New Push to Hire Male Teachers of Color - WSJ

New Push to Hire Male Teachers of Color - WSJ:
New Push to Hire Male Teachers of Color
New York City initiative aims to have teaching staff better reflect student population

Timothy Chen, a computer-science teacher at Urban Assembly Gateway School for Technology in Manhattan, with students Raymercy Hiciano and Andrew Guerrero, during an introductory class on software engineering. PHOTO: STEVE REMICH FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

New York City is rolling out a $16.5 million initiative to recruit and retain nonwhite male teachers so that its teaching staff better reflects its student population.

The effort, led by the city’s Young Men’s Initiative, a group comprising dozens of local programs serving young black and Latino men, aims to add a total of 1,000 black, Latino and Asian men to New York City classrooms or into a teaching track by the fall of 2017.

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According to data from the city’s Department of Education, Black, Latino and Asian male students comprise 43% of the one million students in the city’s public prekindergarten, elementary, middle and high schools. But men of the same races make up 8.3% of the approximately 76,000 teachers at those schools.

“Our teaching force does not look like the students in the classroom,” said Richard Buery,deputy mayor for strategic policy initiatives. “The city’s workforce should look like the city.”

The money behind the initiative is going toward professional development, advertising, guidance counselors and support for people getting teacher certification. The hiring effort is also intended to break a backward slide.

Most of the nonwhite men currently working as teachers have been employed by the city for 10 to 20 years, according to W. Cyrus Garrett, director of the Young Men’s Initiative, and some are nearing retirement age. At the same time, 8% of new hires, regardless of race or gender, quit in their first few years of teaching.

The city loses 450 to 500 nonwhite male teachers a year, Mr. Garrett said, and hires about 350.

Mr. Garrett and Mr. Buery said there was poor recruitment and retention of male teachers of color and cited several factors that they see as contributing to the problem.

Many such teachers are thrust into roles as school disciplinarians, called in frequently to de-escalate situations between students, Mr. Buery said. He described the phenomenon as the “ Joe Clark problem,” referring to the legendary baseball-bat-wielding principal of a school in Paterson, N.J., and the subject of the 1989 film “Lean On Me.”

ENLARGE

At the same time, these teachers are often the ones whom male students of color seek out for mentorship and support, as well as to serve as spokesmen or advocates, according to Amy Wells, a professor of sociology and education at Columbia University’s Teachers College.

Often male teachers of color “feel like they have to defend a lot of students against implicit biases or microaggressions,” said Ms. Wells. “If you’re the only teacher of color on a predominantly white faculty, that can get exhausting, especially when you’re working in an environment where most of your colleagues don’t necessarily understand what you’re saying.”

Timothy Chen, a second-year computer-science teacher at Urban Assembly Gateway School for Technology in Manhattan’s Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood, doesn’t remember having a single teacher of Chinese descent in his hometown of Chelmsford, Mass., but he is one of three at his current school. He has heard from other teachers that some male students look up to him as a role model, he said, and relate to him by talking about videogames.

At the same time, “students can say some culturally insensitive things, both intentionally and innocently,” he said. “The conversation you have with the student following that had potential to be a very powerful New Push to Hire Male Teachers of Color - WSJ:

Arne Duncan Pinpoints Where Schools Fail - WSJ

Arne Duncan Pinpoints Where Schools Fail - WSJ:

Arne Duncan Pinpoints Where Schools Fail

The departing secretary of education says students aren’t getting the education the U.S. economy needs them to have

Arne Duncan has been pushing the cause of education all his career. And as he prepares to step down as education secretary after seven years, he is asking CEOs to join him in the fight.

In today’s global marketplace, it’s critical for the U.S. to develop in young people the skills that will keep America competitive. But across the nation, says Mr. Duncan, businesses continue having trouble finding enough college graduates with those skills.

Mr. Duncan, in discussing the successes and setbacks of his tenure, asked CEOs for help to improve education from top to bottom, and discussed other challenges in an interview with Wall Street Journal Deputy Editor in Chief Matt Murray. Edited excerpts follow.

MR. MURRAY: What skills do employers want and how well prepared is our education system to give them people with those skills?

MR. DUNCAN: People who can think critically, work in diverse teams, and who can take complex information, come to a conclusion and make a recommendation.

I can’t tell you how many CEOs I’ve met who say they can’t find young people with the skills they’re looking for.

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So my request and my challenge is: We have lots of what I call phony debates about silly stuff. Could CEOs lend their considerable voice to, “Do we need high standards or not? Do we want to continue to reduce the dropout rate or not? Do we want to make sure our high-school graduates are truly college-ready? Do we want to lead the world in college-completion rates or not?”

These issues aren’t left or right or Democratic or Republican. This is in our nation’s best interest.

‘A better economy’

MR. MURRAY: What is the biggest undone item to better align the education system with the needs of the labor market?

MR. DUNCAN: Unfortunately, there are lots. I’m a huge believer in early childhood education. The return on investment is remarkable. But we have so many kids entering kindergarten a year, year-and-a-half behind. We often don’t catch them up.

The majority of our public-school students are African-American, Latino. We have to make sure we’re fighting the equity battle, we’re fighting for civil rights, we’re making sure that every young person has access to a great education. And we need folks at every level who are willing to fight not on small-ball stuff, not on sound bites, but on, “Are we educating our way to a better economy?”

MR. MURRAY: Sen. Bernie Sanders wants to make college free. How do we make college accessible and affordable?

MR. DUNCAN: These things should not be reduced to sound bites. Is college too expensive for many people? Yes, and we have to find ways to continue to reduce debt. We’ve talked about free community colleges. If we reduce costs and still have these same outcomes, it’s not good enough. The worst debt is the debt you get when you don’t complete your degree. The vast majority of young people who graduate from college get good jobs and pay back their debt.

With college completion rates so low, when you have debt and no diploma to show for it, that’s the conversation we need to be having.

ENLARGE

MR. MURRAY: College debt has roughly tripled in the past decade. How do we fix this?

MR. DUNCAN: Again, to be very clear, the vast majority of folks who are defaulting are folks who didn’t complete their degree. Yes, we can contain costs. That takes federal investment. It takes state investment. It takes universities containing their own costs. We put $40 billion into Pell grants without going back to taxpayers for a nickel. The goal has to be not just access. The goal has to be completion. It’s got to be around outcomes. That conversation around outcomes I’m not hearing on either side of the political spectrum.

College scorecards

MR. MURRAY: One of the big issues you’ve been involved in is college scorecards. You ran into opposition from the colleges on that front.

MR. DUNCAN: When you challenge the status quo, you get pushed back. That’s totally fine. We’re pushing very hard for transparency.

It’s a very difficult process to navigate. Young people should know, “What are the graduation rates,” not what the one-year cost is. “What’s the four-year cost? What are people like me making once they graduate from college?”

It’s interesting: 7,000 institutions of higher education, best system in the world, but it’s a broken marketplace. It’s absolutely inefficient. The vast majority of young people fill out the financial-aid form—they apply to one school.

I’m a believer in choice and competition. We think we all have this great choice. We really don’t. So we’re trying to expand more options, get that out there, and get more young people good information.

MR. MURRAY: Do you see room for the next secretary of education or president to advance this? You’ve run headfirst into opposition on that front a lot from all the higher educational institutions.

MR. DUNCAN: No worries.

MR. MURRAY: Can we make it happen?

MR. DUNCAN: It is happening. We’ve put unprecedented information out there to empower young people, their parents and college counselors to make good choices.

MR. MURRAY: Where does vocational training come in?

MR. DUNCAN: I’m a huge fan. Department of Labor has put $2 billion behind community colleges where real training is leading to real jobs.There are so many good jobs out there with a two-year community-college degree. We want to do more career and technical ed in the high-school space.

MR. MURRAY: The No Child Left Behind renewal, that may be coming out of committee?

MR. DUNCAN: This law’s been broken for seven, eight years. Folks are trying to work Arne Duncan Pinpoints Where Schools Fail - WSJ:

Local School Councils Persist, Inject Democracy into Chicago Public Schools | janresseger

Local School Councils Persist, Inject Democracy into Chicago Public Schools | janresseger:

Local School Councils Persist, Inject Democracy into Chicago Public Schools

After today, this blog will take a short break for the rest of this holiday week and return on Monday, November 30.  Good wishes for Thanksgiving!

In 1988, after the sudden death of Chicago Mayor Harold Washington, the Illinois Legislature did something unusual. It created an experiment in truly democratic school governance in Chicago: the idea that parents, teachers, and community members would stand for election to local school councils whose members would have considerable power including the hiring of the school principal. When top-down school governance was instituted in 1995 by Mayor Richard M. Daley, who appointed Paul Vallas and then Arne Duncan to run the school district, the power of the elected local school councils faded. Arne Duncan brought Renaissance 2010, whose goal was to expand school choice, shutter so-called “failing” schools, and open 100 new schools—the very top-down school “reform” that has dominated Duncan’s tenure as U.S. Secretary of Education since 2009.

But the 25th Anniversary issue of Catalyst-Chicago features a retrospective examination of the elected local school councils that have persevered in many of the city’s schools: “Of all the reforms that have swept through Chicago Public Schools in the past 25 years, the creation of local school councils is one of the few that persists.”

Chicago’s local school councils have faced challenges from the beginning. Catalyst quotes Sokoni Karanja, an activist in the Bronzeville neighborhood who helped lead the movement to support and maintain what Chicago calls its LSCs: “In the first few years they were very effective and we saw major turnarounds at some schools.  And there are still diehard parents that maintain their commitment to the LSCs, although there has been continuous reductions in their power.”

Catalyst interviews Dion Miller Perez who chaired the Chicago office of what was the Cross-City Campaign for Urban School Reform and who was elected over the years to three LSCs: “There was a fickleness of funders supporting parental involvement in a grassroots way.  There used to be more foundation money for LSC training and parent involvement in general.  That doesn’t exist anymore.”

Elaine Allensworth, of the Consortium on Chicago School Research at the University of Chicago comments on school improvement in the early 1990s, though she is hesitant to attribute the growth in test scores solely to direct democratic involvement of parents through the LSCs: “In that period just after decentralization, we do see improvements in a lot of schools.  A lot of schools did show improvements in student test scores, though it seemed to be related to the economic conditions in the community…. Then we start to see (scores) flatten out when mayor control came in.”

Catalyst ‘s anniversary issue features two parents who have been deeply involved through their LSCs.  These interviews expose not only the commitment of deeply involved parent leaders but also the challenges to parent involvement for schools in poor and working class communities.  Sabrina Jackson, part of the LSC at Perkins, Bass Elementary School in Chicago’s Englewood neighborhood, was involved to the degree that she could be as a parent employed full-time and attending community college through the years of her four children’s Local School Councils Persist, Inject Democracy into Chicago Public Schools | janresseger:

Mike Klonsky's SmallTalk Blog: Chicago teachers show strong, united, and ready to strike if needed

Mike Klonsky's SmallTalk Blog: Chicago teachers show strong, united, and ready to strike if needed:

Chicago teachers show strong, united, and ready to strike if needed

What a great night! Thousands of Chicago teachers and community activists packed Grant Park last night in a show of strength and unity reminiscent of the days leading up to the 2012 teacher strike. Check out DNAInfo for best tweeted pics from last night.

The Little Emperor is back after splitting town, as he usually does in times of crisis. He ran off to China. Remember, Rahm's the guy who said: "You never want a serious crisis to go to waste." What he obviously meant was, when things get hot, get out of town and let underlings like Forrest Claypool or Garry McCarthy,or whoever, take the heat.

And if you're going to run and hide, this is the week to do it. Panicked by the CTU's militant show of strength and the black community's possible response to Wednesday's court-ordered release of the video showing officer Jason Van Dykepumping 16 rounds into defenseless 17-year-old Laquan McDonald, the administration is in full retreat mode. They're dropping crumbs along with way to soften or divert the protests, and pausing every few steps to take pot-shots at the teachers union.

Karen Lewis: "If we strike, we do so to protect our children."

Today, the day before the video release, charges are expected to be brought against Van Dyke. Coincidence? Yesterday, top cop Garry McCarthy (is he still here?) called for the firing of Dante Servin, the cop who pumped 5 bullets into the skull of unarmed Rekia Boyd. Servin was never convicted on murder charges. So, in the face of growing protests and the video release, McCarthy ordered him fired for "poor judgement".

Claypool's response to the CTU rally was, duck/dodge/divert. He claims the CTU Mike Klonsky's SmallTalk Blog: Chicago teachers show strong, united, and ready to strike if needed:

US falls behind other nations in the global knowledge economy, says 46-country report - The Hechinger Report

US falls behind other nations in the global knowledge economy, says 46-country report - The Hechinger Report:

US falls behind other nations in the global knowledge economy, says 46-country report

Fewer Americans are going to preschool and college compared to other nations

The United States continues to fall behind internationally in producing a college-educated workforce as other nations send more of their citizens to university. And in the very early years, many countries are now sending a much higher percentage of their kids to preschool than the United States.

The data showing that other nations are investing more than the U.S. in both early childhood programs and advanced degrees comes from a new report released Tuesday by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). The more than 500-page reportanalyzed the education systems of 46 nations and highlighted long-term trends from preschool to Ph.D. programs.

“The U.S. hasn’t backslid, but other countries have made big gains,” said OECD Education Director Andreas Schleicher, in a pre-publication briefing with journalists.

In the past, the U.S. ranked second in the world in the percentage of adults with some sort of college education, ranging from a post-high-school vocational degree to a Ph.D. Today, the U.S. has slipped to fifth position.

Related: Number of Americans with college degrees growing more slowly than advocates want

In several countries, nearly 60 percent of 25- to 34-year-olds have a college education. Korea tops the list, with nearly 70 percent of this age group earning a college degree, a huge increase from their older generation of 55- to 64-year-olds, among whom fewer than 20 percent have a college education.US falls behind other nations in the global knowledge economy, says 46-country report - The Hechinger Report:

The Broken Chain of Student Data Security » Missouri Education Watchdog

The Broken Chain of Student Data Security » Missouri Education Watchdog:

The Broken Chain of Student Data Security

2015 was not a good year for student data privacy. Massive exposure on three levels has shown that no one is truly capable of protecting the data they gather on American students.

Federal Student Data At Serious Risk

At a House hearing on Oversight and Government Reform held on 11-17-15, Inspector General Kathleen Tighe testified that the US Department of Education’s  “data security” system is riddled with vulnerabilities. The problems encompass both lax controls over the people allowed access to sensitive data, as well as outdated technology and inadequate security to prevent unauthorized access.

“During our testing of the EDUCATE environment, OIG testers were able to gain full access to the Department’s network and our access went undetected by Dell [the vendor] and the Department’s Office of the Chief Information Officer.” Moreover, as the Committee reported, USED “is not heeding repeat warnings from the Inspector General (IG) that their information systems are vulnerable to security threats.”

Key takeaways from the hearing include:

• [USED] scored a NEGATIVE 14 percent on the [Office of Management and Budget] Cybersprint [security program] for total users using strong authentication;
• [USED] received an “F” on the [Federal Information Technology Acquisition Reform Act] scorecard;
• [USED] maintains 184 information systems;
• Twenty-nine [of these systems] are valued by the Office of Management and Budget as “high asset”; and
• [USED] needs significant improvement in four key security areas: continuous monitoring, configuration management, incident response and reporting, and remote access management.

The feds will get individual student test scores and directory info. They get more personal information if you take out a federal student load. More than 139 million Americans have and their social security numbers are at risk. They will have access to the state databases and could conceivably combine information gathered there with the information the states send them directly. How safe is the information the states gather?

Missouri Student Information At Risk

Last month the State Auditor, Nicole Galloway, found serious flaws in the protection system the state uses to guard the student data it collects.  We wrote about it here.  Key findings of her audit report:

• DESE management has not fully established and documented user account management policies and procedures. User account management includes requesting, establishing, issuing, suspending, modifying, closing, and periodically reviewing user accounts and related user privileges. Multiple DESE users are allowed access to the MOSIS system via shared accounts; however, DESE management does not regularly monitor these accounts to ensure actions taken by account holders are appropriate.
• DESE management has not established a comprehensive data breach response policy, as recommended by the U.S. Department of Education. Without a comprehensive data breach response policy, management may not be sufficiently equipped to respond quickly and effectively in the event of a breach, increasing the risk of potential harm to affected individuals.

DESE promised to clean up its act, but it would be understandable if the public was skeptical of such promises, given that the Dept of Revenue made similar promises regarding the Concealed Carry Licensing reporting that they did not live up to.

Private Education Corporation Data Hacked

Pearson, the world’s largest education supplier, with products designed for preschool on up to workforce certification, was hacked recently. TheThe Broken Chain of Student Data Security » Missouri Education Watchdog:

Goodbye, No Child Left Behind : NPR Ed : NPR

Goodbye, No Child Left Behind : NPR Ed : NPR:

Goodbye, No Child Left Behind

After a long stalemate, a bipartisan team of congressional negotiators has agreed to overhaul the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. The law, currently known as No Child Left Behind, sends roughly $14 billion a year to schools that serve mostly low-income students.

Here's what we know about the rough agreement. First, annual testing — a major feature of NCLB — would remain for grades three through eight and at least once in high school. Schools would still have to test 95 percent of their students and report the results by race, income and special need.

Delia Pompa, former vice president with the National Council of La Raza, says this requirement is crucial.

"It is the mechanism that brought to light how children in subgroups — I'm talking about Latinos, African-Americans, children in poverty, limited English-proficient children — how they're doing."

As for what would change, the U.S. education secretary could no longer push for academic standards like the Common Core or mandate that teachers be evaluated based on things like student test scores.

But the biggest change lawmakers are proposing is this: They want the federal government out of the business of identifying failing schools, leaving that tough job to states. Each state would come up with its own plan to help schools improve, its own deadlines and its own metrics to measure that improvement. If schools don't improve, states would have to figure out what to do.

Under NCLB, the federal government has had a big role in all of that, and some lawmakers and advocates worry that this overhaul could move too far in the opposite direction, dramatically weakening the law's protection of poor and minority students. At a recent meeting with civil rights groups on Capitol Hill, Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts sounded anxious.

"The idea that we would pass a major piece of legislation about education and, in effect, shovel money into states and say, 'Do with it what you want', and not have some accountability for how that money is spent, I think, is appalling," Warren said.

Sen. Lamar Alexander, a Republican from Tennessee and one of the architects of the law's rewrite, has dismissed this concern. He declined to be interviewed for this story but sent NPR a statement saying he disagrees with groups "who believe that the path to higher standards, better teaching and real accountability is through Washington instead of states."

But Daria Hall, with the advocacy group The Education Trust, says that, historically, "states have not made decisions with the best interest of vulnerable kids in mind."

Hall says, when given the opportunity, states still find ways to camouflage the fact that most of their low-income, black and Latino students don't get a quality education. As evidence, she points to the most recent reading and math scores from the so-called "Nation's Report Card."

"Those kids are losing ground," Hall says. "And yet, we're telling parents and the public this is an A school when the reality is it's doing C work or maybe D work. That's why we need a continued federal role in education."

How significant a role is the question. Ted Shaw, former head of the NAACP's Legal Defense and Education Fund, says that, without the federal government as a watchdog, it'll be up to states to take the lead in tackling the biggest problem of all — the concentration of poor and minority children in failing schools.

"This is one of the most important issues our nation faces when we talk about educational opportunity," Shaw says. "Concentrated poverty is deadly, and we're not paying enough attention to it."

A compromise bill will soon move to the full House and Senate before it can make its way to President Obama.Goodbye, No Child Left Behind : NPR Ed : NPR:

If we are to get Goldman Sachs out of ESEA, we will have to be the ones to do it. | Fred Klonsky

If we are to get Goldman Sachs out of ESEA, we will have to be the ones to do it. | Fred Klonsky:

If we are to get Goldman Sachs out of ESEA, we will have to be the ones to do it.

-Bev Johns



If we are to remove/change Goldman Sachs Pay for Success in S. 1177, we have to do it.

The National groups to which we belong have decided to do nothing.

The Consortium for Citizens with Disabilities (CCD) generally decides “our” position on “our” issues. All major groups in our field belong to CCD.

CCD met last week on Pay for Success. They decided to take no position.

Not surprising since one of the Co-Chairs of the CCD Education Task Force is the National Center for Learning Disabilities (NCLD) which, through its membership in America Forward, supports Pay for Success.

CCD stated it has not seen the final language on Pay for Success in S. 1177 (nor has anyone else as it is now being written for release on November 30).

Of course it will be very difficult to change/affect any language in S. 1177 AFTER the bill is WRITTEN and ready for a final vote in the U.S. House  and U.S. Senate, as the bill must pass both with identical wording.

Will YOU make a call to D.C. (per the message below)?

——————

The concepts in ESEA have passed Conference Committee but the actual language in S. 1177 is now being written: S. 1177 is to be released to the public on November 30.

It is hard to believe that some members of the Conference Committee on ESEA (Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders) knew that Goldman Sachs Pay for Success is in S. 1177.

After all, only the words Pay for Success are there – no explanation that Utah is using Pay for Success to reduce identifications for special education by over 99 percent, or that Goldman Sachs is already being paid for this “success” for these “results” in Utah.

Or that in Chicago Goldman Sachs will be paid $9,100 each year for each child NOT identified as needing special education as a result of being in the Pay for Success program.

You can CALL the D.C. office of Senator Lamar Alexander, talk to a live person, strongly request to talk with committee staff about Goldman Sachs Pay for Success in S. 1177. If you do, assume they know nothing about how Pay for Success has been used in Utah, nothing about the New York Times If we are to get Goldman Sachs out of ESEA, we will have to be the ones to do it. | Fred Klonsky: