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Teaching, Leading, and Social Justice
7th circuit appeals court rules for transgender student on restroom use
Mark Walsh, Education Week
A federal appeals court on Tuesday upheld an injunction requiring a Wisconsin school district to allow a transgender high school student to use the boys restroom, ruling that Title IX and the U.S. Constitution’s equal-protection clause support the student who was born female, but now identifies as male. “A policy that requires an individual to use a bathroom that does not conform with his or her gender identity punishes that individual for his or her gender nonconformance, which in turn violates Title IX,” said the opinion for a unanimous three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit, in Chicago. The decision is the latest on an issue that has percolated around the country and came close to be decided by the U.S. Supreme Court before the court returned a Virginia case to another federal appeals court for further consideration.
Math, science professionals say goodbye to the office park, hello to the classroom
Carolyn Jones, EdSource
Two years ago, LaTeira Haynes was working in a quiet laboratory at UC San Diego finishing up her doctorate in biomedical engineering. Now, she’s teaching a 9th-grade biology class in South Los Angeles that is so large she uses a microphone to be heard over the constant din of teenage chatter, rustling worksheets, the zipping and unzipping of backpacks. But to her, there is no sweeter sound. “These students are here. They want to be here. I want to be here,” said the energetic second-year teacher, her hair pulled back and her hoop earrings flashing. “I have 47 kids in this class and 44 of them are here today. That’s huge.” Dymally High School, in a neighborhood where only 3.6 percent of adults age 25 or over have a four-year college degree, is a long way from the seaside bluffs of La Jolla, where Haynes was studying immune cells and mulling a career in research. But Haynes said Dymally is a perfect fit for her, and teaching high school is a far more rewarding career than working in a lab.
Hollywood’s reductive narratives about school
Anne Beatty, The Atlantic
Most teachers I know hate the movie Freedom Writers, in which a Long Beach, California, teacher leverages writing to convert apathetic students into crusaders for justice. Though it had not yet been filmed in 2003, when I was a first-year teacher in South Central Los Angeles, I had absorbed enough teacher-savior narratives to reject their simplicity but internalize their winning idealism. These storylines can infiltrate schools, tainting a teacher’s expectations of both her power and her complicated students—like T, my 10th-grader who toted a pink teddy bear with a safety pin jammed through its ear. Trying to teach T confirmed for me the perils of these simplified narratives. The bear, like the pick tucked in T’s afro, seemed a vaguely punk statement of insouciance. Other boys respected his I’ll-go-crazy-on-your-ass aura, maintained through spontaneous outbursts of kicking, shouting, and cursing. Afterwards, he would sink, sighing, into the nearest chair, cross his legs, and pat his hair. When cheerful, T asked to borrow things from the girls in a loud stage whisper: “Can I see your mirror? Mirror!” He spoke in either a breathy falsetto or a rumbly roar. When once I told him to speak in his real voice, he snapped, “This is my voice!” My description so far, while true, caricatures T as a problem student, impossibly alien. I don’t know what to do with T on the page any more than I did in the classroom. Though I left his school a decade ago, in my mind, T is still refusing to slide out through the gym doors in his borrowed graduation robe. Now as a teacher in North Carolina of mostly white students, whose parents mostly watch Fox News, I teach “The Danger of a Single Story,” a TED talk in which the Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Adichie asserts that single stories are created when people are shown to be “only one thing” until “that is what they become.” My limited understanding of T was partly a result of the single story I’d heard about kids like him. The story of low-income, urban students of color has been told too often by white, middle-class people like me who are cast as main characters in pat, triumphant narratives endorsing the redemptive single story of teaching.
Language, Culture, and Power
How Gallaudet University is working to reach young, deaf readers
Sarah Larimer, The Washington Post
There was once a curious little girl with bright pink hair who loved to climb trees. One day, the little girl met an old man, who gave her fruit from a baobab tree. The fruit was delicious. So the girl set off to find the tree. We’re not going to tell you what happens next, though. Wouldn’t want to ruin the ending. This story of the pink-haired child and her fruit-focused adventure is told through an app created in a Gallaudet University lab that aims to give deaf children something quite valuable — easy, early access to American Sign Language. “People like me, deaf people, don’t ask to be fixed,” said Melissa Malzkuhn, founder and creative director of the Motion Light Lab. “We just ask to be able to thrive.” In this lab at Gallaudet, the private university for the deaf and hard of hearing in Northeast Washington, research and innovation turn into resources for children and families. There is so much out there for hearing children, Malzkuhn said through interpreters. But much of what is available is sound-based.
English learners were hurt the most when Texas limited special education
Laura Isensee, NPR
Angel Vazquez is 9 years old, has hearing loss in both ears, has trouble speaking and struggles to concentrate in class. He’s a year behind in school, just learned how to read and is still learning English. For nearly two years, his mom, Angeles Garcia, tried to get him evaluated for special education at his elementary school in Houston. Garcia sent the school three letters, pleading for an assessment. She even included medical documents describing some of his disabilities, but she says the school ignored her. When a response finally came, officials at the Houston school district told Garcia that Angel would have to wait another year to be evaluated because he’d emigrated from Mexico and needed time to assimilate. According to federal law, that’s no excuse. To make matters worse, the school communicated with Garcia using letters written in English, not her native language, Spanish. “I really feel bad because my son is growing up and time is going by,” Garcia says in an interview in Spanish. “And what’s going to happen with him? He’s not advancing at all.” In Texas, Garcia’s story isn’t rare.
Linguistic prejudice and the ultimate public good
Robert Meyer, Literacy and NCTE
In her recent New York Times Magazine article “Have We Lost Sight of the Promise of Public Schools?” Nikole Hannah-Jones frames the current fight over school governance in the history of public education as the ultimate social contract and, at the same time, unending efforts by some of America’s wealthy to disengage from it. She cites the segregation academies of the 1950’s as the origin of today’s voucher movement and as an example of how, for many, racism undermined the public good. Racism has long undermined equality and justice in public education for far too many people, as has, in a much more insidious way, linguistic discrimination. In her landmark book, English with an Accent, Rosina Lippi-Green defined it eloquently: “Accent discrimination can be found everywhere in our daily lives. In fact, such behavior is so commonly accepted, so widely perceived as appropriate, that it must be seen as the last back door to discrimination. And the door stands wide open.” Dr. Wayne O’Neil also described “linguicism” in a 1997 Rethinking Schools article as the last “legitimate” prejudice and as a “thinly veiled racism.”
Whole Children and Strong Communities
Unfolding hope in a Chicago school
Gregory Michie, Rethinking Schools
As I returned to my 7th- and 8th-grade classroom in January after a much-needed winter break, part of me was hoping to leave Donald Trump—and much of 2016—behind. Sure, I knew he would be inaugurated soon. I knew his already ubiquitous presence would become even more suffocating. And I feared his frightening campaign promises would soon land brutally on people’s lives—including the lives of my students. But he had already wormed his way into so many of our lessons over the past year that I thought we were ready, at least for a while, to turn to other topics, other themes. I should have known better. By the end of his first week in office, Trump had already signed an executive order to begin building a wall along the Mexican border, threatened to “send in the feds” if Chicago’s gun violence numbers didn’t improve, blocked Syrian refugees from entering the United States, and temporarily banned immigration from seven majority Muslim countries. It was impossible for us to look away.
When schools meet trauma with understanding, not discipline
Mallory Falk and Eve Troeh, NPR
If you know anything about New Orleans public schools, you probably know this: Hurricane Katrina wiped them out and almost all the schools became privately run charters. Many of those schools subscribed to the no excuses discipline model — the idea that if you crack down on slight misbehavior, you can prevent bigger issues from erupting. That was also true of Crocker College Prep, an elementary school in New Orleans. It had strict rules about everything. Students had to sit up straight at their desks, eyes tracking the speaker. They had to walk the halls in silence and even wear the right kind of socks. Students who broke these rules, or acted out in other ways, were punished. The thing is, students across New Orleans face high rates of exposure to trauma, but school discipline policies have rarely accounted for that. Crocker College Prep is now one of five New Orleans charter schools in a collective to become more trauma-informed. That means Crocker aims to account for the social, emotional and behavioral needs of all students, and their lives outside of school.
How to really help gay teens thrive
Olga Khazan, The Atlantic
Even though acceptance is growing for LGBT teens, the world isn’t quite changing fast enough: Multiple recent studies show that LGBT teens have less life satisfaction and more depression than their straight peers, in part because so many face harassment. LGBT teens are more likely to be suspended or expelled from schools, sometimes because they were trying to protect themselves from bullies. Other kids might drop out on their own or switch to a different school in search of a more welcoming environment. But a recent study published in the Journal of Homosexuality found that gay, bisexual, and lesbian teens who simply switched schools or living situations did not fare as well as their peers who linked up with larger LGBT groups. For the study, the University of Arizona youth development professor Russell Toomey and his co-authors relied on a sample of people in their early 20s who were recruited from LGBT organizations near San Francisco. They examined the correlations between the kinds of strategies the young adults had used to cope with the stress of being a sexual minority in high school and their overall well-being in young adulthood.
Access, Assessment, and Advancement
Free play or flashcards? New study nods to more rigorous preschools
Dana Goldstein, The New York Times
A group of students at Woodside Community School in Queens peered up at their teacher one morning this month, as she used an overhead projector to display a shape. It looked like a basic geometry lesson one might find in any grade school, except for the audience: They were preschoolers, seated cross-legged on a comfy rug. “What attributes would tell me this is a square?” asked the teacher, Ashley Rzonca. A boy named Mohammed raised his hand, having remembered these concepts from a previous lesson. “A square has four angles and four equal sides,” he said. As school reformers nationwide push to expand publicly funded prekindergarten and enact more stringent standards, more students are being exposed at ever younger ages to formal math and phonics lessons like this one. That has worried some education experts and frightened those parents who believe that children of that age should be playing with blocks, not sitting still as a teacher explains a shape’s geometric characteristics.
Next-generation science tests slowly take shape
Liana Loewus, Education Week
Around the country, science instruction is changing—students are being asked to make models, analyze data, construct arguments, and design solutions in ways that far exceed schools’ previous goals. That means science testing, of course, needs to change as well. Students “have got to show us how they know, not just what they know,” said James Pellegrino, a co-director of the Learning Sciences Research Institute at the University of Illinois at Chicago and an expert on assessment. Yet considering federal requirements around science testing, and states’ logistical, technical, and financial limitations, putting a new, performance-heavy state science test in place is no easy task. Of the 18 states now using the Next Generation Science Standards, which were released in April 2013, only Illinois, Kansas, and Nevada, as well as the District of Columbia, have moved completely from their previous science tests to ones that align to the newer “three-dimensional” benchmarks. Illinois and the District of Columbia were the first to take the leap, putting an operational test in place in spring 2016. Illinois did so especially quickly to comply with federal reporting requirements, designing a new test in just six months—a move some experts have questioned.
State board rethinking how to measure performance of alternative schools
John Fensterwald, EdSource
State law recognizes that schools primarily serving expelled students, dropouts and students who had trouble coping in traditional schools should be held accountable for academic performance – but by different measurements. This month, the State Board of Education began a more than year-long process to determine what those metrics should be, which schools should be measured by them and how the schools should fit into the larger system of accountability and school improvement the board is designing. Finding a solution could be tough. Studies have concluded that, through fits and starts over the past two decades, the state has failed to compile useful data on schools serving students who are among those struggling most. They include disproportionate numbers of foster youth, African-American and Latino students. “These schools are often the last-ditch effort to help kids who have fallen through the cracks. It’s where kids with significant credit deficiencies, who have had expulsions and suspensions, have ended up,” said Rob Manwaring, senior policy and fiscal adviser to the nonprofit Children Now.
Inequality, Poverty, Segregation
Our schools have an equity problem. What should we do about it?
Danielle Gonzales and Ross Wiener, Education Week
What is educational equity, whereby all students have equal access to opportunities for a high-quality education? What does it look like when it’s successful, and what does it take to achieve it? These questions have been driving our work at the Aspen Institute’s Education & Society Program for the past several years, and even more so for the last 18 months, as the result of a shift in the federal role in public education and concerns from the state leaders with whom we work. For most of the last half-century, the role of the federal government has been to protect “the education of disadvantaged children,” as articulated in the original Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965. The bipartisan passage of the Every Student Succeeds Act, in 2015, maintains several components of earlier versions of the ESEA, but it also gives more flexibility and responsibility to state leaders to define accountability and determine the interventions and supports for underperforming schools. Just as our federal education laws have changed and evolved, so too have our nation’s demographics. It is significant that the federal role is downsized just as economic inequality is at its highest and mobility from poverty is at its lowest since the ESEA was enacted.
College access index shows shrinking levels of economic diversity
Robert Siegel, NPR
How economically diverse are America’s colleges? That’s a question The New York Times has been asking in an annual survey the paper’s been doing for the past couple of years. The big takeaway this year, according to Times columnist David Leonhardt, is that economic diversity at the nation’s public, four-year colleges is on the decline. And David Leonhardt joins us.
Bringing the dream of an elite college to rural students
Anemona Hartocollis, The New York Times
The first time Nyreke Peters met the new college adviser at his rural high school, he was skeptical. Other adults at Hobbton High School spoke with the same Southern accent and shared an easygoing familiarity that came from having gone to the same schools and having spent their lives in the same county. The adviser, Emily Hadley, was a determined recent college graduate from New Hampshire who seemed bizarrely interested in his future and pressed him to think beyond the confines of the sweet potato and hog farms. Mr. Peters, a senior, had his sights set on the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, but she persuaded him to apply to Middlebury College, an elite institution in Vermont that he had never heard of. A few months later, to his astonishment, he was admitted. A scholarship fund from Sampson County, a little more than an hour’s drive south of Raleigh, N.C., paid for him to visit, and he decided to attend. “Miss Hadley, she’s from up North, and she knew all the schools,” said Mr. Peters, a snare drum player in the marching band who lives with his grandparents. “She pushed me to apply here, apply there.” Ms. Hadley is part of a nonprofit organization, and a movement, trying to break down the social, economic and psychological barriers that keep low-income rural students from having a shot at the elite range of the American dream. Most low-income students rely on their parents for college advice, and many of them end up going to colleges that are less rigorous than they can handle, the research shows.
Public Schools and Private $
Will pro-charter victory in Los Angeles spread to other cities?
Arianna Prothero, Education Week
Now that pro-charter-school forces have taken control of a coveted piece of K-12 real estate—the Los Angeles Unified school board—proponents of school choice are hoping the expensive and hard-fought victory in the nation’s second-largest district will lead to a more robust expansion of charters around the country. After years of trying, charter school supporters succeeded in seizing the majority of seats on the Los Angeles board in a runoff election earlier this month, guaranteeing that the panel with broad powers over the 640,000-student district will support stalled efforts to expand the city’s charter sector. It was a stinging defeat for the city’s teachers’ union, long the dominant player in the district’s politics. Los Angeles Unified is the largest district in the country governed by an elected board, and the race for influence over its future direction pitted pro-charter forces who want to significantly grow charter schools there against teachers’ unions that have been aggressively fighting to hold the line on charters. The election’s price tag—which brought an unprecedented $15 million in independent spending—underscored the tactical importance these groups see in Los Angeles. Some view the Los Angeles race as a harbinger for battles over school board elections in other cities, and possibly bigger legislative battles in states over the expansion of the charter school market.
How school choice affects test scores
Matt Barnum, The Atlantic
At last week’s gathering of school-choice supporters, there was an awkward fact in their midst: A wave of new studies had shown that students receiving a voucher did worse, sometimes much worse, on standardized tests. That was the inconvenient verdict of studies examining programs in Louisiana, Ohio, Washington, D.C., and in Indianapolis, where the advocates had convened for the annual conference of the American Federation for Children. U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, the group’s former leader, gave the keynote address. But many of the school-choice proponents, who had long made the case that their favored reform works, had an explanation at the ready.
Why the only charter school in Princeton, N.J., is now a flash point
Valerie Strauss, The Washington Post; Sarah Maraniss Vander Schaaff, freelance writer
Attack. Battle. War. Devastation. Vandalism. Vitriol. Whisper campaigns. This is not the stuff of Washington, this is the language coming from parents in Princeton, N.J. The issue, depending on whom you ask, is the integrity of public education, school choice, democracy, money, or common courtesy. What is clear is that late last year, the town’s only charter school filed a request with New Jersey’s Education Department to add a weighted lottery and expand enrollment by 76 students over the next two years. The acting commissioner of education approved the plan in early March. An appeal, two lawsuits, and a counter lawsuit are pending. New yard signs have popped up voicing support for the district’s traditional schools. And many wonder how neighbors who have slung insults at each other on the Internet will be able to sit on the same bleachers at their children’s softball games.
Other News of Note
The dream hoarders: How America’s top 20 percent perpetuates inequality
Richard Reeves, Boston Review
In January 2015, Barack Obama suffered an acute political embarrassment. A proposal from the budget he’d sent to Congress was dead on arrival—but it was the president himself who killed it. The idea was sensible, simple, and progressive. Remove the tax benefits from 529 college saving plans, which disproportionately help affluent families, and use the money to help fund a broader, fairer system of tax credits. It was, in policy terms, a no-brainer. You can easily see how the professorial president would have proposed it. But he had underestimated the wrath of the American upper middle class. As soon as the administration unveiled the plan, Democrats started to quietly mobilize against it. Representative Chris Van Hollen from Maryland (now a senator) called his colleague, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi. Pelosi happened to be traveling with Obama from India to Saudi Arabia on Air Force One. As they flew across the Arabian Sea, she persuaded the president to drop the reform. The next day, White House spokesman Eric Schultz declared that the 529 plan had become “a distraction” from the president’s ambitious plans to reform college financing.