Just News from Center X – November 4, 2016

Teaching, Leading, and Social Justice

Enrollments in teacher prep programs rise for first time in 13 years

Louis Freedberg and Fermin Leal, EdSource
At a time when districts across California are reporting shortages of teachers in a number of subject areas, enrollments in teacher preparation programs in California have increased for the first time in 13 years. The increase could be the result of a number of factors, including greater interest among prospective teachers in entering the profession, the success of more aggressive recruitment efforts and an abundance of job openings for teachers, especially in high-needs areas such as special education, bilingual education, and math and science. According to a new California Commission on Teacher Credentialing report, enrollments statewide increased from 18,984 in 2013-14 to 20,881 in 2014-15, a nearly 10 percent increase. Because there is a one-year lag time in publishing data, the commission does not have figures for the 2015-16 school year.

L.A. Unified has persistent problems resolving allegations of teacher misconduct

Howard Blume, Los Angeles Times
Years after a series of high-profile abuse cases, L.A. Unified still has problems resolving allegations of wrongdoing by teachers and holding down costs related to them, according to a state audit released Thursday. Last year, the district paid $12.6 million in ongoing salary to teachers who had been pulled from classrooms and at least another $3.3 million for the substitute teachers who filled in, according to the audit. While substantial, both figures were improvements over recent years.

Struggling new teachers pose dilemma for schools

Jill Tucker, San Francisco Chronicle
Principal Susan Ritter agonized over the decision she had to make: Should she keep four struggling new teachers on staff at San Francisco’s Balboa High School, or get rid of them at the end of the school year? The choice was difficult. If she let the probationary teachers remain, it would mean leaving the four floundering in classrooms while they headed for tenure, making it harder to remove them later if they didn’t improve. If she let them go, she would have to search for replacements amid a broad teacher shortage and probably end up with equally inexperienced educators when school started in the fall.

Language, Culture, and Power

Schools to face teacher shortage if voters end ban on bilingual education

Ashley Hopkinson, EdSource
Voters will decide Tuesday whether to expand bilingual education programs in California schools, bringing an end to an almost 20-year restriction on their growth. But passage could create a new challenge: how to find enough bilingual teachers amid an ongoing shortage of teachers, especially those who can teach in multiple languages. “Right now there are people who want to mount programs and they are not able to do it,” UCLA research professor Patricia Gandara said of Proposition 58. “There is already a demand that cannot be met, and this will increase that demand.”

Hiding in plain sight: The adult literacy crisis

Valerie Strauss, The Washington Post; Lecester Johnson, CEO and president of the Academy of Hope Adult Public Charter School
There is a literacy problem in the nation’s capital, but I’m not talking about young people who can’t read. Many adults — perhaps even parents sitting next to you at back-to-school night — don’t possess academic skills beyond those of a middle-school student. According to data from the 2014 U.S. Census Bureau, 21 percent — or nearly 60,000 —  of working age adults in the city lack a high school diploma. At the same time, 19 percent of adults cannot read a newspaper, much less complete a job application, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.

Teachers underestimate girls’ math abilities, report suggests

Kate Stoltzfus, Education Week
What is keeping girls from pursuing opportunities and careers in math? Certain barriers could be perpetuated by their teachers, a new study suggests. Starting as early as kindergarten, teachers perceive boys’ math ability as higher than girls’, regardless of the students’ learning styles and levels of achievement, according to researchers from New York University, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and West Chester University in a study published last week in AERA Open. This perception at such an early age could affect girls’ confidence and aptitude for math and prevent them from pursuing future STEM opportunities, the researchers wrote.

Whole Children and Strong Communities

How a happy school can help students succeed

Kat Lonsdorf, NPR
Every day at Weiner Elementary School starts with a dance party, usually to Best Day of My Life by American Authors — and that’s before the 7:50 a.m. bell even rings. Then comes the morning assembly, where all 121 students and the staff gather for 20 minutes in the cafeteria of the school in Weiner, Ark. They sing songs and learn about an artist, a musician and an international city of the week. They celebrate birthdays. A lucky student is crowned Student of the Day. And Pam Hogue makes it her goal to be an educator instead of a principal. That assembly — and the many other things this school does to create a sense of community and happiness — is part of what experts call school climate.

Don’t bribe kids with sugar to persuade them to drink more milk

Editorial Board, Los Angeles Times
If students in local public schools refused to quench their thirst with water, would the schools offer them soda instead? Of course not. And if they won’t drink milk, the answer shouldn’t be to add sugar, chocolate or artificial strawberry flavoring and coloring to it. L.A. Unified schools are in a tough position. The only drink they are allowed to offer students that meets federal school-lunch rules for high-nutrition foods is milk. Under federal rules, that milk can be sweetened and flavored. But under a separate L.A. Unified rule, sugar-sweetened drinks are banned — including flavored milk. So in effect, the only drink schools can provide to students in their school lunches is plain milk.

Number of home-schooled students has doubled since 1999, new data shows

Emma Brown, The Washington Post
Approximately 1.8 million U.S. children were home-schooled in 2012, more than double the number that were home-schooled in 1999, when the federal government began gathering data on national home-schooling trends, according to estimates released Tuesday. The estimated number of home-schooled children represents 3.4 percent of the U.S. student population between the ages of 5 and 17. The increase was fastest between 1999 and 2007, then slowed between 2007 and 2012, according to the estimates from the National Center for Education Statistics.
The figures show that most home-schoolers were white and living above the poverty line in 2012. An estimated 4 in 10 home-schoolers had parents who graduated from college, while about 1 in 10 had parents whose formal education ended before they graduated from high school.

Access, Assessment, and Advancement

Map: Tracking the common core state standards

Andrew Ujifusa, Education Week
Confused about the status of the Common Core State Standards? You’re not alone. Since we published an update last year about the status of the English/language arts and math standards across 50 states and the District of Columbia, there’s been a fair bit of activity regarding the standards. Although the national backlash to the common core seems to have cooled a little bit in recent months, several states have announced some kind of change to the standards due to state legislation, governors’ directives, or other reasons. The map below represents our best judgment about the nominal status of the common core across the country. In addition to the map, see our drop-down menu below for information about how different states are handling the common core.

New education standards lead to academic improvement in many states, report asserts

Theresa Harrington, EdSource
More rigorous state standards in math and English language arts have contributed to improved academic achievement for students across the country, including in California, a new report asserts. The analysis looked at improvements in test scores from the 2014-15 school year to the 2015-16 school year. In 2014-15, most states took Common Core-aligned tests for the first time.

How one university used big data to boost graduation rates

Anya Kamenetz, NPR
Whenever you surf the Web, sophisticated algorithms are tracking where you go, comparing you with millions of other people. They’re trying to predict what you’ll do next: Apply for a credit card? Book a family vacation? At least 40 percent of universities report that they’re trying some version of the same technology on their students, according to several recent surveys. It’s known as predictive analytics, and it can be used to either help or hurt students, says a new report from the New America Foundation.

Lack of Hispanics in college could hurt your paycheck

Hechinger Report
Cristina Nino-Zavala watched her parents work in dead-end jobs they didn’t like – her father as a mechanic, her mother putting pills in bottles on a southern Michigan assembly line – and assumed she was headed toward the same fate. No one in her family had gone to college. The daughter of Mexican immigrants and eldest of five siblings, she was only dimly even aware of the concept.

Inequality, Poverty, Segregation

John Oliver explains why school segregation is still a huge problem—and especially in the north

Marissa Martinelli, Slate
Though the Civil Rights Act of 1964 invalidated laws that kept black and white students in separate schools, racial segregation in America’s school systems is still very much alive and well. John Oliver kicked off his Last Week Tonight segment on the subject with an admonishment for his more liberal white viewers, who might think the issue only applies south of the Mason-Dixon: “If you’re in a city like New York, you’re probably thinking, ‘Oh, splendid, I know where this is going: a story vilifying the backwards and racist American South. Let me just grab a handful of kale chips that I can munch on while feeling superior.’”

Black workers’ wages have been harmed by both widening racial wage gaps and the widening productivity-pay gap

Valerie Wilson, Economic Policy Institute
Participants in the ongoing discussion about how to remedy centuries of economic inequality experienced by African Americans generally fall into one of two camps. One group calls for explicitly race-based or racially targeted solutions, while the other group supports race-neutral, or universal, progressive economic policies and programs. This brief focuses on the damage done to typical black workers’ wages in recent decades and demonstrates that progress on both fronts is necessary to undo the damage.

The new neoliberalism

William Davies, New Left Review
In a July 2015 interview, the former Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis gave an insight into his exchanges with the representatives of Greece’s creditors at EU Finance Ministers’ meetings. What stood out was his depiction of almost surreal levels of incomprehension: ‘You put forward an argument that you’ve really worked on—to make sure it’s logically coherent—and you’re just faced with blank stares. It is as if you haven’t spoken. What you say is independent of what they say. You might as well have sung the Swedish national anthem.’

Public Schools and Private $

Push to expand California charter school enrollments provokes backlash

Louis Freedberg, EdSource
After a quarter century of uninterrupted growth, aggressive efforts by charter school advocates to increase enrollments and to elect sympathetic school board members and legislators have triggered a backlash unlike anything that has occurred since the first charter school opened in California. Charter schools have drawn an increasing share of California’s approximately 6 million public school students. How this conflict plays out will have major ramifications for the kinds of schools those students will attend in future years.

A school district on the precipice

Valerie Strauss, The Washington Post; Andre Perry, Hechinger Report
From the outside, Forest Hill High School is a picture of strength and prosperity. A far cry from the one-room schoolhouse that sat on the same spot in the 1850s, the contemporary academic and athletic facility covers more than 47 acres, and it seems to have all the physical attributes parents and teenagers could want. Inside, it’s a different story. Forest Hill High is failing students. The public school built in 1989 received an “F” rating on its most recent state evaluation, as did almost a third of the schools in the Jackson school district. No one understands this struggle better than Sharolyn Miller, chief financial officer for Jackson Public Schools. All summer, Miller struggled to fix a failing HVAC system the high school couldn’t afford — just as JPS found $600,000 for two new charter schools in the city.

Battle over charter school ballot question heating up

Associated Press, Education Week
The battle over a charter school ballot question is heating up in the sprint to Election Day. On Tuesday, opponents of the question — which seeks to expand the number of charter schools in Massachusetts — released a statement from Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders calling for the measure’s defeat. The former Democratic presidential hopeful faulted the question for relying on money from New York backers. Sanders said it would drain resources from traditional public schools.

Other News of Note

Schools hustle to reach kids who move with the harvest, not the school year

Peter Balonon-Rosen, NPR
If you’re carving a jack-o-lantern tonight, take a minute to think about who picked that pumpkin.
Maybe it was Anayeli Camacho, one of the country’s estimated 3 million migrant farm workers, and mother of two. For part of the year she rents a trailer on farmland in Oaktown, Indiana where she works in the fields, harvesting pumpkins and other crops. But as the fall harvest comes to a close, she and her family will head back down south for the winter, following seasonal work. This is what Camacho has done for the last decade, traveling north and south, from Florida to Indiana, bringing her family, which now includes 4-year-old Ximena, along with her.

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.