Teaching, Leading, and Social Justice

LAUSD leaders need to confront racism in schools, UCLA educator says

Mike Szymanski, LA School Report

Racism and stereotypes continue to plague LA Unified, and it’s up to leaders to change that, according to a UCLA professor who is holding seminars at some schools. Tyrone C. Howard, associate dean for equity and inclusion at UCLA’s Graduate School of Education and Information Studies, spoke to the Curriculum, Instruction and Educational Equity Committee on Tuesday about how he is helping principals and teachers understand how to identify underlying racism and avoid enforcing stereotypes on their students. He said that initiating this difficult dialogue is among the steps needed to help persistently low-performing students, particularly African-American and poor children.

 

 

In school reform, relationships are key, say principals, teachers and students

Jane Meredith Adams, EdSource

Reginald Quartey handed in a perfectly fine paper to his English teacher at Oakland High School last year, and his teacher handed it back with a less than stellar grade. To Quartey, this was a good thing — to be seen as the thoughtful, ambitious student he is. “He saw that I was capable of turning in papers that had deeper analysis,” he said, “so he graded me tougher than most of my classmates.” For Quartey, who is 17 and on track to become the first in his family to go to college, the key mechanism for improving K-12 schools can be distilled into a single word: relationships. And how California schools find the money, time and will to support these relationships — up and down the education hierarchy — will help to determine the success of school reform, according to panelists who discussed social and emotional factors in education last week at an EdSource symposium in Oakland.

 

 

Teacher leadership for 21st-century teaching & learning

Kristoffer Kohl, Kim Farris-Berg, and Barnett Berry, Center for Teaching Quality

It’s time for America’s young people—all, not just a privileged few—to engage in deeper learning. But transforming how students learn and lead requires parallel changes in the systems that support teacher learning and leadership. This policy report, drawing on the important efforts of current Stuart Foundation grantees, frames a set of strategies to narrow the achievement gap in California by fueling the development of a teacher leadership system.

 

 

Language, Culture, and Power

 

“The measure of any society is how it treats its women and girls.”

Michelle Obama, USA TV, YouTube

“On Tuesday at the White House we celebrated the International Day of the Girl and Let Girls Learn and it was a wonderful celebration. I had the pleasure of spending hours talking to some of the most amazing young women you will ever meet… I thought it would be important to remind these young women how valuable and precious they are. I wanted them to understand that the measure of any society is how it treats its women and girls. And I told them that they deserve to be treated with dignity and respect, and I told them that they should disregard anyone who demeans or devalues them, and that they should make their voices heard in the world. That was Tuesday. And now here I am out on the campaign trail in an election where we have consistently been hearing hurtful, hateful language about women.”

 

 

Bilingual education poised for a comeback in California schools

Corey Mitchell, Education Week

Nearly 20 years after voting to restrict bilingual education in a state with more than 1 million schoolchildren who don’t speak English as their first language, California voters appear poised to reverse that ban. Next month, voters will decide the fate of a statewide ballot question that would bring an end to the restrictions of Proposition 227 and close out California’s official era of English-only instruction.

 

 

How the stress of racism affects learning

Melinda D. Anderson, The Atlantic

For 15-year-old Zion Agostini, the start of each school day is a new occasion to navigate a minefield of racial profiling. From an early age, walking home from elementary school with his older brother, Agostini took note of the differential treatment police gave to black people in his community: “I [saw] people get stopped … get harassed … get arrested for minor offenses.” Almost a decade later, Agostini said he now faces the same treatment as a sophomore at Nelson Mandela School for Social Justice in Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood. “Me being a black male, I’m more likely to be stopped and frisked by a cop. Then, [I’m] going to school with more cops … [messing] with me at 7 in the morning.” The strain of these interactions is heightened by the daily routine of passing through a metal detector, emptying pockets, and removing clothing that frequently makes him late to his first-period class.

 

 

Whole Children and Strong Communities

 

Here’s how schools can soften the blow of sixth grade

Kat Lonsdorf, NPR

Middle school is tough. Bodies change. Hormones rage. Algebra becomes a reality. But there are things schools can do to make life easier for students — like this big study we wrote about showing that K-8 schools may be better for kids than traditional middle schools.

But aside from re-configuring an entire school system, are there other ways to make the sixth-grade experience better?

 

 

How a farm at an L.A. continuation school became a refuge for both students and animals

Sonali Kohli, Los Angeles Times

Most school days, 17-year-old Alex Snyder eats lunch with a pot-bellied pig named Peanut.

John R. Wooden High School is small. It doesn’t have a football field or a swimming pool or a gym. But it has a farm. And the farm has become a central part of Alex’s life. “It’s my job to go around…every morning and feed the animals,” Alex recently told students visiting the grounds during his first-period animal behavior class as he took them by a pair of tussling goats, past the shed filled with hay for the two alpacas, toward the pigs who were lying by the small pond.

 

 

New effort to promote social-emotional learning in schools

Evie Blad, Education Week

Helping schools figure out how to better teach social and emotional skills to students alongside traditional academic subjects will be the focus of a new, multiyear endeavor recently announced by the Aspen Institute. The aim of the National Commission on Social, Emotional, and Academic Development, which has members from all three sectors, is to “advance a new vision for what constitutes success in schools,” the Aspen Institute said in a statement announcing the group’s formation.

 

 

Access, Assessment, and Advancement

 

In 33 US states it costs more to send your kid to childcare than college

Tanza Loudenback, Business Insider

In America today, 65% of children under age 6 have two working parents — more than double the number since 1970. For families across the country, childcare is a necessity — and financial burden — like never before. The Care Index, a new report from think tank New America, Care.com, and others, details the three “pillars” of childcare — cost, quality, and availability— and the variances across state lines. Among its findings, the report revealed that in 33 US states, the average cost of full-time, in-center care for one child under age 4 has eclipsed that of in-state public college tuition. Overall, across the country, childcare now costs $9,589 a year on average, compared with $9,410 for in-state college tuition.

For New York City’s homeless children, getting to school is the hard part

Elizabeth A. Harris, The New York Times

Family workers carrying caseloads of 256 children at a time. A girl who had transferred to four different schools, one of them twice, by age 11. Attendance reports from multiple agencies, but with none held responsible for making sure that students actually went to school. These are some of the findings in a report on the obstacles faced by homeless children in New York schools that will be released by the city’s Independent Budget Office on Tuesday. The report, which draws largely on data from the 2013-14 school year, vividly maps out just how difficult it is for students who live in shelters to get an education.

 

 

California poll shows strong support for Common Core standards

John Fensterwald, EdSource

The Common Core State Standards have faced strong opposition in many states, but in California, more than three out of five registered voters support them, according to a poll commissioned by the Oakland-based nonprofit advocacy group Children Now.

In the telephone survey of 1,000 registered voters, 63 percent said they either strongly or somewhat favor the standards, while 33 percent said they somewhat or strongly oppose them, with 4 percent expressing no view. Larger percentages of Hispanic, African-American and Asian voters said they favored the standards than white parents, who comprised 51 percent of those surveyed, according to EMC Research, the polling firm that administered the survey.

 

 

Inequality, Poverty, Segregation

 

Black-white wage gaps expand with rising wage inequality

Valerie Wilson and William M. Rodgers III, Economic Policy Institute

Income inequality and slow growth in the living standards of low- and moderate-income Americans have become defining features of today’s economy, and at their root is the near stagnation of hourly wage growth for the vast majority of American workers. Since 1979, wages have grown more slowly than productivity—a measure of the potential for wage growth—for everyone except the top 5 percent of workers, while wage growth for the top 1 percent has significantly exceeded the rate of productivity growth (Bivens and Mishel 2015). This means that the majority of workers have reaped few of the economic rewards they helped to produce over the last 36 years because a disproportionate share of the benefits have gone to those at the very top. While wage growth lagging behind productivity has affected workers from all demographic groups, wage growth for African American workers has been particularly slow. As a result, large pay disparities by race have remained unchanged or even expanded.

 

 

Race, school ratings and real estate: A ‘legal gray area’

Kendra Yoshinaga and Anya Kamenetz, NPR

With her infant son in a sling, Monique Black strolls through a weekend open house in the gentrified Shaw neighborhood of Washington, D.C. There are lots of factors to consider when looking for a home — in this one, Monique notices, the tiny window in the second bedroom doesn’t let in enough light. But for parents like Black and her husband, Jonny, there’s a more important question: How good are the nearby schools? It’s well known in the real estate industry that highly rated schools translate into higher housing values. Several studies confirm this and even put a dollar figure on it: an average premium of $50 a square foot, in a 2013 national study.

 

 

Public Schools and Private $

How privatization increases inequality

In The Public Interest (ITPI)

Inequality in the United States, which began its most recent rise in the late 1970s, continues to surge in the post–Great Recession era.1 During similar eras—such as the New Deal—many of the public goods and services we value today were created to deliver widespread prosperity. But the way in which cities, school districts, states, and the federal government deliver things like education, social services, and water profoundly affects the quality and availability of these vital goods and services. In the last few decades, efforts to privatize public goods and services have helped fuel an increasingly unequal society. This report examines the ways in which the insertion of private interests into the provision of public goods and services hurts poor individuals and families, and people of color.

 

 

We just got even more evidence supporting the theory that charter schools are America’s new subprime mortgages

Abby Jackson, Business Insider

The Office of the Inspector General late last month released the results of a damning audit of the charter school industry, which found that charter schools’ relationships with their management organizations pose a significant risk to the aim of the Department of Education. The OIG is a federal agency that works to prevent inefficient or illegal activities. The findings in the audit, specifically in regard to those relationships, echo the findings of a 2015 study that warned of a bubble similar to that of the subprime-mortgage crisis, one of the study’s authors, Preston Green, told Business Insider.

 

 

Three L.A. charter schools could be shut down, largely because of their practice of bringing in teachers from Turkey

Howard Blume, Los Angeles Times

Three Los Angeles charter schools could be shut down, largely because of their practice of bringing in teachers from Turkey, The Times has learned. The schools are part of a group of 10 campuses operated by locally based Magnolia Public Schools, which has relied heavily on using temporary work visas to import Turkish teachers.

 

 

Other News of Note

 

Math students from high-performing countries memorize less, PISA shows

Liana Heitin, Education Week
Students in high-performing countries for mathematics are less reliant on memorization strategies than their peers in lower-performing countries, according to a new analysis of international assessment data. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, which administers the Program for International Student Assessment every three years to 15-year-olds from around the world, periodically publishes reports looking at slices of the data. A 93-page report released last week offers takeaways for math teachers from the 2012 results (the most recent round available). Among other things, it looks at the relationship between memorization and math achievement.

 

 

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.