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Language, Culture, and Power

January 6, 2017

Living in America 101: When refugees arrive, what do they need to learn?

Gabrielle Emanuel, NPR

I was standing by the airport exit, debating whether to get a snack,
when a young man with a round face approached me. I focused hard to
decipher his words. In a thick accent, he asked me to help him find his
suitcase. As we walked to baggage claim, I learned his name: Edward
Murinzi. This was his very first plane trip. A refugee from the
Democratic Republic of Congo, he’d just arrived to begin his American
life. Beside the luggage carousel at Washington’s Reagan Airport, he
looked out at the two lanes of traffic and the concrete wall beyond. “So
this is America?” he said. From finding his bag to finding his
apartment and finding a job, there was a lot for Edward to learn. Later,
he acknowledged that while he was standing in the airport looking for
his luggage, he felt the magnitude of the task before him. He says
questions were zipping around his head: “How will I start? You get
scared. How will I manage?”

 

These are the classes you get when you give college students control

Teresa Watanabe, Los Angeles Times

For much of each week, UC Berkeley senior Caelle McKaveney studies
chemical signaling in spiders, nucleotide coding patterns and
other serious science. But Monday evenings
were different last semester. She was able to nerd out in a
non-textbook way in a class designed by students for fellow students who
shared a childhood obsession: Harry Potter. In a class called “UC
Hogwarts: The Wizarding World of Harry Potter,” McKaveney could leave
the muggle world of the nation’s top public research university behind
and bond with fellow Potter geeks over Hermione’s feminism and the
metaphorical links between werewolves and those afflicted with HIV/AIDS.
She let loose and channeled her inner Snape during a class skit,
allowing her long hair to cover her face and dropping her voice to the
deep tones of the brooding master of the dark arts.

 

‘I’m a college student, but I was treated like a criminal. How can I not incorporate that into my world view?’

Valerie Strauss, The Washington Post; Zachary Wood, Uncomfortable Learning

When I hear the words “police brutality,” I don’t just picture the
footage on the news. I think of the time I saw a police officer slam an
elderly man on the pavement and press his boot into the side of his face
for asking people to donate money for his medical operation. I recall
the time my father told me that on his way home he was cornered by
several police officers with their guns aimed, all because he was a
black man who resembled the burglar they were looking for. For many
minority students like myself, racism is not an abstraction. It is a
keenly felt experience. We often see examples of racism in videos of
police brutality and connect those examples to personal experiences with
police and the microaggressions and bias that happens on campus.
Knowing how to deal with all of that as a college student can be
difficult, and activism can often come out as indignation.

 

December 16, 2016

Home-grown school superintendents bring stability, deep knowledge to their districts

Michael Collier, EdSource

A small group of home-grown school superintendents in California defy
the stereotype of a school leader who parachutes into a district,
spends three or four years there, and moves on to a new job in another
district. One in 4 of the superintendents in the state’s 20 largest
districts were at one time students in the same district that they now
lead. Some of them – including Los Angeles Unified’s Michelle King, Long
Beach Unified’s Chris Steinhauser and San Juan Unified’s Kent
Kern – have spent their entire professional careers there. These
superintendents bring a deep understanding of their districts that comes
only from growing up there and experiencing district schools from the
inside. Some of those superintendents say they are likely to stay
longer in their positions than the typical school chief, and some
education experts say they have a greater chance of effecting change and
maintaining district stability.

 

Students remove Shakespeare portrait from English Department at Ivy League school

Valerie Strauss, The Washington Post

Shakespeare takes another hit. At the University of Pennsylvania, the
student newspaper reports that a group of students took down a large
portrait of William Shakespeare, which had for years been displayed
above a staircase in a building housing the English Department. Why?
According to the Daily Pennsylvanian

,
the students wanted the wall art in the department to represent the
world’s diversity of authors, so they replaced Shakespeare on the Heyer
Staircase with a photo of Audre Lorde, an African American writer,
feminist and civil rights activist.

 

Facing pressure to cut special education, Texas schools shut out English Language Learners

Brian M. Rosenthal, Houston Chronicle

Refugees, immigrants and other kids who do not speak English are
entitled to the same special education services as native speakers. But
in this Southeast Texas city, they seldom get them.

Just 39 of the nearly 1,000 English Language Learners here receive
services like tutoring, counseling and speech therapy, 70 percent fewer
per capita than a decade ago. Many more need help, but usually, teachers
say, their pleas are ignored. “It’s almost impossible to get my kids
into special ed,” said Arlene De Los Santos of Patti Welder Middle
School. “They have to have very, very severe needs for the school to
even consider it.”

 

December 9, 2016

Why it’s important to talk about successful black and Latino boys

Sonali Kohli, Los Angeles Times

While Chukwuagoziem Uzoegwu was growing up, his mother often would throw
what he and his brothers called “educational tantrums.” On those
weekends or on random days in the long stretch of summer
vacation, the Uzoegwu boys would be barred from TV “from sun up to
sunset,” he said. “Leisure time was spent reading. Leisure time was
spent writing,” said Uzoegwu, now 17 and a senior at King Drew Medical
Magnet High School of Medicine and Science. Uzoegwu attributes his
upbringing with his success as a student. He has a GPA above 4.0, is
taking six Advanced Placement classes and wants to attend Stanford
University. He was one of 201 L.A. County students interviewed for a new
UCLA report on the experiences of successful black and Latino teenage
boys in Los Angeles.

 

Majority of English-learner students are born in the United States, analysis finds

Corey Mitchell, Education Week

The majority of English-language learners in U.S. K-12 schools were born
in the United States, according to an analysis from the
Washington-based Migration Policy Institute. The institute’s analysis of
U.S. Census data found that 82 percent of prekindergarten to 5^th grade English-learners and 65 percent of 6^th and 12^th

grade English-learners are U.S.-born. The data included children
ages 5 to 17 who live with at least one parent. The decision to rely on
that set of numbers may have excluded sizable portions of the nation’s
K-12 ELL population, namely older English-learner students with
interrupted formal education and some undocumented students, including
unaccompanied minors separated from parents and other family.

 

6 potential brain benefits of bilingual education

Anya Kamentz, NPR

Brains, brains, brains. One thing we’ve learned at NPR Ed is that people
are fascinated by brain research. And yet it can be hard to point to
places where our education system is really making use of the latest
neuroscience findings. But there is one happy nexus where research is
meeting practice: bilingual education. “In the last 20 years or so,
there’s been a virtual explosion of research on bilingualism,” says
Judith Kroll, a professor at the University of California, Riverside.
Again and again, researchers have found, “bilingualism is an experience
that shapes our brain for a lifetime,” in the words of Gigi Luk, an
associate professor at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education. At the
same time, one of the hottest trends in public schooling is what’s often
called dual-language or two-way immersion programs.

 

December 2, 2016

President Obama won’t pardon DACA recipients, top aide says

Corey Mitchell, Education Week

President Barack Obama won’t issue a sweeping pardon to undocumented
immigrants brought to the United States as children because it “wouldn’t
protect a single soul from deportation,” a top White House aide says.
Obama ordered the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals policy in 2012,
establishing that hundreds of thousands of undocumented immigrants who
arrived in the U.S. as children could receive a two-year work
authorization and protection from deportation. Immigration advocates
worry that the policy, commonly known as DACA, could be a target of the
Trump administration’s plan to crack down on illegal immigration. Since
the program was created through executive authority, the incoming
president could alter or end DACA, Cecilia Muñoz, assistant to the
president and director of the White House’s domestic policy council,
said in a Center for Migration Studies podcast interview.

 

‘Makerspaces’ for science instruction also proving helpful for English learners

Pat Maio, EdSource

Educators are finding that the new “makerspace” movement – a strategy to
teach K-12 students science, math and technology through hands-on
activities – is providing the added benefit of helping English learners
become more proficient in the language. In makerspaces, students gather a
few times a week in a separate classroom, library or museum for a group
project using such technologies and materials as 3D printing, robotics,
microprocessors, textiles, wood and wires to construct robots and other
electronic gadgets. The teaching technique has been around since the
early 2000s, and educators have applauded the idea for helping teach
science, especially at a time when California and other states are
phasing in the Next Generation Science Standards, which emphasize
practical application of science over rote learning.

 

Millions have dyslexia, few understand it

Gabrielle Emanuel, NPR

“It’s frustrating that you can’t read the simplest word in the world.”
Thomas Lester grabs a book and opens to a random page. He points to a
word: galloping. “Goll—. G—. Gaa—. Gaa—. G—. ” He keeps trying. It is as
if the rest ­­of the word is in him somewhere, but he can’t sound it
out. “I don’t … I quit.” He tosses the book and it skids along the
table. Despite stumbling over the simplest words, Thomas — a
fourth-grader — is a bright kid. In fact, that’s an often-misunderstood
part of dyslexia: It’s not about lacking comprehension, having a low IQ
or being deprived of a good education. It’s about having a really hard
time reading. Dyslexia is the most common learning disability in the
United States. It touches the lives of millions of people, including me
and Thomas. Just like Thomas, I spent much of my childhood sitting in a
little chair across from a reading tutor.

 

November 18, 2016

Los Angeles students stage walkouts to protest President-elect Trump

Joy Resmovits, Sonali Kohli, and Veronica Rocha, Los Angeles Times
Thousands of Los Angeles-area high school students walked out of their
classrooms Monday morning, streaming into the streets for several hours
to protest President-elect Donald Trump. Many were too young to vote
but said their futures were at stake and so their voices needed to be
heard. They identified themselves proudly on handmade signs and flags as
Latinos, transgender and supporters of women’s rights. “A lot of us
don’t agree with what Donald Trump is saying,” said Evelyn Aguilar, a
15-year-old sophomore at Collegiate Charter High School in East L.A.,
who protested in her school uniform. “A lot of people are worried about
being deported and violence against them because of their sexual and
ethnic identity.”

 

At Alameda schools, racist graffiti met by mass ‘greeting’ events

Jill Tucker, San Francisco Chronicle
The racist graffiti painted on the walls at Edison Elementary School in
Alameda over the weekend was gone, but parents and students refused to
let the hateful message linger in anyone’s mind Monday as they lined the
school walkway to greet all families with a warm welcome. The racist
tags appeared overnight Friday in five places on the school building and
were removed Saturday morning. Police are investigating, said school
district Superintendent Sean McPhetridge. The crime was one of hundreds
of racially charged incidents reported across the country after the
election of Donald Trump, including the waving of the Confederate flag
at the Veterans Day parade in Petaluma and the painting of the words
“Heil Trump” and a swastika near a San Diego bus stop.

 

Bilingual education vote in California another shift from bitter 1990s conflicts

Louis Freedberg, EdSource
The overwhelming approval by California voters of an initiative to end
restrictions on bilingual education in its public schools marks another
significant shift from the political expressions of racial and ethnic
resentments that swirled across the state during the 1990s. Its passage
highlights the changes that have occurred in California over the past
two decades – the inexorable shift to a multiracial and multiethnic
society – along with a realization that multilingualism is a benefit,
not a disadvantage, in a world of global communication. With a 72.6
percent yes vote, the passage of Proposition 58 last Tuesday could not
have been more definitive. The initiative received majority support in
each of the state’s 58 counties.

 

November 11, 2016

This is what California’s teenagers want[ed] from the next president (10/19/16)

Sonali Kohli, Los Angeles Times

Most teenagers can’t vote in this election. But they know what they’d
like to say to the next president. L.A. Times High School Insider asked
current and recent high school students what issues are important to
them, and what they want the next president to know. More than 140
students chimed in, most from Southern California. Many asked
for immigration reform so they won’t have to be afraid that
they’ll return home from school to find their parents deported. They
want college to be affordable so they’re not weighed down by student
debt before they get a chance to contribute to their country. They want
to know that the president will put aside partisan politics and lead.
They also want to protect the marginalized: those who fear being shot by
police, those who need safe bathrooms.

 

Voters embrace bilingual education, extend taxes in prop. 58 and 55 victories

Ana Tintocalis, KQED News

California has made a huge about-face when it comes to bilingual
education in public schools, approving Proposition 58. The significance
of this initiative underscores the changing demographics and cultural
shifts in the Golden State. “I’m really elated right now, as a teacher
and as a Californian,” said Anne Zerrien-Lee, who teaches first grade at
Aldama Elementary, a Spanish-English dual-language school in Highland
Park in Los Angeles. “I think this shows that people are realizing the
great benefit to our students of learning in two languages.” Eighteen
years ago, voters approved Proposition 227, the English in Public
Schools initiative, which required schools to teach all students in
“English only” unless parents obtained a waiver for their child.
Proposition 58 will repeal key provisions of Proposition 227, thereby
eliminating the English-only mandate.

 

November 4, 2016

Schools to face teacher shortage if voters end ban on bilingual education

Ashley Hopkinson, EdSource
Voters will decide Tuesday whether to expand bilingual education
programs in California schools, bringing an end to an almost 20-year
restriction on their growth. But passage could create a new challenge:
how to find enough bilingual teachers amid an ongoing shortage of
teachers, especially those who can teach in multiple languages. “Right
now there are people who want to mount programs and they are not able to
do it,” UCLA research professor Patricia Gandara said of Proposition
58. “There is already a demand that cannot be met, and this will
increase that demand.”

 

Hiding in plain sight: The adult literacy crisis

Valerie Strauss, The Washington Post; Lecester Johnson, CEO and president of the Academy of Hope Adult Public Charter School
There is a literacy problem in the nation’s capital, but I’m not talking
about young people who can’t read. Many adults — perhaps even parents
sitting next to you at back-to-school night — don’t possess academic
skills beyond those of a middle-school student. According to data from
the 2014 U.S. Census Bureau, 21 percent — or nearly 60,000 —  of working
age adults in the city lack a high school diploma. At the same time, 19
percent of adults cannot read a newspaper, much less complete a job
application, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.

 

Teachers underestimate girls’ math abilities, report suggests

Kate Stoltzfus, Education Week
What is keeping girls from pursuing opportunities and careers in math?
Certain barriers could be perpetuated by their teachers, a new study
suggests. Starting as early as kindergarten, teachers perceive boys’
math ability as higher than girls’, regardless of the students’ learning
styles and levels of achievement, according to researchers from New
York University, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and
West Chester University in a study published last week in AERA Open.
This perception at such an early age could affect girls’ confidence and
aptitude for math and prevent them from pursuing future STEM
opportunities, the researchers wrote.

 

October 28, 2016

How we teach English learners: 3 basic approaches

Claudio Sanchez, NPR

In a small room in Philadelphia’s school administration building,
Rosario Maribel Mendoza Lemus, 16, sits in a corner, rubbing sweaty
palms on her jeans. In front of her is a binder with a test she has to
take before she’s assigned to a new school. A counselor hovers over her
shoulder, pointing to a drawing of a book. She asks, in English: “Do you
know what that is?” “No,” says Rosario, who arrived this summer from
Honduras, where she made it no further than the sixth grade. She keeps
shaking her head, and it’s clear that Rosario does not understand
anything the counselor is saying. There are 5 million students like
Rosario — English Language Learners or ELLs — living in the U.S., and
we’re going to spend much of the next year reporting on them. They raise
one of the biggest questions facing educators: What’s the best way to
teach English without losing time on the content students need to learn?

 

SDSU professor revives fight to change Aztec mascot

Gary Warth, The San Diego Union-Tribune

San Diego State University professor is bringing up a new argument to revisit an old fight.

American Indian Studies professor Ozzie Monge would like his school to
drop its Aztec mascot, which he finds racist, and replace it with a
non-human character. Others have asked for the mascot to be dropped
because they see it as racist, but he is adding a new objection to his
case. Monge says the school should have never adopted the mascot in the
first place because it perpetuates the misconception that the Aztecs
lived in the southwest United States.

 

One of America’s ‘best’ school districts is actually kind of racist, report says

Collier Meyerson, Business Insider

A big sign that reads “America’s best urban schools” hangs in the window
of the building where Long Beach Unified School District board meetings
are held, says Sarah Omojola, one of the co-authors of a
damning  report released Tuesday  that admonishes the California
district for mistreating its students of color. It’s ironic considering
“Untold Stories Behind One of America’s Best Urban School Districts”
describes how such students are disproportionately punished, suspended,
and policed. The report was compiled by the Children’s Defense
Fund-California, a nonprofit child advocacy organization, and Public
Counsel, a nonprofit law firm that provides services to low-income
Americans.

 

October 21, 2016

2,000 Seattle teachers wear ‘Black Lives Matter’ shirts to class

Paige Cornwell, The Seattle Times

About 2,000 Seattle educators wore Black Lives Matter shirts at their
schools Wednesday to call for racial equity in education. Schools across
the district held “Black Lives Matter at School” rallies before classes
began for the day. Students, parents and teachers also wore stickers
and buttons emblazoned with the “Black Lives Matter” slogan. The purpose
of the day was to affirm that “black lives matter in the public
schools,” according to organizers, who are members of Social Equality
Educators, a group of educators within the Seattle teachers union.
Teachers also wanted to show their support for John Muir Elementary,
which had its “Black Men Uniting to Change the Narrative” event canceled
last month after receiving a threat over teachers’ plans to wear Black
Lives Matter shirts.

 

The right to remain a student: How California school policies fail to protect and serve

Linnea Nelson, Victor Leung, and Jessica Cobb, ACLU

The ACLU of California (ACLU) is one of the first organizations to
analyze recently-released data from the U.S. Department of Education
Civil Rights Data Collection for the 2013-2014 school year. In that
dataset, California K-12 schools reported 22,746 student referrals to
police and 9,540 student arrests. We uncovered troubling statistics
showing that these police interactions disproportionately affect
students of color, students with disabilities, and low-income students.

 

Some say computer coding is a foreign language

Gaby Galvin, U.S. News

As computer coding has become an increasingly sought-after skill, more
K-12 schools are working it into their curriculums. Some states have
considered allowing students to forgo foreign language for coding
classes, despite opposition from educators. There’s a debate over
whether it’s appropriate to teach coding in elementary schools,
with fierce opinions on each side. When it comes to allowing coding to
fill foreign language requirements, though, most educators agree: Coding
should be added to curriculums, but not at the expense of foreign
language classes.

 

October 14, 2016

“The measure of any society is how it treats its women and girls.”

Michelle Obama, USA TV, YouTube

“On Tuesday at the White House we celebrated the International Day of
the Girl and Let Girls Learn and it was a wonderful celebration. I had
the pleasure of spending hours talking to some of the most amazing young
women you will ever meet… I thought it would be important to remind
these young women how valuable and precious they are. I wanted them to
understand that the measure of any society is how it treats its women
and girls. And I told them that they deserve to be treated with dignity
and respect, and I told them that they should disregard anyone who
demeans or devalues them, and that they should make their voices heard
in the world. That was Tuesday. And now here I am out on the campaign
trail in an election where we have consistently been hearing hurtful,
hateful language about women.”

 

Bilingual education poised for a comeback in California schools

Corey Mitchell, Education Week

Nearly 20 years after voting to restrict bilingual education in a state
with more than 1 million schoolchildren who don’t speak English as their
first language, California voters appear poised to reverse that ban.
Next month, voters will decide the fate of a statewide ballot question
that would bring an end to the restrictions of Proposition 227 and close
out California’s official era of English-only instruction.

 

How the stress of racism affects learning

Melinda D. Anderson, The Atlantic

For 15-year-old Zion Agostini, the start of each school day is a new
occasion to navigate a minefield of racial profiling. From an early age,
walking home from elementary school with his older brother, Agostini
took note of the differential treatment police gave to black people in
his community: “I [saw] people get stopped … get harassed … get arrested
for minor offenses.” Almost a decade later, Agostini said he now faces
the same treatment as a sophomore at Nelson Mandela School for Social
Justice in Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood. “Me being a black
male, I’m more likely to be stopped and frisked by a cop. Then, [I’m]
going to school with more cops … [messing] with me at 7 in the morning.”
The strain of these interactions is heightened by the daily routine of
passing through a metal detector, emptying pockets, and removing
clothing that frequently makes him late to his first-period class.

 

October 7, 2016

Ivy League professor: ‘I would much rather my own children interact with drugs than with the police’

Carl L. Hart, The Washington Post

For the past few years, like academic semesters, the killing of black
people by the police has been on a regular schedule. The explanation
script, always controlled by the police, is familiar and tired. The
deceased person’s reputation is dragged through the mud. He had a gun or
she was under the influence of some drug; therefore, deadly force was
necessary. Video footage almost always contradicts this official
account. But it doesn’t seem to matter because the police are rarely
held accountable in such cases. As a result, there is community outrage
that sometimes reaches the level of unrest. Authorities call for calm
and peace — rather than justice — and then we are forced to have the
same national conversation about race and diversity that we have had for
more than 50 years. The only thing that changes is the names of the
pundits paraded before the public. As a professor, a black professor, I
often think about the impact that this has on my students, especially
the black students. What messages does it send to them?

 

The unintended consequences of taking a hard line on school discipline

Clyde Haberman, The New York Times

It did not take long for school safety agents in New York to find their
first gun of the new school year. Day 1 had barely begun at a Brooklyn
high school last month when the officers stopped a 15-year-old student
who had stowed a loaded .22-caliber pistol in his backpack and thought
he could pass it through a metal scanner. In short order, the boy was
led away by the police. Also in short order, the city’s Department of
Education issued a statement invoking a two-word phrase that has
virtually been holy writ in classrooms around the country for the past
quarter of a century: “There is zero tolerance for weapons of any kind
in schools.” It is hard to imagine many law-abiding citizens disagreeing
that the acceptance level for students carrying guns, knives, drugs or
other harmful items should be nonexistent. But the concept of zero
tolerance has come to encompass such a broad range of disruptive actions
that roughly three million schoolchildren are suspended each year, and
several hundred thousand are arrested or given criminal citations.

 

STEM women band together to overcome underrepresentation

Casey Leins, U.S. News

When 32-year-old Amy Orsborn was studying engineering physics as an
undergraduate at Case Western Reserve University, she didn’t even
realize she was the only female in her class – until a male peer pointed
it out, that is. Once she realized her classmate was right, she began
to doubt her academic abilities, even as she went on to earn a Ph.D. in
bioengineering at the University of California—Berkeley. “I think that
basically once I realized that I was one of the only women, it really
dovetailed with when classes started getting really hard,” Orsborn
says.”So rather than just thinking ‘this is a hard class,’ I really
started feeling like ‘maybe I’m not cut out for this,’ ‘maybe there’s a
reason there are no women,’ and it was really tough.”

 

September 30, 2016

Nearly half of U.S. states offer special recognition for bilingual graduates

Corey Mitchell, Education Week

Twenty-two states and the District of Columbia are promoting bilingualism among K-12 students by offering the seal of biliteracy—special recognition on high school diplomas for graduates who demonstrate fluency in two or more languages. The popularity of the seals of biliteracy stems in part from the expansion of dual-language programs across public schools that bring both native English-speakers and English-language learners together into classrooms to learn all academic content in English and the target language.

 

Obama administration gives historic control of education system to Navajo Nation

Vincent Schilling, Indian Country Today Media Network

In what Navajo Nation tribal leaders lauded as an historic agreement with the Bureau of Indian Education and the Department of the Interior, the Obama Administration has approved the first phase of the Navajo Nation’s request to implement an alternative system of accountability for schools. In addition to giving control to the Navajo Nation as to how they teach their Navajo youth, the Obama Administration also is issuing two new rounds of federal grants totaling nearly $25 million to support native youth and educators.

Eye-tracking technology shows that preschool teachers have implicit bias against black boys

Melissa Healy, Los Angeles Times

For African American boys, the presumption of guilt starts before they have entered a kindergarten classroom, new research shows. In a study presented Wednesday to a meeting of education policy officials, researchers found that pre-K educators who were prompted to expect trouble in a classroom trained their gaze significantly longer on black students, especially boys, than they did on white students.

September 23, 2016

California passes game-changing ethnic studies bill

Roque Planas, Huffington Post

California Gov. Jerry Brown (D) signed a landmark bill Tuesday ordering the creation of a model ethnic studies course for state high schools, handing a major victory to educators who contend that school curricula fail to reflect the diversity of student bodies. The bill’s aims seem modest. It directs the state’s Instructional Quality Commission to field a group of scholars and school teachers to create a model ethnic studies curriculum with standards that any state school could implement. But Nolan Cabrera, an education professor at the University of Arizona who has researched the impact of such courses on Hispanic students, said the California bill promised to help earn the field wider acceptance.

 

As students join national anthem protests, how should schools respond?

Evie Blad, Education Week

A silent act of protest started by San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick has spread beyond the NFL and onto the sidelines of many high schools in recent weeks as young players join in. Kaepernick, troubled by police treatment of black Americans, has stirred up both admiration and controversy for his decision to kneel during the national anthem rather than stand with his hand over his heart. And, as news stories from around the country show, some educators have been troubled by student athletes’ decisions to follow his lead.

September 16, 2016

Nearly half a million U.S. citizens are enrolled in Mexican schools. Many of them are struggling

Kate Linthicum, Los Angeles Times

Two decades ago, a team of U.S. and Mexican researchers descended on Dalton, Ga., to study the growing number of Mexican immigrants who had come to work in the city’s carpet mills. Victor Zuñiga, a sociologist at the Monterrey Institute of Technology and Higher Education, was interested in what the demographic shift meant for local schools, so he sat down with a teacher who told him something he couldn’t get out of his head.  “The problem with Latino students,” she said, “is they disappear.” Zuñiga returned to Mexico intent on finding out what had happened to those kids, many of whom had left the U.S. after family members were deported.

When school feels like prison

Melinda D. Anderson, The Atlantic

In December 2012, a Senate subcommittee was convened to examine the school-to-prison pipeline, a national trend in which overly punitive school discipline policies push students out of school and into the criminal-justice system. Among the witnesses at the first-ever congressional hearing on this issue was Edward Ward, at the time an honor-roll student in his sophomore year at DePaul University and a recent graduate of Orr Academy on the West Side of Chicago. He offered an eye-opening first-hand account of his high-school experience. “From the moment we stepped through the doors in the morning, we were faced with metal detectors, X-ray machines, and uniformed security,” said Ward, describing a high-poverty, majority-black campus “where many young people … feel unwelcome and under siege.”

 

New requirements on public meetings, notices and records

Tom Chorneau, Cabinet Report

Legislation signed late last week will require school districts to provide new notice to property owners about parcel taxes, and give new flexibility in posting public meeting information and responding to records requests. AB 2257 by Assemblyman Brian Maienschein, R-San Diego, will allow local government agencies–including school districts–to fulfill existing public meeting notification requirements using the Internet beginning in January, 2019. The author noted in a statement earlier this summer, that the Ralph M. Brown Act was originally adopted in 1953 and needs to be updated to account for the many changes in technology. AB 2257, among other things, will better ensure that public meeting notices will be posted in a consistent, visible location on an agency’s homepage.

 

September 9, 2016

The lasting impact of mispronouncing students’ names

Clare McLaughlin, NEAToday

Taking the attendance at the beginning of class may seem a routine if not mundane task to many educators. But to students, their name can be a powerful link to their identity. Pronouncing students names correctly – during attendance, a classroom activity, or any other time of the school day –  should always be a priority for any classroom teacher. Names holds ancestral and historical significance for many minority, immigrant and English learning students. Names bring stories, which students are often forced to adapt to an “Americanized” context. That transition, however, is often painful and forces many students to take on a name that is not their own.

Preschool suspensions really happen and that’s not ok with Connecticut

Cory Turner, NPR

Every year, thousands of children are suspended from preschool. Take a second to let that sink in. According to the U.S. Department of Education, 6,743 children who were enrolled in district-provided pre-K in 2013-14 received one or more out-of-school suspensions. And that’s just public

 pre-K. Still more children were likely suspended from the nation’s many privately-run preschools and day cares. While most suspensions come as the result of a child’s disruptive, sometimes violent, behavior, experts and advocates now argue that suspending a 3- or 4-year-old, no matter how bad the behavior, is a bad idea.

In Detroit, freedom schools offer an alternative to city’s struggling education system

Zenobia Jeffries, Yes! Magazine

Now that her daughter is in high school, Moore still finds herself fighting. Because of budget cuts, after-school programs have been reduced, teachers have been laid off, and the remaining classes are overcrowded. Moore’s activism soon evolved from watching out for her own kids to advocating for the rest of the district’s children. At a community meeting earlier this year, Moore called on parents to boycott the schools. This captured the attention of local activist group Detroiters Resisting Emergency Management (D-REM), which turned to a legacy of the 1960s civil rights movement for a solution: Freedom Schools.

September 2, 2016

Schools that teach in two languages foster integration—so how come so many families can’t find programs?

Conor Williams and Catherine Brown, The Hechinger Report

Fortunately, this round of interest in integration is sparking in a new
context. America’s schools and communities are more diverse than ever —
particularly in regards to language. For the first time in history, our
public schools are majority minority. These new conditions suggest new
opportunities for integrating schools through instructional programs
that actually require

diverse student enrollment to function.

 

 

Children from “underserved minority” backgrounds have strengths for learning

Barbara Rogoff, University of California, Santa Cruz; AERA Ed-Talk

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=81ecAsH2FP0

 

 

Political education in polarized times

Diana E. Hess, University of Wisconsin-Madison; AERA Ed-Talk

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uP-4Qs2vmPg

August 26, 2016

We must talk openly about real reasons for racial disparities

Judge Steven Teske, Juvenile Justice Information Exchange

Let’s talk about race. The mention of race stirs emotions that are
usually not expressed for fear of the response. For many years, this
chilling effect created the mirage that race relations were not so bad.
We mask the problems that have been festering for years in order to keep
interactions between people of different races peaceful. Many white
people suppress comments about race for fear of the response, especially
in racially mixed settings. That began after the passage of the civil
rights laws of the ’50s and ’60s, leading to a congenial demeanor toward
our fellow citizens of color. This creates the impression — for white
people, at least — that race relations are improving. Black people,
however, have not been fooled.

 

Corporal punishment use found in schools in 21 states

Sarah D. Sparks & Alex Harwin, Education Week

Corporal punishment has declined so rapidly in the United States in the
last 15 years that many people think it’s practically nonexistent in
modern American public schools. To the contrary, more than 109,000
students were paddled, swatted, or otherwise physically punished in U.S.
classrooms in 2013-14, according to Education Week Research Center
analyses of the most recent wave of federal civil rights data.

 

Without local school boards, parents in poor communities lose their vote

Lily Altavena, Rose Velazquez, and Natalie Griffin, The Hechinger Report

In at least 20 states, lawmakers have stripped locally elected school
board members of their power in impoverished, mostly minority
communities, leaving parents without a voice – or a vote – in their
children’s education, according to a News21 state-by-state analysis of
school takeovers.

August 19, 2016

CA voters will revisit bilingual education in November

Press Play with Madeleine Brand, KCRW; Guest: Patricia Gándara, UCLA

As Los Angeles public school students return to school Tuesday, more of
them will enter language immersion programs. It’s an approach that’s
become more and more popular despite Proposition 227, the state law that
practically banned bilingual education back in 1998. A measure on the
November ballot would repeal most of Proposition 227, effectively
allowing teachers to teach in languages other than English. If it
passes, how will instruction change for the 1.3 million English learners
in California’s public schools?

 

How LA Unified plans to help schools track English Learners to proficiency

Kyle Stokes, KPCC

Back in her days as principal of a Los Angeles Unified school, Hilda
Maldonado remembers sifting through lists of students still learning
English, trying to figure out which ones needed help. She was trying to
figure out which of these English learners had checked all three boxes
to be officially “reclassified” as proficient in the language: they
needed to pass California’s language proficiency exam; pass the same
standardized tests as their English-speaking peers; and get good grades.

 

Key education bills still alive – and some that aren’t

EdSource staff, EdSource

The Legislature has less than three weeks to act on important
remaining education bills. Many of the major education bills that were
introduced at the start of the year, such as teacher evaluation reforms,
either have died or, like more money for college preparatory courses,
been incorporated into next year’s state budget. Of a dozen noteworthy
bills still alive when the Legislature went on vacation in July, several
were killed without explanation by the Assembly and Senate
Appropriations committees in a crush of activity last week. Here’s a
status report on nine of the survivors and three of the deceased.

 

August 12, 2016

Dual language programs could get boost with initiative on November ballot

Michael Janofsky, EdSource

With a growing number of parents embracing the value of their children
learning a second language, nine more dual immersion programs are coming
to L.A. Unified when schools open next week. Among the additions are
one in Armenian and another in Arabic, giving the district 65 such
programs, a 25 percent increase over the last three years.

 

Bullied by the badge?

Kyle Spencer, The Hechinger Report

Keyla Walker, a recent graduate of Terry High School, says she still
remembers police yanking her off a school bus to arrest her four years
ago, following a fight she says didn’t even involve her. She still does
not totally understand why, but on a warm morning during her freshman
year, she and her twin sisters — both juniors — were rounded up after
one of the twins slapped another student during the ride to school. All
three girls were ushered into the principal’s office. They eventually
were shackled and transported to a juvenile jail, where they were locked
up.

 

 

What it’s like to be college-bound and worried about your immigration status

Sam Gringlas, NPR

Mayte Lara Ibarra and Larissa Martinez had just finished their senior
year of high school when they each decided to go public with their
immigration status. Both Texas students came to the U.S. illegally, and
they didn’t want to keep that fact a secret any longer. Ibarra
identified herself on Twitter as one of the 65,000 undocumented youth
who graduate high school in the U.S. Martinez revealed her status in the
commencement speech she delivered at graduation. Their actions sparked
support and pointed criticism. That was more than a month ago. Now, with
the media frenzy behind them, they both say they don’t regret the
choice they made to speak up. Next month, Ibarra heads to the University
of Texas-Austin and Larissa to Yale University.

August 5, 2016

U.S. wants one million students studying Mandarin by 2020

Corey Mitchell, Education Week

A multinational effort to boost the number of U.S. students studying
abroad in China has expanded its focus to stateside Mandarin language
learning. The push, led by the US-China Strong Foundation

,
aims to increase the number of American students studying the language
to 1 million by 2020, a fivefold increase. The effort recognizes the
growing importance of U.S.-China relations and aims to prepare a new
generation of U.S. citizens to engage with China through commerce and
culture.

 

Special program for deaf and hard-of-hearing English learners closes reading, writing gap

Elizabeth Aguilera, KPCC

When Imelda Centeno was a toddler she could only say four words. “Agua,
leche, papa, mama,” recalls her mom, Marcelina Rojas. That wasn’t
necessarily unusual for a toddler; Rojas just thought her daughter was
going to be a late talker, like many kids. But when Centeno was 3 1/2,
Rojas learned her daughter is profoundly hard of hearing.

 

Teachers, dishwashers, engineers: Others like Gaspar Marcos who moved to the U.S. without their parents

Tessa Weinberg, Daniela Gerson, Los Angeles Times

In the past five years, more than 100,000 children and teens have
crossed the border between the United States and Mexico without their
parents. Gaspar Marcos, an 18-year-old who lives in Los Angeles, is one
of them. A recent story about how he works until 3 a.m. and gets to
school by 8 a.m. generated a tremendous response. Of the more than
12,000 comments shared, dozens of readers told stories of how they moved
to the United States without their parents. Monier Ouabira of Morocco
remembers being abandoned at the airport and spending his first few days
in the U.S. sleeping there. Edilsa Lopez of Guatemala, who traversed
the desert at 13, was kidnapped and separated from her family. Giorgio
Kyle of Azerbaijan said he worked for five months straight for $150 a
week without taking one day off. Here are their stories.

July 29, 2016

From ‘invisible’ to ‘important’: A teen finds beauty in her story through poetry

Priska Neely, KPCC
As part of our new series Age of Expression, teen artists from around Southern California share stories about the art they create and why they do it.
Like many artists, Vanessa Tahay’s poetry was born out of pain. In her poem, “A Dream in Five Days,” she details her journey from Guatemala for the United States as an unaccompanied minor.

U.S. Secretary of Education: Let’s educate, not incarcerate

John B. King, Jr., Education Week
The return on investment in American education to individuals and to society at large has been growing in both relative and absolute terms since 1980. It is well known that, statistically, people who are well-educated earn substantially more, pay more in taxes, are less likely to be unemployed, live longer, are healthier, and are more likely to vote. Yet, in spite of that, our society is increasing spending on locking people up faster than it is on educating them. Our investments in punishing people for their failures are outpacing our investments in ensuring their success.

Educating students with benefit of indigenous knowledge

Sharon Nelson-Barber, WestEd; AERA Knowledge Forum Research Fact Sheet
Major nationwide educational reforms of the 21st century have had the goal of improving educational outcomes for U.S. students, and for under-achieving students in particular. These efforts have resulted in few measurable improvements in the educational achievement of American Indian and Alaska Native students (The Education Trust, 2013; The White House, 2014). Numerous reforms implemented over many generations have proven to be not only ineffective, but also counterproductive for indigenous students’ educational achievement and social well-being—resulting in cultural trauma, loss of cultural identity and decreased self- efficacy (The White House, 2014). The results of these policies continue to disadvantage indigenous children’s ability to thrive in educational systems, and are compounded by another urgent concern: the rapid decline in the use of heritage languages and practices (House, 2005). The difficulties faced by indigenous learners and their communities can be conceived of as a “perfect storm” and threaten to destroy the timeless treasures of humanity that are indigenous knowledge systems.

 

 

July 22, 2016

California school officials adopt landmark LGBT coursework

Jill Tucker, SF Gate
State officials on Thursday added the evolution of gay rights and the contributions of lesbian and gay figures in history to the list of topics that public-school students will be taught in California, a landmark move that puts the ongoing LGBT civil rights fight into the mainstream of public education.

After hours of testimony, state board adopts history guidelines

John Fensterwald, EdSource
After listening to five hours of charged disagreements by Hindus, Muslims and others on how their religions and culture should be depicted in California classrooms, the State Board of Education adopted new social science guidelines Thursday that will stress teaching critical thinking and objective inquiry so that students can determine historical truths for themselves.

The long-term effects of social-justice education on black students

Melinda D. Anderson, The Atlantic
Last summer, the high-school English teacher T.J. Whitaker revised the reading list for his contemporary literature course with the addition of a new title—The Savage City, a gritty nonfiction account of race and murder in New York City in the 1960s. The 24-year teaching veteran said he chose the book to give his students at Columbia High School in Maplewood, New Jersey, a chance to read “an honest depiction of the Black Panther Party and the corruption that existed in the NYPD during the ‘60s.” In a school where black students are half of the student body—and a photo of two white peers in blackface caused an uproar in May—Whitaker’s classroom is a space for students to examine issues such as oppression, classism, and abuse of power. And it’s yielding results.  

 

 

July 15, 2016

How marginalized families are pushed out of PTAs

Casey Quinlan, The Atlantic

When Rolling Terrace Elementary School in Takoma Park, Maryland, told parents in the fall of 2014 that it would allow students to use Chromebooks as a way to bridge the digital divide between low-income families and affluent families, there were mixed reactions. The plan was aimed at helping students become more adept at using technology, but the affluent parents, most of whom were white, were apprehensive about their children getting more screen time.

 

For LGBTQ students, author says, safety is ‘not enough’

Kendra Yoshinaga, NPR

Across the country there are stories like this: In a high-poverty area of Honolulu, a high school social worker helps her Asian-Pacific Islander students talk with their families about being LBGTQ. At a time when LGBTQ concerns in schools are increasingly visible — and often debated — teachers and administrators are looking for new ways to support students.

 

Nation’s largest teacher union adopts policy statement on school discipline and the school-to-prison pipeline, rebalancing the politics of reform

Derek Black, Education Law Prof Blog

Yesterday, the Nation’s largest professional employee organization and largest teacher union, the National Education Association (NEA), adopted an official policy position on school discipline and the school-to-prison pipeline.  The prefatory language of the policy appropriately recognizes the major issues. 

 

 

July 8, 2016

Schools are under federal pressure to translate for immigrant parents

Tara García Mathewson, The Hechinger Report

When Dadhi Dahal first came to the United States in early 2009, the Bhutanese population in Syracuse, New York was quite small — the first refugees from Bhutan, fleeing ethnic cleansing policies in their home country, arrived in 2008, after they had spent years in refugee camps in Nepal. Fast forward eight years. The Bhutanese population has grown into a flourishing, tightly knit group of about 3,000 people. They are part of a substantial refugee population from South Asia, Africa and the Middle East that has transformed the city and its schools.  Students in the Syracuse City School District speak more than 70 different languages and four of the most common among them are Nepali, Karen, Somali, and Arabic.

 

New teaching strategies are designed to help English learners succeed

Theresa Harrington, EdSource

“Turn and talk to your partner,” Judith Franco told her 4th grade students, after prompting them to think of specific plants and animals that help each other survive. This is not an ordinary 4th grade science lesson. Franco’s classroom is a key part of a push in two California districts to use new instructional strategies to promote greater academic success among students not yet proficient in English.

 

Stop punishing black children just because they’re black

Andre Perry, The Hechinger Report

 

Schools should be held to higher standards than students. If schools irresponsibly impose discipline practices, then those rules (or leaders) should be expelled. However, when it comes to discipline, we give students the cane and schools a slap on the wrist. “I’ll say up front: I am not here to offer any hard-and-fast rules or directives,” said Secretary of Education John King in prepared remarks for the National Charter Schools Conference. Careful not to offend the charter school community, which upholds autonomy as sacred, King added, “But I believe the goal for all schools should be to create a school culture that motivates student to want to do the best.” Suspension and expulsion doesn’t work.

 

July 1, 2016

Report seeks English learner, special ed student supports

Theresa Harrington, EdSource

Teachers need special support and training to help English language learners and special education students meet Common Core standards, says a report by a Los Angeles area teachers group.

 

The benefits of teaching in two languages

Valeria Pelet, The Atlantic

From New York to Utah, U.S. schools have seen a steady rise in bilingual education. Dual-language immersion programs first appeared in the U.S. in the 1960s to serve Spanish-speaking students in Florida. Since then, the demand—and controversy—surrounding these programs has been widespread, and they now address the needs of more than 5 million students who are English-language learners in the country’s public-school system.

 

May 27, 2016

Border’s young people are ambitious, but face barriers

Tatiana Sanchez, The San Diego Union Tribune

Young people living along the U.S-Mexico border maintain close ties to both sides, often crossing for school or to see close family members. But the pressures associated with this constant migration can pose educational barriers for students, a new study shows.

 

California aims to reflect diversity in classroom studies

Janie Har, Associated Press, KPCC

How do you teach the history of the world in California schools, where nearly two-thirds of students are Latino or Asian, many from newly immigrated families? That’s the challenge facing a California panel charged with establishing a new history and social studies framework for the state’s 6.2 million public school students.

 

More instruments are on their way to LAUSD schools

Priska Neely, KPCC

At Huntington Park Elementary School on Friday, young musicians picked up their violins, clarinets, flutes and cornets and played songs like “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star” and “Hot Cross Buns” before a small group of parents in the auditorium. Most schools have culminating festivities like this around this time of year, but just several months ago, this particular showcase wouldn’t have been possible. In the fall, the school had no instruments and the L.A. Unified School District said it couldn’t provide them.

 

May 20, 2016

Mispronouncing students’ names: A slight that can cut deep

Corey Mitchell, Education Week

When people come across Michelle-Thuy Ngoc Duong’s name, they often see a stumbling block bound to trip up their tongues. The 17-year-old sees a bridge. A bridge spanning her parents’ journey from Vietnam to the United States. A bridge connecting the U.S.-born teen to Vietnamese culture. A bridge to understanding.

Report: Nation needs to replicate California’s English learner efforts

Adolfo Guzman-Lopez, KPCC

Nearly three out of four American public school classrooms now includes at least one student who is learning English as a new language, and California is emerging as a leader among states for helping long-term English learners get up to speed. That’s the conclusion of a 28-page report

out Wednesday from the publication Education Week, which details the rapid growth in the U.S. of the population of students whose first language isn’t English.

 

Study: Extended support eases transition for foster youth into adulthood

Susan Frey, EdSource

California foster youth who are taking advantage of newly extended services are having a smoother transition into adulthood, according to a study released this month. But the state needs to do more, the researchers say. Foster youth who remained in care after age 18 were more likely to be in school, had more social support, experienced fewer economic hardships and were receiving more supportive services than those who left care, according to the California Youth Transitions to Adulthood Study by researchers from Chapin Hall at the University of Chicago.

 

May 13, 2016

Exploring quality programs for English language learners in charter schools: A framework to guide future research

Peggie Garcia, P. Zitlali Morales, Education Policy Analysis Archives

Although there has been a great deal of debate about the effectiveness of charter schools in the research literature, there has been surprisingly little attention paid to English language learners (ELLs) in charter schools. Moreover, the charter school research has predominantly focused on whether or not charter schools are effective rather than how or why high-performing charter schools work, particularly for ELLs. We contend that researchers must expand their focus beyond access and achievement and begin to grapple with questions related to the quality of programs for ELLs in charter schools. To meet an emerging need in the field, we synthesize several strands of existing research—related to charter schools, school improvement, and ELLs in traditional public schools— to propose a five-component framework that describes essential elements of quality programs for ELLs in charter schools. We conclude with a discussion of implications of our framework for research, policy, and practice.

 

For stalled ELL students, graduation is often an elusive goal

Alyson Klein, Education Week

Three years ago, Kevin Pineda—who came to the United States from Guatemala at age 6—was failing or struggling in nearly all his classes at Fairfax High School here. He was on the verge of following his father’s advice to drop out of school and come work alongside him as an electrician. Part of what changed Pineda’s mind: the one class he liked and was beginning to succeed in, Advanced English Language Development. That class was a brand-new course aimed at students, who, like Pineda, had been enrolled in the Los Angeles Unified School District for years but never managed to “reclassify” and move on from the English-language-learner designation.

 

Yes, the feds could pull North Carolina’s education funding for violating transgender civil rights

Emma Brown, The Washington Post

North Carolina receives more than $4 billion in federal education funding each year. Now the federal government is considering withholding that money because, the Justice Department says, the state has passed a law that violates the civil rights of transgender individuals by forcing them to use bathrooms that correspond to the sex on their birth certificates instead of their gender identity. But would federal officials really withhold billions of dollars meant to help educate poor children, children with disabilities, and college students who can’t afford to go to school without federal aid? They’ve done it before.

 

May 6, 2016

Ethnic studies gaining momentum after slow growth in California school districts

Michael Janofsky, EdSource

An expansion of ethnic studies courses in some of California’s largest school districts is changing the way thousands of students are learning about the historical contributions of a wide range of racial and ethnic groups. Over the past few years, Los Angeles Unified, the state’s largest school district, and San Francisco Unified, the sixth biggest, have added courses in their high schools designed to broaden understanding of the roles played by African-Americans, Latinos and other racial and ethnic groups.

 

Biliteracy success: Preparing teachers, families

Kimberly Beltran, Cabinet Report

A pilot program being designed to boost the linguistic and literacy skills of preschool children learning two languages at once has caught enough attention at the White House that expectations are staff will issue a policy brief on the educational benefits of bilingualism next month. The Dual Language Learner Pilot, a project of the state’s First 5 California, is aimed at supporting teacher training and effective practices that improve educational gains of California’s more than 1.5 million dual language learners under the age of 5 who, by third grade, lag behind others in reading ability. The $16 million pilot program has been in the planning stage since last year but is moving closer to final design and its planned launch next January.

 

Special-education report makes one thing clear: There’s a lack of clarity on the issue.

Jay Mathews, The Washington Post

The biggest difference between schools I attended a half-century ago and schools I visit now is special education: It took a while for our country to grasp how to help students with extra needs.

 

April 29, 2016

Spanish declines and English is on the rise among U.S. Latinos

Cindy Carcamo, Los Angeles Times

A declining share of Latinos in the U.S. are speaking Spanish and a growing share only speaks English at home, according to findings in a study released Wednesday by the Pew Research Center.

 

#BlackGirlsMatter: Public scholarship engaging with the race/gender interaction in schools

Melissa Harris-Perry, Wake Forest University; Bettina L. Love, University of Georgia; Lori Patton Davis, Indiana University; Adrienne Dixson, University of Illinois; April L. Peters, University of Georgia; Terri Nicol Watson, City College of New York

AERA Presidential Session

In 2014, the White House’s Council on Women and Girls issued a report highlighting the progress of women and girls of color, most notably in education. Along with an increase in high school and college graduation rates it was reported, “Since 2009, both fourth and eighth grade math scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the largest nationwide assessment, have improved for all girls of color” (p. 2). Absent from this conversation, however, were the distinct challenges based on the intersection of race and gender that left Black girls with the least growth across all categories and contexts. This session seeks to open up new avenues of scholarship focused on the promises and perils Black girls and women encounter in PK – 20 systems. The session will also explore how such scholarship could inform policy-based solutions to improve the academic success and life chances of Black girls and women.

 

Education Department announces new tools to support successful reentry for formerly incarcerated youth and adults

U.S. Department of Education

The U.S. Department of Education, in partnership with the U.S. Department of Justice’s Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, announced today $5.7 million in new grants aimed at improving outcomes for students who have been involved in the criminal justice system. The Department also released a new toolkit providing guidance to educators and others to support a successful reentry system for formerly incarcerated youth and adults.

 

Education group enters ‘belly of the beast’ to oppose North Carolina’s LGBT law

Howard Blume, Los Angeles Times

Jennifer Wolfsie, like many visitors to Raleigh, N.C., wasted no time exploring the hip Southern city, ordering clams, beet salad and potatoes aligot at Death & Taxes on Hargett Street, finishing off with a nightcap at Fox Liquor Bar. But at each place the Midwest school board member left not only a tip but also a white paper square with a message about a new state law that critics say discriminates against gay, lesbian and transgender people. “I believe in equality for all,” said the paper, printed by the organizers of the education conference she was attending this month. “I will not return to the state until HB2 is repealed. Make North Carolina a place I want to visit again.”

 

April 22, 2016

CrossCheck: Dialogue over democracy

Jerry Kang, Vice Chancellor for Equity, Diversity and Inclusion, UCLA

My job as Vice Chancellor for Equity, Diversity and Inclusion is to build equity for all, and to make sure that there is an equal learning and working environment for everyone, regardless of political or religious affiliation. But if your name is plastered around campus, casting you as a murderer or terrorist, how could you stay focused on anything like learning, teaching, or research? In modern times, we may have to resign ourselves to the reality of negative, unfair, and often anonymous statements about us strewn throughout the Internet, with little practical recourse. But I refuse to believe that we can do nothing about hateful posters pushed into our school and workplaces by outsiders. Indeed, the recent Statement of Principles Against Intolerance adopted by the UC Regents encourage quick and forceful response (Principles i and j). This message is sent in that spirit.

 

Battle of bilingual education once again brewing in California

Lillian Mongeau, PBS

Last spring, 9-year-old Derrick Fields sat in his social studies classroom at Sherman Elementary School, learning about the creation of the telegraph. The machine was invented so that “someone can connect to someone who is far away,” he said. This was pretty normal stuff for a fourth grade history lesson, except for one thing: The entire lesson — from the textbooks to the teacher’s instructions to the students’ short essays — was in Spanish. In fact, half of Derrick’s time is spent learning in Spanish and the other half in English in what’s known as a dual language immersion program.

 

Supreme Court hears States’ challenge to Obama immigration program

Mark Walsh, Education Week

The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday appeared divided on whether Texas could challenge the Obama administration’s program offering relief from deportation and work permits to some 4 million unauthorized immigrant parents of U.S. citizen children.

 

This mom and teacher says strict school discipline for black kids is ‘deplorable’

Valerie Strauss, Jamila Carter, Answer Sheet

In many school districts across the country, black students in traditional public schools are suspended at rates much higher than for white students, as this University of Pennsylvania analysis shows. What’s more, some “no excuses” charter schools in urban areas operate with a philosophy that more discipline for black students is better, even for tiny infractions. In this post, Jamila Carter, a mother of three and an early childhood educator in Philadelphia, asks and answers the question of whether black students really need “no excuses” discipline. You can follow her Twitter at @jubimom. This appeared on the Edushyster website of education blogger and activist Jennifer Berkshire, who gave me permission to republish.

 

April 15, 2016

The rare district that recognizes gifted Latino students

Claudio Sanchez, NPR
Imagine you’re back in school, bored to death, with limited academic options. Because you’re learning English, everybody assumes you’re not ready for more challenging work. What they don’t realize is that you’re gifted. Researchers say this happens to lots of gifted children who arrive at school speaking little or no English. These students go unnoticed, until someone taps into their remarkable talent and potential. Vanessa Minero Leon was lucky. She was one of those students who got noticed.

 

Why talented black and Hispanic students can go undiscovered

Susan Dynarski, The New York Times
Public schools are increasingly filled with black and Hispanic students, but the children identified as “gifted” in those schools are overwhelmingly white and Asian. The numbers are startling. Black third graders are half as likely as whites to be included in programs for the gifted, and the deficit is nearly as large for Hispanics, according to work by two Vanderbilt researchers, Jason Grissom and Christopher Redding.

 

Does ICE pressure schools for student info?

Emily Von Hoffmann, The Atlantic
Undocumented and mixed-status families (where some have citizen or resident status and others don’t) are increasingly hesitant to send their kids to school. In some areas, families with undocumented members are wary of using their real home address on school forms for fear that their information could be shared with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

 

April 8, 2016

Dual-language classes for kids grow in popularity

Janet Adamy, The Wall Street Journal

Penelope Spain is desperate to make her 3-year-old son fluent in a second language. Last year, the Washington, D.C., attorney competed with hundreds of other parents for a spot at several prekindergarten programs that teach lessons partly or mostly in Spanish. She struck out. “I sat on the couch and just cried endlessly,” she recalled. Now she has widened her search to French and Mandarin schools. Public schools that immerse students in a second language have become hot destinations for parents seeking a leg up for their children in a global economy. New York, Utah, Delaware and other states are adding classrooms where at least half of lessons are taught in a second tongue.

 

NYC to unveil big expansion of bilingual education programs in schools

Ben Chapman, New York Daily News

Big Apple public schools are going to become a bit more of a melting pot — at least linguistically. Schools Chancellor Carmen Fariña will unveil a plan Monday to open 38 bilingual programs at city schools starting in September, the Daily News has learned.

 

Sacrifice zones

Rosemarie Frascella, Rethinking Schools

The concept of sacrifice is nothing new for my immigrant students. They have heard, seen, and lived the sacrifices their family members made coming to the United States. Some risked their lives crossing deserts and borders; others sailed through the Caribbean Sea and Atlantic Ocean in pitch-black containers. Most left loved ones and land in order to survive. Their parents may not have a shot at the “American Dream,” but they have all sacrificed tremendously to give their children a chance to make it. However, the idea that they or their parents may not really have had a choice in the sacrifices they made is new to many of my students, who escaped lands and economies made uninhabitable by capitalism and its hunger for fossil fuels and profits.

April 1, 2016

Federal grants to boost teaching, studying of Native languages

Jackie Mader, Education Week

The U.S. Department of Education’s office of English-language acquisition is offering $3.2 million in grants to support the instruction and studying of various Native American languages, in an attempt to support the preservation of those languages and boost the education of Native youth.

 

The danger of teaching children to be ‘colorblind’

Marie-Anne Suizzo, Answer Sheet

Teaching young people about race and its role in the history, present and future of this country is as important as any other subject — but, as this post explains, one that many whites still grapple with. This was written by Marie-Anne Suizzo, an associate professor in the Department of Educational Psychology at the University of Texas at Austin and a Public Voices Fellow with the OpEd Project, a non-profit working to increase the range of public voices and ideas. Suizzo’s research focuses on parenting and child development across cultures and ethnicities.

 

Exclusive: Data shows 3 of the 5 biggest school districts hire more security officers than counselors

Matt Barnum, The 74

School security officers outnumber counselors in four out of the 10 largest public school districts in the country —  including three of the top five — according to data obtained by The 74. New York City, Chicago, Miami-Dade County, and Houston schools all employ more security staff than counselors.

March 24, 2016

Immigrant influxes put U.S. schools to the test

Corey Mitchell, Education Week

Bishar Hassan spends his days navigating the halls and classrooms of Talahi Elementary School, working to embrace and empower the dozens of Somali students who have arrived since the start of the year. Across town, his brother, Ahmed Hassan, fills a similar role at Discovery Community School, another campus that has experienced a recent surge in enrollment of Somali students. The Hassan brothers are part of a growing community of Somali residents in this central Minnesota city of 65,000. The recent influx of immigrant students is nothing new in the St. Cloud school district, where English-language-learner enrollment has spiked by 350 percent in the past 15 years.

 

Punishment shouldn’t keep students from learning

Pedro A. Noguera, The San Diego-Union Tribune

San Diego Unified School District is searching for new ways to address school discipline and its efforts should be applauded. The old way — relying on suspensions for even minor offenses — has been widely recognized as unfair and ineffective, both because it typically results in the most disadvantaged children being disproportionately punished and because it’s at odds with the goal of keeping kids in school. Since embarking on this search, suspensions at San Diego city schools have declined from 10.3 percent in 2009-10 to 5.8 percent in 2013-14.

 

Restorative justice also boosts school climate

Alisha Kirby, Cabinet Report

Restorative justice techniques often used to lower suspension and expulsion rates may also boost school climate by strengthening relationships between students and teachers, according to a recent study.

 

Study finds many charter schools feeding “school-to-prison pipeline”

Daniel J. Losen, Michael A. Keith II, Cheri L. Hodson, Tia E. Martinez, The Center for Civil Rights Remedies at the UCLA Civil Rights Project

A first-ever analysis of school discipline records for the nation’s more than 5,250 charter schools shows a disturbing number are suspending big percentages of their black students and students with disabilities at highly disproportionate rates compared to white and non-disabled student.

March 18, 2016

The black girl pushout  

Melinda D. Anderson, The Atlantic

The “good girl” and “bad girl” dichotomy, as chronicled by Monique W. Morris in Pushout: The Criminalization of Black Girls in Schools, is a condition that has plagued black girls and women for time immemorial. Society’s deeply entrenched expectations of black girls—influenced by racism and patriarchy—has led to a ritual whereby these young women are often mischaracterized, and mislabeled because of how they look, dress, speak, and act. In short, black girls are devalued based on how others perceive them.

 

The superior social skills of bilinguals

Katherine Kinzler, New York Times

Being bilingual has some obvious advantages. Learning more than one language enables new conversations and new experiences. But in recent years, psychology researchers have demonstrated some less obvious advantages of bilingualism, too. For instance, bilingual children may enjoy certain cognitive benefits, such as improved executive functioning—which is critical for problem solving and other mentally demanding activities. Now, two new studies demonstrate that multilingual exposure improves not only children’s cognitive skills but also their social abilities.

 

March 11, 2016

The ongoing battle over ethnic studies

Melinda D. Anderson, The Atlantic

In Tucson, Arizona, Che Guevara posters and Paulo Freire’s The Pedagogy of the Oppressed are the spark that set off a heated conflict over ethnic studies that has made national headlines for years. For critics, including two former state schools superintendents, the Mexican American studies program in the Tucson Unified School District is little more than divisive propaganda: “ethnic chauvinism” with a “very toxic effect … in an educational setting.” For supporters, reading literature on Chicano history in America and critical race theory is intended to close cultural gaps in the curriculum—and to close academic gaps for the district’s Hispanic students.

 

Book club helps immigrant mothers find joy in reading and support their kids’ education

Daniela Gerson, Los Angeles Times

Maria Onate had not read a book until her son started high school. Her illiterate parents ended her schooling when she was 15, informing her that she had to get ready for marriage and work to help support the family in their rancho in Puebla, Mexico. More than two decades later, she was shocked when the parent center coordinators at her son’s new high school, Bravo Medical Magnet, suggested she join a book club. She was there for her child’s education. She thought it was too late for her own.

 

English-learners are assets, John B. King Jr. tells educators in bilingual address

Corey Mitchell, Education Week

Acting Education Secretary John B. King Jr. told a gathering of English-language-learner educators that the nation’s new federal K-12 law could help broaden the definition of a well-rounded education to include biliteracy. In a three-minute video address to the National Association of Bilingual Education’s annual conference in Chicago, King touted the potential benefits of the Every Student Succeeds Act for English-learners and all students.

March 4, 2016

Commentary: Why CA’s ‘Multilingual Education Act’ matters: Politics, language and Los Angeles’ future

Conor P. Williams, LA School Report

Fittingly, in California, the campaign season will include a subplot — and perhaps a denouement — from one of the last rounds of American immigration anxiety. In 1998, Californians anxious about a recent influx of immigrants passed Proposition 227, a ballot measure that mandated English immersion for nearly all of the states’ multilingual students. This year, as the country argues over whether to build a wall on our southern border, Californians will vote on the Multilingual Education Act, a new ballot initiative that would update and improve Prop. 227 by expanding the availability of bilingual education models (including popular dual-immersion programs) for English language learners.

 

Ed. department to triple size of Native American youth grant program

Corey Mitchell, Education Week

The U.S. Department of Education is tripling the size of a grant program designed to help Native American students succeed in school. The Native Youth Community Projects will make $17.4 million available to organizations, after awarding $5.3 million in grants to a dozen recipients last year. The education department billed the grant program’s expansion as the federal government’s latest move in a broad effort to boost the college and career prospects for American Indian and Alaskan Native youth.

 

South Dakota governor vetoes bill that would have restricted transgender students’ access to school restrooms

Emma Brown, The Washington Post

South Dakota Gov. Dennis Daugaard (R) has vetoed a bill that would have been the first in the nation to restrict transgender students’ access to school restrooms and locker rooms, a move that came after LGBT-rights activists waged a furious campaign against the measure.

February 26, 2016

Black History Month in schools—Retire or reboot?

Melinda D. Anderson, The Atlantic

The seed of what is now known as Black History Month was planted in the doctoral thesis of Carter G. Woodson, a noted scholar, author, and co-founder of the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History. The son of former slaves, Woodson received a Ph.D. in 1912 from Harvard University, where he studied under renowned historians who minimized the importance and vitality of black history. But Woodson would not be deterred. He believed the heritage and contributions of black Americans was excluded from history, and he saw this knowledge as essential to social change.

Lives in limbo: Undocumented and coming of age in America

Roberto G. Gonzales, Forum Network

Over two million of the nation’s eleven million undocumented immigrants have lived in the United States since childhood. Due to a broken immigration system, they grow up to uncertain futures. In Lives in Limbo, Roberto G. Gonzales introduces us to two groups: the college-goers, like Ricardo, who had good grades and a strong network of community support that propelled him to college and DREAM Act organizing but still landed in a factory job a few short years after graduation, and the early-exiters, like Gabriel, who failed to make meaningful connections in high school and started navigating dead-end jobs, immigration checkpoints, and a world narrowly circumscribed by legal limitations. This vivid ethnography explores why highly educated undocumented youth share similar work and life outcomes with their less-educated peers, despite the fact that higher education is touted as the path to integration and success in America.

L.A. County spends more than $233,000 a year to hold each youth in juvenile lockup

Garrett Therolf, Los Angeles Times

Los Angeles County’s juvenile detention system was designed in an era when youth crime was on the rise. The number of juvenile arrests has fallen dramatically in recent years. Some say the system has not kept up with this shift, and now it’s costing taxpayers money.

February 19, 2016

 

Grammy nominee Jose-Luis Orozco on his bilingual children’s album

Deepa Fernandes, KPCC

It’s Grammy time. The big awards show is this Monday, here in Los Angeles at the Staples Center. There are of course the usual headliners, but also some artists you may not have heard of before. Jose-Luis Orozco doesn’t spend a lot of time in hip clubs or on arena tours. He’s most often seen performing on the local preschool and elementary school circuit. This year he’s nominated for a Grammy for Best Children’s Album for ¡Come Bien! Eat Right! The dual language album, made collaboration with Smithsonian Folkways, is all about the benefits of healthy eating.

 

Protecting our Muslim youth from bullying: The role of the educator

Jinnie Spiegler, Anti-Defamation League and Sarah Sisaye, Office of Safe and Healthy Students; Homeroom

Classrooms and schools should provide learning environments that are not only free from discrimination and harassment based on protected traits—including religion—but should also be conduits for students to build bridges with other students across different backgrounds, break down stereotypes, acknowledge and affirm important aspects of their identity, and learn how to be an ally when faced with bullying and bias.

Hillary Clinton’s plan to undo the school-to-prison pipeline, explained

German Lopez, Vox

At a speech in Harlem on Tuesday, Hillary Clinton will call for a $2 billion plan to help end punitive school policies that can push black children from schools to jails and prisons. The new $2 billion plan, which goes after the so-called “school-to-prison pipeline,” will incentivize the hiring of “school climate support teams” — made up of social workers, behavioral health specialists, and education practitioners — to work with school staff to reorient and develop comprehensive reform plans for school discipline policies.

 

February 12, 2016

Bilingual toddlers demonstrate greater cognitive flexibility, study finds

Peter Dockrill, Science Alert

Speaking more than one language at home doesn’t just expose young children to two sets of vocabularies – it could also confer hidden benefits to their cognitive control, according to a new study.

ICE agents won’t be going onto Los Angeles public school campuses

Sonali Kohli, Los Angeles Times

Immigration agents won’t be allowed onto the campuses of the Los Angeles Unified School District to look for undocumented students, the school board promised with a unanimous vote Tuesday.

Room to improve school services for LGBT students

Alisha Kirby, Cabinet Report

Even with all of the progress made in recent years to improve educational services for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender students, their well-being is still at risk in many schools with only a handful of districts attempting to address the issue through their Local Control Accountability Plans, advocates said.

‘Comfort women’ and a lesson in how history is shaped in California textbooks

Victoria Kim, Los Angeles Times

After nearly a decade of delays, California educators released a draft guideline that will shape how history is taught to students across the state. The nearly 1,000-page “History/Social Science framework” received little public attention and went largely unreported in mainstream media when it was announced in December.

February 5, 2016

New federal law puts spotlight on English learners

John Fensterwald, EdSource

In passing the Every Student Succeeds Act, Congress rolled back the federal government’s overall reach into testing requirements for K-12 education. But there is a significant exception: English learners.

 

The other children of Silicon Valley

Alia Wong, The Atlantic

Thousands of low-income kids—most of whom have immigrant parents—are missing out on the early education they need to keep up with their affluent peers.

The chilling rise of Islamophobia in our schools

Kristina Rizga, Mother Jones

Accusations, beatings, even death threats—that’s life for Muslim kids in America.

Legislator proposes new credentials for dance, theater teachers

Adolfo Guzman-Lopez, KPCC

In an effort to increase the number of public schools offering theater and dance classes and to lure more dance and theater professionals to teaching, Santa Monica-area State Senator Ben Allen unveiled a bill on Wednesday to create, for the first time, teaching credentials in those subjects.

January 29, 2016

English one day, Español the next: Dual-language learning expands with a South Bronx school as a model

Margaret Ramirez, The Hechinger Report

At Public School 73 in the South Bronx, 8-year-old Arlette Espallat is reading aloud in Spanish about animals found in “el bosque” or, the forest. Her voice rises as she brings the faraway images to the noisy classroom. Later in the week, Arlette and her classmates will read in English about the life of Olympic medalist Wilma Rudolph.

Congress puts new spotlight on English learner performance

Alisha Kirby, Cabinet Report

Advocates for one of the fastest growing subgroups say one pivotal change called for in the Every Student Succeeds Act has gone largely unnoticed. Under the new law, English learner accountability will be included as part of Title I – the section dedicated to the performance of students – instead of Title III, which dictates the allocation of funds for English language acquisition.

 

How fears of deportation harm kids’ education

Melinda D. Anderson, The Atlantic

For many, the New Year represents new beginnings, a chance to start fresh with a clean slate. But this was not the case for hundreds of undocumented adults and children swept up in deportation raids in the first days of 2016.

Chicago teens and combat veterans join forces to process trauma

Audie Cornish, NPR

For kids in some Chicago neighborhoods, walking up and down the same street where there was a beating or a shooting or a body is just part of life — one that isn’t always talked about. That’s something the Urban Warriors program is trying to change.

January 22, 2016

Children’s book ‘A Birthday Cake for George Washington’ pulled over depiction of happy slaves

Michael Schaub, Los Angeles Times

The publisher Scholastic has announced it will stop distribution of a children’s book called “A Birthday Cake for George Washington” after it was widely criticized for its depiction of happy slaves baking a cake, the Associated Press reports.

Course correction: The case for correctional education in U. S. prisons

Doug Irving, RAND

Daniels is an inmate at the California Institution for Men, a sprawling prison complex about 35 miles east of Los Angeles. He’s 49 years old, a prison veteran with 14 felony convictions on his record. His latest offense, for making criminal threats, helped land him in one place where RAND’s study showed he stands a good chance of turning his life around: A prison classroom.

At-risk students improve when they take a race and ethnicity class – study

Eli Rosenberg, The Guardian

High school students saw large improvements in their grades and attendance records when they enrolled in a class dedicated to exploring race and ethnicity, researchers in California found.

January 15, 2016

The schools taking in Syrian refugees

Naomi Nix, The Atlantic

In Connecticut, communities have welcomed those searching for a home and set up systems to help them rebuild.

Do metal detectors do more harm than good?

Cecelia Reyes, ProPublica, and Jenny Ye, WNYC

On the coldest morning New York City has seen this winter, a stream of teenage students hit a bottleneck at the front of a Brooklyn school building. They shed their jackets, gloves, and belts, shivering as they wait to pass through a metal detector and send their backpacks through an X-ray machine. School-safety agents stand nearby, poised to step in if the alarm bleats.

The steep costs of keeping juveniles in adult prisons

Jessica Lahey, The Atlantic

Despite federal statues prohibiting it, many states imprison those under 18 alongside adults, where they are much more likely to suffer sexual abuse and violence.

January 8, 2016

Amid growing anti-Muslim sentiment, Education Department urges schools to prevent discrimination

Emma Brown, The Washington Post

The U.S. Education Department is urging the nation’s colleges and K-12 schools to guard against harassment and discrimination based on race, religion or national origin, a response to anti-Muslim and anti-refugee sentiments that appear to be on the rise.

 

The new racial generation gap

William H. Frey, Los Angeles Times

In the 1960s, a flip but still effective aphorism summed up the rebelliousness of youth: “Don’t trust anyone over 30.” As it turns out, that admonition is a much more fitting bumper sticker for today’s student activists than it was 50 years ago. Young people now — the post-millennials — face a far deeper generational divide than the one that separated baby boomers from their parents. And the nation faces a far more serious crisis if that divide cannot be bridged.

When restorative justice in schools works

Emily Richmond, The Atlantic

“People were afraid this was going to be a ‘hippy-dippy-granola, nobody’s-going-to-get-into-trouble’ concept.”

December 18, 2015

The struggle for Hawaiian education

Sarah Rosenblatt, Trouthout

The movement for Hawaiian education is agitating for Native Hawaiian self-determination, for the Hawaiian language to be allowed in public schools and for the creation of independent schools based on philosophies and politics of Hawaiian culture, land and resilience.

Immigrant schools aim to get students with little education through high school

Liz Bowie, The Baltimore Sun

High school teacher Alison Hanks-Sloan tried every way she could to stop 20 immigrant students from dropping out. She and a group of teachers gave them career counseling, visited their homes, and even brought in business leaders to explain how much more money they could make with a diploma.

Preschool programs face challenge of preparing staff to teach English learners

Sarah Tully, EdSource

About half of the children in the two largest public preschool programs in California – Head Start and the California State Preschool Program – speak a language other than English at home, but there is a good chance they will not be in classrooms with teachers and teacher assistants who are bilingual or trained specifically in instructing English learners.

Schools continue to grapple with ‘Huckleberry Finn’

Justine McDaniel, The Inquirer

After The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was published in 1885, the book was boycotted in some places in the United States for portraying friendship between a black man and a white boy. “In its time, it was derided and censored,” said Deborah Caldwell-Stone, deputy director of the American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom, which tracks challenges to books. Today, Mark Twain’s classic – about a boy who flees his abusive father and travels down the Mississippi River with an escaped slave – is still sometimes challenged in American schools, but for nearly the opposite reason: its liberal use of the N-word and perceived racist portrayals of black characters.

December 11, 2015

The limitations of teaching ‘grit’ in the classroom

Aisha Sultan, The Atlantic

“We are asking students to change a belief system without changing the situation around them.”

Berkeley High to ‘take back the day’ after racist incident

Tracey Taylor, Berkeleyside

Berkeley High School is preparing for a special day of “communal self-affirmation” on campus Wednesday, following a racist incident on Nov. 4 and the school-wide protest that came in its wake. BHS Principal Sam Pasarow said he is supporting Wednesday’s activities which will see a slightly modified class schedule and include two assemblies.

New report discusses impact of mass incarceration on AAPI community

Frances Kai-Hwa Wang, NBC News

Asian American and Pacific Islander leaders from over 50 organizations are calling for restorative criminal justice policies and an end to the school-to-prison-to-deportation pipeline.

Program at Long Beach Unified aims to keep children out of juvenile hall, probation camps

Sarah Favot, Los Angeles Daily News

The Los Angeles County Department of Probation has launched an educational program for Long Beach Unified School District students who are on probation or at risk of entering the system at Beach High School.

December 4, 2015

California school suspensions decline, driven by fewer punishments for disruption/defiance

Daniel J. Losen, Michael A. Keith II, Cheri L. Hodson, Tia E. Martinez, Shakti Belway, The Center for Civil Rights Remedies at the Civil Rights Project /Proyecto Derechos Civiles

Districts making progress toward reducing racial/ethnic suspension disparities, though gaps still remain. Study shows higher test scores correlated with lower suspension rates, reducing concern that discipline reforms may jeopardize student achievement.

L.A. Unified sees success in counseling rather than arresting truants and kids who fight

Teresa Watanabe, Los Angeles Times

Just before 8 a.m. at Peary Middle School in Gardena, a boy was refusing to leave his mother’s car. The school police officer on duty could have barked orders at him to get to class. He could have written him up for truancy. He could have forcibly moved him — as a South Carolina police officer did to a student last month, sparking a national uproar. But Los Angeles Unified School Police Officer Henry Anderson did none of that.

The changing face of America’s Chinese schools

Audrey Cleo Yap, The Atlantic

Non-Asian students are increasingly spending their Saturdays immersed in China’s language and culture.

November 20, 2015

“¿Qué es deportar?”: Teaching from students’ lives

Sandra L. Osorio, Rethinking Schools

I was sitting around a kidney-shaped table with Alejandra, Juliana, and Lucia, 2nd graders who had chosen to read Del Norte al Sur (From North to South) by René Colato Laínez. I read the book’s introduction out loud, which included the word deportado (deported). I asked my students: “¿Qué es deportar? ¿Ustedes saben qué significa?” (What is deported? Do you know what it means?) Lucia looked straight at me and said, “Como a mi tío lo deportaron”. (Like my uncle, they deported him.)

http://www.rethinkingschools.org/archive/30_01/30-1_osorio.shtml

 

Teaching Spanish to the kids isn’t easy for second-generation parents

Leslie Berestein Rojas, KPCC

Like many of her clients, Palazzolo would like to enter her son in dual-immersion classes, in which native-speaker kids learn along with non-native speakers. But these can be hard to get into, Palazzolo said. Some school districts don’t have them. In the end, much is up to the parents.

http://www.scpr.org/news/2015/11/17/55696/teaching-spanish-to-the-kids-isn-t-easy-for-second/

What’s the recipe for an effective anti-bullying policy?

Virginia Pelley, The Atlantic

A study published this month in JAMA Pediatrics suggests that anti-bullying efforts, including laws many states have passed in the past five years, appear to be helping the 20 percent of kids in the U.S. who say they’ve been bullied in the past 12 months.

http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2015/11/anti-bullying-movement-schools/415398/

 

November 13, 2015

L.A. schools swapped ‘zero tolerance’ for ‘restorative justice.’ Is it working?

Molly Jackson, The Christian Science Monitor

Staff applaud the goals of ‘restorative justice,’ a community-minded alternative to schools’ ‘zero tolerance’ policies, which have not proven to be effective, but they add that more training and resources are needed.

http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/USA-Update/2015/1108/L.A.-schools-swapped-zero-tolerance-for-restorative-justice.-Is-it-working

 

 

Expulsion of preschoolers: ‘Let’s take that option off the table’

Erin Brownfield, EdSource

Children who are expelled or suspended from preschool are more likely to have problems – including higher rates of incarceration – later in life, according to new report titled Point of Entry: The Preschool-to-Prison Pipeline. Preschoolers in public programs, according to research from the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights cited in the report, were expelled at more than three times the rate of K-12 students in 2014.

http://edsource.org/2015/expulsion-of-preschoolers-lets-take-that-option-off-the-table/90150

 

Racial microaggressions: What they are, what they are not, and why they matter

Lindsay Pérez Huber and Daniel G. Solórzano

Latino Policy and Issues Brief, Number 30, November 2015

Research has shown that racial microaggressions are significant obstacles in the educational, professional, and life trajectories of Latinas/os and other people of color in the United States (Pérez Huber and Solórzano 2015; Pierce 1970; Solórzano 1998; Sue 2010), yet these experiences are often dismissed.

http://www.chicano.ucla.edu/publications/report-brief/racial-microaggressions

 

November 6, 2015

California prepares to adopt materials for new English learner approach

Theresa Harrington, EdSource

The State Board of Education is set to adopt a new set of instructional materials and textbooks for kindergarten through 8^th grade on Wednesday that incorporates what education officials describe as a pathbreaking approach to more effectively teaching English learners.

http://edsource.org/2015/california-prepares-to-adopt-materials-for-new-english-learner-approach/89908

 

The costs of English-only education

Melinda D. Anderson, The Atlantic

Efforts to teach ELL students in their native languages are gaining traction—and they’re benefitting native English speakers, too.

http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2015/11/the-costs-of-english-only-education/413494/

 

What if every high school had a ‘justice program’ instead of a cop?

Eric Westervelt, NPR

This week’s viral videos of a Columbia, S.C., deputy’s push-the-chair-over-and-drag-the-student arrest of a 16-year-old high school girl in her classroom has refocused attention on the expanding role of police in schools, “zero tolerance” discipline policies and the disproportionate punishment of minorities.

http://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2015/10/30/452910812/what-if-every-high-school-had-a-justice-program-instead-of-a-cop

October 30, 2015

Violent South Carolina classroom arrest adds to ‘school-to-prison pipeline’ debate

Matt Pearce and Sonali Kohli, Los Angeles Times

It happens so often in classrooms that it’s almost unremarkable. A student sends a text during class, plays a video game on an iPad or mouths off, drawing a reprimand from the teacher. Then what? At Spring Valley High School in Columbia, S.C., a similar scenario ended Monday when a white sheriff’s deputy — summoned after an African American student refused to leave the class — yanked the student from her desk and threw her across the floor.

http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-police-schools-20151028-story.html

 

Black girls suspended more often

KCRW, Guest: Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, Columbia University

Around the country, students of color are suspended three times as often as white students, according to the Department of Education. We hear a lot about how these disparities affect boys. But girls get less attention, even though black girls are suspended six times more often than their white counterparts.

http://www.kcrw.com/news-culture/shows/press-play-with-madeleine-brand/police-in-schools-a-mobile-opera-and-whither-high-speed-rail

 

New ‘diversion’ program helping keep LAUSD students out of court

Mike Szymanski, LA School Report

A new LA Unified police diversion program, which replaces arrests with counseling, is keeping hundreds of students out of the city’s criminal justice system.

http://laschoolreport.com/new-diversion-program-helping-keep-lausd-students-out-of-court/

 

Report calls for big changes in educating state’s English learners

John Fensterwald, EdSource

Researchers studying a group of California school districts are highly critical of the state’s system for providing services to English language learners in a report released this week.

Report calls for big changes in educating state’s English learners

 

October 23, 2015

Feds Put Spotlight on Needs of Black ELLs

Corey Mitchell, Education Week

The White House and the U.S. Department of Education are working together to raise awareness of the needs of a growing, yet often-overlooked subgroup of students: English-language learners who are black.

http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2015/10/21/feds-put-spotlight-on-needs-of-black.html

 

California Gov. Jerry Brown vetoes ethnic studies bill

Stephen Ceasar, Los Angeles Times

Gov. Jerry Brown has vetoed a bill that would have required state education officials to develop a model ethnic studies program for California’s public schools.

http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-brown-ethnic-studies-bill-20151011-story.html

 

Schools across US find alternatives to suspending students

Jamie Stengle, Associated Press

The recent arrest of a 14-year-old Muslim boy whose teacher mistook his homemade clock for a possible bomb led to widespread ridicule of school officials and accusations that Islamophobia may have played a part.

http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/schools-us-find-alternatives-suspending-students-34556088