April 14, 2017

Teaching, Leading, and Social Justice

DeVos dials back consumer protections for student loan borrowers
Danielle Douglas-Gabriel, The Washington Post
Education Secretary Betsy DeVos on Tuesday withdrew a series of policy memos issued by the Obama administration to strengthen consumer protections for student loan borrowers. The Education Department is in the middle of issuing new contracts to student loan servicing companies that collect payments on behalf of the agency. These middlemen are responsible for placing borrowers in affordable repayment plans and keeping them from defaulting on their loans. But in the face of mounting consumer complaints over poor communication, mismanaged paperwork and delays in processing payments, the previous administration included contract requirements to shore up the quality of servicing. Companies complained that the demands would be expensive and unnecessarily time consuming.


Having just one Black teacher can keep Black kids in school
Anya Kamenetz, NPR
How important is it to have a role model? A new working paper puts some numbers to that question. Having just one black teacher in third, fourth or fifth grade reduced low-income black boys' probability of dropping out of high school by 39 percent, the study found. And by high school, African-American students, both boys and girls, who had one African-American teacher had much stronger expectations of going to college. Keep in mind, this effect was observed seven to ten years after the experience of having just one black teacher.


Teacher prep slow to embrace social-emotional learning
Evie Blad, Education Week
As social-emotional learning gains traction in schools, many teachers are coming into their jobs unprepared to develop students’ skills in areas like self-awareness and navigating relationships, advocates say. That’s because many teacher-preparation programs don’t provide enough training on how to identify the skills students need to be successful, and how to teach those skills, they say. Some states have also been slow to adapt teacher-licensing requirements to the reality that a growing numbers of schools and districts are exploring or implementing social-emotional learning.



Language, Culture, and Power

How discrimination nearly stalled a dual-language program in Boston
Tara García Mathewson, The Atlantic
Geralde Gabeau, a longtime leader in Boston’s Haitian community, used to work at the Boston Medical Center and with medical students at Boston University. Several years ago, there was a shortage of interpreters at the medical center to assist patients speaking Haitian Creole. Gabeau, turning to young adults in her own community, found few people had the necessary skills. Yet her university students spoke the language. “There are so many white students willing to go to Haiti and learn the language,” Gabeau said. “I was convinced something had to be done.” Gabeau has been part of a committed group of Haitian leaders who have spent much of the last decade pushing Boston Public Schools to open a dual-language program, in which children can take their classes, from math to social studies, in both English and Haitian Creole. The language is the third most-spoken language in Boston Public Schools, second only to English and Spanish—and the Spanish-speaking community has had a dual-language program that caters to its children since 1970.


On the Navajo Nation, special ed students await water that doesn’t stink
Laurel Morales, NPR
On the Navajo Nation, kids with the most severe developmental disabilities attend a school called Saint Michael’s Association for Special Education. Dameon David, 8, is waking up from a nap in his classroom. He has come to the school in northeastern Arizona for four years. He has cerebral palsy, seizures and scoliosis. His mom, Felencia Woodie, picks him up from a bed with Superman sheets. “Other schools that he was going to go to, they didn't have the nursing staff or the equipment he goes in, or the trained staff that they have here to do his suctioning, his feeding and his medications daily,” she says. Woodie, who also works at Saint Michael’s, says the only problem with the school is its water. “It has a certain stench to it. Sometimes you’ll smell ... kinda like a egg smell,” Woodie says. “Sometimes it's yellow, brown, or even we've seen black.”


Why we’re letting women — and all gender identities — into our fraternity at Harvard
Jake Ascher, The Washington Post
Last spring, Harvard announced dramatic efforts to curb the influence of single-gender social groups, such as the traditional final clubs and fraternities: Starting in the fall, the university said, undergraduates who join such groups won’t be allowed to lead student organizations or athletic teams, and won’t be given recommendations from the dean of Harvard College for elite postgraduate academic opportunities. Jake Ascher, president of the Harvard Chapter of Alpha Epsilon Pi, writes about how his fraternity plans to change.



Whole Children and Strong Communities

San Bernardino shooting puts spotlight on school safety
Carolyn Jones and Theresa Harrington, EdSource
In the wake of Monday’s fatal shooting at a San Bernardino elementary school, schools and security experts across California revisited campus safety protocols intended to keep students safe from gun violence. “As we mourn and remember the victims of today’s school shooting tragedy, we will continue to instill safety and vigilance in making our campuses as safe as possible,” Steven Zipperman, chief of the Los Angeles Unified School Police, said Monday. “While no educational institution can ever be 100 percent safe from an intruder or other safety threat, maintaining vigilant planning, preparedness, response and recovery protocols can help prevent and mitigate tragedies.”


San Diego Unified has a plan to fight Islamophobia and bullying
Gary Warth, Los Angeles Times
San Diego Unified School District administrators and teachers will have calendars showing Islamic holidays, students will learn more about the religion in social studies classes and safe places will be created on campuses for Muslim students as part of a multi-tiered approach to combat Islamophobia. Stan Anjan, the district’s executive director of family and community engagement, said elements of the plan approved this week will be laid out before the end of the school year — with a goal of having it in place at the start of the fall semester.


I never paid attention to school master schedules. That was a mistake.
Jay Mathews, The Washington Post
Karin Chenoweth, a former colleague at The Washington Post, has made a career of revealing why some schools succeed despite lack of funds, reputation and college-educated parents. In her latest book, she delves into the power of the master schedule, a device I have always considered a big bore. That shows how stupid I am. Chenoweth, a writer-in-residence at the Education Trust, makes me feel a bit better by admitting that she, too, at first did not understand why the principal of a high school in Prince George’s County, Md., said his complex master schedule on a wall-size whiteboard was “the reason for our success.” Later she realized that this was where the school was changing average students’ lives by making sure they were scheduled into Advanced Placement classes that had previously been reserved for top students and creating new classes to support that AP learning.

Access, Assessment, and Advancement

Nearly half of California school districts earn top ratings for lowering suspensions
Jane Meredith Adams, EdSource
Nearly half of all California school districts received top ratings from the state for lowering their suspension rates, according to an EdSource analysis of data from the California School Dashboard, a new evaluation tool released in a field test version last month by the California Department of Education. More than 45 percent of districts received either the most positive rating, “blue,” or the second-most positive rating, “green” – indicating a favorable performance relative to suspension standards developed by the State Board of Education. The dashboard, which will be updated and officially used to hold schools to account in the fall, marks the debut of suspensions as an indicator of school success – a change that is part of a new method of evaluating schools.

What are the long-term academic goals in states’ ESSA plans?
Andrew Ujifusa, Education Week
We're not in NCLB land any more, Toto. Under the Every Student Succeeds Act—which replaced the previous version of the nation's main K-12 law—states have a lot of leeway in deciding what their long-term academic goals will be. That means that, unlike with the No Child Left Behind Act, there's no requirement that all states ensure that 100 percent of students are proficient on state English/language arts and math exams by a certain school year. In the ESSA plans submitted to the U.S. Department of Education that we've seen so far, states have laid out a variety of long-term as well as interim goals, and a vastly different set of timelines with key dates ranging from next year all the way to 2039.  


Curriculum ‘playlists’: A take on personalized learning
Benjamin Herold, Education Week
Back in 2009, Joel Rose and his team used spreadsheets to manually produce customized “playlists” for 70 New York City middle school students each day. The goal was to always give each child the best possible content, delivered in the optimal manner, at the best possible time. Figuring out how to make that happen took 11 hours every night. Now, Rose's New York-based nonprofit organization, New Classrooms, performs those same functions each day for 11,000 students in 38 district, charter, and independent schools spread across 10 states and the District of Columbia. Thanks to complex algorithms, the process is now complete by 4:30 p.m. each day.

Inequality, Poverty, Segregation

The new champions of school integration
Richard D. Kahlenberg, The Atlantic
Policies that promote school integration by race and class took a significant hit last week when the U.S. Department of Education announced that it was killing a small but important federal program to support local diversity efforts. The initiative, “Opening Doors, Expanding Opportunities,” was slated to provide $12 million to school districts to boost socioeconomic diversity. The brainchild of President Obama’s Secretary of Education, John B. King Jr., the program had attracted interest from 26 school districts across the country that believed kids would be better off in schools that educate rich and poor, and white and minority students, together rather than separately. According to the Washington Post, an Education Department spokesperson said the program was nixed because “it was not a wise use of tax dollars, in part because the money was to be used for planning, not implementation.” But supporters of the plan rejected that view.  Representative Bobby Scott, a Virginia Democrat and the ranking member of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, said, “Continuing this important program would have been an easy way for the Trump Administration to affirm its commitment to civil rights.  Unfortunately, the Trump administration missed that opportunity.”


PTA gift for someone else’s child? A touchy subject in California
Dana Goldstein, The New York Times
Of all the inequalities between rich and poor public schools, one of the more glaring divides is PTA fund-raising, which in schools with well-heeled parents can generate hundreds of thousands of dollars a year or more. Several years ago, the Santa Monica-Malibu school board came up with a solution: Pool most donations from across the district and distribute them equally to all the schools. This has paid big benefits to the needier schools in this wealthy district, like the Edison Language Academy in Santa Monica, where half the children qualify for free or reduced-price lunch. The campus is decorated with psychedelic paintings of civil rights icons such as Cesar Chavez and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the work of the school’s art teacher, Martha Ramirez Oropeza, whose salary is paid by the pooled contributions. That money has also funded the school’s choral program, teacher aides, a science lab and a telescope.


Inequality in Thai education still a major handicap 
Kultira Yokakul, Bangkok Post 
Finland routinely ranks as the world's top global education system and famously has no banding system (all pupils are taught in the same classes, no matter their level of academic ability). It was ranked No.1 in this field by the World Economic Forum last year, followed by Switzerland and Belgium (joint second) and Singapore (No.4). And as it turns out, the two veterans identified two of the biggest causes of Thailand's educational flaws, and spelled out some ways to fix them. The main problem is the "inequity" of educational opportunities available for children in urban and rural areas, according to one of the invitees, Pasi Sahlberg. 



Public Schools and Private $

Charter schools are expanding where they aren't needed — especially in Los Angeles, new report says
Howard Blume, Los Angeles Times
Charter schools are proliferating where they aren’t needed while state funding continues to support even those charters that violate state law, according to a report released Monday by a research and advocacy group. The new research by an Oakland group called In the Public Interest looks at where charter schools are increasing in number and where schools are needed based on enrollment. The two trend lines do not correspond, researchers found — especially in the Los Angeles Unified School District, where the number of school-age children has declined even as the number of charters has rapidly grown.


Ravitch: Why the Supreme Court should not force the public to pay for religious schools
Valerie Strauss, The Washington Post
If you don’t know what the Blaine Amendments are, it’s time to learn, because they may be gone soon, and that would affect the United States in a major way. The Blaine Amendments are provisions in a majority of U.S. state legislatures that prohibit or limit the use of public funds for religious schools, helping maintain a separation of church and state that has long been seen by many Americans as a central tenet of U.S. democracy. Some school choice supporters, however, oppose these amendments. U.S. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos has long advocated for using public funds to pay for private and religious school tuition and other education expenses. And the Trump administration may propose a federal tax credit to support programs that encourage and facilitate the use of public funding for religious school.


Course choice: A different way to expand school choice?
Liana Loewus and Andrew Ujifusa, Education Week
Plans to expand school choice from President Donald Trump, U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, and Congress have largely focused on high-profile measures like vouchers and tax-credit scholarships. But there’s another option for the Trump administration to promote, one that’s supported in multiple sections of the Every Student Succeeds Act and that many states are already using. Course choice, also known as course access, allows for parents and students to select various pre-approved courses beyond what their districts normally offer. The courses, many of which are taught online, can include everything from university classes and SAT preparation to welder training.

Other News of Note

Islamophobia is racism
Su’ad Abdul Khabeer, Arshad Ali, Evelyn Alsultany, Sohail Daulatzai, Lara Deeb, Carol Fadda, Zareena Grewal, Juliane Hammer, Nadine Naber, and Junaid Rana
Inspired by the #FergusonSyllabus, the #StandingRockSyllabus, the #BlackIslamSyllabus and others, this reading list provides resources for teaching and learning about anti-Muslim racism in the United States. Although “Islamophobia” is the term most recognizable in public discourse, it does not accurately convey the making of racial and religious “others” that fuels the forms of discrimination Muslims face in the United States. The term Islamophobia frames these forms of discrimination and their roots solely as a problem of religious discrimination. Calling this a “phobia” suggests that this discrimination is solely a problem of individual bias, which obscures the structural and systemic production of anti-Muslim racism.  This syllabus reframes “Islamophobia” as “anti-Muslim racism” to more accurately reflect the intersection of race and religion as a reality of structural inequality and violence rooted in the longer history of US (and European) empire building.