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Teaching, Leading, and Social Justice
Presidential advisers on Black, Latino, and Asian students say Trump admin. ignoring them
Corey Mitchell, Education Week
Three long-standing presidential commissions designed to expand educational opportunities for non-white students are set to expire Saturday and members say months of silence from the White House has them worried they’re about to be dissolved. The presidential advisory commissions on educational excellence for black, Hispanic, and Asian American and Pacific Islander students in K-12 schools and on college campuses have not met since President Donald Trump took office in January. Although members of the groups have reached out, the White House has not responded. “We assume that silence indicates a lack of interest,” said Patricia Gándara, a member of the Hispanic commission who is a research professor and co-director at the Civil Rights Project at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Suddenly, Trump wants to spend millions of dollars on STEM in public schools
Valerie Strauss, The Washington Post
During the 2016 presidential campaign, it was Hillary Clinton who talked about spending federal money to provide more STEM education — especially computer science classes for all students. Donald Trump wasn’t much interested then — and his proposed fiscal 2018 budget didn’t spread much love in that direction either. It zeroed out one of the Education Department’s main programs that could be used for such a purpose, and it eliminated funding for NASA’s education office (which, among other things, oversees efforts to support women and underrepresented minorities in STEM fields). Now, he’s changed his mind. The White House issued a memorandum Monday (see text below) directing the Education Department to spend $200 million a year on grants that promote science, technology, engineering and math education, and “particularly computer science.” It noted that only 18 percent of high schools accredited to teach Advanced Placement had computer science classes, and that minorities, students in rural communities and girls are less represented in computer science education than other students.
More states are making it easier to transfer your teaching license
Liana Loewus, Education Week
It’s a problem that teachers, doctors, and lawyers have in common: When they move from state to state, their licenses may not go with them. In the teaching realm, a handful of states offer full reciprocity—meaning certified teachers can come from any other state and be considered fully licensed right away. But the majority of states require incoming teachers to at the least take some additional coursework or assessments. More states, though, are trying to simplify the license transfer process, according to a new analysis from the Education Commission of the States. Since 2016, 11 states have passed regulations making it easier for out-of-state teachers to get their licenses. “That was a big takeaway for me—that this is something states care about and they’re doing a lot of work on,” said Stephanie Aragon, a policy analyst for ECS and the report’s author. Both Arizona and Nevada became full reciprocity states over the last couple of years (joining Florida, Mississippi, and Missouri). Oklahoma went almost as far, granting out-of-state teachers an initial license immediately, and then making them eligible for a full standard license after a year.
Language, Culture, and Power
American inferno: How my cousin became a South Central statistic
Danielle Allen, Library Foundation of Los Angeles
In Danielle Allen’s elegiac family memoir, Cuz: On the Life and Times of Michael A., she tries to make sense of a young African American man’s tragic coming-of-age in Los Angeles. Allen, a Harvard professor and author of Our Declaration: A Reading of the Declaration of Independence in Defense of Equality, became the “cousin-on-duty” when her younger cousin Michael was released from prison. Arrested at fifteen, tried as an adult—three years after his release, Michael was shot and killed. Why? Allen’s deeply personal and poignant story is an unwavering look at a world transformed by the sudden availability of narcotics and the rise of street gangs, drugs, and the failures of mass incarceration. Rallying an urgent call for system-wide reform, Allen discusses her new work with Franklin Leonard, a film executive who founded The Black List, a yearly publication featuring Hollywood’s most popular unproduced screenplays.
How teachers are addressing the ‘bend the knee’ controversy in class
Stephen Sawchuk, Education Week
After a weekend of news dominated by President Donald Trump’s call to fire professional athletes who protest when the national anthem is being played, Tracy Gamache tossed out her original plan for Monday’s lesson—a critical review of a popular new movie—and instead picked a different text for her high school seniors to analyze: singer John Legend’s editorial in the magazine Slate. The piece, which argues that the protests are patriotic—a contrast to Trump’s and some lawmakers’ criticism—is a good example of what she wants her students to learn in her expository reading and writing class: how an argumentative essay is put together. With each example of persuasive writing, she and students try to understand the audience behind it and analyze how the piece works, including how its craftsmanship—features like word choice and syntax—contribute to its meaning. “I said to my students: Protest is a text. It has a beginning, middle, and end. It has a very specific audience. It has a purpose, and it has a message it is attempting to send,” said Gamache, a teacher in the Corona-Norco district in Riverside, Calif. “That’s how we decided to look at the protest.”
UC system will chip in at least $300,000 to help Berkeley pay security costs for controversial speakers
Teresa Watanabe, Los Angeles Times
The University of California will chip in at least $300,000 to help UC Berkeley pay security costs for controversial speakers, an unprecedented step as criticism mounts over the financial toll the events are taking on the campus. “Free speech is not free, it turns out,” UC President Janet Napolitano told the Los Angeles Times’ Washington bureau on Wednesday. She said UC would underwrite security costs through “Free Speech Week” — which begins Sunday and will feature right-wing provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos and others — but that such support may not continue. “The question, or the rock and the hard place that Berkeley is in, and other university campuses, is the value put on free speech and the safety and security issues that are implicated,” Napolitano said. “Milo and his cast of speakers will be on Sproul Plaza, which is a public space … and we will underwrite the safety and security expenses associated with that. At a certain point, that position — i.e. that we will have these speakers and pay for the security costs associated with that — may not be sustainable.”
Whole Children and Strong Communities
Addressing early childhood trauma requires shift in policy, more training for teachers
Ashley Hopkinson, EdSource
For the first time, more than 100 California-based agencies and advocacy groups that have teamed up to raise awareness about the impact of early childhood trauma on families and communities took that effort to state policymakers, urging them to create legislation that can reduce childhood trauma, often associated with long-term illness and academic and behavior problems in school. Early childhood trauma occurs when a child, from birth to age 6, experiences or witnesses a painful and harmful incident, which can include abuse and neglect, domestic violence and loss of, or separation from, a parent. It may also result from high levels of stress associated with living in poverty, according to a recent report titled, “Helping Young Children Who Have Experienced Trauma: Policies and Strategies for Early Care and Education.” Nationwide, almost 35 million children have been exposed to one or more types of trauma, the report states. Young children, including infants, toddlers and preschoolers, are particularly at risk, the report states, pointing to research that finds 60 percent of children who are exposed to domestic violence are in that youngest age group. Those children are also more likely to be victims of abuse and neglect.
Art and justice reform advocates from around the country visit LA County’s Campus Kilpatrick
Carla Javier, KPCC
More than 120 artists and advocates from around the country gathered in Pasadena this week with the goal of developing a national plan for juvenile justice reform – one that both utilizes the restorative and healing effects of the arts, and incorporates the ideas of youth impacted by the justice system. Their discussions and work centered around one central question: “How do we artistically co-design youth centered community systems whose outcomes are justice?” To see a model for how to do so so, over 80 participants went to Campus Kilpatrick, Los Angeles County’s new youth detention facility, located atop the hills of Malibu. There, they participated in arts workshops–including theater, drumming, poetry, and visual arts–and discussions with some of the 24 youth currently living at Campus Kilpatrick. They visited as part of Create Justice: A National Discussion on Arts and Youth Justice, and this is the second forum they’ve held.
The future of work is uncertain, schools should worry now
Benjamin Herold, Education Week
Today’s 6th graders will hit their prime working years in 2030. By that time, the “robot apocalypse” could be fully upon us. Automation and artificial intelligence could have eliminated half the jobs in the United States economy. Or, plenty of jobs could still exist, but today’s students could be locked in a fierce competition for a few richly rewarded positions requiring advanced technical and interpersonal skills. Robots and algorithms would take care of what used to be solid working- and middle-class jobs. And the kids who didn’t get that cutting-edge computer science course or life-changing middle school project? They’d be relegated to a series of dead-end positions, serving the elites who did. Alternatively, maybe Bill Gates and Elon Musk and the other big names ringing the alarm are wrong. A decade from now, perhaps companies will still complain they can’t find employees who can read an instruction manual and pass a drug test. Maybe workers will still be able to hold on to the American Dream, so long as they can adjust to incremental technological shifts in the workplace. Which vision will prove correct?
Access, Assessment, and Advancement
California math, language arts test scores level off – and achievement gaps persist
Kyle Stokes, KPCC
California schools made little, if any progress at all in closing the achievement gap between privileged and underprivileged students in 2017, according to results released Wednesday from last spring’s round of the state’s benchmark standardized tests in math and English. Overall, results on the tests — taken by high school juniors and third through eighth graders in the state’s public schools — were largely unchanged from 2016. In English Language Arts, 48.5 percent of students’ scores met or exceeded the state standard. In math, 37.5 percent of students met or exceeded standards. Both marks were within a percentage point of last year’s totals.
Less than half of all students fully college-ready on revised SAT test
Larry Gordon, EdSource
The results for the newly revised SAT exam show that less than half of all test takers were fully college-ready and that ethnic and racial disparities persist in California and the rest of the nation. This first round of student scores after the much-discussed overhaul were released Tuesday without comparisons to past versions of the influential college entrance exam. California students who graduated high school in 2017 scored 531 in the so-called evidence-based reading and writing section and 524 in math. Those were just two and three points respectively below the national average. (A perfect score would be 800 in each section.) Test administrators have established new score benchmarks to identify students likely ready to take and succeed with at least a C grade in entry-level college-credit bearing courses. The California scores show that 70 percent of test-takers met the 480 benchmark of college readiness in the reading and verbal section; 47 percent did so by hitting at least 530 in math; and 45 percent were college ready in both skill areas. That is close to the national share of SAT takers who were deemed college-ready: 70 percent in reading, 49 percent in math and 46 in both.
First year of community college could soon be free in California
Staff, Daily Breeze
New community college students in California may soon see a surprising number on their tuition balance: $0. Assemblyman Miguel Santiago (D-Los Angeles), who proposed Assembly Bill 19, thinks it will prompt as many as 19,000 students who might not have seen college as a possibility to pursue higher education “What we’re truly talking about is creating a college-going culture in our community,” Santiago said during a phone interview Monday. But the bill faces some serious opposition, namely from Gov. Jerry Brown’s finance department. That office has argued that the bill will cost the state more than $30 million in part by giving waivers to students who don’t need the financial help, “inconsistent with the administration’s efforts to target financial aid to the state’s neediest students.”
Inequality, Poverty, Segregation
Preschool expulsion: The surprising problem this bill aims to prevent
Priska Neely, KPCC
Blanca Rubio often talks to her children about what she has going on at work. Since she’s a legislator, a member of the California Assembly representing the 48th district, this means talking to her 9- and 10-year-old about the laws she’s writing. “I told them that one of the bills I was working on was a bill to stop 3- and 4-years-olds from being expelled,” said Rubio, “And the first reaction was like, ‘Mom! They’re three and four! Why would anyone expel 3- and 4-year-olds? They don’t know any better.’ ” But in California and around the country, preschoolers are actually expelled at a rate more than three times higher than their peers in K-12 grades. At least 575 preschoolers in the state were suspended and 18 expelled, in the 2011-2012 school year, according to the latest data available from Department of Education. Of those students, the majority were Latino and African American.
Examining links between academic performance and food stamps
Shankar Vedantam, NPR
South Carolina researchers have drawn a connection between low-income students’ poor performance on math tests and the time of month when their families run low on food stamps.
The rural higher-education crisis
Jon Marcus and Matt Krupnick, The Atlantic
When Dustin Gordon’s high school invited juniors and seniors to meet with recruiters from colleges and universities, a handful of students showed up. A few were serious about the prospect of continuing their educations, he said. “But I think some of them went just to get out of class.” In his sparsely settled community in the agricultural countryside of southern Iowa, “There’s just no motivation for people to go” to college, Gordon said. “When they’re ready to be done with high school, they think, ‘That’s all the school I need, and I’m just going to go and find a job’” on the family farm or at the egg-packaging plant or the factory that makes pulleys and conveyor belts, or driving trucks that haul grain. Variations of this mindset, among many other reasons, have given rise to a reality that’s gotten lost in the impassioned debate over who gets to go to college, which often focuses on low-income people of color: The high-school graduates who head off to campus in the lowest proportions in America are the ones from rural places.
Public Schools and Private $
GOP tax proposal silent on private school-choice boost, for now
Andrew Ujifusa, Education Week
A much-discussed boost for school choice was absent from the proposed overhaul to federal tax policy outlined by congressional Republicans on Wednesday. But that doesn’t mean it will ultimately be left out. The GOP’s “Unified Framework for Fixing a Broken Tax Code” does not specifically mention the availability of a tax credit for those who make donations to groups sponsoring scholarships to private schools. School choice advocates have pushed for months for Republican lawmakers to include the provision in their tax overhaul, and U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos has long been a supporter of such tax-credit scholarships out the state level. There are more details to come, however: The framework discussing the proposed changes does say that the relevant congressional committees “will also develop additional reforms to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of tax laws.” So it’s possible that some kind of tax credit for school choice could be included in legislation the GOP drafts to implement this tax reform.
The $26,000 station: How did LAUSD board member Ref Rodriguez fund an alleged money laundering scheme?
Adolfo Guzman-Lopez and Kyle Stokes, KPCC
On November 6, 2014 – about a month before prosecutors said then-Los Angeles Unified School Board candidate Refugio “Ref” Rodriguez allegedly cashed out a $26,000 investment he laundered into his campaign fund – he filed a financial disclosure that listed two economic interests: income from a rental property in Las Vegas, and a partnership in a merchandise sales and fundraising company called Better 4 You Fundraising. What Rodriguez didn’t list was his income from the network of L.A. charter schools he founded, Partnership to Uplift Communities (PUC). The charter network’s tax filings from that year listed Rodriguez as the company’s treasurer, earning a salary of $172,430. In the following year’s disclosure of economic interest, Rodriguez didn’t list his role as president in the non-profit Partners for Developing Futures, which — along with PUC — was awarded a $30,000 consulting contract by L.A. Unified in December 2014. It’s not clear whether Partners for Developing Futures paid Rodriguez during this time because the organization failed to file required IRS tax returns for years — a failure that eventually cost the company its tax-exempt status. These discrepancies mean it’s impossible to know from public records reviewed by KPCC whether the money at the center of the three felony charges Rodriguez now faces came from private investments, from income related to his charter school operations or from public school district contracts.
KIPP NYC charter school network is investigating claims of past sex abuse
Elizabeth A. Harris, The New York Times
A prominent New York City charter school network announced on Wednesday that it was opening an investigation into allegations of sexual misconduct that occurred more than 10 years ago. Following a recent precedent set by many private schools, including St. Paul’s School in New Hampshire and Choate Rosemary Hall in Connecticut, the charter network, KIPP NYC, has hired an outside law firm to investigate the allegations. KIPP NYC, which is part of a national network, said the allegations did not involve any current students or staff members. “We are sharing this information with you because we know this is a topic rarely spoken about openly and our hearts go out to any member of the KIPP community who has experienced abuse in any context,” senior network leaders said in a letter to the school community on Wednesday. “We want to encourage any KIPP team and family member to come forward if they have information, or seek support if they need it.”
Former charter school leaders settle lawsuit that alleged self-dealing scheme
Michael Alison Chandler, The Washington Post
The former leaders of a public charter school for disabled and at-risk teenagers have agreed to settle a District lawsuit alleging they sought to enrich themselves by diverting millions of dollars in taxpayer money meant for the school into private companies they created. Donna Montgomery, David Cranford and Paul Dalton, all former managers at Options Public Charter School, agreed to a collective settlement of $575,000, which will be paid to the school that now operates under new leadership as Kingsman Academy. Jeremy Williams, a former chief financial officer of the D.C. Public Charter School Board, who allegedly aided the scheme, agreed to a settlement of $84,237 in a separate deal signed last week. The defendants agreed that they would not serve in a leadership role of any nonprofit corporation in the District until October 2020. “This settlement ensures that more than $600,000 in misappropriated funds will now go to Kingsman Academy to serve disabled students in the District of Columbia, and will deter future wrongdoing,” said Robert Marus, a spokesman for the Office of the Attorney General. “As the referees for the District’s nonprofit laws, our office will continue to bring actions against any who would misuse funds meant for public or charitable purposes.”
Other News of Note
Civics ed key to equity, improving discourse
Shalina Chatlani and Autumn A. Arnett, Education Dive
U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sotomayor joined a group of experts Thursday to discuss the importance of enriching civics education in order to advance not only political knowledge, but also social equality. Among the many topics speakers discussed at the “Democracy at a Crossroads” event, held at the Newseum, they all emphasized this point: a good civics education and background is critical to graduating students who know how to engage in our society.