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Teaching, Leading, and Social Justice
30,000 LAUSD workers call off May 15 strike after reaching tentative contract deal
Kyle Stokes, KPCC
Los Angeles Unified School District bus drivers, cafeteria workers, custodians, classroom aides and other non-teaching employees called off a one-day strike planned for May 15 after leaders of their union reached a tentative contract agreement with district officials late Tuesday. The surprise announcement came just days after L.A. Unified officials said no further progress could be made in contract talks with the classified employees union, SEIU Local 99. Those talks — which had dragged on over 16 months — stalled in the late stages primarily over the issue of wage increases. After district officials declared an impasse Friday, SEIU leaders announced over the weekend they would hold a one-day strike on May 15, nominally over allegations that district managers had mistreated union members over the course of the protracted contract negotiation. Members of the district’s teachers union, United Teachers Los Angeles, raised the stakes for L.A. Unified after saying their teachers would not cross the picket lines at the hundreds of school sites where SEIU members planned to picket on May 15. While the absence of bus drivers, aides and cafeteria workers would’ve caused a significant disruption, the added absence of teachers would’ve left many district schools with little choice but to close altogether. But by Tuesday night, SEIU leaders said district officials had resolved the unfair labor practice allegations and the two sides had come together over a contract deal they could live with.
The outcome in Arizona
Eric Blanc, The Jacobin
After an all-night encampment of striking educators, the Arizona state government passed a budget bill early this morning. To assess the strike and the settlement, Jacobin’s Eric Blanc spoke with Rebecca Garelli, Noah Karvelis, and Dylan Wegela. All three are teachers and leaders of Arizona Educators United, the rank-and-file organization responsible for initiating and leading the state’s Red for Ed movement. EB: What were your highlights from the experience of the strike? RG: Definitely the sense of solidarity. People here never really had that feeling before, that sense of being part of a union and fighting together for one purpose. But this struggle has given people an awareness that they’re not alone in this fight. The movement and the walkout really increased people’s political awareness and our level of grassroots organization. Fifty percent of the win here has been that we now have a strong, organized mass movement. And we’re not going away. People now have the courage to fight.
Gubernatorial debate includes pledges for universal preschool from Democrats
Nico Savidge, EdSource
The Democratic candidates for governor of California reaffirmed their support for universal preschool during Tuesday’s gubernatorial debate in San Jose, pledging that they would work to make it a reality if elected. By contrast, their Republican counterparts opposed the idea of providing state-subsidized preschool for all low-income California 4-year-olds. All six leading candidates — four Democrats and two Republicans — participated in the event, which was sponsored by NBC Bay Area and the Silicon Valley Community Foundation. The foundation’s Center for Early Learning launched a multi-million-dollar “Choose Children” campaign last September calling for the next governor to make early childhood education a priority. The principal moderator was Chuck Todd, host of NBC’s Meet the Press, with additional questions posed by several Bay Area media representatives. Participants also touched on high pension costs facing school districts and the current strike of some workers in the University of California system. But early education was the education issue that the candidates discussed in the most detail during the 90-minute debate.
Language, Culture, and Power
Educators face new challenges in ‘superdiverse’ classrooms where multiple languages are spoken
Ashley Hopkinson, EdSource
Teachers of English learners find it challenging to communicate in classrooms where students come from a variety of language and cultural backgrounds. Some children may speak Spanish at home, while others speak Vietnamese, Punjabi or Arabic. However, learning can improve by incorporating students’ languages in classrooms, increasing teacher access to dictionaries and books in the home languages of their students and encouraging families to participate in class activities, such as parents recording themselves reading books in their home languages for inclusion in a classroom library, where students can listen to the recordings. That is the conclusion of a new report by the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan research and policy organization in Washington, D.C. It is the second in a series exploring “superdiversity,” defined as classrooms where more than five languages are spoken. The first report in the series explores superdiversity in Head Start programs and private and public preschools in Boston, Mass.
When school dress codes ban students’ bodies [AUDIO]
Joshua Johnson, 1A
“Students can face a lot of pressure for what they wear to school. Fashions change. Trendy clothes get expensive. But some of the most damaging critiques of students’ outfits come not from their peers, but often from the grown-ups in school. And in some cases, teachers and principals seem to disproportionately regulate the clothing of girls. This Spring, a student in Florida decided not to wear a bra to school because she had a bad sunburn where the bra would have sat. But the administrators at her school made her wear an additional shirt and made her put on Band-Aids over her nipples.”
African-American students with disabilities suspended at disproportionately high rates
Lee Romney, EdSource
African-American special education students nationwide lose substantially more instruction time due to discipline than their white counterparts, according to a report by The Civil Rights Project at UCLA and the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice at Harvard University. The report, “Disabling Punishment: The Need for Remedies to the Disparate Loss of Instruction Experienced by Black Students with Disabilities,” extrapolated its findings from federal data from 2014-15 and 2015-16, the last year for which it is available. Released last month, it examined only white and black students, in part because research has found that black students overall are suspended at the highest rates of all student groups. The report found that nationwide, for every 100 students with special needs in 2015-16, white students lost 43 days to suspension, while black students lost 121 days. The findings showed a slight increase in disparity between the two groups over the previous year. Nevada, Nebraska, Ohio, Missouri and Tennessee posted the highest black-white gaps. California fell below the national average: For every 100 students with special needs, white students lost 31 days to suspension, while black students lost 82 days. Still, the disproportionality remained stark.
Whole Children and Strong Communities
One Ohio school’s quest to rethink bad behavior
Katherine Reynolds Lewis, The Atlantic
In education, initiatives tend to roll down from above. A district buys a new curriculum, or gets funding for a new program, and principals receive their marching orders, which they in turn hand down to teachers below. That’s not the case at Ohio Avenue Elementary School in Columbus, Ohio. The 19th-century corniced brick building is perhaps an unlikely home for experimental methods of nurturing children’s developing brains. The surrounding streets are lined with abandoned buildings, pawn shops, cash-advance outlets, and dollar stores. A large house with a boarded-up door sits directly across from the school’s playground. In Ohio Avenue’s zip code, half of the families with children under 18 live in poverty, as compared with 25 percent across Columbus and 17 percent nationally, according to census data. Many of Ohio Avenue’s children have brushed against violence and other traumatic experiences in their short lives—abuse and neglect, a household member addicted to drugs, homelessness, to name a few. At schools like this, a small dispute can easily turn into a scuffle that leads to an administrator or school-safety officer corralling the kids involved, if not suspending them. But Ohio Avenue is trying to find another way: Every adult in the building has received training on how children respond to trauma. They’ve come to understand how trauma can make kids emotionally volatile and prone to misinterpret accidental bumps or offhand remarks as hostile. They’ve learned how to de-escalate conflict, and to interpret misbehavior not as a personal attack or an act of defiance. And they’re perennially looking for new ways to help the kids manage their overwhelming feelings and control their impulses.
A conspiracy video teaches kids a lesson about fake news
Eleanor Beardsley, NPR
As the bell rings, students file into class at Maxence Van der Meersch middle school. This morning the kids have a visitor — investigative journalist Thomas Huchon. Without telling them the topic of his visit, Huchon says he’s going to show them a mini-documentary. The video claims that the CIA spread the AIDS virus in Cuba, and says that was the real reason behind the decades-long U.S. embargo. It was only lifted, the narrator says, so American and French pharmaceutical companies could cash in on an AIDS vaccine developed by Cuban doctors. The students don’t yet know it, but Huchon and his colleagues at video news network Spicee created the video themselves, as part of an experiment after the French terrorist attacks in 2015. They noticed how conspiracy theories against the official version of the attacks were spreading on the Internet, and they wanted to do their own experiment. “So we created a fake story,” says Huchon. “We put it on the Web, and what we expected to happen happened: Lots of conspiracy theorist websites picked up on this information and spread it without any kind of verification.”
Mental health services at Cal State campuses at ‘crisis’ levels
Adolfo Guzman-Lopez, KPCC
An increase in demand for counseling services at California State University campuses hasn’t been met with a corresponding increase in counselors and that is leading to a “crisis,” campus mental health officials say. Now, they’re turning to Sacramento in hopes of getting a legislative mandate to hire more staff. Counselors say students with mental health issues that could lead them to harm themselves or others are seen right away but others could wait weeks or even months for an appointment. “We have to prioritize because we don’t have enough slots for folks,” said Mimi Bommersbach, a mental health counselor at Chico State. Bommersbach and other counselors say the greater demand for counseling could be due in part to the domestic troubles today’s students underwent a decade ago during the recession. Therapists say on top of that problems handling jobs and school, a weak social safety net, students with family members who are undocumented, coupled with deficient skills to handle these issues lead to a lot of anxious students.
Access, Assessment, and Advancement
A closer look at California’s impressive educational performance
Bill Honig, EdSource
Which state do you think has made the most progress on the National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) since 2009? Answer: California. Contrary to flat NAEP growth in the rest of the country, California’s average NAEP scores for 4th and 8th-grade reading and 8th-grade math have grown substantially, registering top growth scores nationally from 2009-2017 for 8th-grade reading (first in the nation) and math (tied for second) and 4th grade reading (tied for second). As an example, 8th-grade reading scores grew 10 points, which is equivalent to a little more than a quarter of a standard deviation or about a gain of half to three-quarters of a year’s worth of instruction. The 8th-grade reading scores are now within two points of the national average. The gains were weakest in 4th-grade math but still increased while many other states’ scores fell. Starting at extremely low levels, the state is now approaching the national averages even though California has the most English learner students, the most diversity and high levels of low-income children compared to other states.
The next generation of African-American doctors finds success and support at this university [AUDIO]
Hari Sreenivasan, PBS News Hour
Xavier University, a small, historically black college in New Orleans, manages to graduate more African Americans who go on to become medical doctors than any other undergraduate institution in the country — a fact that’s even more striking given a drop in black males applying to medical schools. In our series Rethinking College, Hari Sreenivasan reports on what sets the school apart.
Who wins and who loses when states earmark lottery revenue for higher education?
Elizabeth Bell, Wesley Whde, and Madeline Stucky, Brookings
While national media headlines in recent weeks have been flooded with stories on K-12 education funding deficits and teacher walkouts, higher education funding shortfalls have been equally severe, if not more so, in some states. Economists estimate that state appropriations for new higher education fell by 30 percent from the 1970s to the early 2000s, which has left many strained public universities with no choice but to raise tuition, effectively shifting the burden of paying for college onto students and families. In turn, state disinvestment has undermined college affordability for many disadvantaged students, and at the same time threatened the economic well-being of industries that rely upon educated workers. As a result of these problematic shifts in higher education finance, state leaders have implemented lottery earmark policies aimed at providing supplementary funding for struggling higher education institutions and students. In fact, as of 2009, 25 states adopted lottery earmark policies with the intent to supplement higher education budgets. However, whether lottery earmarks end up supplanting instead of supplementing education funding remains up for debate. In this post, we describe a recent paper in which we explore the effects these earmark policies have on higher education spending.
Inequality, Poverty, Segregation
Asked about a ‘divisive’ tweet about segregation, Carranza directs an Upper West Side parent to implicit bias training
Alex Zimmerman, Chalkbeat
After inserting himself into a contentious debate about school segregation, schools Chancellor Richard Carranza heard directly from an Upper West Side parent Monday who said his role in the debate has been “divisive.” The mother was referring to a late-night tweet in which Carranza shared a headline accusing “wealthy white Manhattan parents” of angrily ranting against a plan to promote diversity among the Upper West Side’s middle schools. Under the proposal, each middle school in Manhattan’s District 3 would offer a quarter of its seats to students who haven’t passed state exams. “I have to say chancellor you stunned me because what I heard loud and clear — me as a white parent in P.S. 199, I am not part of your constituency,” said the parent, who also identified herself as a “career educator.” But during his first appearance on WNYC’s Brian Lehrer Show, Carranza did not back down from the debate or apologize for his tweet — and even suggested the parent “avail” herself of implicit bias training.
School funding: Deep disparities persist 50 years after Kerner
David Sciarra, Learning Policy Institute
Fifty years after the Kerner Commission warned of a nation divided, school funding remains profoundly unfair and inequitable in most states, shortchanging students across the country. Those most disadvantaged by this enduring failure are millions of children from low-income families and children of color, especially those in high-poverty, racially isolated communities. In the United States, public education is a state obligation. The states, through their finance systems, account for approximately 90% of all education funding in local districts and schools. Every day in schools across America, the lack of funding deprives students of the qualified teachers, support staff, academic interventions, full-day kindergarten, early education, and other programs they need to be successful in school. Unfair school funding remains entrenched in most states, as it has for decades, impeding efforts to improve outcomes for students, especially poor children, those learning English, and students with disabilities. The deplorable condition of state school finance is laid bare in the 2017 edition of the National Report Card, Is School Funding Fair? This report goes beyond raw school spending by analyzing both the funding level in each state and whether funding is greater in higher-poverty school districts.
Fair progress? Economic mobility across generations around the world
The World Bank
If you are born into a low-income family, what are the chances that you will rise higher regardless of your background? The ability to move up the income ladder, both in one’s lifetime and with respect to one’s parents, matters for fighting poverty, reducing inequality, and even for boosting growth. Yet, mobility has stalled in recent years in large parts of the world, with the prospects of too many people across the world still too closely tied to their parents’ social status rather than their own potential, according to the findings of a new World Bank report launched today. Mobility is also much lower, on the average, in developing economies than in high-income economies. The developing world accounts for 46 of the bottom 50 economies in terms of mobility in education from the bottom to the top. The report — Fair Progress? Economic Mobility across Generations Around the World — shows that Africa and South Asia, the regions with most of the world’s poorest people, have the average lowest mobility. In some low-income or fragile African countries, only 12 percent of today’s young adults — those born in the 1980s — have more education than their parents. On the other hand, East Asia, Latin America and Middle East and North Africa have seen their average mobility improve. While mobility tends to improve as economies get richer, the report suggests that there is nothing inevitable about this process. Rather, as economies develop, mobility is likely to increase if opportunities become more equal, which typically requires higher public investments and better policies.
Public Schools and Private $
Report: The cost of charter schools for public school districts
In the Public Interest
In a first-of-its-kind analysis, In the Public Interest has found that public school students in three California school districts are bearing the cost of the unchecked expansion of privately managed charter schools. The report, Breaking Point: The Cost of Charter Schools for Public School Districts, calculates the fiscal impact of charter schools on Oakland Unified School District, San Diego Unified School District, and San Jose’s East Side Union High School District. Charter schools cost Oakland Unified $57.3 million per year. That’s $1,500 less in funding for each student that attends a neighborhood school. The annual cost of charter schools to the San Diego Unified is $65.9 million. In East Side Union, the net impact of charter schools amounts to a loss of $19.3 million per year.
Charter school growth puts fiscal pressure on traditional public schools
Helen F. Ladd and John Singleton, Brookings
Policy debates about the net effects of charter schools on students and on the delivery of K-12 education are ongoing and remain highly contentious. In a recent paper, we contribute to the policy discussion by drawing attention to the fiscal externalities of charter schools, a finance topic that deserves more attention in the overall discussion. Fiscal externalities are the additional burden that charter schools place on the budgets of traditional school districts, and we find evidence that they are consequential in North Carolina. Although such burdens may manifest themselves in higher local tax burdens, the more likely outcome is reduced spending per pupil on educational services–and hence lower educational quality–for students who remain in the district’s traditional public schools. The presence of charter schools typically means that some of the funding that would otherwise have been available to the local school district is diverted to the charter schools. For example, assume that the funding arrangements are such that if 10 percent of a district’s students shift to a charter school, the district loses 10 percent of its revenue. The main problem is that the district cannot simply reduce its costs by 10 percent because some of its costs are fixed, especially in the short run. As a result, unless the district is able to offset the lost revenue with higher local tax revenue, it must cut its spending on variable inputs, such as teachers, by more than 10 percent.
Education Dept to relax rules restricting faith-based institutions from getting federal aid
Jacqueline Thomsen, The Hill
The Education Department is moving to change or remove rules that restrict religious institutions from receiving federal aid, according to a notice posted on Wednesday. The department said it plans to review, amend or rescind the current restrictions placed on faith-based institutions “in order to be consistent with current law and to reduce or eliminate unnecessary burdens and restrictions on religious entities and activities,” according to a copy of the department’s spring regulatory agenda obtained by Politico.
Other News of Note
Teacher pay is so low in some U.S. school districts that they’re recruiting overseas
Dana Goldstein, The New York Times
The latest wave of foreign workers sweeping into American jobs brought Donato Soberano from the Philippines to Arizona two years ago. He had to pay thousands of dollars to a job broker and lived for a time in an apartment with five other Filipino workers. The lure is the pay — 10 times more than what he made doing the same work back home. But Mr. Soberano is not a hospitality worker or a home health aide. He is in another line of work that increasingly pays too little to attract enough Americans: Mr. Soberano is a public school teacher. As walkouts by teachers protesting low pay and education funding shortfalls spread across the country, the small but growing movement to recruit teachers from overseas is another sign of the difficulty some districts are having providing the basics to public school students.