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Teaching, Leading, and Social Justice
California students join thousands nationwide in historic school walkout
David Washburn, EdSource
Wednesday, one month after the massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., thousands of students across California and the U.S. walked out of school as part of an unprecedented effort to force Congress to change the nation’s gun laws. Beginning at 10 a.m., students from elementary schools to colleges left their classrooms for 17 minutes — one minute for each of the people killed on Feb. 14, when Nikolas Cruz walked into the school and opened fire with an AR-15-style assault rifle. It was the nation’s 259th school shooting in the past quarter century. The protests — part of the National School Walkout organized by EMPOWER, the Women’s March youth group — took on a variety of forms. On some campuses students wore all black, while in others they wore orange in reference to Florida. Some were highly organized and included speeches and raucous chants. In others, students simply stood in silence. Many protests were held on campuses, but a number of them also spilled into the streets. Students in Seattle staged sit-ins along roadways. At a school on Chicago’s South Side, hundreds of students streamed out of classrooms and into the surrounding neighborhood. A group of protesters in Manhattan’s Upper West Side marched on the Trump International Hotel and Towers.
A rocky appearance for DeVos on ’60 Minutes’
Anya Kamenetz, NPR
“Why have you become, people say, the most hated Cabinet secretary?” Lesley Stahl asked Education Secretary Betsy DeVos in a 60 Minutes interview that is drawing lots of attention. “I’m not so sure how exactly that happened,” DeVos responded in the interview, which aired Sunday night on CBS. DeVos rarely gives interviews outside outlets like conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt. But she had some news to discuss. Sunday, President Trump named her head of a new commission on school safety in response to the Parkland shooting. That appointment came after yet another example of the controversy that has marked her tenure as secretary: a visit by DeVos to Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School last week that was angrily criticized by some students on social media. “I give a lot of credit to the students for raising their voices,” DeVos told Stahl. “They want gun control,” Stahl responded. DeVos responded: “They want a variety of things. They want solutions.” During her confirmation hearing last year, DeVos memorably supported the idea of arming teachers — perhaps against grizzly bears, she joked. She reiterated that support Sunday night, in line with Trump’s support for the idea: “It should be an option for schools to consider. … No one size fits all.” Educators, teachers unions and some policy experts have been critical of the idea. A new working paper from Johns Hopkins argues this would be both risky and ineffective.
Why America’s teachers haven’t been getting raises
Annie Lowrey, The Atlantic
Larry Cagle is angry. At 54 years of age, he makes $34,500 a year teaching critical-reading skills to public high-school students in Tulsa, Oklahoma. “I do construction and lawn maintenance in the summer” to make ends meet, he said. “I moved here from Florida five years ago, and in Florida I made $25,000 a year more.” He talked about the number of public-school teachers he knew working second jobs on nights and weekends, flipping burgers or hauling luggage at the airport. Teachers digging into their own pockets to pay for students’ basic needs and classroom supplies. Teachers living in cars, taking out loans, panhandling for more money, struggling to pay their own bills. “My school is one of the highest-performing schools in the state,” he said, estimating that two in three of the teachers he had worked with in the past half decade had left for other jobs or retired. “These are primary positions, not ancillary positions. This is math, science, foreign language, arts, history. We had two teachers who just walked out [and quit] recently.” The successful two-week-long strike of public-school workers in West Virginia—as well as the imminent strike of teachers in Oklahoma, led by grassroots activists, including Cagle—has thrown into relief the financial difficulties that thousands of education professionals face. Yet those difficulties are not unique to those two states. Despite the perception that educator jobs are unionized, pay decently well, and are guaranteed-tenure, hundreds of thousands of American teachers have seen their wages and benefits erode in recent years, more so than for many other types of workers.
Language, Culture, and Power
How student activism could potentially impact American politics
Sarah McCammon, NPR
NPR’s Sarah McCammon speaks with Nancy Thomas, director of the Institute for Democracy and Higher Education at Tufts University about the potential impact of student activism in American politics.
Julie Washington’s quest to get schools to respect African-American English
William Brennan, The Atlantic
Studying African-American vernacular English wasn’t Julie Washington’s plan. But one day in the fall of 1990, her speech-pathology doctorate fresh in hand, she found herself sitting with a little girl at a school outside Detroit. The two were reading the classic P. D. Eastman picture book Are You My Mother?, which tells the tale of a lost hatchling trying to find its way home. The girl—4 years old, homeless, and a heavy speaker of the dialect known as African-American English, or AAE—listened attentively as Washington read: Are you my mother?” the baby bird asked the cow. “How could I be your mother?” said the cow. “I am a cow.” Washington closed the book and asked the girl to recount the story from memory. The girl hesitated, then launched into it. “She goes, ‘Is you my mama? I ain’t none a yo’ mama!,’ ” Washington recalls. “She did the whole thing in dialect.” Washington found the girl’s retelling deft and charming, and she left the classroom smiling. Only later, sitting in her office at the University of Michigan, did Washington have the flash of insight that would redirect her career. “As a scientist, I stepped back and thought about what that girl had to do,” Washington told me recently, while waiting to address a gathering of linguists at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. “She had to listen to a story in a dialect she doesn’t really use herself, understand the meaning, hold the story in her memory, recode it in her own dialect, and then say it all back to me.” The girl’s “translation” of the book might not sound like much, but translating it? “That’s hard,” Washington said, especially for a young child. The experience convinced her that dialect was playing a significant and unrecognized role in the reading achievement of millions of children—and very likely contributing to the persistence of the black–white gap in test scores.
A Teacher, a double identity, hatred and justice advocacy
Elwood Watson, Diverse
A recent exclusive story on Huffington Post.com was a detailed exposé about Dayanna Volitich, a 25-year-old social studies teacher at Crystal River Middle School in Florida who turned out to be a White supremacy advocate and has been removed from the classroom pending an investigation of radical views she has espoused. Those who have read the story are now aware of the fact that the previously largely unknown Volitich harbored vehemently racist, sexist, anti-Semitic and xenophobic viewpoints that she promoted on social media and her White nationalist podcast “Unapologetic” under the pseudonym Tiana Dalichov. There’s also strong indication that she hoped to influence her students with her views.
Whole Children and Strong Communities
Trump backs off raising age limit to buy some weapons and focuses on arming teachers
Brian Bennett, Los Angeles Times
President Trump is pushing forward with a plan to arm teachers and improve background checks for gun purchases, but has retreated from his promise to raise the age limit to buy certain kinds of weapons, a move many see as caving to the National Rifle Assn. Trump wrote on Twitter on Monday that there is “not much political support (to put it mildly)” for raising the age limit from 18 to 21 to purchase powerful rifles like the one used to kill 17 people at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., last month. During a meeting with six students and families from the Florida high school in the White House last month, Trump pledged to be “strong” on increasing the age limit. A recent CNN poll found strong support for the idea, including among Republicans. But Trump backed off that stance in recent weeks, following a White House meeting with NRA officials. Rather than push for the comprehensive gun legislation he urged Congress to pass just last month, Trump now wants state and local officials to take the lead in setting age limits and other issues.
Gun-trained teacher accidentally discharges firearm in Calif. classroom, injuring student
Fred Barbash, The Washington Post
A teacher who is also a reserve police officer trained in firearm use ‘accidentally’ discharged a gun Tuesday at Seaside High School in Monterey County, Calif., during a class devoted to public safety, school officials said in a statement. A male student was reported to have sustained non-life-threatening injuries. The weapon, which was not described, was pointed at the ceiling, according to a statement from the school, and debris fell from the ceiling. Seaside Police Chief Abdul Pridgen told the Monterey County Weekly that a male student was “struck in the neck by ‘debris or fragmentation’ from something overhead.” Pridgen said whatever hit the student was not a bullet. However, the student’s father, Fermin Gonzales, told KSBW 8 that it was his understanding that fragments from the bullet ricocheted off the ceiling and lodged in the boy’s neck. The father said the teacher told the class before pointing the gun at the ceiling that he was doing so to make sure his gun wasn’t loaded, something that can be determined visually.
Do police officers in schools really make them safer?
Cheryl Corley, NPR
When the bell rings at Chicago’s Sullivan High School on the city’s far north side, it’s a familiar scene. Hundreds of students pour into the hallway heading to their next class. What’s also becoming increasingly familiar is the presence of two uniformed police officers in the hallway keeping watch. The school resource officers often chat with the students passing by and Sullivan’s principal Chad Adams says the officers provide a higher level of security for the school and much more. “The thing that’s most important for the school and I think any school in this country — especially in the plight of what’s happened in Florida — is relationships,” says Adams. “These school officers that I am lucky enough to have at my school build relationships with kids.” School-based policing is considered one of the fastest growing areas of law enforcement. After the massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., many people — including the President Trump — said there should be school resource officers inside every school. That’s rekindled a debate over the role of police in schools and the affect they have on students and school safety. Advocates believe school resource officers can best handle any threats at schools. Critics say their presence creates unintended consequences like suspensions, expulsions and arrests — especially for students of color.
Access, Assessment, and Advancement
A principal’s perspective on performance assessment
Julie Kessler, Stanford Center for Opportunity Policy in Education
“My name is Julie Kessler and I’m the principal of San Francisco International High School, which is a San Francisco Unified School District public high school entirely for recently arrived immigrant students. So 100% of our students are English learners and the vast majority of our students, when they come to us, are classified as newcomers, which means they are very new to the English language and to American high school as whole…. For us, doing portfolios twice a year with our students in grades 9 through 12 has been one of the single most powerful tools for teaching and learning that we found for our students to be collaborators, for our students to be English speakers, and for our students to defend their work in front of their peers and an audience.”
Student absenteeism: Three studies to know
Sarah D. Sparks, Education Week
For improving achievement, boosting student attendance seems like the lowest of the low-hanging fruit: If you can’t get the kids to school, nothing else you do matters. But new research on chronic absenteeism reveals surprising details can make a difference in whether students make it to class. The Every Student Succeeds Act has spurred more action on chronic absenteeism by requiring states to report chronic absentee rates and allowing districts to use it as another indicator for school accountability. Nearly all of the states that have submitted ESSA plans have included chronic absenteeism in their new accountability systems. That, in turn, is spurring new research on the topic. “I think that within absenteeism, a lot of the focus has been on documenting who’s absent and leaving it there—we know high-poverty schools, boys, kindergartners, all have higher absenteeism,” said Michael Gottfried, an associate professor of education policy at the University of California Santa Barbara. “Those are really important to know, but knowing it doesn’t really move anything forward to solve the problem,” he said. “Looking at schools and structures and programs is a really good way to look at absenteeism, rather than just looking at families. If we are going to start to hold schools accountable for absenteeism, we must think that schools can do something about it. ” Here are a few studies states might want to consider as they work to improve attendance.
At California’s top public universities, why a dearth of Latino professors matters
Felicia Mello, CALmatters
In the middle of a talk on immigration policy, UC Berkeley lecturer Pablo Gonzalez suddenly gets personal. Standing at the front of a windowless classroom on this prestigious public university campus, he recounts how his mother and other women in his West Berkeley neighborhood each year would mark the anniversary of their arrival to the United States.They would make a mile-long pilgrimage from their homes to a local church, he says—“all these Mexican women walking up the street, taking up space.” Afterwards, they’d go to lunch.“These are the traditions that the production of illegality stops,” Gonzalez says. His students nod in recognition. Chicano/Latino Studies majors and minors, they come from Fresno, East Palo Alto, Boonville. Many are the first generation in their families to go to college; some are undocumented.
Inequality, Poverty, Segregation
Students of color and armed school staff
Rachel Martin, NPR
Some Florida lawmakers say they fear arming school staff could harm black and Hispanic students. State Rep. Amy Mercado of the Orlando area talks with NPR’s Rachel Martin.
School segregation is not a myth
Will Stancil, The Atlantic
Is school segregation getting worse? Plenty of people say yes, including scholars, journalists, and civil-rights advocates. For the first time in years, there’s something approximating a consensus: Racially divided schools are a major and intensifying problem for American education—maybe even a crisis. There’s seemingly compelling numerical evidence, too. According to my analysis of data from the National Center on Education Statistics, the number of segregated schools (defined in this analysis as those schools where less than 40 percent of students are white), has approximately doubled between 1996 and 2016. In that same span, the percentage of children of color attending such a school rose from 59 to 66 percent. For black students, the percentage in segregated schools rose even faster, from 59 to 71 percent. But not everyone is on board. In the eyes of some writers, the warning signs of segregation are all a false alarm—little more than a statistical mirage. The National Review writer Robert VerBruggen recently made this case, attacking what he called the “resegregation myth.” VerBruggen and other skeptics contend that methods meant to identify school segregation are instead detecting something much more benign: The growing diversity of the American population.
Subtle bias against students may be present in online classes
Adolfo Guzman-Lopez, KPCC
A new study by education researchers suggests that the kind of subtle racial discrimination known as implicit bias found in brick and mortar classrooms may be present in online college classes. Researchers from Stanford, the University of California – Irvine and Vanderbilt University began by creating fictitious online student identities. They chose names that suggested racial and ethnic identity, such as Todd, Emily, Tyrone, Tanisha, Mei, Tao, Priyanka, and Samir. They then posted comments using those personas in class forums for Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC). “The names that had been assigned a white male name were twice as likely to get a response relative to all other seven categories,” said Stanford professor Thomas Dee, a co-author of the study. The study’s findings come as California is preparing to create a new online community college targeting more than two million people while a recent survey found that the vast majority of California’s college students are Latino, black, or Asian American, while nearly two thirds of tenured college faculty are white. Dee said the research focused on class forums because most online courses now allow students to watch a professor’s lecture at the time of their choosing; that makes interaction in online class forums an important part of the learning process. If some students are getting less attention based on their perceived race or ethnicity, he said, that raises questions about whether the student is receiving the same quality of education as the other students.
Public Schools and Private $
A time for school choice? If so, let’s make sure we ask the right questions
Johann Neem, Brookings
Will we have public schools a decade from now? What will they look like? For the first time since the 19th century, or perhaps since debates over desegregation, we are facing these fundamental questions. A recent article argued that the Koch brothers are investing heavily to disrupt public schools in Arizona. Current Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos promotes parental choice, including public support for private and religious schools. The recent tax reform bill expanded tax benefits for parents of children in private schools and almost expanded tax benefits for homeschooling parents. The number of charter schools continues to grow, and in some cities educate 40 percent or more of students. In this time for choosing, we need to look back as well as ahead. In my recent book, “Democracy’s Schools: The Rise of Public Education in America,” I sought to understand why earlier Americans expanded access to schooling, what they sought to accomplish, how they went about it, as well as their vision’s limits. While the book’s story ends nears the Civil War, it speaks to us today. Like school reformers past, we must determine what kind of institutions will best promote the purposes of democratic education. Americans today are deeply divided over public education, and our divisions lead to different policy preferences. Research abounds. Do charter schools outperform traditional district schools? Do teachers’ unions improve or reduce student achievement? Should parents have the choice to send their child to a school that matches their own religious or political values? What will work? These are all important questions, but they are secondary ones. The fundamental questions concern why we have schools in the first place. Without asking these, we cannot determine which policies best serve America’s future. Worse, we may focus so exclusively on one issue—test scores, for example—that we lose sight of the ends of schooling itself.
Parents, teachers challenging new proposed charter school in Oakland
Lisa Fernandez, KTVU
Nearly 2,000 people have signed a petition trying to prevent a new charter school from coming to the Oakland Unified School District, arguing that this future campus will not serve African Americans and will be yet another drain on the cash-strapped district. Oakland Unified already has 35 charter schools, each of which carry individual overhead costs, such as principals, administrative assistance and custodians. The proposal for “Latitude 37.8 High School” run by Education for Change comes just months after the OUSD board decided to slash $9 million from the schools and the central office in order to stay fiscally solvent after years of excessive administrator spending and lack of internal controls. The petitioners say another charter school in Oakland is costly and unnecessary. “They are duplicating what we already have,” said Jasmene Miranda, the Media Academy director at Fremont High School, and the lead organizer against the new charter. “And we think that’s a major problem.” But these charter school critics are not seeing the bigger picture, argued Aaron Townsend, project manager for Latitude High’s school launch. “The argument is not charter schools vs. district schools,” said Townsend, who used to be a teacher and principal for OUSD. “The conversation should be, ‘How do we serve students well and get better outcomes for kids?’ Part of the frustration is that there is not much self-reflection on their own level of performance.” Parents, Townsend said, don’t care whether their children go to charter schools or traditional schools. “They care whether they are going to good schools,” he said, “and OUSD is not providing that.”
North Hollywood High may have to share its campus with a charter school, and these students aren’t happy about it
Brenda Gazzar, Los Angeles Daily News
Students at North Hollywood High School are spearheading a fight to stop a charter school from potentially sharing their campus next year. The concerned students, along with a handful of parents, have organized an online petition that had garnered more than 1,800 signatures Friday in an effort to prevent the newly approved Valley International Preparatory High School (VIPHS) from co-locating on their campus. They are also asking local neighborhood councils to support their cause. The Los Angeles Unified School District, which green-lighted VIPHS’ charter petition in December for five years, has made a preliminary offer to the charter school applicant to share the Colfax Avenue site next school year. “The primary concern that’s closest to most students’ hearts is the loss of a lot of programs and opportunities on campus that we simply wouldn’t have room for if a charter would co-locate here,” said Ella Michaels, a North Hollywood High senior who is captain of the debate team and whose brother is a junior. “We’re already strapped for resources as it is.”
Other News of Note
Transgender teachers, long isolated, are finding strength in numbers
Anya Kamenetz, NPR
On Dec. 28, 2014, Leelah Alcorn died after walking into traffic on a highway near her hometown of Kings Mills, Ohio. The 17-year-old identified as transgender, and in a suicide note published online, which became national news, Alcorn wrote: “The only way I will rest in peace is if one day transgender people aren’t treated the way I was, they’re treated like humans, with valid feelings and human rights. Gender needs to be taught about in schools, the earlier the better. My death needs to mean something.” Devon Shanley read in those words a personal call to action. He is a transgender man teaching seventh-grade English in New York City. He resolved to become more vocal as a teacher and activist. While realizing that some trans people do not want to be out, and for others being out may threaten their safety, he believes, “this is what is killing us, this silencing.” Awareness of gender diversity has been growing. And schools in particular have been a battleground for gender rights. In interviews with 15 individuals, and in an NPR Ed survey of dozens more trans and gender-nonconforming educators around the country, teachers like Shanley told us they are becoming more visible, more active, more organized.