Teaching, Leading, and Social Justice

Tim Kaine’s record on education

Michael Stratford, Politico
Hillary Clinton’s vice presidential pick has been active in Congress on education issues, particularly when it comes to career and technical education. He’s been pushing to expand federal student loans for some career education programs, has worked on a rewrite of the Perkins Act, and founded and co-chairs the Senate career and technical education caucus.

What did the teachers’ unions get up to at those OTHER conventions?

Stephen Sawchuk, Education Week
In the deluge of news from the Republican and Democratic National Conventions, which featured a starring role for the heads of both of the national teachers’ unions, it’s easy to forget that both the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers held their own internal political conventions this past summer. If you missed them at the time, here’s your chance to get up to speed on all the details.

Some districts step up competition for neighbors’ veteran teachers

John Fensterwald, EdSource
To better compete in a time of shortage, a handful of districts have negotiated changes in their pay scales that are making it easier to recruit veteran teachers. Doing so isn’t adding to the overall teacher supply or winning friends in neighboring districts. But it is helping some districts solve a personnel crunch as well as provide broader job opportunities for experienced teachers.

 

Language, Culture, and Power

 

From ‘invisible’ to ‘important’: A teen finds beauty in her story through poetry

Priska Neely, KPCC
As part of our new series Age of Expression, teen artists from around Southern California share stories about the art they create and why they do it.
Like many artists, Vanessa Tahay’s poetry was born out of pain. In her poem, “A Dream in Five Days,” she details her journey from Guatemala for the United States as an unaccompanied minor.

U.S. Secretary of Education: Let’s educate, not incarcerate

John B. King, Jr., Education Week
The return on investment in American education to individuals and to society at large has been growing in both relative and absolute terms since 1980. It is well known that, statistically, people who are well-educated earn substantially more, pay more in taxes, are less likely to be unemployed, live longer, are healthier, and are more likely to vote. Yet, in spite of that, our society is increasing spending on locking people up faster than it is on educating them. Our investments in punishing people for their failures are outpacing our investments in ensuring their success.

Educating students with benefit of indigenous knowledge

Sharon Nelson-Barber, WestEd; AERA Knowledge Forum Research Fact Sheet
Major nationwide educational reforms of the 21st century have had the goal of improving educational outcomes for U.S. students, and for under-achieving students in particular. These efforts have resulted in few measurable improvements in the educational achievement of American Indian and Alaska Native students (The Education Trust, 2013; The White House, 2014). Numerous reforms implemented over many generations have proven to be not only ineffective, but also counterproductive for indigenous students’ educational achievement and social well-being—resulting in cultural trauma, loss of cultural identity and decreased self- efficacy (The White House, 2014). The results of these policies continue to disadvantage indigenous children’s ability to thrive in educational systems, and are compounded by another urgent concern: the rapid decline in the use of heritage languages and practices (House, 2005). The difficulties faced by indigenous learners and their communities can be conceived of as a “perfect storm” and threaten to destroy the timeless treasures of humanity that are indigenous knowledge systems.

Access, Assessment, and Advancement

 

Los Angeles Unified will open first single-gender school in 20 years

Michael Janofsky, EdSource
When the new school opens in Los Angeles less than a month from now, California will have its first conventional district school in nearly 20 years serving only one gender. The Girls Academic Leadership Academy, known as GALA, a middle and high school in Los Angeles Unified, is built around a STEM curriculum – science, technology, engineering and math – as a way to attract more female students to subjects in which they are underrepresented. Its founding mission is to create an instructional atmosphere sensitive to ways girls learn that may be different from boys to develop self-confidence, emotional well-being and leadership skills. One of its primary goals is 100 percent college acceptance.

Presentations and portfolios take the place of tests for some students

Gail Robinson, Hechinger Report
One afternoon this spring, tension ran high at City-As-School in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village. In drab classrooms, students, many of whom have struggled with school, presented research that would determine whether they would graduate this year. Fellow students listened, murmuring words of encouragement as two teachers pressed the speakers on their findings.

Summer programs help first-gen. college-goers brave the leap

Catherine Gewertz, Education Week
Betty Torres did her best to be brave as she packed up to leave her working-class Texas border town. An academic powerhouse at 16, she felt ready for her summer courses at elite colleges in New England and the Midwest. But when her dad left her at the airport in San Antonio, she crumpled a little inside.

Inequality, Poverty, Segregation

 

U.S. Education Department issues guidelines for supporting homeless students

Joe Heim, The Washington Post
With millions of students across the United States set to begin returning to school in coming weeks, the U.S. Department of Education issued guidance Wednesday for states and school districts on how to respond to the specific needs of homeless students. The guidelines, provided in response to new provisions in the federal Every Student Succeeds Act, emphasize practices aimed at providing stability and safety for the homeless public school population, which included more than 1.3 million students in the 2013-2014 school year.

Income segregation in schools found to rise by 40 percent since 1990

Carmen Constantinescu, Education Week
Segregation among students in public schools based on race has been a persistent and growing concern and new statistics show that income segregation may be growing as well. After analyzing two national data sources—the School District Demographics System (SDDS) and the Common Core of Data (CCD)—researchers found that income segregation between and within public school districts has been on the rise since 1990.

The new segregation

Lauren Camera, US News and World Report
The racial tension and violence that roiled the country this month left politicians, policymakers and protesters of every stripe shocked and exasperated. Two separate incidents caught on video of white police officers shooting and killing black men, one in Baton Rouge and the other in Minneapolis, resulted in the killing of five Dallas police officers during a Black Lives Matter protest and most recently the killing of three Baton Rouge law enforcement officers – all in a two week span.

Public Schools and Private $

 

Review of A 21st century school system in the mile-high city

Terrenda White, National Education Policy Center
A report published by the Progressive Policy Institute calls for aggressively closing more public schools and expanding charter schools and charter networks. It highlights reforms adopted by Denver Public Schools, notably a “portfolio model” of school governance, and argues that these reforms positively impacted student test scores. However, causality cannot be determined, and the report did not attempt to isolate the effect of a multitude of reforms—including charters, performance pay, and a new performance framework—from larger complex forces shaping student demographics in the city. Written in a reportorial voice, the only data presented are in the form of simple charts. The lack of conventional statistical analyses thwarts the reader’s understanding. The report also characterizes the reform’s adoption as a “political success” born of a healthily contentious electoral process. In doing so, it downplays the role of outside forces and moneyed groups that influenced the form of reforms, and it disregards missed opportunities for meaningful engagement with community stakeholders. Finally, while the report acknowledges the district’s failure to close achievement gaps and admits limitations with the evaluation system, it never explains how a successful reform could generate a widening gap in performance between student groups by race and class.

How the relationship between L.A. Unified and charter schools is ‘like a middle school dance’

Sonali Kohli, Los Angeles Times
For years, parents in the nation’s second largest school district have faced disarray when trying to find the best place for their kids to learn. There are about 10 types of public schools in the Los Angeles Unified School District, many with their own admissions processes and schedules. To address that problem, the school district has discussed creating a “unified enrollment system,” a one-stop-shopping experience for choosing between district schools. Initially, the plan only included district schools and not independent charters — the publicly funded but privately run alternatives that are often accused of draining money and enrollment from L.A. Unified. But as the district tries — in the words of its superintendent Michelle King — to “change the narrative” about the rivalry, that might change.

Charter chiefs applaud Zimmer’s summit speech

Mike Szymanski, LA School Report
LA Unified School Board President Steve Zimmer offered a rousing speech at Saturday’s “Promising Practices” forum that was praised by charter leaders because of his inclusiveness. “We understand that a narrative that blames charter schools for all that is wrong in public education may serve short-term organizing goals but is counterproductive and doesn’t help every child,” Zimmer said. “Equally, a narrative that perpetuates the notion that LAUSD schools are failures may increase the short-term goal of increasing charter schools and reinforces deficit mindsets. It’s an immoral narrative. Both of these narratives are not factual, both goals have the effect of dividing us artificially and not really serving the needs of kids and their families and why we got into this work.”

Other News of Note

 

A protest over education has turned into a movement in Mexico

Shannon Young, PRI
What started off as a seasonal protest in southern Mexico against an educational change is turning into a movement. On June 19, about 800 state and federal police were deployed to break up a highway blockade in Nochixtlán, a commercial and transportation hub in the indigenous Mixteca region. Eight people — protesters and townspeople — were killed in the police operation. One month later, no one has been held accountable. The government initially denied police were armed, then rejected the authenticity of video and photographic evidence, but later claimed police were ambushed and opened fire in self-defense. Uniformed police were the only people photographed aiming firearms in Nochixtlán, about 90 minutes north of the city of Oaxaca. Another person was killed by gunfire during a police operation at a traffic circle near Oaxaca City. The protests are over a federal education “reform” bill that ties job security to evaluations and introduces a regime of standardized tests. A dissident union of education workers says it also undermines collective bargaining. And teachers in the bilingual indigenous system object to the reform’s favoring of English in secondary language instruction while not assigning curricular value to native Mexican tongues.