Just News from Center X – July 7, 2017

Teaching, Leading, and Social Justice

Teachers union leader: We won’t work with Trump and DeVos because ‘I do not trust their motives’

Valerie Strauss, The Washington Post
The president of the country’s largest labor union, Lily Eskelsen García of the National Education Association, told delegates at her organization’s annual gathering that they would not work with the Trump administration because the president and Education Secretary Betsy DeVos could not be trusted to do what is in the best interests of children. Eskelsen García just addressed the 96th NEA Representative Assembly meeting in Boston, accusing President Trump of residing “at the dangerous intersection of arrogance and ignorance” and labeled DeVos as “the queen of for-profit privatization of public education.” She said in part: Let me say this to all of you as clearly as I can, so that even if you disagree with me, you understand what is in my heart: I will not allow the National Education Association to be used by Donald Trump or Betsy DeVos. I do not trust their motives. I do not believe their alternative facts. I see no reason to assume they will do what is best for our students and their families. There will be no photo-op. We will find common ground with many Republicans and many Democrats on many issues. We will not find common ground with an administration that is cruel and callous to our children and their families. And I don’t just judge them by their words; I judge them by their actions.

Votes coming on teacher tenure, for-profit charters, other key bills

Staff, EdSource
Between now and July 21, when they take a month off, state legislators will have to decide the fate of bills that passed one chamber of the Legislature and await action in the other. Among those are key education bills that would lengthen teacher probation periods, require more accounting for spending under the Local Control Funding Formula, mandate a later start time for middle and high schools and further restrict student suspensions. What follows is a summary of the bills EdSource is following.

Officials restore money to L.A. schools soon after making controversial funding cuts

Howard Blume, Los Angeles Times
Barely a week after the Los Angeles Board of Education approved a budget based on reduced federal anti-poverty aid, schools officials have restored nearly all of the funding. The added dollars will help L.A. Unified avoid some cutbacks and may make some planned layoffs unnecessary. While the news was welcome, it was less clear why the belt-tightening went forward in the first place: Federal officials had told the district about the improved funding projection in a May 24 letter, and the school board did not approve the budget until June 20. “I am relieved that schools will not after all be enduring a disproportionate cut in budget and services,” said board President Steve Zimmer, whose term ended Friday. “I am troubled by the stress that they went through over a cut that, in the end, was not nearly as dramatic as people feared.” The planned $40-million reduction would have affected more than 700 campuses, about 70% of district schools. The cut in the anti-poverty funds was about 16.5% at each affected campus, about $113 per student at most schools. Now, all but 2% of the cut will be restored, officials said Friday, and the remainder could be added later as well.

Language, Culture, and Power

Research shows transitional kindergarten benefit for English learners

Deborah Kong, EdSource
To the mountain of research on one of the most effective interventions that prepares children to succeed in school, we can now add one more: new findings that transitional kindergarten gives English learners a substantial boost in the year before kindergarten. True to its distinctive approach in many areas, California has a specific brand of pre-k called transitional kindergarten, or TK, a grade offered statewide to a quarter of 4 year olds. The Legislature established transitional kindergarten with the Kindergarten Readiness Act of 2010. Prior to that, 4 year olds attended kindergarten. Today, those 4 year olds with birthdays just below the age cutoff for kindergarten enrollment first attend transitional kindergarten and then kindergarten in the following year.

They dreamed of being doctors. Now they help Syrians with the same dream

Malaka Gharib, NPR
They were teenage brothers. They had big dreams to be doctors. But there was no way it could happen. They were living in the middle of the Iran-Iraq war, studying in classrooms set up in tents. “We thought we were forgotten,” says Kamiar Alaei. But that was a long time ago. He’s now 42 and an internationally recognized doctor. He and his brother Arash, 47, also a doctor, haven’t forgotten what that feels like. So they’re helping a new generation of aspiring doctors: medical students in Syria, displaced in their own country by the ongoing civil war. The brothers now live in the U.S. They head the Global Institute for Health and Human Rights at the State University of New York at Albany. And they’ve set up a long-distance learning program that uses two things they didn’t have when they were students: the internet and mobile phones. Phones are often the only way to reach students on the move in search of safety.

Why students at an affluent school want to drop longtime mascot: The Millionaires

Valerie Strauss, The Washington Post
At Lenox Memorial Middle and High School in the Berkshire region of western Massachusetts, the longtime mascot is the Millionaires — but if most of the students have their way, it won’t be for long. The decision, however, is not in their hands — and some folks in the affluent town of Lenox don’t want it to change. During a recent student council survey of the more than 400 students in grades 6-12, about two-thirds of those who responded said they no longer want to be known as the Millionaires, according to Lenox Public Schools Superintendent Timothy Lee. Nearly 80 percent of the students from grades 6-12 answered the survey, which had a number of questions about what they wanted the student council to accomplish during the next school year. Why? “The rationale explained by the student council leaders was that Millionaires no longer accurately represented their identity and who they are as a group of students,” said Lee. Students report being harassed by rival teams because of the name, and the Berkshire Eagle quoted Julie Monteleone, a student council member, as telling the district’s governing board recently:
“The term Millionaires has become associated with the top 1 percent of our country, which excludes and burdens a very large majority of the population and currently plays a large role in the division of the United States.”

Whole Children and Strong Communities

The diminishing role of art in children’s lives

Tracy Brown Hamilton, The Atlantic
“Ik ben ik”—I am me—was the classroom theme when my son started preschool in the Netherlands two years ago. He painted a portrait of himself, with exaggerated teeth only on the bottom row and three strands of wiry hair on his head (“hair is hard,” he later told me). He went on to depict his home life: our canal-side house more wavy than erect; his father and I standing beside a cat we do not own; and his baby sister next to him while his other sister—his nemesis at the time—was completely absent. It was the first real glimpse we had into his experiences and sense of self, and it was both insightful and entertaining. My house is covered in the artwork of my three children. My middle child’s self-portrait, for example, is framed and featured in our living room, with her bold red hair painted in broad stripes and a third eye she claims is magic; my son’s bedroom wall displays his sketching of a giraffe. What my kids cannot express in written language they delight in sharing through their scribbles. As much evidence will support, drawing has significant developmental benefits for young children. It gives them space to represent what they think—territory within which they can exaggerate what is important to them or express ideas they are not yet able to verbalize. Through art, children are able to describe and reveal their notions about themselves, the world, and their place in it.

Why summer jobs don’t pay

Anya Kamenetz, NPR
Why can’t kids today just work their way through college the way earlier generations did? The answer to that question isn’t psychology. It’s math. A summer job just doesn’t have the purchasing power it used to, especially when you compare it with the cost of college. Let’s take the example of a working-class student at a four-year public university who’s getting no help from Mom and Dad. In 1981-’82, the average full cost to attend was $2,870. That’s for tuition, fees and room and board. The maximum Pell Grant award back then for free tuition help from the government was $1,800. That leaves our hypothetical student on the hook for just about $1,000. Add in a little pocket money, too — say $35 a week. That makes an extra $1,820 for the year on top of the $1,000 tuition shortfall. Now, $3.35 an hour was the minimum wage back then. So, making $2,870 meant working 842 hours. That’s 16 hours a week year-round — a decent part-time job. It’s also about nine hours a day for three straight months — a full-time, seven-day-a-week summer job. Or, more likely, a combination of both. In short: not impossible. Far from it.

To reach hungry children in the summer, these school cafeterias moved outside

Moriah Balingit, The Washington Post
All summer, when his students in Northern Virginia are supposed to be enjoying time away from the classroom, Clint Mitchell worries about whether the children who rely on free lunches during the school year are getting enough to eat. “Every day, we think about it,” said the principal of Mount Vernon Woods Elementary. “You don’t know what happens when they go home.” More than 90 percent of the students at his school in Fairfax County qualify for free or reduced-price meals. How they eat in the summer could be crucial not only to their health but also to their future academic success. This week, the county school system launched an expanded effort to address that need through an old-fashioned method: community barbecues. Of the millions of students nationwide eligible for subsidized school meals, only about 16 percent receive free summer meals, according to No Kid Hungry, an advocacy group. The problem also exists in Fairfax. More than 50,000 children in the county schools are eligible for free and reduced-price meals, but many cafeterias shut down when school is out or serve only children in short-term summer programs.

Access, Assessment, and Advancement

New report on transitional kindergarten gives the grade high scores

Priska Neely, KPCC
A new report out Wednesday gives high marks to the state’s newest primary grade. The multi-year study from the American Institutes for Research (AIR) finds that students enrolled in transitional kindergarten had an advantage in literacy and math skills when they reach kindergarten. Researchers looked at the skills of 6,000 kindergarteners across 20 school districts — some who had attended TK and some who did not. Students who had TK were better at identifying letters and words and had a better grasp on addition and subtraction – even compared with kids who’d been enrolled in other types of preschool programs. In the years they examined, the 2013-14 and 2014-15 school years, researchers were surprised to learn that students excelled no matter how classes were structured – whether half-day, full-day, or combined with kindergarten classes.

Chicago won’t allow high school students to graduate without a plan for the future

Emma Brown, The Washington Post
To graduate from a public high school in Chicago, students will soon have to meet a new and unusual requirement: They must show that they’ve secured a job or received a letter of acceptance to college, a trade apprenticeship, a gap year program or the military. Mayor Rahm Emanuel (D) said he wants to make clear that the nation’s third-largest school system is not just responsible for shepherding teenagers to the end of their senior year, but also for setting them on a path to a productive future. “We are going to help kids have a plan, because they’re going to need it to succeed,” he said. “You cannot have kids think that 12th grade is done.” Few would dispute that kids often need more than a high school diploma to thrive in today’s economy, but there is a simmering debate about the extent to which schools should be — and realistically can be — expected to ensure their graduates receive further training.

DeVos is discarding college policies that new evidence shows are effective

Kevin Carey, The New York Times
In June, the secretary of education, Betsy DeVos, announced plans to dismantle a set of Obama-era policies devised to protect students and taxpayers from predatory for-profit colleges. Yet data released in the final days of the previous administration shows that the existing rules have proved more effective at shutting down bad college programs than even the most optimistic backers could have hoped. The rules that Ms. DeVos wants to repeal are called the gainful employment regulations. For all for-profit programs, and any nondegree employment certificate programs at public or nonprofit colleges, the education department compares how much the typical student borrows versus how much they earn after graduation. If the ratio is too high — if students borrow lots of money and can’t get well-paying jobs — the program is deemed “failing.” A program that fails in two out of three years becomes ineligible for federal financial aid. Since many for-profit programs get up to 90 percent of their revenue through the Department of Education, the penalty will almost surely shut them down.

Inequality, Poverty, Segregation

How schools, parents and organizations are trying to close the achievement gap

WAMU, NPR
According to the latest Pew Research data, college graduation rates are up for Americans in nearly every racial and ethnic group. Last year, former President Barack Obama spoke about how crucial this is for the U.S. economy. “By 2020, two out of three job openings will require some form of higher education,” he said during an event at Benjamin Banneker Academic High School in Washington, D.C. “Our public schools had been the envy of the world, but the world caught up. And we started getting outpaced when it came to math and science education. And African American and Latino students, in part because of the legacy of discrimination, too often lagged behind our white classmates — something called the achievement gap that, by one estimate, costs us hundreds of billions of dollars a year.” The so-called achievement gap is pretty big. As of 2016, according to Pew, 55 percent of white 25- to 34-year-olds had attained at least an associate degree. African-American students? 35 percent. But there is work underway throughout the country to do something about this achievement gap. And it’s happening in the classroom, in the community, and in the home.

An Alabama high school ‘resegregated’ after years of being a model of integration — here’s what happened after

Graham Flanagan, Business Insider
In 2000, I graduated from Central High School in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. Central opened in 1979 after a federal court order forced the mostly segregated high schools in the Tuscaloosa City Schools system to integrate. For the next two decades, Central was an academic and athletic powerhouse in Alabama, producing state championships and National Merit Scholars. In 2000, the court order that created Central High School was lifted, and in August of that year — just months after I graduated — the Tuscaloosa City School Board voted to split Central into three high schools. To many, the move appeared to be a step backward in a state that had just begun to make progress after the civil-rights movement. Some saw the split as an act of resegregation, dividing the diverse student population that had once walked the halls together at the integrated Central High. Today, there are three high schools in the Tuscaloosa City Schools system. The most racially diverse is Northridge, which was built in the most affluent part of Tuscaloosa. Paul W. Bryant High School’s student body is 86% African-American, according to the Alabama State Department of Education, and Central High School’s is 98% African-American. Because of Central’s low standardized-test scores, the department has designated it a “failing school” every year since 2013.

Thousands of homeless among LA community college students

Rina Palta, KPCC
Nearly one in five Los Angeles community college students who responded to a new survey reporting experiencing homelessness at some point in the past year. Officials with the L.A. Community College District and local politicians highlighted the results of the survey Thursday in an effort to bring awareness to what they believe is a growing problem in the county and the nation. “These will not just be statistics on a wall,” said Wendy Greuel, chair of L.A.’s Homeless Services Authority’s Board of Commissioners. The online survey, which garnered about about 5,925 responses out of 134,345 enrolled students, has a two percent margin of error, officials said. Students were asked such questions as whether they’d experienced a night in which they didn’t know where they’d sleep, were ever evicted or thrown out of a home, or stayed in a shelter, abandoned building or car. They were also asked about their access to food, such as whether they had ever neglected to eat because there wasn’t money for food. Nearly 63 percent of respondents reported some degree of hunger. Respondents who’d been in the foster care system reported particularly high rates of food insecurity and homelessness. Those who were widowed or divorced reported high levels of both, as did Native Americans and African Americans compared to other demographic groups.

Public Schools and Private $

Trump’s proposed cuts to education funding create friction in charter school community

Louis Freedberg, EdSource
This should be a time of celebration for charter school advocates. Both President Donald Trump and Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos have focused their education agenda on providing parents with more choices, which include charter schools. The number of charter schools continues to grow, with nearly 3,000 charter schools enrolling nearly 3 million students nationally. But instead, Trump’s and DeVos’ endorsement of charter schools is driving a wedge between traditional allies and is threatening to undermine the bipartisan support charter schools have received almost throughout the quarter century since they emerged on the education landscape. In remarkably frank comments earlier this month, Nina Rees, president of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, acknowledged in advance of her organization’s annual conference in Washington D.C. that “the Trump administration’s policies have put us in a difficult spot.”

More charter school teachers see unions as an option

Liana Loewus, Education Week
Interest in forming teachers’ unions is bubbling up at charter schools in big cities, and the national unions are pitching in to help—but that doesn’t mean they’ve shed their wariness about the charter movement as a whole.
The organizing landscape is still relatively small and diffuse, but union advocates say even more charter teachers are starting to view organizing as an option. “There’s a real appetite” for this work, said Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers. “What you’re seeing is charters where people have decided to make these schools their homes, and they want a voice.” A Washington charter school in June became the first in that city to successfully organize a union. Another New Orleans charter school organized in May, bringing that city’s number of union-organized charter schools to five. As of this spring, Cleveland now has five organized charter schools as well.

The charter-school equity push

Eric Gorski, The Atlantic
When Josue Bonilla started at STRIVE Prep Federal, he spent a lot of time trying to earn happy-face stickers and string cheese. These were the rewards for sticking to his behavior plan. At times, they seemed hopelessly out of reach. One day, Josue was caught playing with a lighter in the bathroom. Another day, he hit a teacher’s aide in the face. Now, as the 13-year-old completes his second year in the middle school’s special-education classroom—named “Wisconsin,” for the teacher Wendi Sussman’s alma mater—Josue is off the behavior plan and spending 90 percent of his time on academics. He is using words his teachers gave him for when a classmate with autism gets too close—“Please be outside my personal space”—and not getting physical. Twice a week he participates in a general-education gym class, where things feel safe and structured to him. Students and their teachers make breakthroughs like Josue’s in schools across Denver and the country every day. But it’s remarkable at STRIVE because until a few years ago, the charter network, like many others, wasn’t focused on meeting the needs of students like Josue.

Other News of Note

Literary giants Junot Díaz and Toni Morrison on their unwillingness to surrender

Joshua Glass, Document
Writer and M.I.T. professor Junot Díaz was born in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, in 1968, and lived there with his mother and grandparents while his father worked in the United States. Six years later they would join him, immigrating to Parlin, New Jersey, where the younger Díaz would soon be confronted by a world of cultures—some seemingly shared to his African Caribbean upbringing but vastly different for the most part—that would inspire questions of social identity and intimacy…. Díaz’s 2007 novel “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao,” which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction the year following, paralleled these maturities in magical realism and multigenerational storytelling, touching on Rafael Trujillo’s dictatorship and black denial…. Born Chloe Ardelia Wofford, the novelist and Princeton professor emeritus Toni Morrison hardly needs an introduction. Her works, vivid epics of lost love, have documented African American history in both times of beauty and peril. She’s received the Medal of Freedom (2012), the National Humanities Medal (2000), the Nobel Prize in Literature (1993), and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (1988), in addition to an unmeasurable list of accolades for decades of contributions to the arts. Junot first met Morrison at an event for a literary publication they both contribute to: “I was incredibly nervous and incredibly honored,” he remembers, “I still am today.” Here, the pair reconvene to speak about black identity and having the credence to keep writing.