News

The Children’s Alliance and other Early Learning Action Alliance members are celebrating a hard-earned victory today.

The Legislature has passed a bill that takes a step toward making early learning for infants and toddlers a top priority as our state builds and strengthens pre-kindergarten.

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Last Thursday, after several days of protest, the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) announced they signed an agreement with the Black Student Union (BSU) to address "diversity issues" and improve the campus climate after the recent "ghetto-themed Compton Cookout" party.

The agreement came after students created a list of demands that would improve race relations on campus. The demands agreed upon include:

• Fund for three years BSU-initiated yield programs to increase the diversity of the undergraduate student body; work to diversify the graduate student applicant pool and induct more members into the Bouchet Graduate Honor Society, which promotes diversity and excellence in doctoral education and the professoriate.


• Fund the program coordinator position for the African American Studies Minor and Chicano/a Latino/a Arts and Humanities Minor; review requests from the Colleges to establish campuswide diversity curricular requirements for undergraduates, to supplement the requirements already in place in the Colleges.


• Create a task force to promote the recruitment, support and retention of underrepresented faculty; make sure that all faculty searches adhere to best practices on diversity considerations; as funding becomes available, reactivate six unfilled faculty positions dedicated to African Diaspora, Indigenous Studies or California Cultures; allocate three new faculty positions over the next three years for hires that will enhance diversity.

Ward Connerly, the man behind Prop. 209 that ended affirmative action in California, isn't happy though. He said members of the Black Student Union would do the most good by going to churches and other organizations in their communities, "emphasizing education to younger children to make them academically competitive when the time comes to apply to college."

“Personally, I think it’s distasteful for the university, under duress, to sit down with a group of students representing racial interest and agree to their demands,” Connerly said. “What about white students, what if they want more diversity? But that’s not a legal issue, that’s just inappropriate public-policy making. They can make promises all they want, but they don’t violate anything until they take action.”

And so the legal battle begins. BSU Vice Chair Fnann Keflezighi said that, despite recent progress, the BSU still has work to do. “This is a step toward victory, but there’s a whole lot of work, language and charters that need to be written. We’re nowhere near victory.”

UC President Mark Yudof and Fox announced on March 5 that Dean of UC Berkeley School of Law Christopher Edley has been appointed to advise UCSD on improving its campus climate.

In this minute-long audio slideshow aimed at our state’s lawmakers, Seattle high schooler Daniel Perlmutter makes a common-sense plea for taxing candy and soda to pay for kids' health care. It’s simple, he says.

“Candy … it’s fun, but it’s not food. Yet our tax laws treat candy like bananas, bread and milk. That’s preposterous!”

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Candy is not food. So Washington’s tax law shouldn’t treat it like it is. Soda is loaded with calories and has zero nutritional value. A penny-per-ounce tax could raise substantial revenues to protect vital medical and dental care programs for children and families across our state.

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The Office of Economic Development is proud to support Mayor Mike McGinn’s Youth and Families Initiative by ensuring that low-income parents receive the career and technical education they need to compete for jobs in an increasingly competitive global economy.

You can read the rest of this post over at the blog for the Youth and Families Initiative.

Actions are taking place everywhere today, on college campuses, school playgrounds and public squares all across the state and country. Here are some photos from actions this morning and protests happening right now in California as students, parents and educators stand together to protest record budget cutbacks and fee hikes. Stay tuned for more. We'll be updating this space throughout the day.

At CSU Fullerton, snapped by cfaCSUN.

At UC Davis, snapped by California Aggie. (No arrests reported so far.)

At UCI, snapped by Brian Lance.

At UCSD, from the UCSD Libraries flickr.

At Lincoln Elementary School in Oakland Chinatown this morning.

At UCLA, snapped by Evan Garcia.

In this edition, you’ll read about how state budget cuts all over the country are threatening child welfare services, such as home-visiting programs (strongly supported by the Children’s Alliance) that have a proven track record of lowering rates of child abuse and neglect, and improving kids’ chances of succeeding in school and life. You’ll also read about progress the Obama administration is making toward extending federal health care assistance to states.

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This week’s large group meeting for the Youth and Families Initiative at Northgate Elementary had an amazing turn out. More than 260 Seattleites participated and shared their ideas.

Read about the ideas that were shared over at the blog for the Youth and Families Initiative.

This article examines the impact of single-sex schooling on a range of academic outcomes for a sample of British people born in 1958. In terms of the overall level of qualifications achieved, single-sex schooling is positive for girls at age 16 but neutral for boys, while at later ages, single-sex schooling is neutral for both sexes. However, single-sex schooling is linked to the attainment of qualifications in gender-atypical subject areas for both sexes, not just during the school years, but also later in life.

This article reports on research with one Black male elementary school teacher in Toronto and draws on feminist, queer, and antiracist analytic perspectives to raise important questions about the discourse of teachers as role models. The voice of this teacher is used to challenge discourses about role modeling in their capacity to address adequately the limits imposed by both cultural and structural problems experienced by minority boys in urban school communities. Important questions about the role of teachers as transformative or organic intellectuals are also raised. A case study approach is employed to draw attention to both important pedagogical issues and the limits of role modeling as a conceptual framework that continues to be used to support generalizable claims about the influence of male teachers on the basis of their gender and racial affiliation with boys in schools. What is required, the authors conclude, is a disarticulation and, hence, a separating out of role modeling from a discussion about the need for a greater representation of minority teachers in urban schools.

Student opposition in school is traditionally cast in terms of individual dispositions, whereby particular students or groups of students are said to "resist" or "oppose" school structures and identities aligned with the dominant cultural group. The author examined instead how the teacher and students in a low-track mathematics classroom jointly constructed opposition through their classroom interactions. Analysis of the classroom interaction revealed the emergence and escalation of a number of classroom practices that became oppositional. These practices were related to the nature of the mathematical activity, the framing and positioning of student participation in this activity, and multiple interpretations of student competence in and out of the classroom. The author found that classroom opposition is fostered by weak opportunities for meaningful mathematical engagement and the transformation of a polarized participation structure into an oppositional one.

The authors investigate how conversational routines, or the practices by which groups structure work-related talk, function in teacher professional communities to forge, sustain, and support learning and improvement. Audiotaped and videotaped records of teachers’ work group interactions, supplemented by interviews and material artifacts, were collected as part of a 2-year project centered on teacher learning and collegiality at two urban high schools. This analysis focuses on two teacher work groups within the same school. While both groups were committed to improvement and shared a common organizational context, their characteristic conversational routines provided different resources for them to access, conceptualize, and learn from problems of practice. More specifically, the groups differed in the extent to which conversational routines supported the linking of frameworks for teaching to specific instances of practice. An analysis of the broader data set points to significant contextual factors that help account for the differences in the practices of the two groups. The study has implications for fostering workplace learning through more systematic support of professional community.

Virtually all states require teachers to undergo licensure testing before participation in the public school labor market. This article analyzes the information these tests provide about teacher effectiveness. The authors find that licensure tests have different predicative validity for student achievement by teacher race. They also find that student achievement is impacted by the race/ethnicity match between teachers and their students, with Black students significantly benefitting from being matched with a Black teacher. As a consequence of these matching effects, the uniform application of licensure standards is likely to have differential impacts on the achievement of White and minority students.