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Teaching, Leading, and Social Justice
US teacher of the year stages silent protest as Trump awards prize
David Smith, The Guardian
A teacher who leads a classroom for teenage refugees staged a silent protest by wearing several overtly political badges while receiving an award from Donald Trump at the White House. Mandy Manning works at the Newcomer Center at Joel E Ferris High School in Spokane, Washington, which specialises in English language development for new refugees and immigrant students. Trump presented her with the National Teacher of the Year award in the East Room and praised her “incredible devotion”. The US president said: “Teachers like Mandy play a vital role in the wellbeing of our children, the strength of our communities and the success of our nation.” Manning wore six badges on her black dress. According to a pooled report, they included one with a poster for the Women’s March that followed Trump’s inauguration, one that said “Trans Equality Now” and one in the shape of an apple with a rainbow.
Unionized or not, teachers struggle to make ends meet, NPR/Ipsos poll finds
Anya Kamenetz, NPR
More than 9 in 10 teachers say they joined the profession for idealistic reasons — “I wanted to do good” — but most are struggling to some extent economically. Those findings come from a nationally representative survey by NPR and Ipsos of more than 500 teachers across the country. The poll was conducted in April amid widespread walkouts in several states, including Colorado, Oklahoma, Kentucky, West Virginia, and currently Arizona. While the story in each state is a little different, calls for better compensation and more school funding are common, as is the mood — fed up. We wanted to gauge how widely these sentiments are shared. Here’s what we found.
L.A. school board makes a bold, controversial choice in Beutner
Howard Blume, Los Angeles Times
The Los Angeles school board made a bold and controversial move Tuesday in selecting former investment banker Austin Beutner to lead the nation’s second-largest school system. Beutner, 58, has no background leading a school or school district, and the choice contrasts sharply with the one a different board made less than 2½ years ago, when it named Michelle King, a former teacher who rose through the ranks, to be superintendent. The former deputy mayor and Los Angeles Times publisher was hired on a 5-2 vote. A board majority elected with major support from charter-school advocates was pivotal in pushing for him, although the move was as much as anything else about signaling a desire for aggressive change. King’s ascension had been a vote of faith in the familiar and the steady but real progress district leaders believed they were making. She stood for stability, which was especially prized after the stormy tenure of Supt. John Deasy, followed by the relatively short stay of Ramon C. Cortines, who had come out of retirement to try to right the ship. A primary focus of King’s mission, as established by the previous board majority, had been to increase enrollment by trying to win students back from charter schools and, if possible, to stem rapid charter growth. But for the current board majority, Beutner, with private-sector financial expertise, is the leader of the moment — when the school system faces a potential financial crisis caused by soaring pension costs, underfunded retiree health benefits and the disappearing state dollars due to declining enrollment.
Language, Culture, and Power
Preparing youth for online civic, political action
Mimi Ko Cruz, DML Central
The internet is where many young people get their news and express their own perspectives on civic and political issues. So, how can educators prepare them to be heard in an informed and impactful way in today’s digital age? Several new Teaching Channel videos provide some great ideas and examples of what’s possible.
Black families increasingly choose to homeschool kids
Sam Weber and Connie Kargbo, PBS News Hour
In the last 15 years, the number of black children in homeschool has doubled from 103,000 to about 220,000. Black parents cite a number of reasons for homeschooling children, including concern over peer pressure and drugs at school — but increasingly, they are also citing school-related racism as a reason to keep students at home. NewsHour Weekend’s Ivette Feliciano reports.
Ability to learn languages stays strong until late teens, new study finds
Corey Mitchell, Education Week
Scientists have long posited that there is a “critical period” for language learning, but new research suggests that the time frame stretches on much longer than previously thought. A new study from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology suggests that children remain skilled at learning the grammar of a new language up to the age of 17 or 18, the time at which many students graduate high school. This finding injects new evidence for the decades-long debate over the “critical period” that had centered on whether the decline in language-learning skills begins at age 5 or at the onset of puberty. However, the same MIT study also found that it is difficult for people to achieve proficiency similar to that of a native speaker unless they start learning a language much earlier, by the age of 10. People who start learning a language between the ages of 10 and 18 will still learn quickly, but since they have a shorter window before their learning ability declines, they’re less likely to reach the proficiency of native speakers, the researchers found. “It takes work on the part of the parents but, as far as the child’s concerned, it’s quite easy to become bilingual,” Joshua Hartshorne, an assistant professor of psychology at Boston College, who conducted this study as a postdoctoral scholar at MIT. “That’s when you’re best at learning languages. It’s not really something that you can make up later.”
Whole Children and Strong Communities
28,000 LA preschoolers are learning how to be better humans
Priska Neely, KPCC
I don’t want to be your friend. Stay away. I’m not going to share with you. These harsh statements are “very normal to hear at the beginning of the school year,” for preschool teachers like Rafaela Campos. To push past those moments of mean, she and more than a thousand other early educators in the Los Angeles Unified School District now have a new tool. This school year, all 86 of the early childhood centers in the district started using a program called Sanford Harmony, which provides structured activities to help kids develop socially and emotionally. That means more than 28,000 kids in preschool and transitional kindergarten are getting hands-on training in how to build friendships, be empathetic and self-aware starting at the age of 4. “Those are all kind of skills that we don’t necessarily put a number to but we notice them in adults when they lack those skills,” said Dean Tagawa, executive director of early childhood education at LAUSD. “This period of time in the 0-5 space where so much brain growth is happening,” Tagawa said. “If they have these skills in place they’re going to be more successful adults.”
The perks of a play-in-the-mud educational philosophy
Conor Williams The Atlantic
Most American kids don’t spend large chunks of their day catching salamanders and poking sticks into piles of fox poop. In a nation moving toward greater standardization of its public-education system, programs centered around getting kids outside to explore aren’t normal. But that’s precisely what students do at the Nature Preschool at Irvine Nature Center in Owings Mills, Maryland. There, every day, dozens of children ages 3 to 5 come to have adventures on Irvine’s more than 200 acres of woodlands, wetlands, and meadows. These muddy explorers stand out at a moment when many American pre-K programs have become more and more similar to K–12 education: row after row of tiny kids, sitting at desks, drilling letter identification and counting. Mention how anomalous this seems, though, and the teachers at the Nature Preschool can only express their wish that that weren’t the case: Why is it odd for 4-year-olds to spend the bulk of their time outside? When did America decide that preschool should be boring routines performed within classroom walls?
‘It opened everything up.’ How school home visits are changing relationships in Detroit
Amanda Rahn, Chalkbeat
A teacher-principal team pulls up to a house on Detroit’s west side. They kill the engine, grab their bags and papers and knock, but no one comes to the door. The principal shrugs. “You remember this mom works nights?” she asks the teacher. “She’s a 9/11 operator. I bet she had to leave for work.” They get back in the car and put in the address for the next stop — another student’s house. Instead of spending time enjoying one of the first warm spring evenings of the year, teacher Melanie Wallace and Principal Melissa Scott from Coleman A. Young Elementary School spend hours after the school day ends driving from home to home to visit their students’ families. “We’ve done as many as 13 a day,” said Wallace, who sometimes works 12-hour days teaching, then visiting homes — and that’s in between driving two families’ students to and from school every day, since the bus doesn’t go far enough to pick them up. Home visits by teachers and principals are popular across the country. There is a national organization that will train teachers and principals on how to conduct visits, extensive research from universities indicating positive results from the visits, and thousands of schools putting the model to use. But in the Detroit, the stakes are higher. Detroit school leaders are trying to change the culture of schools that, for years, have been among the lowest performing in the nation, but experts say teachers can’t do that alone. They need the help and support of parents.
Access, Assessment, and Advancement
California schools getting a little greener as environmental education standards roll out
Carolyn Jones, EdSource
As Californians celebrate Earth Day and the ecology movement over the past month, the state’s public schools are making steady progress in implementing some of the most comprehensive environmental education goals in the country, educators and environmentalists say. Buoyed by $4 million in the current state budget for K-12 environmental education, teachers are planning field trips to mountains and beaches, creating lessons on ecosystems and watersheds and showing students how human activity affects the planet. In April, thousands of students turned out for Earth Day events, picking up trash, pulling weeds and planting trees. “While many states are engaged in strategic efforts to implement environmental education K-12, California is certainly emerging as a leader,” said Sarah Bodor, director of policy and affiliate relations for the North American Association for Environmental Education. “We’re excited to watch as many diverse partners are coming together to ensure that all California students get access to rich, authentic learning that advances environmental literacy and civic engagement.”
Study: Colleges that ditch the SAT and ACT can enhance diversity
Claudio Sanchez, NPR
There are now well over 1,000 colleges and universities that don’t require SAT or ACT scores in deciding whom to admit, a number that’s growing every year. And a new study finds that scores on those tests are of little value in predicting students’ performance in college, and raises the question: Should those tests be required at all? Colleges that have gone “test optional” enroll — and graduate — a higher proportion of low-income and first generation-students, and more students from diverse backgrounds, the researchers found in the study, Defining Access: How Test-Optional Works. “Our research clearly demonstrates that these students graduate often at a higher rate,” said Steve Syverson, an assistant vice chancellor at the University of Washington Bothell, and co-author of the study.
The University of California stands out among top schools when it comes to serving poor students
Adam Harris, The Atlantic
The idea is clear, simple, and generally agreed upon: Colleges need to do more when it comes to enrolling and graduating low-income students. If college degrees are “the great equalizer”—though some research has disputed that characterization—then expanding access to those degrees will help make society more equal. Are any colleges succeeding in doing that? A new report from Third Way, a center-left think tank, tries to answer that question—and the results for many colleges are not pretty. One of the most common ways to understand how colleges are serving low-income students is by looking at how well they are helping students who are eligible to receive Pell Grants, or need-based federal grants for low-income students. Three-quarters of Pell Grant recipients come from families that make less than $40,000 a year. The report finds that fewer than half of first-time, full-time Pell students (meaning students who are attending college for the first time, not transfer or return students, who are a slightly different population) graduate at the institution they started at within six years. By contrast, those who do not receive a Pell Grant are doing much better, and nationally are 18 percent more likely to graduate within that time period. This report represents some of the first significant analysis done on Pell-recipient graduation rates, as the federal government had not made these data available until last fall. But the report found that one system stands out: Schools in the University of California system are doing significantly better than other four-year colleges and universities in the country when it comes to enrolling low-income students and seeing them across the finish line. Of the public and private nonprofit schools with a higher-than-average Pell-awardee enrollment rate (the schools this study examined), the UCs occupy five of the top 10 slots in terms of graduating students. Among only public institutions, they are the top seven.
Inequality, Poverty, Segregation
Shutdown of Texas schools probe shows Trump administration pullback on civil rights
Annie Waldman, Salon
Beside a highway in Bryan, Texas, tucked between a motorcycle bar and the county jail, stands a low-slung, sprawling complex with tinted windows, sandstone walls and barbed wire lining parts of its roof. A roadside sign identifies it as the Brazos County Juvenile Justice Center. One Friday afternoon last October, after an incident at nearby Arthur L. Davila Middle School, a police officer arrested 13-year-old Trah’Vaeziah Jackson and brought her to the juvenile detention facility. She cried as employees patted her down, cut off her hair extensions, and took her photo and fingerprints. She was served dinner — chicken nuggets, mashed potatoes and an apple in a styrofoam box with a carton of milk — but had no appetite. In the shower room, guards applied thick anti-lice shampoo to Trah’Vaeziah’s hair. As she washed and combed it, clumps fell out. Afterwards, she reluctantly changed from her school clothes, a T-shirt and jeans, into the detention uniform, an orange shirt with matching shorts. Then she was locked in her cell, which contained a sink, a toilet, and, instead of a bed, a stuffed blue mat atop a brick base. High on the wall was a sliver of a window, but she wasn’t tall enough to see outside. Only after 8 p.m. was she permitted a phone call. She called her mother and sobbed into the receiver. How could this accident have turned into a jail sentence?
A witness to the desegregation—and resegregation—of America’s schools
Kristina Rizga, The Atlantic
On Rebecca Palacios’s first day in front of a classroom, one of her white students picked up his chair and threw it toward her, declaring that he refused to be taught by a “Mexican teacher.” It was 1976, Palacios was 22 years old, and many of her first-grade students were at the school because of a recently launched busing program in Corpus Christi, Texas, that the courts had mandated in an effort to racially integrate campuses. Large numbers of white students were now traveling across town to her school—Lamar Elementary—which for generations had served mostly working-class Mexican American children. Growing up in the 1950s and ’60s, Palacios learned about American discrimination against Latinos first-hand. Her father, a World War II veteran who worked for the public-park service in Texas, spoke frequently about the daily humiliations of being a Latino in America—of not being able to eat in certain restaurants or use certain water fountains. He would recount stories of teachers prohibiting him from speaking Spanish in school, sometimes hitting him when he spoke it with his friends. The use of Spanish was still discouraged in Corpus Christi school buildings when Palacios became a student in the 1950s. Designed to funnel Latinos into vocational tracks such as factory jobs or secretarial work, these segregated schools didn’t offer academically ambitious students like Palacios the advanced classes they needed to attend college. But thanks to her high-school teachers—both white and Latino—who created the necessary coursework using their own resources, Palacios became the first person in her family to go to college.
Why are New York’s schools segregated? It’s not as simple as housing
Elizabeth A. Harris and Josh Katz, The New York Times
When asked about school segregation in New York City, Mayor Bill de Blasio has said that schools are segregated because neighborhoods are: “We cannot change the basic reality of housing in New York City.” Now, as a debate about plans to integrate middle schools has engulfed one Manhattan district, a report released on Wednesday undermines that notion. It found that a full 40 percent of New York City kindergartners do not attend the nearby school to which they are assigned. That’s a vast stream of 27,000 5-year-olds funneling through the city each day. While parents of all races choose to send their children out of their zones, the overall pattern of their choices may make schools more segregated. It also concentrates the effects of poverty at zoned schools, the schools to which children are assigned based on where they live.
Public Schools and Private $
The nation’s top teachers met with Betsy DeVos, and not all of them were thrilled with what she had to say
Moriah Balingit, The Washington Post
Education Secretary Betsy DeVos met privately with the nation’s top teachers Monday and asked them to talk about the obstacles they face in doing their jobs. At least one of those teachers told DeVos that some of her policies are hurting public education. “We have a problem where public money is siphoned off from the public schools and given to children who are going to charter and private schools,” Oklahoma Teacher of the Year Jon Hazell said. DeVos’s response shocked him, he said. “She immediately answered that it was her goal to redefine what education is and that she wants to call all of it public education,” said Hazell, a high school science teacher.
Charter school backing for Villaraigosa’s gubernatorial bid grows
Louis Freedberg, EdSource
Supporters of charter school expansion continue to pour funds to boost the bid of Antonio Villaraigosa to succeed California Gov. Jerry Brown at a critical point in the former Los Angeles mayor’s campaign, This week philanthropist Eli Broad contributed another $1 million to a pro-Villaraigosa charter-sponsored independent expenditure committee, bringing his total contribution to $2.5 million over the past two weeks. A day later, Michael Bloomberg donated $1.5 million to the same committee. Both are multi-billionaires, with Bloomberg’s net worth is estimated to be $50.5 billion and Broad’s at $7.3 billion. Bloomberg has been a long-time backer of charter schools including contributing to an unsuccessful ballot initiative in Massachusetts to lift a cap on charter schools there. These contributions came on top of a $7 million contribution by Reed Hastings, the founder and CEO of Netflix, $1 million from Richard Riordan, another former LA mayor, and $750,000 this week from Alice Walton. Walton, a staunch charter school supporter, is the daughter of Wal-Mart founder Sam Walton. Forbes magazine estimates her net worth to be nearly $42 billion, and Hasting’s $3.5 billion.
New report tries to move the goalposts for school choice
Christopher Lubienski and T. Jameson Brewer, National Education Policy Center
A new report from the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), Do Impacts on Test Scores Even Matter? Lessons from Long-Run Outcomes in School Choice Research, examines whether student achievement scores on math and English language arts tests align with “long-run” attainment outcomes such as high school graduation rates, college enrollment, and college graduation rates. Drawing on a systematic review of the literature, it concludes that the impacts of school choice programs on test scores are not well connected to such attainment outcomes, which are presented as more positive. This review considers two issues with the report: consistency and evidence. Regarding consistency, the report’s suggestion that achievement scores should play a smaller role in determining the efficacy of school choice models represents a stunning effort to move the goalposts in search of new justifications for supporting their preferred policies. After decades of pro-school-choice research and advocacy promoting test score comparisons with public schools as the primary measurement for evaluating school choice models (e.g., charters and school vouchers), the AEI report now suggests that less attention be given to these learning outcomes. Regarding evidence, the AEI report is riddled with numerous internal inconsistencies in its discussion and treatment of a set of studies that were selected by questionable methods. In view of the 180-degree turn based on questionable evidence, the report — despite the authors’ assertions — is of little use to policymakers.
Other News of Note
Why teachers keep walking out
Molly Olmstead, Slate
Arizona teachers again gathered in mass at the state capitol building on Wednesday in what is now the fifth day of a statewide walkout. Some stood outside to remind legislators of their presence—and of their absence from schools. Others waited inside the capitol building for news as the Legislature tried to finalize a budget that would try to subdue their anger. The teachers, wearing red, have shown up in numbers surprising even after the wave of teacher demonstrations in West Virginia, Oklahoma, Kentucky, and Colorado. Last Thursday, more than 50,000 people marched through downtown Phoenix to demand wage increases and increases in school funding to bring them back to pre-recession levels. On Wednesday afternoon, leaders of the movement asked teachers to return again on Thursday when the Legislature failed to pass a budget. Slate spoke with several of the teachers who participated in the walkout to learn why they were willing to step away from the classroom and what they hoped for their schools. One teacher, 23-year-old music teacher Noah Karvelis, is a leader of the movement and has been accused by conservative media and a state Republican representative of being a political operative. (“These are deliberate misconceptions constructed by opponents because we’re bringing change,” he said.) Another, Beth Maloney, was Arizona’s teacher of the year in 2014. A third, Brandi Rasmussen, missed her son’s first steps while waiting to testify before the House.