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Teaching, Leading, and Social Justice
Gov. Brown’s signed bills include about 100 related to education or children’s issues
Mikhail Zinshteyn and Daniel J. Willis, EdSource
Gov. Jerry Brown signed into law about 100 bills related to education or children’s issues and vetoed 26. That’s based on an EdSource tally of the bills that made it to his desk this year. Oct. 15 was the deadline for the governor to take action. In total, Brown considered 977 bills and signed 859, vetoing the rest. Most of the education bills originated in the Assembly, which has 80 members. Both the Assembly and the Senate have to approve a bill to make it to the governor’s desk.
L.A. school board member Ref Rodriguez faces conflict-of-interest complaint over $285,000 in payments
Howard Blume, Los Angeles Times
The charter school network that L.A. school board member Ref Rodriguez co-founded and ran for years has filed a complaint with state regulators alleging that Rodriguez had a conflict of interest when he authorized about $285,000 in payments drawn on its accounts. Officials at Partnerships to Uplift Communities, or PUC Schools, filed the complaint Friday with the state’s Fair Political Practices Commission. According to the complaint and documents reviewed by The Times, the vast majority of the money transfers that Rodriguez authorized and PUC has flagged went from school accounts to Partners for Developing Futures, a nonprofit under his control. An attorney who reviewed the records for the school network said he has found little or no evidence so far of services provided for these payments.
The ‘elephant in the classroom’: Q&A on substitute teaching
Liana Loewus, Education Week
For the last 20 years, Jill Vialet has been working to improve what’s supposed to be one of the most fun parts of the K-12 experience: recess. Through her nonprofit Playworks, she’s brought professional training and recess coaches to about 1,800 schools across the country, and helped turn learning breaks from a time for potential bullying and ostracism to one in which students can build self-confidence and community. In her new venture, she’s tackling an aspect of K-12 education that’s equally ripe for innovation, but somewhat harder to garner the public’s enthusiasm for: substitute teaching. Teachers are absent about 11 days during the school year on average, according to a 2014 analysis of large districts by the National Council on Teacher Quality. That means that over their K-12 experience, students spend just under a year being taught by someone other than their classroom teacher. “My key insight from Playworks is that it matters how it feels. And substitute teaching and the way it’s currently handled is having a negative impact on the way it feels to be in schools, for kids and for teachers and for principals,” Vialet said. “And it’s having a much bigger impact on school climate and culture than anyone is talking about.”
Language, Culture, and Power
Mainland schools receive Puerto Rican students—and educators—with open arms
Denisa R. Superville, Education Week
When Edgardo Ortiz boarded a flight from Puerto Rico to Florida on Oct. 7, with his wife and 9-year-old daughter, he didn’t have a concrete plan for what would happen next. He planned to stay with his aunt in Kissimmee, enroll his daughter in school, and look for a job. With recovery efforts on the island painfully slow—he still had no potable water or electricity when he left home in Caguas—Ortiz wanted more stability for his daughter, elderly mother, and mother-in-law. At Orlando International Airport, the family ran into Bridget Williams, the chief of staff for the Orange County school system, who, along with other district staffers, had set up a table at the airport five days earlier to greet Puerto Rican evacuees. They were there to inform them about schooling options and social services available in the Orlando area. Williams perked up when she overheard that Ortiz and his wife taught physics and chemistry at the University of Puerto Rico. By the end of the encounter, Ortiz and his wife had job offers to teach science at one of the district’s high schools. The couple may start teaching as early as next week.
California voters strongly back expanded K-12 science and computer education, poll shows
Carolyn Jones, EdSource
Californians overwhelmingly support expanding science and computer education starting in elementary school, according to a Berkeley IGS/EdSource poll. The online survey of 1,200 registered voters in California found that 87 percent favored schools putting “greater emphasis on integrating science as part of the entire public school curriculum.” Although by far the majority of respondents said they had never heard of the Next Generation Science Standards, the new science standards adopted by the state in 2013, 68 percent support the concept once the standards were described to them. The poll was conducted from late August to early September. “It is great news that 68 percent of poll respondents favor the approach the Next Generation Science Standards take to teaching and learning, so that students understand how scientific concepts fit together and are applied in today’s world,” said Trish Williams, a member of the California State Board of Education and board liaison for implementation of the Next Generation Science Standards and a computer science curriculum. “California is seen as a national leader on the new science standards,” she said.
Who is competent to decide what offends?
Conor Friedersdorf, The Atlantic
As the ranks of college administrators have swelled in higher education, one task they’ve undertaken is more aggressively training students—and at times, faculty members— in what is variously called “cultural competence” or “diversity and inclusion.” The aims of these efforts are laudable. College ought to be as welcoming to students from historically marginalized groups as it is to anyone else; and it ought to prepare all students for civic life in a hugely diverse society. But when training faculty members or educating students so that they are “culturally competent,” a process that should involve telling them pertinent facts, is instead used as a pretext to indoctrinate them into a contested ideology, the laudable becomes objectionable.
Whole Children and Strong Communities
What if online bullying behavior also happened in person? For kids, it often does.
Evie Blad, Education Week
A new public service announcement asks viewers to imagine what it would look like if people were as quick to say hurtful things in person as they are online. But, for kids, the line between behavior “in the real world” and behavior on the internet might not be as clear as we think. Monica Lewinsky—who has taken a role as an anti-bullying advocate decades after her time as an intern in the Clinton White House—created the “In Real Life” ad in collaboration with ad agency BBDO New York. It shows actors reciting real, hurtful internet comments while unsuspecting people around them react. “I wanted to creatively demonstrate the difference between our online and offline behavior in a thought-provoking way,” Lewinsky told People magazine. The ad shows how “people hiding behind a screen will write something they’d never say to someone’s face—and what that says about the inhumanity of their actions,” she said. “It’s a stark and shocking mirror to people to rethink how we behave online versus the ways that we would behave in person.”
Educators employ strategies to help kids with anxiety return to school
Samantha Raphelson, NPR
Your child doesn’t want to go to school. It’s a daily struggle that many parents are familiar with. But what if your child refuses to go to school? Mental health professionals and educators say what used to be considered run-of-the-mill truancy could actually be something else. Some cases of chronic absenteeism are now being called “school refusal,” which is triggered by anxiety, depression, family crises and other traumatic events. It can lead to weeks or even months of missed school days. The Anxiety and Depression Association of America estimates anxiety-based school refusal affects 2 to 5 percent of school-age children. It is often triggered when students are transitioning into middle or high school. Doctors say it should be treated with flexibility and therapy – not punishment.
Students get behind-the-scenes training for technical theater jobs
Carla Javier, KPCC
It takes more than just a star to put on a show – there’s a lot of behind-the scenes work too. And so the Latino Theater Company’s Play at Work program is teaching local high school students and young adults the skills they need to get technical work in the entertainment industry. The program meets three times a week, for six weeks. While there, the students rotate through workshops where they learn skills like adjusting and programming stage lights, or setting up microphones and sound for an event. “If they have these basic skills understood, then they are able to apply that in real world situations,” explained Noah Gamboa, who oversees lighting at the Los Angeles Theatre Center and teaches Play at Work students. By “real world situations,” Gamboa means jobs. When the students finish the program, the Los Angeles Theatre Center and the Latino Theater Company take them on as apprentices and pay them to work the theater’s shows and events. According to the program’s coordinator, they make above minimum wage.
Access, Assessment, and Advancement
California joins trend among states to abandon high school exit exam
Theresa Harrington and Louis Freedberg, EdSource
This week Gov. Jerry Brown made official what has been state policy for several years: he signed a bill abolishing the California High School Exit Exam. Known by its initials as CAHSEE — and pronounced KAYSEE by educators and students — it had been in place as a graduation requirement for about a decade, until administration of the exam was abruptly suspended as a result of bureaucratic snafu in the summer of 2015. Soon thereafter, the Legislature abolished the exit exam as a graduation requirement. But it did so for only three years — through the current school year — to give the state time to decide whether to replace it with another test more aligned with California’s current academic standards. With Assembly Bill 830 now law, it is clear that there will be no replacement. State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Torlakson, who made the recommendation to the Legislature against coming up with another exit exam, called it “outdated and unnecessary,” saying that “California education is moving forward,” and has better ways to make sure students are prepared for college and the workplace.
To help those who need to stay close to home, CSU looks to favor local students in admission
Larry Gordon, EdSource
Thousands of potential CSU students have to attend college close to home because of family responsibilities, jobs or financial constraints. So getting rejected by a nearby campus or a major at that local school can have devastating consequences. Now, however, help appears to be on the way. State legislators have ordered the CSU to expand admission preference to so-called place-bound students when campuses and popular majors are over-crowded. In contrast to students who are able to move around the state and choose from among CSU’s 23 campuses, many thousands of other applicants can consider attending only the one campus near their home- or maybe two within a large metro area that hosts several CSU schools. The recent state budget gave the CSU system until May to develop boosts for qualified freshmen and transfer applicants to local campuses. Changes may begin for students who apply next fall for 2019 admission.
A barrier removed for low-income parents seeking education
Priska Neely, KPCC
There’s a new law on the books in California that will remove a barrier for low-income parents aiming to access education. Under a bill signed into law by Gov. Jerry Brown last week, poor parents enrolled in English as a Second Language (ESL) or high school equivalency courses will be eligible for subsidized child care. California’s existing education code said parents who meet certain income criteria and are “engaged in vocational training leading directly to a recognized trade” could receive subsidized child care. Even though parents may need ESL or G.E.D. classes as a prerequisite, the law was not clear on whether those courses qualified. “This law was being unevenly implemented across the state,” said Jennifer Greppi, lead organizer for Parent Voices, California. “Some [child care] agencies saw it very clearly as a step towards a vocational training or goal. Others were like, ‘Nope! Those don’t count.’ ” AB 273, co-sponsored by Parent Voices and the Women’s Foundation of California, adds language that parents are eligible to receive child care if they are “engaged in an educational program for English language learners or to attain a high school diploma or general educational development certificate.” The Department of Education will send out a bulletin to all child care and preschool programs they fund to make sure families are no longer turned away.
Inequality, Poverty, Segregation
Gov. Brown signs bill to end ‘meal shaming’ in schools
Staff, EdSource
Students in California whose families owe money for school lunches will no longer be given only a snack — a cheese stick, an apple and a glass of milk — or nothing at all, until they’re all paid up. They’ll get the same meal as all the other students. That’s because Gov. Brown signed SB 250, authored by Sen. Robert Hertzberg, D-Los Angeles. The law will ensure that children are not denied a full lunch because of their parents’ debt. The bill will also end “meal shaming,” the practice used in some districts across the nation of verbally reprimanding students in the lunch line or stamping children’s hands as a reminder to their parents they owe money. Seeing legislation coming, this year Elk Grove Unified ended its policy of giving kids in debt only a cheese sandwich. Michelle Drake, director of Food and Nutrition Services for the district, told the Sacramento Bee that food service workers encouraged the switch. “It’s just not good for our children and it’s difficult on the staff. The last thing they want to see is a 3rd-grader and 4th-grader with that look on their face. We have changed it up for this school year.”
How the systemic segregation of schools is maintained by ‘individual choices’
David Bianculli, NPR
Journalist and 2017 MacArthur “genius” grant award-winner Nikole Hannah-Jones says that when it comes to school segregation, separate is never truly equal.
Can prep schools fight the class war?
Ginia Bellafanta, The New York Times
Earlier this month Princeton University Press published a book called “Uneasy Street: The Anxieties of Affluence,” by a sociologist, Rachel Sherman, who researched the spending habits of 50 well-to-do parents in New York City, and diagnosed a pervasive problem of reticence around wealth. Ms. Sherman uses her encounters with people who agreed to speak with her, in many cases about their fears of seeming showy, to conclude that there is too much silence around money and that all of this alleged hush and professed shame ultimately slow our efforts to mitigate inequality. Given that we have segued from the era of the Rich Kids of Instagram to a moment in which the rich wives of cabinet secretaries use social media to tell us that they are wearing Hermès and that they are better, it is a difficult time to argue that modesty is really what is complicating things, or that a greater degree of honesty about renovation costs on Central Park West will lead us to a more just tax code. And yet Ms. Sherman’s book does take absorbing measure of what has become a corrosive reality in New York: the tendency among well-off people to regard their circumstances as entirely ordinary — “Manhattan poor’’ as others have put it — given that everywhere they chose to look they find someone who has a lot more money. Private schools emerge as dangerous incubators of this dynamic because they are the places in which the affluent receive the most intimate exposure to the obscenely rich — where your week in a rented condo in Sun Valley is a deprivation compared with the schoolmates flying from Teterboro to third houses in Vail.
Public Schools and Private $
What Ref Rodriguez’s latest legal problems mean for the charter school movement
David Zahniser, Joy Resmovits and Howard Blume, Los Angeles Times
When prosecutors filed campaign finance charges against L.A. school board member Ref Rodriguez last month, many charter-school supporters rallied to his defense in hopes of saving not just his seat but their pro-charter school agenda. They said that Rodriguez, a political novice, had made mistakes and that the amount of money involved, about $24,000, was too small for so much fuss. But new conflict-of-interest allegations that came to light Monday focus on significantly more money — about $285,000 — and on Rodriguez’s actions as co-founder of a charter school network, his area of expertise. Now the prospects of keeping him on the board, as the linchpin of a narrow 4-3 pro-charter majority, have suddenly become politically perilous.
Betsy DeVos releases her priorities for U.S. Education Department grants. Guess what’s No. 1.
Valerie Strauss, The Washington Post
The Education Department released a list of 11 priorities Thursday that Secretary Betsy DeVos wants to set for the agency’s competitive grant program to fulfill her “vision for American education.” Can you guess what her No. 1 priority is? It’s school choice, of course, given that DeVos has made it crystal clear that her chief priority as education secretary is to promote school choice (unlike every other education secretary before her). DeVos says she just wants to give parents a choice of schools for their children, while her critics say she is determined to push the privatization of public education.
Why parents make flawed choices about their kids’ schooling
Gail Cornwall, The Atlantic
A person trying to choose their next set of wheels might see that car A made it farther than car B in a road test and assume it gets better gas mileage. But that’s only true if the two tanks are filled with the same substance. Putting high-octane gas in one and water in the other, for example, provides little useful information about which car makes the most of its fuel. A new working paper titled “Do Parents Value School Effectiveness?” suggests that parents similarly opt for schools with the most impressive graduates rather than figuring out which ones actually teach best. The study joins a body of research looking critically at what it means for a school to be successful.
Other News of Note
Author of ‘Ahimsa’ talks about social justice, activism and parenting
Pooja Makhijani, The Washington Post
Supriya Kelkar is an author and screenwriter who has worked on the writing teams for several commercial Hindi films. Her debut middle-grade historical fiction novel, “Ahimsa,” won the 2015 New Visions Award, which honors a middle grade or young adult novel by an author of color who has not previously published in that genre. “Ahimsa” takes place in colonial India in the 1940s, during the fight for independence from British rule, and 10-year-old Anjali’s mother announces that she has quit her job to become a Freedom Fighter. The story was inspired by Kelkar’s great-grandmother, who joined the freedom movement against the British.