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Teaching, Leading, and Social Justice
L.A. Unified school board reelects Steve Zimmer as president
Howard Blume, Los Angeles Times
Steve Zimmer will serve a second year as the Los Angeles Board of Education’s president after the panel voted 7-0 Wednesday to keep him in office. The president has no greater authority than the other six elected board members, but can assert considerable influence. The president often serves as a public representative of the nation’s second-largest school system and manages the board’s public and closed-door meetings.
Interest in teaching continues to drop among high school students
Catherine Gewertz, Education Week
High school students are becoming less and less interested in becoming teachers, a trend that’s picking up speed at an “alarming” rate, the ACT said Wednesday.
An ACT survey of high school graduates who took its college-entrance exam shows that in the class of 2015, only 4 percent said they planned to become teachers, counselors, or administrators.
Shanker blog: The intervention that works across settings with all children
Geoff Marietta, Chad d’Entremont, Emily E. Murphy
If you learned there was an intervention to improve student outcomes that worked for nearly all children across communities, what would stop you from using it? This intervention has closed learning gaps, both in urban communities serving predominantly low-income minority students and in isolated rural areas with large numbers of white and Native American students living in poverty. It has worked in suburban, urban, and rural settings with white, African-American, Hispanic, Native American, Asian, and multi-racial students. That intervention is collaboration
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Language, Culture, and Power
Schools are under federal pressure to translate for immigrant parents
Tara García Mathewson, The Hechinger Report
When Dadhi Dahal first came to the United States in early 2009, the Bhutanese population in Syracuse, New York was quite small — the first refugees from Bhutan, fleeing ethnic cleansing policies in their home country, arrived in 2008, after they had spent years in refugee camps in Nepal. Fast forward eight years. The Bhutanese population has grown into a flourishing, tightly knit group of about 3,000 people. They are part of a substantial refugee population from South Asia, Africa and the Middle East that has transformed the city and its schools. Students in the Syracuse City School District speak more than 70 different languages and four of the most common among them are Nepali, Karen, Somali, and Arabic.
New teaching strategies are designed to help English learners succeed
Theresa Harrington, EdSource
“Turn and talk to your partner,” Judith Franco told her 4th grade students, after prompting them to think of specific plants and animals that help each other survive. This is not an ordinary 4th grade science lesson. Franco’s classroom is a key part of a push in two California districts to use new instructional strategies to promote greater academic success among students not yet proficient in English.
Stop punishing black children just because they’re black
Andre Perry, The Hechinger Report
Schools should be held to higher standards than students. If schools irresponsibly impose discipline practices, then those rules (or leaders) should be expelled. However, when it comes to discipline, we give students the cane and schools a slap on the wrist. “I’ll say up front: I am not here to offer any hard-and-fast rules or directives,” said Secretary of Education John King in prepared remarks for the National Charter Schools Conference. Careful not to offend the charter school community, which upholds autonomy as sacred, King added, “But I believe the goal for all schools should be to create a school culture that motivates student to want to do the best.” Suspension and expulsion doesn’t work.
Access, Assessment, and Advancement
Dual enrollment programs attracting more students in California high schools
Fermin Leal, EdSource
Emma Centeno stood on the stage last month during her Santa Ana College graduation, proudly holding up her associate of arts degree to cheering friends and family. Two weeks later, she stood on another graduation stage, this time to receive her high school diploma.
UCLA, UC Berkeley boost admissions of Californians, including blacks and Latinos
Teresa Watanabe, Los Angeles Times
The University of California’s flagship campuses have significantly boosted admissions offers to state residents — including the most African Americans and Latinos since voters banned affirmative action two decades ago — officials announced Wednesday. UCLA and UC Berkeley each admitted an additional 1,000 California freshman for fall 2016, increasing students from all ethnicities for an overall boost of more than 11%.
After Fisher: What the Supreme Court’s ruling means for students, colleges, and the country
Gary Orfield, UCLA; Theodore M. Shaw, UNC; Stella M. Flores, NYU; Liliana M. Garces, Pennsylvania State University; and Angelo N. Ancheta, Santa Clara University; AERA
On Tuesday, June 28, 2016, AERA held a briefing at the National Press Club on Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin. The briefing, titled “After Fisher
: What the Supreme Court’s Ruling Means for Students, Colleges, and the Country,” featured a panel of five experts, including Gary Orfield, Theodore M. Shaw, Stella M. Flores, Liliana M. Garces, and Angelo N. Ancheta. The purpose was to address the implications of the decision for ensuring quality education for all students and graduates capable of contributing to the demands of a 21st-century workplace. Issues discussed included next steps in university admissions, best practices for colleges and universities, and potential programs in light of the scientific evidence on the educational benefits of student diversity and the importance of taking race into account.
New college program gives ex-convicts support to earn degree
Adolfo Guzman-Lopez, KPCC
Seven California State University campuses are busy this summer putting the finishing touches on a program to help people who were previously incarcerated become successful in college. The program, called Project Rebound, will create an office where formerly incarcerated students can receive tutoring, counseling on academics and financial aid, and receive cash help to buy meals and books.
Inequality, Poverty, Segregation
School’s out, and for many students, so is lunch
Avery Lill, NPR
Summer break for many students is a time to kick back, play outside, and hang out with friends. For a significant portion of public school students in the United States, however, the end of school also brings a familiar question—what’s for lunch? During the school year, about 30.3 million children receive free or reduced-price lunches at their public schools. But in the summer, only 2.6 million of those students receive a free or reduced lunch. That’s fewer than 10 percent.
Fisher v. University of Texas and lessons for k-12 districts
Erica Frankenberg and Liliana M. Garces, Pennsylvania State University; Education Week
The U.S. Supreme Court’s long-awaited decision last month in Fisher v. University of Texas, a case challenging the constitutionality of a race-conscious student-admissions policy, affirmed that the policy adopted by the University of Texas at Austin satisfied the requirements of the equal-protection clause of the 14th Amendment. The 4-3 majority opinion provided much-needed guidance to postsecondary institutions for how they can lawfully consider race in admissions. As scholars studying racial inequality in education who have contributed to friend-of-the-court briefs the last three times the high court has considered educational diversity cases, we are heartened by this decision and by the attention it brings to the importance of diversity at all levels of education. Others have rightly hailed it as a huge victory for postsecondary institutions in their efforts to further their educational missions. But what does the decision mean for K-12 schools?
50 years seeking educational equality: Revisiting the Coleman report
Education Week
On this weekend in 1966, researcher James S. Coleman and his colleagues released: “Equality of Educational Opportunity.” The 737-page report to Congress was dense with charts, tables, and head-poundingly complex analysis of the disparities between white and black students in public schools, and the effects of that inequity on academic achievement. “You read the overview and you wouldn’t know the dynamite that’s coming up,” said James McPartland, a Johns Hopkins University researcher and one of the original seven authors in Coleman’s research team. In the decades since, what came to be known as the Coleman report has been one of the most influential and hotly debated education studies in American history.
Public Schools and Private $
Cloning great schools is latest in long line of L.A. reform plans
Howard Blume, Los Angeles Times
The latest reformers intent on improving Los Angeles schools are confident that they have it right. The trick, they say, is not to get shoehorned by theories or politics. Instead, simply find a good school and make another one just like it. Then repeat. And repeat. And repeat. Until 160,000 Los Angeles students in bad schools get into excellent ones.
Seeking diversity and money, schools are embracing foreign students
Laura Krantz, The Boston Globe
Dozens of public school districts around the state have signed contracts to enroll foreign students in their high schools, attracted by the prospect of thousands of dollars in tuition revenue and a chance to diversify their student bodies. Recruiting firms, tapping the growing hunger — primarily in China — for an American education, connect students with the schools for a handsome fee.
Teach for America has gone global, and its board has strange ideas about what poor kids need
George Joseph, The Nation
Alisa Currimjee, a second-year Teach for India fellow, is struggling in the classroom today. She points down the hall toward her pupils and grimaces: “They haven’t been very well-behaved.” As she enters the classroom, I wait outside with Hemangi Joshi, a teacher-training expert. We cringe as Currimjee yells until her voice is hoarse, shouting at a classroom of 34 boys sitting two to a desk, with barely any room to move. It’s hot, and so it’s hard to hear Currimjee over the fans. “What does ‘analyze’ mean?” she demands, as kids in the back rows doze off right in front of us. She looks frustrated, calling on student after student, until one of them recites the definition he has scribbled in his notebook. Joshi whispers to me, “She is the only one talking, explaining… and she’s just sticking to the textbook. This is not much different from rote memorization.”
The history of privatization: How an ideological and political attack on government became a corporate grab for gold
Donald Cohen, TPM
The post-WWII era was a tough time for conservative economists, academics, intellectuals, and business leaders. Social Security, the Tennessee Valley Authority, the Securities and Exchange Act, and other New Deal programs represented a dangerous expansion of government’s role in the economy and society – nothing short of a frontal assault on freedom and the beginnings of socialism in the U.S. Today, after 50 years of attack on government, privatization is a standard conservative response to tight public budgets, a key pillar of attacks on government, and a lucrative market opportunity for domestic and global corporations. Large corporations operate virtually every type of public service including prisons, welfare systems, infrastructure, water and sewer, trash, and schools.
Other News of Note
Report: Increases in spending on corrections far outpace education
U.S. Department of Education
State and local spending on prisons and jails has increased at triple the rate of funding for public education for preschool through grade P-12 education in the last three decades, a new analysis by the U.S. Department of Education found. Released today, the report, Trends in State and Local Expenditures on Corrections and Education, notes that even when population changes are factored in, 23 states increased per capita spending on corrections at more than double the rate of increases in per-pupil P-12 spending. Seven states—Idaho, Michigan, Montana, North Dakota, South Carolina, South Dakota, and West Virginia—increased their corrections budgets more than five times as fast as they did their allocations for P-12 public education. The report also paints a particularly stark picture of higher education spending across the country at a time when postsecondary education matters more than ever. Since 1990, state and local spending on higher education has been largely flat while spending on corrections has increased 89 percent.
Just News from Center X is a free weekly education news blast edited by Jenn Ayscue.