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Teaching, Leading, and Social Justice
Immigration crackdown taking heavy toll on California students
Carolyn Jones, EdSource
The Trump administration’s crackdown on immigrants is having a chilling effect in California’s classrooms, with schools reporting increased absenteeism and students having difficulty concentrating, even crying in class, teachers and administrators said. “We may see it all as rhetoric and posturing, but I’ve witnessed kids from elementary school to college level stressed out and traumatized,” said Alejandra Acuna, an assistant professor at Cal State Northridge who studies trauma among urban youth. “We’ve got 8-year-olds worried their parents will have to go back to Mexico. I saw one student literally crying in the elevator. If you’re undocumented, it’s not just rhetoric — it’s about survival.” Trump has pledged to build a wall along the Mexican border, end protections for young people brought to the U.S. illegally as children, ramp up deportations of undocumented residents and greatly restrict immigration generally. In schools with large immigrant populations, these issues have eclipsed the usual business of reading-writing-and-arithmetic and put student welfare — and civics lessons — at the forefront, teachers said. Schools around the state are responding to students’ fears by offering counseling, lessons on the Constitution and immigrants’ rights, and encouraging students to talk about their fears.
Trump taps Common Core foe as No. 2 at Education Department — but most key positions still vacant
Valerie Strauss, The Washington Post
President Trump just tapped as the Education Department’s No. 2 official a former state superintendent of South Carolina who opposes the Common Core State Standards and who in 2016 called Jeb Bush “the only candidate” prepared to be president. Trump announced Tuesday night that he was nominating Mitchell Zais as deputy secretary of education, one of only a handful of positions the president has filled in the department to support Secretary Betsy DeVos. Both Zais and DeVos are strong supporters of school choice and both have criticized a strong federal presence in education policy.
A guide to state ESSA plans: Goals, teacher quality, and more
Alyson Klein, Stephen Sawchuk, and Andrew Ujifusa, Education Week
After more than a year of preparation, the Every Student Succeeds Act is on the verge of hitting classrooms nationwide. And nearly all states have now laid out their blueprints for how they intend to hold schools and districts accountable for requirements of the new federal K-12 law. ESSA is sparking significant shifts in state autonomy after more than a decade of a heavier federal footprint under the law’s predecessor, the No Child Left Behind Act. But getting there hasn’t been a smooth or simple process, as states hammered out detailed plans for ESSA implementation and submitted them to the U.S. Department of Education. To date, all but two states have submitted their plans as required—more than 30 of them flooding into the Education Department this month alone. Another 14 states and the District of Columbia have already gotten the federal green light on plans submitted earlier this spring. U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos has only 120 days from the time a plan is deemed complete to give a state a thumbs up or down. That means there’s likely to be a spate of approvals late this fall. And plenty of people will be watching to see how much scrutiny the plans get, including Republicans on Capitol Hill who openly criticized DeVos’ staff for being too heavy-handed with the first round of applications. Civil rights organizations and congressional Democrats, meanwhile worry that the secretary and her team aren’t doing a good job of ensuring states hold schools accountable for the performance of English-language learners, students in special education, racial minorities, and students in poverty.
Language, Culture, and Power
Here’s how teachers’ racial attitudes compare to those of average Americans
Madeline Will, Education Week
Compared to noneducators, teachers express less-negative racial stereotypes and report less social distance and resentments toward minority groups, a new paper finds—but some teachers do still have problematic attitudes toward race. The paper uses nationally representative data from the General Social Survey, which surveys samples of the U.S. population, to compare the racial attitudes of preK-12 teachers, postsecondary educators, and the general population of the United States from 1972 to 2014. David Quinn, an assistant professor of education at the University of Southern California’s Rossier School of Education and the author of the report, said this is the first descriptive picture of teachers’ racial attitudes. The term “racial attitudes” refers to beliefs and stereotypes that people hold regarding different racial and ethnic groups. Quinn said it’s important to understand teachers’ attitudes toward race to understand how they view and interact with different groups of students.
School books teaching LGBT history fall short
A. Martinez, KPCC
California became the first state in 2011 to require that K-12 students learn about LGBT history, and now, six years later, the law is about to be implemented with new textbooks. But some people say these teaching materials are nothing to be proud of. Rick Zbur, executive director of the LGBT rights group Equality California, is one of these voices. His organization reviewed the textbooks, and they weren’t impressed with what they found. “Half of them were failing in significant ways in meeting the requirements of the Fair Education Act,” Zbur said in an interview with Take Two host A Martinez. “Many of them didn’t have any content related to significant LGBTQ historical figures as part of the history curriculum.” One textbook mentioned lesbian comedian Ellen DeGeneres as a noted historical figure, but it didn’t provide much detail on why. “It basically just said that Ellen DeGeneres was a comedian who makes people laugh,” said Zbur. “And it didn’t describe the significance of what she did: you know, coming out, and really educating the public about the fact that there are LGBTQ people… in significant public roles.”
At UCLA, a dorm floor dedicated to first-generation students
Teresa Watanabe, Los Angeles Times
Desiree Felix didn’t make her way to UCLA with the help of helicopter parents who hired tutors, hounded teachers or edited her application essays. Her father is a handyman with a sixth-grade education. Her mother finished high school and helps manage apartments. At Kennedy High School in Granada Hills, Felix had to figure out most of the nuts and bolts of preparing for and applying to colleges on her own. She didn’t know anything about Advanced Placement classes until her sophomore year, and she came close to missing UC’s application deadline. In her freshman year, Felix has chosen to live on a newly created dorm floor just for students like her who are the first in their families to attend college. “I wanted to be around people who understood and shared my experiences so I could connect with them,” she said on move-in day as she unpacked her bags and arranged her new desk. The dedicated dorm floor is UCLA’s latest effort to support its first-generation students, who make up 32% of undergraduates — a strikingly high number for an elite university.
Whole Children and Strong Communities
Can we talk? Schools try to wrest cell phones from students’ hands
Jane Meredith Adams, EdSource
Three hundred and fifty 8th-graders stood around empty-handed after lunch on the courtyard at Fred Korematsu Middle School last week, forming a throw-back tableau that represented one school’s attempt to revive the art of the face-to-face conversation. No earbuds. No head phones. No music. No photos. No bent necks. No phones. In the first hour of the first day of the school year, the staff broke the news to 718 7th- and 8th-graders that they would no longer be allowed to use their cell phones during free time. The decision to restrict cell phone use came after an experiment with laissez-faire monitoring ran amok, said Matthew Burnham, the youngish, chatty principal of Korematsu Middle School in El Cerrito in the East Bay Area. “Last year, we made the attempt to see how things worked with cell phones — to say, go ahead, use them at lunchtime and passing period,” said Burnham, who has been at the school for 10 years, including seven as principal. “It was clear by the end of the year we would never do that again.”
The extraordinary education of an elite, 13-year-old problem-solver
Benjamin Herold, Education Week
For a moment, Emma Yang was stuck.
It was March 2016. She was trying to get a new project off the ground. She needed artificial-intelligence technology that could identify faces in photographs. IBM’s Watson wouldn’t work. Developers at Google couldn’t help. Undeterred, the 7th grader kept pushing. Online, she came across a Miami-based startup called Kairos. The company’s new developer-friendly AI platform seemed promising. Emma wrote to the company’s chief technology officer. “I’m a 12-year old student in New York. I found your email on GitHub, hope you don’t mind. My passion is to use computer science to improve people’s lives. I’m currently working on an iOS app to help Alzheimer’s patients…I’m struggling a bit. I’m trying to ask for two favors.” And with that, another door opened in Emma Yang’s extraordinary education. Now in 9th grade, Emma is the first student featured by Education Week for our new series, ‘Faces of the Future.’ These profiles will be part of our ongoing special coverage of schools and the future of work. We believe the stories behind these exceptional young people hold important lessons about the promise—and peril—that all of today’s students will face in tomorrow’s uncertain labor market.
L.A. Unified students toss out $100,000 in food a day. A new state law could donate it to food banks
Howard Blume, Los Angeles Times
So much school food goes wasted, tossed in the trash, uneaten. Each day in the Los Angeles Unified School District, students throw out at least $100,000 worth. That works out to about 600 tons of organic waste daily, according to a 2015 study. The district pushed for a new law to help change that — and this week Gov. Jerry Brown signed it. The law allows campuses to collect unopened items and untouched fruit and donate them to food banks. Students pass up school food for a lot of reasons. At L.A. Unified, some complain that entrees lose flavor because they’re cooked in a central kitchen and then reheated on campuses. Then, too, federal law makes students take food they might not want because the food trays have to meet nutritional guidelines. If the guidelines aren’t met, school districts don’t get reimbursed for free meals provided to students from low-income families.
Access, Assessment, and Advancement
California voters want early childhood as priority issue, statewide poll shows
Ashley Hopkinson, EdSource
Nearly 90 percent of California voters want the next governor of the state to commit to improving early childhood education by putting more money into programs for infants, toddlers and preschoolers, according to a new poll of 800 California residents. The poll, released Thursday, found that 87.7 percent agree it is important for the next governor to support greater investment in programs for the state’s youngest learners. The same poll found that, of those residents, 73.1 percent said they would support a candidate who favors creating high-quality, publicly funded childcare and preschool programs for every child in California. The data was collected through phone calls. The poll is a part of an advocacy campaign called “Choose Children 2018,” led by the Silicon Valley Community Foundation’s Center for Early Learning. The goal of the campaign is to ensure that early childhood education is a key campaign issue. California parents seeking child care and preschool programs have long struggled with high costs and limited access to quality care, and are in “desperate need of help,” said Avo Makdessian, vice president and director of the Center for Early Learning at the Silicon Valley Community Foundation.
Teachers say state standards are good for instruction. But testing? Not so much.
Liana Loewus, Education Week
About 9 out of 10 math and English/language arts teachers say having state standards is good for classroom instruction, according to a recent survey from the RAND Corporation. But less than one-third of teachers say they support the use of the current state tests to measure whether students have mastered those standards. “I didn’t know there would be this blanket, ‘Yeah, we support the use of state standards for instruction,” said Julia Kaufman, the report’s lead author. “Most teachers don’t seem to have an objection to that.” The analysis, released today, looked at how teachers feel about standards and testing, as well as the factors that might affect their stances. RAND administered the survey in February 2016 to a nationally representative sample of teachers. Support for state standards was high—above 85 percent—across teacher subgroups, including among teachers in low-income schools, those with high percentages of English-learners, and those with high percentages of students with special needs. Teachers who reported being in states using the Common Core State Standards and those who reported being in non-common-core states were both overwhelmingly supportive of using state standards.
Taking college classes in high school can lead to more college success
Mikhail Zinshteyn, EdSource
New evidence says taking college classes while in high school can improve a student’s chances of earning a college degree. The findings indicate that these dual enrollment classes may be another tool as California grapples with a looming shortage of college-educated workers. Dual-enrollment classes have been shown to give students a preview of the college experience and permit students to amass some post-secondary credit before even enrolling at a college or university. That can lead to savings in tuition and reduce the risk of dropping out. Researchers from the Community College Research Center (CCRC) at Teachers College, Columbia University and the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center crunched the numbers for this first-of-its-kind report, examining the 17-year-olds who took a dual enrollment class in 2010 and tracking them for six years as they made their way through college.
Inequality, Poverty, Segregation
LA County Office admits it shouldn’t have approved Long Beach’s LCAP
John Fensterwald, EdSource
The Los Angeles County Office of Education has issued a mea culpa in a ruling with potentially far-reaching implications. It acknowledged that it mistakenly approved Long Beach Unified’s accountability plan last year that shortchanged low-income children, foster and homeless youth, and English learners $24 million under the state’s funding formula. The Sept. 22 ruling responds to a complaint by the nonprofit law firm Public Advocates that questioned the county office’s rationale for approving Long Beach’s spending under the Local Control Funding Formula for 2016-17. In its 10-page decision, the county office agreed to demand that districts more thoroughly justify what they intend to do with money for student groups entitled to extra funding under the formula. The office has also ordered Long Beach to recalculate how much funding should be spent on these student groups this year and moving forward.
Shelters, cars and crowded rooms
Carolyn Jones and Daniel J. Willis, EdSource
Alison is only 14 but she knows what she wants to be when she grows up: A surgeon. It’s not easy to study, however, when you’re so exhausted and hungry you can barely get through 9th-grade biology. An immigrant from Colombia, Alison is one of more than 200,000 K-12 students in California considered homeless because they lack stable housing. And like most of those students, she lives with her family in a home shared with other families — in her case, two other families. “I go to school every day because I like school, but sometimes I can’t concentrate,” said the Santa Maria teenager whose district reports nearly a third of its students are homeless. “When you’re that tired it affects your personality. You feel like … not much.” As California’s housing costs continue to soar, more and more children like Alison are suffering the severest of consequences: No place to call home. Since 2014, the number of homeless children in California has jumped 20 percent. In the most recently released data, 202,329 young people are living in cars, motels, shelters, on the street or in crowded homes shared with other families.
UC Irvine opens expansive food pantry as more college students struggle with hunger
Teresa Watanabe, Los Angeles Times
UC Irvine student Ernest Devin Rankin grew up in Anaheim on one meal a day as his disabled parents, who had six children, struggled to stretch food stamps and disability payments. When he got to college, he could only afford the cheapest dining plan, offering 100 meals a quarter. When those meals ran out, he asked friends for help or survived on $1 fast-food burgers, tacos and burritos. Rankin and thousands of other UC Irvine students facing similar struggles got some major help Wednesday when the university opened the largest food pantry in the 10-campus University of California system. The 1,800-square-foot FRESH Basic Needs Hub houses shelves of canned and dried foods, coolers for refrigerated and frozen items, toiletries and a kitchenette complete with blenders, a convection oven, a microwave and a coffee machine. It’s a spacious place, with areas where students can sit and talk. If they want, they can read cookbooks or take home any of 15 varieties of seeds — pumpkin, spinach and parsley among them — to try to grow their own produce.
Public Schools and Private $
Newly emboldened, L.A. charter schools push to rewrite local rules
Anna M. Phillips and Howard Blume, Los Angeles Times
A small Hebrew-immersion charter school found out on Tuesday that there were limits to how far it could push a new school board majority that is widely regarded as pro-charter. But Lashon Academy Charter School’s challenge to the rules set by the Los Angeles Unified School District is widely seen as a sign of things to come. The Los Angeles Unified School District authorizes and oversees most charters in its area, and the Van Nuys school, whose charter was up for renewal, had taken a stand, deciding to rebel against regulations that all charters under the district’s oversight have to follow. In a July letter to district officials, Lashon’s executive director, Josh Stock, said he hoped the district would renew the school’s charter for another five years without making Lashon agree to legal language governing special education, school diversity and the circumstances under which charters can sue the district. “We do not intend to negotiate our decisions” about that language, he wrote. And if L.A. Unified declined to renew the charter, the school would appeal the decision to the county.
Federal judge rules against D.C. charter schools that accused city of underfunding
Valerie Strauss, The Washington Post
A federal judge has ruled against an association of Washington, D.C., charter schools that for three years pressed a lawsuit alleging the city government was unlawfully providing more money to traditional public schools than to charters. The lawsuit was seen by many in the District as a fundamental test of the city’s authority to govern itself using powers delegated by Congress through the 1973 Home Rule Act, and U.S. District Judge Tanya S. Chutkan acknowledged as much in her decision, dated Saturday. While the city — which is not a state but a federal district subject to congressional oversight — has been granted the power to elect its governing body and set its own budget, Congress still has the right to step in, and it has.
Treme school’s officials accused of failing to report video showing student sex acts
Ramon Antonio Vargas, The New Orleans Advocate
Two members of the leadership team at a charter school in Treme were arrested Tuesday on allegations they failed to alert authorities about their discovery of video clips allegedly showing a student being forced to perform oral sex on a group of her peers in a bathroom on campus earlier this year. The school includes kindergarten through eighth grade. New Orleans police booked Nicole Kusmirek, the second-in-command at Success Preparatory Academy, and Shayla Shane — listed as the school’s director of culture — on counts of possessing child pornography as well as failing to report child abuse despite being required to do so as educators. Both posted bail Tuesday night for their release from jail in connection with an incident first reported more than four months ago. Kusmirek’s bail was set at $2,500; Shane’s was $5,000 because she is also accused of obstruction of justice.
Other News of Note
How schools are dealing with students’ right to protest
Ariana Figueroa, NPR
After more than 200 NFL players took a knee on Sunday during the national anthem to protest police brutality, public schools across the country have grappled with how to handle students who chose to protest in the same manner. With Saturday night football games ahead for Houston, the district was forced to confront the issue head on. Houston ISD issued a statement that said students will not be forced to stand during the national anthem. “It has been a tradition at HISD athletic events for participants and fans alike to stand in honor of the American flag and the playing of the National Anthem at the beginning of such contests,” the statement says. “HISD also protects the constitutional right of student-athletes, as set forth explicitly in HISD Board Policy FNA (LEGAL), not to participate in that tradition.” Under federal and state law, teachers and students do not lose their First Amendment rights when they enter school property.