Just News from Center X – September 1, 2017

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Teaching, Leading, and Social Justice

Who was — and wasn’t — invited to Betsy DeVos’s education roundtable

Valerie Strauss, The Washington Post
An office manager was invited. So were politicians, ministers and school administrators. But it’s more interesting who wasn’t invited to the education roundtable that Education Secretary Betsy DeVos attended in Tallahassee on Wednesday with the Baptist minister who convened the event. The event was convened by the Rev. R.B. Holmes, leader of the Bethel Missionary Baptist Church in the Florida capital and a prominent advocate of school choice in the state. DeVos is a longtime proponent of school choice too, saying once that traditional public education in the United States was a “dead end.” The Education Department said that DeVos met with “a broad spectrum of education leaders in Florida” in two 45-minutes sessions, the first titled “Saving, Sustaining and Strengthening Public Education and Schools of Choice” and the second titled “Saving, Sustaining and Strengthening HBCUs and Higher Education.”

National group sharply criticizes state’s plan for Every Student Succeeds Act

John Fensterwald, EdSource
A national education nonprofit that is evaluating states’ plans for complying with the federal Every Student Succeeds Act praised California’s vision for a high-quality education for all students but mostly panned how it proposes to implement its goals in a report it issued Tuesday.
Bellwether Education Partners gave California low ratings of 1 or 2 on a 5-point scale in six of nine categories, and a high score of 4 in only one. The state ranked particularly low in how it will identify the lowest-performing schools needing help and then measure how those schools are improving. It got a high score for high-quality assessments and academic standards, tied to preparing students for college and careers.

Affordable, accessible training for educators teaching 4-year-olds

Priska Neely, KPCC
Since California schools began offering a new grade for four-year-olds in 2012, more programs have popped up to train educators working with these younger students. Now, Santa Monica College will become the first community college in the state to offer a Transitional Kindergarten certificate program. “It really is the most affordable, accessible and, I think, high-quality professional development pathway for TK teachers that’s available right now in California,” said Gary Huff, professor of early childhood education at Santa Monica College. The grade was created after a 2010 law changed kindergarten age cutoff dates and the state is phasing in new training requirements for TK teachers. By August 2020, TK teachers who were assigned to classrooms in 2015 must earn at least 24 units of early childhood education or childhood development classes (or an equivalent amount of classroom experience, or a child development permit). So many educators already in the classroom are heading back to school.

Language, Culture, and Power

‘We don’t pretend this is over’: After Charlottesville, colleges expect trouble

Susan Svrluga and Sarah Larimer, The Washington Post
Earlier this month, white nationalist leader Richard Spencer rallied hundreds of torch-bearing followers for a march through the heart of the University of Virginia that began a weekend of rage and violence. He hopes to go back to Charlottesville soon. “Colleges and universities are a great venue,” Spencer said. “I will never give those up.” As the fall semester begins, schools across the United States are girding for fights over controversial speakers after an incendiary year that began with clashes at the University of California at Berkeley and worsened at U-Va. One by one in the days since the Charlottesville mayhem on Aug. 11 and 12, major public universities have shut their doors to Spencer and his followers. Their decisions illuminate the challenge of balancing campus values, security concerns and free speech protections.

Voter initiative opens door to expansion of popular dual language immersion programs

Ashley Hopkinson, EdSource
As an initiative approved by California voters last November clears the path for districts to increase opportunities for students to become fluent in more than one language, the Fresno Unified School District is creating an educational track that will provide dual language instruction from preschool through 12th grade. The goal of the program is for English learners and native English speakers to start mastering two languages earlier in their school careers, and to maintain those skills through classes at every grade level. Longtime bilingual education advocates say under Proposition 58 — the initiative that repeals the mandate that students learning English must be taught in English — more school districts are likely to add similar programs offering pre-K-12 language instruction for the state’s nearly 1.4 million English learners. English learners are defined as students who do not speak, read or write English and whose first language is not English.

University of Nevada-Reno won’t dismiss student in viral Charlottesville rally photo

Leila Fadel, NPR
A University of Nevada, Reno, student became the poster child of the white supremacist march in Charlottesville, after his picture went viral. Despite pressure to kick him out, the school says he’ll stay.

Whole Children and Strong Communities

What the public wants from schools

Emily Richmond, The Atlantic
When it comes to judging a school’s quality, what matters most? A new poll suggests the American public puts a premium on offerings outside of traditional academics, including career-focused education, developing students’ interpersonal skills, and providing after-school programs and mental-health care. At the same time, even as local schools were generally viewed favorably in the national survey, parents said they would consider taking advantage of vouchers for private or religious schools if the price was right. And while parents said they favored schools that were economically and racially diverse, a majority were unwilling to have their child endure a longer commute to attend a less-homogeneous campus.

How to counter back-to-school anxiety

Elissa Nadworny, NPR
The start of the school year can be rough on some kids. It’s a big shift from summer’s freedom and lack of structure to the measured routines of school. And sometimes that can build up into tears, losing sleep, outbursts and other classic signs of anxiety. “Going back to school is a transition for everyone,” says Lynn Bufka, a practicing psychologist who also works at the American Psychological Association. “No matter the age of the child, or if they’ve been to school before.” In the vast majority of cases, this is pretty standard stuff. It doesn’t mean it’s not painful — for you and your kids. Just watch this viral video — (Andrew is now in first grade and doing fine). “If you see that in your kids, don’t panic,” says John Kelly, a school psychologist in Long Island, N.Y. “For most kids, there’s gonna be some level of anxiety.” And, if you think back on it, you can probably remember feeling that way, too. We talked to some experts about what parents can do to ease the transition — plus, what to watch out for if there’s a more serious problem. Here’s their list of tips.

Colorado apprenticeship program turns the factory floor into a classroom

Hari Sreenivasan, PBS
Some high school students in Colorado may get prime jobs even before they get their diplomas. That’s because CareerWise, the nation’s first statewide youth apprenticeship program, links students to industries and addresses manufacturers’ demand for skills, while offering employment, academic credit and support for college. Hari Sreenivasan reports as part of our Rethinking College series.

Access, Assessment, and Advancement

Many L.A. students get to college; only a few finish

Howard Blume, Los Angeles Times
A study released Wednesday put an exclamation point on something that Los Angeles Unified School District officials already have acknowledged: too few of their graduates — about one in four — are earning a college degree. The latest data points from two studies, by UCLA and Claremont Graduate University researchers, were no surprise to L.A. Unified. District officials had early access to the research — in fact, they were partners to the effort, long before this week’s formal release. The collaboration between researchers and the district is a subtle but important component of what’s newsworthy around this announcement of findings. Even while the study was underway, the district used the preliminary results — and their plan for making things better — to apply for a $17 million state grant that is coming this way. To develop the plan, officials also looked at research from Chicago and Houston into “college persistence” — the ability to stay in college and earn a degree.

UC faculty mentors will help the growing ranks of first-generation students

Larry Gordon, EdSource
The growing number of University of California students who are in the first generation of their families to attend a university will be able this fall to easily find role models and mentors close at hand: UC faculty who have the same background. Their need for help could run deep. About 42 percent of UC undergraduates are first-generation students, compared to the 36 percent average at all four-year institutions nationwide. And among UC’s incoming freshmen, the numbers are even higher — 45 percent. About 900 professors at UC’s 10 campuses have volunteered during the first weeks of school to wear shirts and pins declaring that they once were the first in their families to graduate from college and will make themselves available to provide advice and support throughout the year, according to an announcement Wednesday. It is part of a wider effort offering academic and financial aid counseling.

Paying former gang members to go to college? This program does — and it seems to be working.

Valerie Strauss, The Washington Post
Who would pay former gang members to help them go to college? A program in Dorchester, a neighborhood in Boston, is doing just that — and for some of its students, it seems to be working. The nonprofit organization College Bound Dorchester — which works to help at-risk prepare for and successfully attend college — started Boston Uncornered, a program to help former gang members become productive members of society. The brainchild of College Bound Dorchester chief executive Mark Culliton is designed not only to help the individuals but also to use education as a means to help those same people transform their own neighborhoods. “I’ve been working on this for 10 years,” Culliton said, “trying to figure out what really makes a bad neighborhood. I came to the conclusion that a lot of communities have what I think is a small group of highly disruptive young people, with the vast majority of folks who just want to live their lives. So we are working on how to get those who are disruptive to engage and use their power in the community to help transform it positively.”

Inequality, Poverty, Segregation

The urban-school stigma

Jack Schneider, The Atlantic
Urban schools don’t inspire much confidence these days. Politicians and policy leaders routinely bemoan their quality. And media outlets regularly run stories of “failing urban schools.” Middle- and upper-income parents have expressed misgivings, too. But they’ve done it much less volubly. With relatively little fuss, they’ve simply picked up and moved—departing from city school systems at ever-greater rates. Among expressions of no-confidence, this has arguably been the most significant, because it has reshaped district demography. Each year, it seems, urban schools serve larger concentrations of poor students, racial minorities, and English-language learners. As higher-income families depart, resources go with them, and schools are faced with the daunting prospect of doing more with less.

Activists ramp up complaints about Long Beach Unified’s spending on high-needs students

Kyle Stokes, KPCC
A coalition of parents and activists elevated their dispute with the Long Beach Unified School District this week, asking California Department of Education officials to rule whether the district is improperly spending millions in state funding intended to help poor and high-needs kids. The escalation draws fresh attention to a fundamental disagreement about how the state’s five-year-old school funding law, the Local Control Funding Formula, or “LCFF,” ought to work. Under that law, students in three high-need groups of students — low-income kids, foster youth and English learners — generate additional state funding for their schools. In turn, school officials are supposed to spend that money on programs addressing the specific needs of students from these three groups. In their appeal filed with state officials on Wednesday, activists accuse Long Beach Unified of redirecting a portion of the state funding these high-need students generate — some $31 million — to cover more general expenses rather than targeted programs.

Is living in poverty really a ‘mind-set’?

Valerie Strauss, The Washington Post; Richard Rothstein, Economic Policy Institute
Ben Carson, secretary of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, told an interviewer recently that poverty results from “the wrong mind-set” and that low-income people with strong motivation can escape poverty while those with negative attitudes remain poor. His own life story seems to illustrate this. Poor children with ambition and self-discipline can occasionally climb the socioeconomic ladder. Luck figures, too, but a child must be on the lookout for it to benefit. Children expecting defeat may never seize opportunities within reach. Yet as a scientist, the secretary should realize that it’s always dangerous to jump from anecdotes about exceptional cases to generalizations about entire groups. Every human condition has variability. Only some children in Flint, Michigan, got lead poisoning, although all drank the same poisoned water. Even native intelligence is distributed: in any demographic group, some have above average I.Q.s., some are below it, and most are average, around 100.

Public Schools and Private $

LA Unified pursuing path from ​conflict to district-charter collaboration in how it shares space

George White, EdSource
Grappling with long-standing tensions related to charter school expansion, Los Angeles Unified Superintendent Michelle King is implementing changes designed to help district-managed schools and charter schools share school buildings and best educational practices — measures designed to promote collaboration and reduce conflicts over access to classrooms. The changes were recommended last spring by an advisory group that included school principals, parents and representatives from the school district, charter schools and United Teachers Los Angeles, which represents teachers in the district. Charter schools and district-run schools currently share facilities at 106 Los Angeles Unified locations. There are 224 independently managed charter schools in the district — more than any other district in the nation. Many of those charter operators have student waiting lists and are opening more schools to meet the demand. With the cost of new construction prohibitively expensive, many charter schools are looking to expand by using space in existing public schools.

L.A. Unified gets a chance to clone good schools, but what are the necessary ingredients?

Sonali Kohli, Los Angeles Times
The concept sounds simple: take a good school, figure out what’s happening to make students successful, and re-create those elements to spread the success somewhere else. Replication, as this process is called, has become a buzzword with charter schools nationwide as they expand their networks on the promise of bringing high achievement at existing schools to new ones. Could the idea work for public schools? The Los Angeles Unified School District has a chance to find out. In April, the district received two $750,000 grants to give such school cloning a try. The school board voted last week to approve the projects. The grants are controversial because they come from Great Public Schools Now, a relatively new nonprofit that’s closely associated with a push to rapidly expand the number of L.A. charter schools. The group has made a point so far of pledging money to expand good L.A. Unified programs, though some critics contend that these are token gestures to public schools while charter growth remains the group’s real aim.

Do traditional public schools benefit from charter competition?

Valerie Strauss, The Washington Post
The late Gerald Bracey, once called “America’s most acerbic educational psychologist,” spent most of his time calling out bad education research and data, trying to explain that things did not always mean what the author said they did and that numbers were too often wrongly interpreted. He wrote a book about it, titled “Reading Educational Research: How to avoid getting snookered,” in which he was given that “acerbic” title by my Washington Post colleague Jay Mathews in the book’s foreward. The book came out in 2006, but the issue remains as important as ever. Today, hardly a day goes by without yet another research study on some aspect of education being released, often with news releases topped with a headline declaring that something definitive has been found and the proof is finally here. Except too often it isn’t.

Other News of Note

Moving forward from Charlottesville

Linda Darling Hammond, Learning Policy Institute
We are all still reeling from the appalling events in Charlottesville last week, sparked by the white nationalist march that put bigotry on clear display. We at the Learning Policy Institute denounce the hatred that motivated those events, while we mourn for those engaged in peaceful protest who were hurt by the senseless violence and for Heather Heyer, who lost her life. And we remember with respect and deep gratitude the many others over hundreds of years who courageously stood and often gave their lives in the cause of civil rights and social justice. As these marches spread to other cities, it is clear that Charlottesville was just the beginning of another historic arm wrestle between the forces of hatred and those that propel human progress. On the heels of the nearly continuous killings of black men and women by police, the widespread acts of anti-Muslim and anti-Semitic hatred, and the detentions and deportations of immigrants, we are experiencing a growing reign of terror, too often sanctioned and even perpetrated by those in authority. As terrible as these displays of racism and discrimination are, equally terrible are the systemic practices hardwired into our society that aggressively neglect children of color and children in poverty, sending far too many of them into the school-to-prison pipeline instead of into a future where they can achieve their potential and contribute to our collective welfare.

Hurricane Harvey shutters hundreds of Texas schools

Moriah Balingit and Susan Svrluga, The Washington Post
On Monday, when Houston schools were supposed to be welcoming back students, the school district had instead been transformed into part of the storm response. School bus drivers were shuttling residents from deluged homes to auditoriums, which had been transformed into makeshift shelters. Ready-to-eat meals, stockpiled in cafeterias, were being distributed to hungry evacuees. “In many respects, we’re part of the emergency response of the entire city,” said Richard Carranza, superintendent of the Houston Independent School District. “It makes you put a different hat on.” Hundreds of schools across Southeast Texas remained closed Tuesday as the state continued to deal with the worst natural disaster in its history, with many students, teachers and administrators still hemmed in by flooded roadways. The Texas Education Agency said that 181 school districts canceled or delayed schools Monday and that at least 129 remained closed Tuesday. Many were still uncertain as to when they could open.