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Decriminalizing the Classroom: School climate Bill of Rights

**The Edvocate is pleased to publish guest posts as way to fuel important conversations surrounding P-20 education in America. The opinions contained within guest posts are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official opinion of The Edvocate or Dr. Matthew Lynch.** A guest post by Beth Ellor “I believe the purpose of public schools is to educate not exclude children and to help identify and meet child needs, not make children serve adult convenience, self interest, and systems.” So begins the article published in the 9/26/14 Newsletter of the Children’s Defense Fund, written by Marian Wright Edelman. Please …

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4 Troubling Truths About Black Boys and the U.S. Educational System

Most people like to think that American K-12 schools, workplaces and courthouses are pillars of fairness, but statistic after statistic all point to a crisis among the young, Black men of the nation. This crisis begins in homes, stretches to K-12 educational experiences, and leads straight to the cycle of incarceration in increasingly high numbers. In America’s prison systems, black citizens are incarcerated at six times the rates of white ones – and the NAACP predicts that one in three of this generation of Black men will spend some time locked up. Decreasing the rates of incarceration for black men …

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Designer Learning Experiences: Bridging the Gap for Low-Income and Minority Students

The number of minority students outweighs the number of white students—yet underrepresented minorities still often face a worse quality education than their white counterparts. It’s prime time to meet the needs of a rapidly growing population, and fortunately, as a society, we are actively looking for ways to do just that. As of 2014, minorities have been projected to be over 50 percent of the K-12 student population, according to the U.S. Education Department’s Nation Center for Education Statistics. In the fall of 2014, about 49.8 million students attended public elementary and secondary schools. Of these students, 35.1 million were …

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Hope for High School Dropouts: How Increasing Graduation Rates Will Transform Our Country

Are math and science killing our high school graduation rates? More rigorous math and science requirements for high school graduation are in place. At the same time, dropout rates in this country are up. Is this a coincidence? Research back to 1990 showed that the US dropout rate rose to a high of 11.4 percent when students were required to take six math and science courses, compared with 8.6 percent for students who needed less math and science courses to graduate. The dropout rate is up to 5 percentage points higher when gender, race, and ethnicity are considered. Andrew Plunk, …

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The economic argument for ethnic studies

**The Edvocate is pleased to publish guest posts as way to fuel important conversations surrounding P-20 education in America. The opinions contained within guest posts are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official opinion of The Edvocate or Dr. Matthew Lynch.** A guest column by Jim Estrada Our nation is undergoing a cultural evolution as a result of an ethnic population explosion. In a blink of the eye, Hispanics, Latinos, and mestizos have grown to 54 million in 2015 and are projected to reach 132.8 million by 2050, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Much of this …

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Will the pending ESEA actually move funding backward?

By Derek Black of Law Professor Blogs Network Last week, Nora Gordon focused on one of the more technical aspects of the pending Senate bill to reauthorize the Elementary and Secondary Education Act: the supplement not supplant standard. The standard requires that Title I funds for low income students only be used to supplement the resources that state and local entities were already providing those students, not supplant them. Gordon summarized the new revisions and her sense of their importance: The larger legacy of the Every Child Achieves Act may well be how it cleans up supplement not supplant, a …

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Is your child taking a test? When is the right time?

Francesca Gino, Harvard Business School Standardized tests have become the primary tool for determining a student’s academic ability. Legislators and administrators use test data to evaluate the effectiveness of schooling on children and create curriculum. Their use is supported by two fundamental assumptions: that the tests do not have a bias, and that they accurately assess a student’s academic knowledge. A typical standardized test assesses a student’s knowledge base in an academic domain, such as science, mathematics or reading. When taking a standardized test, it is assumed that the substance of the test and its administration will be the same …

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When researchers ask for data on penalization of black kids, schools resist, cover up

**The Edvocate is pleased to publish guest posts as way to fuel important conversations surrounding P-20 education in America. The opinions contained within guest posts are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official opinion of The Edvocate or Dr. Matthew Lynch.**   Muhammad Khalifa, Michigan State University & Felecia Briscoe, University of Texas at San Antonio Students of color are more likely to be suspended. Rod Library, CC BY That students of color bear the brunt of the zero tolerance discipline policies in schools has been well-established. What is not so well known is that some school administrations are actually complicit in this act of …

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Spend less time searching for classroom resources

A teacher’s job does not end when the school bell rings. From grading papers and prepping classroom materials, to creating lesson plans and seeking out professional development opportunities, to say that educators have a lot on their plate would be an understatement. Finding classroom resources and quality training has been an even more arduous task with the adoption of the Common Core State Standards. According to a report from the Center on Education Policy, a majority of educators are creating new curricula independently—more than two-thirds of districts reported that their teachers were designing their own curricula to meet the new …

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Data secrecy violating data democracy in D.C. public schools

**The Edvocate is pleased to publish guest posts as way to fuel important conversations surrounding P-20 education in America. The opinions contained within guest posts are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official opinion of The Edvocate or Dr. Matthew Lynch.** A guest post by Audrey Amrein-Beardsley The District of Columbia Public Schools (DCPS) is soon to vote on yet another dramatic new educational policy that, as described in an email/letter to all members of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) by AFT President Randi Weingarten, “would make it impossible for educators, parents and the general …

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