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Teaching, Leading, and Social Justice
Demand for UC immigrant student legal services soars as Trump policies sow uncertainty
Teresa Watanabe, Los Angeles Times
Maria Blanco did a double take when the Google alert popped up in her inbox late last week: President Trump had reversed his campaign pledge and decided to continue a federal program temporarily suspending deportations of young people who are in the country illegally. The news thrilled Blanco, an attorney who heads the University of California Immigrant Legal Services Center — the nation’s first and only university system to provide free legal aid to students without legal status and their families. But her excitement was quashed within hours, when administration officials clarified that they still had made “no final determination” on the program — called Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA — leaving in question the fate of 750,000 young immigrants under its protection. An estimated 3,700 students without legal status attend UC campuses. “It’s such a roller-coaster ride,” Blanco said Saturday. “We’re back to where we were, which is not knowing really what the fate of this program is. Everybody’s still in limbo.”
New research: Student well-being higher in diverse schools
Adolfo Guzman-Lopez, KPCC
A study by University of California Los Angeles researchers published in the journal Child Development on Tuesday finds that students who attend more racially- and ethnically-diverse schools report less vulnerability, loneliness, insecurity and bullying. “There’s more of a balance of power in these diverse schools,” said report co-author Sandra Graham. The study polled nearly 6,000 sixth graders in 26 middle schools, mostly in Los Angeles County. The student population of 11 of the schools was dominated by one ethnic or racial group. In nine of the schools, two ethnic or racial groups made up most of the student body, and in six of the schools the student population was composed of several ethnic or racial groups in roughly equal proportions. In the more diverse schools, “kids have more opportunity to have cross-race friendships and then they become protective,” Graham said. “So if you’re in a diverse school and you’ve made friends with people from different racial and ethnic groups then they help protect you, they help introduce you to kids in their ethnic, racial group, there’s more opportunities to find your niche and fit in.” Student populations in schools, she said, are becoming more racially and ethnically segregated while California’s population is becoming more diverse.
How the 2017-18 funding increase for California education will be spent
Justin AllenDaniel J. Willis, and John Fensterwald, EdSource
The Legislature passed a $183 billion state budget for 2017-18 last week that includes a $3.2 billion increase in funding under Proposition 98, the formula that determines how much of the General Fund will go to K-12 school, community colleges and state-funded preschool programs. The additional $3.2 billion represents an increase of 4.4 percent over last year’s allocation, bringing Prop. 98 next year to $74.5 billion.
Language, Culture, and Power
Are Confederate-statue controversies teachable moments?
Stephen Sawchuk, Education Week
When New Orleans officials removed the last of four Confederate monuments in the city in May, social studies teacher Hayley Breden didn’t avoid the potentially explosive topic. Instead, she used it as a jumping-off point for a discussion in her Holocaust and Human Behavior class on how history is remembered, transmitted, and commemorated.
“One of the assignments was to pick a shameful event, write a paper, and create an educational piece or memorial to teach it to others—what are appropriate and not appropriate, effective and not effective ways to remember events in the past?” said Breden, a teacher at Denver’s South High School. “The Confederate-monument issue paired really well with that question.” The spate of efforts to remove the statues stretches from Baltimore to St. Louis to Arizona and shows no sign of abating by fall. Given how the movement is steeped in sensitive questions of identity, racism, and oppression, talking about it with students poses significant challenges for teachers, say history and education experts.
For some students, getting an education means crossing the border
Jonathan Levinson, NPR
The land border crossing between Tijuana, Mexico and San Ysidro, Calif. is one of the busiest in the world. Every day 25,000 people cross the border on foot. Among the crowd are students whose families live in Tijuana. Each morning their families commute many hours to bring the children to school in the U.S. Juan and his mom, Maria, wake up at 5:30 a.m. each day to make the trek from their home in Tijuana to Juan’s high school in San Ysidro. Some mornings, crossing the border can take up to an hour and half. “It’s been kind of, it’s been a lot,” Juan says. “Every day crossing it’s like, the time management, it’s finishing homework on time. It’s a lot.” But Juan’s mom says it’s worth the sacrifice.
Lawsuit alleges hostile environment for Jews on San Francisco State campus
Rosanna Xia, Los Angeles Times
Students and Jewish community members filed a lawsuit Monday against San Francisco State University and Cal State’s board of trustees, alleging that the San Francisco campus of the country’s largest public university system has long cultivated a hostile environment in which Jewish students are “often afraid to wear Stars of David or yarmulkes on campus, and regularly text their friends to describe potential safety issues.” The lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court of the Northern District of California by attorneys from The Lawfare Project and the firm Winston & Strawn LLP, was prompted by a confrontation in April 2016, when the mayor of Jerusalem, Nir Barkat, was invited by SF Hillel to speak on campus. According to the lawsuit, protesters used bullhorns to drown out the mayor’s speech and yelled and chanted “Intifada,” “Get the [expletive] off our campus,” and “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” while university administrators allowed the disruption to continue and instructed campus police to “stand down.”
Whole Children and Strong Communities
A school that provides the one constant in homeless children’s lives
Katie Hayes Luke, NPR
On the last day of school, the fifth grade students at Positive Tomorrows perform last-minute rehearsals for the inaugural “Classy Awards.” Teachers, parents and mentors file into the classroom through a doorway pasted with dangling gold stars, along a red paper carpet. While similar scenes play out in classrooms across the country, this particular group of fifth-graders has a more uncertain future than most. Positive Tomorrows is a small, privately funded school in the heart of Oklahoma City, designed to meet the needs of homeless children. The future of these students hinges on the one constant in their lives: the school, which addresses both education and basic needs. The educational challenges associated with homelessness are broad and extend to every corner of a child’s life. Without consistent access to adequate food, shelter and safety, students are often too hungry, tired and stressed to keep up in the classroom.
The youth-counseling program helping to curb Chicago’s violence
Ulrich Boser, The Atlantic
In the minds of many, the South Side of Chicago has descended into a type of madness. While crime doesn’t define the vibrant, inspiring city, violence clings to certain South Side streets where shootings have become commonplace. President Trump referred to parts of the city as “worse” than areas in the Middle East. A few weeks ago, two men shot a young man named Daniel Cardova, and when a group gathered to mourn Cardova some hours later, yet another shooting occurred, killing two people and injuring another eight. Given this harsh and violent reality, a new report offers a gossamer of optimism. Written by researchers at the University of Chicago, the study looks at the success of the counseling program known as Becoming a Man, or BAM, which is run by the nonprofit Youth Guidance. Started in 2001, the BAM program operates in Chicago and has posted tremendous results. One 2015 study found that students in the program were 45 percent less likely than their peers in South Side Chicago to be arrested for violent crimes. What’s more, the researchers believe that BAM students are as much as 19 percent more likely to graduate from high school.
As social and emotional learning expands, educators fear the ‘fizzle’
Jane Meredith Adams, EdSource
Four minutes late to his first class of the day, an 11th-grade boy at Oakland’s Skyline High School swung into his seat and blurted an explanation: “I had a bad nosebleed last night.” His U.S. history teacher, Jimmy Barbuto, looked up. Being late to class can wreck the morning flow at school, provoking confrontations and derailing lesson plans. “I’m sorry to hear that,” Barbuto replied. The remark was a nod to their shared humanity as well as an academic strategy, a tiny moment of modeling social skills that is part of a blooming movement in education known as social and emotional learning. While the term is jargon, the concept is straightforward: Help students recognize and manage their emotions so they can get excited about academics and get along with others. The class rolled on. “Anyone doing self-management?” Barbuto asked his 28 students, who sat in rows and paid a good deal of attention, considering they were teenagers in the early morning. “Having appropriate things on the desk?”
Access, Assessment, and Advancement
Is DeVos sending mixed messages on advanced courses and accountability?
Alyson Klein, Education Week
U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos seems to be sending some confusing signals when it comes to whether states will be allowed to use Advanced Placement, International Baccalaureate tests, the SAT, dual-enrollment courses, or career certifications to figure out if students are ready for college and the workforce, some experts say. Rating schools based on whether they get kids ready for college and the workforce was all the rage in state’s plans to implement the Every Student Succeeds Act. And at least eight states—that’s about half of the 17 that have turned in plans so far—want to use AP, IB the SAT, dual enrollment courses, or career certifications for accountability. The problem? It’s unclear if DeVos is cool with that, even though she has said she will make local control a big focus of ESSA implementation. What’s more, some experts worry that her team may be telling different states different things when it comes to how they measure college and career readiness.
California colleges transform remedial courses to raise graduation rates
Larry Gordon, EdSource
Before Aida Tseggai could major in biology at Cal State Dominguez Hills, she had to catch up in math. She passed a non-credit remedial math class in the fall and then was offered a new pathway – a for-credit course in college-level algebra that provided extra class time, tutoring and review of more fundamental material. Such combination classes – known as co-requisites, bridges or hybrids – are seen as a crucial tool to help hundreds of thousands of CSU students climb out of the remedial education hole in which some feel trapped. Part of a national reform movement, such courses also are aimed at helping students graduate faster. “It saved me time and money,” said Tseggai.
How the liberal arts help veterans thrive
Kara Voght, The Atlantic
Balanced on the edge of an armchair in the basement of Vassar College’s student center, Eduardo de la Torre is explaining his senior thesis: an exploration of the social construction of technology. The soon-to-be graduate, bouncing on the heels of his grey suede sneakers, looks ready to spring out of his seat as he articulates ideas with frenetic energy, barely able to express connections he’s observed before the next thought sparks. As a fellow Vassar graduate, I feel myself lulled back into a comfortable mode of intellectual discourse, reminded of the fact that de la Torre is a combat Army veteran, and that we’re sitting in a brand new student-veteran lounge, only when he relates his critique of applied economic theory to the difference between a battle’s expected conditions and its reality. “I joke with my Army buddies, I tell them [theory] is like the plane that gets you there,” the 36-year-old former paratrooper, who deployed to Iraq for the 2007 surge, said. “But once you jump out of the plane, everything else is different on the ground. That’s how you have to look at economics.” Hardly any Vassar student could have arrived at this analogy until four years ago, when de la Torre and 10 other United States military veterans embarked on an experiment Vassar was leading among small, selective liberal-arts colleges: to seek out and enroll vets. In partnership with the Posse Foundation, a nonprofit with a successful track record of connecting students from underrepresented backgrounds with elite schools, Vassar enrolled its first cohort of veterans in the fall of 2013. The results of this effort became clearer in May as five of those student-veterans, including de la Torre, graduated after spending the traditional four years on campus.
Inequality, Poverty, Segregation
California urged to improve college access for young men of color
Larry Gordon, EdSource
Too many black, Latino, Native American and Pacific Islander young men in California face difficult barriers in trying to complete high school and enroll in and finish college, according to a new report by the Education Trust-West. In addition to grappling with cultural and ethnic biases, young men of color disproportionately attend high schools without enough science labs, counselors and college preparatory classes and are more likely to be expelled or suspended than white students, the report said. Only 76 percent of Latino boys and 67 percent of African-American boys graduate from California high schools compared to 85 percent of white and 94 percent of Asian boys, the study noted. Disparities continue in college enrollment and graduation rates. The report, titled “Hear My Voice: Strengthening the College Pipeline for Young Men of Color in California,” urged high schools, colleges and policy makers to take steps so those students “overcome the additional hurdles they often confront above and beyond what most other students face.” It declared that “the economic future of the state will hinge on our ability to help” those minority men – including Hmong and Laotian students along with the other groups – succeed in high school and college.
Poverty, dropouts, pregnancy, suicide: What the numbers say about fatherless kids
Claudio Sanchez, KPCC
The growing number of fatherless children in this country poses one of the the most serious problems in education today, according to best-selling author Alan Blankstein. He has spent most of his life advocating for kids who struggle in school. He wrote “Failure is Not an Option,” a guide to creating high-performing schools for all students. So, just how many kids are fatherless? NPR Ed put that question to Blankstein, who told us that 24.7 million kids in the U.S. don’t live with a biological father.
Schools become whiter and wealthier in communities that secede from districts
Denisa R. Superville, Education Week
Since 2000, 47 communities have broken away from their old school districts to form new ones—often creating school systems that are wealthier and less racially diverse. And nine others are in the process of seceding from their current school districts, according to a new report released Wednesday by EdBuild, a New Jersey-based nonprofit that focuses on school funding inequity. The secessions have been happening largely under the radar as some communities—with the help of state law and policies—seek to wall off their wealth and resources, said Rebecca Sibilia, EdBuild’s founder and CEO. Thirty states have laws that allow communities to break away from their current school districts, according to the report.
Public Schools and Private $
Oakland charters more likely to enroll higher-performing students than district schools
Mikhail Zinshteyn, EdSource
Oakland’s charter schools enroll students who are more academically prepared than students who attend district-run schools, giving city charter schools an edge on the question of which kind of school excels at educating its students, according to a new analysis of the city’s public school landscape. The study was considered especially noteworthy and has statewide significance because 30 percent of Oakland students attend charter schools – one of the highest concentrations of charter students in California. In the new report, titled “Informing Equity: Student Need, Spending, and Resource Use in Oakland’s Public Schools,” a coalition of charter and traditional school advocates found that on average 40 percent of incoming 6th- graders enrolling at Oakland charter schools met or exceeded standards in English Language Arts on the Smarter Balanced state standardized test compared to 27 percent for students entering schools run by the Oakland Unified School District. The gap was similar among students just starting high school, with 37 percent of incoming 9th-grade charter students meeting or exceeding standards compared to 26 percent of students entering district-run schools.
Hidden money: The outsized role of parent contributions in school finance
Maia Cucchiara, National Education Policy Center
While inequalities in school funding resulting from state and local policies have long been a source of concern to education researchers and policymakers, a recent report from the Center for American Progress examines a source of educational inequality that receives less attention: private fundraising by parents. It focuses on the 50 Parent-Teacher Associations (PTAs) that raised the most money in 2013-2014, with two main findings. First, the PTAs raising large amounts were located in schools and districts with low rates of student poverty. Second, while a PTA in a high-poverty community may raise only a few hundred dollars, PTAs in this sample raised hundreds of thousands of dollars each year. Using case studies, the report considers district regulation of private fundraising. This review concludes that the report’s findings about the scope and beneficiaries of private fundraising are credible and important—showing the impact successful PTAs can have. However, the focus on a small number of schools and districts, a lack of attention to school and community context, and problems with the case study design limit the report’s overall relevance. In addition, it is important to note that most funding inequalities arise at the state level; funds raised by parents represent only a minute portion of overall school spending. Nevertheless, the report’s recommendations, especially in support of equity grants, will be useful to district-level policymakers.
How private funding creates disparities among Detroit’s pre-k classrooms
Erin Einhorn, The Atlantic
LaWanda Marshall and Candace Graham both teach pre-kindergarten at the Carver STEM Academy on Detroit’s west side. Both have colorful, toy-filled classrooms, computers for students to use and assistant teachers to help guide their 4- and 5-year-olds as they learn and explore. But Marshall’s classroom has other things too—lots and lots of other things that regularly arrive like gifts from the pre-K gods. “The office calls and says you have a package, and we’re like ‘Yay!’ and the kids get excited. It’s like Christmas,” said Marshall. Boxes filled with classroom supplies like musical instruments and science kits arrive every few weeks. Marshall’s students—part of the Grow Up Great program funded by the PNC Foundation—go on regular field trips and get frequent visits from traveling instructors. The parents of her students get access to support programs like one that connects job seekers with employment opportunities. And Marshall receives special training in teaching arts and sciences that she credits with upping her game as an educator. Graham and her students, meanwhile, hang back when the kids down the hall board the bus to go on field trips. Few packages or visitors arrive.
Other News of Note
Why grades are not paramount to achievement
Ashley Lamb-Sinclair, The AtlanticAt the beginning of this school year, my colleagues and I decided to avoid giving the sophomores in our English classes any grades for six weeks. Research showsdiminishleading to low self-esteem and other mental-health issues. In a highly academic setting, here was an opportunity to catalyze our students’ broader motivations for learning—a quality with macro-benefits in an environment obsessed with single Scantron marks.