Just News from Center X – October 27, 2017

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Teaching, Leading, and Social Justice

Stress, hostility rising in American high schools in Trump era, UCLA report finds

Valerie Strauss, The Washington Post
Student anxiety and hostility on public high school campuses has worsened since Donald Trump became president and is affecting student learning, according to a new UCLA report. More than half of public high school teachers in a nationally representative school sample reported seeing more students than ever with “high levels of stress and anxiety” between last January, when Trump took office, and May. That’s according to the study, “Teaching and Learning in the Age of Trump: Increasing Stress and Hostility in America’s High Schools,” by John Rogers, director of the Institute for Democracy, Education and Access at the University of California at Los Angeles.

For more coverage, see: NPR, Education Week, Huffington Post, La Opinion, San Francisco Chronicle, Los Angeles Times

His three allies on the L.A. school board want Rodriguez to take a leave. He says no.

Howard Blume and Sonali Kohli, Los Angeles Times
Ref Rodriguez’s closest allies on the Los Angeles school board on Tuesday called on him to step aside until he resolves his criminal case and other legal problems. Rodriguez flatly refused, in a statement he posted on social media. The three board members made their request on a day that Rodriguez appeared in court, pleading not guilty to felony and misdemeanor charges for alleged campaign money laundering. Their joint statement was a stunning development, given what was at stake. They and Rodriguez now essentially control the board with a 4-3 majority. All the members of the bloc were elected with substantial financial support from charter-school supporters. The loss of the majority could stall the goals of those charter advocates. But Rodriguez’s continued presence on the board — while he faces criminal charges — comes with its own set of perils, particularly when it comes to the bloc’s reputation. Rodriguez indicated from the start that he planned to remain on the board as his criminal case moves forward. Before Tuesday, board members had publicly maintained a wait-and-see attitude regarding the criminal case and separate questions about conflicts of interest.

California gubernatorial candidates take on — or don’t — the issue of teacher tenure

Louis Freedberg, EdSource
In one of the first debates among the four leading Democratic gubernatorial candidates, only one — former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa — expressed enthusiasm for taking on controversial teacher tenure and seniority laws in California. “Yes, I would reform it as governor, because we have to address the fact that system is broken when so many poor children and so many children of color are not making it in this state,” Villaraigosa said in the debate sponsored by the San Francisco Chronicle at the City Club on Tuesday. By contrast, Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom, the current front-runner in the November 2018 race, argued that a more important issue to address was the “crisis” of demoralized teachers. Villaraigosa backed the highly contentious Vergara lawsuit that charged that minority students’ constitutional rights were violated by being taught disproportionately by less effective teachers as a result of the state’s seniority and tenure laws. The trial judge in the case ruled in favor of the plaintiffs, but his ruling was overturned by a higher appeals court. The issue died, at least in the courts, when the California Supreme Court declined to overturn the appeals court ruling.

Language, Culture, and Power

Ally of Milo Yiannopoulos wins control of California College Republicans

Rosanna Xia and Teresa Watanabe, Los Angeles Times
In a closely divided election, a UC Irvine student who led an insurgency against establishment politics won a bitter battle Saturday for control of the California College Republicans, a triumph for provocative conservatism over a more moderate approach. Ariana Rowlands, an ally of right-wing provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos, led a slate called Rebuild, which advocates aggressive actions in campus culture wars and taking on college administrators and liberals who try to suppress the conservative voice. Her opponent, USC graduate Leesa Danzek, works for a centrist Republican state legislator, favors inclusion and encourages students to help GOP candidates with phone banking and electioneering. She headed the Thrive slate and had led the state organization, which supports about 70 campus chapters, over the last year. Rowlands defeated Danzek, 88-64, in the first contested election in nearly a decade but the 14-member executive board ended up evenly split between the two sides. The divide between them reflects the national battle between GOP establishment insiders and insurgents inspired by Trump. In remarks after the vote, Rowlands told students she would stand up to attacks from peers who “seem to hate you more than ever before.”

What the Girl Scouts can learn from women’s colleges

Isabel Fatal, The Atlantic
The news of the Boy Scouts of America’s decision to open its programs up to girls has inquiring minds wondering what it means for the Girl Scouts. After all, the girls’ organization has expressed concerns about the decision, citing skepticism about the Boy Scouts’ motives and a perceived lack of involvement in the decision, among other criticisms. But one of Girl Scouts’ biggest objections is a philosophical one: that an all-girls organization has the ability to empower and support girls in a way that a coed institution can’t. All-women’s organizations have been fading from the country’s social fabric over the past few decades. The most dramatic example is that of women’s colleges: While there were about 230 women’s colleges in 1960, today there are around three dozen. Like the Girl Scouts, women’s colleges have long argued that they are poised to offer resources and experiences to women that a coed institution can’t provide. But even so, most of them crumbled as men’s colleges began to coeducate in the mid-20th century.

Mascot controversy: Should Johnny Rebel go away?

Michele Gile, CBS Los Angeles
Some students and parents want Savanna High School in Anaheim to get rid of the mascot — Johnny Rebel, a Confederate soldier.

Whole Children and Strong Communities

Time children spend on mobile devices has tripled in four years

Ashley Hopkinson, EdSource
The amount of time young children spend on mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets has tripled in the last four years, according to a nationwide report that measures technology use among children 8 years old and younger. Children in that age group, on average, currently spend 48 minutes per day on a mobile device, compared to 15 minutes per day in 2013 and 5 minutes in 2011, according to the report released Thursday, by Common Sense Media, a nonprofit group that reviews media and digital products for children. The report states that, overall, children spend two hours and 19 minutes a day with “screen media,” which includes mobile devices, television, DVDs and videos, video game players, computers and small digital devices such as iPods and virtual reality headsets. However, how children are using that media time has shifted from 2011 to 2017, researchers state. A third of all screen time is now mobile, with 35 percent of children on mobile devices in 2017, compared to 4 percent in 2011.

Switching to middle school can be hard on kids, but there are ways to make it better

Anya Kamenetz, NPR
“I’ll be famous one day, but for now I’m stuck in middle school with a bunch of morons.” That’s harsh language from the downtrodden sixth-grade narrator of Diary of A Wimpy Kid, a blockbuster series of graphic novels. But it speaks to a broader truth. A large body of research suggests that students who go to middle school or junior high do worse academically, socially and emotionally, compared to the young teenagers who get to be the oldest students at schools with grades K-8. A new paper in the Journal of Early Adolescence reinforces this message. The study found that starting a new school in either sixth or seventh grade hurts students’ perceptions of their own reading ability and motivation to work hard in English language arts. It tracks nearly 6,000 students from kindergarten through eighth grade. The authors compared the performance of students who attended a K-8 school to those who left for a middle school in sixth grade or a junior high in seventh grade. They focused on outcomes by eighth grade to rule out the negative impact that may have come merely from making the transition to a new school itself.

When we start with empathy and compassion, we do what’s right for kids

Jonathan Raymond, Vunela
I love the baseball movie Field of Dreams. Who could forget the scene when Annie (played by Amy Madigan) attends a PTA meeting where they’re considering banning books by provocative author Terence Mann? “Who thinks the Bill of Rights is a good thing?”, she exclaims, “Who thinks we have to stand up to the kind of censorship they had under Stalin?” It’s a powerful and poignant scene. So, imagine my shock when I recently learned a school district in Mississippi pulled Harper Lee’s Pulitzer prize-winning novel, To Kill a Mockingbird from 8th grade curriculum due to complaints that some of the book’s language “makes people uncomfortable.” Uncomfortable because race and class and sexism are no longer issues in our country so why address them in our schools? Are you kidding me?!

Access, Assessment, and Advancement

Children whose parents speak a language other than English less likely to enroll in preschool

Ashley Hopkinson, EdSource
Young children with at least one parent who speaks a language other than English at home are less likely to be enrolled in quality early childhood programs, although it is most critical for those students, according to a national report that includes a 30-state analysis on how different policies affect dual language learners. “Dual language learners especially stand to benefit from participation in high-quality pre-K. However, dual language learners in California are enrolling in pre-K programs at lower rates than their non-dual language learner peers, which may contribute to lags in kindergarten readiness for this population,” according to the California section of the report released Thursday by the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan research and policy organization in Washington D.C. The report defines dual language learners as students ages 8 and younger with at least one parent who speaks a language other than English at home. That differs from the California Department of Education’s definition, which includes both students who speak a language other than English at home and children who speak English and are learning another language.

U.S. education needs to move past its ‘fixation on the bachelor’s degree,’ study says

Catherine Gewertz, Education Week
American educators and policymakers must “move beyond our current fixation on the bachelor’s degree,” and embrace the promise of associate and certificate programs, a new paper argues, noting that many jobs with good pay don’t require bachelor’s degrees. The conclusion of the study published Friday by the American Enterprise Institute is not new. Other papers, like those by Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce, and the Community College Research Center, which are cited in the new paper, have made similar arguments. But the new paper, “Degrees of Opportunity,” is yet another sign of the swinging policy pendulum. As we’ve reported, policymakers are increasingly hailing the benefits of programs that are shorter and less costly than those that award bachelor’s degrees. The rallying cry has changed from the longstanding “college for all”—which has typically meant bachelor’s degrees for all—to “college doesn’t necessarily mean a bachelor’s degree.” In their paper, the AEI’s Mark Schneider and Rooney Columbus explore the labor market value of various degrees and credentials, and ask whether shorter, less-expensive routes than bachelor’s degrees can pay off down the road.

California community college tuition still the lowest nationally; UC above average, study finds

Larry Gordon, EdSource
While California continues to have the lowest community college tuition in the country, the costs for UC rank above the average of other research universities, a new report shows. Listed at $1,430 for a full-time student, the tuition and fees for California’s community colleges are the lowest nationwide in 2017-18, as they have been for years, according to the study by the College Board. That annual price, before being adjusted for financial aid, is less than half the $3,570 national average, the survey found. California’s ranking as having the least expensive community colleges was not affected by plans in other states like Tennessee and New York that offer free college tuition in various forms and durations. The College Board noted that those states still establish a tuition level and that their programs are partly dependent on federal aid or cut off the grants for higher income students. California Gov. Jerry Brown last week signed a law that could make the first year of community college free to all if funding is allocated and the schools adopts key reforms.

Inequality, Poverty, Segregation

Until poverty eliminated, schools won’t graduate 100 percent of students, expert says

Theresa Harrington, EdSource
California has made higher graduation rates one of its key measures for assessing school performance as part of its new accountability system. Graduation rates have increased steadily in California in recent years, now reaching an average of 83.2 percent for the class of 2016.
But just how high can or should graduation rates go? Los Angeles Unified Superintendent Michelle King has set a goal of graduating 100 percent of district students. But one of the state’s leading experts on how to increase graduation rates says that is not likely to happen without far-reaching changes in the society as a whole. Russell Rumberger, a professor emeritus at UC Santa Barbara who directs the California Dropout Research Project, said poverty is too big an obstacle for some students to overcome. Although the graduation rate has increased, more than 50,000 students drop out of high school each year, he said. “A lot of kids and their families live in very dire circumstances, with food insecurity and health issues that affect their ability to learn,” he said. “Even if schools are working their butts off, most people would agree, you’re never going to solve any major problem like graduation rates without attempts to help kids and families improve.”

‘They can’t just be average’: Lifting students up without lowering the bar

Kavitha Cardoza and Cory Turner, NPR
“They can’t just be average.” Charles Curtis is talking about the roughly 100 young, black men in the inaugural freshman class at Ron Brown College Prep, a radical new high school in Washington, D.C. Curtis, the school psychologist, puts it simply: “There is no place in the world for an average black person.” So begins Part 2 in our series: Raising Kings: A Year of Love and Struggle at Ron Brown College Prep. The school is devoted to restorative justice, forcing students into uncomfortable conversations and face-to-face apologies instead of suspension or detention. There’s also a high-expectations approach to academics, best told through the voices of two veteran teachers.

Teachers’ lower expectations for black students may become ‘self-fulfilling prophecies,’ study finds

Evie Blad, Education Week
White teachers are generally less optimistic about their black students’ chances of obtaining a four-year degree than black teachers, a new study finds. And those lowered expectations could become “self-fulfilling prophecies” when students internalize them or when teachers change their approach to students as a result, researchers suggest in an article published in Education Next. “Our analysis supports the conventional wisdom that teacher expectations matter,” write Seth Gerhenson, a public policy professor at American University, and Nicholas Papageorge, an economics professor at Johns Hopkins University. “College completion rates are systematically higher for students whose teachers had higher expectations for them. More troublingly, we also find that white teachers, who comprise the vast majority of American educators, have far lower expectations for black students than they do for similarly situated white students.” The authors suggest schools should address teacher expectations, work to eliminate racial bias among staff, and seek to hire a more diverse teaching force.

Public Schools and Private $

In strategy shift, Gates Foundation to spend bulk of education dollars on ‘locally driven solutions’

Louis Freedberg, EdSource
In a significant shift in strategy, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the nation’s largest charitable foundation, will invest the biggest share of its education philanthropy dollars over the next five years to support networks of teachers, schools and districts that come up with their own “locally driven solutions” to improving student achievement. That strategy was outlined yesterday by Bill Gates himself at the annual conference Thursday of the Council of the Great City Schools in Cleveland. His remarks were noteworthy because the Gates Foundation has arguably exerted a greater influence over education policy and practice in the United States than any other foundation in recent years, not only because of its level of spending, but because of several targeted and in some cases controversial initiatives. The approach Gates outlined resonates with the major thrust of education reform on a national level which is moving away from the top-down reforms like the No Child Left Behind law to ones driven by states and local school districts.

The only national Black school choice advocacy group is folding

Arianna Prothero, Education Week
The Black Alliance for Educational Options is shutting down for good at the end of the year, the group announced on its website Wednesday. Founded by school choice pioneer Howard Fuller, BAEO is the only group at the national level focused exclusively on expanding school choice for low-income and working class African-American families—both through charter schools and school vouchers. But the school choice advocacy world has become increasingly crowded in the 18 years since BAEO’s founding, said Fuller who sits on the group’s board, and that’s meant more competition for visibility and funding. “Some organizations, and ours is one of them, have a shelf-life,” he said. “And we just reached a point where we had done great work but didn’t see the ability to continue to do that work going forward.”

Betsy DeVos promotes school choice; protesters say her ideas aren’t welcome in Washington

Paige Cornwell and Neal Morton, The Seattle Times
In a hotel ballroom in Bellevue on Friday, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos called on Washington residents to fight for more school choice. Inside the Hyatt Regency, she spoke to an appreciative audience of 1,500 people, with roughly an equal number of protesters in the streets outside. DeVos, the keynote speaker at the Washington Policy Center’s annual dinner, said she was against a “one-size-fits-all federal government mandate” and wants to give parents more options for where they can send their children to school. “States are different, families are dynamic and children are unique,” she said to applause. “What choice looks like for one family here in Washington will be different from what a family in Oregon decides. In fact, what choice looks like for one child may be different than what it looks like for his or her own sibling.” Outside, speakers railed against DeVos and her ideas. Elected leaders, including Washington Attorney General Bob Ferguson, King County Executive Dow Constantine and Bellevue Mayor John Stokes, told protesters that DeVos’ policies aren’t welcome in this state.

Other News of Note

The work of 213,284 kids was analyzed. These are the writing and critical-thinking skills that stumped students.

Valerie Strauss, The Washington Post
It’s often said that young people today don’t know how to write, or, at least cannot write as well as their parents’ generation did. (Not that their parents were great writers, either). So how bad is the problem? Pretty darn bad, and in specific ways that have now been evaluated by the people behind NoRedInk, a Web-based platform that attempts to help students in sixth through 12th grade improve their writing and critical-thinking skills through an adaptive, Internet-based curriculum. The material, including an evidence-based argument program, challenges students on a number of different skills, such as making logical deductions from a set of facts and recognizing vague language. NoRedInk was started about five years ago by Jeff Scheur, a National Board Certified Teacher who taught — and graded high school English papers — for eight years, then decided to find a way to help students beyond his own classroom. There are both free and paid versions of the platform, which he said is used in about half of the school districts in the country. Scheur said in an interview that the company decided recently to try to drill down on seven proficiency areas in which students get in trouble when it comes to writing and thinking critically about written material. From the more than 3 billion questions that students have so far answered on NoRedInk, the company analyzed questions answered by 213,284 students (see the demographic breakdown below) in sixth through 12th grade across all 50 states.