Teaching, Leading, and Social Justice
New Trump executive order could lead to a smaller education department
Andrew Ujifusa, Education Week
President Donald Trump’s proposed budget for education could lead to significant cuts to staff and various programs, sources have told us. But it’s not the only action on the president’s agenda that could shrink the U.S. Department of Education. On Monday, Trump released a new executive order that directs each agency leader to submit “recommendations to eliminate unnecessary agencies, components of agencies, and agency programs, and to merge functions” to Mick Mulvaney, the director of the Office of Management and Budget.
Trump education dept. releases new ESSA guidelines
Alyson Klein, Education Week
U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos Monday released a new application for states to use in developing their accountability plans for the Every Student Succeeds Act. And, as you might expect, it is shorter and includes fewer requirements than an earlier application released by the Obama administration in November. The biggest difference seems to be on the requirements for outreach to various groups of educators and advocates.
LA Unified alerts central office staff of possible cuts
Kyle Stokes, KPCC
Los Angeles Unified school officials formally notified hundreds of administrators and support staffers working in the district’s central office on Wednesday that their current positions might be eliminated in July. In making those notifications, L.A. Unified leaders laid the groundwork to potentially act upon their current plans to slash central administrative budgets in the nation’s second-largest school system next year by $86.5 million, a reduction of roughly 25 percent. On Tuesday, district officials released a list of 300 central office positions — ranging from secretaries, payroll specialists and stock clerks to high-level administrators — that district leaders are considering eliminating.
Language, Culture, and Power
If immigration agents come knocking, schools must follow these steps
Corey Mitchell, Education Week
Following the lead of dozens of school systems around the nation, Broward County, Fla., school leaders passed a resolution that affirms that they will do everything they can to protect undocumented students who are on school grounds or participating in off-site school-related activities. As is the case elsewhere, Broward County’s memo makes clear that federal agents seeking student information, or access to students, need to produce a warrant or another court document signed by a judge, and the school district’s attorney must review the order. But while most other districts passed resolutions that are several paragraphs long, Broward County’s exhaustive five-page policy includes a glossary that defines terms such as immigration status, immigration agent, and enforcement action. The Broward County resolution also clarifies that staff in the 270,000-student district, which includes the city of Ft. Lauderdale, shall not ask questions about the immigration status of students or their parents. It also requires the district to develop a plan within 30 days to help students who are left without guardians if their parents are detained or deported.
A pause in international students?
Aria Bendix, The Atlantic
A new survey reveals that four in 10 U.S. colleges have experienced a decline in international applicants for the Fall 2017 term. The survey of around 250 colleges and universities—which will be released in its entirety later this month—was conducted in February by six higher-education groups, including the Institute of International Education.* More than three-quarters of institutions surveyed expressed concern about future enrollment. According to a news release, the survey was initiated in response to fears “that the political discourse surrounding foreign nationals in the U.S. … could be damaging to international student-recruitment efforts.” Indeed, the most significant decline in applicants came from the Middle East, with universities reporting a 39 percent decrease in Middle Eastern undergraduate applications and a 31 percent decrease in graduate applications from the region.
In response to a xenophobic incident on campus, these Chinese students want you to ‘Say My Name’
Emily Becker, A Plus
After multiple incidents in which the name tags of Asian American students were ripped off the doors of their dorm rooms at Columbia University, a group of Chinese students at the university posted a video in which they ask other students to “Say My Name” in an effort to turn a xenophobic incident into one of cultural understanding. “Any discrimination, xenophobic behaviors or hate crimes come down to ignorance,” Yan Huhe, one of the students involved in the video, told A Plus in an email. “This is why I think a vital step to start resolving these issues is to establish platforms for conversations and mutual understanding.” In the two-and-a-half minute video, which has garnered over 360,000 views, international Chinese students introduce themselves and explain the meaning of their names, including the multiple layers of significance embedded in each one. For example, in the video, one of the students, Yan explains that his name literally means “to preach harmony,” but it’s also the first two characters of the city that he comes from in China.
Whole Children and Strong Communities
Why even the world’s highest-scoring schools need to change
Valerie Strauss, The Washington Post; Marion Brady, author of “What’s Worth Learning?”
Betsy DeVos, the new U.S. secretary of education, has a theory. She agrees with former Florida governor Jeb Bush and other education “reformers” now shaping American education that what’s wrong with America’s schools has an easy fix: competition in the form of market forces — vouchers, merit pay, charter schools, etc. DeVos is wrong. Dozens of variables — most of them beyond educator control — affect kids’ ability to learn. Believing that market forces can erase the effects of those variables is magical thinking. Albert Einstein, Buckminster Fuller, David Bohm, Alfred North Whitehead, Ernest Boyer, Harlan Cleveland, Arthur Koestler, Thomas Merton, Peter Senge, and many other internationally known and respected thinkers have a different theory about poor learner and school performance. If they’re right, even the world’s highest-scoring schools aren’t serving learners well.
How many transgender children are there?
Evie Blad, Education Week
As policymakers and educators debate the rights of transgender children in schools, they have no federal data to answer even the most basic question: How many transgender children are there? That’s because publicly collected data on transgender individuals—part of a U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention survey—is not collected in every state, and participating states only survey adults. Although it’s generally believed that transgender children make up a relatively small share of the population, advocates surmise some are now more likely to “come out” and transition at younger ages than in years past because of greater public awareness of the issue. About 0.7 percent of 13- to 17-year-olds living in the United States identify as transgender, some 150,000 teenagers, according to an estimate released in January by the Williams Institute at the University of California, Los Angeles, School of Law. The think tank, which researches issues related to sexual orientation and gender identity, based its estimates on statistical modeling rather than direct surveys of children. More work is needed to gather more representative and demographic data about transgender youths, the organization says.
Professor Caveman
Richard Schiffman, The Atlantic
“That’s my blood, not the deer’s,” said Eden Kloetzli, a senior at Washington College, in Maryland, as she gazed at the red liquid staining her palm. She and about a dozen other students were busy slicing and dicing four deer carcasses laid outside the school’s new archaeology laboratory. Making the task harder, the novice butchers were using tools that they had knapped themselves out of obsidian, basalt, and flint. Their anthropology professor, Bill Schindler—who somehow looked ruggedly handsome despite the fact that he hadn’t shaved in days and was wearing an odd necklace made of seal bone, African baobab seeds, and beads cast from copper he had smelted himself—grinned. “With a simple flake that you can create in a second,” he said proudly, “you have transformed that deer into food for you, rather than just something to look at while you starve.” This is high praise, coming from Schindler, who says that fewer people have mastered basic survival skills today than at any other time in human history. Over the course of this semester-long class, Experimental Archaeology and Primitive Technology, Schindler’s students learn to build fires with wooden hand drills, make rope from plant fibers, and gather tree nuts, among other things. Although most of us no longer rely on these skills, Schindler argues that they are essential to understanding what it means to be human, and should be a part of our educational curricula.
Access, Assessment, and Advancement
Kindergartners enter more ready in math and literacy, researchers say
Christina A. Samuels, Education Week
Kindergarten students in 2010 started school with more math and literacy skills than kindergartners did just 12 years earlier. What changed in that time?
California’s long-awaited School Dashboard debuts
John Fensterwald, EdSource
The California School Dashboard, a website with multicolor displays rating schools and districts on a range of performance measurements, went live today. Years in planning, the website broadens the concept of a successful school from a single metric – standardized test scores – to multiple indicators measuring academic achievement, school climate, student engagement and other priorities specified in the Local Control Funding Formula. The State Board of Education said the website is intended to provide data for school improvement as well as information for parents and the public.
California Democrats unveil a sweeping financial aid plan to help students avoid debt
Melanie Mason and Teresa Watanabe, Los Angeles Times
Seizing on growing concerns over college affordability, California lawmakers proposed what would be the most generous college aid plan in the nation Monday, covering not just tuition but also living expenses that have led to spiraling student debt. The plan would supplement California’s existing aid programs with the aim of eradicating the need for student loans for nearly 400,000 students in the Cal State and University of California systems. It also would boost grants to community college students and give those attending them full time a tuition-free first year. “Lower-income students … are able to many times, through our great programs in California, get help to pay for tuition. But they’re still graduating with a tremendous amount of debt,” said Assemblyman Kevin McCarty (D-Sacramento), who is spearheading the plan. “The cost of living, the books, the transportation — that’s [what] we really need to tackle.”
Inequality, Poverty, Segregation
Try this one trick to improve student outcomes
Anya Kanenetz, NPR
“Millions of poor, disadvantaged students are trapped in failing schools.” So said President Trump at the White House recently. It’s a familiar lament across the political spectrum, so much so that you could almost give it its own acronym: PKTIFS (Poor Kids Trapped In Failing Schools).… President Trump, and his education secretary, Betsy DeVos, are largely focused on the T for “trapped” part of the problem. They talk about creating escape routes, largely by expanding charter and voucher programs. Richard Kahlenberg has spent decades stumping for a third way. His idea: Create public schools that are more integrated. He helped innovate the use of social and economic indicators to do that — instead of race and ethnicity, the use of which is prohibited by a 2007 Supreme Court decision.
A Mississippi school district is finally getting desegregated
Aria Bendix, The Atlantic
School segregation did not end in 1954 with the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision. For the past 52 years, the Cleveland, Mississippi, school district has faced ongoing litigation in response to its racially divided high schools and middle schools. After decades of legal battles and failed integration initiatives, a settlement was finalized Monday, creating a single high school on the historically white Cleveland High campus and a single middle school on the historically black East Side High campus. Prior to Monday’s ruling, Cleveland was one of many nationwide districts suffering from the remnants of deep-seated segregation in schools. As of 2015, nearly 180 U.S. school districts were involved in active desegregation cases, 44 of them in Mississippi.
Girls draw even with boys in high school STEM classes, but still lag in college and careers
Carolyn Jones, EdSource
High school engineering classrooms look a lot different than they did a few decades ago, and it’s not just because of computers. Those classes now have girls. Lots of girls. Thanks to long-standing efforts by teachers, administrators and nonprofits, girls now make up about half the enrollment in high-school science and math classes. They are scoring almost identically to their male classmates on standardized tests, according to data compiled by the National Girls Collaborative Project, a nonprofit funded in part by the National Science Foundation that aims to increase girls’ participation in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math). But progress lags beyond the walls of high schools. The percentage of women majoring in STEM fields at California State University, for example, has remained a steady 37 percent since 2007, even though women make up 55 percent of all undergraduates. At the University of California, women make up 52 percent of enrollment, but only 24 percent of those studying for engineering degrees are women. Still, the numbers have improved a bit: In 1999, only 21 percent of those studying engineering at UC were women.
Public Schools and Private $
Green Dot to open new school in Inglewood
Alex Cohen, KPCC News
When charter schools were begun in the early 1990s the idea was that they were going to be experimental stations that would develop new ideas that would benefit the system as the whole. In the 2000s we saw this dramatic expansion.… As we had this dramatic expansion, the role of charters has shifted from experimental stations to drivers of competition,” said UCLA’s John Rogers. (Approx. 01:20 mark)
Here’s what you should know about that voucher bill from Rep. Steve King
Andrew Ujifusa, Education Week
Although he’s made headlines recently for controversial comments not directly about schools, Republican Rep. Steve King of Iowa has also made waves for introducing a bill that would dramatically reshape K-12 and education policy. That’s House Resolution 610, and it would create federally backed vouchers for students. We wrote about the bill earlier this year. The Choices in Education Act of 2017, the in-plain-English name of the bill, would repeal the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, the main K-12 law, of which the Every Student Succeeds Act is the latest version. It would create vouchers funded by Washington for parents to use at private schools if they chose to do so, or to use for home schooling their child. Under King’s legislation, the federal government would fund those vouchers through creating block grants for states.
GOP lawmakers refuse to protect LGBT students and those with disabilities in school voucher bill
Valerie Strauss, The Washington Post
There was something buried in the news that a U.S. House committee had just advanced a bill renewing federally funded school vouchers in Washington — the only such program in the country — and it is highly revealing about Republican priorities when it comes to protecting the civil rights of students. A bill to extend the Scholarships for Opportunity and Results Reauthorization Act, known as SOAR, through 2022 was approved Friday by the House Oversight Committee, which is chaired by Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah), who spends a lot of time trying to tell D.C. residents what to do, even though he was elected by people in Utah. But the panel’s Republicans voted down Democratic efforts to add amendments that would protect the civil rights of students with disabilities and LGBT students.
Other News of Note
The underground railroad for refugees
Jake Halpern, The New Yorker
In the fall of 2014, two Afghan police officers, Mohammed Naweed Samimi and Mohammed Yasin Ataye, travelled to America on temporary visas. For five weeks, along with other law-enforcement officers from Afghanistan, they attended lectures on intelligence-gathering techniques at a Drug Enforcement Administration facility in Virginia. One Saturday, the trainees took buses into Washington, D.C., for a day of sightseeing. That evening, they all returned to the buses—except for Samimi and Ataye. They had contacted an Afghan family in suburban Virginia, who picked them up in Washington and drove them to their house. From there, Samimi and Ataye took a bus to Buffalo, New York. Their destination was a safe house known as Vive, at 50 Wyoming Avenue, on the east side of the city. At Vive, a staff composed largely of volunteers welcomes asylum seekers from around the world. A dozen or so people show up each day, looking for advice, protection, and a place to sleep.