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March 3, 2017
Teaching, Leading, and Social Justice
Without providing details, Trump and DeVos continue to promote ‘school choice’ plan
Louis Freedberg, EdSource
In his first speech to a joint session of Congress, President Donald Trump last night called on Congress to pass “school choice” legislation, but without providing any details of what it should consist or how much it would cost. Calling education “the civil rights issue of our time,” he urged Congress to “pass an education bill that funds school choice for disadvantaged youth, including millions of African-American and Latino children. These families should be free to choose the public, private, charter, magnet, religious, or home school that is right for them.” During his campaign, he called for a $20 billion school choice program that would repurpose existing federal education dollars, but he has yet to give any indication of which dollars would be repurposed, or whether he will propose anything remotely close to that figure to Congress.
Study: Private school vouchers favored by DeVos don’t offer real advantage over public schools
Valerie Strauss, The Washington Post
A new study reports that there is no evidence that school vouchers — which use public dollars to pay for private school tuition and are favored by Education Secretary Betsy DeVos — offer students significant academic advantages and are a proven education reform strategy. The study comes at a time when DeVos and President Trump have made clear that expanding school “choice” is a priority, arguing that traditional public schools are failing too many students and that parents should have choices. Trump has said he wants to spend $20 billion to help states expand voucher programs, and the people who administer the only federally funded voucher program currently operating, the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program, say they expect to get more federal money soon to expand by “hundreds of new students” for the 2017-2018 school year.
California legislators reassure transgender students of protections, denounce Trump
Jane Meredith Adams, EdSource
A day after the Trump administration rescinded federal protections that allowed transgender children and youth to use the school bathroom of their choice, members of the California Legislative LGBT Caucus on Thursday told those students that they are legally protected and welcome to be themselves in California schools. “It wasn’t enough for this administration to bully and pick on immigrants, Muslims and women,” state Sen. Scott Wiener, D-San Francisco, said at a news briefing in Sacramento. “Our president is now bullying, picking on and attacking some of the most marginalized members of our community – children, transgender children.” Transgender students in California have the right under state law to use bathrooms and locker rooms that align with their gender identity, a term referring to a person’s internal sense of who they are, which may or may not align with their physical features. About 150,000 young people in the United States ages 13 to 17, or 0.7 percent of children in that age group, identify as transgender, according to a study by the Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law.
Language, Culture, and Power
Schools often fail to educate, support English-language learners
Corey Mitchell, Education Week
Schools across the United States often provide substandard instruction and social-emotional support to the nation’s English-language learners—and fail to properly train the educators who teach them, a new report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine finds. Noting that limited English proficiency remains a substantial barrier to academic success for millions of children in K-12 schools, the study explores how under-resourced schools and under-prepared educators can hinder efforts to help those students learn and master English. The committee behind the report—consisting of a who’s who of experts on language acquisition and educators—also explored the struggles of specific populations of English-learners such as those with disabilities, who are less likely than their native English-speaking peers to be referred to early intervention and special education programs. The report examined the challenges for long-term English-learners—those who are not considered proficient after being educated for seven or more years in U.S. schools.
Former Homeland Security Secretary, champion of immigrant students
Louis Freedberg, The Atlantic
When Janet Napolitano was named president of the University of California over three years ago, her appointment provoked impassioned protests by students and others upset about her role as head of the Department of Homeland Security overseeing the deportation of more than 2.5 million undocumented immigrants. At the July 2013 board of regents meeting when she was selected to the position, protesters brandishing signs like “Undocumented is not a crime, Napolitano, it’s not your time” briefly shut down the proceedings. Cinthia Flores, the student regent and only dissenting vote against her on the board, said Napolitano’s background in immigration enforcement would “cast a long shadow on her future endeavors” at the university. Fast forward to today. Napolitano has emerged as one of the leading defenders of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which at least for now President Trump appears to have spared, despite vowing during the presidential campaign to rescind it. The program has provided temporary relief from deportation to three-quarters of 1 million undocumented immigrants who came to the United States as children, including many attending the University of California.
San Francisco students push to end use of the R-word
Jill Tucker, San Francisco Chronicle
That old playground saying about sticks and stones breaking bones but words never hurting? It’s wrong. Ask Lily Marshall-Fricker. The 21-year-old San Francisco native has heard lots of words that hurt — words tossed at her because she’s in a wheelchair, her movements limited by the cerebral palsy she’s had since birth. “I have thoughts and opinions and I’m pretty similar to you,” she said. “I just use a wheelchair to get around.” The R-word is one of the worst. And she, along with her classmates at AccessSFUSD at the Arc — a program for students ages 18 to 22 who have disabilities — wants people to stop using the R-word.
Whole Children and Strong Communities
Cultivating community wellbeing and educational justice
University of Washington, College of Education, Youtube
“So we’re in a different era, where it is important for us to really think about how we relate to one another. And often times we assume that because we are in America and we actually all have these freedoms that they are actually accessible to everyone. And that’s simply not true. So it requires us to come together and be collective and be intentional about how we think about issues of equity, issues of educational justice, issues of social transformation, so that we can actually get on the same page and really figure out how to attack those issues so that those who are disenfranchised will actually have other opportunities to grow.”
Districts, advocates warily await health-care law overhaul
Alyson Klein, Education Week
Few people may associate the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act—sometimes derided as “Obamacare”—with school districts and school-age children. But scrapping the ACA or revamping it significantly, a long-standing Republican priority, could have serious implications for everything from student mental-health services to the hiring of substitute teachers. At this point, it’s unclear just how Republicans, who control both chambers of Congress and the White House for the first time in more than a decade, will proceed. President Donald Trump campaigned on getting rid of the ACA, but has also said he’d like to keep some of its most popular parts, including allowing young adults to remain on their parents’ insurance. He vowed earlier this year to work toward the goal of “insurance for everybody.” Since the 2016 election, GOP leaders in both chambers have been wrestling with ideas for changing, repealing, and replacing the law, which was enacted in March 2010.
What happened when one school banned homework — and asked kids to read and play instead
Valerie Strauss, The Washington Post
Mark Trifilio, principal of the public pre-K-5th grade Orchard School in Vermont, sat down with the school’s 40 educators last summer to discuss the soon-to-start new school year and homework — how much kids were getting and whether it was helping them learn. Trifilio had been pondering the issue for some time, he said, concerned that there seemed to be an uneven homework load for students in different classrooms within the same grade and that the differences from grade to grade didn’t make sense. He had looked up research on homework effectiveness and learned that, generally, homework in elementary school isn’t linked to better academic performance — except for after-school reading. So at that meeting with teachers, he proposed an experiment: stopping all homework in every grade and asking students to read on their own at school — or, if they were not ready to read on their own, to do it with a parent or guardian. He said he was surprised when every one of them — classroom teachers as well as those who work with special-education students and English-language learners — signed on to the idea.
Access, Assessment, and Advancement
How does California rank in per-pupil spending? It all depends
John Fensterwald, EdSource
As Californians struggle to determine what constitutes a sufficient level of education funding, one yardstick is what California spends compared with other states. So here’s a question: How does California rank in K-12 per-pupil spending nationally in the latest studies? a) 46th; b) 41st; c) 29th; d) 22nd. The answer is all of them. Depending on how spending is calculated and how up-to-date the data are, the per-student amount differs by thousands of dollars, and the state’s ranking varies widely. This FAQ explains the most frequently cited methodologies, their differences and the reasoning behind them. While useful, state spending comparisons won’t provide Californians the answer only they can answer: What would constitute adequate funding in the state with the world’s sixth-largest economy, and with the largest number of children living in poverty and highest percentage of English learners in the nation?
Common Core in California likely to continue despite Trump opposition
Louis Freedberg and Theresa Harrington, EdSource
Opposition by President Donald Trump and Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos to the Common Core is unlikely to slow implementation of the new standards in English language arts and math in states like California, where there has been little opposition to the standards. That is the consensus of education leaders in California from diverse regions of the state, even those in areas of the state where the majority of voters cast their ballots for Trump. One reason is that implementation of the Common Core is well underway in most parts of the state, and reversing its momentum will be difficult, if not impossible, to do. Voters backed Trump in 26 out of 58 California counties, including Kern County, where Trump received 53 percent of the vote. Kern County Superintendent of Schools Mary Barlow said implementation of the standards in her county is fully underway and “we are seeing a lot of progress.” She noted that despite the pro-Trump sentiment there, “we have had relatively little pushback on the California state standards.”
For Black college prospects, belonging and safety often top Ivy prestige
Denene Millner, NPR
Tales of talented black students on majority-white campuses running through a racial gauntlet that has them questioning their brilliance, abilities and place are familiar to parents like me who have a college-bound child at home. The trauma that sometimes comes with being a black student at predominately white institutions is tangible. In their 2015 paper, “Reimagining Critical Race Theory in Education: Mental Health, Healing and the Pathway to Liberatory Praxis,” Ebony McGee, a professor at Vanderbilt University, and David Stovall, a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, found that black college students who weather the effects of studying and living on predominately white campuses suffer from a “physical and mental wear-and-tear that contributes to a host of psychological and physical ailments.” “We have documented alarming occurrences of anxiety, stress, depression and thoughts of suicide, as well as a host of physical ailments like hair loss, diabetes and heart disease,” McGee said in an article on Vanderbilt’s website, adding that calls for black students to draw on mental toughness and perseverance — what researchers are referring to these days as “grit” — overlook the additional burden black students bear as they face off against overt and covert racism.
Inequality, Poverty, Segregation
Report: Public schools in the District remain highly segregated
Mandy McLaren, The Washington Post
Public schools in the nation’s capital remain highly segregated, a new analysis shows, with many D.C. campuses enrolling almost exclusively students of color despite an influx of white families into the city in recent years. The Civil Rights Project at UCLA found in a report released this month that 71 percent of black students in the D.C. public school system and the city’s charter sector attended schools in 2013 that had virtually no white peers. That was down from nearly 90 percent in 1992. But the report’s authors argued that city officials have not done enough to lure white families into public schools and to diversify the enrollment of individual campuses. They contend that the city’s changing demographics — with no single racial or ethnic group accounting for a majority of its estimated 681,000 residents — make it ripe for new initiatives, such as high-quality magnet programs, to promote racial integration in schools.
‘Homeless’ students reach nearly 23,000 in county
Gary Warth, The San Diego Union-Tribune
Nearly 23,000 students in district and charter schools throughout the county were considered homeless, according to the most recent figures compiled by the San Diego County Office of Education. The majority of those students are not on the street or in shelters, however. “The largest population of kids who are in our public schools and identified as homeless by the Department of Education are those who are doubled up, sharing places,” said Michelle Lustig, director of Foster Youth Services, Coordinating Program and Homeless Education Services for the County Office of Education. There are also many who do meet the more common definition of homelessness. In San Diego Unified, 705 students were identified as living in temporary shelters, and 137 were unsheltered in the 2015-16 school year. The district also had 5,620 students whose families had doubled-up in someone else’s home as a financial necessity, and 284 were living in hotels or motels.
HBCUs graduate more poor Black students than White colleges
Nick Chiles, NPR
At a congressional luncheon in their honor Tuesday, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos told leaders from historically black colleges and universities that the Department of Education “will continue working closely with you to help identify evolving needs, increase capacity, and attract research dollars. We will also work closely with you to launch new initiatives that meet the needs of today’s students.” “HBCUs remain at the forefront of opening doors that had previously been closed to so many,” she said. “You made higher education accessible to students who otherwise would have been denied the opportunity.” The White House acclaim for HBCUs comes in the same week as a study by The Education Trust, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit, revealed that the nation’s HBCUs are doing a much better job than predominantly white schools in graduating low-income black students.
Public Schools and Private $
When charters go to church
Thor Benson, U.S. News & World Report
Our religious groups are a creative bunch. They have invaded our school boards and forced religion into our textbooks in states like Texas, and they have been finding numerous ways to fight for things like school prayer for decades. However, one way in which religious groups have been able to push their ideology on our children that often goes unnoticed is currently happening inside our charter schools. In 2013, The New York Times ran a story about a Texas woman named Latisha Andrews. She had attempted to run a private school out of a church for some time but eventually lacked the funding necessary to continue. What did she do? She did what so many Americans have done in recent years; she asked Uncle Sam to foot the bill. As the story notes, there are many charter schools in Texas that operate inside churches. So much for the separation of church and state.
Report: How charter schools are used to hide dropouts and game the educational system
Monique Judge, The Root
Olympia (Fla.) High School was ranked among the nation’s top 1,000 schools by U.S. News and World Report last year. It offers more than two dozen Advanced Placement courses, a great many after-school clubs and an assortment of sports, everything from bowling to water polo. Yet a recent report says that Olympia’s success as a top school with a 90 percent graduation rate is entirely dependent on another school. ProPublica reports that Sunshine High, an alternative charter school located in a strip mall just 5 miles from Olympia, takes in “cast-offs” from Olympia and other Orlando high schools in a “mutually beneficial agreement.” The schools get to maintain their high graduation records and high ratings within Florida’s school-grading system, and Sunshine collects enough money from the school district to cover costs and pay its management firm, Accelerated Learning Solutions, more than $1.5 million as a “management fee.” That management fee is more than what the school spends on instruction.
For-profit schools, an Obama target, see new day under Trump
Patricia Cohen, The New York Times
Since Election Day, for-profit college companies have been on a hot streak. DeVry Education Group’s stock has leapt more than 40 percent. Strayer’s jumped 35 percent and Grand Canyon Education’s more than 28 percent. You do not need an M.B.A. to figure out why. Top officials in Washington who spearheaded a relentless crackdown on the multibillion-dollar industry have been replaced by others who have profited from it. President Trump ran the now-defunct Trump University, which wound up besieged by lawsuits from former students and New York’s attorney general, who called the operation a fraud. Within days of the election, Mr. Trump, without admitting any wrongdoing, agreed to a $25 million settlement. Betsy DeVos, the newly installed secretary of education, is an ardent campaigner for privately run schools and has investments in for-profit educational ventures.
Other News of Note
How a successful hunger strike is leading to a national movement for better education
Steven Rosenfeld, AlterNet
Jitu Brown helped lead one of the most striking protests in America in 2015, a weeks-long hunger strike to stop Chicago from closing a community high school. He’s part of a coalition of community groups that have exposed and fought the institutional racism in K-12 education, from GOP-led privatization to Democratic neglect in blue cities. He spoke with AlterNet as his group, Journey for Justice Alliance, launches a new national coalition for equitable public schools.
Just News from Center X is produced weekly by Leah Bueso, Anthony Berryman, Beth Happel, and John Rogers. Generous support from the Stuart Foundation allows Center X to provide this service free to the general public.
