access

Evie Blad, Education Week
The Texas Senate approved a so-called ‘bathroom bill’ Tuesday that would restrict access to restrooms and locker rooms in buildings operated by local governments—including public schools—based on the sex listed on a person’s birth certificate or state-issued ID. The bill would also restrict local anti-discrimination ordinances. It passed in a 21-10 vote over the strong objections of law enforcement, groups of superintendents, business officials, and transgender advocates who said the bill discriminates against transgender people and that taking a statewide stand on such a divisive issue may drive tourism dollars from the state.

Public Schools and Private $

NAACP: School choice not the answer to improving education for black students

Emma Brown, The Washington Post
Education for black students in the United States has long been unequal and inadequate, but the solution to that problem does not lie in the school choice movement, NAACP leaders said at the organization’s national conference Wednesday. The nation’s oldest civil rights group called for tighter regulation of existing charters and an outright ban on those operated for profit, as well as greater investment in traditional public schools, particularly those where students struggle most. “While high-quality, accountable, and accessible charters can contribute to educational opportunity, by themselves, even the best charters are not a substitute for more stable, adequate and equitable investments in public education,” wrote members of the NAACP’s task force on quality education in a report released Wednesday.

Betsy DeVos and teachers’ union leader trade barbs

Theresa Harrington, EdSource
U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos urged state leaders to support school choice on the same day a prominent union chief called policies DeVos is promoting “only slightly more polite cousins of segregation.”Randi Weingarten highlighted the stark division that exists between some choice advocates and those who staunchly back traditional public schools.

How teachers are taught

Monica Disare, The Atlantic
One charter school teacher-training program gives first-year teachers a part-time workload and allows them to learn alongside mentor teachers. Another has summer workshops that include home visits with students’ families. A third network often starts the year with a week of workshops at a Westchester hotel, has a staff member devoted to professional development, and brings in consultants for math, writing, and reading instruction. These are a handful of training programs at charters that may soon substitute for the formal state-certification process, which requires obtaining a master’s degree and passing certification exams. Under regulations proposed by SUNY earlier this month, some charter schools would largely be able to design their own alternative certification programs that would be valid at other SUNY-authorized schools. And charter leaders say those programs will be heavy on practical experience and embedded within the schools’ existing teacher-improvement efforts.

Charter school’s demise prompts debate about strengthening oversight

George White, EdSource
Prompted by investigations into alleged misappropriation of funds at Tri-Valley Learning Corporation, a charter school chain based in Alameda County, the California Charter Schools Association and advocates for more charter school transparency are stepping up efforts to advance competing approaches to combating financial fraud, waste and mismanagement. Tri-Valley operated in two districts in Northern California, east of San Francisco. It had two schools in Livermore in Alameda County and two schools in Stockton in San Joaquin County. The Alameda County district attorney was already investigating Tri-Valley when the state’s Fiscal Crisis and Management Assistance Team completed an audit in June. That report concluded that charter school executives had conflicts of interest and that the organization had commingled funds, including the use of “bonds totaling over $67 million to purchase land and buildings under the pretext that the acquisition was for a public charter school.” Tri-Valley filed for bankruptcy in June, the same month its schools were closed.

Other News of Note

The real story of how a failing North Carolina school became a success story

Valerie Strauss, The Washington Post; Pam Grundy, Parents Across America
It was a pleasure to welcome the trustees of BEST NC to Shamrock Gardens Elementary, and to show off our school’s many accomplishments. We’re delighted they were impressed with our school and its wonderful staff. In her recent account of Shamrock’s “blueprint” for innovation, however, BEST NC President Brenda Berg left out a critical piece of the foundation of the school’s transformation. She focused on the school’s “core business principles,” which she described as “supporting developing employees, creating clear career paths for leaders, and adapting their delivery of services based on data to meet ever-changing needs.” Indeed, Shamrock has done these things and done them well. But Shamrock’s long-term accomplishments — and the difference the school makes in its students’ lives — are inextricably linked to the success of a 12-year effort to reintegrate the school racially and economically. This endeavor has fostered increased parent involvement, student activities that reach beyond the narrow range of material measured by standardized tests, and the kind of supportive, joyful atmosphere that makes students want to learn and teachers want to stay. This is a crucial concept for those who wish to improve struggling schools. A school is not a business — it is a community that reaches well beyond its walls. Building schools that reflect the society we want our children to live in is a more daunting task than simply reorganizing internal operations and monitoring test scores. But it’s a necessary one.