Just News from Center X – September 8, 2017

Teaching, Leading, and Social Justice

Understanding DACA and education in California: A quick guide

Larry Gordon, EdSource
What is DACA and does it have any effect on a student being allowed to enroll in a California high school or college? President Barack Obama’s 2012 executive order known as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) allowed certain undocumented young people who were brought to this country under the age of 16 to apply for two-year work permits and be protected from deportation during that time. The permits were designed to be renewed indefinitely but did not provide a path to citizenship. Now, unless Congress acts otherwise, the Trump administration said it will phase out DACA; it will no longer accept new DACA applications and current DACA holders will be able to renew them just once by Oct. 5 and only if their current permits expire before March 5, 2018. Former DACA holders will not be a high priority for deportation unless they are convicted of crimes, according to the White House.

California educational leaders vow to protect immigrant students from deportation

Teresa Watanabe, Los Angeles Times
Within minutes of the Trump Administration’s announcement that it would end protections for nearly 800,000 young immigrants in the country without legal status, California campus leaders began a furious pushback. From large campuses to small, education leaders on Tuesday vowed to join together to protect their vulnerable students. California is home to the nation’s largest concentration of students — about 214,000 as of last year — who received temporary protection from deportation under the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals. University of California President Janet Napolitano quickly announced in a statement that the 10-campus UC system, which educates an estimated 4,000 students who are in the country without legal status, would keep fighting to defend its vulnerable students.

California schools increase legal and counseling supports in wake of DACA’s end

Adolfo Guzman-Lopez and Kyle Stokes, KPCC
California colleges and K-12 school districts are stepping up their legal and counseling teams in the wake of President Donald Trump’s decision to phase out the Obama-era protections for immigrants who arrived in the United States without documentation as children. The Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program has protected nearly 800,000 people nationwide from deportation — about 220,000 of those in California. School officials stressed that immigration status does not affect eligibility to enroll in school and encouraged students who might be affected by the decision to terminate the program in six months to continue to pursue their education. Still, officials also condemned the decision and many said they are at least considering increasing the resources dedicated to providing students with legal help and emotional support. U.C. Riverside, for example, is considering using its legal resources in case their students’ protected status is threatened. “We’ll certainly engage our university attorneys in a review of the change in policy,” said the school’s Vice Chancellor of Student Affairs Jim Sandoval. “We’ll reach out immediately to our students to advise them of the changes and provide them with as much counsel as possible. To the extent that there is an opportunity for us to petition on their behalf to remain in the states, then of course we would do that as well. We’re going to fully advocate for our students.”

Teachers protected by DACA launch a new school year under a threatening cloud

Philissa Cramer, Chalkbeat
The morning after Donald Trump was elected president, a few teachers within Teach For America stayed home. The educators had secured the right to work through DACA, the Obama administration program that allows young adults who came to this country illegally as children to temporarily live and work without fear of deportation. Trump had campaigned on a promise of ending the program, and the teachers didn’t know what to tell their students, according to Viridiana Carrizales, the Teach For America official who leads the “DACA-mented” group, which now includes 190 members working with more than 10,000 students. But as it became clear that Trump planned to follow through on the promise, the teachers made a different decision this week, she said Tuesday. “Many of our teachers if not all showed up to school this morning because they know they have a responsibility to their students,” Carrizales said. “That’s what so remarkable about this group of people who are doing so much for our community.” It was a moment of confidence at the start of a school year that will be characterized by uncertainty for the unknown number of teachers across the country who are part of the DACA program, and for the countless students whose loved ones count on the program.

Language, Culture, and Power

What should we be teaching young children?

Tania Lombrozo, NPR
Early-childhood and elementary school programs reflect a diverse set of commitments about what children ought to learn, and about how they ought to do so. Some focus on academic preparation and advancement, with extra attention to reading and mathematics. Some emphasize social-emotional development and community values. Others tout their language classes, or their music program, or the opportunities for children to engage in extended projects of their choosing. Some praise structure and discipline; some prize autonomy and play. Alongside this profusion of options is a rich diet of advice: parenting books, articles, Facebook groups, and friends who swear by one approach or another. For the most part, though, these conversations miss an important question: not just what to learn and how to learn it, but when to do so. In other words, what should young children be learning while young? What’s the argument for learning a particular skill sooner rather than later?

These Oklahoma City schools are named for Confederate generals … or are they?

Emily Wendler, NPR
District leaders in the Oklahoma City Public Schools will soon head out into the community to ask this question: Should the four elementary schools they believe are the namesake of Confederate generals be renamed? The origin of that question goes back several weeks. Right after the violence broke out in Charlottesville, Va., Charles Henry, a school board member in Oklahoma City, voiced his concern about the name of Jackson Elementary, which he says had been bothering him for a while. Initially he thought the school was named after Andrew Jackson, “which I think is equally offensive, personally. And then I looked it up and it wasn’t named after Andrew Jackson. It was named after Stonewall. I researched him, too, and I was like, ‘Yeah, that’s wrong,’ ” he says. Jackson Elementary is on the south side of Oklahoma City and Stonewall Jackson’s name is engraved above the door where the school’s students, who are a majority black and Hispanic, enter and exit the building. Henry says he doesn’t think kids should learn in a place named after a Confederate officer who fought to keep slavery legal.

Pro-Palestinian UCI students appeal sanctions after Israeli event protest

Hillary Davis, Los Angeles Times
A pro-Palestinian student group at UC Irvine is appealing its punishment in response to a protest during an on-campus Israeli veterans panel in May. University administrators gave the Students for Justice in Palestine two years of probation, 12 mandatory meetings to discuss free speech and a requirement to meet with administrators two weeks before hosting any event. In a statement, representatives for the group said that their clapping and chanting at the event — sponsored by Students Supporting Israel — was in response to aggressive behavior by a member of the soldiers’ group. “It’s outrageous that the university is punishing us, students, instead of protecting us from aggressive foreign military agents on campus,” Daniel Carnie, a Jewish UCI student, said in a statement. “We’re a diverse group of Palestinian, black, Latino and Jewish students who attended the soldiers’ speaking event and asked critical questions.”

Whole Children and Strong Communities

Few children follow preschool obesity-prevention guidelines, study finds

Marva Hinton, Education Week
Preschoolers don’t eat enough healthy foods or get enough exercise, according to a new study by the Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center. The study was published online in August in the journal Preventative Medicine Reports. Researchers studied nearly 400 preschoolers over the course of one 24-hour period at school and at home to find out if the children were meeting what’s known as the 5-2-1-0 daily guidelines, which recommend that children eat at least five servings of fruits and vegetables, watch less than two hours of screen time, participate in one hour of physical activity and consume no sugar-sweetened drinks. Only one child actually met those guidelines.

Study finds potential economic upside to starting school later in the day

Robert Siegel, NPR
There’s clear research that starting school at 8:30 a.m. or later has many benefits for teen health. But school districts aren’t changing, citing the costs of making start times later. A new study from the RAND Corporation found the potential upside to a nationwide shift for the U.S. economy could be $83 billion over a decade.

It’s 10 P.M. Do you know what apps your children are using?

Hayley Krischer, The New York Times
Alexander Graham Bell didn’t expect his telephone to be widely used for prank calls. And Steve Jobs was chary of children using his iThings. But social media apps are appendages for tweens and teens. It’s one way they earn social currency. Below, a guide to what parents will (or should) be anxiously monitoring during this busy back-to-school season.

Access, Assessment, and Advancement

A workforce conundrum: Low-paid child care providers need to learn more to earn more, but learning more isn’t cheap

Priska Neely, KPCC
During the recent eclipse craze, Rosa Lopez taught the 3- and 4-year-olds she cares for about the science behind the big event that had everyone titling their heads to the sky. She showed them pictures and they made art projects out of black and yellow construction paper. “They kept reciting it, like, ‘The eclipse is when the sun was covered by the moon like this,’ ” Lopez recalled with a warm chuckle. “They were so eager to learn it and they were telling their parents and the other teachers. And I was like, Oh my god, I taught them that.” Moments like this have kept Lopez in the early childhood field for 24 years, even though she barely earns enough to get by. Despite her decades of experience, Lopez, 44, makes just under $14.50/hour. “It would be nice – don’t get me wrong,” said Lopez. “Having enough money to sustain yourself without struggling is good, but the income isn’t as important as what I teach them.” Many in the field do struggle. Studies show that most child care workers don’t earn enough to make ends meet. Lopez says without her husband’s income, she’d be living paycheck to paycheck.

Refugee kids find that ‘summer school is cool’ as they learn how to navigate their new home

Ruby De Luna, NPR
Each year, the International Rescue Committee holds a summer school program for newly-arrived refugee kids. This year’s session in Seattle includes 36 students from Iraq, Syria, Somalia and Afghanistan.

Trump wants to cut college work study amid calls to boost job aid to public campuses

Larry Gordon and Mikhail Zinshteyn, EdSource
Whittier College junior Iyesha Ferguson learned the advantages of a federally subsidized work-study job — especially compared to dishing out pizza off-campus. Her work-study position at the college website and communications office allows her to earn up to $2,000 a year and pick up Internet skills, all with flexible hours so she can study for exams and complete class projects. In contrast, she recently quit a local pizza restaurant job because scheduling was rigid and her grades suffered. “It took a lot of time away from my school things,” said the English major from Chicago. So she is delighted to hold down the 15-hour-a-week campus job that pays $10.50 an hour and helps her afford books, transportation, telephone and other costs that her hefty scholarship grants and loans don’t cover. But she is worried that the 2017-18 budget put forward by President Trump in March would sharply cut back the federally subsidized work-study program nationwide and could mean hundreds of thousands of students like her will have to delay buying textbooks or reduce college enrollment to part-time.

College leaders urge changes to California’s Higher Education master plan to improve access and affordability

Larry Gordon, EdSource
Easing overcrowding and curbing the costs of attending California’s three systems of public higher education were among the issues on the table as state legislators Thursday opened a lengthy process to update the state’s Master Plan for Higher Education.
A special Assembly Select Committee held the first of what are expected to be five hearings around the state over the next year on ways to improve California’s 1960 Master Plan for Higher Education. Officials said it then could take at least six years in all to develop and approve concrete reforms and possible changes in admissions eligibility. The influential master plan and later policy changes say that UC should accommodate the top 12.5 academic percent of high school graduates and CSU the top 33.3 percent, with community colleges having more of an open door policy. “The promise of the master plan was access to an affordable, high quality education for all California students who qualified,” the select committee’s chairman Marc Berman (D-Palo Alto) said in an interview before the hearing. “I have complete confidence in the high quality but I think we’ve lost a little bit of the accessibility and a lot of the affordability.”

Inequality, Poverty, Segregation

Lawmaker to request state audit of districts’ compliance with funding formula

John Fensterwald, EdSource
Hours before formally proposing an audit of three California districts’ spending under the state’s school funding formula, the sponsoring legislator pulled the request Tuesday. Assemblyman Al Muratsuchi, D-Torrance, faced the united opposition of school management organizations and teachers unions, which in a letter dismissed the idea as “wasteful, unnecessary and duplicative.” But Muratsuchi said Wednesday he intends to reintroduce his proposal after “fine tuning” it in coming months based on feedback. On Tuesday, he was scheduled to seek approval for his plan from fellow members of the Joint Legislative Audit Committee. If approved, his proposal would require the California State Auditor to audit a sampling of school districts to determine if they are complying with the intent of the Local Control Funding Formula. The committee won’t meet again until next year. “The goal is to get data on whether, after five years under the law, students with the greatest needs are getting the greatest resources,” as the funding law requires, he said.

New crisis text line identifies California college student homelessness as big issue

Adolfo Guzman-Lopez, KPCC
Last May, the California Community College system partnered with Crisis Text Line – a free service funded by grants and donations – to give students an all-hours, anonymous counseling service for mental health emergencies. “We’ve had over 800 conversations with people in the California Community College system,” said Libby Craig, the west coast director for Crisis Text Line. “The highest volume day of week is Wednesday.” The company was founded four years ago and also partners, she said, with Penn State, the University of San Francisco, and Iowa State. In the four years since its founding volunteer counselors have logged 45 million text conversations. Homelessness, she said, is four times more likely to be a topic of conversation and finances nearly three times by California Community College texters compared to all the other communications the service receives nationwide.

Do conversations about race belong in the classroom?

Melinda D. Anderson, The Atlantic
In 1997, Beverly Daniel Tatum, one of the country’s foremost authorities on the psychology of racism, answered a recurring question that surfaced in her work with teachers, administrators, and parent groups: Why are all the black kids sitting together in the cafeteria? The result was a critically acclaimed book of the same name that gave readers—numbering in the hundreds of thousands—a starting point to demystify conversations about race, better understand the concept of racial identity, and communicate across racial and ethnic divides. Now two decades later, the black kids are still sitting together. And Tatum has returned with a revised and updated 20th-anniversary edition of her national bestseller that publishes today. One aspect that has changed dramatically since the original release of Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? And Other Conversations About Race are America’s demographics. Latinos and Asian Americans are the largest and fastest-growing populations of color, respectively, with children of color for the first time outnumbering white children in public schools. Additionally, the backlash against the election of the first black president, the continuing segregation of schools, and highly visible incidents of police violence seem to belie the claim of a “post-racial society”—making Tatum’s perspectives on effective dialogue about race and racism especially relevant.

Public Schools and Private $

Why are California charter schools’ vaccination rates so much worse than district-run schools?

Kyle Stokes, KPCC
When a particular group of parents call Claudia Weintraub asking for a spot in her school, they don’t speak in code. They’re not coy. They’re honest. “They call me,” Weintraub said, “because, they say, ‘My child isn’t fully immunized and I can’t go to a traditional school.'” Weintraub is the director of River Oaks Academy, an “independent study” charter school in Ventura County. It’s essentially a publicly-funded homeschooling program, with 260 students, a dozen roving teachers and physical locations in Westlake Village and Oxnard. Independent study charter schools, like Weintraub’s, have taken on a new appeal for parents who oppose mandatory vaccination. Last year, after California’s new, stricter immunization law took effect, parents could no longer simply obtain a “personal belief” exemption to enroll their unvaccinated child in school, public or private. And unless the child had a legitimate medical reason not to be vaccinated — or, at least, a physician willing to sign an exemption — or a special education plan, the rule was “no shots, no school.” But the law exempted students who didn’t receive classroom-based instruction, making independent study programs like River Oaks Academy among the only options left for an unvaccinated child to receive publicly-funded schooling.

Proposal for state-run STEM school shifts in face of opposition

John Fensterwald, EdSource
The drive to set up a state-run school with a science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) curriculum has made it past another legislative hurdle, though the proposed school continues to face significant resistance. Last Friday, the Senate Appropriations Committee endorsed a revised version of Assembly Bill 1217, adding some amendments intended to mollify union and school district critics but including others that could intensify the opposition. Among the former: requirements to use union labor to build the school in downtown Los Angeles and to change the selection process for the nonprofit board that would run the new school. Under the latest version of the bill, the governor and Legislature would appoint four members to the board, which will be made up of at least seven members. They would include a teacher and a classified worker from Los Angeles. Among changes likely to fuel the opposition: exempting the school from all state education statutes not specified in the bill.

Parents cite student privacy concerns with popular online education platform

Valerie Strauss, The Washington Post; Leonie Haimson, Parent Coalition for Student Privacy
In October, The Washington Post published an article on its front page about the “personalized” online learning platform that Summit charter schools and Facebook developed in collaboration. This platform, called Summit Basecamp, is a learning management system complete with a curriculum, including projects, online resources and tests. Summit says that the program has been adopted in about 130 schools across the country, both public and charter schools. About 38 percent of schools using the platform are middle schools, 24 percent high schools, 13 percent elementary schools, and the rest are K-12 or K-8 schools. Summit was recently awarded a $10 million grant from the Emerson Collective, run by Laurene Powell Jobs, to “reinvent” the high school by starting a new school in Oakland that will run an expanded version of its online learning platform. In March, it was announced that the operation and further development of the Summit online platform would be transferred from Facebook to the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI), the for-profit LLC owned by Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, with billions of dollars at its disposal. At about the same time, Summit decided it would no longer ask for parent consent before collecting and re-disclosing their children’s personal data. The Washington Post article reported primarily on parent concerns with their children’s lack of data privacy at these schools, as the Summit parental consent form, Privacy Policy and Terms of Service were astonishingly open-ended — essentially providing Summit with the ability to share student data with nearly anyone they choose.

Other News of Note

What ‘dreamers’ gained from DACA, and stand to lose

A.J. Chavar, The New York Times
“I was brought when I was 11.” “I came when I was seven from Brazil.” “I was about 10.” “I was 12 years old.” “I was seven years old.” “About eight years old when I came to the United States with my mother and my sister.” “We crossed the border, but we were little.” “My father was the first one to leave Mexico and come here in 2000. And then in 2001, my older siblings.” “So I’ve been here 18 years.” “I’m 29 years old.” “I am 20.” “I am 19 years old.” “I’ve been here for 21 years.” “I am 27 years old now.” “I’m 23 years old and I’m originally from Mexico.”

Undocumented activists rally at Trump Tower

Race Forward, Color Lines
“Undocumented and unafraid (repeated by crowd). I refuse to go back into the shadows (repeated by crowd). Donald Trump and Jeff Sessions (repeated by crowd). You don’t ******* scare me (repeated by crowd).”