Just News from Center X – October 13, 2017

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Teaching, Leading, and Social Justice

Enrollment drops even more than expected in L.A. Unified

Howard Blume, Los Angeles Times
Enrollment has dropped even more than anticipated in the Los Angeles Unified School District, exacerbating budget problems and signaling that efforts to reverse the decline are falling short. L.A. Unified had been expecting enrollment to shrink 2.1% but the actual drop has been 2.55%. That small percentage difference translates to about 5,400 students, said Scott Price, chief financial officer for L.A. Unified. The faster decline represents an unexpected loss of $17 million in funding. Total enrollment this year is 513,875, more than 13,000 fewer than last year. The numbers are particularly discouraging because for the nation’s second-largest school system has made increasing enrollment a priority. The district moved quickly to add more of its most popular programs, including magnet schools and dual-language immersion. These efforts have not necessarily failed; enrollment might have been lower without them. But they didn’t reverse the trend.

Should teachers make as much as lawmakers? Calif. voters could decide

Brenda Iasevoll, Education Week
California teachers could soon earn as much as state legislators earn. That’s the goal of a proposed measure that education advocates are working to add to the November 2018 ballot. The measure, called the Teacher Fair Pay Act, would require that credentialed teachers get paid the same as lawmakers who typically earn $104,118 each year, reports the Los Angeles Times. The state’s teachers currently earn anywhere from $41,00 to nearly $93,000, according to the California Department of Education. “If we want the best and the brightest teachers in our classrooms, we have to pay competitive salaries,” said Marc Litchman, the founder of the nonprofit California Trust for Public Schools and the author of the measure. (Find out in this Teaching Now blog post which states are friendliest to teachers based on indicators including salary, pensions, and tenure protections.) Litchman argues that teachers should be paid even more than what lawmakers make today. “Adjusted for inflation, a teacher should make $125,000 today to make what they did in 1960,” he wrote in an email to Education Week. He added that teacher salaries lag 17 percent behind salaries in the private sector and comparable public sector professions. Sarah D. Sparks explores this phenomenon in a recent Inside School Research blog post that includes this surprising fact: U.S. teachers make less than 60 cents on every dollar made by others with their education level.

‘We will keep coming back:’ Richard Spencer leads another torchlight march in Charlottesville

Susan Svrluga, The Washington Post
Richard Spencer, who in August led white nationalists and white supremacists in a torchlight march across the University of Virginia campus that touched off a weekend of deadly clashes, returned Saturday night to Charlottesville. Spencer, a white nationalist, posted video on social media of torch-bearing followers heading to the statue of Robert E. Lee in Emancipation Park, which the city has sought to remove. The rally, led by Spencer, included 40 to 50 people and lasted five or 10 minutes, according to Lt. Stephen Upman, a spokesman for the Charlottesville Police Department. There were no incidents of disorder at the rally. The group then left, boarding a tour bus at another location. Police followed to ensure that the group left the city. “Our department is conferring with city leadership and the commonwealth attorney’s office to determine what legal action may be taken in response to this event,” Upman said. The march coincided with the university’s celebration of its bicentennial.

Language, Culture, and Power

Fla. school district picks abstinence-only center for sex education. Lesson 8: ‘Steps of intimacy and how to stop them’

Valerie Strauss, The Washington Post
A Florida school district has signed on with an abstinence-only center to provide sex education — or, rather, “relationship education” — to teens, replacing curriculum that had been informed by the Florida Department of Health. The Santa Rosa County School District has decided to have the Pregnancy Resource Center in Milton, Fla., provide sex education to high school students in the form of 12 lessons in two 50-minute sessions over two days, according to this report in the Pensacola News Journal. Lesson No. 8 is “Steps of intimacy and how to stop them”; Lesson No. 12: “Saving sex for marriage.” Sexual education has been controversial in the United States for as long as it has existed, with some families opposed to students receiving it in schools and others wanting it severely limited in scope. Abstinence-only education — which attempts to teach young people not to have sex outside marriage and often does not include material on birth control and safe sex — began receiving federal funding in the 1980s.

SoCal University: More international students denied visas to attend

Adolfo Guzman-Lopez, KPCC
California State University, Long Beach said there’s been a sharp increase in the number of international students denied student visas by U.S. officials abroad. University officials tallied about a dozen visa denials for students entering this semester, three times more than last year. “It’s hard to second guess the decision-making at the consulates overseas,” said Terrence Graham, the university’s associate dean for international programs. But “certainly I think there’s an increase in scrutiny of students’ academic plans, and why they’ve chosen specific places and programs to go to, [and] increased scrutiny of the finances that students are bringing to cover the costs of being in the U.S.” Graham said more international students this year told his staff that U.S. officials abroad requested additional documents and information from the prospective students. He says the students whose visas were denied are mostly from Iran, India, Turkey and nearby countries. No students from European countries were denied visas, he said.

The powerful forces that fight for American fraternities

John Hechinger, The Atlantic
Ian Gove’s fraternity was in trouble, and he wasn’t about to see it go down without a fight. On a fall evening after classes, he slipped on a suit and tie and steeled himself to defend Sigma Alpha Epsilon (SAE), one of the largest college fraternities in America. The charges were serious: hazing and reckless drinking that had landed an underaged SAE recruit in the hospital. The 21-year-old college senior may have seemed outgunned as he argued his case at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington. His adversary, a university dean, oversaw the school’s honor code and wanted the fraternity shut down. But Gove had a secret weapon: Thom Goolsby, a trial lawyer and Republican North Carolina state senator who was also a devoted fraternity alumnus. At the November 2012 student-conduct board hearing, Goolsby whispered in Gove’s ear as if they were co-counsel: “This is a kangaroo court.” Reflecting his patron’s disdain, Gove, who was the SAE chapter president, offered a spirited defense. He fumed because he couldn’t cross-examine some witnesses, including one of the accusers, a Wilmington resident who had sent emails to the school reporting late-night SAE keg parties. Gove called him a liar. “These are college kids living next to a neighbor who obviously doesn’t want college kids living next to him—which is why he fabricated this testimony,” Gove argued.

Whole Children and Strong Communities

For traumatized children, an offer of help from The Muppets

Anya Kamenetz, NPR
Cookie Monster is all wound up. The Count has him hold up his furry blue fingers, count them (of course), and blow on each one in turn as if he were blowing out a birthday candle. Afterward, Cookie declares, in his familiar growly voice, that he feels much better. “Hey! Me feel terrific! Me calm. Me relaxed.” You won’t be catching this scene on HBO or PBS. It’s part of a special initiative called Sesame Street in Communities. Free materials, including videos, books and games, will be released today to help parents and caregivers, in turn, help young children cope with traumatic experiences. The science of adverse childhood experiences, or ACEs for short, is beginning to transform education and social services. ACEs include poverty, abuse and neglect, domestic violence, divorce, and mental illness or substance abuse on the part of a caregiver. A new analysis of the 2016 National Survey of Children’s Health, released today, shows that nearly half of American children experience at least one of these adversities, and 1 in 5 have had at least two. Research shows that growing up with more ACEs negatively affects children’s development, education, and even later in life, chronic disease and longevity. But children’s brains are also resilient, and they can recover with the right kind of responsive care.

New poll: Safe and positive school environment more important than higher test scores

Louis Freedberg, John Fensterwald, and Theresa Harrington, EdSource
In evaluating school performance, registered voters in California say creating a safe and positive school environment is far more important than higher scores on standardized tests, according to a Berkeley IGS/EdSource poll. Voters also express considerable concerns about bullying, school fights and other forms of intimidation or violence on school campuses, along with harassment that students experience through social media. These are among the principal findings of the poll to be released Thursday at EdSource’s 40th anniversary symposium in Oakland. The poll reveals strong voter support for school districts to devote more funds and resources to address the needs of the state’s most vulnerable students, a central theme of this year’s symposium. In particular, voters feel strongly that schools should do more to support homeless children as well as those whose family members are threatened with deportation as a result of current heightened federal immigration enforcement policies.

A pipeline to juvenile detention? A new study aims to find where officials can intervene

Priska Neely, KPCC
A new study finds that the troubles of the hundreds of youth leaving the juvenile justice system in Los Angeles County each year may have started at home in early childhood. For most coming out of juvenile detention, the county’s child protective system had received a warning about their mistreatment as kids, according to the study released Friday from the University of Southern California’s Children’s Data Network. Four out of five exiting in 2015 had at least one referral to the Department of Children and Family Services’s child protection hotline for suspected maltreatment, researchers found. For nearly half, those referrals occurred before age 5. “The reason we’re so interested in this finding [is because it] means that we can offer those families support and help at the time of the initial call – as opposed to waiting until they’ve already committed a crime or are already involved in the juvenile justice system,” said Jacquelyn McCroskey, co-director of the Children’s Data Network at the USC Suzanne Dworak-Peck School of Social Work.

Access, Assessment, and Advancement

Can apprenticeships pave the way to a better economic future?

Catherine Gewertz, Education Week
Colorado leaders are painfully aware that they need to find skilled workers to fill thousands of jobs. And they’re betting big on their new secret weapon: an apprenticeship program for high school students. This fall, 116 teenagers from four districts have fanned out to 40 companies in Colorado in the inaugural year of the state’s apprenticeship program. Three days a week, the junior and senior students are at school, and two days a week, they’re earning minimum wage or more while they learn the ins and outs of finance, information technology, business operations, or advanced manufacturing. Colorado has a grand vision for the outcome of this project: By 2026, 20,000 apprentices from all across the state will have finished high school with transferable college credit, at least one postsecondary credential, three years of work experience, and in most cases, an associate degree. The program fits into an expanding national conversation about how schools can do a better job with the career side of the well-known mantra “college- and career-readiness.” A changing economy demands a workforce with sophisticated technical skills, and at least some training or education after high school.

Hitting the return key on education

Jay Mathews, The Washington Post
Joe Clement and Matt Miles teach social studies at Chantilly High School in Fairfax County. They know a teacher who spent six hours jazzing up a lesson on old political cartoons with a PowerPoint presentation. Students pulled laptops off a cart so they could follow and comment on the lesson online. The class went well. But something unusual happened, part of a series of Clement and Miles discoveries that threaten the foundations of the high-tech classroom and are recounted in their new book “Screen Schooled: Two Veteran Teachers Expose How Technology Overuse Is Making Our Kids Dumber.” The teacher mentioned his successful lesson to another history teacher. She told him about her similar lesson, using not PowerPoint and laptops but printed copies of the cartoons affixed to large newsprint sheets. Students walked around the room and made lesson-related comments on the newsprint. He decided to try it her way. The lesson took 15 minutes to prepare. What had been a good if quiet class earlier, with students staring at their screens, became a boisterous, involving discussion. Letting students interact energized the room, brought in more comments and added the physical movement that many teens crave. “In short,” Clement and Miles concluded, “this lesson was superior in nearly every way compared to the more complex technology-enhanced lesson.”

Californians favor more college aid for both low- and middle-income students, poll finds

Larry Gordon, EdSource
California voters strongly support increasing state-funded financial aid for both low-income and middle-income students at public colleges and universities, according to a Berkeley IGS/EdSource poll. However, that support is uneven depending on party affiliation and geographic region. Analysts said those poll results could influence the ongoing debate in Sacramento about proposals to vastly bolster such aid and those plans’ possible impact on college enrollment and graduation rates. California already provides some of the most generous financial aid in the nation to cover tuition and, as a result, college students graduate with some of the lowest total education loan debt in the nation. Still, the discussion’s focus has widened recently to whether students’ costs for room, board and transportation should be covered fully too and whether community college tuition should be free to all for at least the first year.

Inequality, Poverty, Segregation

What’s changed in South Carolina schools since violent student arrest

Kat Chow, NPR
A video of a school resource officer throwing a student sparked a national debate about race, discipline and the role of law enforcement in schools. The incident prompted changes.

Florida’s schools — once integration’s great hope — are resegregating

Moriah Balingit, The Washington Post
In the years after the Supreme Court’s landmark 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education, many Southern states revolted against school desegregation orders. Not Florida. There, leaders accepted them. Florida witnessed more dramatic integration than other states, in part because desegregation was allowed — and then embraced — by LeRoy Collins, who was Florida’s governor in the late 1950s. The state’s school systems are also organized by county — encompassing cities and their whiter, more affluent suburbs — making it easier to create demographically balanced schools. But there is growing evidence the schools in the nation’s third most-populous state are resegregating, according to a report released last month by UCLA’s Civil Rights Project. The trend in Florida mirrors what is happening in the rest of the nation. A Government Accountability Office report published last year found that the nation’s schools are resegregating, with the share of schools that are majority black and Latino growing. “What’s happening is very threatening to educational equity in the United States,” said Gary Orfield, a scholar with the Civil Rights Project. Orfield and researcher Jongyeon Ee co-authored the report for the LeRoy Collins Institute at Florida State University.

The push for college-endowment reform

Anne Kim, The Atlantic
In 2015, a New York Times op-ed observed that Yale University had spent $480 million that year on fees for hedge-fund managers to grow the university’s already massive endowment—while spending just $170 million on tuition assistance and fellowships for its students. “We’ve lost sight of the idea that students, not fund managers, should be the primary beneficiaries of a university’s endowment,” wrote the law professor Victor Fleischer, whose 2006 proposal to change the tax treatment of “carried interest” became a liberal cause célèbre. “The private-equity folks get cash; students take out loans.” Though Fleischer’s screed was not the first to attack elite-college endowments—the progressive commentator and former Clinton administration Labor Secretary Robert Reich has also railed against them—it presaged a wave of criticism that has since become a storm. Shortly after Fleischer’s op-ed was published, the New Yorker writer Malcolm Gladwell grabbed the baton, launching what’s become an ongoing, high-profile crusade against fat-cat university fundraising. In 2016, he dedicated an entire podcast to the absurdity of billionaires donating millions in endowment dollars to schools that don’t need the money, and later waged a very public war against Stanford University for its fundraising appeals to alumni. “If Stanford, with $22 billion in the bank, still has needy undergraduates, how are they spending the billions they ALREADY have?” he tweeted in February.

Public Schools and Private $

Independent charter schools aim to elevate their status

Arianna Prothero, Education Week
Students dressed in uniforms standing in military-straight lines under a dangling line of college pennants. An ethos of “no excuses” for low academic achievement. That, perhaps, is the most popular notion of what makes a charter school. And that’s because a relatively small number of charter networks—KIPP, Success Academy, and YES Prep to name a few—dominate the sector in ways that over the last decade or so have shaped the national debates and policy agendas around charters. But that dominance, say some charter school supporters, has to change. To do that, a group of independent charter schools and some founders of the 25-year-old charter movement are organizing efforts to muscle their way back into the spotlight. An inaugural national gathering of leaders in independent charters is on tap next month in New York, and its organizers are hoping the event will spawn a new national organization to represent their specific interests. But the bigger, more important challenge for independent charters, supporters say, will be to shift the public perception of the “franchise” charter school model that they argue is undermining the sector and get back to the movement’s roots: creating innovative schools that serve as education laboratories.

Virtual charter academies in California must refund nearly $2 million to state

Louis Freedberg, EdSource
As a result of a just released state audit, the California Department of Education says a network of virtual charter schools must refund nearly $2 million in improperly used state funds that were intended for implementation of the Common Core standards in English and math. In addition, the department will require the schools to conduct a new audit of its average daily attendance records and a number of other actions. “The California Department of Education is committed to ensuring public schools follow the laws and regulations that safeguard taxpayer funds,” said State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Torlakson. “It’s critical that our students receive the resources they need to succeed.”

The new insult Betsy DeVos is hurling at her critics — and why it matters

Valerie Strauss, The Washington Post
First, they were “defenders of the status quo.” Or “defenders of the ‘system.’ ” Those were the insults Education Secretary Betsy DeVos hurled at people who don’t like her brand of school reform. The insults were aimed at people in the education world, especially teachers unions, who oppose her brand of school reform — which favors “choice” and the use of public money for private and religious education. She was accusing them of caring not about children but about themselves, as she made plain in one of the first speeches she delivered as education secretary, on Feb. 23: “Defenders of the status quo will stop at nothing to protect their special interests and their gig.” To be sure, “defenders of the status quo” was not original to DeVos. The term was used over and over by Arne Duncan, education secretary for seven years under President Barack Obama, when he attacked critics of Obama’s standardized test-based reform program. But DeVos and her speechwriters seem to like it just fine, too. Now she has added a new insult to her repertoire. Instead of “defenders,” she used this term in her recent speech at Harvard University: “sycophant of the ‘system.’ ” The full section in which she uses this refers to lotteries in which families win seats for their children in charter schools in those areas where there is a bigger demand than supply.

Other News of Note

How teachers and schools can help when bad stuff happens

Anya Kamenetz, NPR
Fred Rogers, the beloved children’s television host, used to tell a story about when he would see scary things in the news as a child. His mother would reassure him by saying: “Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.” Lately, there’s been a surfeit of scary news: Charlottesville, Texas, Florida, Puerto Rico, and now Las Vegas. And unfortunately, the stress of children’s daily lives doesn’t go away with all that’s happening in the world around us. The National Survey of Children’s Health consistently finds that nearly half of American children experience at least one adversity such as physical abuse or food insecurity, and 1 in 5 experience at least two. At NPR Ed we’ve covered many of the ways that teachers can be helpers, whether the disaster of the day is affecting your students directly or not: trauma-informed education, mindfulness, and yoga to name a few. It seemed like a good time to share some of the reminders and starting points (listed alphabetically).