Just News from Center X – November 18, 2016

Teaching, Leading, and Social Justice

 

UC won’t assist federal agents in immigration actions against students

Teresa Watanabe, Los Angeles Times

The University of California announced sweeping actions Wednesday to protect its students who came into the country illegally, saying it would refuse to assist federal immigration agents, turn over confidential records without court orders or supply information for any national registry based on race, national origin or religion. “While we still do not know what policies and practices the incoming federal administration may adopt, given the many public pronouncements made during the presidential campaign and its aftermath, we felt it necessary to reaffirm that UC will act upon its deeply held conviction that all members of our community have the right to work, study, and live safely and without fear at all UC locations,” UC President Janet Napolitano said in a statement.

 

Teaching Trump

Joel Westheimer, CBC Player

“Now Donald Trump says he is not happy with the satirical sketch show Saturday Night Live, but viewers are loving the parodies of the American President-Elect. (Plays clip from SNL). Well for comics President-Elect Trump remains fair game and the perfect fodder for political satire. But for many teachers, Trump’s forthcoming presidency is nothing to joke about and it’s raising questions about neutrality in the classroom and the role teachers play in shaping students’ opinions. Our education columnist Joel Westheimer is here with more.”

 

State’s teacher shortage hitting ‘alarming rates’ for 2016-17, new survey says

Fermin Leal, EdSource

California’s teacher shortage is worsening, with many districts struggling to find enough qualified teachers to fill vacancies, according to a new statewide survey by the Learning Policy Institute and the California School Boards Association. Among the 211 districts that participated in the survey – about a fifth of all the state’s districts – 75 percent indicated having a shortage of qualified teachers for the current 2016-17 school year, with the greatest needs in large cities and for those seeking special education teachers. The survey findings are part of a policy brief, “California Teacher Shortages: A Persistent Problem,” that was released Wednesday. More than 80 percent of the districts that reported shortages said their shortages have grown worse compared with three years ago.

 

U.S. police shootings echo through criminology classrooms

David Ingram, Reuters

A new crop of ads on New York City subway cars reads “Justice now, but justice how?” The words evoke the tone of street protests over police killings of black men across the United States during the past three years. But the ads are not a plea from civil rights activists. They are a recruiting pitch from the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in Manhattan. One of them reads, “If the system is ever going to change, this is the place where change will begin.” John Jay is one of a number of schools that are making academic changes in the wake of the high-profile killings of black men and boys by police in recent years in places like Cleveland, Chicago, Baton Rouge, Louisiana and Ferguson, Missouri, that have fueled a debate about racial bias in the U.S. criminal justice system.

 

 

 

Language, Culture, and Power

 

President Obama won’t pardon DACA recipients, top aide says

Corey Mitchell, Education Week

President Barack Obama won’t issue a sweeping pardon to undocumented immigrants brought to the United States as children because it “wouldn’t protect a single soul from deportation,” a top White House aide says. Obama ordered the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals policy in 2012, establishing that hundreds of thousands of undocumented immigrants who arrived in the U.S. as children could receive a two-year work authorization and protection from deportation. Immigration advocates worry that the policy, commonly known as DACA, could be a target of the Trump administration’s plan to crack down on illegal immigration. Since the program was created through executive authority, the incoming president could alter or end DACA, Cecilia Muñoz, assistant to the president and director of the White House’s domestic policy council, said in a Center for Migration Studies podcast interview.

 

 

‘Makerspaces’ for science instruction also proving helpful for English learners

Pat Maio, EdSource

Educators are finding that the new “makerspace” movement – a strategy to teach K-12 students science, math and technology through hands-on activities – is providing the added benefit of helping English learners become more proficient in the language. In makerspaces, students gather a few times a week in a separate classroom, library or museum for a group project using such technologies and materials as 3D printing, robotics, microprocessors, textiles, wood and wires to construct robots and other electronic gadgets. The teaching technique has been around since the early 2000s, and educators have applauded the idea for helping teach science, especially at a time when California and other states are phasing in the Next Generation Science Standards, which emphasize practical application of science over rote learning.

 

Millions have dyslexia, few understand it

Gabrielle Emanuel, NPR

“It’s frustrating that you can’t read the simplest word in the world.” Thomas Lester grabs a book and opens to a random page. He points to a word: galloping. “Goll—. G—. Gaa—. Gaa—. G—. ” He keeps trying. It is as if the rest ­­of the word is in him somewhere, but he can’t sound it out. “I don’t … I quit.” He tosses the book and it skids along the table. Despite stumbling over the simplest words, Thomas — a fourth-grader — is a bright kid. In fact, that’s an often-misunderstood part of dyslexia: It’s not about lacking comprehension, having a low IQ or being deprived of a good education. It’s about having a really hard time reading. Dyslexia is the most common learning disability in the United States. It touches the lives of millions of people, including me and Thomas. Just like Thomas, I spent much of my childhood sitting in a little chair across from a reading tutor.

 

 

Whole Children and Strong Communities

The push for positive school climate bumps up against Trump rhetoric

Jane Meredith Adams, EdSource

If President-elect Donald Trump were a high school student in California, he might find himself in a restorative justice circle making amends for his hurtful words and behavior.

“He would be in a lot of trouble,” said Jaana Juvonen, a UCLA researcher who studies student bullying. Supported by civil rights laws, brain science and research on learning, schools in California and across the nation have increasingly made it a priority to try to create classrooms that are welcoming to all. The goal is civil discourse, improved academic performance and fewer discipline incidents. Positive school climate is part of the idea behind elementary school students shaking hands with their teachers in the morning, middle school students creating “No Bullying!” posters and high school students talking it out in stress management support groups. In California, improving “school climate” is part of the new education accountability system, although no one is quite sure what to measure.

There are 63,000 homeless youths in L.A. County. These are the children of skid row

Joy Resmovits, Los Angeles Times

Their eyes shift from joy to fatigue as they walk hand in hand and take in the tents, the smells, the people. The smaller ones tune it out, faces blank. The eldest openly stare. These are the children of skid row — black, white, Latino. They have pink and red Adidas sneakers or thumbs in their mouths or studs that glint like diamonds in their ears or the first hint of hair above their lips. They’re sisters and friends who profess their love for each other, who like listening to music when they study, who talk in class without raising their hands. They could be any kids.

 

When the students on campus have kids of their own

Noah Adams, NPR

The young women in this story have labels. Three labels: Single, mother, college student. They’re raising a child and getting an education — three of the 2.6 million unmarried parents attending U.S. colleges and universities. Getting a degree is hard enough for anyone, but these students face extra challenges. And when it comes to helping out with their needs, Wilson College in Chambersburg, Pa., is considered one of the best in the country. It’s a liberal arts school with 1,100 students. There’s a large farm, an equestrian program, and 15 students in the Single Parent Scholars program. This year all are moms, though men are welcome too.

 

 

 

Access, Assessment, and Advancement

Details awaited on Trump team’s early-ed. path

Christina Samuels, Education Week

Making child care more affordable for working families was one of a handful of education policy positions that President-elect Donald Trump tackled with some specificity on the campaign trail, promising to offer “much-needed relief” through a combination of tax deductions and credits.

But the incoming administration’s views on a number of other early-childhood initiatives championed by the Obama White House—including federal support of state-run preschool programs, home visiting, and Head Start—are as yet unknown. The early-childhood-advocacy community is still grappling with what a Trump administration will mean for those policies and many others.

 

California’s rising high school graduation rates subject of federal audit

Maureen Magee, The San Diego Union-Tribune

The U.S. Department of Education is auditing the accuracy of high school graduation rates in California and Alabama. Launched in the summer, the federal inquiry coincides with record graduation rates reached throughout the state, including the San Diego and Los Angeles unified school districts. News of the audits was included in a November U.S. Department of Education Office of Inspector General “Annual Plan for 2017.”  The probe will “Continue our work to determine whether selected (state education agencies) have implemented systems of internal control over calculating and reporting graduation rates that are sufficient to ensure that reported graduation rates are accurate and reliable,” according to the report.

 

Obama administration to release new rules for judging schools

Emma Brown, The Washington Post

The U.S. Education Department on Monday released final regulations governing how states should judge which schools are doing well and which are struggling and require help, a contentious set of rules that has pitted the Obama administration and its civil rights allies against an unusual alliance of teachers unions and GOP leaders. But for all the debate, it is unclear — given Republican Donald Trump’s surprise election — whether the new rules will much matter. Trump has pledged a smaller federal footprint in public education, giving rise to speculation that his administration is likely to either rewrite the new regulations entirely, giving states more leeway to handle school accountability as they wish, or render the rules meaningless by declining to enforce them.

 

 

Inequality, Poverty, Segregation

 

Civil rights group documents nearly 900 hate incidents after presidential election

Moriah Ballingit, The Washington Post

In Sarasota, Fla., someone pulled a 75-year-old gay man from his car and beat him, saying: “You know my new president says we can kill all you f—— now.” In San Antonio, a man told an Asian girl: “When they see your eyes, you are going to be deported.” A teacher in Wesley Chapel, Fla., told black students: “Don’t make me call Donald Trump to get you sent back to Africa.” The Southern Poverty Law Center documented 867 “hate incidents” in the 10 days after Donald Trump was elected president, more than 300 of which included direct references to the president-elect or his campaign rhetoric. The incidents — documented in the media or reported through a form on the center’s website — included vandalism of places of worship, attacks on Muslim women in headscarves and bullying of Hispanic students in schools.

 

The push to diversify gifted-and-talented programs

Christina Viega, The Atlantic

Families from across New York City flock to Brooklyn School of Inquiry in the Gravesend neighborhood—the kind of school where parents raise enough money to pay for extra helpers in most classrooms and where a multi-million dollar STEM lab is being built on the roof. But for all the gifted-and-talented school offers, Principal Donna Taylor says there is one thing lacking: a student body that reflects the diversity of the city. Taylor hopes to make a dent in that. Starting next fall, BSI will become the first citywide gifted-and-talented school to experiment with new admissions policies to promote integration. The Department of Education has allowed the highly sought-after school to set aside 40 percent of its kindergarten seats specifically for low-income children.

 

“There aren’t qualified minority candidates” is a myth

Viviane Callier, Scientific American

The complaint that “there just aren’t enough qualified minority candidates” is frequently heard with respect to faculty diversity in academia. In fact, the number of biomedical Ph.D. scientists from under-represented minority (URM) groups has grown exponentially in the last 30 years—but this growth in the minority talent pool did not lead to a corresponding increase in the number of minority faculty hires, a new study to appear in eLife

shows. This suggests that although programs to increase diversity at the undergraduate and graduate levels have been largely successful, new interventions at a slightly later career stage may be required to increase faculty diversity, the researchers say. Today, nearly 900 Ph.D.’s in the basic biomedical sciences are awarded annually to under-represented minorities, and that amounts to more than nine-fold growth since 1980. “There has been an assumption by many institutions that there simply isn’t a pool of qualified minority candidates,” said Hannah Valantine, NIH’s Chief Officer for Scientific Workforce Diversity. “But the data are quite compelling.”  Despite this growth and the growth of the overall population of assistant professors, the number of minority assistant professors in basic biomedical research actually fell slightly between 2005 and 2014.

 

 

Public Schools and Private $

School choice advocate Betsy DeVos named Ed. Sec.: What does that mean?

Alyson Klein and Andrew Ujifusa, Education Week

President-elect Donald Trump has tapped Betsy DeVos, a longtime school choice advocate and Republican mega-donor, to be his education secretary, he announced Wednesday. DeVos is best known in the school choice world as the chairwoman of the American Federation for Children, an advocacy and research organization that champions school vouchers and tax-credit scholarships. And just hours after her selection, DeVos sent a tweet making it clear that she adamantly opposes the Common Core State Standards, which Trump also has denounced. “Betsy DeVos is a brilliant and passionate education advocate,” said President-elect Trump in a statement announcing the pick, which is still subject to U.S. Senate confirmation. “Under her leadership we will reform the U.S. education system and break the bureaucracy that is holding our children back so that we can deliver world-class education and school choice to all families.”

 

 

Locals concerned with Trump’s top pick for education: DeVos seen as threat to public schools and Common Core by county officials

Austin Walsh, The Daily Journal

President-elect Donald Trump tapping Betsy DeVos as his preferred candidate to be the next education secretary raised eyebrows among some members of the local school community.  A few San Mateo County school officials claim they harbor severe reservations regarding Trump potentially appointing DeVos, who is seen by critics as a threat to the public school system. Those taking issue with the nomination point to her school choice advocacy and public criticism of Common Core standards as potential sources of consternation, though questions remain over the degree of influence her policies may have in local classrooms… Immediately following announcement of her candidacy, the California Charter Schools Association expressed their appreciation for the selection.

 

Charter challenges appellate ruling to state Supreme Court

Maureen Magee, The San Diego Union-Tribune

A Northern California charter school has turned to the state’s highest court to review and potentially reverse an appellate court ruling that calls into question the legality of hundreds of satellite charter campuses. California’s charter school industry suffered a major blow in October when a state appellate court ruled that a charter school cannot operate mini-campuses outside its home district in its resident county. Growth in satellite charters has stirred turf wars and costly litigation locally and throughout San Diego County and state. Tens of thousands of California students attend satellite charter schools that operate in shopping malls, office parks and other unlikely campus venues within boundaries of school districts that did not authorize them. The appellate court decision puts at stake the education of students and millions of dollars in revenue generated by the charters for privately run organizations.

Other News of Note

What is faculty diversity worth to a university?

Patricia A. Matthew, The Atlantic

The spate of racialized attacks on college campuses after the election are, in some ways, the flip side of the protests that sprung up across the country starting last fall. Then, students of color called for their schools to develop more inclusive climates—with big stories breaking from campuses like the University of Missouri and Princeton—and pressed elite institutions to confront the racist histories of the leaders they enshrine. Such activism took place on campuses that don’t have such high profiles, too. To put it simply, in the parlance of social media, the students protesting are woke AF—and one of the things they want are more faculty of color. It’s a complicated request in many ways. This is in part because a call for a more diverse professoriate suggests that faculty of color, simply by being brown and on campus, can serve the institution in unique ways. In turn, when faculty of color are hired, they are often expected to occupy a certain set of roles: to serve as mentors, inspirations, and guides—to be the racial conscience of their institutions while not ruffling too many of the wrong feathers.

 

Being watched: New website seeks to register professors accused of liberal bias and “anti-American values”

Colleen Flaherty, Inside Higher Ed

A new website is asking students and others to “expose and document” professors who “discriminate against conservative students, promote anti-American values and advance leftist propaganda in the classroom.” The site, called Professor Watchlist, is not without precedent — predecessors include the now-defunct NoIndoctrination.org, which logged accounts of alleged bias in the classroom. There’s also David Horowitz’s 2006 book, The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America. But such efforts arguably have new meaning in an era of talk about registering certain social groups and concerns about free speech.

 

 

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.