Just News from Center X – September 15, 2017

Teaching, Leading, and Social Justice

L.A. school board president faces felony charges over campaign contributions

Ann Phillips, David Zahniser, and Howard Blume, Los Angeles Times
Los Angeles school board President Ref Rodriguez was charged Wednesday with three felony counts of conspiracy, perjury and procuring and offering a false or forged instrument, the result of a months-long investigation by local authorities into donations to his successful first-time run for office in 2015. The charges against Rodriguez, 46, whose District 5 stretches from Los Feliz to South Gate, were detailed in a 14-page criminal complaint filed by the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office. Prosecutors accused Rodriguez of giving more than $24,000 to his own campaign, while illegally representing that the donations had been made by more than two dozen other contributors.

State adopts plan required by federal education law; here’s what’s in it

John Fensterwald, EdSource
The State Board of Education adopted the state’s compliance plan for the federal Every Student Succeeds Act on Wednesday, with, as expected, few changes to the draft published last month. After 18 months of hearings and work, most board members said they were satisfied that the document meshes with and advances the state’s larger comprehensive effort for school improvement combining new academic standards, more equitable funding and a locally driven accountability system. But board members Patricia Rucker and Feliza Ortiz-Licon voted against the plan in an 8-2 vote. Ortiz-Licon said the board missed an opportunity to reaffirm its commitment to close gaps in achievement between English learners and other student groups and to detail how to do it. “It’s not enough to restate good intentions,” she said. Rucker disagreed with an amendment related to the use of a portion of administrative funding. What follows is an FAQ on the federal law and the state’s response to it.

Why teachers need their freedom

Ashley Lamb-Sinclair, The Atlantic
My co-teacher and I met in the parking lot before school and stared into my car trunk at the costumes and props we had gathered over the weekend. We were giddy with excitement and nervous because neither of us had tried anything like this before. We also taught in the kind of school where one wrong move in the classroom could lead to disastrous results because of our students’ intense behavioral and learning needs. The co-teacher, Alice Gnau, had found a book called Teaching Content Outrageously by Stanley Pogrow, which explained how secondary classrooms can incorporate drama into any content to engage students in learning—incorporating the element of surprise, for example, or developing role-play or simulation experiences to teach content and standards. The book inspired us to change how we taught our seventh-grade language-arts students in a high-poverty school that struggled with test scores, especially reading and math. The sense of urgency in the building was palpable, and the pressure on teachers to increase student achievement was often overwhelming. The district required us to teach a curriculum rigidly aligned with a 15-year-old reading textbook containing outdated articles about Ricky Martin, ice fishing, and cartography in an attempt to provide relevant, entry-level reading for students. I refused to teach from this text on the grounds that it was both condescending and uninteresting. But district personnel insisted that teachers use the textbook, citing evidence that it brought up test scores.

Language, Culture, and Power

Here’s what 2 big college systems think of DACA

Claudio Sanchez, KPCC
This week, President Trump finally made good on his campaign promise to end DACA — Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals. This 2012 executive action implemented by President Obama, has allowed about 800,000 undocumented immigrants who were brought to the U.S. as children to remain in the country. They’re known as “DREAMers,” after a proposed law that never passed. At least a third of them are, or have been, enrolled in college. So when U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions officially announced the end of DACA at a news conference Tuesday, an avalanche of criticism from the higher education community began in news releases, emails to reporters and on social media. From community colleges to some of the country’s most selective institutions, higher ed leaders were defiant. “It’s disappointing and it’s just wrong at many levels,” says Janet Napolitano, president of the University of California system. Napolitano, former head of the Department of Homeland Security in the Obama administration, says undoing DACA violates the constitutional rights to due process of students covered by DACA, so she’s suing the Trump administration in federal court.

Girls say high school dress code is sexist: ‘School is telling us female bodies are distracting, and it’s wrong’

Priscella Vega, Los Angeles Times
Some local high school students are challenging Burbank Unified’s dress code, saying it is sexist against girls, and they are planning to survey parents, teachers and students on how to amend the policy. Eight students from Burroughs and Burbank high schools shared their personal experiences dealing with the dress code during the public-comment period of a Burbank school board meeting last week. According to the policy, clothing must not “detract from the academic environment” and cannot promote the use of illegal substances, alcohol and should be void of profanity and violence. Low-cut tops, spaghetti-strap shirts, short skirts and short shorts are not permitted, nor are beanies and hats. If a student wears inappropriate clothing, they are asked to change or a parent is asked to bring appropriate clothing. Burroughs High student Virginia Begakis said she was pulled out of an honors class earlier this month because she wore a shirt with straps that were too thin during a 110-degree day. “School is telling us female bodies are distracting, and it’s wrong,” Virginia said, countering that the actual distraction is when teachers interrupt class to send a student away to change.

Betsy DeVos signals rollback of Obama policies on campus sexual assault

Tovia Smith, NPR
The Trump administration is expected to address Obama-era policies cracking down on campus sexual assault. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos has signaled she wants to make significant changes to how schools handle allegations, to ensure the process is fair to accused students.

Whole Children and Strong Communities

Scientists to schools: Social, emotional development crucial for learning

Evie Blad, Education Week
Schools must broaden their approach beyond a narrow focus on academic work, a group of nationally recognized scientists said in a consensus statement released Wednesday. That’s because students’ social, emotional, and academic development are “deeply intertwined,” and all are central to learning, says the brief. “Students who have a sense of belonging and purpose, who can work well with classmates and peers to solve problems, who can plan and set goals, and who can persevere through challenges— in addition to being literate, numerate, and versed in scientific concepts and ideas—are more likely to maximize their opportunities and reach their full potential,” the brief says. It’s the product of a year of work by 28 academic researchers who study issues like student motivation, school climate, and social-emotional learning. The panel, known as the council of distinguished scientists, was organized by the Aspen Institute’s National Commission on Social, Emotional, and Academic Development, which has set out to bring together educators, scientists, policy makers, and philanthropists to clarify a vision for social-emotional learning in schools.

Saved by the peace and quiet at a growing number of California schools

Carolyn Jones, EdSource
Hoping to create calmer, more peaceful atmospheres on campus, schools around the state are turning off their bell systems and letting students figure out when class starts the old-fashioned way: by looking at a clock. “The only places that have bells any more are prisons and schools,” said Chris Calderwood, assistant principal at Rancho Mirage High School near Palm Springs. “The bottom line is, every kid has a cell phone in their pocket. They know what time it is. Why not trust the kids to manage their own time?” Rancho Mirage High, which opened in 2013, has never used bells. In creating protocols for the new school when it opened, Calderwood and other administrators looked at a range of policies designed to teach life skills and improve campus culture. Dumping the bells was one of them.

In the age of screen time, is paper dead?

Steve Drummond, NPR
Paper … or glass? Advances in laptops and technology are pushing screens into schools like never before. So what does this drive toward digital classrooms mean for that oldest and simplest of touch screens: a plain old sheet of paper? It may seem a wasteful and obsolete technology, ready to follow the slate chalkboard and the ditto machine into the Smithsonian, or a flat, white invitation to creativity, just waiting for some learning magic to happen. And when it comes to learning and retention, is there any difference between reading and writing on an electronic “tablet” or a paper one? Not surprisingly, the good folks over at the Paper and Packaging Board aren’t ready to give up on paper just yet. They’ve sent me their new report about it, called “Paper and Productive Learning.” It’s printed on glossy paper and it arrived on my non-digital desktop via non-email, with a stamp and everything. “Read on,” it encourages, “to discover the many ways paper remains essential for productive learning in today’s technology-fueled culture.” As you might expect in a report from an organization aimed at promoting paper and packaging, it’s pretty full of pro-paper information. “In many ways, paper is still the most important technology for productive learning,” it says. Here are just a few of the fun facts and findings.

Access, Assessment, and Advancement

Are LAUSD grads leaving high schools ready for college? Board could authorize deeper study

Kyle Stokes, KPCC
There are many ways to measure how prepared the Los Angeles Unified School District’s graduates are for what comes after high school — college or a career. “The challenge,” says L.A. Unified School Board member Kelly Gonez, “is that these data do not exist all in one place.” On Tuesday, the school board might change that. They plan to take up Gonez’s resolution, co-sponsored by board members George McKenna and Richard Vladovic, which asks district staff to deliver a broad-ranging report on the district’s college readiness data by January. The report would synthesize some of the more easily-accessible data — like district high schoolers’ scores on the SAT and AP exams — with more obscure measures, like how many L.A. Unified gradates need remediation once they get to college and how many persist from freshman to sophomore year.

“Transfer maze” awaits California community college students, advocacy group says

Mikhail Zinshteyn, EdSource
California’s community college students face frustrations on the path to a four-year degree, enduring confusing and competing policies that result in a small share of students actually transferring to a Cal State or University of California campus. That’s the conclusion of a report produced by The Campaign for College Opportunity, a prominent advocacy group that has fought to simplify the steps for community college students to enter the state’s vaunted four-year public universities. “Students are still confused, still searching for guidance, still racking up enormous amounts of units,” said Audrey Dow, senior vice president at The Campaign for College Opportunity. “This transfer maze means it is more cost-effective for a student to go to a four-year university than start at a two-year university.” As a result, Dow said, “The two-year community college affordability notion is a myth.”

Why one educator says it’s time to rethink higher education

Anya Kamenetz, NPR
“What would it mean to redesign higher education for the intellectual space travel students need to thrive in the world we live in now?” That is one of the provocative questions that opens Cathy Davidson’s latest book, The New Education. And unlike some of the journalists and business figures who have taken previous swings at that piñata, Davidson has a full career of research and practice to inform her abundance of answers. Davidson spent more than two decades as a professor at Duke University. She taught English and humanities, but with the advent of the Internet, she saw the need for a new kind of interdisciplinary and student-centered learning. She opened up her classrooms, beginning in simple ways, trying to get more people to participate and collaborate — while lecturing less. She has even been known to interrupt her own keynote addresses to get people in the audience talking to one another. In 1998, she became the university’s vice provost of interdisciplinary studies. And in 2002, Davidson co-founded the Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Alliance and Collaboratory, which has grown into an international network of more than 15,000 scholars, artists and technologists working on teaching, learning, technology, innovation and much more. The New Education’s title is taken from Charles Eliot, Harvard University’s president for 40 years, beginning in 1869. He is credited for laying the framework that we now recognize as fundamental to formal education, such as credit hours, majors and distribution requirements. It’s time to rethink all of that, Davidson argues. And, the examples are already out there.

Inequality, Poverty, Segregation

Settlement will send $151 million to 50 L.A. schools over the next three years

Sonali Kohli and Howard Blume, Los Angeles Times
The Los Angeles Unified School District will pour $151 million into a group of 50 schools to settle a lawsuit over how the school system spends money intended for some of its neediest students. The funds, to be distributed over three years, will go to schools in low-income neighborhoods, mostly in South and East Los Angeles, and will pay for such efforts as increased tutoring, mental health support, counseling, parent participation and restorative justice. The extra help is supposed to benefit three groups of students: those from low-income families, English learners and those in the foster-care system.

“The way to survive it was to make A’s”

Mosi Secret, The New York Times
The road to Virginia Episcopal School was more secluded in those days, winding a few miles from the white section of segregated Lynchburg through a wood of maple and oak to the school’s rolling campus, shielded by trees and the more distant Blue Ridge Mountains. The usual stream of cars navigated the bends on the first day of school, white families ferrying their adolescent sons. Like nearly every other elite prep school in the South, it had been the boarding school’s tradition since its founding in 1916 that its teachers guide white boys toward its ideal of manhood — erudite, religious, resilient. But that afternoon of Sept. 8, 1967, a taxi pulled up the long driveway carrying a black teenager, Marvin Barnard. He had journeyed across the state, 120 miles by bus, from the black side of Richmond, unaccompanied, toting a single suitcase. In all of Virginia, a state whose lawmakers had responded to the 1954 court-ordered desegregation of public schools with a strategy of declared “massive resistance,” no black child had ever enrolled in a private boarding school. When Marvin stepped foot on V.E.S. ground, wearing a lightweight sport jacket, a white dress shirt, a modest necktie and a cap like the ones the Beatles were wearing, the white idyll was over.

In the weeks before freshman year, money worries aplenty

Elissa Nadworny, NPR
During the last few weeks of August, Torri Hayslett’s room at McKinley Technology High School feels more like an accountant’s office than a college adviser’s. “Thirty-one thousand dollars minus $4,000, minus $2,500,” she says, saying the numbers out loud before punching them into the calculator. She’s sitting with one of her students, who recently graduated from McKinley. They’re looking over her first college bill. “Does the $9,000 include the $3,000?” Hayslett asks. “I think that is including,” the student responds. “Again, I do not know a lot of logistics right now.” Hayslett works as a college and career manager, helping nearly 150 seniors at this public high school in Washington, D.C. Nearly 40 percent of McKinley’s students come from low-income families. She says this is what happens in July and August: Seniors who’ve already graduated come to her office (or call or text) trying to get a handle on all these numbers. Many of the students who shuffle into her office ended the school year in celebration. They’re going to college! The schools they’ve picked were pinned up on bulletin boards in the hall; some students even made the local news. And then summer rolls around, bringing with it one big question: Can I actually afford this?

The question of race in campus sexual-assault cases

Emily Yoffee, The Atlantic
The archetypal image of the campus rapist is a rich, white fraternity athlete. The case of Brock Turner—the freshman swimmer at Stanford University convicted last year of sexually assaulting an unconscious woman after meeting her at a party, but sentenced to only six months in jail—reinforced this. Petula Dvorak, a Washington Post columnist, wrote, “The brilliant smile of a Stanford swimmer with Olympic dreams, the happy privileged face of a white college kid named Brock Turner … This is what a campus sexual predator looks like.” Amy Ziering, the producer of The Hunting Ground, a 2015 campus-sexual-assault documentary, has said much the same thing. In a radio interview, she asserted that her movie exposed “privileged” well-off white men and challenged “dominant white male power.” But a close viewing of her film reveals a different reality. Her movie tells at length the stories of four allegations. In at least three of the cases, the accused is black. How race plays into the issue of campus sexual assault is almost completely unacknowledged by the government. While the Office for Civil Rights (OCR), which regulates how colleges respond to sexual assault, collects a lot of data on race, it does not require colleges and universities to document the race of the accused and accuser in sexual-assault complaints. An OCR investigator told me last year that people at the agency were aware of race as an issue in Title IX cases, but was concerned that it’s “not more of a concern. No one’s tracking it.”

Public Schools and Private $

Americans have given up on public schools. That’s a mistake.

Erika Christakis, The Atlantic
Public schools have always occupied prime space in the excitable American imagination. For decades, if not centuries, politicians have made hay of their supposed failures and extortions. In 2004, Rod Paige, then George W. Bush’s secretary of education, called the country’s leading teachers union a “terrorist organization.” In his first education speech as president, in 2009, Barack Obama lamented the fact that “despite resources that are unmatched anywhere in the world, we’ve let our grades slip, our schools crumble, our teacher quality fall short, and other nations outpace us.” President Donald Trump used the occasion of his inaugural address to bemoan the way “beautiful” students had been “deprived of all knowledge” by our nation’s cash-guzzling schools. Educators have since recoiled at the Trump administration’s budget proposal detailing more than $9 billion in education cuts, including to after-school programs that serve mostly poor children. These cuts came along with increased funding for school-privatization efforts such as vouchers. Our secretary of education, Betsy DeVos, has repeatedly signaled her support for school choice and privatization, as well as her scorn for public schools, describing them as a “dead end” and claiming that unionized teachers “care more about a system, one that was created in the 1800s, than they care about individual students.”

States adjust course on school turnaround districts

Daarel Burnette II, Education Week
In the waning years of the No Child Left Behind Act, school turnaround districts became a solution du jour for many state legislatures: Take all of your worst-performing schools, place them in their own state-controlled district, and either run them directly or hand them over to a charter school operator. A network of autonomous, independently-run schools was seen as a route to swift, efficient, and inspirational improvement. To date, six states have experience with some form of turnaround district, their startup costs paid in a variety of ways, including by philanthropists, state funding, and federal School Improvement Grant money.

Celerity, a troubled network of LA charter schools, outlines plans to reform

Kyle Stokes, KPCC
In recent months, a Los Angeles-based non-profit organization — Celerity Educational Group — has become a poster child for critics of charter schools. Last October, L.A. Unified School District officials voiced unease about the charter network’s too-close-for-comfort ties to another entity, Celerity Global Development. The charter school’s leaders have denied anything improper about those ties, but district officials essentially raised the possibility that public money intended for the network’s charter schools could have been diverted for Celerity Global’s private profit. And more was still to come. In January, for reasons still unclear, federal agents raided Celerity’s home offices. In May, state officials moved to close two of the network’s schools. But Celerity Educational Group leaders say the organization has put a plan in place to right the ship — and on Tuesday, the L.A. Unified School Board tentatively blessed that plan.

Other News of Note

A quick look at immigration history

Hiroshi Motomura, UCLA School of Law
“An important part of American history is the history of immigration in this country. And a key part of the immigration history of this country are two places that are quite storied in the history books. One of them is Ellis Island in New York Harbor and the other, less well known is Angel Island in San Francisco Bay. And they tell a lot about the history of immigration in this country and I think it’s worth spending a minute to try to figure out how they were similar and how they were different.”