OPINION: Good teachers use the N-word

OPINION: Good teachers use the N-word

OPINION: Good teachers use the N-word

But it's how they use it that makes all the difference

Omarosa Manigault Newman, the senior White House staffer turned author, said recently during her book tour that she had heard a tape of President Donald Trump using the N-word during his time on the reality show The Apprentice. Trump denied the existence of any such tape, tweeting, “I don’t have that word in my vocabulary and never have. She made it up.”

Whether such a tape exists or not, would such a recording tell us anything we don’t already know? We already have plenty of evidence of the president’s bigotry and racism. From his taking out a one-page ad in The New York Times to call for the death penalty for the Central Park Five in 1989 before they were eventually exonerated, to his equating of torch-toting neo-Nazis and Confederate sympathizers with anti-racist protesters in Charlottesville last year, and instituting a travel ban for those from certain Muslim-majority nations, and proposing a border wall with Mexico, and his gross labeling of Mexican immigrants as rapists and murderers (I could go on), his actions have betrayed his words. It’s a safe assumption that he has used the word before.

The day after Manigault Newman’s revelation, on the comedy news program The Daily Show, correspondent Roy Wood Jr. eloquently and hilariously explained the situation using muscular movie star Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, saying, “I don’t need footage of the Rock in the gym to know if he works out!”

Likewise, we don’t need tapes to know Trump — or other past presidents for that matter — used the word; we have public policy to show it. Government-backed slavery, redlining that kept black people from getting low-interest loans and a three-strikes policing policy that led to the mass incarceration of black people speak volumes about what federal leaders believed, and said, behind closed doors. Nevertheless, if a tape surfaces of Trump using the N-word, how should teachers respond to the media storm that would surely follow?

Related: The invisible signs to look for on the first day of school

To be clear, educators hear and use the N-word everyday. They say it as a slur, or a term of endearment, or they teach it within the text of assigned readings. Students spew it in the hallways, on the way to and from school, on buses and in sports practice. It proliferates in pop culture: in music, in movies and in slang. It’s so ubiquitous that Continue reading: OPINION: Good teachers use the N-word

Dana Goldstein: How Do You Get Better Schools? Take the State to Court, More Advocates Say - The New York Times

How Do You Get Better Schools? Take the State to Court, More Advocates Say - The New York Times

How Do You Get Better Schools? Take the State to Court, More Advocates Say

By his own account, Alejandro Cruz-Guzman’s five children have received a good education at public schools in St. Paul. His two oldest daughters are starting careers in finance and teaching. Another daughter, a high-school student, plans to become a doctor.

But their success, Mr. Cruz-Guzman said, flows partly from the fact that he and his wife fought for their children to attend racially integrated schools outside their neighborhood. Their two youngest children take a bus 30 minutes each way to Murray Middle School, where the student population is about one-third white, one-third black, 16 percent Asian and 9 percent Latino.

“I wanted to have my kids exposed to different cultures and learn from different people,” said Mr. Cruz-Guzman, who owns a small flooring company and is an immigrant from Mexico. When his two oldest children briefly attended a charter school that was close to 100 percent Latino, he said he had realized, “We are limiting our kids to one community.”

Now Mr. Cruz-Guzman is the lead plaintiff in a lawsuit saying that Minnesota knowingly allowed towns and cities to set policies and zoning boundaries that led to segregated schools, lowering test scores and graduation rates for low-income and nonwhite children. Last month, the state’s Supreme Court ruled the suit could move forward, in a decision advocates across the country hailed as important.

The case is part of a wave of lawsuits over the quality of schools in more than a half-dozen states. The suits could serve as road maps for advocates in other states amid a nationwide teachers’ movement and a push in some state legislatures for more school funding.

The legal complaints have different areas of focus — from school funding to segregation to literacy — but all of them argue that the states are violating their constitutions by denying children a quality education.

Such lawsuits were filed in past decades, but the recent cases show a renewed energy for using the courts to fight for better education, and they may signal an end to a period when many courts, after the last recession, seemed unwilling to require states to spend more money on schools.

“The courthouse doors are in effect open again,” said David Sciarra, executive director of the Education Law Center, which has argued school funding cases in New Jersey and has filed amicus briefs in several of the current cases. “What we’re seeing are the beginnings of a broader conversation about what the right to an education should look like.”

Advocates are focused on state courts because of roadblocks at the federal level: A 1973 Supreme Court decision found that unequal school funding was not a violation of the United States Constitution, which does not Continue Reading: How Do You Get Better Schools? Take the State to Court, More Advocates Say - The New York Times

Healthy Kids Survey Results - Year 2018 (CA Dept of Education)

Healthy Kids Survey Results - Year 2018 (CA Dept of Education)

State Superintendent Torlakson Announces Results of Healthy Kids Survey at Public Schools

SACRAMENTO—State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Torlakson announced today that alcohol, tobacco, and other drug use continues to decline among middle and high school students, and improvements have occurred in indicators of pupil engagement, school climate, and mental health among high school students, according to the 2015–17 Biennial State California Healthy Kids Survey.

The survey assesses how well schools are meeting students’ needs for school safety, drug and alcohol prevention, mental health, and other factors that influence learning and positive development.

Conducted every two years since 1985, the survey provides insights for educators and health professionals about how to improve services for students.

The California Department of Education (CDE) and the California Department of Health Care Services (DHCS) coordinated the survey of a representative, random sample of seventh, ninth, and eleventh graders statewide.

"This is the largest statewide survey in the nation to identify the needs of adolescents and how well our schools are meeting those needs. It increases our understanding of how students feel about school and how they rank their school environment," said Torlakson, who started his career as a high school science teacher and coach.

"The more we can meet the needs of the whole child, including their social and emotional health and mental health needs, the more we can help them succeed on their way to 21st century careers and college. The improvements in academic motivation and school climate indicators suggest that the state’s requirement that school districts address these factors as part of their Local Control and Accountability Plans (LCAP) may already be working. However, most of these school climate improvements occurred among seventh graders, pointing to the need to enhance our efforts in high schools to address this LCAP priority."

DHCS Director Jennifer Kent added, "The California Healthy Kids Survey helps behavioral health agencies, school-based health programs, and community organizations harness support for youth prevention programs, and helps to justify the sustainability of these programs over time by showing real prevention successes to funders and stakeholders."

The survey results have indicated a general decreasing trend in alcohol and marijuana use since 2011–13. Current use of alcohol, binge drinking, and marijuana use among eleventh graders decreased by four points. Lifetime marijuana use dropped by seven points. Nevertheless, use of marijuana was reported by 17 percent of eleventh graders, only six percentage points lower than for alcohol.

“We must continue to be diligent in our efforts to prevent, or at least limit, marijuana use in light of the potential effect of the legalization for adults as a result of the passage of Proposition 64 two years ago,” Torlakson said. 

The results also show pronounced improvements in all grades in academic motivation (by seven points in seventh grade) and across indicators of bullying and victimization at school. Experiencing any harassment is down more than six points in 9th grade, to 31 percent.

Among seventh graders, but not among high school students, there were also increases in school connectedness and perceived safety.  Perceived school safety even declined in eleventh graders by more than four points. Only six in ten high school students now feel their school is safe or very safe.

Also noteworthy, two indicators of mental health—chronic, debilitating sadness and suicide contemplation—both improved among ninth and eleventh graders after showing little change in the last survey. It is still disturbing that three in ten high school students appear to suffer from chronic sadness and about one-sixth have contemplated suicide. 

 “Although, overall, there are many positive survey findings, our state’s high schools clearly need to do more to be safer, more supportive, and more engaging,” Torlakson added.

CDE and DHCS are working together to ensure even further improvements over the next two years. Educators, prevention specialists, youth service providers, and health agencies will collaboratively focus more attention to better meet the needs of youth and help them thrive and succeed.

Survey results are available at the 16th Biennial Statewide Survey (PDF) website.

# # # #

Tom Torlakson — State Superintendent of Public Instruction
Communications Division, Room 5602, 916-319-0818, Fax 916-319-0100

Healthy Kids Survey Results - Year 2018 (CA Dept of Education)

Teachers in the US are even more segregated than students #educlor

Teachers in the US are even more segregated than students

Teachers in the US are even more segregated than students

Editor's Note: 

This post is part of "Teacher diversity in America," a series from the Brown Center on Education Policy that examines minority underrepresentation among public educators in the U.S.

An increasing amount of evidence shows that alignment in the racial or ethnic identity of teachers and students is associated with a range of positive student outcomes, from test scores to disciplinary actions to teacher expectations. Due to the underrepresentation of teachers of color in the current workforce, minority students stand to disproportionally benefit from efforts to increase teacher diversity.

With this evidence, it is easy for many practitioners and policymakers to take a next logical step, concluding that, because minority students tend to benefit uniquely from diverse teachers, teachers of color will be most beneficial in schools serving large numbers of minority students. Thus, any new teachers of color are often steered (whether covertly or overtly) toward high-minority schools. Taken to an extreme, given the tenacious grip of racial segregation on America’s schools, we could have a school system where the teacher workforce is every bit as diverse as its students—and perhaps every bit as segregated.

In addition to the risk of creating a racially segregated workforce, the logical leap above is misguided for at least two reasons. First, it ignores the evidence showing that teachers of color benefit white students—perhaps not always through test scores, but through pro-social beliefs and attitudes. Second, schools serving large numbers of minority students already tend to have the most racially diverse workforces, while many students of color in predominantly white schools have virtually no exposure to teachers of color.

As districts and states across the country pursue racial and ethnic diversity among teachers, we should pay attention to how teachers of color are distributed to avoid creating another layer of school segregation.

As districts and states across the country pursue racial and ethnic diversity among teachers, we should pay attention to how teachers of color are distributed to avoid creating another layer of school segregation. After briefly contextualizing segregation and its manifestations in schools, we report our findings that teachers are even more segregated than students in the U.S., suggesting the need for a new framework around the hiring of nonwhite teachers.

MANY TYPES OF SEGREGATION

School segregation does not exist in a vacuum, but is part of an interconnected structure of segregation that extends to residence and employment. Residential segregation can be primarily attributed not to self-segregation of minority racial groups but instead to decades of federal policy that prevented nonwhite families from acquiring mortgages, redlining practices, the strategic placement of interstates and highways throughout the 20th century, and individual actions of white families. Employment segregation takes the form of predominantly white jobs having an average salary four times higher than that of heavily black or Hispanic jobs. Furthermore, a 2017 meta-analysis of callback rates for fake resumes with racially coded names reveals the continued presence of simple employment discrimination.

Each of these factors significantly influences the racial segregation of Continue reading: Teachers in the US are even more segregated than students

Big Education Ape: Black Lives Matter in Our Schools: Developing an Anti-Racist Pedagogy – I AM AN EDUCATOR - http://bigeducationape.blogspot.com/2018/08/black-lives-matter-in-our-schools.html

Elizabeth Warren questions the hiring of for-profit-college officials at the Education Department - The Washington Post

Elizabeth Warren questions the hiring of for-profit-college officials at the Education Department - The Washington Post

Elizabeth Warren questions the hiring of for-profit-college officials at the Education Department

 

Updated with response from Education Department.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) is asking Education Secretary Betsy DeVos to explain the hiring of two officials with ties to the for-profit-college industry, questioning their roles and potential conflicts of interest.

Warren, a member of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, sent a letter to DeVoson Friday raising concerns about Robert S. Eitel and Taylor Hansen. Eitel, as first reported in the New York Times, has taken unpaid leave from Bridgepoint Education, an operator of for-profit colleges where he works as an attorney, to serve as a special assistant to DeVos. Hansen, a former lobbyist at the Association of Private Sector Colleges and Universities (now called Career Education Colleges and Universities), told ProPublica that he was hired on a temporary basis at the department.

Their appointments come as the Education Department has extended the deadline for career schools and community colleges that provide vocational training to submit appeals under the gainful employment rule. The controversial regulation threatens to withhold federal financial aid from institutions whose graduates are unable to earn enough to repay their student loans.

[Feds say too many career-training programs, for-profit schools leaving graduates saddled with debt]

For-profit colleges have lobbied against the rule for years, arguing that it unfairly targets the sector and would ultimately hurt the low-income students they educate. Their protests fell on deaf ears during the Obama administration, but the Trump administration and congressional Republicans have taken up the cause with promises to roll back the rule.

In her letter, Warren questions the timing of the extension and Hansen’s hiring because he lobbied against the gainful rule, according to the Senate Office of Public Records Lobbying Disclosure databases. She said his “recent employment history clearly calls into question his impartiality in dealing with higher education issues at the Department of Education, and raises alarming conflicts of interest concerns.”

Hansen, she added, also may have other conflicts of interest related to the student loan program because his father, Bill Hansen, is president of United Student Aid Funds, a company that collects education debt. The Continue reading: Elizabeth Warren questions the hiring of for-profit-college officials at the Education Department - The Washington Post

Schools are using AI to track their students — Quartz

Schools are using AI to track their students — Quartz
Schools are using AI to track what students write on their computers

Over 50 million k-12 students will go back to school in the US this month. For many of them using a school computer, every word they type will be tracked.

Under the Children’s Internet Protection Act (CIPA), any US school that receives federal funding is required to have an internet-safety policy. As school-issued tablets and Chromebook laptops become more commonplace, schools must install technological guardrails to keep their students safe. For some, this simply means blocking inappropriate websites. Others, however, have turned to software companies like Gaggle, Securly, and GoGuardian to surface potentially worrisome communications to school administrators.

These Safety Management Platforms (SMPs) use natural-language processing to scan through the millions of words typed on school computers. If a word or phrase might indicate bullying or self-harm behavior, it gets surfaced for a team of humans to review.

In an age of mass school-shootings and increased student suicides, SMPs can play a vital role in preventing harm before it happens. Each of these companies has case studies where an intercepted message helped save lives. But the software also raises ethical concerns about the line between protecting students’ safety and protecting their privacy. 

“A good-faith effort to monitor students keeps raising the bar until you have a sort of surveillance state in the classroom,” Girard Kelly, the director of privacy review at Common Sense Media, a non-profit that promotes internet-safety education for children, told Quartz. “Not only are there metal detectors and cameras in the schools, but now their learning objectives and emails are being tracked too.”

The debate around SMPs sits at the intersection of two topics of national interest—protecting schools and protecting data. As more and more schools go one-to-one, the industry term for assigning every student a device of their own, the need to protect students’ digital lives is only going to increase. Over 50% of teachers say their schools are one-to-one, according to a 2017 survey from Freckle Education, meaning there’s a huge market to tap into.

But even in an age of student suicides and school shootings, when do security precautions start to infringe on students’ freedoms?

Safety, managed

The most popular SMPs all work slightly differently. Gaggle, which charges roughly $5 per student annually, is a filter on top of popular tools like Google Docs and Gmail. When the Gaggle algorithm surfaces a word or phrase that may be of concern—like a mention of drugs or signs of cyberbullying—the “incident” gets sent to human reviewers before being passed on to the school. Securly goes one step beyond classroom tools and gives schools the option to perform sentiment analysis on students’ public social media posts. Using AI, the software is able to process thousands of student tweets, posts, and status updates to look for signs of harm. 

Kelly thinks SMPs help normalize surveillance from a young age. In the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal at Facebook and other recent data breaches from companies like Equifax, we have the opportunity to teach kids the importance of protecting their online data, he said.

“There should be a whole gradation of how this [software] should work,” Daphne Keller, the director of the Stanford Center for Internet and Society (and mother of two), told Quartz. “We should be able to Continue reading: Schools are using AI to track their students — Quartz

As students return to school, US teachers face nationwide struggle to defend education - World Socialist Web Site

As students return to school, US teachers face nationwide struggle to defend education - World Socialist Web Site
As students return to school, US teachers face nationwide struggle to defend education

As the new school year begins across the United States, teachers are angry and determined. None of the demands teachers and school employees raised in last spring’s strikes and protests in West Virginia, Oklahoma, Arizona, Kentucky, Colorado and North Carolina have been met. Many of the supposed gains touted by the teachers’ unions have proven to be fictitious, and next to nothing has been done to restore the billions of dollars in education cuts carried out over the past decade.

West Virginia teachers protesting on the steps of the state capitol in Charleston

It has not taken long for the claims of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and National Education Association (NEA) and their pseudo-left allies such as the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and the International Socialist Organization (ISO) that the spring struggles resulted in “victories” to be exposed as lies.

In each state, teachers are returning to school facing broken promises. In West Virginia, there is no fix for health care funding under the Public Employee Insurance Agency. In Arizona, the $1 billion in school funding has not been restored and wage increases for many teachers have fallen far short of the contract terms announced by the unions.

As the new school term begins, contract battles are ongoing in Seattle and Spokane, Washington. Teachers in the Los Angeles United School District, the second largest in the US, have been working without a contract for a year and negotiations are at an impasse. In New York City, the United Federation of Teachers has agreed to work under an expired contract until after the midterm elections, pointedly avoiding any action in November that might prove embarrassing to Democratic Party candidates. Unions are similarly forcing educators to work under expired or extended contracts in other locations such as Denver, Colorado and Oakland, California.

The conditions are emerging for teachers to link up their struggles with those of hundreds of thousands of other workers in the US and internationally. Some 230,000 United Parcel Service workers, who voted by more than 90 percent to strike when their contract expired on July 31, are battling a conspiracy between the company and the Teamsters union, which extended the contract indefinitely in an effort to force through a sellout that establishes a second tier of lower-paid “hybrid” driver-warehouse workers and maintains poverty wages for the bulk of the workforce.

Some 200,000 postal workers face contract expiration in September, and contracts will soon expire for steel, telecom and entertainment workers.

A report by the Brookings Institution looked at teachers’ salaries and per-pupil spending on a state-by-state basis and concluded that conditions were “favorable” this fall for statewide teachers’ strikes in such largely nonunion states as Mississippi, North Carolina, Alabama, Georgia, Idaho, New Mexico, South Carolina, South Dakota and Utah. Brookings added that growing calls for action have been reported in Indiana and Texas. An Education Weekblog predicted that Louisiana would be next.

As school doors open, what is the state of education in America?

• According to Education Week, the average teacher in 30 states makes less than a “livable wage.” One in five holds down a second job to make ends meet; many have three jobs. In rural Colorado districts, the earnings of 95 percent of teachers are less than the cost of living.

• In addition to spending hundreds of dollars out of their own pockets for school supplies, teachers are using charity appeals through crowdsourcing sites to Continue reading: As students return to school, US teachers face nationwide struggle to defend education - World Socialist Web Site

Black Lives Matter in Our Schools: Developing an Anti-Racist Pedagogy – I AM AN EDUCATOR

Black Lives Matter in Our Schools: Developing an Anti-Racist Pedagogy – I AM AN EDUCATOR

Black Lives Matter in Our Schools: Developing an Anti-Racist Pedagogy

First published in TruthOut.org

Empowering Black students to become change makers is a key goal of the book, Teaching for Black Lives. Editors Dyan Watson, Jesse Hagopian and Wayne Au have assembled a cogent group of essays that offer the opportunity for developing an anti-racist pedagogy.

Truthout interviewed one of the editors, Jesse Hagopian, who is also a Truthout contributing writer.

Mark Karlin: You note in your introduction that “We must teach for black lives in our classrooms.” How did you and your fellow editors come up with the idea for a textbook that can also be used as a reader by adults?

Co-editor Jesse Hagopian.

Rethinking Schools

Jesse Hagopian: As I answer these questions, white supremacists and neo-Nazis are readying plans to march on Washington, DC. Hate crimes are on the rise around the country. Police violence against Black people continues unabated and the school-to-prison pipeline is helping to fuel the nation’s system of mass incarceration. And yet, there are also a growing number of educators who are organizing and fighting back against anti-Black racism.

In this way, I think the Black Lives Matter (BLM) at School movementand the broader movement for Black lives inspired the idea for Teaching for Black Lives as a book that could be used by educators, students, activists and community organizers. The BLM at School movement went national during the 2017-2018 school year and educators in over 20 cities participated in a week of action from February 5 to 9, to affirm the lives of Black students and challenge institutional racism. The BLM at School movement developed three demands: (1) End “zero tolerance” discipline and implement restorative justice; (2) Hire more Black teachers; (3) Mandate Black history and ethnic studies in K-12 curriculum. In addition, educators taught lessons throughout the week that corresponded to the 13 guiding principles of #BlackLivesMatter Global Network including restorative justice, empathy and loving engagement, diversity and globalism, trans-affirming, queer-affirming, collective value, intergenerational, Black families and Black villages, Black women and unapologetically Black.

Seeing this movement spread from Seattle to Philadelphia during the 2016-2017 school year, and then explode nationally the following year, made the editors at Rethinking Schools want to find ways to contribute and arm teachers with lesson plans that can help them empower students to become change makers. I was truly blessed to be able to work with co-editors Dyane Watson and Wayne Au on this project whose expertise in anti-racist pedagogy was invaluable.

How did you decide on the five sections of the book?

The five sections of the book are:

• Making Black Lives Matter in our Schools;
• Enslavement, Civil Rights and Black Liberation;
• Gentrification, Displacement and Anti-Blackness;
• Discipline, the Schools-to-Prison Pipeline and Mass Incarceration; and
• Teaching Blackness, Loving Blackness and Exploring Identity.

Each section represents a major aspect of the Black experience that we believed is not often taught–or not taught well—yet is critical for empowering Black students to understand their own identities and challenge the institutional racism they face. As we write in the introduction to the book,

“We recognize that anti-Black racism constructs Black people, and Blackness generally, as not counting as human life. The chapters here in Teaching for Black Lives push back directly against this construction by not only providing educators with critical perspectives on the role of schools in perpetuating anti-Blackness, but also by offering educators concrete examples of what it looks like to humanize Black people in Continue reading: Black Lives Matter in Our Schools: Developing an Anti-Racist Pedagogy – I AM AN EDUCATOR

DPE 2.0 The City Fund | tultican

DPE 2.0 The City Fund | tultican
DPE 2.0 The City Fund

Billionaire Netflix CEO, Reed Hastings, has joined with billionaire former Enron executive, John Arnold, to launch an aggressive destroy public education (DPE) initiative. They claim to have invested $100 million each to start The City Fund. Neerav Kingsland declares he is the Fund’s Managing Partner and says the fund will help cities across America institute proven school reform successes such as increasing “the number of public schools that are governed by non-profit organizations.”

Ending local control of public schools through democratic means is a priority for DPE forces. In 2017, EdSource reported on Hastings campaign against democracy; writing, “His latest salvo against school boards that many regard as a bedrock of American democracy came last week in a speech he made to the annual conference of The National Alliance for Public Charter Schools in Washington D.C., attended by about 4,500 enthusiastic charter school advocates, teachers and administrators.”

When announcing the new fund, Kingsland listed fourteen founding members of The City Fund. There is little professional classroom teaching experience or training within the group. Chris Barbic was a Teach for America (TFA) teacher in Houston, Texas for two years. Similarly, Kevin Huffman was also a TFA teacher in Houston for three years. The only other member that may have some education experience is Kevin Shafer. His background is obscure.

The operating structure of the new fund is modeled after a law firm. Six of the fourteen founding members are lawyers: Gary Borden; David Harris; Kevin Huffman; Neerav Kingsland; Jessica Pena and Kameelah Shaheed-Diallo.

Ready to Pilfer Community Schools and End School Boards

In a 2012 published debate about school reform, Kingsland justified his call for ending democratic control of public education writing,

“I believe that true autonomy can only be achieved by government relinquishing its power of school operation. I believe that well regulated charter and voucher markets – that provide educators with public funds to operate their own schools – will outperform all other vehicles of autonomy in the long-run. In short, autonomy must be real autonomy: government operated schools that allow “site level decision making” feels more Orwellian than empowering – if we believe educators should run schools, let’s let them run schools.”

This is a belief in “the invisible hand” of markets making superior judgements and private businesses always outperforming government administration. There may be some truth here, but it is certainly not an ironclad law.

The City Fund has distinct roots stretching back to early 2016. On April 4 that year, Kingsland announced on his blog, Relinquishment, “Very excited about this update: Ken Bubp and Chris Barbic are joining the combined efforts of the Laura and John Arnold Foundation and Hastings Fund.”

In January of 2016, Philanthropy News Digest reported, “Netflix founder and Continue Reading: DPE 2.0 The City Fund | tultican